Variation on a Theme, Book 6
Copyright© 2024 by Grey Wolf
Chapter 139: Not Quite Endings
Wednesday, May 14, 1986
CBS gave us our lodging and flight information. With that set, I called the Grand Hyatt and made a reservation for the 12th through the 18th using the booking code for the Amnesty VIP block. Not that most people in that block were going to be there for that many days — the artists were performing somewhere else on the 13th, after all — but this was the last show and some of them might take a day or two before flying home. They would certainly be there on the 14th and 15th.
We added two more rooms, currently booked for the 13th through the 16th. Cammie, Mel, Laura, and Jess were all flying in on Friday and out on Monday. That would leave them missing two days of summer school each. None of them felt like it would be a big deal, and they wanted to have a free Saturday in New York.
Hopefully, we could get tickets to a show on Saturday with the whole group. It amused me enormously that I might again see a Broadway-type show with Laura — and before I had ever seen one with her, too!
Yes, I said that out loud. Yes, several girls whapped me.
And, yes, it was totally worth it!
After that set of phone calls, I got both American Express and Sue Ann Hollister working on airplane tickets for Cammie and Mel. They could make their own reservations, of course, but I had two travel agencies ready to help.
I also had American Express working on theater tickets. Our top picks were ‘Cats’, ‘La Cage Aux Folles’, and ‘Singin’ in the Rain’. We might see all three of them. ‘Cats’ was a top pick largely because of Cammie, Mel, Jess, and Laura. Only Laura had seen it before, and that had been in the early 1990s. None of us had seen any of the others on stage, with the exception that I’d seen a high school theater production of ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ somewhere around 2010, more or less. It wasn’t at my kids’ high school, and I doubted the school it had been at even existed yet.
With ‘Cats’ as the favorite, it was the one we wanted on Saturday, the 14th, if we could get it. We would be just as happy with a matinee as with an evening show. Maybe happier, since we had to get up fairly early on the 15th to get over to Giants Stadium. But, if we could only get one of the others, those were fine, too.
Jess was handling getting plane tickets for her and Laura, likely with help from Sue Ann. She’d done a great job for me with both ‘Back to the Future’ and the England trip, and I imagined she would do a great job for Jess as well.
I called Laura, then Jess, in the evening and let them know I’d booked a room that they could transfer to either name as needed. Both of them appreciated it.
Amusingly, Laura herself made the same comment I had. It would be the first show we’d seen together (not counting our alternate selves), and it would be long before either of us had met those alternate selves.
Hilarious! It felt like we were finally at the point in our relationship where this could just be fun, with no real overtones of suspicion on Laura’s part nor defensiveness on mine. Nearly three years had healed Laura’s wounds.
Probably a few of mine, too, though I would never have considered mine to be nearly as significant. Asshole Steve had devastated Laura, after all. ‘My’ Laura had, at worst, never made her feelings clear to poor, clueless first-life Steve. After all, Jas, Angie, and Paige were all convinced she had had those feelings.
But, then, perhaps she’d done me a favor. Had she confessed her feelings to me, I might never have wound up with my ex-wife. And, without that doomed relationship, could I have wound up in this amazing life?
All is for the best, after all. Isn’t it?
Thursday, May 15, 1986
Finals had nearly wound down by this morning. Yesterday had been busy, but my last final was Statistical Methods, and it was over by noon. It hadn’t been an easy one. In fact, it might have been the toughest final I’d had so far at A&M. Even at that, I was still confident that I had an A in the class. We were just that good (and prepared).
With that, another semester was in the books. Two years done, two to go.
Or more, of course. Angie was going to be ‘Dr. Angie,’ I was pretty much certain. I would likely get an MBA, but it might not be right away. Paige would probably also get one, if only to sort-of keep up with Angie. Jas seemed likely to stop with her undergraduate degree, but I was hardly certain of that. She might develop a passion for something and charge off into it. Considering that, under three years ago, the idea of Angie being ‘Dr. Angie’ or getting a math degree would have sounded, respectively, unlikely and absurd, I would hardly be surprised if anyone’s plans took an abrupt detour.
Heck, three years ago most people (including Michael himself) would have assumed that Michael Dell was heading off into some sort of medical career. Even then, there were some warning signs, but that’s what he’d set off to do.
I was fairly certain Cammie, Mel, Amy, and Darla were going to stay the course on their respective pursuits, but that didn’t tell me where they would top out.
Marshall, Lizzie, and Janet were all firmly on the path to law degrees. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see Sue join them. Gene, too. Amit would surprise me if he didn’t wind up getting a medical degree, even though he himself hadn’t talked about it much. Connie would shock me if she didn’t get one.
