"Ken Grimwood - Replay" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grimwood Ken)

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REPLAY
Ken Grimwood
For my mother and father


ONE
Jeff Winston was on the phone with his wife when he died.
"We needтАФ" she'd said, and he never heard her say just what it was they needed, because something
heavy seemed to slam against his chest, crushing the breath out of him. The phone fell from his hand and
cracked the glass paperweight on his desk.
Just the week before, she'd said something similar, had said, "Do you know what we need, Jeff?" and
there'd been a pauseтАФnot infinite, not final, like this mortal pause, but a palpable interim nonetheless.
He'd been sitting at the kitchen table, in what Linda liked to call the "breakfast nook," although it wasn't
really a separate space at all, just a little formica table with two chairs placed awkwardly between the left
side of the refrigerator and the front of the clothes drier. Linda had been chopping onions at the counter
when she said it, and maybe the tears at the corner of her eyes were what had set him thinking, had lent
her question more import than she'd intended.
"Do you know what we need, Jeff?"
And he was supposed to say, "What's that, hon?" was supposed to say it distractedly and without
interest as he read Hugh Sidey's column about the presidency in Time. But Jeff wasn't distracted; he
didn't give a damn about Sidey's ramblings. He was in fact more focused and aware than he had been in
a long, long time.
So he didn't say anything at all for several moments; he just stared at the false tears in Linda's eyes
and thought about the things they needed, he and she.
They needed to get away, for starters, needed to get on a plane going someplace warm and
lushтАФJamaica, perhaps, or Barbados. They hadn't had a real vacation since that long-planned but
somehow disappointing tour of Europe five years ago. Jeff didn't count their annual Florida trips to see
his parents in Orlando and Linda's family 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 in the air like the smell of hot red
flowers.
A decent house would be nice, too, maybe one of those stately old homes on Upper Mountain Road
in Montclair that they'd driven past so many wistful Sundays. Or a place in White Plains, a twelve-room
Tudor on Ridgeway Avenue near the golf courses. Not that he'd want to take up golf; it just seemed that
all those lazy expanses of green, with names like Maple Moor and Westchester Hills, would make for
more pleasant surroundings than did the on ramps to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the glide
path into LaGuardia.
They also needed a child, though Linda probably felt that lack more urgently than he. Jeff always
pictured their never-born child as being eight years old, having skipped all the demands of infancy and
not yet having reached the torments of puberty. A good kid, not overly cute or precocious. Boy, girl, it
didn't matter; just a child, her child and his, who'd ask funny questions and sit too close to the TV set and
show the spark of his or her own developing individuality.
There'd be no child, though; they'd known that was impossible for years, since Linda had gone
through the ectopic pregnancy in 1975. And there wouldn't be any house in Montclair or White Plains,
either; Jeff's position as news director of New York's WFYI all-news radio sounded more prestigious,
more lucrative, than it actually was. Maybe he'd still make the jump to television; but at forty-three, that
was growing increasingly unlikely.
We need, we need тАж to talk, he thought. To look each other straight in the eye and just say: It didn't