The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story (12 page)

"His face ... his face lit up and he shook my hand so I couldn't move it for an hour. Announced to the class Dick Bach sold an article, to make me feel about a quarter-inch high. Got my A in Creative Writing, no further effort required. And I figured that was the end of the story."

I thought about that day . . . twenty years ago or yesterday? What happens to time, in our minds?

"But it wasn't," she said.

"It wasn't what?"

"It wasn't the end of the story."

"Nope. John Gartner showed us what it was to be a writer. He was working on a novel about teachers. Cry of September. Wonder if he finished it before he died. ..." Again, a queer tightening in my throat; I thought it best to press on and finish this story and change the subject.

"He'd bring in a chapter every week from his book, read it aloud and ask us how we'd write it better. It was his first novel for grown-ups. It had a lovestory in it, and his face

would get bright red, reading parts of it, he'd laugh and shake his head in the middle of a sentence he thought was a little too true and tender for a football-coach to be sharing with his writing class. He had a terrible time writing women. Whenever he got too far from sports and the outdoors, we could hear it in his writing; telling about women was creaking along thin ice. So we'd criticize gleefully; we'd say, 'Mister Gartner, the lady doesn't seem quite as real to us as Rock Taylor does. Is there some way you can show her to us instead of tell her to us?'

"And he'd bellow with laughter and pat his handkerchief over his forehead and he'd agree, he'd agree. Because always Big John drove it into us, he'd pound his fist on the table: 'Don't TELL me, SHOW me! INCIDENT! and EXAMPLE!' "

"You loved him a lot, didn't you?"

I smashed away another tear. "Ah ... he was a good teacher, little wookie."

"If you loved him, what's wrong with saying that you loved him?"

"I never thought of it that way. I did love him. I do love him."

And then before I knew what I was doing, I was kneeling in front of her, arms around her legs, head down in her lap, sobbing for a teacher whose death I had heard fifth-hand without a blink, years before.

She stroked the back of my head. "It's all right," she said softly, "it's all right. He must be so proud of you, and your writing. He must love you, too."

What a strange feeling, I thought. This is what it's like to cry! It had been so long since I had done more than clench my jaw and bring down steel against sorrow. The last time I

had cried? I couldn't remember. The day my mother died, a month before I became an aviation cadet, off to earn my wings in Air Force pilot training. From the day I joined the military, intensive practice in emotional control: Mr. Bach, henceforth you will salute all moths and flies. Why will you salute all moths and flies? You will salute all moths and flies because they have their wings and you do not. There is a moth on yonder window. Mister Bach, Laiuff: FACE! Fo-wurd: HAR! And: HALT! Face moth: FACE! Hand: SALUTE! Wipe that smile off your mouth, Mister. Now step on that smile, kill that smile, KILL IT! Now pick it up and carry it outside and bury it. You think this program's a joke? Who's in control of your emotions, Mister Bach!"

That was the center of my training, that's what mattered: who's in control?

Who's in control? I am! I the rational, I the logical, screening and weighing and judging and picking the way to act, the way to be. Never did I-the-rational consider I-the-emotional, that despised minority, never allowed him to take the wheel.

Until tonight, sharing a sliver of my past with a best-friend sister.

"Forgive me, Leslie," I said, straightening, wiping my face. "I can't explain what happened. Never done that before. I'm very sorry."

"Never done what before? Never cared about someone's dying or never cried?"

"Never cried. Not for a long time."

"Poor Richard . . . maybe you should cry more often."

"No, thank you. I don't think I'd approve of me if I did too much of that."

"Do you think it's bad, for men to cry?"

I moved back to my chair. "Other men can cry, if they want. I don't think it's right for me."

"Oh," she said. I felt that she was thinking about that, judging me. What kind of person would judge against another for wishing to control his emotions? A loving woman might, one who knew a lot more about emotions and how to express them than I did. After a minute, no verdict returned, she said, "So what happened then?"

"Then I dropped out of my first and only waste-of-a-year in college. Wasn't wasted. Took a course in archery, and there met Bob Keech, my flight instructor. The college was a waste, the flying lessons changed my life. But I stopped writing, after high school, till I was out of the Air Force, married, and discovered that I couldn't hold a job. Any job. I'd go wild with boredom and quit. Better starve than live with the staml of the time clock, twice a day.

