The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story (7 page)

"It isn't."

"Thank you."

"Do you get a lot of those?" I asked.

"A few is too many," she said. "One marriage was enough. In my case, one marriage more than I should have had. Some people are better off married; I'm not."

I told her a little about the marriage I had ended, happy years gone hard and grim. I had learned exactly the lessons she had.

I checked the soft glass table of the Gulf for wind-ruffles. The sea was smooth as warm ice.

"What a shame, Donna, we can't disagree on something."

We drifted for another hour before wind caught the sails and the boat surged ahead. By the time we set foot on land once more we were good acquaintances, hugging farewell, promising to see each other again someday.

As it was with Donna, so with every other woman in my

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life. Respect for sovereignty, for privacy, for total independence. Gentle alliances against loneliness, they were, cool rational love-affairs without the love.

Some of my women-friends had never married, but most were divorced. A few were survivors of unhappy affairs, beaten by violent men, terrified, warped by massive stress into endless depressions. Love, for them, was a tragic misunderstanding; love was an empty word left after meaning had been battered away by spouse-as-owner, lover-become-jailer.

Had I gone looking way far back in my thought, I might have found a puzzle: Love between man and woman isn't a word that works anymore. But Richard, is it a meaning?

I wouldn't have had an answer.

Months rippled by, and as I lost interest in love, what it is and isn't, so I lost the motive to look for my hidden soulmate. Gradually her place was taken by a different idea emerging, an idea as rational and flawless as those upon which my business affairs now turned.

If the perfect mate, I thought, is one who meets all of our needs all of the time, and if one of our needs is for variety itself, then no one person anywhere can be the perfect mate!

The only true soulmate is to be found in many different people. My perfect woman is partly the flash and intellect of this friend, she's partly the heart-racing beauty of that one, partly the devil-may-care adventure of another. Should none of these women be available for the day, then my soulmate sparkles in other bodies, elsewhere; being perfect does not include being unavailable.

"Richard, the whole idea is bizarre! It will never work!" Had the inner me shouted that, and it did, it would have had rags stuffed in its mouth.

"Show me why this idea is wrong," I would have said,

"show me where it won't work. And do it without using the words love, marriage, commitment. Do it bound and gagged while I shout louder than you can about how I intend to run my life!"

What do you know? The perfect-woman-in-many-women design, she won the contest hands-down.

An infinite supply of money. As many airplanes as I wish. The perfect woman for my own. This is happiness!

eleven

. HERE ARE no mistakes. The events we bring upon ourselves, no matter how unpleasant, are necessary in order to learn what we need to learn; whatever steps we take, they're necessary to reach the places we've chosen to go.

I lay on the floor, sunk in thick cinnamon carpet, and thought about it. These three years have not been mistakes. I built every year carefully, a million decisions each, into airplanes and magazine interviews and boats and travels and films and business staff and lectures and television shows and manuscripts and bank-accounts and copper-futures. Daylight air displays in the new little jet, nighttime talks and touches with many women, every one lovely, none of them her.

I was convinced she didn't exist, yet she haunted me still.

Was she as sure that I didn't exist? Did my ghost disturb

her convictions? Was there a woman somewhere this moment lying on plush carpet in a house built over a hangar with five airplanes inside, three more on the lawn and a floatplane tethered at water's edge?

I doubted it. But could there be one alone in the midst of news stories and TV shows, lonely while surrounded by lovers and money, hired friends-become-staff and agents and lawyers and managers and accountants? That was possible.

Her carpet might be a different color, but the rest . . . she could be on the other side of a mirror from here, finding her perfect man in fifty men, and still walking alone.

I laughed at myself. How hard the old myth of one love does die!

An airplane-engine started on the lawn below. That would be Slim, running up the Twin Cessna. A supercharger on the right side was leaking. Retrofit superchargers are retrofit problems, I thought, bolted onto what is otherwise a fine engine.

