The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story (26 page)

see that future and not want it, or after all this time do you just not see it?"

It was nearly dark in the trailer, but neither of us moved to put on the light.

"Leslie, I saw something else, just now. Has this happened before?"

"You mean this minute happened before?" she said. "Deja vu?"

"Yes. Where you know every word I'm going to say. Did you just have that feeling?"

"No."

"I did. I knew exactly what you were going to say, and you said it."

"What happened then?"

"I don't know, it faded out. But I was terribly awfully sad."

She stretched out her arm, touched my shoulder; I caught the ghost of a smile in the dark. "Serves you right."

"Let me chase it. Give me ten minutes. . . ."

She didn't protest. I lay down on the carpet, closed my eyes. One deep breath.

My body is completely relaxed. . . .

Another deep breath.

My mind is completely relaxed. . . .

Another.

I am standing at a door, and the door is opening into a different time. . . .

The trailer. Sunset. Leslie curled in a defensive shell on the far side of the couch, real as a three-dimension film.

"Oh, Richard," she said, bleak and tired. "I want it to work, being together. Do you want it to work?"

"Yes, I do." I do if you'll let me be who I am, I thought. I'll never stand between you and anything you wish; why can't you say the same for me?

She uncurled and sat at the far end of the little couch, silent. No more tears, but there was the weight in the air of so much disagreement between us, such a distance between our two islands.

"Are you sure? Are you sure you want it to work?"

"No! To be honest with you, I'm not sure. I don't think I can put up with these ropes, I feel like I'm caught in a rope-storm! Move this way and you don't like it, move that way and you shout at me. We're so different, you scare me. I've given this experiment a fair try, but if you can't let me go off and be alone for a couple of weeks, I'm not sure I do want it to work. I can't see much future."

She sighed. Even in the dark, I could see her walls going up, me on the outside. "I can't see any future either, Richard. You told me you were selfish, and I -didn 't listen. We tried, and it didn 't work. Everything had to be your way, exactly your way, didn't it?"

" 'Fraid so, Leslie." I almost called her wookie, and when I didn't, I knew that the last time I had used the word had been the last time ever. "I can't live without the freedom ..."

"Not your freedoms again, please. No more soapboxes. I should never have let you talk me into one more try together. I give up. You are who you are."

I tried to lift some of the weight. "You did solo the glider. You'll never again be afraid to fly."

"That's right. Thank you for helping me do that." She stood, turned on the light, looked at her watch. "There's

a late plane back to Los Angeles tonight, isn't there? Can you drive me to Phoenix to catch the late plane?"

"If that's what you want Or we can fly back ourselves, in the Meyers."

"No, thanks. The late plane will be fine."

She packed her clothes in ten minutes, crammed everything in two piles, shut lids over them.

Not a word between us.

I set the suitcases in the truck, waited for her in the desert night. There was a slim quarter-moon, low in the west. A baby moon, laughing sideways, she had written. Now the same moon, just a few turns later, dim and mourning.

I remembered our nine-hour phone call, when we barely saved our life together. What am I doing? She is the dearest, wisest, most beautiful woman ever to touch my life, and I'm driving her away!

But the ropes, Richard. You have given it a fair try.

I felt a lifetime of happiness and wonder, learning and joy with this woman break away, shift and fill like a giant silver sail under the moon, flutter once, fill again, and fade, and fade, and fade. . . .

"Do you want to lock the trailer?" she said. The trailer was my place now, not hers.

"Doesn't matter."

She left it unlocked.

"Shall I drive?" she said. Never had she liked my driving; it was too distracted for her, unwatchful.

"It doesn 't matter," I said. "I'm sitting in front of the steering-wheel, I might as well drive."

We rode together without speaking, forty miles through the night to the Phoenix airport. I parked the truck,

waited quietly with her to check her baggage, wishing for something to say that hadn't been said, walked with her toward the gate.

"Don't bother," she said. "I can take it from here. Thank you. We'll be friends, OK?"

"OK."

" 'Bye, Richard. Drive ..."... carefully, she would have said, drive carefully. Not now. Now I could drive any way I wanted. " 'Bye."

"Goodbye." I leaned to kiss her, but she turned her head.

