"You are thinking something very important," she said with an important frown at me.
"Yes. Right. You are absolutely right." I knew her so well in that moment, and liked her so well, that I told her what it was. "I was thinking that it is the very difference between us that makes you the best friend I have."
"Oh?"
"We have a little in common-chess, hot fudge, we want to get the film made-but we're so different in every other way that you don't threaten me the way other women do.
Ill
With them there's the hope of marriage, sometimes, in their minds. One marriage was enough, for me. Never again."
The line inched forward. We'd be inside the theater in less than twenty minutes.
"It's the same with me," she said, and laughed. "I don't mean to threaten you, but that's another thing we have in common. I was divorced a long time ago. I dated hardly at all before I was married, so after my divorce, I went out on dates dates dates! It's impossible to get to know someone that way, don't you think?"
We can get to know them a little, I thought, but better to hear what she thinks.
"I have dated some of the brightest, most glamorous, wealthy men in the world," she said, "but they didn't make me happy. Most of them pull up at your door in a car bigger than your house, they're wearing the right clothes and they take you to the right restaurant where all the other right people have gone, and you get your picture taken and it all looks so glamorous and fun and right! I kept thinking, I'd rather go to a good restaurant than the right one, wear clothes I like instead of what designers thought was In, that year. Most of all, I'd rather have a quiet talk or go for a walk in the woods. Different values, I guess.
"We have to deal in a currency that's meaningful to us," she said, "or all the success in the world won't feel good, it won't bring happiness. If someone promised they'd pay you a million scrunchies to walk across the street, and scrunchies had no meaning for you, would you cross the street? If they promised a hundred million scrunchies, so what?
"I felt that way about most of the things highly valued in Hollywood-as if I were dealing in scrunchies. I had all the
right things, yet somehow I felt empty, I couldn't seem to care. What's a scrunchy worth? I wondered. All the while, I was afraid if I kept on dating, sooner or later I'd hit the jackpot worth millions of scrunchies."
"What was that?"
"I'd marry Mr. Right; wear the right clothes for the rest of my life, play hostess to all the right people at the right parties: his parties. He'd be my trophy and I'd be his. Soon we'd be complaining that the meaning had gone out of our marriage, we weren't as close as we should be-when we'd never had meaning or closeness to begin with.
"Two things I do value a lot, intimacy and the capacity for joy, didn't seem to be on anyone else's list. I felt like the stranger in a strange land, and decided I'd better not marry the natives.
"That's another thing I quit. Dating. And now . . ." she said, ". . . want to know a secret?"
"Tell me."
"Now I'd rather be with my friend Richard than on a date with anybody!"
"Awww . . ."I said. I hugged her for that, a shy one-arm hug.
Leslie was unique in my life: a beautiful sister whom I trusted and admired, with whom I spent night after night over a chessboard, but never a moment in bed.
I told her then about my perfect woman, how well the idea worked for me. I sensed she didn't agree, but she listened with interest. Before she could respond, the line moved into the theater.
Inside the lobby, out of the cold, I took my arm from around her and didn't touch her again.
The movie we saw that night was one we were to watch eleven times before the end of the year. In that film was a large furry blue-eyed creature from another planet, copilot of a battered spaceship. The creature was called a wookie. We loved him as though we were two wookies ourselves, with our own idol on-screen.
The next time I flew to Los Angeles, Leslie met me at the airport. When I was down from the cockpit she handed me a box, ribbon and bow tied around.
"I know you hate presents," she said, "so I got you one."
"I never give you presents," I gruffed pleasantly. "That's my present to you: I never give you presents. Why. . . ?"
"Open it," she said.
"OK, this one time. I'll open it, but . . ."
"Open it," she said impatiently.
The present was a latex-and-creature-fur wookie-mask, a pullover hat-to-the-neck complete with eye-holes and partly bared teeth-a perfect likeness of our motion-picture hero. "Leslie. . . !" I said. I loved it.
