The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story (15 page)

"Bored? Listening to Bach? Then you don't know how to listen; you've never learned to listen to him!" She pressed a rocker-switch and the tape began; Grandaddy on some monster organ, it was clear. "First you have to sit right. Here. Come sit here, between the speakers. This is where we sit when we want to hear all the music."

It felt like musical kindergarten, but I loved being with her, sitting very close to her.

"The complexity of it alone should make it irresistible for you. Now, most people listen to music horizontally, following along with the melody. But you can listen structurally, too; have you ever done that?"

"Structurally?" I said. "No."

"Early music was all linear,'Vshe said over a landslide of organ-notes, "simple melodies strung out one at a time, primitive themes. But your grandaddy took complex themes, with tricky little rhythms, and spun them out together at odd intervals so they created intricate structures and made vertical sense as well-harmony! Some Bach harmonies are as dissonant as Bartok, and Bach was getting away with them a hundred years before anyone even thought of dissonance."

She stopped the tape, slid onto the piano-bench, and without a blink of her eye there was the last chord from the speakers in her hand on the keyboard.

"There." It sounded clearer on the piano than it had on the speakers. "See? Here's one motif . . ." She played. "And here's another . . . and another. Now watch how he builds this. We start with the A theme in the right hand. Now A enters again four bars later in the left hand; do you hear it? They go on together until . . . here comes B. And A is subordinate to it just now. Here's A entering again in the right. And now . . . C!"

She set out themes, one by one, then put them together. Slowly at first, then faster. I barely followed. What was Simple Addition for her was Advanced Calculus to me; by closing my eyes and squashing my forehead together with my hands I could nearly understand.

She started again, explaining every step. As she played, a light began to glow through an inner symphony-hall that had been dark all my life.

She was right! There were themes among themes, dancing together, as if Johann Sebastian had locked secrets into his music for the private pleasure of those who learned to see beneath surfaces.

"Aren't you a joy!" I said, excited to understand what she was saying. "I hear it! It's really there!"

She was as glad as I, and forgot to get dressed or brush her hair. She moved sheet-music from the back of the music-shelf on the piano to the front. Johann Sebastian Bach, it said, and then a thunderstorm of notes and sweeps and dots and sharps and flats and ties and trills and sudden commands in Italian. Right at the beginning, before the pianist could get her wheels up and fly into that storrn, she was hit with a con brio, which I figured meant she had to play either with brightness, with coldness, or with cheese.

Awesome. My friend, with whom I only recently emerged from warm sheets and voluptuous shadows, with whom I spoke English with ease, Spanish with laughter, German and French with much puzzlement and creative experiment, my friend had all at once burst out singing a new and vastly complicated language that I was on my first day's learning to hear.

The music broke from the piano like clear cold water from a prophet-touched rock, pouring and splashing around us while her fingers leaped and spread, curled and stiffened and melted and flickered hi magic pass and streaked lightning above the keyboard.

Never before had she played for me, claiming that she was out of practice, too self-conscious even to uncover the

keys of the instrument while I was in the room. Something had happened between us, though . . . because we were lovers, now, was she free to play, or was she the teacher so desperate to help her deaf one that nothing could keep her from music?

Her eyes traced every raindrop of that hurricane-on-pa-per; she had forgotten that she had a body, except that the hands remained, the blurred fingers, a spirit that found its song in the heart of a man died two hundred years ago, raised triumphant from his tomb by her wish for living music.

"Leslie! My God! Who are you?"

She turned her head only a little toward me and half-smiled, her eyes and her mind and her hands still on the music storming upward.

Then she looked at me; the music stopped instantly but for strings trembling harplike inside the piano.

"And so on and so on," she said. The music shimmered in her eyes, in her smile. "Do you see what he's doing there? Do you see what he's done?"

"A little bit, I see," I said. "I thought I knew you! You whelm the daylights out of me! That music is . . . it's . . . you're . . ."

"I'm way out of practice," she said; "the hands aren't working the way they . . ."

"Leslie, no. Stop. Listen. What I have just heard is pure . . . listen! . . . pure radiance, that you took from cloud-linings and sunrises and distilled into light that I can hear! Do you know how good, how lovely that is, that you make the piano do?"

