by Ken Grimwood
It wouldn’t be as if the children were his own, he thought. Even if he grew to love them, he wouldn’t be responsible for their having come into being. They already existed, had been born, whoever they might be. The worst could happen, and they’d still exist, though with a different life in store for them.
"Yes," he told her. "Yes, I’d like that very much."
The put-in was at a place called Earl’s Ford, at the southern edge of the great Appalachian forests, near the spot where North and South Carolina met the upper tip of Georgia. There were six rafts in all: black, ungainly-looking things, inflated at the base camp and hauled with difficulty to the edge of the Chattooga River. Jeff, Judy, and the children shared one raft with a jolly, gray-haired woman and a guide who looked to be of college age, his face and arms brown from the sun.
As the raft slid into the clear, leisurely-flowing water, Jeff reached to cinch April’s life vest tighter around the child’s thin frame. Dwayne saw the paternal motion and tightened his own vest, a look of manly determination in his young eyes.
April was a charming little blond-haired girl who’d been severely abused by her natural parents; her brother was an intense, very bright child whose mother and father had died in an automobile accident. The children’s names weren’t necessarily what Jeff or Judy would have chosen to call them, but they’d been six and four years old when they were adopted, and it seemed best not to further disturb either one’s sense of self by changing their given names.
"Daddy, look! A deer!" April pointed at the far bank of the river, her face agleam with excitement. The animal stared back at them complacently, poised to run if need be, but unwilling to interrupt its feeding simply for having seen these strange apparitions.
Soon the wooded banks on either side began to rise, become a rocky gorge. As the canyon deepened, the river’s speed increased, and before long the flotilla of rafts had entered the first set of rapids. The children whooped with pleasure as the craft bucked and swayed in the downward current.
Jeff looked at Judy after they had cleared the white water and were again drifting smoothly downstream. He was gratified to see that her earlier anxiety had been replaced with an exhilaration matching that of the children. She’d been worried about taking them on this outing, but Jeff hadn’t wanted the children to be deprived of anything so joyfully inspiring.
The expedition pulled ashore at a small island, and Judy spread out the lunch she’d packed in a watertight chest. Jeff munched on a chicken leg and sipped his cold beer, watching April and
Dwayne explore the triangular wedge of land. The children’s curiosity and imagination never ceased to fascinate him; through their eyes, he had come to appreciate this tired world anew. When he and Judy had decided to adopt them, he’d bought some Apple and Atari stock at the right time; not much, just enough to edge the family’s income up a couple of notches. They’d bought a larger house, on West Paces Ferry Road; it had a huge backyard, with a shallow fishpond and three big oak trees. Perfect for the children.
The rafts got underway again, breached another, larger set of rapids a mile or so downriver. The current was moving much more swiftly now, even in the blue-water segments of the journey; but Jeff could see that his wife had lost her fear of the river, was caught up in the beauty and the thrill of it. She held his hand tightly as they shot through the torrent of Bull Sluice Falls, and then it was over, the water calm again and the sun retreating behind the pines.
April and Dwayne were manifestly sad to see the bus that stood waiting to take them back to Atlanta, but Jeff knew their adventures, like the summer, had scarcely begun. He’d soon be taking his family on an unhurried, two-month drive through France and Italy; next year he planned a trip for them to Japan and the newly accessible vastness of China.
Jeff wanted them to see it all, experience every bit of glory and wonder the world had to offer. Still, he had a secret fear that all these memories, along with all the love he had given them, would soon be obliterated by a force he could understand no better than they.
After three days his chest had begun to itch something fierce where the electrodes were taped, but he wouldn’t allow the EKG to be unhooked, not for a minute.
The nurses were full of contempt for him; Jeff knew that. They laughed about him when they thought they were out of earshot, resented having to cater to a perfectly healthy hypochondriac who was taking up valuable bed space.
His physician felt more or less the same way, had said so openly. Still, Jeff had demanded, had been vehement. Finally, after making a sizable donation to the hospital’s building fund, he’d gotten himself admitted for the week.
The third week of October 1988. If it was going to happen, this would be the time.
