The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story (21 page)

If it weren't for Leslie, I'd have left for Antarctica or Botzwezoland, so disgusted was I with money, with taxes, with accounts and ledgers. Any paper with numbers on it, I wanted to shred.

" 'Bye," she said, as I got into the car.

" 'Bye?"

"You're gone again, Richard. 'Bye."

"Sorry," I said. "Think I ought to apply for Antarctican citizenship?"

"Not yet," she said. "After this meeting, maybe. Unless you can come up with a million dollars plus interest."

"I can't get over it! How could I owe that much in taxes?"

"Maybe you didn't," she said, "but the deadline was missed; it's too late to argue it now. Damn, that makes me mad! How I wish I could have been with you before it was too late. They could at least have told you!"

"I knew on other levels, wook," I said. "I think part of me wanted the whole thing wiped out. It wasn't working, it wasn't making me happy."

"I'm surprised that you know that."

Richard! I thought. You know nothing of the sort! Of course it was making you happy! Didn't you have all the airplanes . . . don't you still? And your perfect woman? Of course it made you happy!

What a lie. The empire was a shambles, money plastered around like wallpaper stuck up by amateurs, myself the worst. I had a taste of empire life, and it was fluff, whipped cream, with a spoon of sweet-arsenic neglect for flavor. Now the poison was at work.

"That's not the way it had to be," she said. "You would have done so much better not to have hired anybody. Just gone on and been your same old serf."

"I was my same old self. I had more toys, but I was still me. My same old self never could do bookkeeping."

"m," she said.

We settled around the desk of John Marquart, the attorney Leslie had hired when I was in Spain. Cups of hot chocolate were brought in, as though somebody knew it was going to be a long meeting. She opened her attache case, set out her lists of notes, but the lawyer spoke to me.

"You filed a capital loss against ordinary income," he said. "Is that the problem, in a nutshell?"

"I think the problem is I hired a financial wizard who knew less about money than I did, which is less than zero," I told him. "The money he was investing, it wasn't numbers on paper, it was real money and it-pouf-disintegrated in the market. The IRS doesn't have a square on the tax-form for pouf. I think that's it, in a nutshell. To be honest, I don't know what the guy filed. I was sort of hoping you'd tell me

answers instead of problems. It's me hiring you, after all, and this is supposed to be your specialty. ..."

Marquart looked at me odder and odder, reached for his coffee, peered over the cup as though he hoped it might protect him from a raving client.

Leslie stepped in then, and I heard her voice in my mind, asking me please to sit there and be quiet, if possibly I could.

"As I understand it," she said, "the damage is done. Richard's tax attorney-the tax attorney his financial manager got for him-didn't answer the IRS in time, so the government won a judgment by default. Now it wants a million dollars. Richard doesn't have a million dollars in cash to pay them at once. So the question is, can he arrange to make payments? Can he give them a lump-sum down payment, and promise the rest as he liquidates his assets? Will they give him time to do it?"

The attorney turned to her with evident relief. "I don't see why not. That's fairly common in these cases; it's called an Offer in Compromise. Did you bring the figures I wanted?"

I watched her, marveled that she'd be so much at home in a law office.

She set labeled lists on his desk. "Here's Cash Available Now, this one is Assets To Be Liquidated, and here's his Income Projection Over The Next Five Years," she said. "Between these and new income, the figures show he can pay the full amount in two years, three at the most."

While I was sailing, I thought, Leslie was researching tax-payment schemes! I'm being wiped out, not getting rich- why does she care so much?

Soon the two of them were analyzing my problems as though I weren't in the room. I wasn't. I felt like a mosquito

in a bank vault ... I could find no way to break through the utter heavy dullness of liens, assets, liquidations, payment schedules. The sun was shining outside. We could go for a walk, buy ch@colate-chip cookies. . . .

"I'd rather structure the payout over the next five years, instead of three," Marquart was saying, "in case his income isn't quite what you project. If he can pay it sooner, that's fine, but he'll have a heavy current-tax burden with this kind of income, and we want to be sure we aren't making new problems for him down the road."