My mind was a slow grey blur. I was doing something irrevocable, like diving out the door of a jump-plane two miles up.

Now I was in reach of her; I could touch her arm if I wanted.

She walked away.

Now it was too late.

A thoughtful person considers, makes a decision, acts on it. Never is it wise to go back and change. She had done that once with me, and she had been wrong. To do it again was not worth another word between us.

But Leslie, I thought, I know you too well for you to leave! I know you better than anyone in the world, and you know me. You are my best friend of this lifetime; how can you leave? Don't you know I love you? I've never loved anyone and I love you.

Why hadn 't I been able to say that to her? She was still walking away and she wasn 't looking back. Then she was through the gate, and she was gone.

There was that sound like wind once more in my ears,

a propeller turning slow, patient, waiting for me to climb back aboard and finish out my life.

I watched the gate for a long time, stood there and watched it as though she might suddenly come running back through it and say oh Richard how foolish we both are, what silly geese to do such a thing to each other!

She didn't, and I didn't run through the gate to catch her.

The fact is that we are alone on this planet, I thought, each of us is totally alone and the sooner we accept that, the better it is for us.

Lots of people live alone: married and single, searchers without finding, at last forgetting they ever had searched. That had been my way before, and so it will be again. But never, Richard, never let anyone come so close to you as that one came.

I walked out of the airport, no hurry, to the truck, drove no hurry away from the terminal.

There, a DC-8 lifting off westward, was she aboard?

A Boeing 727 followed, then another. Deck-angles tilting high as they took off, so high; wheels coming up, flaps coming up, turning on course. That was my sky she was flying, this moment, how can she leave me on the ground?

Out of your mind with it. Put it out of your mind, think of it later. Later.

My launch-time next day put me the eighteenth sailplane in line for takeoff. Full water-ballast in the wings, survival kit aboard, canopy marked and turn-point cameras checked.

How empty the trailer had been all the sleepless night, how completely still!

Is it true she's gone? Somehow I can't believe . . .

I lay back in the contoured pilot's seat, checked the flight controls, nodded OK to the crew outside, didn 't even know his name, rocked the rudder-pedals left-right-left: Let's go, towplane, let's go.

Like an aircraft-carrier catapult-launch, in slow motion. A great thrashing and roaring from the towplane out ahead on its rope, we creep forward for a few feet, then faster, faster. Speed gives power to the ailerons, to the rudder, to the elevators, and now we lift a foot off the ground and wait, runway blurring below, while the towplane finishes its takeoff and begins to climb.

Last night I made a spectacular mistake, to say what I said, to let her go. Is it too late to ask her to come back?

Five minutes later, a climb on the end of the tow-rope, a dive to loosen the tension, and I pull the handle for an easy release.

There is one good thermal near the airport, and it is thick with sailplanes. First plane off finds the lift, and the rest of us like lemmings follow in a great swirl of sleek white fiberglass, a gaggle of gliders going round and round, higher and higher in the warm rising air.

Careful, Richard, look around! Enter the thermal at the bottom, circling same direction as everyone else. A midair collision, some like to mutter, it can spoil your whole day.

All the flying I've done, still I'm nervous, jumpy as a duck when I slide into this small airspace with so many airplanes.

Tight turn. Fast turn. Catch the core of the lift and it's an express elevator on the way to the top . . . five hundred feet per minute, seven hundred, nine hundred. Not Arizona's best thermal, but good enough, for the first lift of the day.

Would she answer the phone if I called, and if she did, what would I say?

Leslie, I am terribly sorry?

Let's go back to where we were?

I've said those before, I've used up I'm-sorry.

Across the thermal from me is an AS-W 19, mirror of my own sailplane, race-number CZ painted on the wing and tail Below, three more gliders enter the thermal together; above, a dozen at least. Looking up is looking up through the eye of a cyclone just hit an airplane factory, a swirling dream of noiseless flying sculpture.

Did I want to drive her away? Was Fve-got-to-be-alone a pill I knew she'd never swallow; was it a coward's way of quitting? Is it possible for soulmates to meet and then to separate forever?