"Hi, honey; how you feeling?" Judy wore a rust-colored fall outfit; her hair was piled loosely atop her head.
"Itching. Otherwise fine."
She smiled with a slyness uncharacteristic of her still-innocent face. "Anything I can scratch?"
Jeff laughed. "I wish. Think we’re gonna have to wait another few days, though, till I get unwired."
"Well," she said, holding up a pair of shopping bags, one from the Oxford Book Store and another from Turtle Records. "Here’s some stuff to keep you occupied in the meantime."
She’d brought him the latest Travis McGee and Dick Francis mysteries (tastes he had acquired this time around), plus a new biography of André Malraux and a history of the Cunard shipping line. For all she’d never learned about him, Judy certainly understood the eclectic nature of his interests. The other bag contained a dozen jewel-boxed compact discs, ranging from Bach and Vivaldi to a digital transfer of "Sergeant Pepper." She slid one of the shiny discs into the portable CD player at his bedside, and the exquisite strains of Pachelbel’s "Canon in D" filled the hospital room.
"Judy—" His voice broke. He cleared his throat and started again. "I just want you to know … how very much I have always loved you."
She answered in measured tones, but couldn’t hide the look of alarm in her eyes. "We’ll always love each other, I hope. For a long, long time to come."
"As long as possible."
Judy frowned, started to speak, but he shushed her. She leaned over the bed to kiss him, and her hand was trembling as it found his.
"Come home soon," she whispered against his face. "We haven’t even started yet."
It happened a little over an hour after Judy had left the room to get lunch in the hospital cafeteria. Jeff was glad she wasn’t there to see it.
Even through his pain he could see the astonishment on the nurse’s face as the EKG went berserk; but she behaved with complete professionalism, didn’t delay calling the Code Blue for an instant. Within seconds Jeff was surrounded by a full medical team, shouting instructions and status reports as they worked over him:
"Epi, one cc!"
"Bicarb two amps? Gimme three-sixty joules!"
"Stand back…" WHUMP!
"V-tach! Blood pressure eighty palpable; two hundred watt seconds, lidocaine seventy-five milligrams IV, stat!"
"Take a look—V-Fib."
"Repeat epi and bicarb, defib at three-sixty; stand back…" WHUMP!
On and on, their voices fading with the light. Jeff tried to scream in anger because it wasn’t fair; he’d been totally prepared this time. But he couldn’t scream, he couldn’t even cry, he couldn’t do a goddamned thing but die again.
And wake again, in the back seat of Martin Bailey’s Corvair with Judy beside him. Judy at eighteen, Judy in 1963 before they ever fell in love and married and built their lives together.
"Stop the car!"
"Hang on, buddy," Martin said. "We’re almost back to the girls' dorm. We’ll—"
"I said stop the car! Stop it now!"
Shaking his head in bewilderment, Martin pulled the car to a halt on Kilgo Circle, behind the history building. Judy put her hand on Jeff’s arm, trying to calm him, but he jerked away from her and shoved the car door open.
&
nbsp; "Jesus, what the hell are you doing?" Martin yelled, but Jeff was out of the car and running, running hard in whatever direction it was; it didn’t matter.
Nothing mattered.
He raced through the quadrangle, past the chemistry and psych buildings, his strong young heart pounding in his chest as if it had not betrayed him minutes ago and twenty-five years in the future. His legs carried him past the biology building, across the corner of Pierce and Arkwright drives. He finally stumbled and fell to his knees in the middle of the soccer field, looking up at the stars through blurry eyes.
"Fuck you!" He screamed at the impassive sky, screamed with all the force and despair he’d been unable to express from that terminal hospital bed. "Fuck you! Why … are … you … DOING THIS TO ME!"
EIGHT
Jeff just didn’t much give a shit after that. He’d done all he could, achieved everything a man could ever hope to—materially, romantically, paternally—and still it came to nothing, still he was left alone and powerless, with empty hands and heart. Back to the beginning; yet why begin at all, if his best efforts would inevitably prove futile?
