Chapter 38

I will admit to being hesitant about agreeing to move in with Dave. It seemed like a much bigger step forward in my life than I had intended on making, but it seemed like the right thing to do, too.

I had been a very independent person for a long time, literally going back to when I went to Venable College for the first time. Cat and I had been partners of a sort, each of us taking the lead from time to time, but I tended to be the instigator and leader the majority of the time. I had more or less been on my own ever since we left Venable, so it was obviously going to be hard for me to learn to be in a partnership again – this time with a sexual component, which had not been present with Cat.

So I think I was right to have some concerns.

In the end we decided to give Tokyo and Mount Fuji a pass, at least this time; it was something we could do in the future. We changed our tickets around so we would go to San Francisco, only making a brief stop in Tokyo. Two days later, we were at San Francisco International, getting Dave’s car out of the long-term parking lot. This proved to be a rather worn-out 1973 Buick Century, and something didn’t seem right.

“I thought you had a better car than this,” I commented as I helped load our luggage from the parking service jitney into the trunk of the Buick.

“Oh, I do,” he said. “You don’t think I’m going to let a decent car sit outside in a public parking lot all the time, do you?”

I had known since our first day together that Dave lived in Sausalito, a town near San Francisco, but I wasn’t familiar enough with the area that it rang a bell with me. So I was surprised when we drove right through the city and out onto the Golden Gate Bridge. I’d been there before – Cat and I had crossed it in the Karmann Ghia long ago, on our trip out west following our sophomore year.

We got off at the first exit north of the bridge, and drove down into what was a small but clearly upscale town, and finally stopped in a parking lot along the shoreline. The docks and bay out in front of the parking lot were filled with houseboats of all descriptions from the staid to the downright outlandish. “Well, we’re here,” he said as he shut off the engine. I may not have known much of anything about San Francisco, but even I had heard about the Sausalito houseboats!

“You live on a houseboat?”

“Not one of the big, pretentious ones,” he smiled. “Just a little one. I’m good with small spaces. Bigger ones are more trouble to keep up.”

Dave’s houseboat wasn’t terribly big. I had been in Joe and Cindy’s mobile home back in the previous fall (and in my other timeline had lived there for almost a decade,) and it had more floor space – but the houseboat was nice in a way that a mobile home could never be. It was cozy and comfortable, and the view out the front window wasn’t another mobile home, but the Golden Gate Bridge with San Francisco on the far side!

I had known from the beginning that Dave wasn’t exactly living solely on his disability checks and had some money all his own, but he wasn’t one to flaunt his wealth or his daily driver wouldn’t have been an elderly Buick. It came on me very slowly that Dave had a little more than “some” money on his own. He was, in fact, pretty well off!

In fact, it was some time before I totally understood how well off Dave really was. It seemed that Dave’s father had had pieces of several local businesses ranging from hamburger chains through an ice company and a car dealership, sometimes minority ownership, sometimes owning the whole business, all mixed in under the cover of a couple of holding companies. The way Dave told the story, both of his parents had died in a car accident not long after his release from the hospital, so the whole works got dumped in his lap while he was still in a wheelchair. At the time it looked as if he would never be out of it.

“One of the co-owners of the businesses saw me as an easy mark,” he explained some time later. “He tried to take it away from me and not leave me a dime, but my father had always thought he was a crooked bastard, and I managed to get a couple of pretty good lawyers. I won’t go into the ins and outs, and it took several years, but we wound up taking it from him instead. Since then I’ve been able to put some of the excess money into places where it would do some good.”

Places like Apple Computers and Hewlett-Packard, for example, as well as several software companies. Not big shares, just profitable ones, but he had several of them.

Dave said he did not have the inclination or the knowledge to actually try to run any of his businesses personally. Even the businesses he owned outright or held majority shares in were actually run by managers of one sort or another, although Dave kept pretty close rein on them. There was some good reason for that – for years he’d spent time in and out of hospitals and physical therapy, which had not given him the time to learn to run the businesses by himself. That meant that these days if he felt like taking off for a few days, he usually could.

