The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story (22 page)

To be told that canceling your date to help me when I was in a state of crisis "wouldn't work for you" brought the truth crushing down on me with the force of an avalanche. Facing facts as honestly as I can, I know I cannot continue, no matter how much I might wish to do so; I cannot bend further.

I hope you will not see this as the breaking of an agreement, but rather the continuation of the many, many endings you have begun. I think it is something we both know must be. I must accept that I have failed in my effort to let you know the joys of caring.

Richard, my precious friend, this is said softly, even tenderly and lovingly. And the soft tones do not camouflage an underlying anger: they are real. There are no accusations, no blames or faults. I am simply trying to understand, and to stop the pain. I am stating what I have been forced to accept: that you and I are never going to have a development, much less the glorious climactic expression of a relationship grown to full blossom.

I have felt if anything in my life deserved departure from previously established patterns, going beyond all known limitations, this relationship did. I suppose I might be justified in feeling humiliated about the lengths to which I have gone to make it work. Instead, I feel proud of myself and glad to know I recognized the rare and lovely opportunity we had while we had it, and gave all I could, in the purest and highest sense, to preserve it. I am comforted by this now. In this awful moment of ending, I can honestly say I do not know of one other thing I might do to get us to that beautiful future we could have had.

Despite the pain, I'm happy to have known you in this special way, and will always treasure the time we've had together. I have grown with you, and learned much from you, and I know I have made major positive contributions to you. We are both better people for having touched one another.

At this late juncture, it occurs to me that a chess metaphor might also be useful. Chess is a game in which each party has its own singular objective even as it engages the other; a mid-game in which a struggle develops and intensifies and

bits and pieces of each side are lost, both sides diminished; an end-game in which one traps and paralyzes the other.

I think you see life as a chess game; I see it as a sonata. And because of these differences, both the king and the queen are lost, and the song is silenced.

I am still your friend, as I know you are mine. I send this with a heart full of the deep and tender love and high regard you know I have for you, as well as profound sorrow that an opportunity so filled with promise, so rare and so beautiful, had to go unfulfilled.

I stood looking out the window at nothing, noise roaring in my head.

She's wrong. Of course she's wrong. The woman doesn't understand who I am or how I think.

Too bad, I thought.

Then I crumpled her letter and threw it away.

thirty-one

AN HOUR later, nothing had changed outside the window.

Why do I lie to myself? I thought. She's right and I know she's right even if I never admit it, never think of her again.

Her story of the symphony, and of chess . . . why didn't I see those? I've always been so goddamned intelligent, except about taxes, so much more insightful than anybody who ever lived, how can she see these things when I can't? Am I not as bright as she? Yet if she's so smart, where's her system, her shield to keep her from pain? I've got my Perf . . .

DAMN your Perfect Woman! It's a half-ton peacock you've invented, flounced out weird colors fake feathers that will never fly! Your peacock might run around and flap its wings and screech instead of sing, but never never will it get

off the ground. You, terrified of marriage, do you know you've married that?

The picture of it, a little me in a wedding photo with a twenty-foot peacock, it was true! I was married to an idea that was wrong.

But the restriction of my freedom! If I stay with Leslie, I'll get bored!

About that moment I split into two different people: the me who had run things for so long, and a newcomer out to destroy him.

Boredom is the least of your worries, you son-of-a-bitch, said the newcomer. Can't you see she's smarter than you are, she knows worlds you're afraid to touch with a stick? Go ahead, stuff my mouth full of cotton and wall me away like you do every other part of you that dares say your almighty theories are wrong! You're free to do that, Richard. And you're free to spend the rest of your life in superficial how-do-you-do's with women as scared of intimacy as you are. Like attracts like, bucko. Unless you've got a goddamn ounce of sense, which you do not stand a prayer of finding this lifetime, you belong with your gutless scared Perfect Woman fiction till you die of loneliness.