He couldn’t bring himself to see Judy again. This sweet-faced adolescent girl was not the woman he had loved, but merely a blank slate with the potential to become that woman. It would be pointless, even masochistic, to repeat by rote that process of mutual becoming, when he knew too well the emotional and spiritual death to which it all would lead.
He went back to that anonymous bar he’d found so long ago on North Druid Hills Road, and started drinking. When the time came, he again went through the charade of convincing Frank Maddock to place the bet on the Kentucky Derby. As soon as the money came in he flew to Las Vegas, alone.
After three days of wandering the hotels and casinos he finally found her, sitting at a dollar-minimum blackjack table at the Sands. Same black hair, same perfect body, even the same red dress he’d once ripped in a moment of shared impatient lust on the living-room sofa of her little duplex.
"Hi," he said. "My name’s Jeff Winston."
She smiled her familiar seductive smile. "Sharla Baker."
"Right. How’d you like to go to Paris?"
Sharla gave him a bemused stare. "Mind if I finish this hand first?"
"There’s a plane to New York in three hours. It makes a direct connection with Air France. That gives you time to pack."
She took a hit on sixteen, busted.
"Are you for real, or what?" she asked.
"I’m for real. You ready to go?"
Sharla shrugged, scooped the few chips she had left into her purse. "Sure. Why not?"
"Exactly," Jeff said. "Why not?"
The sweetly harsh scent of a hundred smoldering Gauloises and Gitanes cigarettes hung in the air of the club like a rancid fog. Through the haze, Jeff could see Sharla dancing alone in a corner, eyes closed, drunk. She seemed to drink more this time around than he’d remembered; or maybe it was just that she was keeping pace with him, and he was drinking more now than he ever had. At least the liquor made him gregarious; there were half a dozen people at his table tonight, most of them ostensibly "students" of one sort or another, but all more interested in the city’s never-ending night life than in their books.
"You have these clubs in U.S., hein?" Jean-Claude asked. Jeff shook his head. The Caveau de la Huchette was a Parisian jazz cavern in the classic mold, a rock-walled dungeon full of music as smoky and pungent as the cigarettes everyone here seemed to exist on. Unlike the newer discothèques, it was a style that would never catch on in the States.
Mireille, Jean-Claude’s petite red-haired girlfriend, gave a wry and lazy smile. "C’est dommage," she said. "The blacks, no one likes them in their home country, so they must come here for to play their music."
Jeff made a noncommittal gesture, poured himself another glass of red wine. America’s present racial troubles were a major topic of conversation in France right now, but he had no interest in getting involved in that discussion. Nothing serious, nothing that would make him think or remember, held any interest for him now.
"You must to visit l’Afrique," Mireille said. "There is much of beauty there, much to understand."
She and Jean-Claude had recently returned from a month in Morocco. Jeff kindly didn’t mention France’s recent debacle in Algeria.
"Attention, attention, s’il vous plaît!" The owner of the club stood on its tiny stage, leaning close to the microphone. "Mesdames et messieurs, copains et copines … Le Caveau de la Huchette a le plaisir extraordinaire de vous présenter le blues hot … avec le maître du blues, personne d’autre que—Monsieur Sidney … Bechet!"
There was wild applause as the old expatriate musician took the stage, clarinet in hand. He kicked things off with a rouser, "Blues in the Cave," and followed that with a soulfully sexy version of "Frankie and Johnny." Sharla continued her solo dance in the corner, her body undulating with the visceral thrust of the music. Jeff emptied the wine bottle, signaled for another.
The old blues man grinned and nodded as the second number ended and the young crowd roared its appreciation of his alien art form. "Mercy, mercy, mercy!" Bechet exclaimed. "Mon français n’est pas très bon," he said with a thick black-American accent, "So I just gots to say in my own way that I can tell y’all knows the blues. You heah me?"
At least half the audience understood enough English to answer enthusiastically. "Mais oui!" they cheered, "Bien sûr!" Jeff gulped his fresh glass of wine, waited for the music to carry him away again, to wipe out all the memories.
