Ken Grimwood - Replay

"Did you ever see any of those rockets go up?" she asked.

"Sure," he said, thinking of the drive he and Linda had made to the Cape in 1969 for the launch of Apollo 11.

"Do you think they’ll ever really get to the moon, like they say?"

"Probably." He smiled. "Oh, my name’s Jeff, Jeff Winston."

She extended a slender, ringless hand, and he grasped her fingers for an instant.

"I’m Sharla Baker." She took her hand back, ran it through her straight, wet hair and down her neck. "What kind of work do you do in Atlanta?"

"Well … I’m still in college, actually. I’m thinking about going into journalism."

She grinned good-naturedly. "A college boy, hmm? Your momma and daddy must have plenty of money, sending you to college and to Las Vegas."

"No," he said, amused; she couldn’t have been more than twenty-two or twenty-three herself, and he’d been automatically considering the age difference from the opposite perspective. "I paid my own way here. Won the money on the Kentucky Derby."

She raised her delicate eyebrows, impressed. "Is that so? Hey, have you got a car here?"

"Yeah, why?"

Her long, tanned arms arched lazily above her head, swelling her breasts against the nylon of the demurely styled, old-fashioned bathing suit. The effect, to Jeff, was as erotic as if she’d been wearing one of those outrageous French-cut designs of the eighties, or nothing at all.

"I just thought we might get out of the sun for a little while," she said. "Maybe take a drive over to Lake Mead. You interested?"

Sharla lived in a tidy little duplex near Paradise and Tropicana. She shared the place with a girl named Becky, who worked the 4:00 P.M.-to-midnight shift at the information booth in the airport. Sharla didn’t seem to do much of anything, except hang out in the casinos at night and by the hotel pools in the afternoon. She wasn’t really a hooker, just one of those Vegas girls who liked to have a good time and weren’t insulted by a little gift or a handful of chips now and then. Jeff spent most of the next four days with her, and he bought her several small presents—a silver ankle bracelet, a leather purse dyed to match her favorite dress—but she never mentioned money. They went sailing on the lake, drove up to Boulder Dam, saw Sinatra’s show at the Desert Inn.

Mostly, they fucked. Frequently and memorably, at her apartment or in Jeff’s suite at the Flamingo. Sharla was the first woman he’d been to bed with since this whole thing had begun, the first other than Linda since he’d gotten married. Sharla’s eagerness for sex more than matched his own. She was as wanton as Judy had been coy, and Jeff reveled in the heat of her unrestrained eroticism.

Frank Maddock took occasional advantage of the outright play-for-pay girls who were a feature of every lounge and casino, but he spent most of his time at the blackjack tables. Winning. By the day of the Belmont, he’d run his own stake up another nine thousand dollars, of which he generously offered Jeff a third for having bankrolled this venture in the first place. Between them, they now had almost twenty-five thousand dollars on deposit with the hotel; and Frank was, with some reservations, willing to go along with Jeff’s insistent notion that they bet it all on the one race.

When post time came that Saturday, Jeff was at the Flamingo’s pool with Sharla.

"Aren’t you even gonna watch it on TV?" she asked as he showed no sign of budging from his rattan mat.

"Don’t have to. I know how it comes out."

"Oh, you!" She laughed, slapping his rear. "Rich college boy, think you know it all."

"I won’t be rich if I’m wrong."

"That’ll be the day," she said, reaching for the bottle of Coppertone.

"What? That I’m wrong, or poor?"

"Oh, silly, I don’t know. Here, do the backs of my legs."

Jeff was half dozing in the sun, his hand resting on Sharla’s naked thigh, when Frank came out of the hotel with a look of shock on his face. Jeff bolted to his feet when he saw his friend’s expression; Christ, maybe they shouldn’t have bet it all.

"What’s the matter, Frank?" he asked tightly.

"All that money," Frank rasped out. "All that fucking money." Jeff grabbed him by the shoulders. "What happened? Just tell me what happened!"

Frank’s lips pulled back in a crazy half-smile. "We won," he whispered.

"How much?"

"A hundred and thirty-seven thousand dollars." Jeff relaxed, let go his grip on Frank’s arms. "How do you do it?" Maddock asked, staring hard into Jeff’s eyes. "How the hell do you do it? Three times in a row now you’ve called 'em right." "Just lucky."

"Luck, my ass. You did everything but hock the family jewels to bet on Chateaugay in the Derby. You know something you’re not telling, or what?"

Sharla bit her lower lip and looked up at Jeff thoughtfully. "You did say you knew how it was gonna come out."

Jeff didn’t like the turn this conversation was taking. "Hey," he said with a laugh, "next time out we’ll probably lose it all."

Frank grinned again, his curiosity apparently gone. "With this kind of track record, I’ll follow you anywhere, kid. When do we take the plunge again? You got any good hunches coming up?"

"Yeah," Jeff said. "I’ve got a hunch Sharla’s roommate will call in sick from work tonight, and the four of us are gonna have one hell of a celebration. That’s all I’d bet on right now."

Frank laughed and headed for the poolside bar to get a bottle of champagne, while Sharla ran to phone her girlfriend. Jeff sank back down on the mat, angry at himself for having said as much as he had and wondering how he was going to tell Frank their gambling partnership was over, at least for the summer.

He damn sure wasn’t about to admit that they couldn’t bet any more races this year because he couldn’t remember who’d won them.

Jeff spread a thin layer of marmalade on the hot croissant, bit off one flaky corner. From the balcony above the avenue Foch he could see both the Arc de Triomphe and the green expanse of the Bois de Boulogne, each an easy walk from the apartment.

Sharla smiled at him from across the linen-covered breakfast table. She took a large red strawberry from her plate, dipped it first in a bowl of cream and then in powdered sugar, and slowly began to suck the ripe berry, her eyes still locked with Jeff’s as her lips encircled the fruit.

He set aside his copy of the International Herald-Tribune and watched her impromptu performance with the strawberry. The news was depressingly familiar, anyway; Kennedy had delivered his "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech in the divided city east of here, and in Vietnam, Buddhist monks had begun immolating themselves on street corners to protest the Diem regime.

Sharla dipped the berry back into the thick cream, held it suspended above her open mouth as she licked off the white droplets with the tip of her tongue. Her silk gown was translucent in the morning sunlight, and Jeff could see her nipples as they stiffened against the thin fabric.

He’d rented the two-bedroom apartment in the Neuilly district of Paris for the entire summer, and they had left the city only for an occasional day’s excursion to Versailles or Fontainebleau. It was Sharla’s first trip to Europe, and Jeff wanted to experience Paris in a different manner than he had on the whirlwind package tour he’d taken with Linda. He had certainly succeeded: Sharla’s lush sensualism meshed perfectly with the romantic aura of the city. On clear days they would stroll the side streets and boulevards, stopping for lunch at whatever bistro or café might capture their interest; and when it rained, as it did often that summer, they would curl up in the comfortable apartment for long, languid days of fire and flesh, with the unseasonable hazy chill of Paris outside the windows a perfect backdrop to their passion. Jeff wrapped his fears in Sharla’s sleek black hair, hid his un-diminished confusion in the folds of her sweet-scented, supple body.