Replay

11: Then he saw that there were also bits and pieces of various movies, television shows, old music videos … And suddenly he caught a glimpse of his cabin in Montgomery Creek on one of the monitors, and on another was a quick still-frame of Judy Gordon’s college yearbook picture, followed by a video tape of her as an adult, waving at the camera along with her son, Sean, the boy who in another life had studied dolphins because of Starsea.

Jeff’s eyes darted rapidly now from screen to screen, trying to take it all in, trying not to miss anything: Chateaugay winning the 1963 Kentucky Derby, his parents' house in Orlando, the jazz club in Paris where Sidney Bechet’s clarinet had pierced his soul, the college bar where he’d watched Pamela begin replaying, the grounds of his estate nearby … And there on one monitor was a long shot of the hillside village in Majorca; the camera zoomed slowly in to the villa where Pamela had died, then cut abruptly to a blurry home-movie clip of her at age fourteen, with her mother and father in the house in Westport.

'My God,' he said, transfixed by the ever-changing montage of all their replays. 'Where did you find all this?'

'Some of it was easy,' she said. 'The news-file footage is readily available. As for the rest, I shot most of it myself, in Paris, California, Atlanta…' She smiled, her face illuminated by the flashing screens. 'I did a lot of traveling for this one. To some familiar places and to others that I only knew about through you.' One of the screens now showed the corridors and wards of a hospital, all the beds filled with children; Jeff assumed it was the clinic in Chicago where she’d been a physician her first time back. On another monitor was the boat they’d once rented in Key West, anchored off the same deserted island where they’d decided to begin their search for other replayers. On and on the surrounding images played, an incessant kinetic collage of their many lives, together and apart.

'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