The meeting broke up quietly, with none of the usual wisecracks and raucous laughter. The reporters and the offgoing early-morning editor filed out of the conference room, casting quick, covert glances at Jeff. Gene Collins hung behind, stacking and restacking his sheaf of papers.
'You want to talk about it?' he finally said.
Jeff shook his head. 'Nothing to talk about. I told you, I’ll be all right.'
'Look, if it’s problems with Linda … I mean, I understand. You know what a rough go of it Carol and I had a couple of years back. You helped me through a lot of that—God knows I bent your ear enough—so anytime you want to sit down over a beer, just let me know.'
'Thanks, Gene. I appreciate your concern, I really do. But it’s something I have to work out for myself.'
Collins shrugged, stood from the table. 'That’s up to you,' he said. 'But if you ever do feel like unloading your problems, feel free to dump a few in my direction. I owe you.'
Jeff nodded briefly, then Collins left the room, and he was alone again.
TWENTY
Jeff quit work, made enough bets and short-term-yield investments to enable Linda to get by on her own for the next three years. There was no time to build a major inheritance for her; he increased his life-insurance coverage tenfold and let it go at that.
He moved into a small apartment on the Upper West Side, spent his days and evenings wandering the streets of Manhattan, taking in all the sights and smells and sounds of humanity from which he had so long isolated himself. The old people fascinated him most, their eyes full of distant memories and lost hope, their bodies slumped in anticipation of the end of time.
Now that Pamela was gone, the fears and regrets she had expressed came back to trouble him as deeply as they’d disturbed her toward the end. He’d done what he could to reassure her, to ease the grief and terror of her final days, but she’d been right: For all that they had struggled, all they’d once achieved, the end result was null. Even the happiness they had managed to find together had been frustratingly brief; a few years stolen here and there, transient moments of love and contentment like vanishing specks of foam in a sea of lonely, needless separation.
It had seemed as if they would have forever, an infinity of choices and second chances. They had squandered far too much of the priceless time that had been granted them, wasted it on bitterness and guilt and futile quests for nonexistent answers—when they themselves, their love for each other, had been all the answer either of them should have ever needed. Now even the opportunity to tell her that, to hold her in his arms and let her know how much he had revered and cherished her, was eternally denied him. Pamela was dead, and in three years' time Jeff, too, would die, never knowing why he’d lived.
He roamed his city streets, watching, listening: tough-eyed bands of punks, furious at the world … men and women in corporate attire, hurrying to accomplish whatever goals they had established for themselves … giggling swarms of children, exuberant at the newness of their lives. Jeff envied them all, coveted their innocence, their ignorance, their expectations.
Several weeks after he’d quit his job at WFYI, he got a call from one of the news writers who worked there, a woman—girl, really—named Lydia Randall. Everyone at the station was concerned about him, she said, had been shocked when he’d resigned, and worried further when they’d heard his marriage had broken up. Jeff told her, as he had told Gene Collins, that he was all right. But she pressed the issue, insisted that he meet her for a drink so she could talk to him in person.
They met the next afternoon at the Sign of the Dove on Third Avenue at Sixty-fifth, took a table by one of the windows that was open to a gloriously sunny New York June. Lydia was wearing a shoulder-baring white cotton dress and a matching wide-brimmed hat from which a pink satin ribbon trailed. She was an exceptionally pretty young woman, with a mass of wavy blond hair and wide, liquid-green eyes.
Jeff recited the story he’d concocted to explain his sudden retirement, a standard tale of journalist’s burn-out combined with some half-truths about the recent 'luck' he’d had with his investments. Lydia nodded understandingly, seemed to accept his explanations at face value. As far as his marriage went, he told her, it had effectively been over for a long time; no specific problems worth belaboring, just a case of two people who had gradually grown apart.
Lydia listened solicitously. She had another drink, then began to talk about her own life. She was twenty-three, had come to New York right after she’d graduated from the University of Illinois, was living with the boyfriend she had met in college. He—his name was Matthew—was eager to get married, but she was no longer so sure. She felt 'trapped,' needed 'space,' wanted to meet new friends and have all the adventurous experiences she’d missed growing up in a small town in the Midwest. She and Matthew were no longer the same people they used to be, Lydia said; she felt she had outgrown him.
Jeff let her talk it out, all the commonplace woes and longings of youth that to her were freshly overwhelming and of unprecedented import in her life. She hadn’t the perspective to recognize how utterly ordinary her story was, though perhaps she did have some glimmering of that awareness, since she had at least expressed her urgent desire to break free of the cliche her life had become.
He commiserated, talked with her for an hour or more about life and love and independence … told her she had to make her own decisions, said she had to learn to take risks, said all the obvious and necessary things that one must say to someone who is facing a universal human crisis for the first time in her life.
A gusting breeze from the open window stirred her hair, wafted the ribbon from her hat against her face. Lydia brushed it away, and Jeff found something inexplicably touching about the gesture, the girlish way her hand moved. In her prettily animated face he suddenly saw a reflection of Judy Gordon, and of Linda on that day she’d brought him the daisies: bright promise, unshaped dreams aborning.
They finished their drinks, and he saw her to a taxi. As she got into the cab she looked up at him and said, with all the optimism and presumed infinity of youth, 'I guess it’ll be O.K.; I mean, we’ve got plenty of time to work it out. We have so much time.' Jeff knew that illusion, far too well. He gave the young woman a halfhearted smile, shook her hand, and watched her ride away toward life, her long pink ribbon blowing free.
The Metro North commuter train pulled to a stop precisely on time, Jeff noted from his vantage point a hundred feet farther down the platform. At this time of day it was something of a misnomer to call it a commuter train, he thought; not many businessmen would have taken the 11:00 A.M. run into the city.
Jeff began walking briskly toward the ramp to the Terminal, as if he’d just gotten off a different line. He slowed his pace a bit as he passed the train from New Rochelle, and saw that he’d been right: There were a number of women dressed for shopping trips, a smattering of college students, but almost no one with a suit and tie and briefcase among the disembarking passengers.
She was one of the last to leave the train. He almost missed her, and had begun to worry that the information he’d been given might be incorrect. She was nicely dressed, but without the fanatical attention to detail that marked the women headed for Bendel’s or Bergdorfs. Her low-heeled shoes were designed for walking, and her pale blue linen dress and light wool sweater had an appealing air of practicality about them.
Jeff fell into step twenty or thirty paces behind her as she walked up the ramp and into Grand Central’s huge Main Concourse. He was afraid he might lose her in the crowd, but her height and distinctive straight blonde hair helped him keep her in view as they weaved their separate ways through the swarms of people.
She went up the broad stairs that led to the Pan Am Building, and Jeff dropped back a bit as he followed her through the less-crowded lobby and out onto East Forty-fifth Street. She strode across Park Avenue, past the Roosevelt Hotel and across Madison to Fifth, where she turned north. The
