"Oh, honey," she whispered, moving closer to him, "I don’t mean to be a scold. It’s just that this has got me so worried for you, I can’t—"
"Hush," he said, holding her face in both his hands. "There’s nothing to worry about, I promise."
"But you don’t know—"
He quieted her with a kiss that lasted until a woman’s harsh voice interrupted them, calling, "Curfew in five minutes!"
Girls hurried past them as he walked her to the brightly lit front door of the dorm. "So," he said, "do you want to go car-shopping with me tomorrow?"
"Oh, Jeff." She sighed. "I’ve got a term paper to finish tomorrow afternoon, but if you come by around seven I’ll buy you a burger at Dooley’s. And don’t get too depressed when you lose; at least it’ll be a good lesson."
"Yes, ma’am." He grinned. "I’ll be sure and take notes."
A red-jacketed valet parked the Jaguar for them at the Coach and Six. Jeff slipped the wine steward a twenty, and nobody asked for Judy’s ID when he ordered them a magnum of Moët et Chandon.
"To Chateaugay," Jeff toasted when the champagne was poured.
Judy hesitated, holding her glass in midair. "I’d rather just drink to tonight," she said.
They clinked glasses, sipped the wine. Judy looked wonderful tonight, in a dark blue low-cut gown she’d bought for the spring formaclass="underline" halfway between a girl playing dress-up and a vibrantly sexy woman. He had been too quick to dismiss her before, had been seeking a woman whose experience would match his own. But of course that was an impossible goal. Now he basked with delight in the warm honesty of her ingenuousness, so different from Sharla’s cheap eroticism or Diane’s cold, sophisticated manner. Such innocence deserved to be nurtured, not denied.
The fare at the Coach and Six was standard upscale American, nothing adventurous on the menu, but Judy seemed impressed, was obviously taking pains to stay on her best adult behavior. Jeff ordered lobster for her, prime rib for himself. She watched to see which forks he used for the salad and the appetizer, and he loved her for her open artlessness.
After dinner, over Drambuie, Jeff handed her the little blue Claude S. Bennett jeweler’s box. She opened it, and stared at the perfect two-carat diamond ring for several moments before she started to cry.
"I can’t," she murmured, closing the box carefully and setting it down on his side of the table. "I just can’t."
"I thought you said you loved me."
"I do," she said. "Oh, damn, damn, damn."
"Then what’s wrong? We could wait a year or two if you think we’re too young, but I’d like to make our plans official right now."
She dried her eyes with a napkin, smearing what little makeup she wore. Jeff wanted to kiss the streaks away, wanted to bathe her with his mouth as a cat would a kitten.
"Paula says you haven’t been to class in weeks," she told him. "She says you might even flunk out."
Jeff beamed, took her hand. "Is that all? Honey, it doesn’t matter. I’m quitting school anyway. I just won seventeen thousand dollars, and by October I can make … Look, it’s nothing to be concerned about. We’ll have plenty of money; I’ll always see to that."
"How?" she asked bitterly. "Gambling? Is that how we’d live?"
"Investments," he told her. "Perfectly legitimate business investments, in big companies like IBM and Xerox and—"
"Be realistic, Jeff. You got real lucky on one horse race, and now all of a sudden you think you can strike it rich in the stock market. Well, what if the stocks go down? What if there’s a depression or something?"
"There won’t be," he said quietly.
"You don’t know that. My daddy says—"
"I don’t care what your daddy says. There isn’t going to be any—"
She set her napkin down, pushed her chair back from the table. "Well, I do care what my parents say. And I hate to even think how they’d react if I told them I was getting married to an eighteen-year-old boy who’s dropped out of school to be a gambler."
Jeff could think of nothing to say. She was right, of course. He must seem an irresponsible fool to her. It had been a terrible mistake to tell her what he was doing.
He slipped the ring back in his jacket pocket. "I’ll hold on to this for now," he said. "And maybe I’ll reconsider about school."
Her eyes went moist again, their vivid blue shimmering through the layer of tears. "Please do, Jeff. I don’t want to lose you, not because of some craziness like this."
He squeezed her hand. "You’ll wear that ring someday," he said. "You’ll be proud of it, and proud of me."
They were married at the First Baptist Church in Rockwood, Tennessee in June of 1968, the week after Jeff received his M.B.A. Just four days before the date he’d met Linda—twice, with such drastically different outcomes—in those other lives. Rockwood was Judy’s hometown, and the reception her parents threw afterward was a big, informal barbecue at their summer place on nearby Watts Bar Lake. Jeff noticed that his father’s cough was getting worse, but still he wouldn’t listen to his son’s entreaties that he stop chain-smoking Pall Malls. He wouldn’t quit until the emphysema was diagnosed, years from now. Jeff’s mother was happier than she’d been at his weddings to Linda and Diane, though of course she had no memory of either occasion. His sister, a shy fifteen-year-old with braces on her teeth, had taken to Judy right away.
The Gordon family, likewise, had welcomed Jeff into the fold wholeheartedly. He had transformed himself into the very image of a perfect catch: twenty-three, good education, industrious, responsible. A nice little nest egg already set aside and a conservative but steadily building portfolio of stocks in his and Judy’s names.
It hadn’t been easy. The five years of school were tough enough, forcing himself back into the long-abandoned regimen of studies and term papers and exams; but the hardest part had been contriving not to get rich. The last time he’d been this age he’d been a financial wunderkind, the major partner in a powerful conglomerate. Such a sudden infusion of massive wealth would have thrown Judy off balance, would have created significant problems between them. So he’d passed up the Belmont and World Series bets entirely, and had painstakingly avoided the many high-yield investments with which he could easily have made another multimillion-dollar fortune.
He and Frank Maddock had drifted apart soon after the Kentucky Derby this time. His unknowing one-time partner at the pinnacle of corporate success had finished Columbia Law School and was now a junior attorney with a firm in Pittsburgh.
Jeff and Judy assumed the mortgage on a pleasant little fake-colonial house on Cheshire Bridge Road in Atlanta, and Jeff rented a four-room office in a building near Five Points that he’d once owned. Five days a week he put on a suit and tie, drove downtown, bid his secretary and associates good morning, locked himself in his office, and read. Sophocles, Shakespeare, Proust, Faulkner … all the works he’d meant to absorb before but had never had the time to read.
At the end of the day he’d dash off a few memos to his partners, recommending perhaps that they not risk investing in an unproven company like Sony, but should keep their gradually growing principal in something safe, such as AT&T. Jeff steered the small company carefully away from any sources of sudden wealth, made sure he and his associates remained comfortably but unspectacularly entrenched in the upper middle class. His partners frequently followed his advice; when they didn’t, the losses tended to balance out the gains, so the net effect remained as Jeff intended.