Replay

by Ken Grimwood

  "Pamela…"

  "I can’t resent your feelings for Linda," she said. "We’ve been apart too long for me to turn possessive, and I know how much it must mean to you to have that work out positively, after the problems you and she had the first time."

  "That doesn’t change anything about the way I feel for you."

  "I know," she said gently. "It has nothing to do with us, but it’s real, and right now it takes priority for you. Just as I need this time with my children, my family; I need it desperately."

  "You’re not still angry about—"

  "Everything that happened last time, with Russell Hedges? No. Not angry at you; we both set that in motion and did what we thought was best. There were so many times, during those last few months particularly, that I wanted to turn to you, apologize for having blamed you … but I was stubborn. I couldn’t handle all the guilt I felt. I had to saddle someone else with it to protect my own sanity, and that should have been Hedges, not you. I’m sorry."

  "I understand," he told her. "I did then, too, though it was difficult."

  The longing in her eyes, the deep regret, mirrored his own emotions. "It’ll be even harder now," she said, covering his hand with her smooth palms. "It’s going to take a lot of understanding, on both our parts."

  The gallery was on Chambers Street in TriBeCa, the Triangle Below Canal Street, which had replaced Soho as Manhattan’s primary artists' enclave. Since the mid-eighties, though, the same process that had led to the exodus from Soho had begun anew in TriBeCa: Trendy bars and restaurants were sprouting on the side streets off Hudson and Varick, the prices in the shops and galleries had begun to reflect the spending power of their uptown patrons, and loft space was at a premium. Soon the young painters and sculptors and performance artists whose presence had set in motion the flowering of this once-desolate corner of the city would be driven out to some new bohemia, some thoroughly undesirable, and thus affordable, sector of this congested island. Jeff spotted the understated brass plaque that identified the Hawthorne Gallery, and led Linda through the doorway of the renovated building that had once been a tenement next to an industrial warehouse. They came into an elegantly sparse reception area, white walls and ceiling, a low black sofa facing a curved black desk. The only decoration was a surprisingly delicate piece of hanging ironwork, its elongated slender swirls like a distillation and extension of the intricate iron filigree typical of the gates and balconies of old New Orleans.

  "May I help you?" asked the whippet-thin young woman behind the desk.

  "We’re here for the opening," Jeff said, handing her the embossed invitation.

  "Certainly," she said, consulting a printed list and crossing off their names. "Go right in, won’t you?"

  Jeff and Linda walked past the desk, into the main gallery space. The walls were the same stark white, but devoted to the display of what might have seemed a riot of images, had their placement not been subject to such careful design. The one huge room had been subdivided here and there into intimate little alcoves suited to quiet study of the contemplative pieces they contained, while at the other extreme the full grandeur of the larger works was enhanced by the openness of the areas in which they were exhibited.

  The gallery was dominated by a twenty-foot canvas of an undersea vista that could exist only in the imagination of the artist: a serene mountain peak far beneath the waves, its unmistakably distinctive symmetry undimmed, the snows upon its heights undisturbed by the waters that surrounded it. A school of dolphins swam among the crevasses of its lower slopes; looking closer, Jeff could see that two of the dolphins had ageless, clearly human eyes.

  "It’s … stunning," Linda said. "And look, look at that one over there."

  Jeff turned to see where she had pointed. The smaller painting there was no less striking than the image of that drowned mountain; this one depicted the view from within a sailplane, stretched as if by a wide-angle lens to encompass a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree field of vision. In the foreground, the rudder stick and struts of the plane were visible; through the windows, another glider could be seen close by … and both were soaring, not through blue sky, but in the infinity of space, in orbit around a dusky-orange ringed planet.

  "I’m glad you could come," Jeff heard a voice behind him say.

  The years had been kind to her this time. There was none of the drawn, haggard emptiness that had haunted her face in Maryland, and in New York after they had first met Stuart McCowan. Though she was unambiguously a woman in her late thirties, her face shone with the clear light of contentment.

  "Linda, I’d like you to meet Pamela Phillips. Pamela, this is my wife, Linda."

