by Ken Grimwood
She talked about her abandoned art career, about the frustrations and joys of raising her family. He could see the restlessness in her eyes, the gnawing sense of a life not fully lived; a life, Jeff knew, which soon would end. He ached to tell her of all she’d once achieved.
There came a moment when the lunch was finished, the conversation at an awkward lull.
"So," he said, wanting to prolong the encounter but not certain how. "This has been very pleasant."
"Yes, it has," she agreed, fumbling uncomfortably with her coffee spoon.
"Do you get into the city very often?"
"A couple of times a month."
"Maybe we could…" his voice trailed off; he wasn’t sure what he was proposing, was even less sure whether he should propose anything at all between them.
"Could what?" she asked, into the silence.
"I don’t know. Go to another museum. Have lunch again."
She fidgeted with the spoon. "I’m married, you know."
"I know."
"I don’t just—I mean, I’m not—"
He smiled, handed her a paper napkin.
"What’s this for?" she said, startled.
"For tearing into very tiny pieces."
Pamela laughed abruptly, then stared back at him with a quizzical look. "How did you know I…" She shook her head slowly from side to side. "Sometimes I feel like you can read my mind. Like when you asked if I’d ever painted dolphins. I never told you how much I love whales and dolphins."
"I just thought you might."
She ripped the napkin straight down the middle with an exaggerated flourish, and looked up at him with curious merriment and an air of sudden resolve.
"There’s a Jack Youngerman show at the Guggenheim," she said. "I might come down for that next week."
The musk-warm scent of their lovemaking clung to him, permeated the bedroom with its aromatic catalogue of memories. That sweetly pungent essence brought back vivid recollections of nights beneath thick blankets at the cabin in Montgomery Creek, hot bright days on the foredeck of a yacht off the Florida Keys, Sunday mornings wrapped in the sheets of their suite at the Pierre … and finally the afternoons, one year’s worth of stolen afternoons, here in this apartment.
Jeff looked down at her face against his chest, her eyes closed, her lips parted like a sleeping child’s. His mind brought forth, unbidden, the lines from the Bhagavad-Gita that she’d once spoken with such passionate intensity on that long-ago evening in her Topanga Canyon retreat:
"You and I, Arujna, have lived many lives.
I remember them all. You do not remember."
Pamela stirred in his arms, uttered a wordless sound of contentment as she stretched, her body sliding against his like an affectionate kitten.
"What time is it?" she asked, yawning.
"Twenty after six."
"Damn," she said, sitting up in bed. "I have to get going."
"Will you be down again on Tuesday?"
"My class was canceled, but … I haven’t mentioned anything about that at home. We can spend the whole day together."
Jeff smiled, tried to look pleased. Next Tuesday. The whole day together. Faint, bittersweet echoes of what once had been; but of course she had no way of knowing that.
"Maybe I can finish the painting then," she said, slipping out of bed and gathering up her scattered clothes.
"When do I get to look at it?"
"Not till it’s done; you promised."
He nodded, feeling slightly guilty that he’d sneaked a look at the covered canvas the day before. Her talent had progressed in the past year, since she’d started painting regularly again and taking graduate courses in advanced composition at NYU; but she’d never again reach the level of ability, the bold flights of imaginative brilliance she had displayed in other, unremembered lives.
The painting she had almost completed was a nude study of the two of them, hands joined, laughing and running through a sun-dappled tunnel of white, vine-covered trellises. Jeff was touched by its simplicity, by the naivete of the free-spirited joy it portrayed; it was a painting by an artist who had only begun to love, who had not yet had the chance to test the limits of that love, or of life itself.
The time they’d spent together since that first unplanned meeting at the museum had been inescapably circumscribed: An afternoon once or twice a week here at his apartment, a rare overnight when she’d told her husband she wanted to stay in the city for a concert or a play … and once, once only, they’d gone away for a long weekend together to Cape Cod. She’d told her family she was in Boston, visiting a woman she had known in college.
