Till We Meet Again (51 page)

“Aren’t you even surprised! My God, what an ego!” Delphine’s head snapped up in an unexpected anger, a welcome anger.

“It took you long enough to get around to it,” he said, as if he hadn’t heard her, as if he were continuing a conversation that had started differently. Perhaps with someone else?

“Have you been talking about me?” she asked suspiciously.

“Why would I?”

“Never mind. All right, now you know. Do you have anything to say?”

“You are
unspeakably
spoiled.”

“I’m aware of that. Anything else?” Delphine said crisply. Being told she was spoiled wasn’t going to exorcise him, anger or not. If only he’d pitied her. Damn him for taking off his glasses. She wanted to caress away the faint marks they had made on his nose between his eyes, those remarkable eyes, nearsighted or farsighted or whatever they were. She wanted to rub her face against the bristles of his disgraceful day-old beard, she wanted to take handfuls of his too-long, messed-up hair and pull him toward her and press him to her lips.

“You’re appallingly privileged. You’ve done nothing to deserve it but be outrageously decorative. You always have been, and you always will be, and you’ll always take advantage of it.”

“That’s not my fault. I can’t help it.”

“I didn’t say it was, I said it was appalling.” He fell silent, meditative.

“What does it have to do with my loving you?” Delphine forced herself to use the words again. He didn’t seem to have paid proper attention the first time.

“For one thing, I’ve heard that you’ve done some painful things to a lot of guys.”

“What can I do if people fall in love with me? I can’t love them back on command,” Delphine said, on the defensive. What exactly had he heard? How bad had she looked?

“I understand that you’re a caroming renegade in sexual matters. They should put out storm warnings when you’re on the loose, babe.”

“I’ve never been in love before,” Delphine said, hoping it was an excuse.

“That’s no excuse.”

“You sound like my mother.”

“So what? I understand that you’ve specialized in directors, with an occasional producer for dessert.”

“That’s disgusting.”

“But true. The word’s out. I’m not interested in becoming a part of your fantasy life, another of the directors you’ve honored.”

“I never asked you to! I didn’t make a single move toward you when we were working together. I wish it were only a fantasy. You’re not my director anymore. Don’t you understand? I love you!”

“I understand, babe, only too well. There’s a touch of the demonic about you. Frankly, you scare the shit out of me.”

“Sissy! That’s that. I’m going.” Delphine rose to leave. He’d said enough to start a good exorcism, and she couldn’t take any more. It hurt too much to be here and not be able to touch him, even if he was talking about her, which was better, no matter what he said, than if he was ignoring her.

“Sit down. I’m not finished with you yet. Don’t you wonder how I know that you love me?”

“I don’t give a shit. How typical of you to try to analyze everything,” she said bitterly. “It’s your business to know how people feel. I probably gave myself away a dozen times. What difference does it make? Shall we now have a seminar on the portrayal of the emotion of unwilling love as perceived through the eyes of the brilliant director, Armand Sadowski?”

“Shut up, Delphine. You talk too much.” He seemed to be buoyed up by a kind of secret joke.

“You’re so pleased with yourself, it’s sickening. I’m sorry I ever came here. I should have known better.”

“I love you too,” he said slowly. The joke vanished. “I
love you more than I’m frightened by you. That’s how I know you’re telling the truth.”

“You? Love me?” Delphine spoke quickly, in headlong disbelief. “You couldn’t possibly love me. If you loved me you would have told me. I wouldn’t have had to come here … and … throw myself at your feet.”

“I hoped that if you loved me, you’d let me know in your own good time.”

“If?”
Where was her exorcism? Why were they talking, splitting hairs about a love that didn’t exist, that couldn’t exist, or he wouldn’t have been able to conceal it? Why wasn’t she angry anymore? Why was she listening to him as if her life depended on it?

“How could I be sure while I was directing you? It could just have been part of your well-known pattern.”

“Oh.”

“Exactly.”

They sat facing each other, looking at the floor, enraptured, shy, elated, tongue-tied, the past wiped out, the future unknown, while the world turned and turned until it had changed forever around them.

