by Ken Grimwood
Not everything worked exactly as Jeff planned, of course. He wanted to acquire a major portion of Comsat when it went public, but the stock was so wildly popular that the issue was limited to fifty shares per buyer. IBM, surprisingly, remained stagnant all the way through 1965, though it took off again the following year. Fast-food chains—Jeff chose Denny’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and McDonald’s—went through a big slump in 1967, before skyrocketing up an average five hundred percent one year later.
By 1968 his company’s assets were into the hundreds of millions, and he had approved an I. M. Pei design for a sixty-story corporate-headquarters building at Park and Fifty-third. Jeff also mandated the purchase of extensive parcels of land in choice commercial and residential areas of Houston, Denver, Atlanta, and Los Angeles. The company bought close to half of the undeveloped property in L.A.'s new Century City project, at a price of five dollars per square foot. For his personal use, Jeff bought a three-hundred-acre estate in Dutchess County, two hours up the Hudson from Manhattan.
He went out with a variety of women, slept with some of them, hated the whole meaningless process. Drinks, dinners, plays and concerts and gallery openings … He grew to despise the rigid formality of dating, missed the easy familiarity of simply being with someone, sharing friendly silences and unforced laughter. Besides, most of the women he met were either too openly interested in his wealth or too studiedly blasé about it. Some even hated him for it, refused to go out with him because of it; immense personal fortunes were anathema to many young people in the late sixties, and on more than one occasion Jeff was made to feel directly responsible for all the world’s ills, from starvation in the inner cities to the manufacture of napalm.
He bided his time, focused his energies on work. June was coming, he reminded himself constantly. June 1968; that was when everything would change.
The twenty-fourth of June, to be precise.
Robert Kennedy was not quite three weeks dead, and Cassius Clay, now stripped of his title and reborn as Muhammad Ali, was appealing his conviction for draft evasion. In Vietnam the rockets from the north had been striking Saigon since early spring.
It had been midafternoon, Jeff recalled, on a Monday. He’d been working nights and weekends at a Top 40 station in West Palm Beach, playing the Beatles and the Stones and Aretha Franklin and learning the essentials of broadcast journalism on his own time, selling his interviews and stories to the station and occasionally to UPI audio on a per-piece basis. He remembered the date because it was the beginning of his Monday/Tuesday "weekend," and when he returned to work that Wednesday he’d somehow managed to arrange the first big interview of his career, a long and candid telephone conversation with retiring U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren. He still didn’t know why Warren had consented to talk to him, a noncredentialed novice reporter from a small-time radio station in Florida; but somehow he’d managed to pull it off, and the great man’s pithy ruminations on his controversial tenure had been picked up by NBC for a healthy sum. Within a month, Jeff had been doing news full time at WIOD in Miami. He was off and running; his entire adult life, such as it had been, could be traced back to that summer week.
There’d been no reason for him to choose Boca Raton; no reason not to. Some Mondays he’d drive north, to Juno Beach; on others he might head down to Delray Beach or Lighthouse Point, any of a hundred interconnected strips of sand and civilization that lined the Atlantic coast from Melbourne to South Miami Beach. But on June twenty-fourth, 1968, he’d taken a blanket and a towel and a cooler full of beer to the beach off Boca Raton, and now here he was again in that same place on that same sunny day.
And there she was, lying on her back in a yellow crocheted bikini, her head propped on an inflatable beach pillow, reading a hardcover copy of Airport. Jeff stopped ten feet away and stood looking at her youthful body, the lemony streaks in her thick brown hair. The sand was hot against his feet; the surf echoed the pounding in his brain. For a moment he almost turned and walked away, but he didn’t.
"Hi," he said. "Good book?"
The girl peered up at him through her clear-rimmed, owlish sunglasses and shrugged. "Kind of trashy, but it’s fun. It’d make a better movie, probably."
Or several, Jeff thought. "You seen 2001 yet?"
"Yeah, but I didn’t know what it was all about, and it was kind of draggy up to the end. I liked Petulia better; you know, with Julie Christie?"
