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 wil
l 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. . . ."
I offered my notebook, and Leslie nodded, accepting it. "Here we are," she said to the lady. "Thank you, sir," to me.
She wrote a greeting to Corrie and signed her name, tore off the sheet of paper and handed it to the woman.
"You were Daisy Mae in Li'l Abner, too," the woman said, as though Leslie might have forgotten, "and The Man-churian Candidate. I loved it."
"You remember, after all this time? That's so nice of you. . . ."
"Thank you, very much. Corrie will be so happy!"
"Give her a hug for me."
It was quiet for a moment after the woman went back to her place in line.
"Don't you say a word," Leslie growled at me.
"That was touching!" I said. "I'm not kidding. Really."
She softened. "She's sweet and sincere. The ones who say, 'Aren't you somebody?' I just say no and try to get by. 'No, you're somebody, I know you're somebody, what have you done?' They want you to list your credits. . . ." She shook her head, perplexed. "What do you do? There's no sensitive way to deal with insensitive people. Is there?"
"Interesting. I don't have that problem."
"You don't, wookie? You mean that you've never had one rude person crash into your privacy?"
"Not in person. To writers, insensitive people send written demands, and they send manuscripts. About one percent is that way, maybe not that much. The rest of the mail is fun."
I resented the speed of the ticket-line. In less than an hour we had to cut off our discoveries to walk into the theater on business and sit down and watch a movie. There's so much to gain from her, I thought, holding her hand in the dark, my shoulder touching hers, more to say than ever there was! And now lived the wild gentility of sex between us, changing us, completing us.
Here is a woman unequaled in my history, I thought, looking at her in the dark. I cannot imagine what it would take to shatter, to threaten the warmth of being close to her. Here is the one woman, of all the women I know, with whom there can never be any question, any doubt of the bond between us, for so long as we both shall live.
Isn't it strange, the way certainty always comes before shatterings?
twenty-two
. HERE WAS the lake once more, Florida sparkling under my windows. Seaplanes like sun-color water-moths practicing, gliding on water and air. Nothing changed about the place, I thought, laying down the garment-bag on the couch.
A movement at the edge of my eye and I jumped, to see him in the doorway, another me that I had forgotten: armored, defended and at the moment, disgusted. Like coming home from a walk in the meadow, daisies in my hair, pockets empty of apple-snacks and sugar-cubes for the deer, to find a mailed warrior standing coldly await in the house.
"You are seven weeks late!" he said. "You did not tell me where you were. You will be hurt by what I must say, and I could have saved you pain. Richard, you have seen quite enough of Leslie Parrish. Have you forgotten everything you've learned? Don't you see danger? The woman threat-
ens your entire way of life!" The chain-steel cape moved, the armor creaked.
"She's a beautiful woman," I said, then knew he'd miss the meaning, remind me that I knew many beautiful women.
Silence. Another creak. "Where's your shield? Lost it, I suppose. Luck, that you made it back alive!"
"We got to talking . . ."
"Fool. Do you think we wear armor for fun?" Eyes glowered, within the helmet. A mailed finger traced dents and blows on the metal. "Every mark was made by some woman's design. You were nearly destroyed by marriage, you escaped by miracle, and were it not for armor you would have been cut ten times since by friendships turned obligation turned oppression. One miracle you deserve. Dozens you had better not count on."
"I've worn my armor," I growled at him. "But you want me to ... all the time? Every moment? There's a time for flowers, too. And Leslie is special."
"Leslie was special. Every woman is special for a day, Richard. But special turns to commonplace, boredom sets in, respect vanishes, freedom's lost. Lose your freedom, what more is there to lose?"
The figure was massive, but quicker than a cat in battle, immensely strong.
"You built me to be your closest friend, Richard. You did not build me pretty, or laughing, or warm and pliant. You built me to protect you from affairs turned ugly; you built me to guarantee your survival as a free soul. I can save you only if you do as I say. Can you show me a single happy marriage? One? Of all the men you know, is there one whose
marriage would not go happier through instant divorce, and friendship instead?"
I had to admit. "Not one."
"The secret of my strength," he said, "is that I do not lie. Until you can out-reason me, change my fact to fiction, I shall be with you, and I shall guide and protect you. Leslie is beautiful to you to
day. Other women were beautiful to you yesterday. Every one of them would have destroyed you in marriage. There is one perfect woman for you, but she dwells in many different bodies. . . ."
"I know. I know."
"You know. When you find one woman in the world who can give you more than many women can, I'll disappear."
I didn't like him, but he was right. He had saved me from attacks that would have killed who I was this moment. I didn't like his arrogance, but arrogance came from certainty. It was chilly to stand in the same room with him, but to ask him to thaw was to become casualty to each discovery that this woman or that one is not my soulmate, after all.
As long as I could remember, freedom equaled happiness. A little protection, that's small price to pay for happiness.
Naturally, I thought, Leslie has her own steel person to guard her . . . many more men had planned her capture and marriage than women planned mine. If she lived without armor, she'd be married today, without a prayer of the glad Ipvership we had found. Her joy was founded on freedom, too.
How we frowned at the married ones who sometimes looked to us for extramarital affairs! Act as you believe, no matter what-if you believe in marriage, live it honestly. If you do not, un-marry yourself fast.
Was I marrying Leslie, spending so much of my freedom on her?
"I'm sorry," I told my armored friend. "I won't forget again."
He gave me a long dark look before he left.
I answered mail for an hour, worked on a magazine article that had no deadline. Then, restless, I wandered downstairs to the hangar.
Over the great hollow place hung the faintest veil of something wrong ... so light a vapor that there was nothing to see.
The little BD-5 jet needed flying, to blow the cobwebs from its control surfaces.
There are cobwebs on me, too, I thought. It is never wise to lose one's skill in any airplane, to stay away too long. The baby jet was demanding, the only aircraft I had flown more dangerous on takeoff than landing.
Twelve feet from nose to tail, it wheeled out of the hangar like a hot-dog pushcart without the umbrella, and as lifeless. Not quite lifeless, I thought. It was sullen. I'd be sullen, too, left alone for weeks, spiders in my landing gear.