“When?” Delphine demanded at last, falling back on the familiar to make sure of the bewildering present. “When did you fall in love with me?”

“Never mind.”

“You have to tell me.”

“It’s too damn stupid.”

“When?” She was inexorable. He owed her that.

“When I turned around and looked at you in my office that first day, that first meeting—I didn’t know anything about you. Even Hollywood wouldn’t go for something that simpleminded.”

“I would. I’d go for that. But why? Why did you fall in love with me?”

“Now who’s analyzing everything?”

“I have my rights,” she commanded, blazingly certain that she did. “Why?”

“You’ve got me, babe. I don’t know. No good reason, just love at first sight, God help me. Believe me, it was involuntary. Come over here.”

“What’s my motivation?” If she could tease him, she thought, the obsession must be exorcised. Now it was ordinary, simple, priceless, perfect love. Magic.

“Actresses!” He got up, took one big step and pulled her to her feet. He put his hands around her neck and unfastened the catch of her pearls. “Put these away somewhere, they’re much too good to lose in this mess.”

“Aren’t you going to kiss me?”

“All in good time. First I have to undress you. Button by button. I’ve got to be careful of your dress, it’s just too right.”

“Right for what?”

“The scene where the girl goes to tell the guy she loves him, of course. It’s such a clever dress, so severe, so uncompromising, so low-cut. So very low-cut. The poor sucker, he never had a chance.”

Freddy had gone to sleep unusually early the evening after she’d taken her white Rider up for the first time since her accident. Mac sat at the kitchen table, in front of a sheet of writing paper, the newspaper he’d just finished pushed to the floor in weary disgust. He’d dueled in the air with too many fearless, wily German pilots to believe that they’d ever give up. The last twenty years had seemed like one long, uneasy half-truce to him, and Munich just another battle they had won.

Where would they attack next? And how soon? The pace had been getting quicker ever since ’33, when, first, he had clearly heard the sound of approaching cannon. It wasn’t a question of
if
any longer, now that the Sudetenland had been sacrificed, it was only a question of
when
. Any man, he thought heavily, who understood how the borders of countries vanish when you try to find them from the air, knew that Isolationism couldn’t last. A year? Maybe less?

The news from Munich had only underlined the resolution he’d made yesterday, when Freddy had spoken of his making a good father. But it had come as a warning, pushing him over the edge of the line on which he’d been hesitating in heartbreak and self-hatred for the past few weeks. Freddy wasn’t pregnant. He knew that. She wasn’t yet, but, like the next war, it was only a matter of time. He took up a pen and started to write, searching with difficulty for every word he was doomed to write, finally leaving out all but the essentials.

Darling Freddy
,

I have to leave you. It’s the only thing for us. I know you want to get married. I know you realize that if you
were pregnant I’d marry you. So I’m going away to give you room to live your life as you should. You haven’t even started on your life yet. I can’t clip your wings
.

You know how I feel about marrying you. As unfair as I’ve been in the past, it would be worse to take that far greater advantage of you. I’ve told you that, as directly as I can, and I’d tell you again and again, but it won’t do any good. You never believe I really mean it. And you’ll never give up on me unless I leave. Everything I own is yours, the house, the planes, the business. Keep them or sell them, as you like
.

The one thing you must never think is that I didn’t love you enough. If I were a young man, I’d marry you tomorrow—I’d have married you long ago
. It’s because I love you so much that I’m letting you go. I
am not your future, my beloved girl
.

Mac
     

He reread the letter, put down the pen, took the paper, folded it in half and wrote her name on the outside. Then he weighed down a corner with the pitcher of wildflowers she always kept on the table, and went to the closet to take out the bag he’d packed while she was out flying. If there were any better way to do it, Mac thought, he’d have found it by now. But there wasn’t. She would recover from the pain. He would not.

Many hours later, as he drove his car too rapidly north, he realized where he was going. His only thought, for hundreds of miles, had been to get far away before he changed his mind, his only destination a place without memories. Only as dawn broke did he feel safe, because soon she’d be reading the letter.