You're cruel as ice. You belong with your ice-cruel chessboard and your ice-cruel sky; you wrecked a glorious opportunity with that asinine empire of yours; now the whole thing's a bunch of splinters with a government-with of all things a government lien on it!

Leslie Parrish was an opportunity a thousand times more glorious than any empire, but you're scared to death of her because she's smarter than you will ever be so you're going to dump her, too. Or has she dumped you? It won't hurt her, pal, because she ain't a loser. She will feel sad and she

will cry for a little while because she's not afraid to cry when something that might have been beautiful dies, but she'll get over it, she'll lift right on above it.

You'll get over it too, in about a minute and a half. Just pull your goddamn steel doors down shut, slam 'em tight and never think of her again. Instead of rising above, you'll go straight to the bottom, and before too long you'll be a brilliant success at your subliminal suicide-tries and wake up miserable that you were handed a fire-and-silver, a laser-diamond lifetime and you took your greasy damn hammer and smashed it to lard. You are looking at the biggest choice of your life and you know it. She's decided not to put up with your savage stupid fear, and she's happy this minute to be free of the dead weight of you.

Go ahead, do what you always do: run away. Run out to the airport, fire up the airplane and take off into the night. Fly, fly! Go find a nice girl with a cigarette in one hand and a rum-glass in the other and watch her use you for a step-pingstone to the something better that you're going to run away from tonight. Run, you stupid coward. Run to shut me up. Next time you see me is the day you die and then you can tell me how it felt after you burned the only bridge. . .

I slammed the doors down over the noise, and the room went still as calm at sea.

"My," I said aloud, "aren't we emotional!"

I retrieved the letter, started to read it again, let it fall back into the wastebasket.

If she doesn't like who I am, it's kind of her to say so. What a pity ... if only she were different, we could have stayed friends. But I can't abide jealousy! Does she think I'm her personal property; does she decide who I spend my

time with, and when? I told her clearly who I am and what I think and how she can trust me to live, even if that is not the I-love-you fakery she wants from me. No I-love-you's from me, Ms. Parrish. I will be true to myself, even though it costs me the joy-overflowing of every happy time we had together.

One thing I never did, dear Leslie-I never lied or cheated or deceived you; I lived what I believe exactly as I told you I would. If that now turns out to be unacceptable to you, that's the way it goes; I'm sorry and I wish you would have let me know a little sooner and saved us both the trouble.

I'll be off tomorrow sunrise, I thought. Throw my things in the plane and take off for someplace I've never been. Wyoming, maybe, Montana. Leave the plane for the IRS, if they can find it, and disappear. Borrow a biplane somewhere, vanish.

Change my name. Winnie-the-Pooh lived under the name of Sanders, so can I. That'll be fun. James Sanders. They can have the bank accounts and the airplanes and the whatever else it is they want. Nobody will ever know what happened to Richard Bach, and that will be a blessed relief.

Whatever I have to write again, if anything, I'll write with the new name. I can do that if I want. Drop everything. Maybe James Sanders will wander up to Canada, out to Australia. Maybe old Jim could knock around backwoods Alberta, or go way south to Sunbury, or Whittlesea, flying a Tiger Moth. He could learn Australian, hop a few passengers, enough to get along.

Then . . .

Then . . .

Then what, Mister Sanders? Is the government murdering

Richard Bach or are you? Do you want to kill him because Leslie cut him loose? Will his life be so empty without her that it won't matter to you if he dies?

I thought about it for a long time. It would be exciting to take off and change my name and run away. But: is that what I most want?

Is that your highest truth? she would have asked.

No.

I sat on the floor, leaned against the wall.

No, Leslie, that's not my highest truth.

My highest truth is I've got a long way to go to learn about loving another person. My highest truth is that my Perfect Woman at best is good for some talk, some sex- transient affairs, staving off loneliness. She's not the love that the kid at the gate had in mind, so long ago.

I knew what was right when I was the kid, and again when I quit barnstorming: find my lifemate foreversoul an-gel-become-woman to learn with and to love. One woman who will challenge the hell out of me, force me to change, to grow, to prevail, where otherwise I'd run away.