The possibility of divorce had been raised once, briefly; but Jeff knew she wasn’t ready for such a drastic break. There were more limitations on what they could share than she would ever know, a piercing line of demarcation between their awareness of each other. Pamela seemed to sense it sometimes, vaguely: In a faraway look on Jeff’s face, in a suddenly halted conversation.
He loved her, genuinely loved her for the self she was today, not merely as a reflection of all those other Pamelas, in other existences … and yet the constant reminder, in her unknowing eyes, of all that had been put behind them tinged everything they did with an unremitting melancholy.
She had finished dressing and was brushing the bed-tangles from her fine, straight hair. How many times had he watched her do that, in how many mirrors? More than she could imagine, or than he could now bear to recall.
"See you next week," Pamela said, bending to kiss him as she scooped her purse from the night stand. "I’ll try to get an early train."
He returned her kiss, held her shining face between his open hands for a lingering moment, thinking of the years, the decades, the hopes and plans of their lifetimes fulfilled and thwarted …
But next week they’d have all day together; a day of warmth, of early spring. It was something to look forward to.
The first breath of winter blew in from off the lake, stirring the red and yellow leaves of the trees on Cherry Hill. The fountain in the Concourse burbled its chill waters as Jeff and Pamela walked past it toward the graceful cast-iron sweep of Central Park’s Bow Bridge.
On the other side of the bridge they wandered north along the wooded pathways of the Ramble, skirting the lake to their left. Birds by the hundreds twittered excitedly all around them, getting ready for the long voyage south.
"Wouldn’t it be nice if we could join them?" Pamela said, huddling close to Jeff as they strolled. "Fly away to some island, or to South America…"
He didn’t answer her, simply held her tighter, his arm protectively around her waist. But he knew with bitter certainty that he could offer no protection from what was soon to happen to them both.
At the north end of the lake they stopped on Balcony Bridge, and stood gazing at the woods below, the water reflecting the surrounding towers of Manhattan.
"Guess what?" Pamela whispered, her face close to his.
"What?" he said.
"I’ve told Steve I’m going to visit my old roommate in Boston again next weekend. Friday through Monday. We can fly away somewhere, if you want to."
"That’s … great." There was nothing he could say; it would be the height of cruelty to tell her what he knew: That this was the last day they would ever see each other. This coming Tuesday, five days from now, the world would cease forever for both of them.
"You don’t sound all that thrilled about it," she said, frowning.
Jeff put on a grin, tried to mask his grief and fear. Let her cling to her innocent trust in the years she assumed would be there to be lived; now, at the end, the greatest gift that he could give her was a lie.
"It’s wonderful," he told her with pretended enthusiasm. "I’m just surprised, that’s all. We can go anywhere you’d like to go. Anywhere at all. Barbados, Acapulco, the Bahamas … you name it."
"I don’t care," she said, snuggling to him. "Just as long as it’s warm, and quiet, and I’m with you."
>
If he spoke again, he knew, his voice would give away too much. Instead, he kissed her, willed all his heartsick sorrow into a final, tangible expression of all that he had ever felt for her, all they’d ever—
She gave a sudden moan, fell limply against him. He gripped her shoulders, kept her from collapsing to the ground.
"Pamela? God, no, what—"
She regained her footing, pulled her face back and looked at him in shock. "Jeff? Oh, Jesus, Jeff?"
It was there, all of it, in her widened eyes: comprehension, recognition, memory. The accumulated knowledge and anguish of eight varied lifetimes spilled across her face, twisted her mouth with sudden confusion.
She looked around her, saw the park, the New York skyline. Her eyes filled with tears, sought Jeff’s again.
"I was—it was supposed to be over!"
"Pamela—"
"What year is it? How long do we have?"
He couldn’t keep it from her; she had to know. "It’s 1988."
She looked back at the trees, the coppery leaves drifting and! swirling everywhere about them. "It’s already fall!"
