by Ken Grimwood
He was convinced she felt a special something for him, more than just the bright warmth she displayed to the other boys; he was positive he perceived a special glow, a flame, in her eyes when she spoke to him. Once, in class, she had stood behind his chair and slowly, casually massaged his neck as she led the students in reciting Baudelaire. That had been a moment of high erotic intensity for him, and he’d basked in the envious glares of his classmates. For a while he’d even stopped masturbating over the Playboy centerfolds, had reserved his sexual fantasies for Deirdre, as he thought of her privately, for Deirdre alone.
By the end of November it became obvious that Mrs. Rendell was pregnant. Jeff did his best to ignore what that implied about the health of her relationship with her husband, and focused instead on the fresh beauty that impending motherhood brought to her face.
She took her maternity leave in the winter, and another teacher took over her classes until she was able to return. The baby was born in mid-February. Mrs. Rendell was back at the couple’s table in the dining commons by April, her breasts gorgeously swollen with milk. She kept the infant in a portable bassinet when she didn’t have it in her arms; and her husband doted on her constantly from the seat next to her. Between the two of them, they captured almost every moment of her cherished attention; Jeff could no longer imagine he read secret endearments in the rare smiles she bestowed on him.
The Rendells lived in a house off-campus, on the other side of the woods behind the library. On sunny days, Mrs. Rendell liked to walk to and from school, through the peaceful stand of elms and birches. There was a well-worn footpath that led that way, though it was broken by a small creek. In the fall, she’d been able to ford the narrow rivulet easily; but now, pushing the baby in its perambulator, the stream presented a serious obstacle.
Her husband labored for six weeks, building the little bridge. He cut the lumber to size on the band saw in the school’s shop, planed the wood to smoothness, made the joists and crossbeams of the tiny span twice as sturdy as they needed to be. The night of the day it was completed, Mrs. Rendell kissed him right at the table in the dining commons, kissed him long and lovingly. She’d never done anything like that in front of any of the boys before. Jeff stared at his uneaten food, his stomach tight and cold.
The next day he walked into the woods to be alone, to sort out the awful feelings that overwhelmed him; but something seemed to snap inside when he came across the bridge.
His mind was blank with unaccustomed rage when he picked up the first large rock from the creek bed, hurled it with all his strength at the wooden guardrail.
Again and again he heaved rocks, the heaviest ones he could find and lift. The buttresses were the hardest parts to crush; they’d been built to last, but under Jeff’s furious assault the beams finally gave way, collapsed into the creek along with the splintered remains of the rest of the bridge.
When it was done, Jeff stood staring at the sodden wreckage, his breath coming in great gulps of exhaustion and anguish. Then he glanced up, and saw Mrs. Rendell standing in the path on the other side of the stream. The face that he’d adored for so many months was an expressionless mask as she looked at him. Their eyes locked for several seconds, and then Jeff bolted.
He assumed he’d be expelled; but nothing was ever said about the incident. Jeff never sat at the Rendells' table again. He avoided seeing either of them as much as he was able. She remained unfailingly polite, even pleasant, to him in class, and at the end of the year he received an A in French.
He tossed a pebble into the lazy creek, watched it bounce off a rock and plop into the water. Destroying the bridge had been a vile, unforgivable act. Yet Mrs. Rendell had forgiven him, protected him, had even had the good sense not to shame him further by expressing her forgiveness in words. She must have understood the lonely, mindless fury that had led him to such an extreme, must have recognized that in his childlike way he had seen her love for her husband and baby as betrayal of the deepest sort.
And it had been, in Jeff s crush-distorted view of things. It had been his introductory encounter with the death of hope.
Now he knew what had drawn him back here to the school, to this quiet clearing in the woods of his youth. He must again face that emptiness of infinite loss, but this time on a more complex level. This time he knew he could not crack beneath the weight of the intolerable. There were no more bridges to destroy; he must learn to go forward, and to build, despite the torment of his daughter’s death, of knowing what could never be.
