Ken Grimwood - Replay

There was a tentative knock on the door, and Linda called to him: "Honey? Want to take a break?"

"Sure," he said, turning off the typewriter and the tape machine. "Come on in."

She opened the door, came in balancing a tray with two slices of Key lime pie and two cups of Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee. "Sustenance." She grinned.

"Mmmm." Jeff inhaled the dark aroma of the coffee, the cool tang of the fresh lime pie. "More than that. Infinitely more than that."

"How’s the Solzhenitsyn material coming?" Linda asked, sitting cross-legged on the oversized ottoman next to his desk with the tray in her lap.

"Excellent. I’ve got a lot to work with here, and it’s all so good I don’t even know where to start cutting or paraphrasing."

"It’s better than the stuff you got from Thieu?"

"Much better," he said between bites of the excruciatingly delicious pie. "There are enough good quotes in the Thieu material to make it worth including, but this is going to form the backbone of the book. I’m really excited about it."

With good reason, Jeff knew; this new project had been forming in his mind ever since he’d begun writing the first book, the one about Heyerdahl and the lunar-orbit astronauts. That had been a modest critical and commercial success when it was published, two years ago, in 1973. He felt sure that this one, for which his research was almost complete now, would surpass even the best segments of his earlier work.

He would write, this time, of enforced exile, of banishment from home and country and one’s fellow men. In that topic, he felt he could find and convey a core of universal empathy, a spark of understanding rising from that metaphoric exile to which all of us are subject, and that Jeff grasped more than anyone before him: our common and inevitable expulsion from the years that we have lived and put behind us, from the people we have been and known and have forever lost.

The lengthy musings Jeff had elicted from Alexander Solzhenitsyn—about his exile, not about the Gulag—were, as he’d told Linda, unquestionably the most profound of all the observations he had gathered to date. The book would also include material from his correspondence with deposed Cambodian Prince Sihanouk, and his interviews in both Madrid and Buenos Aires with Juan Perôn, as well as the reflections he had garnered from Nguyen Van Thieu after the fall of Saigon. Jeff had even spoken with the Ayatollah Khomeini at his sanctuary outside Paris. To ensure that the book was fully democratized, he had sought the comments of dozens of ordinary political refugees, men and women who had fled dictatorial regimes of both the right and the left.

The notes and tapes he had amassed overflowed with powerful, deeply moving narratives and sentiments. The task Jeff now faced was to distill the essence of those millions of heartfelt words, to maximize their raw power by paring them to the bone and juxtaposing them in the most effective context. Harps upon the Willows, he planned to call it, from the hundred and thirty-seventh psalm:

Jeff finished his Key lime pie, set the plate aside, and sipped the heady richness of the fresh-brewed Jamaican coffee.

"How long do you think—" Linda began to ask, but her question was interrupted by the sharp ring of the phone on his desk.

"Hello?" he answered.

"Hello, Jeff," said the voice he’d known through three separate lifetimes.

He didn’t know what to say. He’d thought of this moment so many times in the past eight years, dreaded it, longed for it, come to half-believe it might never arrive. Now that it was here, he found himself temporarily mute, all his carefully rehearsed opening words flown from his mind like vanished wisps of cloud in the wind.

"Are you free to talk?" Pamela asked.

"Not really," Jeff said, looking uncomfortably at Linda. She had seen the change in his expression, he could tell, and was regarding him curiously but without suspicion.

"I understand," Pamela told him. "Should I call back later, or could we meet somewhere?"

"That would be better."

"Which? Calling back later?"

"No. No, I think we ought to get together, sometime soon."

"Can you get to New York?" she asked.

"Yes. Any time. When and where?"

"This Thursday, is that all right?"

"No problem," he said.

"Thursday afternoon, then, at … the Pierre? The bar there?"

"That sounds fine. Two o’clock?"

"Three would be better for me," Pamela said. "I have an appointment on the West Side at one."

"All right. I—I’ll see you Thursday."

Jeff hung up, could sense how pale and shaken he must look. "That was … an old friend from college, Martin Bailey," he lied, hating himself for it.

"Oh, right, your roommate. Is something wrong?" The concern in her voice, on her face, was genuine.

"He and his wife are having bad problems. It looks like they may get a divorce. He’s pretty upset about it, needs somebody to talk to. I’m going up to Atlanta for a couple of days to see if I can help."

Linda smiled, sympathetically, innocently, but Jeff felt no relief that she had so readily believed the impromptu falsehood. He felt only guilt, a sharp, almost physical stab of it. And, intensifying that guilt, a rush of undeniable elation that he would be seeing Pamela again, in only three days' time.

Jeff took the elevator down from his room at the Pierre at 2:20, turned left, and walked past the gray Italian marble with brass inlays that marked the entrance to the Café Pierre. He found a quiet table toward the back of the long, narrow bar, ordered a drink, and waited nervously, watching the entrance. So many memories he had of this hotel: He and Sharla had watched most of that pivotal 1963 World Series from a room here, near the beginning of his first replay, and he’d stayed here frequently in the decades past, most often with Pamela.

She walked in at five minutes before three. Her straight blond hair was just as he’d remembered it, her eyes the same. Her generous lips were set in a familiar expression of seriousness, but without the bitter, downturned tightness he had seen her mouth take on during those final years in Maryland. She was wearing delicate emerald earrings to match her eyes, a white fox fur … and a light gray, stylishly tailored maternity dress. Pamela was five months pregnant, maybe six.

She came to the table, took Jeff’s hands in hers, and held them for a long, quiet moment. He glanced down, saw the plain gold wedding ring.

"Welcome back," he said as she sat down across from him. "You … look lovely."

"Thank you," she said carefully, her eyes on the tabletop. A waiter hovered; she ordered a glass of white wine. The silence lingered until the wine was set before her. She sipped it, then began rubbing the cocktail napkin between her fingers.

Jeff smiled, remembering. "You going to shred that?" he asked lightly.

Pamela looked up at him, smiled back. "Maybe," she said.

"When—" he began, and stopped.

"When what? When did I start replaying again, or when am I due?"

"Both, I guess. However you want to start."

"I’ve been back for two months, Jeff."

"I see." It was he who turned away this time, stared at one of the gold sconces against the satin drapes.

Pamela reached across the table, touched his arm. "I couldn’t bring myself to call, don’t you understand? Not just because of the differences we’d had last time, but … because of this. It was a tremendous emotional shock for me."

He softened, looked back into her eyes. "I’m sorry," he said. "I know it must have been."