He smoothed her wind-mussed hair, wished that he could stave off the truth for one more moment; but it would not be denied. "October," he told her gently. "The thirteenth."
"That’s—that’s only five days!"
"Yes."
"It’s not fair," she wept, "I’d prepared myself last time, I’d almost accepted—" She broke off, looked at him with new bewilderment. "What are we doing here together?" she asked. "Why aren’t I at home?"
"I … I had to see you."
"You were kissing me," she said accusingly. "You were kissing her, the person I used to be, before!"
"Pamela, I thought—"
"I don’t care what you thought," she snapped, jerking herself away from him. "You knew that wasn’t really me, how could you have done something so … so perverse as that?"
"But it was you," he insisted. "Not with all the memories, no, but it was still you, we still—"
"I can’t believe you’re saying this! How long has this been happening, when did you start this?"
"It’s been almost two years."
"Two years! You’ve been … using me, like I was some kind of inanimate object, like—"
"It wasn’t like that, not at all! We loved each other, you started painting again, went back to school…"
"I don’t care what I did! You seduced me away from my family, you tricked me … and you knew exactly what you were doing, what strings to pull to influence me, to … control me!"
"Pamela, please." He reached for her arm, trying to calm her, make her understand. "You’re twisting everything, you’re—"
"Don’t touch me!" she shouted, backing off the bridge where they’d embraced just moments before. "Just leave me alone and let me die! Let us both die, and get it done with!"
Jeff tried to stop her as she fled, but she was gone. The last hope of his last life was gone, lost on the path that led to Seventy-seventh Street, into the anonymous, devouring city … to death, immutable and certain death.
TWENTY-ONE
Jeff Winston died, alone; yet still his dying wasn’t done. He awoke in his office at WFYI, where the first of his many lives had so abruptly ended: Reporters' schedules posted on the wall, framed picture of Linda on his desk, the glass paperweight that had cracked when he had clutched his chest and dropped the phone so long ago. He looked at the digital clock on his bookshelf:
12:57 PM OCT 1988
Nine minutes to live. No time to contemplate anything but the looming pain and nothingness.
His hands began to shake, tears welled in his eyes.
"Hey, Jeff, about this new campaign—" Promotions director Ron Sweeney stood in his open office door, staring at him. "Jesus, you look white as a sheet! What’s the matter?"
Jeff looked back at the clock:
1:02 PM OCT 1988
"Get out of here, Ron."
"Can I get you an Alka-Seltzer or something? Want me to call a doctor?"
"Get the hell out of here!"
"Hey, I’m sorry, I just…" Sweeney shrugged, closed the door behind him.
The tremors in Jeff s hands spread to his shoulders, then to his back. He closed his eyes, bit his upper lip and tasted blood.
The phone rang. He picked it up in his shaking hand, completed the vast cycle that had begun so many lifetimes ago.
"Jeff," Linda said, "We need—"
The invisible hammer slammed into his chest, killing him again.
He woke again, looked in panic at the glowing red numbers across the room:
1:05 PM OCT 1988
He threw the paperweight at the clock, smashed its rectangular plastic face. The phone rang and kept on ringing. Jeff blotted out the sound of it with a scream, a wordless animal bellow, and then he died, and woke with the telephone already in his hand, heard Linda’s words and died again, again, again: waking and dying, awareness and void, alternating almost faster than he could perceive, centered always on the moment of that first heavy agony within his chest.
Jeff’s ravaged mind cried out for some release, but none was granted; it sought escape, whether in madness or oblivion no longer mattered … Yet still he saw and heard and felt, remained alert to all his torment, suspended without surcease in the awful darkness of not-life, not-death: the eternal, paralyzing instant of his dying.
"We need…" he heard Linda say, " … to talk."
There was a pain somewhere. It took him a moment to identify the source of it: his hand, rigid as a claw where he clutched the telephone. Jeff relaxed his grip, and the ache in his sweaty hand eased.
