And then he remembered. His grandpa swinging with him on the hammock. Talking about a summer he’d spent years ago when his grandma was still alive, on Cape Cod. He was four, maybe five, so it was 1990 or 1991. His parents and little sister had gone out to Cooke’s for supper. He’d had a bad cold, and had to stay in the cottage. Grandma Sarah stayed with him. It had started raining—very hard—an August Cape Cod storm that seemed to drench the beach and every living thing. And she told him about the strange man who had come to her long ago in Saperman’s, the bakery where she used to work…
Jeff shook as he recalled his grandfather’s words. Thank you, Sarah—you came through for me. He felt like running back and hugging her, but didn’t dare, lest this somehow throw a curve into what he had just accomplished here.
He was sure this memory of what his grandfather had told him about what his grandmother had told him hadn’t existed before. It proved that he was real in this convoluted past—that he could do things here which could indeed change the future, even if the change was as slight as a grandmother’s words in a Cape Cod storm some sixty years before he’d been bom. But those words, his memory of his grandfather’s conveyance of them, meant everything. Sarah Harris had given him his first real hope. If he could change the future through her, he could figure out a way to somehow contact his team, and get back to where he belonged.
He was crying. For he also realized that in a deep, indescribable way he missed Sarah Harris even more than his world of 2084, and he knew there was no way he ever could have both.
“I think he’s very attractive,” Carla Caplan of Flushing said. “You know, not in the Marlon Brando or Paul Newman way, but in a cuddly way. Like a teddy bear.” She stroked her left thumbnail with an emery board.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Amy Jacobson replied. “His accent is a little strange. And anyway, he never pays any attention to us. The only girl he ever looks at is the girl in back of the class.”
Carla moved her hand along the nylon stocking on her leg. “That’s not true, Amy. I’ve seen him look at us lots of times.”
“The two of you are ridiculous.” Sandy Greenfarb shook her curly brown hair. “Besides, teachers don’t date students in this pathetic school. City College is too old-fashioned for that.”
“Who said anything about dating?” Carla replied. “And you’re wrong, anyway. Didn’t you hear about Atwick in the bio department? They say he got a girl pregnant. Put some Spanish Fly in her drink.”
Sandy blushed. “That’s absurd. And anyway, Professor Harris is nothing like Professor Atwick. He’s much more refined—more of a gentleman.”
“How would you know?” Amy jumped back in.
“No one knows much about Professor Harris. He just started teaching here this term,” Carla said.
“He’s not married. That’s all Carla needs to know.” Amy laughed.
“Shh,” Sandy said as Jeff walked into the room.
“Late as usual.” Amy whispered.
“Well, I’ve read through most of your papers.” Jeff slouched into the chair on wheels and stretched his feet out on the desk. “And I’m afraid to say that they were more gruesome than I expected.”
A murmur of irritation rippled through the class.
“Now to begin with…” Jeff began, as one student, even later than he, hurried through the door. It was the girl with the soft brown eyes, who bit her lower lip in an apologetic $mile and slipped into a rear seat as inconspicuously as possible.
“Miss, uh…” Jeff inquired, returning the smile.
“Laura Chapin.”
“Yes, uh, Miss Chapin, I was just telling the class that most of these papers on the McLuhanesque interpretation of the Beatles missed the point entirely. But there were a few exceptions. And yours was among the most refreshing.”
Amy shot an I-told-you-so glance to Carla.
Laura’s eyes dilated with delight. “Thank you.”
Jeff finished the class five minutes early and headed quickly out the door. “Professor Harris,” Laura called after him. He stopped a few feet down the hall and turned to face her. Jeff realized she looked taller and older than he had thought, her brown hair jostling invitingly around her shoulders. “I wanted to thank you for what you said about my paper,” she said, slightly out of breath.
“You earned it. You have a fine mind.”
She smiled without looking too embarrassed. “I was wondering if we might be able to get together and talk sometime—in your office—I, um, have some questions I’d like to go over with you about grad school.”
Jeff looked at his watch and gestured Laura to walk with him towards the stairs. “Look, I’d ask you to join me for lunch right now, but I’ve a departmental meeting to attend. Why don’t we have lunch together next Monday?”
Now Laura’s face flushed a bit. “I… that would be very nice, but I’ve got labs starting at noon that run to four o’clock. Do you think it might be possible for us to meet in your office at 4:30 on Monday?”
Jeff stopped and looked steadily at Laura for a moment. Those eyes were alluring. “Monday at 4:30 it is, then,” he said crisply, and strode away.
“I almost didn’t keep our appointment today,” Jeff said, sipping the third glass of red wine he and Laura had partaken since they’d adjourned their meeting from his office.
“Oh? And what possibly could have kept you?” The wine had lowered Laura’s voice to a quiet, warm contralto. The cafe, five minutes on the subway from his office, had the smell of fine spirits and food.
“I didn’t want the aggravation,” Jeff said.
Laura considered his deadpan face, then burst out laughing. “Well, thank you very much.”
“What would you say if I told you that I could predict the future?” Jeff asked offhandedly, taking another sip of his wine.
“You mean in a socially forecasting way?”
“I mean in every way.”
“Well, Professor Harris, you told us in one of your lectures that for very good reasons no one can ever really know the future. So I would say either you were lying… or speaking metaphorically.”
“Good,” Jeff nodded, “but let’s say I stubbornly insisted that I did know the future, and that this in no way contradicts what I said in my lecture about no one ever being able to know the future. What would you say then?”
“I’d say you were kidding me or crazy.” Laura thought for a bit. “I don’t think the future exists yet—it doesn’t exist until it’s actually created, in the present—so there’s no way you or anyone could really know it in the way that we know we’re here in this little bistro on Broadway, for instance.”
“Fair enough.” Jeff waved to the waiter for another round of wine. “You’re sharp. But let’s say I were to tell you that Lyndon Johnson will beat Barry Goldwater by a landslide this November?”
Laura shook her head. “No. Not good enough. Everyone expects Goldwater to get the nomination, and there’s no way that Johnson won’t win big what with the Kennedy sympathy vote. You’d have to do better than that.”
Jeff smiled and rubbed his lips with his fingers. The Beatles’s “Thank You, Girl” played languorously in the background. “OK, how’s this: Let’s say I tell you that in about a year and a half from now, the Beatles will have a hit record called ‘Help’ from a movie by the same name?”
Laura laughed. “You’ve got imagination, I’ll say that for you. But I still don’t think I’d be convinced. How do I know that you’re not a personal friend of George Martin’s with some special information about the Beatles’s plans?” Laura frowned for a moment then snapped her fingers. “No, I’ve got it! You tell me what number on Billboard’s Hot 100 a non-Beatle record—one that won’t almost certainly make number one—will be in 1966, and I’ll believe that you know the future!”