I stopped pacing, sat on the arm of the couch. Dark slanted in the windows around me.
"What do you think I want?" I asked.
"Exactly what you have. Many women that you know a little and don't care very much about. Superficial flirtations, mutual use, no chance of love. That's my idea of hell. Hell is a place, a time, a consciousness, Richard, in which there is no love. Horrible! Leave me out of it."
She spoke as if her mind were made up and as if mine were, too. As if there were no hope of change. She was asking for nothing; she was telling me her highest truth, knowing I'd never agree.
"I've had the greatest respect and admiration for you," she said. "I thought you were the most wonderful person I ever knew. Now I'm beginning to see things about you that I don't want to see. I'd like to end it thinking you're wonderful."
"What I was scared of, Leslie, is that we were starting to own each other. My freedom is as important to me as . . ."
"Your freedom to do what?" she shot back. "Your freedom not to be intimate? Your freedom not to love? Your freedom to seek relief from joy in restlessness and boredom?
You're right ... if we had stayed together, I wouldn't have wanted you to have those freedoms."
Well said! I thought, as though her words had been a chessmove.
"You've pretty well shown ..." I said. "I understand what you're saying, and I didn't understand before. Thank you."
"You're welcome," she said.
I shifted the telephone. Someday a wizard will design a telephone that stays comfortable more than a minute. "I think there's a lot to say. Is there any way we could get together and talk for a while?"
A pause, and then, "I'd rather not. I don't mind talking on the phone, but I don't want to see you 'in person, for a while. I hope you understand."
"Sure. No problem," I said. "Do you have to go now?"
"No. I can stay on the phone."
"Is there any way you can see, that you and I could still be close? I've never met anybody like you, and your idea of friendship I think means a cordial letter and handshake at the end of every fiscal year."
She laughed. "Oh, it's not that bad. A handshake semian-nually. Quarterly, since we've been such good friends. Just because our love-affair didn't last, Richard, doesn't mean it failed. We learned from it what we needed to learn, I guess."
"Maybe the freedom I was talking about," I said, "a big part of it, maybe it's the freedom to change, to be different next week from what I am today. And if two people are changing in different directions ..."
"If we change in different directions," she said, "then we don't have any future anyway, do we? I think it's possible for two people to change together, to grow together and enrich instead of diminish each other. The sum of one and one, if they're the right ones, can be infinity! But so often one person drags the other down; one person wants to go up like a balloon and the other's a dead weight. I've always wondered what it would be like if both people, if a woman and a man both wanted to go up like balloons!"
"Do you know couples like that?"
"Few," she said.
"Any?"
"Two. Three."
"I don't know any," I told her. "Well ... I know one. Of all the people I know, one happy marriage. The rest are . . . either the woman's a joy and the man's a weight, or the other way around, or they're both weights. Two balloons are pretty rare."
"I thought we could have been that way," she said.
"That would have been nice."
"Yes."
"What do you think it might take," I said, "what could possibly get us back together the way we were?"
I sensed that she wanted to say, "Nothing," but wasn't saying it because it would have been too glib. She was thinking about it, so I didn't prod her, didn't hurry her.
"The way we were, I don't think anything could get us back that way. I don't want that. I tried hard as I could to change, I even tried going out with other men when you were gone, to see if I could balance your Perfect Woman with my Perfect Man. It didn't work. Dull, dull, dull. Stupid waste of time.
"I'm not one of your party girls, Richard," she went on slowly. "I've changed as much as I'm willing to change. If you want to be close to me, it's your turn to change."
I stiffened. "What kind of change would you offer for my consideration?" The worst thing she could say would be something that I couldn't accept, I thought, and that's no worse than we've got right now.
She thought for a while. "I'd suggest that we consider an exclusive love-affair, you and me only. A chance to see if we're two balloons."
"I would not be free ... I'd all at once stop seeing my friends who are women?"
"Yes. All the women you sleep with. No other love-affairs."
Now it was my turn to be silent, and hers to let the quiet stay on the line. I felt like a rabbit cornered by hunters. The men I knew who had agreed to those terms had been sorry for it. Holes had been shot in them and they'd managed to stay alive, but barely.