"Then at last, I finally understood what John Gartner had taught us: This is what it feels like to sell a story! Years after he died, I got his message. If the high-school-kid can sell one story, why can't the grown-up sell others?"

I watched myself, curious. Never had I talked this way, to anyone.

"So I started collecting rejection slips. Sell a story or two, earn a mass of rejections till the writing-boat sank and I was starving. Find a job letter-carrying or jewelry-making or drafting or tech-writing, hold it till I could stand it no longer. Back to writing, sell a story or two, rejections till the boat sank again; get a diflEerent job. . . . Over and over. Each time the writing-boat sank slower, until finally I was barely able to survive, and I never much looked back. That's how I got to be a writer."

She had a stack of cookies left on her plate, I had crumbs.

I licked my fingertip and touched the crumbs, eating them in neat order, one after the other. Without comment, listening, she moved her cookies to my plate, saving only one for herself.

"I had always wanted an adventurous life," I said. "It took a long time to realize that I was the only one who was going to make an adventurous life happen to me. So I did the things I wanted to do, and wrote about them, books and magazine stories."

She studied me carefully, as though I were a man she had known a thousand years before.

I felt suddenly guilty. "On and on I go," I said. "What have you done to me? I tell you I'm a listener and not a talker and now you won't believe it." , "We're both listeners," she said, "we're both talkers."

"Better finish our chess-game," I said. "Your move."

I had forgotten my elegant trap, took me as long to remember what it was as it took her to consider her position and move.

She did not make the pawn advance that was essential for her survival. I was sad and delighted. At least she would see my marvelous satin trap spring shut. That's what learning is, after all, I thought, not whether we lose the game, but how we lose and how we've changed because of it and what we take away from it that we never had before, to apply to other games. Losing, in a curious way, is winning. ,

Even so, part of me stayed sad for her. My queen moved and lifted her knight from the board, even though the knight was guarded. Now her pawn would take my queen, for the sacrifice. Go ahead and take the queen, you little devil, enjoy it while you can. . . .

Her pawn did not take my queen. Instead, after a moment, her bishop flew from one corner of the board to the other, her night-blue eyes watched mine for response.

"Checkmate," she whispered.

I turned to ash, unbelieving. Then studied what she had done, reached for my notebook and wrote half a page.

"What did you write?"

"A nice new thought," I said. "That's what learning is, after all: not whether we lose the game, but how we lose and how we've changed because of it and what we take away from it that we never had before, to apply to other games. Losing, in a curious way, is winning."

She sat lightly on the sofa, shoes off, her feet drawn cozily beneath her. I sat on the chair opposite and placed my shoes carefully on the coffee-table, not to leave marks on the glass.

Teaching Horse-Latin to Leslie was like watching a new water-skier stand up on her first tow. Once through the principles of the language, she spoke it. Days, it had cost me as a kid, learning this, neglecting algebra to do it.

"Wivel, Liveslivie," I said, "civan yivou ivundiverstivand whivat ivl'm sivayiving?"

"Ivi civerti . . . Ivi civerti . . . vanlivy civan!" she said. "Hivow divo yivou sivay 'Fuzzalorium' ivin Hivorse Liva-tivin?"

"Whivy, ivit's 'Fivuzz-iva-livor-ivi-ivum,' ivof civorse!"

How swiftly she learned, what a pleasure of mind she was! The only way to keep up with her was to have studied something she had never seen, to invent new rules of communication, or to lean way out on sheer intuition. I leaned, that night.

"I can tell, just looking, that you have played the piano for a long time, Ms. Parrish. Just looking at the music there, the Beethoven sonatas on the yellowed paper with the old pencilmarks in amongst the notes. Let me guess . . . since you were in high school?"

She shook her head no. "Before that. When I was a little girl I made a paper keyboard to practice at, since we didn't have money for "a piano. Before that, before I could walk, my mother says I crawled to the first piano I ever saw and tried to play it. From then on, music was all I wanted. But I didn't get it for a long time. My parents were divorced; my mother got sick; my brother and I bounced from foster-home to foster-home for a while."