The Rapide and the motorglider are down there gathering dust. The Rapide is going to need rebuilding before long and that is going to be a monstrous job, a cabin biplane that size. Better sell the thing. I don't fly it enough. Don't fly anything enough. They're strangers to me, like everything else in my life. What is it I am trying to learn? That after a while, and in excess, machines begin to own us?

No, I thought, the lesson is this: To be handed a lot of money is to be handed a glass sword, blade-first. Best handle it very carefully, sir, very slowly while you puzzle what it's v for.

The other engine started on the twin. Ground checkout must have been OK, and he's decided to take it up for a check in the air. A windy blast of power while he got the

machine moving, then the sweet roar of engines faded as he taxied to the runway.

What else had I learned? That I hadn't survived publicity quite so unchanged as I had thought. I never would have believed, before, that anyone could stay curious about what I think and say and what I look like, where I live, what I do with my time and money; or that it would affect me the way it had, driven me back into caves.

Anyone fallen into camera or print, I thought, they didn't trip. Knowingly or not, they've chosen themselves to be examples for the rest of us to watch, they've volunteered as models. This one has marvels for a life; another is rolling wreckage, loose on deck. This one faces her adversity or her talent with calm wisdom, this one shrieks, this one leaps to his death, this one laughs.

Daily the world ties celebrities to tests and we watch fascinated, unable to turn away. Unable because the tests that our examples face are tests we all must face. They love, they marry, they learn, they quit and begin again, they are ruined; they transport us and they are transported, in plain sight of camera and ink.

The one test they face that others don't is the test of celebrity itself. Even then we watch. Someday it will be us in a spotlight, and examples are always welcome.

Whatever happened, I thought, to the airplane pilot from the fields of the Midwest? Had he turned so swiftly from simple flyer into frilly playboy?

I got up and walked across my empty house to the kitchen, found a bowl of corn chips gradually going stale, walked back to the Eames chair by the picture window and looked out over the lake.

Me, a playboy? Ridiculous. I haven't changed, inside, hardly a bit changed.

Do all frilly playboys say that, Richard?

A Piper Cub from the seaplane school next door practiced glassy-water landings ... the long slow descent, power-on, and gentle touch on glistening Lake Theresa, then a step-turn and taxi back for takeoff.

The spotlight, it showed me how to hide, where to build walls. Everyone has plates of iron and rows of spikes somewhere inside that say this is as far as you go with me.

For the outgoing, recognition's fun. They don't mind the cameras; cameras come with the territory, and there are some pretty fine people behind those lenses. I can be nice as long as they can be nice, and about two minutes longer.

Such was the height of my wall that day in Florida. Most of the people who knew me from a talk-show here or a magazine cover there or a newspaper story across the way were people who couldn't know how grateful I was for their courtesy, for their respect of privacy.

I was surprised at the mail, glad for the family of readers to whom the strange ideas that I loved made sense. There were many people out there, inquisitive learning men and women every race age nation, every kind of experience. The family was so much larger than I had imagined!

Side-by-side with the delightful letters, once in a while came a few strange ones: write my idea; get me published; give me money or you'll burn in hell.

For the family I felt happy close warmth, sent postcards to reply; against the others was another ton of iron bolted to my wall, daggers welded along the top, rag of a welcome-mat snatched away.

I was a more private person than ever I thought. Had I

not known myself before, or was I changing? More and more, I chose to stay alone at home, that day and that month and those years. Stuck with my big house and nine airplanes and cobweb decisions I'd never make again.

I looked up from the floor to the photographs on the wall. There were pictures of airplanes that mattered to me. Not one human being there, not a single person. What had happened to me? I used to like who I was. Did I like me still?

I walked down the stairs to the hangar, pushed out the airshow biplane and slid into the cockpit. I met Kathy in this airplane, I thought.

Shoulder harness, seat belts, mixture rich, fuel pump ON, ignition ON. Such promise unfulfilled, and she's pushing me now about marriage. As though I've never told her the evils marriage brings, nor shown her I'm only part of the perfect man for her.

