The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story (11 page)

Her cat clearly enjoyed the song, but it was too intimate a moment for me to be standing there unseen, so I spoke as if I had just arrived.

"How are your flowers doing?"

She whirled about, hose in hand, eyes blue-saucer fright that she wasn't alone in her private garden. The nozzle of the hose was pointed chest-high, but it was set to drench a cone several feet in diameter, from my mouth to my belt. Neither of us said a word, neither moved while the hose poured water into me as though I were a tall fire escaped.

She was stricken with fright, first from my sudden words, then from what the water was doing to my coat and shirt. I stood without moving, because I thought it unseemly to

scream and run, because I hoped that before long she might decide to turn the hose in some other direction than point-blank on my city-clothes.

As well she held a sandblaster, the scene is so clearly etched today ... the sunlight, the garden around us, her eyes enormous astonishment at this polar bear broken into her flower-patch, a hose her only defense. If you water a polar bear long enough, she must have been thinking, it will turn and dash away.

I didn't feel like a polar bear, except for the ice-water spraying over me, soaking in. I saw her horror, finally, at what she was doing to what was not a polar bear but a business-partner friend and guest in her home. Though she was still frozen aghast, she gained control of her hose-hand and slowly turned the water away.

"Leslie!" I said into a dripping silence, "it was only me. . . ."

Then she was crying with laughter, her eyes helpless merry blurred shock, imploring forgiveness. She fell laughing, sobbing, against my coat, which squished water from the pockets.

fifteen

"JILL CALLED today from Florida," said Leslie, moving her chesspeople to their places for another game. "Is she jealous?"

"Not possible," I said. "Jealousy is not part of my agreement with any woman."

I frowned to myself. After all these years, I still have to mutter "Queen-on-Her-Own-Color" to set my pieces right.

"She wanted to know if you have some special girlfriend out here, you've been coming to Los Angeles so much lately."

"Oh, come on," I said. "You're not serious."

"Honest."

"What did you tell her?"

"I told her not to worry. I told her that when you're here, you don't go out with anybody, you spend all your time with me. I think she felt better, but maybe you ought to go over your no-jealousy agreement with her one more time to be sure."

She left the table for a minute to puzzle over her tape collection. "I have Brahms's First by Ozawa, by Ormandy and by Mehta. Any preferences?"

"Whatever will be most distracting to your chess."

She considered for a moment, chose a tape and slid it into the intricate electronics of her sound-system.

"Inspiring," she corrected. "For distraction, I have other tapes."

We played for half an hour, a tough game from the first move. She had just reread her Modern Ideas in the Chess Opening, which would have powdered me had I not finished Chess Traps, Pitfalls and Swindles two days earlier. We played nearly to a draw; then a brilliant move on my part, and the game teetered in the balance.

As far as I could see, any move but one would be disaster. Her only escape was an obscure pawn advance, to control the hidden square around which I had built a towering delicate strategy. Without that square, my effort would collapse in rubble.

The part of me that takes chess seriously hoped she would see the move, demolish my position and force me to fight for my hand-carved wooden life (I play best when my back is to the wall). Yet I couldn't imagine how I would recover if she blocked this scheme.

The part of me that knew it was just a game hoped she wouldn't see it, because it was such a pretty, such an elegant strategy I had coming up. A Queen sacrifice, and five moves to checkmate.

I closed my eyes for a minute, while she considered the board, opened them, struck head-on by a remarkable thought.

There in front of me was a table and a window full of color; beyond, the twilight flickerings of Los Angeles, the last of June fading into the sea. Silhouetted against twinkles and color was Leslie misted in thought, as still as a warned deer over a chessboard melted honey and cream in the shadows of an evening still to come. A warm soft vision, I thought. Where did it come from, who's responsible for it?

A quick little trap of words, a net of ink and pocket notebook over the idea before it vanished.

From time to time, I wrote, it's fun to close our eyes, and in that dark say to ourselves, "I am the sorcerer, and when I open my eyes I shall see a world that I have created, and for which I and only I am completely responsible." Slowly then, eyelids open like curtains lifting stage-center. And sure enough, there's our world, just the way we've built it.

