by Ken Grimwood
A voice droned on interminably in the dim background of Jeff’s consciousness. It didn’t matter who the voice belonged to, or what it might be saying.
Pamela was dead, never to return. The realization washed over him like seawater against an open wound, filled his mind with an all-encompassing grief he had not felt since the loss of his daughter Gretchen. He clenched his fists, lowered his head beneath the weight of the undeniable, the intolerable … and still the voice babbled forth its senseless litany:
"… see if Charlie can get react from Mayor Koch on Reagan’s Bitburg trip. Looks like this one could really whip up into a firestorm; we’ve got the American Legion coming down on him about it, and Congress is starting to buzz. That’s—Jeff? You O.K.?"
"Yeah." He glanced up briefly. "I’m fine. Go ahead."
He was in the conference room of WFYI in New York, the all-news radio station where he’d been news director when first he died. He was seated at one end of a long oval table; the morning and midday editors were on either side of him, and the reporters occupied the other chairs. He hadn’t seen these people for decades, but Jeff recognized the place, the situation, instantly. He’d had this same meeting every weekday morning for years: the daily assignment conference, where the structure of the day’s news coverage was planned as best it could be in advance. Gene Collins, the ongoing midday editor, was frowning at him with j concern.
"You sure you’re feeling all right? We could cut this short; there’s not much else to discuss."
"Just go ahead, Gene. I’ll be fine."
"Well … O.K. Anyway, that’s about it for metro stories and; local angles. On the national front, we’ve got the shuttle going! up this morning, and—"
"Which one?" Jeff rasped out.
"What?" Gene asked, puzzled.
"Which shuttle?"
"Discovery. You know, the one with the senator on board."
Thank God for that at least; so immediately after Pamela’s final death, Jeff wasn’t sure he could have handled a repeat of the chaos and depression in the newsroom on the day of the Challenger disaster. He should have known better, anyway, if he’d been thinking clearly; Reagan had gone to Bitburg in the spring off 1985. That would make this sometime around April of that year, nine or ten months before the shuttle would explode.
Everyone at the table was looking at him strangely, wondering why he seemed so distraught, so disoriented. To hell with it. Let them think whatever they wanted.
"Let’s wrap it up, all right, Gene?"
The editor nodded, began gathering the scattered papers he had brought to the meeting. "Only other good story developing is this rape-recant thing in Illinois. Dotson’s going back to prison today while his lawyer prepares an appeal. That’s it. Questions, anybody?"
"The school-board meeting looks like it might run long today," one of the reporters said. "I don’t know if I’ll be able to make this 2:00 P.M. Fire Department awards thing. You want me to dump out of the school board early, or would you rather put somebody else on the awards?"
"Jeff?" Collins asked, deferring to him. "I don’t care. You decide."
Gene frowned again, started to say something but didn’t. He turned back to the reporters, who had begun to mumble among themselves. "Bill, stick with the school board as long as you need to. Charlie, you hit the Fire Department ceremony after you talk to the mayor. Give us a live shot on Koch and Bitburg at one. Then you can hold off filing until after the awards are over. Oh, and Jim, Mobile Four is in the shop; you’ll be taking Mobile Seven."
The meeting broke up quietly, with none of the usual wisecracks and raucous laughter. The reporters and the offgoing early-morning editor filed out of the conference room, casting quick, covert glances at Jeff. Gene Collins hung behind, stacking and restacking his sheaf of papers.
"You want to talk about it?" he finally said.
Jeff shook his head. "Nothing to talk about. I told you, I’ll be all right."
"Look, if it’s problems with Linda … I mean, I understand. You know what a rough go of it Carol and I had a couple of years back. You helped me through a lot of that—God knows I bent your ear enough—so anytime you want to sit down over a beer, just let me know."
"Thanks, Gene. I appreciate your concern, I really do. But it’s something I have to work out for myself."