  "I’m so pleased to meet you," Pamela said, taking Linda’s hand. "You’re even lovelier than Jeff had told me."

  "Thank you. I can’t tell you how impressed I am by your work; it’s absolutely magnificent."

  Pamela smiled graciously. "That’s always nice to hear. You should look at some of the smaller pieces, too; they’re not all quite so imposing or austere. Some of them are even quite humorous, I think."

  "I look forward to seeing the whole show," Linda said eagerly. "It was kind of you to invite us."

  "I’m happy you could make it up from Florida. I’ve been an admirer of your husband’s books for years, even before we met last month. I thought he and you might enjoy seeing some of the things I’ve been doing."

  Pamela turned toward a knot of people who stood nearby, sipping wine and nibbling from small plates of pasta salad with pine nuts and pesto sauce. "Steve," she called, "come on over; there are some people I’d like you to meet."

  A friendly-looking man wearing glasses and a gray twill jacket detached himself from the group and moved to join them. "This is my husband, Steve Robison," Pamela said. "I use my maiden name, Phillips, for my work, and Robison for real life. Steve, this is Jeff Winston and his wife, Linda."

  "A pleasure." The man beamed, gripping Jeff’s hand. "A genuine pleasure. I think Harps upon the Willows is one of the best things I’ve ever read. Won the Pulitzer, didn’t it?"

  "Yes," Jeff said. "I was gratified that it seemed to strike a chord in so many people."

  "Hell of a book," Robison said. "And your last one, the one on people returning to the places where they grew up, that runs a close second. Pamela and I have both been big fans of yours for a long time; I believe some of your thoughts have even influenced her own work. I couldn’t believe it when she told me she’d met you on the plane from Boston a few weeks ago. What a wonderful coincidence!"

  "You must be very proud of her," Jeff said, sidestepping the fiction he and Pamela had concocted to explain their knowing each other. She’d written him at the beginning of the summer, wanted to see him, at least briefly, before this final autumn wanted him to see this opening. Jeff hadn’t even been to Boston this year. Pamela had flown there and back alone to set up their prearranged story while he spent a week in Atlanta, walking around the Emory campus and thinking of all he’d been through since that first morning when he’d awakened in the dorm room there.

  "I’m extremely proud of her," Steve Robison said, putting an arm around his wife. "She hates to have me talk this way about her, says it makes it sound like she’s not even in the room. But I just can’t help boasting when I think of all she’s accomplished, in so short a time and with two kids to raise."

  "Speaking of which"—Pamela smiled—"that’s them over there by the phoenix sculpture. Behaving themselves, I hope."

  Jeff looked across the gallery, saw the children. The boy, Christopher, was an endearingly ungainly fourteen-year-old, on the awkward brink of manhood; and Kimberly, at eleven, was already a young facsimile of Pamela. Eleven. Just two years younger than Gretchen, when—

  "Jeff," Pamela said, "there’s an exhibit I especially want to show you. Steve, why don’t you get Mrs. Winston some pasta and a glass of wine?"

  Linda followed Robison toward the caterer’s buffet and bar, and Pamela led Jeff toward a small cylindrical
enclosure, a tiny room within a room, at the center of the gallery. Several people stood waiting to enter the cubicle, outside of which was mounted a small card requesting that it be occupied by no more than four persons at a time. Pamela turned the card around so that it read "Temporarily closed for repairs." She apologized to those in line, told them she needed to make some adjustments to the equipment. They nodded sympathetically, wandered off to other areas of the show. After a few moments a quartet of guests emerged from the booth and Pamela took Jeff inside, closing the door behind them.