I wrote that at high speed in dim light. Then closed my eyes, tested once more: / am the sorcerer . . . slowly opened my eyes again.

Elbows on chess-table, face cupped in hands, I saw Leslie Parrish, eyes large and dark looking directly into my own.

"What did the wookie write?" she said.

I read it to her. "The little ceremony," I said, "is a way of reminding ourselves who's running the show."

She tried it, "I am the sorceress ..." She smiled when she opened her eyes. "Did that just come to you now?"

I nodded.

"I created you?" she said. "I'm responsible for bringing you onstage? Movies? Sundaes? Chessgames and talks?"

I nodded again. "Don't you think so? You're the cause of me-as-you-know-me. Nobody else in the world knows the

Richard that's in your life. No one knows the Leslie that's in mine."

"That's a nice note. Would you tell me some other notes, or am I prying?"

I turned on a light. "I'm glad you understand that these are very private notes. ..." I said it lightly, but it was true. Did she know it was another ribbon of trust between us, first that she who respected my privacy would ask to hear the notes and next that I'd read them to her? I had a notion that she knew it well.

"We have some book titles," I said, "Ruffled Feathers: A Birdwatcher's Expose of a National Scandal. Here's one could be a five-volume set-What Makes Ducks Tick?"

I turned the page back, skipped a grocery list, turned another page.

"Look in a mirror, and one thing's sure: what we see is not who we are. That was after your talk about mirrors, remember?

"When we look back on our days, they've passed in a flash. Time doesn't last, and nobody's got long to live! SOMETHING bridges time-What? What? What?

"You can tell that all of these aren't quite finished yet. . . .

"The best way to pay for a lovely moment is to enjoy it.

"The only thing that shatters dreams is compromise.

"Why not practice living as though we were extremely intelligent? How would we live if we were spiritually advanced?"

I reached the first page of the month's notes. "How do we save the whales? WE BUY 'EM! If whales were bought, and then made American citizens, or French or Australian or Jap-125

anese, there's no country in the world dare lay a hand on 'em!"

I raised my eyes to hers, over the notebook. "That's about it so far this month." "We buy 'em?" she said.

"I don't have the details of that worked out. Each whale would carry the flag of the country it belongs to, a giant passport, sort of. Waterproof, of course. The money from the sale of citizenships goes to a big Whale Fund, something like that. It could work." "What do you do with them?"

"Let 'em go where they want. Raise little whales . . ." She laughed. "I mean what do you do with your notes." "Oh. End of every month, I read them through, see what they're trying to tell me. Maybe a few will wind up in a story or a book, maybe they won't. To be a note is to lead a very uncertain life."

"These notes tonight, do they tell you anything?" "I don't know yet. A couple of them are saying I'm not too sure this planet is home. Do you ever have the feeling you're a tourist on earth? You'll be walking down the street and suddenly it's like a moving postcard around you? Here's how the people live here, in big house-shaped boxes to keep off 'rain' and 'snow,' holes cut in the sides so they can see out. They move around in smaller boxes, painted different colors, with wheels on the corners. They need this box-culture because each person thinks of herself and himself as locked in a box called a 'body,' arms and legs, fingers to move pencils and tools, languages because they've forgotten how to communicate, eyes because they've forgotten how to see. Odd little planet. Wish you were here. Home soon. Has that ever happened to you?"

"Once in a while. Not quite that way," she said.

"Can I get you anything from your kitchen?" I said, "a cookie or something?" " -

"No, thank you."

I got up and found the cookie-jar, put a leaning tower of chocolate-chips on a plate for each of us. "Milk?"

"No, thank you."

I brought the cookies and milks to the table.

"The notes remind. They help me remember that I'm a tourist on earth, remind me the funny customs they have here, how fond I am of the place. When I do that, I can almost recall what it's like where I came from. There's a magnet that's pulling on us, pulling us against the fence of this world's limits. I have this strange feeling that we come from the other side of the fence."

Leslie had questions about that, and she had answers I hadn't thought of. She knew a world-as-it-ought-to-be, that I bet her was a warless world-as-it-is on some parallel dimension. The idea bemused us, melted the clock away.