And yet, how different I was, with Leslie! Only with her could I be the kind of person I most liked to be. I wasn't shy with her, or awkward. I admired her, learned from her. If she wanted to teach me to love, I could at least give it a try.
"We're such different people, Leslie, you and me."
"We're different, we're the same. You thought you'd never find a word to say to a woman who didn't fly airplanes. I couldn't imagine myself spending time with a man who didn't love music. Could it be it's not as important to be alike as it is to be curious? Because we're different, we can have the fun of exchanging worlds, giving our loves and excitements to each other. You can learn music, I can learn flying. And that's only the beginning. I think it would go on for us as long as we live."
"Let's think about it," I said. "Let's think about it. We've both had marriages and almost-marriages, we both have
scars, promised we won't make mistakes again. You don't see any other way for us to be together than to try ... than to try being married?"
"Give me some suggestions," she said.
"I was pretty happy the way it was, Leslie."
"Pretty happy is not good enough. I can be happier than that by myself, and I can do it without listening to you find excuses to run away, to put me off, to build walls against me. I'll be your only lover, or I won't be your lover at all. I've tried your halfway thing and it doesn't work-not for me."
"It's so hard, marriage has such limitations. . . ."
"I hate marriage as much as you do, Richard, when it makes people turn dull, when it makes them deceivers or shuts them in cages. I've avoided it longer than you have; it's sixteen years since my divorce. But I'm different from you this way-I think there's another kind of marriage that sets us freer than we can ever be alone. There's very little chance you'll see that, but I think you and I could have been that way. An hour ago, I would have said there was no chance. I wouldn't have thought you'd call."
"Oh, come on. You knew I'd call."
"Nope," she said. "What I knew you'd do is throw my letter away and fly off to somewhere in your airplane."
Mind-reader, I thought. I put myself into that picture again, running away to Montana. Plenty of action, new sights, new women. But it was boring, even thinking about it. I've done that, I thought, and I know what it's like and it's every bit of it on the surface; it doesn't move me or change me or matter. It's action that doesn't mean anything. So I fly away ... so what?
"I wouldn't fly off without a word. I wouldn't leave with you mad at me."
"I'm not mad at you."
"Hm," I said. "Just mad enough to stop the nicest friendship I've ever had."
"Listen, Richard, really: I'm not mad at you. I was furious the other night, and disgusted. Then I was sad, and I cried. But after a while I stopped crying and I thought about you a lot, and I finally understood that you're being the very best person you know how to be; that you have to live with that until you change and no one is going to make that happen except you. How can I be
mad at you for doing your best?"
I felt a wave of heat in my face. What a difficult, loving thought! For her to understand, in the midst of that moment, that I was doing the best I knew how! Who else in the world would have understood that? The burst of respect for her triggered a suspicion of myself.
"Well, what if I'm not doing my best?"
"Then I'm mad at you."
She nearly laughed when she said it, and I relaxed a little, on the couch. If she could laugh, it wasn't the end of the world, not quite yet.
"Could we write a contract, come to a very clear arid careful agreement of exactly what changes we want?"
"I don't know, Richard. It sounds like you're playing games, and it's too important for that. Games, and your litany of old phrases, your old defenses. I don't want them anymore. If you have to defend 'yourself against me, if I have to keep proving over and over that I'm your friend, that I love you and I'm not going to hurt you or destroy you or bore you to death, that's too much. I think you know me
well enough, and you know how you feel about me. If you're afraid, you're afraid. I've let you go, and I feel good about it, I really do. Let's leave it at that. "We're friends, OK?"
I thought about what she said. I was so used to being right, so used to prevailing in any debate. But here, try as I did to find threads broken in her thinking, I couldn't. Her argument collapsed only if she were lying to me, only if she were out to hurt me or cheat me or destroy me. And that I could not believe. What she could do to anyone else, I knew, she could one day do to me, and I had never seen her cheat or wish pain to anyone, even people who had been cruel to her. She had forgiven them, every one, no bad feelings.
