Replay

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.

She talked about her abandoned art career, about the frustrations and joys of raising her family. He could see the restlessness in her eyes, the gnawing sense of a life not fully lived; a life, Jeff knew, which soon would end. He ached to tell her of all she’d once achieved.

There came a moment when the lunch was finished, the conversation at an awkward lull.

"So," he said, wanting to prolong the encounter but not certain how. "This has been very pleasant."

"Yes, it has," she agreed, fumbling uncomfortably with her coffee spoon.

"Do you get into the city very often?"

"A couple of times a month."

"Maybe we could…" his voice trailed off; he wasn’t sure what he was proposing, was even less sure whether he should propose anything at all between them.

"Could what?" she asked, into the silence.

"I don’t know. Go to another museum. Have lunch again."

She fidgeted with the spoon. "I’m married, you know."

"I know."

"I don’t just—I mean, I’m not—"

He smiled, handed her a paper napkin.

"What’s this for?" she said, startled.

"For tearing into very tiny pieces."

Pamela laughed abruptly, then stared back at him with a quizzical look. "How did you know I…" She shook her head slowly from side to side. "Sometimes I feel like you can read my mind. Like when you asked if I’d ever painted dolphins. I never told you how much I love whales and dolphins."

"I just thought you might."

She ripped the napkin straight down the middle with an exaggerated flourish, and looked up at him with curious merriment and an air of sudden resolve.

"There’s a Jack Youngerman show at the Guggenheim," she said. "I might come down for that next week."

The musk-warm scent of their lovemaking clung to him, permeated the bedroom with its aromatic catalogue of memories. That sweetly pungent essence brought back vivid recollections of nights beneath thick blankets at the cabin in Montgomery Creek, hot bright days on the foredeck of a yacht off the Florida Keys, Sunday mornings wrapped in the sheets of their suite at the Pierre … and finally the afternoons, one year’s worth of stolen afternoons, here in this apartment.

Jeff looked down at her face against his chest, her eyes closed, her lips parted like a sleeping child’s. His mind brought forth, unbidden, the lines from the Bhagavad-Gita that she’d once spoken with such passionate intensity on that long-ago evening in her Topanga Canyon retreat:

Pamela stirred in his arms, uttered a wordless sound of contentment as she stretched, her body sliding against his like an affectionate kitten.

"What time is it?" she asked, yawning.

"Twenty after six."

"Damn," she said, sitting up in bed. "I have to get going."

"Will you be down again on Tuesday?"

"My class was canceled, but … I haven’t mentioned anything about that at home. We can spend the whole day together."

Jeff smiled, tried to look pleased. Next Tuesday. The whole day together. Faint, bittersweet echoes of what once had been; but of course she had no way of knowing that.

"Maybe I can finish the painting then," she said, slipping out of bed and gathering up her scattered clothes.

"When do I get to look at it?"

"Not till it’s done; you promised."

He nodded, feeling slightly guilty that he’d sneaked a look at the covered canvas the day before. Her talent had progressed in the past year, since she’d started painting regularly again and taking graduate courses in advanced composition at NYU; but she’d never again reach the level of ability, the bold flights of imaginative brilliance she had displayed in other, unremembered lives.

The painting she had almost completed was a nude study of the two of them, hands joined, laughing and running through a sun-dappled tunnel of white, vine-covered trellises. Jeff was touched by its simplicity, by the naivete of the free-spirited joy it portrayed; it was a painting by an artist who had only begun to love, who had not yet had the chance to test the limits of that love, or of life itself.

The time they’d spent together since that first unplanned meeting at the museum had been inescapably circumscribed: An afternoon once or twice a week here at his apartment, a rare overnight when she’d told her husband she wanted to stay in the city for a concert or a play … and once, once only, they’d gone away for a long weekend together to Cape Cod. She’d told her family she was in Boston, visiting a woman she had known in college.

The possibility of divorce had been raised once, briefly; but Jeff knew she wasn’t ready for such a drastic break. There were more limitations on what they could share than she would ever know, a piercing line of demarcation between their awareness of each other. Pamela seemed to sense it sometimes, vaguely: In a faraway look on Jeff’s face, in a suddenly halted conversation.

He loved her, genuinely loved her for the self she was today, not merely as a reflection of all those other Pamelas, in other existences … and yet the constant reminder, in her unknowing eyes, of all that had been put behind them tinged everything they did with an unremitting melancholy.

She had finished dressing and was brushing the bed-tangles from her fine, straight hair. How many times had he watched her do that, in how many mirrors? More than she could imagine, or than he could now bear to recall.

"See you next week," Pamela said, bending to kiss him as she scooped her purse from the night stand. "I’ll try to get an early train."

