"Won't they be surprised!" Leslie reached forward, her fingers touched the gate.
In that instant I froze, time stopped. Her hand on the wood, new ring gleaming gold, the sight of it burst down through my mind, vaporized thirty years in the blink of an eye.
The kid, had known! The kid I was had stood at this gate and known that the woman that he was born to love would one day be here. Not a gate in space, that moment, the white wood was a gate in time. For the flash of an instant I saw him, standing in the dark of that deep past, standing open-mouthed at the sight of Leslie radiant in the sunlight. The kid had known!
My wife pushed the gate open, ran to hug my dad and stepmother.
The boy went transparent and vanished, eyes goggling wonder, mouth still open, and the moment was gone.
Don't forget! I shouted wordless, across decades. Never forget this moment!
forty-two
WE undressed that night in our hotel room, I told her about the gate, about how my life had been shaken those years ago by her lightest of touches on that wood. She listened, smoothing her blouse neatly to a hanger.
"Why did you have to hold me away for so long?" she said. "What were you afraid of?"
I laid my shirt on a chair for a moment, nearly forgetting to be as neat as she, then reached for a hanger. "Afraid I'd change, of course. I was protecting my known, my almost-right routine."
"And so the armor?" she said.
"Well, the defenses, yes."
"Defenses. Nearly every man I knew, buried in defenses," she said. "That's why even the beautiful ones were so damned unattractive!"
"They drove you away. I did, too."
"You didn't," she said, and when I protested with facts, admitted. "You almost drove me away. But I knew the cold thing I saw wasn't you."
I drew her into bed, breathed her golden hair.
"What a lovely body! You're so ... impossibly lovely, and you're my wife! How can those fit together?"
I kissed the corner of her mouth, ever so lightly. "Goodbye, hypothesis!"
"Goodbye?"
"I had an hypothesis, almost a theory, well on its way before you stopped my research: beautiful women, they don't much care for sex."
She laughed in surprise. "Oh, Richard, you're not serious! Really?"
"Really." I was caught in contrary pressures. I wanted to tell her, and I wanted to touch her, too. Time for both, I thought, time for both.
"Do you know what's wrong with your hypothesis?" she said.
"Nothing, I don't think. There are exceptions and you're one, thank the Maker, but generally it's true: beautiful women get so tired of being seen as sex-things, when they know they matter so much more than that, their switches turn off."
"Nice, but no," she said.
"Why not?"
"Sexist goose. Turn it around. 'I have a theory, Richard, that handsome men don't much care for sex.' "
"Nonsense! What are you getting at?"
"Listen: 'I'm defended like a fortress against handsome men, I'm cold to them, I keep them at arm's-length, don't
let them be a part of my life, and somehow it doesn't seem as if they enjoy sex as much as I want them to. . . .' "
"No wonder," I said, and in a flying shatter of broken conjecture knew what she was saying. "No wonder! If you weren't so cold to them, wookness, if you'd open up a little, let them know how you feel, what you think-none of us really handsome men wants to be treated as a sex-machine, after all! Now, if a woman shows us a little human warmth, there's a different story!"
She moved her body very close to mine. "Class?" she said. "What's the moral of this story? Richard?"
"Where intimacy is not, is not the finest sex," I said. "Is that the moral, teacher?"
"What a wise philosopher you are becoming!"
"And if one learned that, if one found someone whom one loved and admired and respected and for whom one had spent one's life looking, might one find the warmest bed of all? And even if the one that one found was a very beautiful woman, would one find that she might care a very great deal for sex with one, and might enjoy sweet carnality as much as one might, oneself?"
"Fully as much as one might, oneself," she laughed. "Could be, more!"
"Teacher!" I said. "No!"
"If you could be a woman, you might be surprised."
We newlyweds touched and talked through a night that made crumbling walls, collapsing empires, clashing with government and plunging into bankruptcy-that made those insignificant. One night of many, lifting from the past, arching through the present, shimmering into the future.