Very gradually I climb past CZ in the thermal, a sign I'm flying well, tired as I am. Our race is a 145-mile triangle above the ferocious broil of desolation that is the desert. It looks like death on the ground, but there's enough lift to hold a sailplane up all afternoon long, at high speed.

Look sharp, Richard! And careful. Next above me is a Libelle, then a Cirrus and a Schweizer 1-35. I can outcllmb the Schweizer, maybe the Cirrus, not the Libelle. Before long we'll be at the top, get headed on-course, it won't be quite so tight.

Then what? The rest of my life alone, racing

sailplanes? How does an expert retreater run away from being without the woman he was born to meet? Leslie! I'm so sorry!

No warning, a sun-bright strobe fired in my eyes. A flash, a spray of flying plexiglass, the cockpit juddering sideways, windblast in my face, bright red light.

I'm slammed against the shoulder harness, then smashed into the seat, G-force trying to throw me out, then trying to crush me flat.

The cockpit tumbles like shrapnel flying. Time creeps.

Richard, you've been hit! And there is not much left of your airplane and if you want to live you've got to kick out of this thing and pull a ripcord.

I feel wreckage lurch, tear apart, tumble faster.

In a red haze there's sky whirling to rocks whirling to sky. Pieces of wing in a ragged torn cloud around me. Sky-ground-sky. . . . Can't seem to get my hands to the safety-belt release.

Not much improved with experience. Slow to evaluate problem.

Oh, hi, pal! Give me a hand, will you. They're gonna say I was pinned in the wreckage. I'm not pinned. It's just the G's are so heavy . . . I can't . . .

Says "can't" when means "won't." / will . . . pull that release. . . .

Listens to observer in last seconds. Curious end to lifetime.

THERE!

The instant I pull the release, the cockpit is gone, I grab the parachute ripcord, pull it, roll over to see the ground before the parachute opens . . . too late. Wook, I am sorry. So ...

black

On the floor of the trailer, my eyes blinked open into dark.

"Leslie . . ."

I lay on the floor, breathing deep, my face wet with tears. She was still there, on the couch.

"Are you OK?" she said. "Wookie, are you all right?"

I got up from the floor, curled close as I could beside her, held her tightly.

"I" don't want to leave you, little wookie, I never want to leave you," I said. "I love you."

There was the faintest ripple through her in the night, silence for a moment that felt like forever.

"You what?" she said.

thirty-four

.LONG ABOUT two in the morning, discord forgotten, twined on our bed together in the midst of a talk about flowers, about inventions, about what a perfect life for us might be, I sighed.

"Remember my old definition?" I said. "That a soulmate is someone who meets all our needs, all of the time?"

"Yes."

"Then I don't guess we're soulmates."

"Why not?" she said.

"I don't have a need to argue," I said. "I don't have a need to fight."

"How do you know?" she said softly. "How do you know that's not the only way some lessons can get through to you? If you didn't need to fight in order to learn, you wouldn't create so many problems! There are times I don't understand you till you're angry . . . aren't there times you

don't know what I mean until I scream? Is there a rule that we can't learn except in sweet words and kisses?"

I blinked, startled. "I thought being soulmates was supposed to be every moment perfect, so how can soulmates fight? Are you saying, wookie, that it is perfect? Are you saying even when we clash, it's magic? When a clash materializes understanding between us that hasn't been there before?"

"Ah," she said in the golden dark, "life with a philosopher ..."

thirty-five

UR LAUNCH-time for the race next day put me twenty-third sailplane in line for takeoff, second from last. Full water-ballast in the wings, survival-kit aboard, canopy marked and turn-point cameras checked. Leslie handed me maps and radio codes, kissed me good luck, eased the canopy down. I locked it from the inside. I lay back in the contoured pilot's seat, checked the flight controls, nodded OK, blew her one last kiss, rocked the rudder-pedals side to side: Let's go, towplane, let's go.

Every launch is different, but every one is the same aircraft-carrier catapult-launch in slow motion. A great thrashing and roaring from the towplane out ahead on its towline, we creep forward for a few feet, then faster, faster. Speed gives power to the ailerons, to the rudder, to the elevators, and now we lift a foot off the ground and wait while the towplane finishes its takeoff and begins to climb.