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"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.