He nodded, tried to make his smile more natural, relaxed. "My name’s Jeff. Mind if I sit with you?"
"Go right ahead. I’m Linda," said the woman who had been his wife for eighteen years.
He spread his blanket, opened the cooler, and offered her a beer. "Summer vacation?" he asked.
She shifted on one elbow, took the dewy bottle. "I go to Florida Atlantic, but my family lives right here in town. How about you?"
"I grew up in Orlando, went to Emory for a while. Living in New York now, though."
Jeff was striving for an air of nonchalance but having trouble; he couldn’t keep his eyes off her face, wished she’d take off those damned sunglasses so he could see the eyes he’d known so well. His final memory of her voice reverberated in his skull, tinny and distant, a telephone voice: "We need—We need—We need—"
"I said, what do you do up there?"
"Oh, sorry, I—" he took a swig of the icy beer, tried to clear his head. "I’m in business."
"What kind?"
"Investments."
"You mean, like a stockbroker?"
"Not exactly. I have my own company. We deal with a lot of brokers. Stocks, real estate, mutual funds … like that."
She lowered the big round sunglasses, gave him a look of surprise. He stared into the familiar brown eyes, wanting to say so much: "It’ll be different this time," or "Please, let’s try it again," or even simply "I’ve missed you; I’d forgotten how lovely you were." He said nothing, just looked at her eyes in silent hope.
"You own the whole company?" she asked, incredulous.
"Now I do, yes. It was a partnership until a few years ago, but … it’s all mine now."
She set her beer in the sand, scrunching the bottle back and forth until she’d dug out a space to hold it upright.
"Did you have some kind of big inheritance or something? I mean, most guys I know couldn’t even get a job in a company like that in New York … or else they wouldn’t want to."
"No, I built it up myself, from scratch." He laughed, starting to feel more relaxed with her, confident and proud of his achievements for the first time in years. "I won a lot of money on some bets, horse races and such, and I put it all into this company."
She regarded him skeptically. "How old are you, anyway?"
"Twenty-three." He paused a beat, realized he was talking too much about himself, hadn’t expressed enough curiosity about her. She had no way of knowing he already knew everything about her, more—at this point in her life—than she knew about herself. "What about you; what are you studying?"
"Sociology. Were you a business major at Emory, or what?"
"History, but I dropped out. What year are you?"
"Senior this fall. So how big of a deal is this company of yours? I mean, have you got a lot of people working for you? Have you got an office right in Manhattan?"
"A whole building, at Park and Fifty-third. Do you know New York?"
"You have your own building, on Park Avenue. That’s nice." She wasn’t looking at him anymore, was drawing daisy-petal curlicues in the sand around the beer bottle. Jeff remembered a day, months before they were married, when she’d shown up unexpectedly at his door with a bunch of daisies; the sun had been behind her hair, and all of summer in her smile.
"Well, it’s … taken a lot of effort," he said. "So, what do you plan to do when you get out of school?"
"Oh, I thought maybe I’d buy a few department stores. Start small, you know." She folded her towel, began gathering her belongings from the blanket and stuffing them into a la
rge blue beach bag. "Maybe you could help me get a good deal on Saks Fifth Avenue, hmm?"
"Hey—hold on, please don’t go. You think I’m putting you on, is that it?"
"Just forget about it," she said, cramming her book into the bag and shaking sand from the blanket.
"No, look, I’m serious. I wasn’t kidding around. My company’s called Future, Inc. Maybe you’ve even heard of—"
"Thanks for the beer. Better luck next time."
"Hey, please, let’s just talk a little longer, O.K.? I feel as if I know you, as if we have a lot to share. Do you know that feeling, like you’ve been with someone in some previous life, or—"
"I don’t believe in that kind of nonsense." She threw the folded blanket over one arm and started walking toward the highway and the rows of parked cars.
"Look, just give me a chance," Jeff said, following alongside her. "I know for a fact that if we just get to know each other we’ll have a lot in common; we’ll—"
She wheeled on her bare feet and glared at him over the sunglasses. "If you don’t stop following me I’m going to yell for the lifeguard. Now, back off, buddy. Go pick up somebody else, all right?"