I picked a chocolate-chip cookie, imagined it warm, attacked it gently. Leslie sat back with a curious little smile, as though she cared about my notes, about the thoughts that I found so interesting.

"Have we talked about writing before?" I said.

"No." She reached for a cookie at last, her resistance broken by the patient ruthless proximity of her favorite morsel. "I'd love to hear. I'll bet you started early."

How odd, I thought. I want her to know who I am!

"Yep. Everywhere at home, when I was a kid, books. When I learned to crawl, there were books at nose-level. When I could stand, there were books that went on out of

sight, higher than I could reach. Books in German, Latin, Hebrew, Greek, English, Spanish.

"My dad was a minister, grew up in Wisconsin speaking German, learned English when he was six, studied Bible languages, speaks them still. My mother worked in Puerto Rico for years.

"Dad would read stories in German and translate them for me as he read; Mom would chat with me in Spanish even when I couldn't understand, so I grew up sort of basted in words. Delicious!

"I loved opening books to see how they'd begin. Writers create books the way we write lifetimes. A writer can: lead any character, to any event, for any purpose, to make any point. What does this writer do, or this one, I wanted to know, with a blank Page One? What do they do to my mind and my spirit, when I read their words? Do they love me or despise me or don't they care? Some writers are chloroform, I found out, but some are cloves and ginger.

"Then I went to high school, learned to hate English Grammar, so bored with it I'd yawn seventy times in a fifty-minute class, walk out at the end slapping my face to wake up. Came my senior year at Woodrow Wilson High School, Long Beach, California, I picked Creative Writing to duck the torment of English Literature. Room four-ten, it was. Sixth-period Creative Writing."

She moved her chair out from behind the chess table, listening.

"The teacher of the class was John Gartner, the football coach. But John Gartner, Leslie, he was also a writer! In person, a real writer! He wrote stories and articles for outdoor magazines, books for teenagers: Rock Taylor-Football Coach, Rock Taylor-Baseball Coach. A bear, he was, stood

about six-foot-five, hands this big; tough and fair and funny and angry sometimes, and we knew he loved his work and he loved us, too." All at once there was a tear in my eye, and I wiped it away, swiftly, thinking how strange. Haven't thought of Big John Gartner . . . he's been dead ten years and now there's this odd feeling in my throat. I hurried on, trusting she wouldn't notice.

" 'OK, you guys,' he said the first day. 'I know you're in here so you don't have to take English Literature.' There was this guilty murmur you could hear among us, and the class kind of looked the other way. 'Let me tell you,' he said, 'the only way that anyone in this class gets an A on their report card is to show me the check from a piece of writing that you have written and sold this semester.' A chorus of groans and whines and howls . . . 'Oh, Mister GARTNER that's not fair, we're poor little high-school kids, how could you possibly expect-that's not FAIR, Mister Gartner!' which he silenced with a word that sounded like, 'GROWL.'

" 'There's nothing wrong with a grade of B. B is Above Average. You can be Above Average without selling what you write, can't you? But A is Superior. Don't you agree that if you sell something that you have written it would be superior and you would be worth an A?' "

I picked the second-to-last cookie from my plate. "Am I telling you more than you want to know?" I asked her. "Honest, now."

"I'll say when to stop," she said. "Unless I ask you to stop, go on, OK?"

"Well. I was highly grade-oriented, in those days."

She smiled, remembering report-cards.

"I wrote a lot and sent articles and stories to newspapers

and magazines and just before the end of the semester sent a story to the Sunday supplement of the Long Beach Press-Telegram. It was a story about a club of amateur astronomers. They Know the Man in the Moon.

"Imagine the shock! I come home from school, bring in the trash can from the street, feed the dog, and Mom hands me a letter from the Press-Telegram! Instant ice in all veins! I tremble it open, gulp through the words, start again and read from the beginning. They bought my story! Check enclosed for twenty-five dollars!

"Can not sleep, can not wait for school to open in the morning. Finally it opens, finally sixth period, I whomp it dramatically on his desk, WHOMP! 'There's your check, Mister Gartner!'