"Jeff? Did you hear what I said?"
He tried to speak, could issue nothing but a guttural sound that was half-moan, half-grunt.
"I said we need to talk," Linda repeated. "We need to sit down together and have an honest discussion about our marriage. I don’t know if it can be salvaged at this point, but I think it’s worth trying."
Jeff opened his eyes, looked at the clock on his bookshelf:
1:07 PM OCT 1988
"Are you going to answer me? Do you understand how important this is for us?"
The numbers on the clock changed silently, advanced to 1:08.
"Yes," he said, forcing the words to form. "I understand. We’ll talk."
She let out a long, slow breath. "It’s overdue, but maybe there’s still time."
"We’ll see."
"Do you think you could get home early today?"
"I’ll try," Jeff told her, his throat dry and constricted.
"See you when you get here," Linda said. "We have a lot to talk about."
Jeff hung up the phone, still staring at the clock. It moved to 1:09.
He touched his chest, felt the steady heartbeat. Alive. He was alive, and time had resumed its natural flow.
Or had it ever ceased? Maybe he had suffered a heart attack, but only a mild one, just bad enough to push him over the edge into hallucination. It wasn’t unheard of; he himself had made the analogy of a drowning man seeing the events of his life played back, had half-expected something like that to happen when the pain first hit him. The brain was capable of prodigious feats of fantasy and time compression or expansion, particularly at a moment of apparent mortal crisis.
Of course, he thought, and mopped his sweating brow with relief. That made perfect sense, much more than believing he’d actually been through all those lives, experienced all those—
Jeff looked back at the phone. There was only one way to know for certain. Feeling slightly foolish, he dialed information for Westchester County.
"What city, please?" the operator asked.
"New Rochelle. A listing for … Robison, Steve or Steven Robison."
There was a pause, a click on the line, and then a computer-synthesized voice read out the number in a dull monotone.
Maybe he’d heard the man’s name someplace, Jeff thought, perhaps in some minor news story. It could
have gotten lodged in his mind, to be subtly woven into his delusion weeks or months ' later.
He dialed the number the computer had given him. A young girl’s voice, thick with sinus congestion, answered. "Is, ah, your mother home?" Jeff asked the child. "Just a minute. Mommy! Telephone!"
A woman’s voice came on the line, muffled and distorted, out of breath. "Hello?" she said.
It was hard to tell one way or the other, she was breathing in such quick, shallow gasps. "Is this … Pamela Robison? Pamela Phillips?"
Silence. Even the breathing halted.
"Kimberly," the woman said, "You can hang up the phone now. It’s time for you to take another Contac and some cough medicine."
"Pamela?" Jeff said when the girl had put down her receiver. "This is—"
"I know. Hello, Jeff."
He closed his eyes, took a deep lungful of air, and let it out slowly. "It … happened, then? All of it? Starsea, and Montgomery Creek, and Russell Hedges? You know what I’m talking about?" "Yes. I wasn’t sure myself that it was real, until I heard your voice just now. God, Jeff, I started dying over and over, so fast, it was—"
"I know. The same thing happened to me. But before that, you really do remember all the things we went through, all those lives?"
"Every one of them. I was a doctor, and an artist … you wrote books, we—"
"We soared."
"That, too." He heard her sigh, a long, empty sound full of regret, and weariness, and more. "About that last day, in Central Park—"
"I thought it would be my last time, I thought that you—were gone. Forever. I had to be with you toward the end, even if it was only … a part of you, that didn’t really know me."
She didn’t say anything, and after several seconds the silence hung between them as the lost years once had.
"What do we do now?" Pamela finally asked.
"I don’t know," Jeff said. "I can’t think straight yet, can you?"
"No," she admitted. "I don’t know what would be best, for either of us, right now." She paused, hesitated. "You know … Kimberly’s home sick from school today—that’s why she answered the phone—but it’s not just that she has a cold, this is the day after she got her first period. I died just as she began to become a woman. And now…"