I clenched my jaw. There's a grim childhood, I thought. What's it done to her?

"When I was eleven, my mother got out of the hospital and we moved to what you'd call the ruins of a pre-Revolu-tionary War house, crumbling great big thick stone walls, rats, holes in the floors, boarded-up fireplace. We rented it for twelve dollars a month, and Mom tried to fix it up. One day she heard about an old upright piano for sale, and she bought it for me! It cost her a fortune, forty dollars. But it changed my world; I was never the same again."

I inched out on another limb. "Do you remember the lifetime when you played the piano before?"

"No," she said. "I'm not too sure I believe in other lifetimes. But there is one funny thing. Music that's no later than Beethoven, than the early 1800s, it's as if I'm relearn-ing, it's easy, I seem to know it at first sight. Beethoven, Schubert, Mozart-like meeting old friends. But not Chopin, not Liszt . . . that's new music to me."

"Johann Sebastian? He was an early composer, early 1700s. . . ."

"No. I have to study him, too."

"If somebody played the piano in the early 1800s," I asked, "they'd have to know Bach, wouldn't they?"

She shook her head. "No. His music was lost, it was forgotten till the mid-1800s, when his manuscripts were rediscovered and published again. In 1810, 1820, nobody knew anything about Bach."

The hair quivered at the back of my neck. "Would you like to find out if you lived then? I read it in a book, a way to remember lifetimes. Want to try it?"

"Maybe sometime . . ."

Why is she reluctant? How can such an intelligent person not be sure that there is more to our being than a flash-bulb in eternity?

Not long after that, at something past eleven in the evening, I checked my watch. It was four o'clock in the morning.

"Leslie! Do you know what time it is?"

She bit her lip, looked for a long moment to the ceiling. "Nine?"

sixteen

"WAKING AT seven to fly to Florida is not going to be pleasant, I thought, after she dropped me back at my hotel and drove away in the dark. To stay up past ten P.M. was unusual for me, remnants of the barnstormer who rolled up under the wing an hour past sundown. To go to sleep at five, wake at seven and fly three thousand miles will be a challenge.

But there had been so much to hear from her, so much to say!

It won't kill me to go without a little sleep, I thought. With how many people in this world can I listen and talk till four, till long after the last cookie has disappeared, and not feel the least tired? With Leslie, and with whom else? I asked.

I fell asleep without an answer.

seventeen

"LESLIE, FORGIVE me for calling so early. Are you awake?" It was the same day, just past eight A.M. on my watch.

"I am now," she said. "How are you this morning, wookie?"

"Do you have time today? We didn't talk long enough last night, and I thought if your schedule allows, we might have lunch. And dinner, maybe?"

There was a silence. I knew at once I was imposing on her, and winced. I shouldn't have called.

"You said you were flying back to Florida today."

"Changed my mind. I'll go tomorrow."

"Oh, Richard, I'm sorry. I'm going to have lunch with Ida, then I have a meeting this afternoon. And a dinner-meeting, too. I'm sorry, I'd love to be with you, but I thought you'd be gone."

That'll teach me, I thought, for making assumptions. What made me think she's got nothing to do but sit and talk with me? I felt instantly alone.

"No problem," I said. "It's better I take off, anyway. But may I tell you how much I enjoyed our evening last night? I could listen to you, talk with you till the last cookie in the world is crumbs. Do you know that? If you don't know that, let me tell you!"

"Me too. But all those cookies that Hoggie feeds me, I've got to starve for a week till you'll be able to recognize me again, I'm so fat. Why can't you like seeds and celery?"

"Next time I'll bring celery seeds."

"Don't forget."

"You go back to sleep. I'm sorry I woke you. Thanks for last night."

"Thank you," she said. " 'Bye."

I hung up the telephone, began laying clothes into my garment-bag. Is it already too late to leave Los Angeles and fly so far east before dark?

I did not relish night-flying in the T-33. An engine flame-out, any forced landing in a heavy fast airplane is difficult enough in the daytime; black night outside would turn it thoroughly unpleasant.

If I'm wheels-up by noon, I thought, I'll be in Austin, Texas, by five, their time, off at six, Florida by nine-thirty, ten o'clock their time. Any light left at ten o'clock? None.