Entr'acte (14 page)

“Is this much different than what it would be like when you last saw this street?” Bart asked.

Joyce looked around. Several employment agencies, including one that claimed to be “reliable industrial help specialists for 35

years,” had lists of jobs posted in their plate glass windows.

One storefront had a caricature of a muscle-bound man in tights. “Physical culture studio,” was etched on the glass.

“Instruction for health and strength.”

“We’d call that a gym, and men and women would work out together,” Joyce said.

Bart wrinkled his nose in distaste. “People get pretty sweaty when they exercise.” A pause, and then, “They don’t shower together, do they?”

“No. We call it “working out,’ and it’s a big way for people to meet each other,” she smiled.

“You can keep it,” Bart said.

The front door of the apartment where the party was being held opened onto a bedroom. People casually tossed their coats on the bed, picked up a drink and walked to the large living room at the back of the railroad flat, where food was spread out buffet style.

When they reached the back room, Muriel sang out, “Oh there’s Tom. Doesn’t he look like Ross Alexander?”

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“A movie star,” Bart whispered.

“He either killed himself or is going to, I forget exactly when it happened,” Joyce answered. “Ross Alexander, that is. My grandmother always thought he was handsome.”

Muriel was acting like anything but somebody’s grandmother, having draped herself all over Tom. She reached into his suit pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, shaking out one for herself and one for their owner.

Tom balanced Muriel on his knee, stuck both cigarettes in his mouth and lit them with one match. He puffed deeply on both and then gave Muriel one.

“Uh. Murals,” she said. “Don’t you have any Luckys?”

Tom patted his pockets and shrugged. He had small, beady eyes but thick, wavy hair with a tight curl that fell onto his forehead.

His hair and sideburns had been trimmed so evenly it looked like they had been painted on.

“He got a singe job,” Bart said. “It’s the latest thing. The barber takes a stick with electric current running through it and burns the hair off.”

“That must hurt,” Joyce winced.

“Not really, but it smells bad. No amount of pomade can cover the smell of burning hair when you first get a singe,” he said.

Muriel and Tom were locked in an embrace, and most of the people that had been standing near them had drifted away, bored.

“This is too weird,” Joyce said, turning away herself.

“Is he your grandpa?” Bart asked. “I mean, I went to school with him…”

“No. For all her carrying on, she’s going back to Maine and marrying a hard-working guy with dirt under his finger nails.” She grabbed Bart’s arm and they floated over to another clique.

“I got this at Jane Engel on Madison Avenue,” a tall, ravishing 127

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redhead in the center of the circle was saying. She wore a long, pleated skirt of royal blue jersey, and a blue and white striped top with a scalloped neck and a tucked bodice.

“I only paid $24.95,” she said, while her friends ooh-ed and ahhed at her good taste.

“Some things never change,” Joyce laughed. “Actually, that is a good color on her; and horizontal stripes are a good idea.”

“Meow,” said Bart.

A young man with his sweater tied around his waist and an air of bored nonchalance was describing his new apartment to a petite, doe-eyed brunette he was obviously trying to lure there.

“What do you bet he has etchings to show her?” Joyce laughed. “Why are men so obvious about these things?”

“Because you make it so difficult for us. You just stand there and let us make complete fools of ourselves,” he answered.

“For example,” he pressed on with a sharp intake of breath, “I live alone in the Beverly Hotel. It’s a nice, respectable place on East 50th. I have a terrace and a serving pantry, and room service is available.

“I don’t have any etchings, but I’ve got quite a collection of sheet music, especially jazz, for the saxophone and clarinet,” he finished in a rush.

“Why are you telling me this?” Joyce smiled, amused. “Are you asking me to come up sometime?”

“Only if you’d like to,” Bart replied, copying the studied nonchalance of the other man.

“Sure; when I know you better,” she replied, putting a hand lightly on his arm. “We’d call a guy like that a “preppie” because he either went to prep school or wished he did….”