"Hello?"
"Linda?"
"It’s Jeff, Jeff Winston. We met on the beach this afternoon. I—"
"How the hell did you get this number? I never even told you my last name!"
"That’s not important. Listen, I’m sending you a recent issue of Business Week. There’s an article about me in there, with a photograph. Page forty-eight. You’ll see I wasn’t lying."
"You have my address, too? What kind of stunt is this, anyway? What do you want from me?"
"I just want to get to know you, and have you get to know me. There’s so much left undone between us, so many wonderful possibilities for—"
"You’re crazy! I mean it; you’re some kind of psycho!"
"Linda, I know this has started badly, but just give me the opportunity to explain. Give us the leeway to approach each other in an open, honest manner, to find—"
"I don’t want to get to know you, whoever the hell you are. And I don’t care if you’re rich, I don’t care if you’re goddamn J. Paul Getty, O.K.? Just leave … me … alone!"
"I understand that you’re upset. I know all this must seem very strange to you—"
"If you call this number again, or if you show up at my house, I’ll call the police. Is that clear enough?"
The phone slammed loudly in Jeff’s ear as she hung up.
He’d been given the chance to relive most of his life; now he’d trade it all for another shot at this one day.
The Mirassou Vineyards teemed with pickers working the slopes southeast of San Jose, great buckets of fresh green grapes atop their heads as they wound their way like harvest ants down to the crusher and the presses outside the old cellar. The hills rippled with wide-spaced rows of trellised vines, and here among the masonry buildings the oaks and elms were a splendor of October colors.
Diane had been angry at him all day, and the bucolic setting and arcane intricacies of the winery had done little to appease her. Jeff never should have taken her along with him this morning; he’d thought she might be fascinated, or at least amused, by the two young geniuses, but he was wrong.
"Hippies, that’s all they were. That tall boy was barefoot, for God’s sake, and the other one looked like a … a Neanderthal!"
"Their idea has a lot of potential; it doesn’t matter what they looked like."
"Well, somebody ought to tell them the sixties are over, if they want to do anything with that silly idea of theirs. I just don’t believe you fell for it, and gave them all that money!"
"It’s my money, Diane. And I’ve told you before, the business decisions are all mine, too."
He couldn’t really blame her for the way she’d reacted; without benefit of foresight, the two young men and their garageful of secondhand electronic components would indeed seem unlikely candidates for a spot on the Fortune 500. But within five years that garage in Cupertino, California would be famous, and Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak would prove to be the soundest investment of 1976. Jeff had given them half a million dollars, insisted they follow the advice of a retired young marketing executive from Intel they had recently met, and told them to make whatever they wanted as long as they continued to call it "Apple." He had let them keep forty-nine percent of the new enterprise.
"Who in the world would want a computer in their house? And what makes you think those scruffy boys really know how to make one, anyway?"
"Let’s drop it, all right?"
Diane went into one of her petulant silences, and Jeff knew the matter wouldn’t really be dropped, not even if she remained silent about it from now on.
He’d married her a year ago, out of convenience if nothing else, soon after he’d turned thirty. She’d been a twenty-three-year-old socialite from Boston, heiress to one of the country’s oldest and largest insurance firms; attractive in a reedy sort of way, and able to handle herself quite well in any gathering where the individual net worths of the participants exceeded seven figures. She and Jeff got along as well as could be expected for two people who had little in common other than their familiarity with money. Now Diane was seven months pregnant, and Jeff had hopes that the child might bring out the best in her, forge a deeper bond between them.
The young blond woman in the tailored navy suit led them inside the main winery building, to the tasting room in one front corner. Diamond-shaped racks of bottled wine lined the walls, broken by softly lit recesses in which photographs of the vineyards were displayed, along with cut flowers and standing bottles of the Mirassou product. Jeff and Diane stood at the rosewood bar in the center of the room, accepted ritual sips of Chardonnay.
