Ken Grimwood: Replay

"So," Martin said. "Where the hell have you been?"

"Downtown. Just wandering around."

"You couldn’t find time to just wander by Dooley’s, huh? Or maybe even wander by the Fox Theater? We almost missed the first part of the goddamned movie, waiting for you."

"I’m sorry, I … wasn’t feeling up to it. Not tonight."

"The least you could’ve done was to leave me a fucking note, or something. You didn’t even call Judy, for Christ’s sake. She was going out of her mind, worrying about what had happened to you."

"Look, I’m really wiped out. I don’t much feel like talking, O.K.?"

Martin laughed without humor. "You’d better be ready to talk tomorrow, if you want to see Judy again. She’s gonna be pissed as all hell when she finds out you aren’t dead."

Jeff dreamed of dying, and woke to find himself still in that college dorm room. Nothing had changed. Martin was gone, probably to class; but it was Saturday morning, Jeff remembered. Had there been Saturday classes? He wasn’t sure.

In any event, he was alone in the room, and he took advantage of the privacy to poke at random through his desk and closet. The books were all familiar: Fail-Safe, The Making of the President— 1960, Travels with Charley. The record albums, in their new, unfaded, and unwarped sleeves, conjured up a hundred multi-sensual images of the days and nights he had spent listening to that music: Stan Getz andjoao Gilberto, the Kingston Trio, Jimmy Wither-spoon, dozens more, most of which he’d long since lost or worn out.

Jeff turned on the Harman-Kardon stereo his parents had given him one Christmas, put on "Desafinado," and continued to rummage through the belongings of his youth: hangers draped with cuffed h.i.s. slacks and Botany 500 sports jackets, a tennis trophy from the boarding school outside Richmond that he’d gone to before Emory, a tissue-wrapped collection of Hurricane glasses from Pat O’Brien’s in New Orleans, neatly ordered stacks of Playboy and Rogue.

He found a box of letters and photographs, hauled it out, and sat on the bed to sort through the contents. There were pictures of himself as a child, snapshots of girls whose names he couldn’t recall, a couple of hamming-it-up photo-booth strips … and a small folder full of family pictures, his mother and father and younger sister at a picnic, on a beach, around a Christmas tree.

On impulse, he dug a handful of change from his pocket, found the pay phone in the hall, and got his parents' long-forgotten old number from information in Orlando.

"Hello?" his mother said, with the distracted tone that had only increased as the years had passed.

"Mother?" he said tentatively.

"Jeff!" Her voice was muffled for a moment as she turned away from the mouthpiece. "Honey, pick up in the kitchen. It’s Jeff!" Then, clear and distinct again: "Now, what’s this Mother business? Think you’re getting too old to call me Mom, is that it?"

He hadn’t called his mother that since he was in his early twenties.

"How—how’ve you been?" he asked.

"Not the same since you left, you know that; but we’re keeping busy. We went fishing off Titusville last week. Your father caught a thirty-pound pompano. I wish I could send you some of it; it’s just the tenderest you’ve ever tasted. We’ve got plenty left in the freezer for you, but it won’t be the same as it was fresh."

Her words brought back a rush of memories, all tenuously related: summer weekends on his uncle’s boat in the Atlantic, the sun bright on the polished deck as a dark line of thunderheads hovered on the horizon … the ramshackle little towns of Titusville and Cocoa Beach before the great NASA invasion … the big white freezer in their garage at home full of steaks and fish, and above it shelves of boxes stuffed with all his old comic books and Heinlein novels …

"Jeff? You still there?"

"Oh, yeah, I’m sorry … Mom. I just forgot what I called about for a minute, there."

"Well, honey, you know you never need a reason to—" There was a click on the line, and he heard his father’s voice.

"Well, speak of the devil! We were just talking about you, weren’t we, hon?"

"That’s right," Jeffs mother said. "Not five minutes ago, I was saying how long it’d been since you called."

Jeff had no idea whether that meant a week or a month, and he didn’t want to ask. "Hi, Dad," he said quickly. "I hear you bagged a prize pompano."

"Hey, you should’ve been there." His father laughed. "Bud didn’t get a nibble all day, and the only thing Janet came up with was a sunburn. She’s still peeling—looks like an overcooked shrimp!"

Jeff hazily remembered the names as belonging to one of the couples his parents had been friends with, but he couldn’t put faces to them. He was struck by how vital and full of energy his mother and father both sounded. His father had come down with emphysema in 1982, and seldom left the house anymore. Only with difficulty could Jeff picture him out on the ocean, besting a powerful deep-sea fish, the Pall Mall in the corner of his mouth soggy with spray. In fact, Jeff thought numbly, his parents were now almost exactly his own age—or the age he had been this time yesterday.

"Oh," his mother said, "I ran into Barbara the other day. She’s doing just fine at Rollins, and she said to tell you Gappy got that problem all straightened out."

Barbara, Jeff dimly recalled, was a girl he’d dated in high school; but the name Gappy meant nothing to him now.

"Thanks," Jeff said. "Next time you see her, tell Barbara I’m real glad to hear that."

"Are you still going out with that little Judy?" his mother asked. "That was such a darling picture you sent of her, we can’t wait to meet her. How is she?"

"She’s fine," he said evasively, beginning to wish he hadn’t made this call.

"How’s the Chevy doing?" his father interjected. "Still burning oil like it was?"

Jesus; Jeff hadn’t thought about that old car in years.

"Car’s O.K., Dad." That was a guess. He didn’t even know where it might be parked. The smoky old beast had been a graduation present from his parents, and he’d driven it until it finally died on him during his senior year at Emory.

"How about the grades? That paper you were griping about, the one on … You know, the one you told us last week you were having some trouble with. What was that, anyway?"

"Last week? Yeah, the … history paper. I finished that. Haven’t gotten the grade yet."

"No, no, it wasn’t for history. You said it was some English Lit thing, what was it?"

A child’s voice suddenly came on the line, babbling excitedly. Jeff realized with a jolt that the child was his sister—a woman who’d been through two divorces, who had a daughter of her own just entering high school. Hearing her nine-year-old’s exuberance, Jeff was touched. His sister’s voice seemed the very embodiment of lost innocence, of time turned poignantly back upon itself.

The conversation with his family had grown stifling, uncomfortably disturbing. He cut it short, promised to call again in a few days. When he hung up, his forehead was damp with chill sweat, his throat dry. He took the stairs down to the lobby, bought a Coke for a quarter, drained it in three long gulps. Someone was in the TV room, watching "Sky King."

Jeff dug in his other pocket, fished out a key ring. One of the six keys was for the dorm room, he’d used that to let himself back m last night; there were three others he didn’t recognize, and two that were clearly a set of General Motors ignition and trunk keys.

He walked outside, blinked at the bright Georgia sunshine. There was a weekend feel to the campus, a distinctive lazy quietude that Jeff recognized instantly. On fraternity row, he knew, captive squads of pledges would be mopping the houses clean and hanging papier-mâche decorations for the Saturday-night round of parties; the girls in Harris Hall and the unnamed new women’s dorm would be lounging about in Bermuda shorts and sandals, waiting for their afternoon dates to pick them up for a drive to Soap Creek or Stone Mountain. Off to his left, Jeff could hear the chanted cadences of the Air Force ROTC drill, being conducted without irony or protest. No one was playing Frisbee on the grass; no odor of marijuana hung in the air. The students here could not conceive of the changes the world was about to endure.