“I’ve got three bedrooms, two of them face south, and a park view,” the bored man was saying. “There’s a working fireplace in 128

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the library and a landscaped garden on the roof. I keep my telescope up there.

“A clear night like this is perfect for stargazing,” he said. He looked at his watch with dramatic emphasis. If this prey did not nibble soon, he would cast his line somewhere else.

“Where is your place?” the girl said with a little pout. She bit her lower lip, and looked around the room for her friends’

support.

“Park Avenue near 79th Street,” he said diffidently. “Place costs me $8,000 a year, but it’s worth it. Terrazzo and marble floors…”

“Whoa,” Joyce whispered to Bart. “Got any money to invest?

You couldn’t rent a place like that for $8,000 a month 68 years from now.

“If you could buy a place like that, you’d be a wealthy old geezer someday.”

“Thing is, I’m a broke musician today,” Bart said ruefully. “I can barely afford the place I’m in now.”

Bart excused himself to get another beer and a drink for Joyce from the bar.

Moments later, Muriel came up to her, giddy and laughing and pulling some hapless guy behind her by his tie. The man must have been a student, judging by his quiet demeanor, charcoal grey wool pants and yellow cardigan.

“This is my sister,” Muriel said, practically shoving the man toward Joyce. His glasses almost came flying off his nose. “Tell her that stuff you were giving me, what gas!” Muriel whooped.

“His name’s Cliff,” she slurred to Joyce. “He’s studying physics. Doesn’t have anything to do with sex, though,” she said, and then melted back into the crowd.

Joyce looked up at the earnest, bespectacled man who stood before her with his hand extended.

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“Actually, we’ve met a few times before, always in about the same way,” he said. “It’s a little embarrassing. Muriel never remembers who I am but she always thinks I’m a hoot.

“I’m Cliff Collins,” he said, his ears still bright red.

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“Cliff, my God! Am I glad to see you!” Joyce almost shouted in surprise.

“You are?” He pushed his glasses back up his nose with his fingers, and smiled at Joyce shyly. “So you remember me, then, Connie?”

Joyce’s mind raced as she did the math in her head. Cliff must be, what, 22 now? A graduate student. His work on the theory of time travel was years ahead of him.

She looked at him like a gallery browser studies a painting. The earnest, open face was almost exactly the same, just missing the lines that life’s experience would etch.

Cliff had much more hair than he did the last time Joyce saw him, but it was still unruly—as if with so much going on inside his head, he didn’t want to spend the time fussing with the exterior.

The jug ears, “barn doors,” he called them, still provided convenient hooks for the glasses perched on his nose. Cliff once joked to her that he was born wearing glasses; Joyce guessed this would not be the right moment to remind him of that.

Cliff shuffled his feet and wiped the condensation from his glass with his napkin. “Do you know why this moisture forms?

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Oh, listen to me! Why would a beautiful girl care about something like that.

“I’m really pleased you remembered me. You never give any sign, every time we meet at one of these things Muriel introduces us again.

“Have you thought about what I asked you last time?” Cliff suddenly asked her.

Joyce played with the coil of hair at the back of her head and did her best imitation of coy. “Sure. But you better ask me again,”

she said.

Cliff sat down and reached an arm up for her. Joyce sank down next to him on the sofa, conscious of the smell of Old Spice and the awkward presence of Cliff’s arm as he debated with himself whether to drape it over her shoulders.

He decided against it. “There’s a dinner dance sponsored by the Pan Hellenic Council, the fraternities, in July, at the Waldorf.

You said you’d think about going with me, Connie.”

Joyce glanced into the youthful face of the man she knew as an unofficial uncle. They were nearly the same age now, and from the look in his eyes he had a mad crush on her.

Cliff’s eyes were partly closed and he wore a kind of puppy-dog expression, like he felt he was lucky to even be in her presence.

This is no good, Joyce thought. If he tries to kiss me, I’m not going to be able to handle it. But if I have traveled back in time and now I’m interacting with him, how come he didn’t remember that when I visited him before I left for New York?