  The exhibit was a video display, a dozen color monitors of various sizes set into the inner walls of the darkened cylinder, with a round leather seat in the center. The screens flickered from every direction, an arm’s reach away wherever the viewer turned. Jeff’s eyes moved from one to the next at random, focusing, adjusting. Then he began to comprehend what he was seeing. The past. Their past, his and Pamela’s. The first thing he noticed was the news footage: Vietnam, the Kennedy assassinations, Apollo 11: Then he saw that there were also bits and pieces of various movies, television shows, old music videos … And suddenly he caught a glimpse of his cabin in Montgomery Creek on one of the monitors, and on another was a quick still-frame of Judy Gordon’s college yearbook picture, followed by a video tape of her as an adult, waving at the camera along with her son, Sean, the boy who in another life had studied dolphins because of Starsea.

  Jeff’s eyes darted rapidly now from screen to screen, trying to take it all in, trying not to miss anything: Chateaugay winning the 1963 Kentucky Derby, his parents' house in Orlando, the jazz club in Paris where Sidney Bechet’s clarinet had pierced his soul, the college bar where he’d watched Pamela begin replaying, the grounds of his estate nearby … And there on one monitor was a long shot of the hillside village in Majorca; the camera zoomed slowly in to the villa where Pamela had died, then cut abruptly to a blurry home-movie clip of her at age fourteen, with her mother and father in the house in Westport.

  "My God," he said, transfixed by the ever-changing montage of all their replays. "Where did you find all this?"

  "Some of it was easy," she said. "The news-file footage is readily available. As for the rest, I shot most of it myself, in Paris, California, Atlanta…" She smiled, her face illuminated by the flashing screens. "I did a lot of traveling for this one. To some familiar places and to others that I only knew about through you." One of the screens now showed the corridors and wards of a hospital, all the beds filled with children; Jeff assumed it was the clinic in Chicago where she’d been a physician her first time back. On another monitor was the boat they’d once rented in Key West, anchored off the same deserted island where they’d decided to begin their search for other replayers. On and on the surrounding images played, an incessant kinetic collage of their many lives, together and apart.

  "Incredible," he whispered. "I can’t tell you how grateful I am for the chance to see this."

  "I did it for you. For us. No one else can understand it; you’d be amused at the interpretations some of the critics have come up with."

  He tore his eyes away from the screens, looked at her. "All of this … the whole show…"

  Pamela nodded, returning his gaze. "Did you think I’d forgotten? Or that I no longer cared?" "It’s been so long."

  "Much too long. And a month from now, we begin all over again."

  "Next time. Next time is for us, if you want it to be." She looked away at one of the monitors, which was displaying scenes of the surfside restaurant in Malibu where they’d had their first long conversation, their first disagreement over the film she’d planned to make to convince the world of the cyclical nature of reality.

  "It may be my last," she said quietly. "The skew was almost eight years for me this time; next time I won’t come back until sometime in the eighties. Will you wait for me? Will you—"

  He pulled her to him, silenced her fearful words with his lips, his hands, caressing, reassuring. They embraced within that silent cubicle, lit by the reflected glow of all the lives they’d lived, and warmed by the finite promise of the single, brief life that remained for them to share.

  "What’s the matter, can’t you hear me? Turn down that damned television. Since when do you care about ice skating, anyway?"

  It was Linda’s voice, but not as he had grown to know it. No, this was a voice from long ago, tight with strain and sarcasm.

  She strode into the room, turned off the volume of the TV set. On the silenced screen, Dorothy Hamill leaped and spun gracefully across the ice, her bobbed hair falling immaculately into place each time she came to rest.

  "I said, dinner’s ready. If you want it, come get it. I may be the cook around here, but I’m not a servant."

  "It’s all right," Jeff said, struggling to adjust, trying to identify his new surroundings. "I’m not really hungry, anyway."

  Linda gave him a derisive scowl. "What you mean is, you don’t want to eat what I’ve cooked. Maybe you’d rather have lobster, hm? And some fresh asparagus? Champagne?"

  Dorothy Hamill went into a final quickened spin, her brief red skater’s skirt a twirling blur above her thighs. When she’d finished her routine she smiled and blinked into the camera, and the network replayed that look in slow motion: sweet elation, the gradually spreading smile like a rising sun, the decelerated blink become an expression of both modesty and sensuality. In that one lengthened moment, the girl seemed the very emblem of fresh, vital youth.