At a quarter to eleven on a Friday night, at least twenty couples embraced in the shadows outside Harris Hall: arms around each other, faces pressed together for a last few minutes of fevered contact before the young women would be called into the dorm by their vigilant housemother. Jeff and Judy shared a stone bench away from the huddling pairs. She was upset.
"It’s that Frank Maddock, isn’t it? It was all his idea; I know it was."
Jeff shook his head. "I told you, I suggested it to him."
Judy wasn’t listening. "You shouldn’t hang around with him. I knew something like this would happen. He thinks he’s so cool, thinks he’s Mr. Sophistication. Can’t you see through that act of his?"
"Honey, it’s not his fault. The whole thing was my idea, and it’ll work out fine. Just wait’ll tomorrow, you’ll see."
"Oh, what do you know about it?" A chilly night breeze came up, and she took her hand from his to pull her rabbit jacket closed. "You’re not even old enough to go make the bets yourself; you have to get him to do it."
"I know enough," Jeff said, smiling.
"Sure, enough to throw all your money away. Enough to sell your car. I still can’t believe that—you actually sold your car to bet on a horse race."
"I’ll buy another one tomorrow afternoon. You can come with me, help me pick it out. What would you like, a Jaguar, a Corvette?"
"Don’t talk foolish, Jeff. You know, I used to think I knew you pretty well, but this…"
The wind picked up a fallen dogwood blossom and dropped it in her hair. He reached to retrieve the flower, and the motion became a caress. She softened at his touch, and he gently ran the white petals along her cheek, pressed them lightly to her lips and then to his.
"Oh, honey," she whispered, moving closer to him, "I don’t mean to be a scold. It’s just that this has got me so worried for you, I can’t—"
"Hush," he said, holding her face in both his hands. "There’s nothing to worry about, I promise."
"But you don’t know—"
He quieted her with a kiss that lasted until a woman’s harsh voice interrupted them, calling, "Curfew in five minutes!"
Girls hurried past them as he walked her to the brightly lit front door of the dorm. "So," he said, "do you want to go car-shopping with me tomorrow?"
"Oh, Jeff." She sighed. "I’ve got a term paper to finish tomorrow afternoon, but if you come by around seven I’ll buy you a burger at Dooley’s. And don’t get too depressed when you lose; at least it’ll be a good lesson."
"Yes, ma’am." He grinned. "I’ll be sure and take notes."
A red-jacketed valet parked the Jaguar for them at the Coach and Six. Jeff slipped the wine steward a twenty, and nobody asked for Judy’s ID when he ordered them a magnum of Moët et Chandon.
"To Chateaugay," Jeff toasted when the champagne was poured.
Judy hesitated, holding her glass in midair. "I’d rather just drink to tonight," she said.
They clinked glasses, sipped the wine. Judy looked wonderful tonight, in a dark blue low-cut gown she’d bought for the spring formal: halfway between a girl playing dress-up and a vibrantly sexy woman. He had been too quick to dismiss her before, had been seeking a woman whose experience would match his own. But of course that was an impossible goal. Now he basked with delight in the warm honesty of her ingenuousness, so different from Sharla’s cheap eroticism or Diane’s cold, sophisticated manner. Such innocence deserved to be nurtured, not denied.
The fare
at the Coach and Six was standard upscale American, nothing adventurous on the menu, but Judy seemed impressed, was obviously taking pains to stay on her best adult behavior. Jeff ordered lobster for her, prime rib for himself. She watched to see which forks he used for the salad and the appetizer, and he loved her for her open artlessness.
After dinner, over Drambuie, Jeff handed her the little blue Claude S. Bennett jeweler’s box. She opened it, and stared at the perfect two-carat diamond ring for several moments before she started to cry.
"I can’t," she murmured, closing the box carefully and setting it down on his side of the table. "I just can’t."
"I thought you said you loved me."
"I do," she said. "Oh, damn, damn, damn."
"Then what’s wrong? We could wait a year or two if you think we’re too young, but I’d like to make our plans official right now."
She dried her eyes with a napkin, smearing what little makeup she wore. Jeff wanted to kiss the streaks away, wanted to bathe her with his mouth as a cat would a kitten.