Leslie nodded, and they talked on, the two of them working out details. A calculator clucked numbers on the desk between them; Leslie's notes marched in order down a blue-lined tablet.

"I can see it from their point of view," she said at the end. "They don't care about the people Richard hired, or whether he knew or didn't know what was going on. They want their money. Now they'll get it, with interest, if they'll just wait a little. Do you think they'll wait?"

"It's a good offer," the attorney said. "I feel sure they'll accept it."

By the time we left, the disaster had been tamed. Once, I had found a million dollars in my account with a single telephone call; to come up with such a modest sum over five whole years, that would be simple. Sell the house in Florida, sell the airplanes, all but one or two of them, get the film produced . . . simple.

And now I have Leslie and a professional Los Angeles tax attorney to keep order in my life, no slender twigs to break under pressure.

There had been a storm at sea; I had fallen in way over

my head. This woman had jumped into the waves and pulled me out, saved my financial life.

We left the lawyer's office full of hope.

"Leslie?" I said, holding the door open for her as we left the building.

"Yes, Richard?" she said.

"Thank you."

"You're welcome, wookie," she said. "You're quite welcome!"

twenty-nine

"CAN YOU come over, wookie?" Her voice sounded weak, on the phone. "I'm afraid I need your help."

"I'm sorry, Leslie, I can't make it tonight."

Why was it so uncomfortable, to tell her? I know the rules. I made the rules. We couldn't have been friends without them. Still it was hard to say, even on the telephone.

"Wook, I'm feeling terrible," she said. "I'm dizzy and sick and I'd feel so much better if you were here. Won't you be my doctor, come heal me?"

The part of me that wished to rescue and heal I pushed into the closet and locked the door. "Can't make it. I have a date tonight. Tomorrow's fine, if you'd like."

"You have a date? You are going out with a date when I am sick and need you? Richard, I can't believe . . ."

Must I tell her again? Our friendship is nonpossessive, open, based on our mutual freedom to be away from each

other whenever we wish, for any reason or for no reason. Now I was frightened. It had been so long since I had seen any other woman in Los Angeles, I felt us slipping into a taken-for-granted marriage, felt us forgetting that we needed our apart-times as well as together-times.

The date had to stand. If I felt obligated to be with Leslie just because I was in Los Angeles, something was wrong with our friendship. If I had lost my freedom to be with whomever I chose, bur purpose together had ended. I prayed for her to understand.

"I can be with you till seven. ..." I said.

"Till seven? Richard, don't you hear me? I need you. I need some help from you, this time!"

Why was she pressuring me? The very best thing for her to say would be that she'd get along just fine and that she hoped I'd have a good time. To do otherwise, doesn't she know? That's a fatal mistake! I will not be pressured, I will not be possessed by anyone, anywhere, under any conditions!

"I'm sorry. Wish I'd known earlier. Now it's too late to cancel. That won't work for me, I don't want to do that."

"Does she matter so much to you," she said, "whoever she is? What's her name?"

Leslie was jealous!

"Deborah."

"Does Deborah matter so much to you that you can't call her and say that your friend Leslie is ill and is it all right to postpone your hot date till tomorrow or next week or next year sometime? Is she so important to you that you can't call her and say that?"

There was anguish in her voice. But she was asking for

something that I couldn't give without destroying my independence. And her sarcasm wasn't helping, either.

"No," I said. "She's not that important. It's the principle she stands for-that we're free to be with whomever we choose. ..."

She was crying. "Damn your freedom, Richard Bach! I work like hell to save your goddamn empire from being Swept completely away, I can't sleep for worry there's some way I haven't thought of, nobody's thought of ... to save you . . . because you matter so much . . . I'm so tired from it I can hardly stand up and you won't be with me when I need you because you have a date with some Deborah you've hardly seen, she stands for some goddamn principle?"

I spoke over walls a yard thick, solid steel. "That's right."