  "Just tell me," Linda snapped, "just tell me what kind of gourmet meal you’d like instead of meat loaf tomorrow. And then tell me how we’re supposed to afford it—will you do that?"

  The freeze-frame image of Dorothy Hamill’s smile faded into blackness, was replaced by one of ABC’s mini-tours of Innsbruck, Austria. The Winter Olympics, 1976. He and Linda would be in Philadelphia. Camden, New Jersey, actually; that was where they’d lived while he was working at WCAU, across the river. "Well?" she asked. "Have you got any bright suggestions as to what we might use to buy something other than ground beef or chicken next week?"

  "Linda, please … let’s not do this."

  "Not do what—Jeffrey?"

  She knew how he hated the long form of his name; whenever she’d used it, she’d been openly goading him into a fight.

  "Let’s not argue," he said complaisantly. "There’s nothing more to argue about; everything’s … changed."

  "Oh, really? Just like that, hm?" She put her hands on her hips and turned in a slow circle, making an exaggerated show of inspecting the cramped apartment, the rented furniture. "I don’t see that anything’s changed at all. Not unless you’re about to tell me you’ve gotten a better-paying job, after all these years."

  "Forget the job. That’s irrelevant. There won’t be any more worries about money."

  "And what’s that supposed to mean? Have you won the lottery?"

  Jeff sighed, flicked off the distracting television set with the remote control box. "It doesn’t matter," he told her. "There won’t be any more financial problems, that’s all. For the moment, you’ll just have to trust me on that."

  "Big talk. That comes easy to you, doesn’t it? From way back when, all your talk about broadcast journalism, how you were going to be such a hotshot newsman, some kind of latter-day Edward R. Murrow. God, you had me snowed! And what does it all come down to? One piddling little radio station after another, moving all over the country to live in crappy places like this. I think you’re afraid to succeed, Jeffrey L. Winston. You’re afraid to move into television or to get into the corporate end of the business, because you’re scared you just don’t have what it takes to make it. And I’m beginning to think you don’t."

  "Stop it, Linda, right now. This isn’t doing either of us any good, and it’s pointless."

  "Sure, I’ll stop it. I’ll stop it good." She stormed into the kitchen. He could hear her angrily preparing dinner for herself, setting the table with a deliberate clatter, slamming the oven door shut. Reverting to one of her
silent treatments. Those had started around this time and had become lengthier, more frequent, as the years went on. The arguments in between had almost always been about money, but that had been only the most conspicuous source of their difficulties. The real problems had been more deeply rooted, had derived from and been severely aggravated by their inability to communicate about the things that truly troubled them, such as the ectopic pregnancy. That had happened the year before this, and they’d never openly dealt with what that disappointment had meant to each of them, how they might overcome it and move beyond it together.

  Jeff glanced into the kitchen, saw Linda hunched bitterly over the table, picking at her food; she didn’t bother to look up at him. He closed his eyes, remembered her at his door with a bunch of daisies, pictured her in a warm breeze on the deck of the S.S. France. But that had been a different person, he realized; someone with whom he had shared his innermost feelings, if not the details of his numerous lives, from the beginning. Now the patterns of silence were set; all the money in the world wouldn’t help at this point, not if they couldn’t even talk to each other about the things that mattered.

  He found an overcoat in the tiny hall closet, pulled it on, and left the apartment. Not a word passed between them as he went.

  Outside, the snow was grimy, patchy, as unlike the pristine sheets of white the television had shown from Innsbruck as the woman in that kitchen was from the Linda he had loved these past nineteen years.

  He’d make the money fast this time, he decided, and see to it that she had enough to keep her comfortable for the rest of her life, but there was no way he could bring himself to stay, not now. The only question was what to do with himself until Pamela arrived, whenever that might be.

  NINETEEN

  The blue jay, darting and flitting outside the kitchen window as it built its nest in the backyard elm tree, was the first thing Pamela saw. She watched the bird’s colorful aerial dance, took several long, deep breaths to calm herself before she looked around or moved.