"Now you can tickle all your girlfriends with your soft furry face. Put it on."
"Right here at the airport in public you want me to. . . ?"
"Oh, put it on! For me. Put it on."
She charmed the ice out of me. I put on the mask, to please her, gave her a wookie-roar or two, and she laughed till she cried. Behind the mask I laughed too, and thought how much I cared for her.
"Come on, wookie," she said, brushing tears, impulsively taking my hand. "We'll be late."
True to her word, she drove us from the airport to MGM, where she was finishing a television film. Along the way I
noticed people looking frightened at me in the car, and took off the mask.
For one who had never been on a sound-stage, it was the same as being invited to the moon Complexity, that turned about the planet Deadline. Cables and stands and booms and cameras and dollies and tracks and ladders and catwalks and lights ... a ceiling so encrusted with enormous heavy lights I swore the beams would crack overhead. Men were everywhere, wrestling equipment into position, adjusting it, or perching in the midst of it waiting for the next ringing bell or flashing light.
She emerged from her dressing room in a gold Iam6 gown, or the better part of one, and glided to me across the cables and traps in the floor as though they were patterns on a rug. "Can you see OK from here?"
"Sure can." I squirmed in the stares of stagehands watching her; she was oblivious to them. I was nervous, self-conscious, a prairie-horse in a tropic jungle; she was at home. It felt to me as if the temperature was in the low hundreds; she was cool and fresh and bright.
"How do you do it? How can you act, with all this going on, all of us watching? I thought acting was sort of a private thing, somehow. ..."
"COMING THROUGH! HEADS UP!" The two men were rushing a tree onstage, and had she not touched me on the shoulder to step aside, I would have been branched through the side of a painted street.
She looked at me and at what I thought was chaos around us. "There's going to be an awful lot of waiting around while they're setting up the special effects," she said. "I hope you won't be bored."
"Bored? It's fascinating! And you're just as cool-aren't you the littlest bit nervous, to do it right?"
An electrician on the catwalk above us looked down at her and called across the ceiling, "Sure can see those mountains clear today, George! Beautiful! Oh, hi, Miss Parrish, how you doin', down there?"
She looked up and pressed the top of the gold lame to her chest. "Go on, you guys," she laughed, "Is that all you have to do?"
The electrician winked at me, shook his head. "Workman's compensation!"
She continued without so much as airown. "The producer's nervous. They're a day and a half behind. We might stay late tonight to make it up on overtime. If you get tired and I'm in the middle of something, run on back to the hotel and I'll call you later, if it's not too late."
"Doubt I'll get tired. Don't let me talk to you if I shouldn't be, if you want to study your lines. . . ."
She smiled. "No problem," she said, and glanced toward the set. "I ought to get in there now. Have fun."
Next to the camera, a fellow shouted, "First team! Places, please!"
Why wasn't she at least a little tense about remembering her lines? I'm lucky to remember words I've written myself, .without reading them over and over again. Why wasn't she nervous, with s
o much to remember?
The shooting began, one scene and then another, then one more. Not once did she look at her script. I felt as if I were a friendly spirit, watching the role she played in the drama onstage. She didn't miss a line. Watching her at work was watching a friend who was at the same time a stranger. I felt
a curious warm apprehension-my own sister, centered in lights and cameras!
Does it change the way I feel about her, I thought, to see her there?
Yes. There is something magical going on. She has skills and powers I haven't learned, and never will. I wouldn't have liked her less if she weren't an actress, but I did like her more because she was. There has always been electricity for me, pleasure hi meeting people who can do things that I can't. That Leslie was one of them pleasured me indeed.
Next day in her office, I asked a favor. "Can I borrow your telephone? I want to call the Writers' Guild. ..."
"Five five oh, one thousand," she said absently, pushing the phone toward me as she read a financing proposal from New York.
"What's that?"
She looked up. "The telephone number of the Writers' Guild."
"You know the number?"
"M-hm."
