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"And so on and so on," she said. The music shimmered in her eyes, in her smile. "Do you see what he's doing there? Do you see what he's done?"
"A little bit, I see," I said. "I thought I knew you! You whelm the daylights out of me! That music is . . . it's . . . you're . . ."
"I'm way out of practice," she said; "the hands aren't working the way they . . ."
"Leslie, no. Stop. Listen. What I have just heard is pure . . . listen! . . . pure radiance, that you took from cloud-linings and sunrises and distilled into light that I can hear! Do you know how good, how lovely that is, that you make the piano do?"
"Don't I wish! You know that was my chosen career, the piano?"
"It's one thing to know that in words, but you never played, before! You give me one more whole different . . . heaven!"
She frowned. "THEN DO NOT BE BORED WITH YOUR GRANDADDY'S MUSIC!"
"Never again," I said meekly.
"Of course never again," she said. "Your mind is too much like his, not to understand. Every language has its key, and so does your grandaddy's language. Bored! Indeed!"
She accepted my promise to improve, having flattened me in awe, and went to brush her hair.
twenty-one
iJHE TURNED from the typewriter, smiled at me where I had settled with my cup of chocolate and a draft screenplay.
"You don't have to gulp it down all at once, Richard, you can sip it slowly. That way you can make it last longer."
I laughed at me, with her. To Leslie, I thought, I must look like a pile of jackstraws on her office couch.
Her desk organized, her files trim, not a paper-clip out of place. She looked just as neat, herself: snug beige pants, transparent blouse tucked in, a brassiere as sheer as the blouse, outlined in filmy white flowers. Her hair was brushed gold. Here, I thought, is the way neatness ought to look!
"Our drinks are not paperweights," I said. "Hot chocolate, most people drink it. Yours, you befriend. I can drink
enough hot chocolate to hate the taste of it for the rest of my days in the time it takes you to get acquainted with one cup!"
"Wouldn't you rather drink something friendly," she said, "than something you've hardly met?"
Intimate with her chocolate, with her music, with her garden, her car, her house, her work. I was linked to the things I knew by a network of silken threads; she was bound to hers by braided silver cables. To Leslie, nothing close was unvalued.
Acting-dresses and gowns hung in her closets, sorted by color and by shade of color, clear-plastic dust-covers over each. Shoes to match on the floor below, hats to match on the shelf above.
Books in their cases by subject; phonograph records and tapes by composer, conductor and soloist.
A hapless clumsy spider tripped and fallen in the sink? Everything stops. Down slides a papertowel spidey-ladder to the rescue, and when the creature steps aboard, it's lifted outside and set gently in the garden, tucked away with soothing words and soft warnings that sinks are not safe places for spiders to play.
I was so much the opposite. Neatness, for instance, had a lower priority. Spiders do need to be saved from sinks, of course, but they don't have to be pampered. Taken outside and dropped on the porch, they ought to count their lucky stars.
Things, they disappear in the blink of an eye; a wind ruffles them and they're gone. Her silver cables . . . attach ourselves so strongly to things and to people, when they're gone, doesn't part of us go, too?
"Better far to attach ourselves to forever-thoughts than to here-now gone-now things," I told her as she drove us toward the Music Center. "Don't you agree?"
She nodded, driving five miles above the speed limit, catching green lights.
"Music is a forever thing," she said.
Like a rescued cat, I was fed on top-cream classical music, for which she insisted I had ear and aptitude.
She touched the radio and at once violins flowed, the midst of some perky air. Another quiz coming up, I thought. I liked our quizzes.
"Baroque, classical, modern?" she asked, sweeping into an open lane toward city center.