I was to find out that he had to spend anywhere from parts of one to four days a week on various businesses, most of them in Marin Country north of the Golden Gate Bridge. Every now and then he’d have to go over to the main part of the city to do business; the traffic and the parking were bad enough that he often took the ferry to the city, rather than drive. Other times he would drive down to San Jose to deal with some of the new computer startups that were becoming common down there. I often went with him on such trips, and for a while people thought I was his secretary. But that came later.

“The problem is that I often don’t have much to do to keep my attention,” he explained. “I have had some things to keep me busy, but sometimes life gets a little dull. Joan, I hope that’s one problem you can help me with.”

It was a little uncomfortable to move in on top of Dave’s clearly settled life, and for a while I felt like something of an intruder, but bit by bit I began to feel at home in his home and in his life.

Our hike up Jade Mountain had been his biggest effort on his legs since the accident, and the aftereffects were still giving him problems days after we returned. He couldn’t have managed it at all if his legs were not now in the best shape he could ever expect them to be. Dave may not have been able to walk very well but that didn’t keep him from doing things, especially if he didn’t have to use his legs much.

For instance, I had never given any thought to sea kayaking, but there was a sea kayak sitting on the broad deck of the houseboat. Dave borrowed another one from a nearby floating neighbor and took me out into the bay in front of Sausalito, and I soon got the hang of it. Before long, there was a second sea kayak sitting next to his, and while the weather remained nice we often were out in them. I had always been strong for a woman my size – it came with the climbing – but in upper body strength Dave was at least my equal and then some. Being in the kayaks put us on a level with each other, and I soon became pretty good at it.

It turned out he did have some other cars, and some nice ones, including a blue Corvette with a timing slip from the Southern California Timing Association that said it had gone over 240 miles an hour. It wasn’t exactly street legal, but several other cars that Dave had parked in the warehouse behind one of his businesses were. The place looked like a nondescript building on the outside, but it was nicely fitted out inside, and we often spent time there messing around with his cars, taking me back to when I had done the same thing with Dad. Well, mostly it was when I was Joe or the old Joanie, but I had done some of it, too, and those times were among the best I remembered from my Simsville days.

I often wondered why Dave didn’t have a whole string of women on the line. In San Francisco, of course, it is not surprising to see men who are not particularly interested in women, so to speak, but Dave had already proved to me that he was not one of them. He was pretty good looking for a guy his age, and while he was not ostentatious it was clear that he had money. Granted, he was physically challenged to some degree but that shouldn’t have made much difference.

My own theory, which only evolved over time, was that he felt intimidated by a lot of women. His physical difficulties were part of that, of course, but I also got the feeling that he felt himself held back by the fact that he had been in Vietnam when he was hurt. That really shouldn’t have mattered, but he was living in a pretty liberal part of the country, and there were still a lot of residual attitudes from the anti-war days so he felt he was resented by a lot of the people he was in contact with as a result. He couldn’t cover up his physical difficulties, for example, and when people found out why he was walking with canes, they often wanted little to do with him. If he’d been similarly injured in a car wreck, things probably would have been a little different.

I honestly think it was more his problem than it was anyone else’s – he was simply somewhat paranoid about it, and therefore was rather shy, with the shyness made worse by the fact that he didn’t have any living close relatives to support him. I just happened to be the one lucky enough to break through it, since I not only knew the truth but also had been through it with him.

That sort of paranoia was not uncommon among Vietnam veterans at the time. Many were reluctant to admit they had been in-country. I even avoided the topic when I could, mostly because I had seen too many bad reactions. If cornered about it, I would admit to having been there as a Red Cross worker, which was the truth if not all of it, and people even hassled me over that years after the war was over. So I realized that Dave had a valid reason to be reticent about it.

But I digress. The simple fact of the matter is that Dave and I had something in our past that we shared in a way nobody else on Earth could, something that we didn’t have to hide from each other.

As it turned out, I had only been living with him for a couple of weeks before I was sure that I didn’t want to go back to teaching school in some far-off country. I had gotten past that period of my life, and I was just as happy. One day toward the middle of August I called up Jonas Logan at American Schools Worldwide.

“Joan!” he said as soon as he heard my voice. “I’ve been wondering when I would hear from you! I’ve got a new assignment for you.”

“Sorry, Jonas,” I told him. “I won’t be taking it, but out of curiosity, what is it?”