"Clear the prop!" I called from habit into the empty place, pressed the starter.

Half a minute after takeoif I was rolling inverted, climbing 2,000 feet per minute, the wind blasting over my helmet and goggles. Love it. A super-slow roll, first, to a sixteen-point. Sky clear? Ready? Now!

The green flat land of Florida; lakes and swamps rose majestically, immensely from my right, turned huge and wide over my head, set to my left.

Level. Then VAM! VAM! VAM! VAM! around went the land in sudden hard jerks, sixteen times. Pull straight up to a hammerhead stall, press left rudder, dive straight down, wind howling in the wires between the stubby wings, and push the stick forward to recover 160 mph upside-down. I threw my head back and looked up at the earth. Stick suddenly full back, hard right rudder, the biplane reared, stalled

her right wings and spun twice around, a skygreen earthblue doubletwist; stick forward left rudder and HN! she stopped, wings-level inverted.

A split-S to squash me five Gs into the seat, tunnel my vision to a tiny hole of clear surrounded in grey, dive to a hundred feet over my practice-area and then through the routine again at low-level, airshow-height.

It clears the mind, Spanish moss roaring up toward one's windscreen, a swamp full of cypress and alligators rolling three hundred degrees per second around one's helmet.

The heart stays lonely.

twelve

HERE HAD been not a word between us for minutes.

Leslie Parrish sat quietly on her side of the walnut-and-pine chessboard, I sat on mine. For nine moves in a breath-stopping midgame, the room was silent save for the soft thock of a knight or queen moved into place or out of it, an occasional hm or eek as lines of force swung open on the board, clanged shut.

Chess-players sketch their portraits in the motion of their pieces. Ms. Parrish neither bluffed nor deceived. She played eyes-open straight-on power chess.

I watched her through my laced fingers and smiled, even though she had just captured my bishop and threatened next move to take a knight I could ill afford to lose.

I had first seen that face years before, we had first touched in the most important of ways. By coincidence.

"Going up?" she called, and ran across the lobby to the elevator.

"Yes." I held the door open till she was inside. "Where you headed?"

"Three, please," she said. Three was my floor, too.

The door paused a second, softly rumbled shut.

Bluegrey eyes glanced my way in thanks. I held the glance for less than a quarter-second, to tell her that it had been my pleasure to wait, then politely looked away. Darn politeness, I thought. What a lovely face! Had I seen her in movies? Television? I dared not ask.

We rode upward in silence. She was as tall as my shoulder, golden hair swirled and tucked under a spice-color cap. Not dressed like a movie-star: faded work-shirt under a surplus Navy coat, bluejeans, leather boots. Such a beautiful face!

She's here on location for the film, I thought. Is she a technician on the crew?

What pleasure it would be, to know her. But she's so far ... Isn't it interesting, Richard, how infinitely far away she is? You two are standing thirty inches apart, yet there's no way to bridge the gulf and say hello.

If only we could invent a way, I thought, if only this were a world when unmet people could say you charm me and I'd like to know who you are. With a code: "No thanks," if the charm might not be mutual.

But that world hadn't yet been made. The half-minute ride finished without a word. Softly the door rumbled open.

"Thank you," she said. Barely on the walk side of running, she hurried down the hall to her room,

opened the door, entered, closed it behind her and left me alone in the corridor.

I wish you didn't have to leave, I thought, entering my own room, two doors from hers. I wish you didn't have to run away.

By moving my knight, I could shift pressures on the board, blunt her attack. She had an advantage, but she hadn't won, not yet.

Of course! I thought. N-QN5! Threaten NxP, NxR!

I moved the piece, and watched her eyes once more, pleasuring in beauty strangely unflickered by my counterattack.

A year after our meeting in the elevator, I had brought suit against the director of that film, over changes he had made in the script without my approval. Even though he was required by the court to take my name off the credits and reverse some of the worst changes, I could hardly keep from smashing furniture while discussing the matter directly with him. A mediator had to be found with whom each of us could speak.