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 s
uccessful 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.
She had told me once that she was sensitive to heat, but now she gave no sign of it. Like a sand-trooper she worked,
without letup, five days in a row. We were chalking up excellent times in our practice, and much of the credit was hers. She was as perfect a ground-crew as she was everything else she chose to be.
Why did I pick that time to distance her? Shortly after she met my landing, there were my walls again; I got to talking with some other pilots, didn't notice she was gone. I had to put the sailplane away by myself, no small job in the sun, but made easier by my anger at her walkout.
When I entered the trailer, she was lying on the floor, faking exhaustion.
"Hi," I said, tired from work. "Thanks a lot for the help."
No response.
"Just what I needed, after a really tough flight."
Nothing. She lay on the floor, refusing to say a word.
Probably noticed I was a little distant, reading my mind again, and got mad.
Silence-games are silly, I thought. If something's bothering her, if she doesn't like what I'm doing, why doesn't she just come out and say so? She won't talk, I won't talk.
I stepped over her body on the floor, turned on the air-conditioner. Then I stretched out on the couch, opened a soaring book and read, thinking that there is not much future for us if she insists on acting this way.
After a time she stirred. Still later she rose, infinite weariness, dragged herself to the bathroom. I heard the pumps running water. She was wasting the water because she knew I had to haul every drop of it from town, fill the trailer tanks myself. She wanted to make work for me.
The water stopped.
I put down the book. The wonder of her, and of our life together in the desert, was it corroding in acids from my
past? Can't I learn to forgive her thorns? She misunderstood, and she was hurt. I can be big enough to forgive, can't I?
No sound from the bathroom; the poor thing is probably sobbing.
I walked to the little door, knocked twice.
"I'm sorry, wookie," I said. "I forgive you. . . ."
"RRREEEEEAAAAAARGHHH! A beast exploded, inside. Bottles disintegrated against the wood; jars, brushes, hair-dryers hurled at walls.
"YOU GODDAMN (SMASH!) SON OF A BITCH! I (VLAMSHATTR!) HATE YOU! I NEVER WANT TO SEE YOU EVER AGAIN! I'M (THAKL!) LYING ON THE FLOOR PASSED OUT GODDAMNED NEARLY DEAD FROM HEAT-STROKE WORKING ON YOUR DAMNED GLIDER AND YOU LET ME LIE THERE WHILE YOU READ A BOOK I COULD HAVE DIED YOU DON'T CARE! (VASH-TINKL-THOK!) WELL I DON'T CARE EITHER RICHARD GODDAMN BACH!! GET OUT GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE AND LEAVE ME ALONE, YOU SELFISH . . . PIG!" (SVASH!)
Never; had anyone; in my life; talked that way; to me. Nor had I seen anyone act like that. She was breaking things, in there!
Disgusted, furious, I slammed from the trailer, ran to the Meyers, parked in the sun. The heat was relentless as ants swarming; I barely noticed. What is the matter with her? For her sake I've given up my Perfect Woman! What a fool I've been!
When I was barnstorming, my cure for crowdophobia was simple: get away from crowds at once, fly off and be
alone. So effective a fix was it that I began using it for per-sophobia, which it cured equally well. Anyone I didn't like, I'd leave, nor thereafter a word or thought of them.
Most of the time it works perfectly-leaving is an instant cure for whomever ails you. Except, of course, on the one-in-two-billion chance that the whomever that ails you happens to be your soulmate.
It felt like I was locked on a rack and stretched. I wanted to run, run, run. Jump in the plane start the engine don't check the weather don't check nothing just take off point the nose any direction, firewall that throttle and GO! Land somewhere, anywhere, fuel, start the engine, take off and GO!
Nobody has the right to shout at me! One time, you shout at me. And you never get another chance because I am permanently and forever gone. Slam-clank done and finished and through!
Yet there I stayed, fingers on the blistering handle of the airplane door.
My mind, this time, didn't allow running.
My mind nodded, OK, OK ... so she's mad at me. She's got a right to be mad at me. I've done something thoughtless again.
I set off walking into the desert, walking to cool my rage, my hurt.
This is one of my tests. I'll prove I'm learning if I don't run away. We have no real problem. She's just a little . . . more expressive, than I am.
I walked for a while, till I remembered from survival training that people can die, out too long in this sun.
Had SHE been too long in the sun? Had she collapsed not from spite but from heat?
Temper and hurt vanished. Leslie had fainted from the heat, and I had called it faking! Richard, can you be that much a fool?
I hurried toward the trailer. On the way I saw a desert flower unlike any we'd seen, quickly dug it from the sand, wrapped it in a page from my notebook.
When I entered, she was lying on the bed, sobbing.
"I'm sorry, wookie," I said quietly, stroking her hair. "I'm very sorry. I didn't know . . ."
She didn't respond.
"I found a flower ... I brought you a flower from the desert. Do you think it wants water?"
She sat up, wiped her tears, examined the little plant gravely.
"Yes. It wants water."
I brought a cup for the plant to be in, and a glass of water for it to drink.
"Thank you for the flower," she said after a minute. "Thank you for the apology. And Richard, try to remember: Anyone you want to keep in your life-never take them for granted!"
Friday afternoon late, she came down happy from a flight, bright and lovely; she had stayed in the air more than three hours, landed not because she couldn't find lift, but because another pilot needed the plane. She kissed me, glad and hungry, telling me what she had learned.
I tossed a salad, listening to her, stirred it in the air over its bowl, dished it into two parts.
"I watched your landing again," I said. "Like Mary
Moviestar for the camera. Your touchdown was light as a sparrow!"
"Don't I wish," she said. "I had full spoilers all the way down final approach or I would have rolled on into the sagebrush. Bad judgment!"
She was proud of her touchdown, though, I could tell. When she was praised, she often switched the subject to something alongside not quite perfect to spread the shock of the compliment, make it easier to accept.
This is the time, I thought, to tell her. "Wook, I think I'm going to take off for a while."
She knew at once what I was saying, looked at me frightened, gave me a door to change my mind last minute by speaking two levels at once:
"Don't bother taking off now. The thermals are all cold."
Instead of turning back, I plunged ahead. "I don't mean take off in a sailplane. I mean leave. After the race tomorrow; how does that sound? I need to be alone for a while. You do, too, don't you?"
She put down her fork, sat back on the couch. "Where are you going?"
"I'm not sure. Doesn't matter. Anywhere. Just need to be alone for a week or two, I think." Please wish me well, I thought. Please say you understand, that you need to be alone, yourself, maybe go back and shoot a TV thing in Los Angeles?
She looked at me, her face a question. "Except for a few problems, we've been having the happiest time in our lives, we're happier than we've ever been, and you suddenly want to run off to anywhere and be alone? Is it alone, or do you need to be with one of your women so you can start over new with me?"
"That's not fair, Leslie! I promised changes, I've made changes. I promised no other women, there aren't any other women. If our test wasn't working out, if I wanted to see somebody else, I'd tell you. You know I'm cruel enough to tell you."
"Yes, I do." There was no expression in the lovely planes and shadows of her face . . . her mind was sorting, sorting, fast as light: reasons, suggestions, options, alternatives.
I thought she should have expected this, sooner or later. My cynical destroyer, that viper in my mind, doubted our experiment would last longer than two weeks, and we'd been living in the trailer six months tomorrow, not a day apart. Since my divorce, I thought, never had I stayed six days with one woman. Even so, time for a break.