He returned her kiss, held her shining face between his open hands for a lingering moment, thinking of the years, the decades, the hopes and plans of their lifetimes fulfilled and thwarted …

But next week they’d have all day together; a day of warmth, of early spring. It was something to look forward to.

The first breath of winter blew in from off the lake, stirring the red and yellow leaves of the trees on Cherry Hill. The fountain in the Concourse burbled its chill waters as Jeff and Pamela walked past it toward the graceful cast-iron sweep of Central Park’s Bow Bridge.

On the other side of the bridge they wandered north along the wooded pathways of the Ramble, skirting the lake to their left. Birds by the hundreds twittered excitedly all around them, getting ready for the long voyage south.

"Wouldn’t it be nice if we could join them?" Pamela said, huddling close to Jeff as they strolled. "Fly away to some island, or to South America…"

He didn’t answer her, simply held her tighter, his arm protectively around her waist. But he knew with bitter certainty that he could offer no protection from what was soon to happen to them both.

At the north end of the lake they stopped on Balcony Bridge, and stood gazing at the woods below, the water reflecting the surrounding towers of Manhattan.

"Guess what?" Pamela whispered, her face close to his.

"What?" he said.

"I’ve told Steve I’m going to visit my old roommate in Boston again next weekend. Friday through Monday. We can fly away somewhere, if you want to."

"That’s … great." There was nothing he could say; it would be the height of cruelty to tell her what he knew: That this was the last day they would ever see each other. This coming Tuesday, five days from now, the world would cease forever for both of them.

"You don’t sound all that thrilled about it," she said, frowning.

Jeff put on a grin, tried to mask his grief and fear. Let her cling to her innocent trust in the years she assumed would be there to be lived; now, at the end, the greatest gift that he could give her was a lie.

"It’s wonderful," he told her with pretended enthusiasm. "I’m just surprised, that’s all. We can go anywhere you’d like to go. Anywhere at all. Barbados, Acapulco, the Bahamas … you name it."

"I don’t care," she said, snuggling to him. "Just as long as it’s warm, and quiet, and I’m with you."

If he spoke again, he knew, his voice would give away too much. Instead, he kissed her, willed all his heartsick sorrow into a final, tangible expression of all that he had ever felt for her, all they’d ever—

She gave a sudden moan, fell limply against him. He gripped her shoulders, kept her from collapsing to the ground.

"Pamela? God, no, what—"

She regained her footing, pulled her face back and looked at him in shock. "Jeff? Oh, Jesus, Jeff?"

It was there, all of it, in her widened eyes: comprehension, recognition, memory. The accumulated knowledge and anguish of eight varied lifetimes spilled across her face, twisted her mouth with sudden confusion.

She looked around her, saw the park, the New York skyline. Her eyes filled with tears, sought Jeff’s again.

"I was—it was supposed to be over!"

"Pamela—"

"What year is it? How long do we have?"

He couldn’t keep it from her; she had to know. "It’s 1988."

She looked back at the trees, the coppery leaves drifting and! swirling everywhere about them. "It’s already fall!"

He smoothed her wind-mussed hair, wished that he could stave off the truth for one more moment; but it would not be denied. "October," he told her gently. "The thirteenth."

"That’s—that’s only five days!"

"Yes."

"It’s not fair," she wept, "I’d prepared myself last time, I’d almost accepted—" She broke off, looked at him with new bewilderment. "What are we doing here together?" she asked. "Why aren’t I at home?"

"I … I had to see you."

"You were kissing me," she said accusingly. "You were kissing her, the person I used to be, before!"

"Pamela, I thought—"

"I don’t care what you thought," she snapped, jerking herself away from him. "You knew that wasn’t really me, how could you have done something so … so perverse as that?"

"But it was you," he insisted. "Not with all the memories, no, but it was still you, we still—"

"I can’t believe you’re saying this! How long has this been happening, when did you start this?"

"It’s been almost two years."

"Two years! You’ve been … using me, like I was some kind of inanimate object, like—"

"It wasn’t like that, not at all! We loved each other, you started painting again, went back to school…"

"I don’t care what I did! You seduced me away from my family, you tricked me … and you knew exactly what you were doing, what strings to pull to influence me, to … control me!"

"Pamela, please." He reached for her arm, trying to calm her, make her understand. "You’re twisting everything, you’re—"

"Don’t touch me!" she shouted, backing off the bridge where they’d embraced just moments before. "Just leave me alone and let me die! Let us both die, and get it done with!"

Jeff tried to stop her as she fled, but she was gone. The last hope of his last life was gone, lost on the path that led to Seventy-seventh Street, into the anonymous, devouring city … to death, immutable and certain death.