Linda had, apparently, meant everything she’d said after that disastrous meeting on the beach seven years ago. His letters to her had been returned unopened, and the gifts he’d sent were all refused. After a few months he had finally stopped attempting to contact her, though he added her name to the list of "Personal/Priority" subjects to be kept track of by the clipping service to which he subscribed. That was how he’d learned, in May of 1970, that Linda had married a Houston architect, a widower with two young children. Jeff wished her happiness, but couldn’t help feeling abandoned … by someone who had never known him, as far as she was concerned.
Again he had sought solace in his work. His most recent coup had been the sale, at enormous profit, of his oil fields in Venezuela and Abu Dhabi, and their immediate replacement with similar properties in Alaska and Texas, plus the contracts for a dozen offshore drilling rigs. All deals completed, of course, just before the OPEC sword had fallen.
The women whose company he sought had all been similar, in most respects, to Diane: attractive, well-groomed companions, versed in all the most rarefied of social skills, accomplished, and, on occasion, enthusiastic in bed. Daughters of fortune, a sisterhood of what passed for the American beau monde. Women who knew the ground rules, had understood from birth the boundaries of and obligations attendant upon the holders of great wealth. They were his peers now; they constituted the pool from which he should in all rationality select a mate. His choice of Diane among them had been almost random. She fit the appropriate criteria. If something greater were eventually to grow of their pairing, well and good … and if not, then at least he had not come to the marriage with unrealistically high expectations.
Jeff cleansed his palate with a bit of cheese and sampled a semisweet Fleuri Blanc. Diane abstained this time, patted her swollen belly by way of explanation.
Maybe the child would make a difference, after all. You never knew.
The plump orange cat skittered across the hardwood floor in a headlong broken-field run good enough to match the best performance of O. J. Simpson. His prey, a shiny yellow satin ribbon, had suffered crippling damage and would soon be shredded if the cat had his way with it.
"Gretchen!" Jeff called. "Did you know Chumley’s te
aring up one of your yellow ribbons?"
"It’s O.K., Daddy," his daughter answered from the far corner of the large sitting room, near the window overlooking the Hudson. "Ken’s home now, and Chumley and I are helping to celebrate."
"When did he get home? Isn’t he still in the hospital in Germany?"
"Oh, no, Daddy; he told the doctors he wasn’t sick and he had to get home right away. So Barbie sent him a ticket for the Concorde, and he got home before anybody else, and as soon as he walked in the door she cooked him six blueberry muffins and four hot dogs."
Jeff laughed aloud, and Gretchen shot him the most withering look her wide-eyed five-year-old’s face could muster. "They don’t have hot dogs in Iran," she explained. "Or blueberry muffins, either."
"I guess not," Jeff said, keeping his expression carefully somber. "I suppose he’d be hungry for American food by now, huh?"
"'Course he would. Barbie knows how to make him happy."
The cat darted back in the other direction, batting the tattered ribbon between his paws, then settled on his side in a patch of sunlight to gloat over his conquest, kicking at it in sporadic bursts with his hind legs. Gretchen went back to her own games, absorbed in the alternate reality of the elaborate dollhouse that Jeff had spent more than a year building and expanding to her specifications. The miniature trees in its green felt front yard were now festooned with bright yellow ribbons, and for the past week she’d been following news reports of the end of the hostage crisis with a depth of interest most children invested only in the Saturday-morning cartoon shows. At first Jeff had been concerned about her fascination with the events in Tehran, had wanted to protect her from the potentially traumatizing effects of watching all those rabid mobs chanting "Death to the U.S"; but he’d known the episode would have a peaceful, upbeat conclusion, so he chose to respect his daughter’s precocious grasp of the world and to trust in her emotional resilience.
He loved her to a degree he had not thought possible, found himself simultaneously wanting to shield her from all darkness and share with her all light. Gretchen’s arrival had done nothing to cement his marriage to Diane, who, if anything, seemed to resent the constraints on her life that the child represented. But no matter, Gretchen herself was source and object of all the deep affection he could encompass or imagine.