"Paula says you haven’t been to class in weeks," she told him. "She says you might even flunk out."
Jeff beamed, took her hand. "Is that all? Honey, it doesn’t matter. I’m quitting school anyway. I just won seventeen thousand dollars, and by October I can make … Look, it’s nothing to be concerned about. We’ll have plenty of money; I’ll always see to that."
"How?" she asked bitterly. "Gambling? Is that how we’d live?"
"Investments," he told her. "Perfectly legitimate business investments, in big companies like IBM and Xerox and—"
"Be realistic, Jeff. You got real lucky on one horse race, and now all of a sudden you think you can strike it rich in the stock market. Well, what if the stocks go down? What if there’s a depression or something?"
"There won’t be," he said quietly.
"You don’t know that. My daddy says—"
"I don’t care what your daddy says. There isn’t going to be any—"
She set her napkin down, pushed her chair back from the table. "Well, I do care what my parents say. And I hate to even think how they’d react if I told them I was getting married to an eighteen-year-old boy who’s dropped out of school to be a gambler."
Jeff could think of nothing to say. She was right, of course. He must seem an irresponsible fool to her. It had been a terrible mistake to tell her what he was doing.
He slipped the ring back in his jacket pocket. "I’ll hold on to this for now," he said. "And maybe I’ll reconsider about school."
Her eyes went moist again, their vivid blue shimmering through the layer of tears. "Please do, Jeff. I don’t want to lose you, not because of some craziness like this."
He squeezed her hand. "You’ll wear that ring someday," he said. "You’ll be proud of it, and proud of me."
They were married at the First Baptist Church in Rockwood, Tennessee in June of 1968, the week after Jeff received his M.B.A. Just four days before the date he’d met Linda—twice, with such drastically different outcomes—in those other lives. Rockwood was Judy’s hometown, and the reception her parents threw afterward was a big, informal barbecue at their summer place on nearby Watts Bar Lake. Jeff noticed that his father’s cough was getting worse, but still he wouldn’t listen to his son’s entreaties that he stop chain-smoking Pall Malls. He wouldn’t quit until the emphysema was diagnosed, years from now. Jeff’s mother was happier than she’d been at his weddings to Linda and Diane, though of course she had no memory of either occasion. His sister, a shy fifteen-year-old with braces on her teeth, had taken to Judy right away.
The Gordon family, likewise, had welcomed Jeff into the fold wholeheartedly. He had transformed himself into the very image of a perfect catch: twenty-three, good education, industrious, responsible. A nice little nest egg already set aside and a conservative but steadily building portfolio of stocks in his and Judy’s names.
It hadn’t been easy. The five years of school were tough enough, forcing himself back into the long-abandoned regimen of studies and term papers and exams; but the hardest part had been contriving not to get rich. The last time he’d been this age he’d been a financial wunderkind, the major partner in a powerful conglomerate. Such a sudden infusion of massive wealth would have thrown Judy off balance, would have created significant problems between them. So he’d passed up the Belmont and World Series bets entirely, and had painstakingly avoided the many high-yield investments with which he could easily have made another multimillion-dollar fortune.
He and Frank Maddock had drifted apart soon after the Kentucky Derby this time. His unknowing one-time partner at the pinnacle of corporate success had finished Columbia Law School and was now a junior attorney with a firm in Pittsburgh.
Jeff and Judy assumed the mortgage on a pleasant little fake-colonial house on Cheshire Bridge Road in Atlanta, and Jeff rented a four-room office in a building near Five Points that he’d once owned. Five days a week he put on a suit and tie, drove downtown, bid his secretary and associates good morning, locked himself in his office, and read. Sophocles, Shakespeare, Proust, Faulkner … all the works he’d meant to absorb before but had never had the time to read.
At the end of the day he’d dash off a few memos to his partners, recommending perhaps that they not risk investing in an unproven company like Sony, but should keep their gradually growing principal in something safe, such as AT&T. Jeff steered the small company carefully away from any sources of sudden wealth, made sure he and his associates remained comfortably but unspectacularly entrenched in the upper middle class. His partners frequently followed his advice; when they didn’t, the losses tended to balance out the gains, so the net effect remained as Jeff intended.