“Asunción, Paraguay. You’d do well there, what with your skills in Spanish. We’ve been looking forward to having you back.”

“It’s not as good as La Paz, but I won’t be going anyway. Jonas, I don’t know for sure yet, but I suspect I’m done with international teaching.”

“Wow, I never expected that.”

“I found a guy, Jonas, a good one. We haven’t done anything permanent yet, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it happens.”

“We’re going to be sorry to lose you, but sometimes it has to happen. I suppose he’s not a teacher?”

“No, he’s a businessman in the San Francisco area. Look, I hope I’m not leaving you hanging on this, Jonas.”

“It’s nothing I can’t solve. Good luck to you, Joan, and if you ever want to come back to us there’ll be room for you. Kinshasa on short notice maybe, but room nevertheless.”

“I hope I don’t have to come back. Jonas, I think I’m tired of being a wanderer, and I think the time has come to settle down.”

“It happens to most of us, Joan. Be nice to your guy and drop in to see me if you’re ever in DC.”

I hadn’t exactly burned the bridge behind me, but it was definitely on fire. Even if this didn’t work out with Dave I didn’t think I wanted to go back to that life.

Dave and I had a good time for the next several months. We began to fit together even closer, and I think it safe to say that we were both comfortable with it. A couple of months after returning from the Far East we flew to Simsville, mostly to pack up some of my belongings so I could move them to Sausalito. I had never been one to own a lot of things, and all my possessions from over the years were easily packed in a few boxes for shipment.

My folks were delighted with Dave, and I don’t think it was because they had been despairing that I would ever get seriously involved with a guy – I think they just wanted to have a permanent address and phone number for me. Dave liked them, too – after all, he’d never had much family of his own, and he’d lost what he’d had in the accident after he got out of the hospital.

Dad was over sixty now, and slowing down a bit, although still working; I doubted if he’d ever be happy if he weren’t doing something, even if it was fixing some little something at a neighbor’s for the sake of doing it. They were talking about trying a couple of months in Florida for the winter, so that told me they were indeed getting older.

Dave and I spent much of the next year just learning how to live with each other. He couldn’t do rock climbing, of course, but he had no objections to sitting back on the ground and watching me do it. I managed to find a couple of climbers living nearby to partner with occasionally, and there were some nearby places we could go and get some exercise for the afternoon.

Alpine climbing was a little different story, although we had to wait until the following spring to work out the details. Dave could do some of it, if well selected and planned and if we took it easy; Jade Mountain had pushed his limits about as far as we dared to go with them, but there were easier climbs within reach and we learned to enjoy them together.

But there were other things he could do where his legs didn’t matter that much. My old dude-ranching friend Norm in Colorado was still running pack trips into the mountains, and we decided to give it a try. Dave had never been on a horse, and it took a little while for him to adapt to it. There’s more involved with your legs in staying in the saddle than it appears to someone who hasn’t done it, but he soon figured it out. That helped get Dave up in the high country – sometimes close enough to a peak that we could do the rest of the way together on foot.

Getting together with Dave had restored the balance between Cat and me; I had felt like the odd person out, being single and moving all the time. After school was out the following spring, they came out to join us in California for a couple of weeks. Dave and Steve hit it off right from the beginning, and I suppose being Vietnam vets had something to do with it. We even went camping up in the Sierras for a few days; while Steve and Dave sat in the campground watching the kids and talking cars, Cat and I took on a few mountains and found out that she hadn’t lost much of her love for mountains and her skills. It was nice to have that friendship restored, even though there was still a continent between us; another piece of my puzzle was back in place.

One night not long after Cat and Steve headed back to North Carolina, Dave and I were out on the bay in front of the houseboat in our kayaks, just sitting there silently, looking at the lights of San Francisco across the bay. “Joan,” he said, more or less out of nowhere, “there’s something I’d like to say, and I don’t know how to say it.”

“Go ahead and say it, Dave. You’re not going to embarrass me. I love you too much.”

“All right, I will. There are two parts to it, I think. It was just about a year ago when you dropped into my life so unexpectedly on that plane to Taipei. Joan, we haven’t spent very much time apart since then, and I’ve enjoyed every minute of the time we’ve been together. Having you in my life has made it so very much richer than it was before I don’t know how I was able to put up with it before you came along.”