Collins shrugged, stood from the table. "That’s up to you," he said. "But if you ever do feel like unloading your problems, feel free to dump a few in my direction. I owe you."
Jeff nodded briefly, then Collins left the room, and he was alone again.
TWENTY
Jeff quit work, made enough bets and short-term-yield investments to enable Linda to get by on her own for the next three years. There was no time to build a major inheritance for her; he increased his life-insurance coverage tenfold and let it go at that.
He moved into a small apartment on the Upper West Side, spent his days and evenings wandering the streets of Manhattan, taking in all the sights and smells and sounds of humanity from which he had so long isolated himself. The old people fascinated him most, their eyes full of distant memories and lost hope, their bodies slumped in anticipation of the end of time.
Now that Pamela was gone, the fears and regrets she had expressed came back to trouble him as deeply as they’d disturbed her toward the end. He’d done what he could to reassure her, to ease the grief and terror of her final days, but she’d been right: For all that they had struggled, all they’d once achieved, the end result was null. Even the happiness they had managed to find together had been frustratingly brief; a few years stolen here and there, transient moments of love and contentment like vanishing specks of foam in a sea of lonely, needless separation.
It had seemed as if they would have forever, an infinity of choices and second chances. They had squandered far too much of the priceless time that had been granted them, wasted it on bitterness and guilt and futile quests for nonexistent answers—when they themselves, their love for each other, had been all the answer either of them should have ever needed. Now even the opportunity to tell her that, to hold her in his arms and let her know how much he had revered and cherished her, was eternally denied him. Pamela was dead, and in three years' time Jeff, too, would die, never knowing why he’d lived.
He roamed his city streets, watching, listening: tough-eyed bands of punks, furious at the world … men and women in corporate attire, hurrying to accomplish whatever goals they had established for themselves … giggling swarms of children, exuberant at the newness of their lives. Jeff envied them all, coveted their innocence, their ignorance, their expectations.
Several weeks after he’d quit his job at WFYI, he got a call from one of the news writers who worked there, a woman—girl, really—named Lydia Randall. Everyone at the station was concerned about him, she said, had been shocked when he’d resigned, and worried further when they’d heard his marriage had broken up. Jeff told her, as he had told Gene Collins, that he was all right. But she pressed the issue, insisted that he meet her for a drink so she could talk to him in person.
They met the next afternoon at the Sign of the Dove on Third Avenue at Sixty-fifth, took a table by one of the windows that was open to a gloriously sunny New York June. Lydia was wearing a shoulder-baring white cotton dress and a matching wide-brimmed hat from which a pink satin ribbon trailed. She was an exceptionally pretty young woman, with a mass of wavy blond hair and wide, liquid-green eyes.
Jeff recited the story he’d concocted to explain his sudden retirement, a standard tale of journalist’s burn-out combined with some half-truths about the recent "luck" he’d had with his investments. Lydia nodded understandingly, seemed to accept his explanations at face value. As far as his marriage went, he told her, it had effectively been over for a long time; no specific problems worth belaboring, just a case of two people who had gradually grown apart.
Lydia listened solicitously. She had another drink, then began to talk about her own life. She was twenty-three,
had come to New York right after she’d graduated from the University of Illinois, was living with the boyfriend she had met in college. He—his name was Matthew—was eager to get married, but she was no longer so sure. She felt "trapped," needed "space," wanted to meet new friends and have all the adventurous experiences she’d missed growing up in a small town in the Midwest. She and Matthew were no longer the same people they used to be, Lydia said; she felt she had outgrown him.
Jeff let her talk it out, all the commonplace woes and longings of youth that to her were freshly overwhelming and of unprecedented import in her life. She hadn’t the perspective to recognize how utterly ordinary her story was, though perhaps she did have some glimmering of that awareness, since she had at least expressed her urgent desire to break free of the cliche her life had become.
He commiserated, talked with her for an hour or more about life and love and independence … told her she had to make her own decisions, said she had to learn to take risks, said all the obvious and necessary things that one must say to someone who is facing a universal human crisis for the first time in her life.