What matters most in every lifetime we choose? I thought. Can it be so simple as intimacy with one we love?
Except for the hours when we had been furious with each other in the desert, or collapsing in fatigue over the computers, there hummed a soft gh'mmering aura of sex over everything we did. The brief flash of an eye, a quick smile, a touch in passing, those were welcome events between us every day long.
One reason I had sought out beginnings, years before, was that I hated endings, hated the vanishment of the subtle electrics of sex. To my delight, with this one woman, voltages didn't fade. Gradually my wife became more beautiful, became ever more lovely to see and touch.
"It's all subjective, isn't it?" I said, lost in curves and golden light.
"Yes it is," she said, knowing what I thought. There was no technique to our telepathy, it just happened, often, that we knew each other's mind.
"Somebody else could look at us and say we hadn't changed," she said, "that we're still the same. But there is something about you that gets more and more attractive, to me!"
Exactly, I thought. If we weren't changing, to each other, we would get bored!
"Have we ended our beginning?" I said. "Or does it go on like this always?"
"Remember in your book, what the seagull said? Could be that's where you are: Now you're ready to fly up and begin to know the meaning of kindness and of love."
"He didn't say that. It was said to him."
She smiled. "Now it's being said to you."
forty-three
THE BANKRUPTCY court allowed us to stay in our little house as caretakers for a time, while we looked for a place to rent. Someplace farther north, someplace cheap. Then it was time to leave the Little Applegate Valley.
We walked inside, outside, saying goodbye together. Goodbye desk and timber-sale protest. Goodbye bed under skylight, where we watched the stars before we slept. Goodbye fireplace of stones we had carried one by one. Goodbye warm little house. Goodbye gardens that Leslie had imagined into flowered reality, that she had mixed and dug and planted and protected. Goodbye forests and animals we loved, and fought to save. Goodbye, we said.
When it came time to leave, she buried her face in my chest, her courage dissolved in tears.
"Our garden!" she sobbed. "I love our garden! And I love our little house and our wildplants and our deer-family and
the sun coming up over the forest. . . ." She cried as though she would never stop.
I held her, smoothed her hair. "It's all right, wookie," I murmured, "It's all right. It's just a house. The home is us. Wherever we go ... someday we'll build another house better than this one, and your gardens will be everywhere, fruit trees and tomato trees and flowers more than we ever dreamed of here. And we'll get to meet new wildplants and a new deer-family will come live near us. The place we're going will be even more beautiful, I promise!"
"But Richie, I love this place!"
She sobbed deeper and deeper within herself, till I helped her into the car and we drove away. The valley where we had lived dropped behind us, out of sight.
I didn't cry, for we had an unspoken agreement-only one of us goes off-duty at a time, one of us at a time exhausted or ill or injured, grief-stricken, dependent. I drove the car in silence, and at last Leslie cried herself to sleep against my shoulder.
We're free at last, I thought, turning north on the Interstate. We can start
over, and not from nothing. We can start over, knowing everything we've learned along the way! Principles of love and guidance and support and healing, those are working for us, even now.
Bankruptcy, losing the rights to the books, it may look like unjust disaster, Richard, but we know better than to believe appearances, don't we? Now's our chance to hold strong to what is, in spite of what seems.
Clean slate, no ties, no anchors-I've just been handed a chance to prove the power of my so-trusted Unseen! It's
Cosmic Law, I thought, unbreakable: Life never abandons life.
Lifting from the ruins of wealth is like lifting out of a dungeon in a light-balloon. Rough dark walls dropped from around us both; the most challenging, testing, difficult iron-bound years were falling away. Yet within those walls had grown the gold-and-rainbow answer to the barnstormer's search ... I had found the one person who mattered more to me than any other in the world, the restless search of decades had stopped at last.
This is the moment, right here as the hills of Oregon disappear in twilight, that any good writer would whisper, "The End."
forty-four
MOVED farther away north, started over in a house rented with Mary Moviestar's money, which Leslie now insisted was our money. How strange it felt, not to have a dime of my own!