Jimmy? Sheila? I really didn’t know. We’d stayed in touch, but I had little idea of what their academic intentions were at this point. Both of them were in the ‘wind beneath my wings’ role in their relationships (as was Gene), but that shouldn’t stop them from doing great things themselves.
Cal and Andy were plugging along in their chosen majors. I had a feeling both of them might wind up with graduate degrees when it was all over, but I wasn’t going to be surprised if they (and Marshall) played on Sundays for at least a few years first. That would make them ‘celebrities’ of a sort, as well, but would likely derail any additional schooling during that time.
A degree was likely irrelevant for Jess, who seemed increasingly likely to be a bona fide celebrity in her own right. She would get one, I felt certain, but it probably would never define her.
Laura was going to get her doctorate in computer science. That was obvious to everyone. I fully expected her to use her time in graduate school to develop her research (without somehow letting her university get hold of the patents on it!) and build a team to commercialize it. The hints she was dropping still had me believing it wasn’t going to be commercially viable until at least the mid-1990s, but she might have a patent portfolio established before that — one that would prevent anyone else from getting there before her.
That timing might work well. I was hoping ‘Marshall Investments’ (or whatever name it turned out to have) could be her venture capital firm. By that point, we would have more than a decade of trust built up, and there wasn’t much I could do to ‘steal’ her idea if she held the patents and most of the shares, anyway. At the very worst, I would be the devil she knew quite well. Any other VC firm would be a devil she didn’t know.
A fair bit of this could have been predicted years ago. Not all of it. Marshall as a lawyer was a relatively recent development, as was Angie as a serious mathematician. Cammie’s interest in real estate had been unknown to me until we started college, but it probably had always been there. Some of the others were still potentially going to be surprises. And, of course, Amy hadn’t been in my life at all, and I hadn’t known Darla nearly as well.
Still, one side effect was that I — or, rather, all of us in the inner circle — were going to have friends all over the place. Friends in a position to make a difference in their fields of interest. I might blame the meddlesome universe, but many of these people were who they were in their first lives. They might be ‘better’ — in quite a few cases, they clearly were — but they were still on relatively similar paths.
Others, I didn’t know. Was there a Marshall Briggs in my first life? A Chau Ng? I had never known them, so I couldn’t tell. Had they existed but ‘underachieved?’ It was certainly possible.
And what of Calvin Bryant? Would this version play in the NBA? Would Megan Early perhaps play in the Olympics, there being no WNBA yet?
So many changes, and so much potential. If we were truly going to make the world a better place, as we fully intended, we would have a great supporting cast along the way.
Angie and Anne got a second round of questions from CBS. No one else did. Angie promised to get them done quickly and fax them back before we left town.
Hers dug even more into what it felt like to be so ‘out.’ What was it like to have a leadership role, to have been on TV, in the papers, and so forth? Much of that also applied to Paige, but Angie was the leader, pretty much. Thanks to GSS, she had a credential proving it.
For Anne, some of the questions were about what she might do next if PROMISE actually achieved its goal. That seemed clear to me, but I wanted to hear what she said. As far as I knew, it would likely involve broadening PROMISE to all extracurriculars and getting rid of policies that treated gay kids differently from straight ones.
For instance, at many schools — Memorial included — public displays of affection were banned for everyone, in theory, but most were overlooked as long as they were ‘toned down.’ The difference was that some schools considered it impossible for gay kids to ‘tone down’ displays of affection. At those schools, a quick peck on the lips would be fine for straight couples but a disciplinary infraction for gay couples. That was a fight Anne could take on and win.
Would she go beyond that? Enter the legal fray? There was a clear place to do so. Many states’ ‘Romeo and Juliet’ laws only covered straight couples, while homosexual activity was against the law for anyone underage, regardless of age difference. Putting it another way, my making love to Mel back in 1981 was perfectly legal. Cammie and Mel? Even without the sodomy law, that would have been a felony.
Absurd, and something to take on. It wasn’t where Anne had been, but nothing said she wouldn’t head there in the future.
I changed into dating attire and headed over to Amy’s around six. She was still working today, and would head out of town tomorrow. We had no movie plan tonight. It was dinner, sex, and snuggling.
Tonight’s date was at The Grapevine. It felt appropriate. We had started here many months ago, after all, and — if nothing else — it pointed out how far we’d come.
With Amy, there was no ambiguity about the summer. She would be here, and we would undoubtedly get together a time or two — or more — over the summer. I would have plenty of gaps in our schedule in which to head up to College Station, hang out, and date.
