The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story (24 page)

Her voice broke; I heard her press the phone into a pillow. Oh Leslie no, I thought, listening to the choking silence of the feathers. Does it have to disappear, our enchanted city of two, a mirage come once in a lifetime only to vanish into smog and the everyday world? Who is it that's killing us?

If some outsider broke upon us, tried to pull us apart, we'd turn to claws and tear him to hell. This now, it's an inside job, the outsider is me!

What if we're soulmates, I thought while she sobbed. What if we're the ones we've been looking for our whole lives long. We've touched and we've shared this quick taste of what love on earth can be, and now, because of my fears, are we going to separate and never meet again? Will I go on the rest of my days looking for the one I've already found, and was too frightened to love?

The impossible coincidences! I thought, that led us to meet at a time when neither of us was married or committed to marry, when neither of us was devoted every-waking-second to causes, when neither of us was too busy with acting or writing or traveling or adventuring or otherwise too blindly involved. We met on the same planet in the same era, we met at the same age, grown up in the same culture. Had we met years earlier, it wouldn't have happened . . . we did meet years earlier, and we went sailing past in an elevator-the time wasn't right. And it will never be right again.

I paced quietly forth and back, a half-circle on the tether of the telephone cord. If I decide in ten years or twenty that I shouldn't have let her go, where will she be then? What if I come back in ten years to say Leslie I'm sorry! and find she's Mrs. Leslie Parrish-Somebody? What if she's not to be found, her house empty, she's moved, left no address? What if she's dead, killed by something that never would have killed her had I not flown away tomorrow?

"I'm sorry," she said, back on the phone again, tears wiped away. "I'm a silly goose. I wish I had your control, sometimes. You handle goodbyes so well, as if they don't matter."

"It's all in deciding who's in charge," I explained, glad for a change of subject. "If we let our emotions run things, then times like these aren't much fun."

"No," she sniffed. "They're not much fun."

"When you pre-live it, pretend it's tomorrow now, or next month, how do you feel?" I said. "I try that, and I don't feel better, without you. I imagine what it's like alone, no one to talk with nine hours on the telephone, run up a hundred-dollar bill on a local call. I'll miss you so much!"

"I'll miss you, too," she said. "Richard, how do you get someone to look around a corner when he hasn't reached it yet? The only life worth living is the magical one, and this is magic! I'd give anything if you could see what's there for us. ..." She paused for a moment, casting for what more to say. "But if it's out of sight for you, I guess it doesn't exist, does it? Even if I'm looking at it, it's not really there." She sounded tired, resigned. She was about to hang up the telephone.

Whether it was because I was tired or scared or both, I'll

never know. No warning; something snapped, something broke loose inside my head and it was not happy.

RICHARD! it screamed. WHAT ARE YOU DOING? ARE YOU CRAZY GONE OUT OF YOUR MIND? That's not some metaphor swaying on the ledge, that is YOU! That is your future, and if it falls you are a ZOMBIE, you are living dead, marking time till you kill yourself right! You've been playing games with her for nine hours on the telephone, WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU'RE ON THIS PLANET FOR, TO FLY AIRPLANES? You're here, you arrogant bastard, to learn about LOVE! She's your teacher, and in twenty-five seconds she is going to hang up and you will never see her again! Don't sit there, you idiot son-of-a-bitch! You've got ten seconds and she's gone! Two seconds! SPEAK!

"Leslie," I said. "You're right. I'm wrong. I want to change. We've tried it my way and it didn't work. Let's try it your way. No Perfect Woman, no walls against you. Just you and me. Let's see what happens."

There was silence on the line.

"Are you sure?" she said. "Are you sure, or are you just saying that? Because if you're just saying that, it's going to make it worse. You know that, don't you?"

"I know it. I'm sure. Can we talk about it?"

Another silence.

"Of course we can, wookie. Why don't you hang up the phone and come over here and we'll have breakfast."

"OK, sweet," I said. " 'Bye."

After she hung up I said to the empty phone, "I love you, Leslie Parrish."

In absolute privacy, no one to hear, the words that I had so despised, that I never used, were true as light.