She was as prudent and careful as I had been profligate. Prudence, thrift-qualities nowhere to be found on my list of requirements for a soulmate, yet such is the foresight I expect of the universe: one of a charmed pair must always supply what the other might lack.
What I had missed, from the moment of first attack by a heavyweight income, was simplicity. Unless one is ready in advance for the shock, sudden wealth buries one in complis-tiquesque multibranch crosswebulated tangleworks weight-freighted toward intricationary ponderositives. Simplicity, like quicksilver, disappears when it's squeezed.
Now simplicity shyly knocked on the jamb where the
door used to be. "Hi, Richard. Couldn't help notice your money's gone. Have you seen the sky, lately! Have a look at them clouds! Regard what happens when Leslie plants flowers, even in a rented garden! And isn't it beautiful to watch your wife come to work at her computer?"
Beautiful it was. On warm days, Leslie dressed in the simplest clothes: white sailcloth pants, a gossamer blouse to work next to me in our little office. It was lustful pleasure just to turn and ask her the right way to spell compatable. How I loved simplicity!
Not all pressures were gone, however. The time came at last when the trustee in bankruptcy, charged to liquidate all my former assets, sent us notice that he was ready to receive bids for the copyrights of my books. They were for sale, seven of them. Like anyone else, we could make a bid if we wished.
Our roles reversed. I was the cautious; Leslie, after months of waiting, the sudden spendthrift.
"Let's not offer much," I said. "Three of the books are out of print. Who's going to offer good money for that?"
"I don't know," she said. "I don't want to take any chances. I think we should offer every penny we have."
I caught my breath. "Every penny? How are we going to pay the rent; how are we going to live?"
"My parents said they'd lend us money," she said, "till we're on our feet again." Leslie was ferociously determined.
"Not borrow money, please. I can go back to work, now. There's a new book to write, I think."
She smiled. "I think so, too. Remember when you said your mission was done? Remember when you told me you could die anytime because you had said everything you had come to say?"
"I was a silly goose. I didn't have anything else to live for, then."
"Now you do?"
"Yes."
"Make sure you do," she said. "If you die, there are going to be two bodies on the floor! I'm not going to stay around here if you go."
"Well, there are going to be two bodies right quick if you spend our grocery-money buying old copyrights!"
"We'll manage. We can't let seven of your books go without even trying to save them!"
Around midnight, we compromised. We'd offer every penny we had, and borrow money from Leslie's parents to live on. The next morning before I could convince her it was too much, she sent the bid to the trustee.
The trustee sent notices to other prospects: Can you top this offer, for these copyrights?
The suspense, in our rented house, you could have cut it with an axe.
Weeks later, a telephone call.
She ran breathless up the stairs. "Wookie!" she cried. "We got 'em! We got 'em! The books, they're ours again!"
I hugged the air out of her, we screeched and shouted and jumped and laughed. I hadn't known it would matter so much to me, that our paper children had come home.
"What was the next closest bid?" I said.
She looked sheepish. "There were no other bids."
"Nobody else even BID? Ever?"
"No."
"Not even close! Hurray!"
"Not hurray," she said.
"Not hurray?"
"You were right! We shouldn't have bid so high. I've squandered our grocery money for the next hundred years!"
I hugged her again. "Not at all, little wookie. Your offer was so intimidating, nobody else even dared to bid, that's what happened! Had you bid lower, they would have moved right in and topped you by a nickel!"
At this she brightened, and so did a strange light over our future.
forty-five
M. N THOSE months aviation was bursting with the revolution of low-cost aircraft, and the first story I wrote on my clean slate was one that earned just enough money to buy us some food and an ultralight airplane kit, a flying machine from a company called Pterodactyl, Ltd. Soon as I heard its name, I liked the company, but it turned out Pterodactyl made the best ultralight for what I wanted to do: fly once more from hayfields and pastures, look down on clouds from the open air, for the fun of it.