"Don't I wish! You know that was my chosen career, the piano?"

"It's one thing to know that in words, but you never played, before! You give me one more whole different . . . heaven!"

She frowned. "THEN DO NOT BE BORED WITH YOUR GRANDADDY'S MUSIC!"

"Never again," I said meekly.

"Of course never again," she said. "Your mind is too much like his, not to understand. Every language has its key, and so does your grandaddy's language. Bored! Indeed!"

She accepted my promise to improve, having flattened me in awe, and went to brush her hair.

twenty-one

iJHE TURNED from the typewriter, smiled at me where I had settled with my cup of chocolate and a draft screenplay.

"You don't have to gulp it down all at once, Richard, you can sip it slowly. That way you can make it last longer."

I laughed at me, with her. To Leslie, I thought, I must look like a pile of jackstraws on her office couch.

Her desk organized, her files trim, not a paper-clip out of place. She looked just as neat, herself: snug beige pants, transparent blouse tucked in, a brassiere as sheer as the blouse, outlined in filmy white flowers. Her hair was brushed gold. Here, I thought, is the way neatness ought to look!

"Our drinks are not paperweights," I said. "Hot chocolate, most people drink it. Yours, you befriend. I can drink

enough hot chocolate to hate the taste of it for the rest of my days in the time it takes you to get acquainted with one cup!"

"Wouldn't you rather drink something friendly," she said, "than something you've hardly met?"

Intimate with her chocolate, with her music, with her garden, her car, her house, her work. I was linked to the things I knew by a network of silken threads; she was bound to hers by braided silver cables. To Leslie, nothing close was unvalued.

Acting-dresses and gowns hung in her closets, sorted by color and by shade of color, clear-plastic dust-covers over each. Shoes to match on the floor below, hats to match on the shelf above.

Books in their cases by subject; phonograph records and tapes by composer, conductor and soloist.

A hapless clumsy spider tripped and fallen in the sink? Everything stops. Down slides a papertowel spidey-ladder to the rescue, and when the creature steps aboard, it's lifted outside and set gently in the garden, tucked away with soothing words and soft warnings that sinks are not safe places for spiders to play.

I was so much the opposite. Neatness, for instance, had a lower priority. Spiders do need to be saved from sinks, of course, but they don't have to be pampered. Taken outside and dropped on the porch, they ought to count their lucky stars.

Things, they disappear in the blink of an eye; a wind ruffles them and they're gone. Her silver cables . . . attach ourselves so strongly to things and to people, when they're gone, doesn't part of us go, too?

"Better far to attach ourselves to forever-thoughts than to here-now gone-now things," I told her as she drove us toward the Music Center. "Don't you agree?"

She nodded, driving five miles above the speed limit, catching green lights.

"Music is a forever thing," she said.

Like a rescued cat, I was fed on top-cream classical music, for which she insisted I had ear and aptitude.

She touched the radio and at once violins flowed, the midst of some perky air. Another quiz coming up, I thought. I liked our quizzes.

"Baroque, classical, modern?" she asked, sweeping into an open lane toward city center.

I listened to the music with intuition as well as with new training. Too deep-structured to be baroque, not combed a'nd formal enough to be classical, not crinkly enough to be modern. Romantic, lyric, light . . .

"Neoclassical," I guessed. "Feels like a major composer, but he's having fun with this one. Written, I'd say-1923?"

I was convinced Leslie knew epoch, date, composer, work, movement, orchestra, conductor, concertmaster. Once she had heard a piece of music, she knew it; she sang along with every one of the thousand performances she had collected. Stravinsky, as unpredictable to me as a rodeo bronc, she hummed, hardly aware she did.

"Good guess!" she said. "Close! Composer?"

"Definitely not German." It wasn't heavy enough; it didn't have enough wheels on the road to be German. Playful, so it wasn't Russian. Nor did it taste French nor feel Italian nor look British. It wasn't colored like Austria, not

enough gold in it. Homey, I could hum it myself, but not American homey. It was dancing.

"Polish? Sounds to me like it was written in the fields east of Warsaw."

"Nice try! Not Polish. Little bit farther east. It's Russian." She was pleased with me.