There was a long silence on the telephone.

Her voice changed. Jealousy gone, anguish gone, she was calm and quiet.

"Goodbye, Richard. Enjoy your date."

While I was saying thank you for understanding how important . . . she hung up.

thirty

SHE DIDN'T answer her phone the next day or the next. The day after that, this letter:

Wednesday evening 12/21 Dearest Richard,

It's so difficult to know how and where to begin. I've been thinking long and hard through many ideas trying to find a way. . . .

I finally struck one little thought, a musical metaphor, through which I have been able to think clearly and find understanding, if not satisfaction, and I want to share it with you. So please bear with me while we have yet another music lesson.

The most commonly used form for large classical works is sonata form. It is the basis of almost all symphonies and concertos. It consists of three main sections: the exposition

or opening, in which little ideas, themes, bits and pieces are set forth and introduced to each other; the development, in which these tiny ideas and motifs are explored to their fullest, expanded, often go from major (happy) to minor (unhappy) and back again, and are developed and woven together in greater complexity until at last there is: the recapitulation, in which there is a restatement, a glorious expression of the full, rich maturity to which the tiny ideas have grown through the development process.

How does this apply to us, you may ask, if you haven't already guessed.

I see us stuck in a never-ending opening. At first, it was the real thing, and sheer delight. It is the part of a relationship in which you are at your best: fun, charming, excited, exciting, interesting, interested. It is a time when you're most comfortable and most lovable because you do not feel the need to mobilize your defenses, so your partner gets to cuddle a warm human being instead of a giant cactus. It is a time of delight for both, and it's no wonder you like openings so much you strive to make your life a series of them.

But beginnings cannot be prolonged endlessly; they cannot simply state and restate and restate themselves. They must move on and develop-or die of boredom. Not so, you say. You must get away, have changes, other people, other places so you can come back to a relationship as if it were new, and have constant new beginnings.

We moved cm to a protracted series of reopenings. Some were caused by business separations that were necessary, but unnecessarily harsh and severe for two so close as we.

Some were manufactured by you in order to provide still more opportunities to return to the newness you so desire.

Obviously, the development section is anathema to you. For it is where you may discover that all you have is a collection of severely limited ideas that won't work no matter how much creativity you bring to them or-even worse for you -that you have the makings of something glorious, a symphony, in which case there is work to be done: depths must be plumbed, and separate entities carefully woven together, the better to glorify themselves and each other. I suppose it is analogous to that moment in writing when a book idea must be/cannot be run from.

We have undoubtedly gone further than you ever intended to go. And we have stopped far short of what I saw as our next logical and lovely steps. I have seen development with you continually arrested, and have come to believe that we will never make more than sporadic attempts at all our learning potential, our amazing similarities of interest, no matter how many years we may have-because we will never have unbroken time together. So the growth we prize so highly and know is possible becomes impossible.

We have both had a vision of something wonderful that awaits us. Yet we cannot get there from here. I am faced with a solid wall of defenses and you have the need to build more and still more. I long for the richness and fullness of further development, and you will search for ways to avoid it as long as we're together. Both of us are frustrated; you unable to go back, I unable to go forward, in a constant state of struggle, with clouds and dark shadows over the limited time you allow us.

To feel your constant resistance to me, to the growth of this something wonderful, as if I and it were something horrible -to experience the various forms the resistance takes, some of them cruel-often causes me pain on one level or another.

I have a record of our time together, and have taken a long and honest look at it. It has saddened me, and even shocked me, but it has been helpful in facing the truth. I look back to the days in early July, and the seven weeks that followed, as our only truly happy period. That was the opening, and it was beautiful. Then there were the separations with their fierce and, to me, inexplicable cutoffs-and the equally fierce avoidance-resistance on your returns.

Away and apart or together and apart, it is too unhappy. I am watching me become a creature who cries a lot, a creature who even must cry a lot, for it almost seems that pity is necessary before kindness is possible. And I know I have not come this far in life to become pitiful.