'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!'