"How come you know it?"
"I know lots of numbers." She went back to the proposal.
"What does that mean, 'I know lots of numbers'?"
"I just know lots of numbers," she said sweetly.
"What if I wanted to call . . . Paramount Studios?" I said suspiciously.
"Four six three, oh one hundred."
I squinted at her, sideways. "A good restaurant?"
"Magic Pan's good. It has a no-smoking section. Two seven four, five two two two."
777
I reached for a telephone book, turned to a listing. "Screen Actors Guild," I said.
"Eight seven six, three oh three oh." She was right.
I began to understand. "You haven't . . . Leslie, the script yesterday, you don't have a photographic memory, do you? You haven't memorized . . . the entire telephone book?"
"No. It's not a photographic memory," she said. "I don't see, I just remember. My hands remember numbers. Ask me for a number and watch my hands."
I opened the huge book, turned pages.
"City of Los Angeles, Office of the Mayor?"
"Two three three, one four five five."
The fingers of her right hand moved as though she were dialing a push-button telephone in reverse, taking numbers off instead of putting them in.
"Dennis Weaver, the actor."
"One of the sweetest human beings in Hollywood. His home number?"
"Yes."
"I promised I'd never give it out. How about The Good Life, his wife's health-food store?"
"OK."
"Nine eight six, eight seven five oh."
I looked up the number; of course she was right again. "Leslie, you're scaring me!"
"Don't be scared, wookie. It's just a funny thing that happens with me. I memorized music when I was little, and every license plate in town. When I came to Hollywood, I memorized scripts, dance routines, phone numbers, schedules, conversations, anything. The number of your pretty yellow jet airplane is N One Five Five X. Your hotel number
is two seven eight, three three four four; you are staying in room two one eight. When we left the studio last night you said, 'Remind me to tell you about my sister in show business.' I said, 'Can I remind you now?' and you said, 'I think you might as well because I really want to tell you about her.' I said, 'Do I know . . .'" She broke off remembering and laughed at my astonishment. "You're looking at me as if I'm a freak, Richard."
"You are. But I like you anyway."
"I like you too," she said.
Late that afternoon, I was working on a television screenplay, rewriting the last few pages, knocking them out on Leslie's typewriter while she slipped into the garden to care for her flowers. Even there, so diflerent we were. Flowers are pretty little things, all right, but to put so much time into them, to have them depending on you to water them and feed them and wash them and whatever else flowers need . . . dependence is not for me. I'd never be a gardener, she'd never be otherwise.
There among the plants in her office were shelves of books reflecting mists of the rainbow that she was, there above her desk the quotes and ideas that mattered to her:
Our country right or wrong. WHEN RIGHT, TO BE KEPT RIGHT; WHEN WRONG, TO BE PUT RIGHT.
-Carl Schurz.
No smoking, here or anywhere. Hedonism is no fun. I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.
-Thomas Jefferson. Suppose they gave a war, and no one came?
The last was a quote from herself. She had it printed as a bumper-sticker, and then it had been picked up by the peace movement and spread fast as television around the world.
I studied those from time to time between paragraphs of my script, knowing her better with every spade-crunch, scis-sor-snip, rake-scratch from her garden, the muffled hiss of water through pipes and hose, gently slaking the thirst of her flower family. She knew and loved each separate blossom.
Different different different, I thought, finishing the last paragraph, but my, I admire that woman! Have I ever, for all our differences, had a friend like her?
I stood and stretched, walked through the kitchen and the side door into her garden. Her back was to me as she watered the flower-beds, the long hair pulled into a work-time ponytail. I walked quietly and stood a few feet behind her. She was singing softly to her cat.
"You are a pussycat, oh yes you are/my fluffalorium, my little star/and if you leave me, don't go far. ..."
Her cat clearly enjoyed the song, but it was too intimate a moment for me to be standing there unseen, so I spoke as if I had just arrived.
"How are your flowers doing?"
