Ken Grimwood - Replay

"Incredible," he whispered. "I can’t tell you how grateful I am for the chance to see this."

"I did it for you. For us. No one else can understand it; you’d be amused at the interpretations some of the critics have come up with."

He tore his eyes away from the screens, looked at her. "All of this … the whole show…"

Pamela nodded, returning his gaze. "Did you think I’d forgotten? Or that I no longer cared?" "It’s been so long."

"Much too long. And a month from now, we begin all over again."

"Next time. Next time is for us, if you want it to be." She looked away at one of the monitors, which was displaying scenes of the surfside restaurant in Malibu where they’d had their first long conversation, their first disagreement over the film she’d planned to make to convince the world of the cyclical nature of reality.

"It may be my last," she said quietly. "The skew was almost eight years for me this time; next time I won’t come back until sometime in the eighties. Will you wait for me? Will you—"

He pulled her to him, silenced her fearful words with his lips, his hands, caressing, reassuring. They embraced within that silent cubicle, lit by the reflected glow of all the lives they’d lived, and warmed by the finite promise of the single, brief life that remained for them to share.

"What’s the matter, can’t you hear me? Turn down that damned television. Since when do you care about ice skating, anyway?"

It was Linda’s voice, but not as he had grown to know it. No, this was a voice from long ago, tight with strain and sarcasm.

She strode into the room, turned off the volume of the TV set. On the silenced screen, Dorothy Hamill leaped and spun gracefully across the ice, her bobbed hair falling immaculately into place each time she came to rest.

"I said, dinner’s ready. If you want it, come get it. I may be the cook around here, but I’m not a servant."

"It’s all right," Jeff said, struggling to adjust, trying to identify his new surroundings. "I’m not really hungry, anyway."

Linda gave him a derisive scowl. "What you mean is, you don’t want to eat what I’ve cooked. Maybe you’d rather have lobster, hm? And some fresh asparagus? Champagne?"

Dorothy Hamill went into a final quickened spin, her brief red skater’s skirt a twirling blur above her thighs. When she’d finished her routine she smiled and blinked into the camera, and the network replayed that look in slow motion: sweet elation, the gradually spreading smile like a rising sun, the decelerated blink become an expression of both modesty and sensuality. In that one lengthened moment, the girl seemed the very emblem of fresh, vital youth.

"Just tell me," Linda snapped, "just tell me what kind of gourmet meal you’d like instead of meat loaf tomorrow. And then tell me how we’re supposed to afford it—will you do that?"

The freeze-frame image of Dorothy Hamill’s smile faded into blackness, was replaced by one of ABC’s mini-tours of Innsbruck, Austria. The Winter Olympics, 1976. He and Linda would be in Philadelphia. Camden, New Jersey, actually; that was where they’d lived while he was working at WCAU, across the river. "Well?" she asked. "Have you got any bright suggestions as to what we might use to buy something other than ground beef or chicken next week?"

"Linda, please … let’s not do this."

"Not do what—Jeffrey?"

She knew how he hated the long form of his name; whenever she’d used it, she’d been openly goading him into a fight.

"Let’s not argue," he said complaisantly. "There’s nothing more to argue about; everything’s … changed."

"Oh, really? Just like that, hm?" She put her hands on her hips and turned in a slow circle, making an exaggerated show of inspecting the cramped apartment, the rented furniture. "I don’t see that anything’s changed at all. Not unless you’re about to tell me you’ve gotten a better-paying job, after all these years."

"Forget the job. That’s irrelevant. There won’t be any more worries about money."

"And what’s that supposed to mean? Have you won the lottery?"

Jeff sighed, flicked off the distracting television set with the remote control box. "It doesn’t matter," he told her. "There won’t be any more financial problems, that’s all. For the moment, you’ll just have to trust me on that."

"Big talk. That comes easy to you, doesn’t it? From way back when, all your talk about broadcast journalism, how you were going to be such a hotshot newsman, some kind of latter-day Edward R. Murrow. God, you had me snowed! And what does it all come down to? One piddling little radio station after another, moving all over the country to live in crappy places like this. I think you’re afraid to succeed, Jeffrey L. Winston. You’re afraid to move into television or to get into the corporate end of the business, because you’re scared you just don’t have what it takes to make it. And I’m beginning to think you don’t."

"Stop it, Linda, right now. This isn’t doing either of us any good, and it’s pointless."

"Sure, I’ll stop it. I’ll stop it good." She stormed into the kitchen. He could hear her angrily preparing dinner for herself, setting the table with a deliberate clatter, slamming the oven door shut. Reverting to one of her silent treatments. Those had started around this time and had become lengthier, more frequent, as the years went on. The arguments in between had almost always been about money, but that had been only the most conspicuous source of their difficulties. The real problems had been more deeply rooted, had derived from and been severely aggravated by their inability to communicate about the things that truly troubled them, such as the ectopic pregnancy. That had happened the year before this, and they’d never openly dealt with what that disappointment had meant to each of them, how they might overcome it and move beyond it together.

Jeff glanced into the kitchen, saw Linda hunched bitterly over the table, picking at her food; she didn’t bother to look up at him. He closed his eyes, remembered her at his door with a bunch of daisies, pictured her in a warm breeze on the deck of the S.S. France. But that had been a different person, he realized; someone with whom he had shared his innermost feelings, if not the details of his numerous lives, from the beginning. Now the patterns of silence were set; all the money in the world wouldn’t help at this point, not if they couldn’t even talk to each other about the things that mattered.

He found an overcoat in the tiny hall closet, pulled it on, and left the apartment. Not a word passed between them as he went.

Outside, the snow was grimy, patchy, as unlike the pristine sheets of white the television had shown from Innsbruck as the woman in that kitchen was from the Linda he had loved these past nineteen years.

He’d make the money fast this time, he decided, and see to it that she had enough to keep her comfortable for the rest of her life, but there was no way he could bring himself to stay, not now. The only question was what to do with himself until Pamela arrived, whenever that might be.

The blue jay, darting and flitting outside the kitchen window as it built its nest in the backyard elm tree, was the first thing Pamela saw. She watched the bird’s colorful aerial dance, took several long, deep breaths to calm herself before she looked around or moved.

She was in the process of making a cup of coffee, had been just about to insert the filter in the machine. The kitchen was cozy, familiar. Different than it had been last time, but she remembered it well from her first life, before the replaying had begun. Last replay she hadn’t spent much time in here, had been too busy in her studio, painting and sculpting; the room had taken on the character of the maid they’d hired more than of herself. This kitchen, now, bore the stamp of her own personality, or at least the personality she’d had that first time around.