There was, apparently, ambiguity about our status, even now. I found that fairly early in our dinner. She said, “So ... just ... to make things clear. Again. We are dating, and we will remain dating unless we break up. At least, that is very much my preference.”
“Absolutely! That’s very much my preference, too.”
She beamed at that, getting up and coming over to give me a kiss.
“Saying that makes me very happy,” she said, then gave me another kiss, after which she sat back down.
“It makes me happy, too. I love you, and I’m very happy we’re together.”
“I love you, too,” she said. “That still feels ... unexpected. Good, but ... it is very much a new thing. I love my parents, and I love Cindy, but neither of those is the same.”
I noted, but didn’t comment on, the present tense for Cindy. It was perfectly reasonable, I thought. I loved my kids, who were — in one sense — not even born yet. And I loved my ex-wife, who — in the same sense — would not have had the slightest clue who I was. If their future versions existed, they were forever inaccessible to me.
Cindy was very much the same. If she was indeed fine, she was nonetheless beyond our knowledge. Why not say you still loved her, not merely had loved her in the past? I might well say the same about Professor Berman and Grandmother, and I definitely might say the same about Mom and Dad when they were no longer with us. And, God forbid, Jas, Angie, Paige, and Jess.
And perhaps Amy, for that matter.
Instead, I said, “I think loving people is also a skill. It’s something most people learn how to do, but a lot of them don’t do it well the first time. You may well be an exception, because it’s another thing that doesn’t come naturally to you, and you tend to learn how to do things before doing them, plus adapt on the fly.”
She chuckled and said, “That last part saved it. Because ... I was pretty bad at teasing and innuendo at first, notwithstanding that I’d practiced them some. But I adapted on the fly, partly thanks to a good practice partner.”
“Happy to help!” I said, smiling.
“I will explain some of this to my parents, if that is fine. They will undoubtedly hope to meet you. I do not know what they will think, when they do. They will not understand you much more than they understand me, but they will think they understand you, at least somewhat. And you are good with all sorts of people. I ... am not pressuring you to meet them. Merely ... it seems likely to be something they will want.”
“Please share what you want to share. I would be happy to meet them at some point. We certainly get up to the Dallas area occasionally. It wouldn’t be hard to make something happen.”
She smiled widely.
“They — well, my mother, in particular — see how I’ve changed. Both in person and now when we speak on the phone. I can tell that it makes her happy, even though she does not understand what it means. She thinks I am more ... conventional ... rather than merely being better at appearing to be conventional. But it’s not just that. I can tell them about leading my project group, and they know I couldn’t have done that last semester. Dad understands leadership. I think he assumed I would be what you said — an engineer who does her work well, but quietly, and contributes that way. He is a leader at what he does, and he wants that for me, but he had no idea of how to teach me to be a leader. I’m not sure you did, either, but you opened up the possibility for me. Which means, perhaps, he and you did teach me, implicitly.”
“We’re all still learning. I think my dad taught me how to be a leader, too, but quietly. Implicitly, like you said. For most of high school, I wasn’t consciously trying to be a leader. Half of the time, I was trying not to be one and turning out to be one, anyway. I’ll be better at it in the future than I am now. So will you, if you keep doing it.”
She chuckled just a bit and nodded.
“I plan to! It was wonderfully fulfilling. I have not felt responsible for anyone since Cindy, and ... maybe I felt as if I had failed in that, even though I hadn’t. Before you say it, I know the idea is ridiculous, but ... it was there, at least.”
I nodded and said, “Now, at least, you know you can do well with responsibility.”
“I am looking forward to doing more of it, most definitely.”
“And we will be looking forward to hearing about how it all goes.”
She grinned a bit and said, “I still insist that I am the lucky one. We can both be, certainly. And ... I understand your logic about how the man is always the lucky one, but I will counter by saying I am unusual and defy the usual logic. Thus, we both win.”
I chuckled and nodded.
“That last part is definitely true. We both win.”
“And I also win in the short term,” she said, chuckling. “I would never have been able to attend summer classes without you welcoming me to your house. I think Cammie and Mel deserve most of the thanks, but all of you do. It is very special.”
“We have the room, and we’re more than happy to share it with someone who fits in. Obviously, you fit in the most with me and Jas...”
She grinned at that.
“But fitting in with us nearly guarantees you’ll also fit in with the others. We really have yet to find someone who some of us really like but others don’t much like at all. You have to practically go back to Angie’s freshman-year boyfriend to get something like that.”
“I have heard that story,” she said. “Angie herself explains it well. He had potential, apparently, but ... there was no way to develop it.”
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