He’s taken me for Connie, what would happen if I tried to convince him I am Joyce? she thought. Would it mess up the future somehow?

She felt like Alice in Wonderland. Once, at an electronics show, Joyce had seen a camera pointed directly at a television set.

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The effect was an endless series of television screens, one fitting just inside the other, on into infinity.

Somehow, that reminded her of what she was feeling now. I must have decided not to tell him who I am, she thought grimly, or we both already would know that I did.

She glanced over at Bart, who had squeezed in next to the bar and was having an animated discussion about baseball with several other men and a woman. He waved jauntily at her and Joyce waved back.

“I’m still thinking about it. I’ll get back to you,” she said to Cliff. Although it sounded rude as she said it, her ardent suitor seemed relieved that he hadn’t been turned down outright for a date.

“There is something I want to ask you, though.”

Cliff arranged himself expectantly on the sofa.

Joyce drew in her breath. Even if he hadn’t yet done the studies, Cliff’s mind would already be big enough to embrace the possibility of time travel.

She hoped he’d be able to help her get back to the present.

Joyce giggled involuntarily at a mental image of Cliff building a contraption in his dorm room and sending Joyce home in it.

“Do you think time travel is possible?” she began.

“Sure,” Cliff answered confidently. He took another pull on his drink and waited for what he hoped was a more romantic question.

“How?” Joyce tucked her legs under herself and tried to sound idly curious.

Cliff pushed his glasses back up his nose again and blinked owlishly. “Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, 1905. We’re all moving together through time and space at identical speeds, because we’re all on a large mass, the Earth.”

Joyce nodded.

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“The Earth’s speed is the same for all of us, Einstein’s theory says. So, if you could leave earth, the faster you travel, the slower time will pass for you in relation to everything rooted on Earth and moving at its constant, slower speed.”

“Then why doesn’t it happen in a plane?” Joyce asked. “How come you don’t come back before you left?”

“Well, the theory only postulates that travel to the future is possible, because you are aging at a different rate than the folks left behind on earth. But anyway, an airplane can’t travel fast enough to make any difference,” Cliff said.

Joyce was disappointed. This didn’t seem to cover what happened to her. But she pressed on. “A rocket, then?”

“Sure, someday when rocket travel is possible, we may be able to visit the future like we visit other states now,” Cliff said cheerfully. “Scientists don’t know what happens to man outside Earth’s atmosphere.

“It presents an insurmountable problem, in that the incredible heat on reentering the atmosphere would incinerate everything,”

he said. “But we may someday be able to overcome that.”

The conversation was veering off in another direction, and Joyce wanted to get back to the subject. She knew space travel in rockets was possible, but that astronauts always stayed in their own eras. The answer didn’t lie there.

“How fast would you have to travel to travel through time as well as space?” Joyce asked.

Cliff studied her face to make sure she wasn’t putting him on.

When he realized she wasn’t, he looked at Joyce with new respect.

“Faster than the speed of light, which of course we can’t do yet,” he said. “That of course brings up the biggest problem in achieving time travel: as you approach the speed of light, mass disappears.

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arrived in another time,” Cliff said. “That, at least, is what Einstein’s theory says. The man himself only says getting to the future is theoretically possible, but that the laws of physics would probably prevent it in some other way.”

“Do you think it’s possible?” Joyce asked.

Cliff stood up for that one. He sounded as if he was presenting a research paper to a prestigious conference. “I believe if it is possible at all, one could only reach the future as an essence, a spirit, because his mass would have been lost. He would not be able to interact.”

Joyce thought to herself grimly, Guess again, pal. At least you get to take it all with you to the past. To Cliff she said, “How about traveling to the past? Is that possible?”

“Only in books, so far,” the young man said. “Have you read H.G. Wells? In “The Time Machine” the device works by harnessing the power of the sun to make electricity.

“The juxtaposed fields of energy create friction, and the result is a series of reactions that lifts the machine out of one time sphere and into another, so that you would be in the same place, but a different time,” Cliff related.