What a delight to work with my hands again, building that machine! Aluminum tube and steel cable, bolts and rivets and fabric, an engine one-quarter the size of the Fleet's old Kinner. I finished it in a month, reading the instruction book step by step, following the photos and drawings in the box from the factory.
"What a cute little thing," Leslie had said when she first saw pictures of the Pterodactyl.
She said it again, in bigger letters, when ours stood completed on the grass, a giant edition of a child's model airplane, teetering like a silk-and-metal dragonfly on its lilypad.
It's so simple, I thought, why wasn't this machine invented forty years ago? No matter. It had been invented now, just in time for people shy of money and eager to get off the ground again.
With great respect for the unknown thing, and after much practice taxiing and many a ten-second flight skimming a borrowed pasture, I finally pushed full throttle and the power-kite launched up out of the grass, colors like a flame-and-sunshine Spirit of Flight, going home. Pterodactyl's president gave me a snowmobile suit to match the airplane . . . that season of year, without a cockpit, it was cold indeed.
There in the sky, the air! Wind and calm, mountains and valleys, grass and earth and rain and sweet ice air through me for the first time ever once again! I had stopped counting flying-hours at 8,000, stopped keeping record of the airplane-types I had flown at 125, yet this one gave me a pure pleasure of being in the air like no other I had flown.
It did require special cautions-by no means was it for flying in heavy weather, for instance-but in a calm there was nothing that could match it for delight. Flying done for the day, the Pterodactyl folded its wings, slipped into a long bag lifted on top of the car, came home to sleep in the yard.
The only thing wrong with the machine was that it carried one person only; I couldn't share the flying with Leslie.
"It's OK," she said. "I'm up there, too, when you fly. I can look down and see me waving when you fly over!"
She sat in the framework cockpit, ran its engine, tucked her hair into a crash-helmet and ta
xied the little kite around the pasture for fun, promising to fly it when she had time to learn.
It must have been the exhilaration of that first month's flying, but a night came not long after with a most unusual dream.
I flew the Pterodactyl, which had two seats instead of one, high over a misty silver bridge to land on a meadow-green slope by some huge meeting-place, an open-air auditorium. Wandered inside, still wearing the bright coveralls, sat down and waited, chin on my knees. I've never had a dream, I thought, in which I show up early for something that's not quite ready to happen. In a minute or two there was a sound behind me.
I turned, recognized him at once. Recognized me. An earlier me, looking lost, a me from five years gone, shelled around with yearnings turned to shields, wondering what this place could be.
An odd pleasure to see the man, I was swept with love for him. Yet I felt sorry for him at once; he was desperately alone and it showed. He wanted so much to ask and he dared so little to know. I stood up and smiled at him, remembering. He was a terror about time-contracts, never was he late.
"Hi, Richard," I said, off-handed as I could. "Not only punctual, you're early, aren't you?"
He was ill at ease, trying to place me. If you're not sure, I thought, why don't you ask?
I led him outside, knowing he'd be more at home near the airplane.
Every answer to his questions I had, answers to his pain and isolation, corrections for his mistakes. Yet the tools that worked enchantments in my hands, they'd be white-hot irons in his. What could I say?
I showed him the airplane, told him about the controls. Funny, I thought. Me telling him about flying, when I'm the one who hasn't flown anything beside the ultralight in years. He may be lonely, but he's a lot better airplane pilot than I am.
When he was settled in his seat, I called the propeller clear and started the engine. It was so quiet and different that for a moment he forgot why he had chosen to meet me, forgot the airplane was the background and not the focus of our dream.
"Ready?" I said, set for takeoff.
"Go."
How would I describe him? Game, I thought. The guy's going through the deceitful torture of sudden money, what it does to an innocent and his friends, and now the whole thing is blowing up around him, his world is coming apart. Yet this minute he's a kid with a toy, he likes airplanes so much. How easy it is to be compassionate, I thought, when it's ourselves we see in trouble.