Had I allowed myself the word, that moment, I would have told her that I was in love with her.
"You're doing your best, too, aren't you?" I said.
"Yes, I am."
"Doesn't it strike you as strange that we would be the exception, you and me, when nearly no one can make intimacy work? Without shouting and slamming doors, losing respect, taking for granted, boredom?"
"Don't you think you're an exceptional person?" she said. "Don't you think I am?"
"We're like nobody I've ever met," I said.
"If I get mad at you, I don't think there's anything wrong with shouting and slamming doors. Throwing things, if I get mad enough. But that doesn't mean I don't love you. And that doesn't make any sense to you, does it?"
"None. There's no problem we can't solve with calm, rational discussion. When we disagree, what's wrong with saying, 'Leslie, I disagree, and these are my reasons'? And then you say, 'Quite so, Richard. Your reasons have convinced
me that yours is the better way.' And there's the end of it. No crockery to sweep up, no doors to repair."
"Don't you wish," she said. "The shouting comes when I get frightened, when I think you aren't hearing me. Maybe you're hearing my, words, but you're not understanding, and I'm scared you're going to do something that will hurt us both and we'll be sorry and I see a way to avoid it and if you're not hearing I have to say it loud enough so you will!"
"You're telling me that if I listen to you, you won't have to shout?"
"Yes. I probably won't have to shout," she said. "Even if I do, it's over in a few minutes. I get it out of my system and I calm down."
"Meanwhile I'm a quivering ball clinging up at the top of the curtains. . . ."
"If you don't want anger, Richard, then don't make me mad! I've grown into a fairly calm and well-adjusted person. I'm not hair-trigger set to blow up at the smallest thing, but you are one of the most selfish people I have ever known! I've needed my anger to keep you from trampling right over me, to let both of us know when enough is enough."
"I told you I was selfish, a long time ago," I said. "I promised you that I'd always act in what I thought was my own best interest, and I hoped you'd do the same. . . ."
"Spare me your definitions, please!" she said. "It is by not always thinking of yourself, if you can manage it, that you might someday be happy. Until you make room in your life for someone as important to you as yourself, you will always be lonely and searching and lost. . . ."
We talked on for hours, as though our love were a terrified fugitive, leaning wide-eyed on a twelfth-floor ledge, set to jump the instant we stopped trying to save it.
Keep talking, I thought. If we keep talking, it won't push off the cornice and plunge screaming to the pavement. Yet neither of us wanted the fugitive to live unless it turned sane and strong. Each comment, every idea we shared was a wind blown at the ledge-sometimes our future together teetered out over the streets, others it was trembled back against the wall.
How much would die if it fell! The warm hours separated from time, when we so mattered to each other, when I breathlessly delighted in who this woman is; they all will have led to nothing, worse than nothing: to this terrible loss.
The secret of finding someone to love, she had told me once, is first finding someone to like. We had been the best of friends long before we became lovers. I liked her and admired her and trusted her, trusted her! Now so much good tilted in the balance.
If our fugitive slipped, the wookies would be killed in the fall, Hoggie clutching a sundae, the sorceress, the sex-goddess; the Bantha would die, chess and films and sunsets would disappear forever. Her fingers flashing over the keyboard. I'd never listen to Johann Sebastian's music again, never hear his secret harmonies because I had learned them from her, never another composer-quiz, never see flowers without thinking of her, never anyone again so close to me. Build more walls, bolt spikes on top, and then build walls inside those, and more spikes. . . .
"You don't need your walls, Richard!" she cried. "If we never see each other again, can't you know that walls don't protect? They isolate you!"
She's trying to help, I thought. In the last minutes we pull ourselves apart, this woman wants me to learn. How can we leave each other?
"And Hoggie ..." she said, ". . . Hoggie doesn't . . . he doesn't have to die. . . . Every July eleventh, I promise ... I'll make a chocolate-chip hot-fudge sund . . . hot-fudge sundae . . . and remem ... my dearest Hoggie. . . ."
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."