The Bantha didn't slow; green lights were Leslie's servants.

"Russian? Where's the yearning? Where's the pathos? Russian! My goodness!"

"Not so quick with generalities, wookie," she said. "You haven't heard any happy Russian music, till now. You're right. This one, he's playful."

"Who is it?"

"Prokofiev."

"What do you know!" I said. "Rus . . ."

"GODDAMN IDIOT!" Brakes shrieked, the Bantha swerved wildly, missed the black-lightning streak of sudden truck by a yard. "Did you see that son of a bitch? Straight through the light! He nearly killed . . . what the HELL does he think ..."

She had reflexed like a racing driver to miss the thing and now it was gone, a quarter-mile down Crenshaw Boulevard. What stunned me was not the truck but her language.

She looked at me, frowning still, saw my face, looked again, puzzled, struggled to suppress a smile, failed.

"Richard! I've shocked you! Did I shock you with Goddamn Hell?" She smothered her mirth with immense effort. "Oh, my poor baby! I cursed in front of it! I'm sorry!"

I half-raged, half-laughed at myself.

"All right, Leslie Parrish, this is it! You enjoy this moment because this is the last time you will ever see me shocked over goddamn hell!"

Even as I said the last words, they sounded strange in my mouth, awkward syllables. Like a nondrinker saying martini; a nonuser saying cigarette or joint or any of the jargon that comes easy to addicts. No matter the word, if we never use it, it sounds awkward. Even fuselage sounds funny, coming from one who doesn't like airplanes. But a word is a word is a sound in the air and there is no reason why I shouldn't be able to say any word I want without feeling like a goat.

I didn't talk for a few seconds, while she twinkled at me.

How does one practice swearing? To the melody of Prokofiev, still on the radio, I practiced, quietly. "Oh . . . damn, damn hell, damn-damn-hellllll/damn-danm-hell-oh damn-damn-hell, DAMN-DAMN HELLLLLL/Oh, dam-dam-hel-hel-dam-dam-hell-oh-dam-dam-hel-hel dammtnn; Oh dammmmmmn. . . . HELL!"

When she heard what I was singing, and the earnest determination with which I sang, she dissolved against the wheel in merriment.

"Laugh if you want, damn it hell, wookie," I said. "I'm going to learn this damn stuff right! Hell! What's the name of the damn music?"

"Oh, Richard," she gasped, wiping tears. "It's Romeo and Juliet ..."

I went on with my song regardless, and sure enough, after a few stanzas the words lost their meaning altogether. Another few verses and I'd be damning and helling with the worst of them! And other words beyond, to conquer! Why hadn't I thought of curse-practice thirty years ago?

She got me to curb my profanity by the time we entered the symphony hall.

It wasn't till we were back in the car after an evening of front-row Tchaikovsky and Samuel Barber, Zubin Mehta conducting Itzhak Perlman and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, that I could express my feelings.

"That was hot damn hellacious fine music! Don't you think it was, god ... I mean, damn?"

She looked to heaven, imploring. "What have I done?" she said. "What am I creating?"

"Whatever the hell you're creating," I said, "you're doing a damn fine job of it!"

Business partners still, we insisted some work get done in those weeks together, so we chose a film to research and left early to .stand in line for the afternoon show. The traffic sighed and hummed in the street while we waited, yet the traffic wasn't there, as though an enchanted mist began at arm's-length around us, everything beyond turned ghostly as we talked on our private planet.

I hadn't noticed the woman watching us, not far away in the mist, but all at once she made a decision that frightened me. She walked directly to Leslie, touched her shoulder, demolished our world.

"You're Leslie Parrish!"

At once, my friend's bright smile changed. Still a smile, but suddenly frozen; inside she had retreated, cautious.

"Excuse me, but I saw you in The Big Valley and Star Trek and ... I love your work and I think you're beautiful. ..." She was sincere and shy, so that the walls thinned.

"Oh-thank you!"

The woman opened her purse. "Could you ... if it isnt too much trouble, would you mind signing an autograph for my daughter Corrie? She'd kill me if she knew I was this close to you and didn't . . ." She wasn't having much luck finding paper to write on. "There's got to be something here. . . ."