She whirled about, hose in hand, eyes blue-saucer fright that she wasn't alone in her private garden. The nozzle of the hose was pointed chest-high, but it was set to drench a cone several feet in diameter, from my mouth to my belt. Neither of us said a word, neither moved while the hose poured water into me as though I were a tall fire escaped.
She was stricken with fright, first from my sudden words, then from what the water was doing to my coat and shirt. I stood without moving, because I thought it unseemly to
scream and run, because I hoped that before long she might decide to turn the hose in some other direction than point-blank on my city-clothes.
As well she held a sandblaster, the scene is so clearly etched today ... the sunlight, the garden around us, her eyes enormous astonishment at this polar bear broken into her flower-patch, a hose her only defense. If you water a polar bear long enough, she must have been thinking, it will turn and dash away.
I didn't feel like a polar bear, except for the ice-water spraying over me, soaking in. I saw her horror, finally, at what she was doing to what was not a polar bear but a business-partner friend and guest in her home. Though she was still frozen aghast, she gained control of her hose-hand and slowly turned the water away.
"Leslie!" I said into a dripping silence, "it was only me. . . ."
Then she was crying with laughter, her eyes helpless merry blurred shock, imploring forgiveness. She fell laughing, sobbing, against my coat, which squished water from the pockets.
fifteen
"JILL CALLED today from Florida," said Leslie, moving her chesspeople to their places for another game. "Is she jealous?"
"Not possible," I said. "Jealousy is not part of my agreement with any woman."
I frowned to myself. After all these years, I still have to mutter "Queen-on-Her-Own-Color" to set my pieces right.
"She wanted to know if you have some special girlfriend out here, you've been coming to Los Angeles so much lately."
"Oh, come on," I said. "You're not serious."
"Honest."
"What did you tell her?"
"I told her not to worry. I told her that when you're here, you don't go
out with anybody, you spend all your time with me. I think she felt better, but maybe you ought to go over your no-jealousy agreement with her one more time to be sure."
She left the table for a minute to puzzle over her tape collection. "I have Brahms's First by Ozawa, by Ormandy and by Mehta. Any preferences?"
"Whatever will be most distracting to your chess."
She considered for a moment, chose a tape and slid it into the intricate electronics of her sound-system.
"Inspiring," she corrected. "For distraction, I have other tapes."
We played for half an hour, a tough game from the first move. She had just reread her Modern Ideas in the Chess Opening, which would have powdered me had I not finished Chess Traps, Pitfalls and Swindles two days earlier. We played nearly to a draw; then a brilliant move on my part, and the game teetered in the balance.
As far as I could see, any move but one would be disaster. Her only escape was an obscure pawn advance, to control the hidden square around which I had built a towering delicate strategy. Without that square, my effort would collapse in rubble.
The part of me that takes chess seriously hoped she would see the move, demolish my position and force me to fight for my hand-carved wooden life (I play best when my back is to the wall). Yet I couldn't imagine how I would recover if she blocked this scheme.
The part of me that knew it was just a game hoped she wouldn't see it, because it was such a pretty, such an elegant strategy I had coming up. A Queen sacrifice, and five moves to checkmate.
I closed my eyes for a minute, while she considered the board, opened them, struck head-on by a remarkable thought.
There in front of me was a table and a window full of color; beyond, the twilight flickerings of Los Angeles, the last of June fading into the sea. Silhouetted against twinkles and color was Leslie misted in thought, as still as a warned deer over a chessboard melted honey and cream in the shadows of an evening still to come. A warm soft vision, I thought. Where did it come from, who's responsible for it?
A quick little trap of words, a net of ink and pocket notebook over the idea before it vanished.
From time to time, I wrote, it's fun to close our eyes, and in that dark say to ourselves, "I am the sorcerer, and when I open my eyes I shall see a world that I have created, and for which I and only I am completely responsible." Slowly then, eyelids open like curtains lifting stage-center. And sure enough, there's our world, just the way we've built it.