“I feel the same way, Dave,” I replied, wondering where this was going. “I didn’t know what I was missing, but I’m just glad I found it.”

“Joan, spending time with Steve and Cat and their kids has gotten me to thinking that I’m missing something. I don’t have it on my bucket list, but it’s always been there in my gut, even if I didn’t realize it, and it’s been especially true since I lost my family. I know we haven’t talked much about having kids because I know you’re lukewarm about the idea at best. But I think I would like to be a father. I mean, I think now it’s what I need to make my life complete.”

Wow, I didn’t see that one coming at all.

I had never seriously thought about having kids. Oh, I’d considered it intellectually, but only in theory. I had now been Joan for many years, and the Joe part of my memory had faded considerably since I had been in college. Back then, I still think I was more Joe than Joan, and his life of experiences had a strong effect on me. But in the over a decade since college I think I had become Joan, and I didn’t think I was Joe under the skin of a woman any longer.

Back in college days, and even when Cat was having her children, the thought of being pregnant seemed pretty weird to me mostly because of the Joe still in me. It isn’t something a man has to consider, after all. Now, Dave had brought that conundrum into a new light and I wasn’t sure I was as opposed to it as I had been before.

“I don’t know how I feel about it, Dave,” I said after a possibly too-long period of kicking it around in my mind. “I hadn’t even considered the idea until just now. I spent so much of my life living on my own where having a child would have been inconvenient at best. It certainly would have not been good for the child to have a single mother who spent as much time traveling and living in not very nice places. I would have had to give that up, and until you came along I had no desire to do it, but maybe that doesn’t apply any longer. I’d have to think about it, Dave, and I can’t give you a straight answer without careful consideration.”

“I didn’t think you were going to jump right in and say ‘Yes, let’s have a baby,’” he laughed. “I think I know you well enough to understand why you’d want to be careful about making a decision like that.”

There’s a part of me that you will never know at all, I thought, and you wouldn’t believe me if I told you. But then, I reflected that I wasn’t sure I still believed it myself. Was Joe just a hallucination, a weird piece of schizophrenia hidden in my mind? After all, it had been a long time ago, now . . . but I could still reach into my Joe memories and pull them up, like the days of being a father when Cindy and I had had much the same discussion, under far different circumstances, of course. Anita was still just a little kid in this timeline – we had seen her when we had been in Simsville the previous fall – but in Joe’s timeline she was now a mother with a kid older than she was in this timeline. It seemed strange to think of myself, Joan, as being a grandfather, but there it was. I was used to such conundrums, but it still seemed awkward at best.

I shook off the weirdness and replied. “Dave, there’s more to it than that. I’m not a young kid just out of college anymore. I’m getting old enough to where if I’m going to do it I will have to do it soon, or there won’t be any doing it at all. Back when Cat was having her children I was not exactly crazy about it, since I could see that having a child would limit my freedom to do the things I wanted to do. I thought at the time if I was going to have children at all, I should wait until I’d exercised my freedom and my adulthood a little. Now, while there are still things I want to do, I’ve done a lot of them, and for the ones left, maybe children wouldn’t be the obstacle that they were with Cat, when they were first married and pinching every penny. They had it rough there for a while, and at times Cat was pretty jealous of me and my freedom.”

“That’s not a problem we would have,” he laughed, then went on. “Look, while I would like to be a father, I think a kid ought to be brought up in a family if at all possible. I’ve missed having my family, and while your folks fill in some, it isn’t the same with them so far away. Look, this is leading away from where I wanted it to go. Joan, I think the time has come to move past us just living together, and children or no children are beside the point. While I would like to have a child with you, I think I have to leave the rest of that decision up to you. But Joan, I think that whatever happens, it’s time for us to get married.”

“Dave, are you asking me, or is this just a point for discussion?”

“I’m asking you. Joan, will you marry me?”

“Dave,” I laughed. “You picked the damnedest time to ask me that. We’re sitting here in the kayaks so I can’t reach out and kiss you without rolling over. But yes, Dave. I’ll marry you.”