prevent it?'
Jeff shrugged. 'Two possibilities. One, maybe there really was a massive conspiracy to murder Kennedy, and Oswald was a minor, expendable figure. Whoever planned it had Bennett waiting in the wings in case something went wrong, and probably more backups besides. Everything was thoroughly arranged in advance, right down to having Jack Ruby kill whoever took the fall. Eliminating Oswald from the picture was no more than a trivial inconvenience for the people who were behind it all.
Kennedy would have died no matter what I did, because they were just too strongly organized for anyone or anything to stop them, whoever they were.
'That’s one possibility. The other is less specific, but it has much deeper implications for you and me, and it’s the one I tend to believe.'
'And that is?'
'That it’s impossible for us to use our foreknowledge to effect any major change in history. There are limits to what we can do; I don’t know what those limits are, or how they’re imposed, but I think they’re there.'
'But you created an international conglomerate. You owned major companies that had never before been linked…'
'None of that really affected the overall course of things,' Jeff said. 'The companies existed as they always had, turning out the same products, employing the same people. All I did was rechannel the flow of profits a bit, in my direction. The changes in my own life were extreme, but in the larger scheme of things, what I did was insignificant. Outside the financial community, most people—you included—didn’t even know I existed.'
Pamela twisted her napkin pensively. 'What about Starsea, though? Half the population of the planet knows about that. I’ve introduced a new concept, a new way for humanity to view itself in relation to the universe.'
'Arthur Knight in Variety, right?'
She blushed, raised her hand to hide it.
'I looked up all the reviews before I came to see you. It’s a wonderful movie, I grant you that, but it’s still essentially a piece of entertainment, nothing more.'
Her eyes flashed moonlight back at him, beams of anger and hurt pride. 'It could be much more. It could be the beginning of—' She stopped, composed herself. 'Never mind. I don’t share your pessimism about our capabilities; let’s leave it at that. Now, do you want to hear about my second … 'replay'—that’s what you call the cycles, isn’t it?'
'That’s how I’ve come to think of them. It’s as good a name as any other. Do you feel like continuing?'
'You’ve told me your experiences. I might as well bring you up to date on mine.'
'And then?'
'I don’t know,' she said. 'We seem to have very different attitudes about this.'
'But there’s no one else we can discuss it with, is there?'
'Just let me finish what I was telling you, all right?' She’d shredded the paper napkin into strips, which she now crumpled and piled into the ashtray.
'Go ahead,' Jeff told her. 'Want another drink? Or another napkin?'
She looked at him sharply, searching for sarcasm in his face. She found none, nodded once. Jeff made a circular motion with his hand in the air, signaling the waitress for another round of Grand Marnier.
'The second time I died,' Pamela began, 'I was more infuriated than anything else. As soon as I came to, in my parents' house, fourteen years old again, I knew exactly what was happening, if not why. And I just wanted to smash something. I wanted to scream with rage, not fear. The way you said you felt on your third … replay. It all seemed such a waste: medical school, the hospital, all the children I had treated … pointless, all of it.
'I became extremely rebellious, vicious, even, with my family. I’d spent more years as an adult than my mother and father put together, had been married twice, had a career as a physician. And here I was legally a child, with no rights or options whatsoever. I stole some money from my parents, ran away from home. But it was dreadful—nobody would rent me an apartment, I couldn’t get a job … There’s nothing a girl that age can do on her own, other than go on the streets, and I wasn’t about to put myself through that kind of hell. So I crawled back to Westport, devastated, incredibly alone. Went back to school, despising every moment of it, flunking half my classes because I just couldn’t stand to memorize the same damned algebra formulas for the third time.
'They sent me to the psychiatrist I’d seen before, the one who’d gotten so upset when I knew about the Kennedy assassination. This time I didn’t tell her anything real about myself. I’d studied most of the standard texts on child development and psychology myself by then, so I just fed her the answers I knew would make me come across as a mildly screwed-up adolescent
She paused while the waitress set down their drinks, waited until the girl was well away from the table before she resumed her narrative.
'To keep at least some of my sanity intact, I went back to my first love, painting. My parents bought me whatever materials I asked for, and I asked for the works. But they were proud of my art; it was the one thing I was doing that they could recognize as constructive. Never mind that I was sneaking gin from their liquor cabinet, staying out half the night with guys in their twenties, and being put on academic probation every semester. They’d just about given up trying to control me. They could see there was something too strong and willful behind my misbehavior for them to cope with. But I had my talent; it was quite real, and I worked at it as hard as I had worked at being a doctor. They couldn’t ignore that; no one could.
'I dropped out of high school when I was seventeen, and my parents found an art institute in Boston that was willing to take me on the basis of my portfolio, despite my terrible record in school. There I blossomed; I could finally start living as an adult again. I shared a loft with one of the older girls from the school, started dating my composition instructor, painted day and night. My work was full of bizarre, sometimes brutal images: maimed children falling down a black vortex, photorealistic close-ups of ants crawling out of surgical incisions … strong stuff, as unschoolgirlish as you could imagine. Nobody knew what to make of me.
'I had my first show in New York when I was twenty. That’s where I met Dustin. He bought two of my canvases, and then, after the gallery closed, we went out for a drink. He told me he’d—'
'Dustin?' Jeff interrupted.
'Dustin Hoffman.'
'The actor?'
'Yes. Anyway, he liked my paintings, and I’d always been impressed with his work—Midnight Cowboy had just come out that year, and I had to keep reminding myself not to say anything to him about Kramer vs. Kramer or Tootsie. We hit it off right away. We started seeing each other whenever he was in New York. We got married a year later.'
Jeff couldn’t hide his amused surprise. 'You married Dustin Hoffman?'
'In one version of his life, yes,' she said with a trace of annoyance. 'He’s a very nice man, very bright. Now, of course, he knows me only as a writer and producer; he has no idea we spent seven years together. I ran into him at a party just last month. It’s strange, seeing such a complete lack of recognition in someone you’ve been that intimate with, shared that much time with.
'Anyway, it was a good marriage, by and large; we respected each other, supported our separate goals … I continued to paint, had some modest success with it. My best-known work was a triptych called Echoes of Selves Past and Future. It was—'
'My God, yes! I saw that at the Whitney, on a trip to New York with my third wife, Judy! She liked it all right, but she couldn’t understand why I was so thoroughly taken with it. Hell, I bought a print of it, had it framed over the desk in my den! That’s where I’d heard your name before.'
