Ken Grimwood - Replay

Replay

Ken Grimwood

For my mother andfather

Jeff Winston wason the phone with his wife when he died.

We need shedsaid, and he never heard her say just what it was they needed, becausesomething heavy seemed to slam against his chest, crushing the breath out ofhim. The phone fell from his hand and cracked the glass paperweight on hisdesk.

Just the weekbefore, shed said something similar, had said, Do you know what we need,Jeff? and thered been a pausenot infinite, not final, like this mortalpause, but a palpable interim nonetheless.

Hed been sittingat the kitchen table, in what Linda liked to call the breakfast nook,although it wasnt really a separate space at all, just a little formica tablewith two chairs placed awkwardly between the left side of the refrigerator andthe front of the clothes drier. Linda had been chopping onions at the counterwhen she said it, and maybe the tears at the corner of her eyes were what hadset him thinking, had lent her question more import than shed intended.

Do you know whatwe need, Jeff?

And he wassupposed to say, Whats that, hon? was supposed to say it distractedly andwithout interest as he read Hugh Sideys column about the presidency in Time. But Jeff wasnt distracted; he didnt give a damnabout Sideys ramblings. He was in fact more focused and aware than he had beenin a long, long time.

So he didnt sayanything at all for several moments; he just stared at the false tears inLindas eyes and thought about the things they needed, he and she.

They needed toget away, for starters, needed to get on a plane going someplace warm andlushJamaica, perhaps, or Barbados. They hadnt had a real vacation since thatlong-planned but somehow disappointing tour of Europe five years ago. Jeff didntcount their annual Florida trips to see his parents in Orlando and Lindasfamily in Boca Raton; those were visits to an ever-receding past, nothing more.No, what they needed was a week, a month, on some decadently foreign island:making love on endless empty beaches, and at night the sound of reggae music inthe air like the smell of hot red flowers.

A decent housewould be nice, too, maybe one of those stately old homes on Upper Mountain Roadin Montclair that theyd driven past so many wistful Sundays. Or a place inWhite Plains, a twelve-room Tudor on Ridgeway Avenue near the golf courses. Notthat hed want to take up golf; it just seemed that all those lazy expanses ofgreen, with names like Maple Moor and Westchester Hills, would make for more pleasantsurroundings than did the on ramps to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and theglide path into LaGuardia.

They also neededa child, though Linda probably felt that lack more urgently than he. Jeffalways pictured their never-born child as being eight years old, having skippedall the demands of infancy and not yet having reached the torments of puberty.A good kid, not overly cute or precocious. Boy, girl, it didnt matter; just achild, her child and his, whod ask funny questions and sit too close to the TVset and show the spark of his or her own developing individuality.

Thered be nochild, though; theyd known that was impossible for years, since Linda had gonethrough the ectopic pregnancy in 1975. And there wouldnt be any house inMontclair or White Plains, either; Jeffs position as news director of NewYorks WFYI all-news radio sounded more prestigious, more lucrative, than itactually was. Maybe hed still make the jump to television; but at forty-three,that was growing increasingly unlikely.

We need, we need to talk, he thought. To look each other straight in the eye and just say: Itdidnt work. None of it, not the romance or the passion or the glorious plans.It all went flat, and theres nobody to blame. Thats simply the way it happened.

But of coursetheyd never do that. That was the main part of the failure, the fact that theyseldom spoke of deeper needs, never broached the tearing sense of incompletionthat stood always between them.

Linda wiped ameaningless, onion-induced tear away with the back of her hand. Did you hearme, Jeff?

Yes. I heardyou.

What we need,she said, looking in his direction but not quite at him, is a new showercurtain.

In alllikelihood, that was the level of need shed been about to express over thephone before he began to die. a dozen eggs, her sentence probably would haveended, or a box of coffee filters.

But why was hethinking all this? he wondered. He was dying, for Christs sake; shouldnt hisfinal thoughts be of something deeper, more philosophical? Or maybe afast-speed replay of the highlights of his life, forty-three years on Betascan.That was what people went through when they drowned, wasnt it?

This felt likedrowning, he thought as the expanded seconds passed: the awful pressure, thehopeless struggle for breath, the sticky wetness that soaked his body as saltsweat streamed down his forehead and stung his eyes.

Drowning. Dying.No, shit, no, that was an unreal word, applicable to flowers or pets or otherpeople. Old people, sick people. Unlucky people.

His face droppedto the desk, right cheek pressing flat against the file folder hed been aboutto study when Linda called. The crack in the paperweight was cavernous beforehis one open eye: a split in the world itself, a jagged mirror of the rippingagony inside him. Through the broken glass he could see the glowing rednumerals on the digital clock atop his bookshelf:

1:06 PM OCT 1988

And then therewas nothing more to avoid thinking about, because the process of thought hadceased.

Jeff couldntbreathe.

Of course hecouldnt breathe; he was dead. But if he was dead, why was he aware of notbeing able to breathe? Or of anything, for that matter?

He turned hishead away from the bunched-up blanket and breathed. Stale, damp air, full ofthe smell of his own perspiration.

So he hadntdied. Somehow, the realization didnt thrill him, just as his earlierassumption of death had failed to strike him with dread.

Maybe he hadsecretly welcomed the end of his life. Now it would merely continue as before:the dissatisfaction, the grinding loss of ambition and hope that had eithercaused or been caused by the failure of his marriage, he couldnt rememberwhich anymore.

He shoved theblanket away from his face and kicked at the rumpled sheets. There was musicplaying somewhere in the darkened room, barely audible. An oldie: Da Doo RonRon, by one of those Phil Spector girl groups.

Jeff groped for alamp switch, thoroughly disoriented. He was either in a hospital bed recoveringfrom what had happened in the office, or at home waking from a dream that wasworse than usual. His hand found the bedside lamp, turned it on. He was in asmall, messy room, clothes and books strewn on the floor and piled haphazardlyon two adjacent desks and chairs. Neither a hospital nor his and Lindasbedroom, but familiar, somehow.

A naked, smilingwoman stared back at him from a large photograph taped to one wall. A Playboy centerfold, a vintage one. The buxom brunette laydemurely on her stomach, atop an air mattress at the afterdeck of a boat, herred-and-white polka-dotted bikini tied to the railing. With her jaunty roundsailors cap, her carefully coiffed and sprayed dark hair, she bore a distinctresemblance to the young Jackie Kennedy.

The other walls,he saw, were decorated in a similarly dated, juvenile style: bullfight posters,a big blowup of a red Jaguar XK-E, an old Dave Brubeck album cover. Above onedesk was a red, white, and blue banner that read, in letters made of stars andstripes, FUCK COMMUNISM. Jeff grinned when he saw that; hed ordered one justlike it from Paul Krassners then-shocking little rag, The Realist, when he was in college, when

He sat uprightabruptly, pulse sounding in his ears.

That oldgooseneck lamp on the desk nearest the door had always come loose from its basewhenever he moved it, he recalled. And the rug next to Martins bed had a bigblood-red stainyes, right therefrom the time Jeff had sneaked Judy Gordonupstairs and shed started dancing around the room to the Drifters and knockedover a bottle of Chianti.