A gusting breeze from the open window stirred her hair, wafted the ribbon from her hat against her face. Lydia brushed it away, and Jeff found something inexplicably touching about the gesture, the girlish way her hand moved. In her prettily animated face he suddenly saw a reflection of Judy Gordon, and of Linda on that day she’d brought him the daisies: bright promise, unshaped dreams aborning.
They finished their drinks, and he saw her to a taxi. As she got into the cab she looked up at him and said, with all the optimism and presumed infinity of youth, "I guess it’ll be O.K.; I mean, we’ve got plenty of time to work it out. We have so much time." Jeff knew that illusion, far too well. He gave the young woman a halfhearted smile, shook her hand, and watched her ride away toward life, her long pink ribbon blowing free.
The Metro North commuter train pulled to a stop precisely on time, Jeff noted from his vantage point a hundred feet farther down the platform. At this time of day it was something of a misnomer to call it a commuter train, he thought; not many businessmen would have taken the 11:00 A.M. run into the city.
Jeff began walking briskly toward the ramp to the Terminal, as if he’d just gotten off a different line. He slowed his pace a bit as he passed the train from New Rochelle, and saw that he’d been right: There were a number of women dressed for shopping trips, a smattering of college students, but almost no one with a suit and tie and briefcase among the disembarking passengers.
She was one of the last to leave the train. He almost missed her, and had begun to worry that the information he’d been given might be incorrect. She was nicely dressed, but without the fanatical attention to detail that marked the women headed for Bendel’s or Bergdorfs. Her low-heeled shoes were designed for walking, and her pale blue linen dress and light wool sweater had an appealing air of practicality about them.
Jeff fell into step twenty or thirty paces behind her as she walked up the ramp and into Grand Central’s huge Main Concourse. He was afraid he might lose her in the crowd, but her height and distinctive straight blonde hair helped him keep her in view as they weaved their separate ways through the swarms of people.
She went up the broad stairs that led to the Pan Am Building, and Jeff dropped back a bit as he followed her through the less-crowded lobby and out onto East Forty-fifth Street. She strode across Park Avenue, past the Roosevelt Hotel and across Madison to Fifth, where she turned north. The window displays at Saks and Carder caused her only the briefest of pauses, during which Jeff slowed to feign interest in a Korean Airlines' package tour or the matched sets of Mark Cross luggage.
She turned west again at Fifty-third Street, and entered the Museum of Modern Art. The detective agency Jeff had hired six weeks ago was right, at least as far as today went: Every other Thursday, they’d told him, Pamela Phillips Robison took a train into Manhattan for an afternoon of visiting galleries and museums.
He paid his admission fee, and noticed as he went through the turnstile that his palms were damp with perspiration. Now he had lost track of her for the moment.
Jeff still wasn’t sure just why he’d gone to such lengths to arrange to see her, if only from a distance; he was fully aware that this woman was not the Pamela he had known and loved, and that she never would be. Her replays had reached their end. He could never hope for that sudden look of awareness and intimate recognition he’d seen on her face that night in the college bar when she’d understood who she was, who he was, who and what they’d been together over the decades.
No, this version of Pamela would remain forever ignorant of all that; yet he longed to look once more into her eyes, perhaps even to briefly hear her voice. The temptation had finally proven irresistible, and he felt no shame for harboring that desire, no guilt for having followed her.
Jeff looked for her in the Museum Shop off the lobby first, on the unlikely chance that she might have stopped in only to purchase a book or a poster, but Pamela wasn’t among the browsers. He walked back through the lobby, into the glass-walled Garden Hall and over to the first-floor galleries before coming back to take the escalators to the upper levels. There were two main exhibits under way, in addition to the familiar displays from the permanent collection: One was a show in commemoration of Mies van der Rohe’s centennial year; the other was a retrospective of the sculptor Richard Serra. Jeff gave the exhibits only the most cursory of appraisals; he had yet to catch a glimpse of Pamela again.