Leslie Parrish might be the wrong person. She may not be my soulmate come to find me on my way to find her. But she's the only one . . . she has Leslie's mind in Leslie's body, a woman I don't have to feel sorry for, I don't have to rescue, I don't have to explain to anyone, wherever I go. And she's so god-damn smart that the very worst thing that could happen is that I could learn a lot before she leaves me next.

If a person is cruel enough, I thought, anti-life enough, even his soulmate backs away, letting him alone, willing to wait another lifetime before a new hello.

But what if I don't run away? What's to lose but my

hundred tons of steel plate, supposed to protect me from hurt? Stretch my wings without armor and maybe I can fly well enough not to get shot down. Next time I can change my name to Sanders and take off for Port Darwin!

That impudent talk-back I had sealed away, he was right. I opened the doors, apologized, let him free; yet he said not one word more.

I was looking at the biggest choice of my life, he didn't have to say it again.

Could this be a test, planned by a hundred other aspects of me from different planets and times? Are they gathered now behind a one-way glass, watching me, hoping that I'll let go of the steel, or are they praying that I'll hold on? Are they taking bets on what I'm going to do?

If they were, they were awfully quiet, behind their glass. No sound. Even the roaring in my head was still.

The road split two directions, in front of me.

The two futures were two different lifetimes: Leslie Par-rish, or my so-safe Perfect Woman?

Choose, Richard. Now. It's turning night outside. Which one?

thirty-two

"ff

fj. ELLO?"
  
HER voice was out of breath,

nearly drowned in guitars and drums.

"Leslie? It's me, Richard. I know it's late, but could you have time to talk?"

No answer. The music smashed, beat on while I waited for the click of her telephone hanging up. All that struggling with choices, I thought, and the choice has already been made; Leslie was no longer interested in the likes of me.

"Yes," she said at last. "Let me turn down the music. I've been dancing."

The phone went quiet, and in a moment she was back. "Hi."

"Hi. I got your letter."

"Good."

I held the phone and paced, left and right, not knowing I

moved. "Do you really want to stop everything, just like that?"

"Not everything," she said. "I hope we'll still work together on the film. I'd like to think of you as my friend, if that's OK with you. The only thing I want to stop is the hurting."

"I never wanted to hurt you." It's not possible for me to hurt you, I thought. You can't be hurt unless you first perceive yourself hurt. . . .

"Well, it hurt anyhow," she said. "I guess I'm no good at open relationships. At first it was OK, but later we were so happy together! We had such warm delight, the two of us! Why keep ripping it apart for people who didn't matter, or for abstract principles? It just didn't work."

"Why didn't it work?"

"I used to have a cat," she said. "Amber. Big fluffy Persian cat. Amber and I, every minute I was home, we'd spend together. She'd have her dinner when I did, we'd sit and listen to music together, she'd sleep on my shoulder at night; each of us knew what each other was thinking. Then Amber had kittens. Cute as could be. They took her time and love, and they took my time and love. Amber and I weren't alone together anymore, we had to take care of the kits, we had to spread our love around. I was never as close to her after the kittens came, and she was never as close to me, not until the day she died."

"The depth of intimacy we feel toward another is inversely proportional to the number of others in our lives?" I asked. Then, afraid she'd see it as mockery, "Do you think you and I should have been exclusive to each other?"

"Yes. I accepted your many girlfriends, at first. What you did when you were gone was your business. But when Deborah came along, the principle of Deborah, as you would say, I suddenly realized that you were moving your harem west, and planned to make me part of it. I don't want that, Richard.

"Do you know what I learned from you? I learned what is possible, and now I must hold out for what I thought we had. I want to be very close to someone I respect and admire and love, somebody who feels the same way about me. That or nothing. I realized that what I'm looking for is not what you're looking for. You don't want what I want."

I stopped pacing, sat on the arm of the couch. Dark slanted in the windows around me.