"Well, all right!" Bechet said from the stage, wiping the mouthpiece of his clarinet. "Now, this next one is really what the blues is most about. You see, there’s some blues for folks ain’t never had a thing, and that’s a sad blues … but the saddest kind of blues is for them that’s had everything they ever wanted and has lost it, and knows it won’t come back no more. Ain’t no sufferin' in this world worse than that; and that’s the blues we call I Had It But It’s All Gone Now. "
The music began, deep-throated sounds of evanescence and regret in a minor key. Irresistible, unendurable. Jeff slumped in his chair, trying to blot out the sound of it. He reached for his glass, spilled the wine.
"Something?" Mireille said, touching his shoulder.
Jeff tried to answer, couldn’t.
"Allons-y," she said, pulling him to his feet in the smoke-filled nightclub. "We go outside, to breathe some air."
A light drizzle was falling as they stepped out onto the rue de la Huchette. Jeff raised his face to the cool rain, let it trickle across his forehead. Mireille reached up, put a slender hand on his cheek.
"Music can hurt," she said softly.
"Mm."
"No good. Better to … comment dit-on oublier?"
"Forget. "
"Oui, c’est ça. Better to forget."
"Yeah."
"For a while."
"For a while," he agreed, and they set off toward the boul’Mich to find a taxi.
Back in the living room of Jeff s apartment on the avenue Foch, Mireille filled a small pipe with crumbly brown hashish and an equal measure of opium. She sat beside him on an Oriental rug, lit the potent mixture, and passed the pipe to him. He inhaled deeply, relit it when it went out.
Jeff had smoked a joint now and then, mainly in his first existence, but he’d never felt such a deep rush of blissful calm as this. It was, as Malraux had described the opium experience, "like being carried away on great motionless wings," yet the hashish kept his mind active and open, kept him from drifting off entirely into dreams.
Mireille lay back on the carpet, her green silk dress rising to her thighs. The rain against the window beat an insistent cadence, and she lolled her head in a rhythmic circle to the sound, her lustrous russet hair falling now across her face, now upon her naked shoulders. Jeff stroked her calf, then her inner thigh, and she made a soft murmur of acquiescence and desire. He leaned forward, undid the front of her dress, slid the smooth fabric awa
y from her girlish breasts.
There on the floor they used each other’s bodies wordlessly, almost furiously. When they were done, Mireille filled another pipe with the opiated hash, and they smoked it in the bedroom. This time they came together languorously beneath the down-filled blanket, their legs and arms entwining with newly familiar ease; and later, as the bells of Saint-Honoré d’Eylau called early Mass, Mireille climbed atop him once again, her slim hips riding his in playful joy.
Sharla let herself back into the apartment with the drab dawn. "Morning," she said as she opened the bedroom door, looking spent. "You guys want coffee?"
Mireille sat up in bed, shaking her tousled hair. "With perhaps a little Cognac?"
Sharla pulled off her wrinkled dress, fished in the closet for a robe. "That sounds good," she said. "Same for you, Jeff?"
He blinked, rubbed the drug haze from his eyes. "Yeah, I guess."
Mireille got up and padded casually to the bathroom for a shower. When Sharla came back with the breakfast tray, the little redhead was sitting on the edge of the bed, still nude, drying her hair. As they sipped their coffee laced with brandy, the two women talked pleasantly about a new lingerie shop on the rue de Rivoli.
A little after nine Mireille said she had to go home and change; she was meeting another friend for brunch, and didn’t want to show up at the café wearing last night’s silk. She kissed Jeff goodbye, gave Sharla a quick hug, and was gone.
As soon as Mireille had left, Sharla cleared the coffee cups from the bed, pulled back the sheets, and moved her warm tongue down Jeff’s belly. He was limp when she took him in her mouth, but soon grew hard again.
Jeff never asked where Sharla had been all night; it didn’t really matter.
The Mediterranean lapped gently against the pebbly beach, its quiet waves a whisper of eternity, of changelessness. The scent of a fresh pot of bouillabaise drifted from one of the cafés nearby. Jeff was getting hungry; as soon as the girls finished swimming, he’d suggest lunch.