On the fourth floor he saw something that made him smile despite his growing impatience: As part of the van der Rohe exhibit, the museum had installed numerous examples of the architect’s furniture designs—including a Barcelona chair exactly like the one Frank Maddock had chosen for Jeff’s office at Future, Inc., so long ago.
Still no sign of Pamela. He might have to wait two weeks before she came into the city again, trail her to another museum or perhaps devise some kind of momentary, seemingly accidental encounter in the train station itself … just long enough to look her full in the face one time, maybe to hear her say "Excuse me," or "It’s twenty minutes to noon."
Back on the third-floor level of the Garden Hall Jeff stopped to rest, leaned against a railing, stared out the great glass wall … and saw, in the Sculpture Garden below, the soft blonde helmet of her hair and the sky-blue linen of her dress.
She was still outside when he got down to the garden. She was standing with her arms crossed, looking at one of the Serra sculptures. Jeff stopped ten feet away from her, felt a thousand conflicting emotions and memories go through his mind. Then Pamela unexpectedly turned toward him, said "What do you think of it?"
He hadn’t prepared himself for what he might do or say if she initiated a conversation with him, hadn’t even thought beyond the moment of being confronted once again, however briefly, with those piercing green eyes he knew so well—No, he forcefully reminded himself, he didn’t know these eyes at all, they hid a soul that had been and forever would be closed to him. This woman in the garden would know only a single lifetime—soon to end, with no reprise—in which he played no part at all.
"I said, what do you think of the Serra?"
As forthright as ever; it was part of her basic nature, he realized, not something that had been instilled in her by the experience of the replays.
"A little too abrasive for my taste," he finally answered, his thoughts on anything but the artist’s work.
She nodded pensively. "There seems to be a sort of implied threat in most of his stuff," she said. "Like that one piece, Delineator, II? The one with the big steel plate flat on the floor and the other one bolted to the ceiling above it? All I could think about was what would happen if the top one tore loose and fell. Anybody standing under it would be crushed to death."
He couldn’t stand here and make museum small-talk with her; his mind was leaping from image to image of their lives together: Her smiling from the canopy of a nearby sailplane, her in the
kitchen on Majorca, her in the many beds they had shared through the years … it was as if, through memory alone, he had created an inner replica of the video exhibit of their lives that she’d once put together as a gallery piece of her own.
"And that other one," she went on, "the one called Circuit, II … I know the effect was supposed to be an interesting division of the room’s space, but all those sharp steel rectangles coming out of the corners made me feel like I was surrounded by guillotine blades." She gave an easy, self-mocking laugh. "Or maybe I’ve just got a particularly morbid imagination, I don’t know."
"No," Jeff said, regaining his composure. "I know what you mean. I felt the same way. He has a very aggressive style."
"Too much so, I think. It interferes with my ability to appreciate the forms on an objective level."
"This one looks like it might topple over any second," Jeff said.
"Right. And in this direction, too."
He laughed in spite of himself, felt a rush of the same easy self-confidence with her that he had felt when—he willfully stopped his thoughts again. It would do no good to recall those other times, times spent with someone this woman only outwardly resembled. And yet, and yet: She still had the same dry wit, the same aura of warmth beneath a coolly analytical sensibility … it was a pleasure to talk to her, even though she would never have the slightest recollection of all they’d been through together.
"Listen," he said, "do you want to get out from under this thing before it crashes on us, and maybe have some lunch?"
They ate in the cafe overlooking the Sculpture Garden, laughed some more about the blatantly menacing nature of the Serra pieces, bemoaned the museum’s increasing reluctance to showcase newer artists. Jeff helped her on with her sweater as the shadow of the condominium tower above the museum fell across the garden; his hand brushed her hair as he did so, and it was difficult to restrain himself from caressing that familiar, long-lost face.