I put the phone down in its cradle. "DONE!" I shouted to the empty room. "IT'S DONE!" Our fugitive was in our arms again, safely down from the ledge. I felt light as a mountain-summer sailplane launched for the stratosphere.

There's an alternate me this moment, I thought, veering sharp away, turned left out the fork in the road where I turned right. This moment in a different time, Richard-then hung up on Leslie-then after an hour or ten, or he didn't call her in the first place. He dropped her letter in the wastebas-ket, caught a cab to the airport, took off and climbed northeast, he levelled at nine-thousand-five and he ran to Montana. After that, when I looked for him, everything went dark.

thirty-three

"I CAN'T do it," she said. "I try, Richie; I'm

scared to death, but I try. I start the spin, we're diving straight down and spinning, and then I black out! The next thing I know we're level again and Sue is saying, 'Lesliel.Are you all right'?" She looked at me, dejected, hopeless. "How can she teach me-how can I learn spins if I black out?"

Hollywood disappeared four hundred miles over the horizon west, my Florida house sold, we lived in a trailer parked in ten thousand square miles of Arizona sagebrush and mountains, on the fringe of an airport for gliders. Estrella Sailport. Sunset like clouds soaked in jet-fuel and lit afire on a noiseless match. Sailplanes parked smooth seamless sponges for the light, dripping crimsons and melted-gold into pools on the sand.

"Dear little wook," I told her. "You know it, I know it, it is useless for us to fight what is true: there is nothing that

Leslie Parrish cannot do when she sets her mind to do it. And against that, a simple little thing like learning spins in a glider, it doesn't have a chance. You are in control of that flying-machine!"

"But I faint," she said sullenly. "It's hard to be in control when you're unconscious."

I went to the trailer's micro-closet, found our little broom, brought it to her where she sat on the edge of the bed. "Here's your control stick, the handle of this broom," I said. "Let's do it together, we'll do spins right here on the ground till you get bored."

"I'm not bored, I'm terrified!"

"You won't be. The broom is your control-stick, your feet are on the rudder pedals, pretend. Now here you are way up in the sky, flying along straight and level, and now you ease the stick back slowly, slowly, and the glider's nose comes up and it's going to shudder now, it's going to stall the way you want it to, and keep the stick back and the nose drops and NOW you stomp on full right rudder, that's right, hold the stick back and count the spins: one . . . two . . . three . . . count every time Montezuma Peak turns around the nose. Three, and stomp on the left rudder, at the same time move that stick forward, just forward of neutral, the spin's already stopped, and you lightly ease the nose back up to level flight. That's all there is to it. Was that so hard?"

"Not here in the trailer."

"Do it some more and it'll get easy in the airplane, too, I promise. I went through the same thing and I know what I am talking about. I was terrified of spins, too. Now again. Here we are in level flight, and you ease the stick back . . ."

Spins, the most frightening lesson in basic flying. So

frightening that the government dropped the requirement for spin instruction years ago ... students reached spin-training and they quit flying. But Laszlo Horvath, the national soaring champion who owns Estrella, Horvath insisted that every student learn spin-recoveries before solo. How many pilots had been killed because they fell into a spin and didn't know how to recover? Too many, he thought, and it wasn't going to happen at his sailport.

"You want the bottom to drop out right here," I told her, "that's what's supposed to happen. You want the nose to point straight down and the world to go whirling round and round! If it doesn't do that, you're doing it wrong! Again . . ."

It was Leslie's test to confront that fear, vault over it and learn to fly an airplane that didn't even have an engine to keep it up.

My test was a different fear. I promised that I'd learn from her how to love, to drop my frozen Perfect Woman and let Leslie as close to me as she would let me to her. Each trusted the other to be gentle, no barbs or daggers in that quiet place.

The trailer in the desert had been my idea. If this experiment in exclusivity could blow up, I wanted it to explode quickly and get it over with. What better test than to live two of us in a tiny room under a plastic roof, without a private corner for escape? How better challenge people intensely private? If we could find delight in that, month after month, we had found a miracle.

Instead of snarling, pressed together so, we thrived.