He could have used one of the planes, he thought. He would join up in Vancouver, across the border. There was bound to be a Canadian Air Force base there. Or if not there, in Toronto. They always needed instructors, and didn’t quibble about age. Nobody ever wanted that job, not once they’d learned to fly. At least he could lend a hand, at least there was one worthwhile thing left for him to do with whatever was left of his life.

15

F
REDDY tore across the landing strip at Dry Springs, driving her car as fast as it would go. She came to a violent, skidding stop with a smashing of brakes, two feet away from her plane. She sprinted out of the car, untied the Rider, kicked the chocks out from under its wheels, jumped into the cockpit, punched the starter button, started the plane, and left the ground behind within seconds. For the first and last time in her life she neither checked out her ship before she got into it, nor went through the necessary run-up procedure to test the motor before takeoff.

She had found Mac’s letter less than a half hour earlier, and she had known immediately that if she didn’t get into the sky she couldn’t live through the pain. She had no way to handle it. She had no capacity to exist with this all-obliterating plunge into intolerable suffering. She had to flee from it or go mad. She put the nose of the ship up as high as it would go and climbed at the top possible speed, up and up into the gloomy, overcast sky, her stall signal shrieking again and again, so that she was kept busy correcting the attitude of the ship to keep from falling into a nosedive. She panted through her mouth, like a dog, blinking constantly into the grayness that was lit by a white glare. She had forgotten her goggles, she had on only the Levi’s, shirt and sweater in which she had gone down to breakfast, and soon she was shivering with the cold of altitude. Still she climbed headlong, on and on, height her only goal. Suddenly she burst through the overcast and found herself above the clouds. The blue sky struck the necessary blow she had been racing toward, like a runner straining for the tape at the finish line, and she slumped over the controls, all strength gone.

The Rider, uncontrolled, quickly assumed the configuration for which it had been designed and soon Freddy was flying level, a few hundred feet above a field of whiteness.

The sun on the cockpit warmed her, and little by little she stopped shaking. She lifted her head and took charge of her ship. Now, below her, there were scattered breaks in the clouds and she dove down through one like a porpoise, climbing up over the back of the next cloud, diving, climbing, diving and climbing, mindless motion her only focus. She saw a cloud with an unfamiliar shape and circled it meticulously, just at its edge, one wing in, one wing out. She found narrow, winding, brightly lit blue avenues between towering walls of white, and followed them wherever they led her; she entered clouds and stayed hidden inside them, unable to see more than fifty feet in any direction, until suddenly, at random, she charged out, seeking whatever lay beyond.

Freddy played with the clouds for as long as she could, crisscrossing, tracing edges, cutting them up, down and sideways, sometimes bullying them as if they were soapsuds, sometimes touching them as lightly as if they were made of old lace, never looking downwards. When, finally, she consulted her controls, she realized that she had almost no fuel left. She had no idea how long she’d been aloft. Now, some purpose restored, she dipped below the cloud level to find out where she was.

Beneath her, in every direction, stretched the desert. There were no roads, no trees, no landmarks of any kind. All pilots who know the San Fernando Valley know that only a few minutes away lies a vast desert no man has ever been able to chart. Freddy was as utterly lost as if she had been a thousand miles out at sea, except that, like all other mariners, she had a compass. Obedient to ancient laws that apply to all who wish to adventure, and all who wish to survive, she turned the Rider due west and found Dry Springs only minutes before she would have run out of gas.

On the ground she taxied to a far edge of the strip and came to a full stop. She turned off the motor, but she couldn’t make herself get out of the plane. As long as she remained where she was, she thought she was insulated, safe. As long as she stayed in the cockpit, nothing bad had really happened. Even as the words came into her mind, she understood that reality had returned. Once she had realized that the plane was a refuge, it ceased to be a refuge. As lightly as a ghost, Freddy touched each of the controls, thanking them. Today they had been forgiving, today they had not made her
pay any price for her insanely careless takeoff. Subdued by thoughts of what might have happened, she taxied the Rider and had it filled with fuel before she took it back to its parking space, and tied it down with reluctant thoroughness.