At night he and Judy would cuddle in the den to watch "Laugh-In" or "The Name of the Game" together, then maybe play a game of Scrabble before they went to bed. On warm weekends they’d go sailing on Lake Lanier, or play tennis and hike the nature trails at Callaway Gardens.
Life was quiet, ordered, sublimely normal. Jeff was thoroughly content. Not ecstatic—there was none of the sense of absolute enchantment he had felt in watching his daughter, Gretchen, grow up at the estate in Dutchess County—but he was happy, and at peace. For the first time, his long, chaotic life was defined by its utter simplicity and lack of turmoil.
Jeff dug his toes into the sand, raised himself to his elbows, and shaded his eyes from the sun with one hand. Judy was asleep on the blanket beside him, curled fingers still holding her place in a copy of Jaws. He gently kissed her half-open mouth.
"Want some Pina Colada?" Jeff asked as she stretched herself awake. "We’ve still got half a thermos left."
"Mmm. Just want to lie here like this. For about twenty years."
"Better turn over every six months or so, then."
She twisted her head to look at the back of her right shoulder, saw it was getting red. She rolled faceup, close to him, and he kissed her again; longer this time, and deeper.
A few yards down the beach another couple had a radio playing, and Jeff broke the kiss as the music ended and a Jamaican-accented announcer began reading about John Dean’s testimony that day in the Watergate hearings. "Love you," Judy said.
"Love you," he answered, touching the tip of her sun-pink nose. And he did, Lord God how he did.
Jeff allowed himself six weeks of vacation every year, in keeping with his pretense of a regular work schedule. The arbitrarily imposed limitation made the time seem all the sweeter. Last year they’d bicycled through Scotland, and this summer they planned to take a hot-air balloon tour of the French wine country. At this moment, though, he could think of no place he’d rather be than here in Ocho Rios, with the woman who had brought sanity and delight to his disjointed life.
"Necklace for the pretty missy, mon? Nice cochina necklace?" The little Jamaican boy was no older than eight or nine. His arms were draped with dozens of delicate shell necklaces and bracelets, and a cloth pouch tied at his waist bulged with earrings made
from the same colorful shells. "How much for … that one, there?"
"Eight shilling."
"Make it one pound six, and I’ll take it." The boy raised his eyebrows, confused. "Hey, you crazy, mon? You s’pose go lower, not higher."
"Two pounds, then."
"I’m not gonna argue with you, mon. You got it." The child hurriedly took the necklace from his arm, handed it to Judy. "You wan' buy any more, I got plenty. Ever’body on the beach know me, my name Renard, O.K.?"
"O.K., Renard. Nice doing business with you." Jeff handed him two one-pound notes, and the boy scampered away down the beach, grinning.
Judy slipped the necklace on, shook her head in mock dismay. "Shame on you," she said, "taking advantage of a child that way."
"Could have been worse." Jeff smiled. "Another minute or so and I might have bargained him up to four or five pounds."
She looked down to rearrange the necklace, and when her eyes met his again there was sadness in them. "You’re so good around children," she said. "That’s my only regret, that we’ve never—"
Jeff placed his fingers lightly on her lips. "You’re my baby girl. All I need."
He could never tell her, never even let her guess, about the vasectomy he’d had in 1966, soon after they’d started making love. Never again would he give life to a human being, as he had to Gretchen, only to see her entire existence negated. To everyone but Jeff, she did not even live in memory; and on the unthinkable chance that he might be doomed to repeat his life yet again, he refused to leave in that sort of absolute limbo someone he’d not only loved, but had created.
"Jeff … I’ve been thinking."
He looked back at Judy, tried to keep the pain and guilt from showing. "About what?"
"We could—don’t answer right away; give yourself time to consider it—we could adopt."
He didn’t say anything for several seconds, just looked at her. Saw the love in her face, saw the need for even more of an outlet through which to express that love.