We ran with each other at sunrise, hiked in the desert with flower-handbooks and field-guides in our pockets, flew sailplanes, had two-day talks, four-day talks, studied Span-260

ish, breathed clean air, photographed sunsets, began a lifetime's training to understand one and only one other human being besides ourselves: where did we come from, what had we learned, how might we build a different world if it were up to us to build it?

We wore our premiere best for dinner, desert-flowers in a vase on our candle-lit table; we talked and listened to music till the candles melted out.

"Boredom between two people," she said one evening, "doesn't come from being together, physically. It comes from being apart, mentally and spiritually." Obvious to her, it was such a startling thought to me that I wrote it down. So far, I thought, we don't have to worry about boredom. But one can never promise for the future. . . .

The day came, I stood on the ground and watched her meet her dragon, stood in the rumbling blast of a towplane pulling her trainer aloft for spin-practice. In minutes the white cross of the glider released from the towline way overhead, alone and quiet. It slowed, stopped in the air and Whush! the nose dropped and wings swirled, a cotton-color maple-seed falling, failing-and smoothly recovered, eased out of its dive, to slow, to stop in the air and spin again.

Leslie Parrish, not so long ago a prisoner of her fear of light-planes, today in control of the lightest plane of any, bidding it do its worst: spins left, spins right, half-turns and recover, three turns and recover; all the way down to minimum altitude, then floated into the pattern and landed.

The glider touched down, rolled smoothly on its single wheel toward a stripe limed white on the dirt runway, stopped within feet of it. The left wing gradually tilted down to touch the ground and her test was done.

I ran toward her on the runway, heard a cry of triumph

across the distance from inside the cockpit, her instructor rejoicing. "You did it! You spun it by yourself, Leslie! Hurray!"

Then the canopy swung open and there she was, a smile on her mouth, looking shyly out to see what I might say. I kissed her smile. "Perfect flying, wook, perfect spins! How proud I am of you!"

The next day, she soloed.

What a delighted fascination it is, to stand aside and watch our dearest friend perform on stage without us! A different mind had stepped into her body and used it to destroy a fear-beast that had lurked and threatened for decades, and the mind showed now in her face. Within the seablue eyes were golden sparkles, electricity dancing in a powerplant. Power, she is, I thought. Richard, never you forget: this is no ordinary lady you are looking at, this is not a conventional human being and never you forget it!

I was not so successful with my tests as she was with hers.

From time to time, for no reason, I'd be cold to her, silent, push her away without knowing why.

Those times she was hurt and she said so. "You were rude to me today! You were talking to Jack when I landed and I ran over to join you and you turned your back on me, as if I weren't there! As if I were there and you wished I weren't!"

"Leslie, please! I didn't know you were there. We were talking. Must everything stop for you?"

I did know she was there, but didn't act, as though she were a leaf fallen, or a breeze passing by. Why was I annoyed when she minded?

It happened again, between the walks and musics and flying and candlelight-from habit, I built new walls, hid

cold behind them, used old shields against her. She was not so angry, then, as she was sad.

"Oh, Richard! Are you cursed with a demon that so hates love? You promised to lift barriers, not dump new ones between us!"

She left the trailer, walked back and forth, alone, the length of the glider-runway in the dark. Back and forth, for miles.

I'm not cursed with a demon, I thought. One thoughtless moment, and she says I'm cursed with a demon. Why must she overreact?

Unspeaking, deep in thought when she returned, she wrote for hours in her journal.

It was practice-week for the sailplane race we had entered; I was pilot and Leslie was ground-crew. Up at five A.M. to wash and polish and tape the plane before the morning temperature rose past a hundred degrees, push it to its place in line on the runway, fill the wings with water-ballast. She kept ice packed around my neck in towels till takeoff-time, while she stood in the sun.

After my takeoff, she stayed in contact on the truck radio as she went to town for groceries and water, ready to come collect me and the plane should we be forced to land a hundred miles away. She was there with cold root-beer when I landed, helped push the glider back to its tiedown for the night. Then transformed into Mary Moviestar, she served candlelight dinner and listened to my day's adventures.