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She gave me a sidelong glance, went back to looking for other aircraft as we slanted down toward San Diego.
Home again in Los Angeles that evening, after a flight as smooth as the morning's, she collapsed in bed.
"Let me tell you a secret, wookie," she said.
"I will let you. What's the secret?"
"I am terrified of flying! TERRIFIED!! Light planes especially. Until today, if somebody came along and put a gun to my head and said either you get into this little airplane or I am going to pull the trigger, I would say, 'Pull the trigger!' I can't believe what I did today. I was scared to death, and I did it!"
What? I thought. "Terrified? Why didn't you tell me? We
could have driven the Bantha. ..." I couldn't believe. A woman I care about so much, she's afraid of airplanes?
"You would have hated me," she said.
"I wouldn't have hated you! I would have thought you were a silly goose, but I wouldn't have hated you. Lots of people don't enjoy flying."
"It's not that I don't enjoy it," she said, "I can't stand flying! Even a big airplane, a jet. I fly in the biggest airplane possible, only when I absolutely have to. I walk in, sit down and grab the armrests and try not to cry. And that's before they start the engines!"
I hugged her softly. "Poor little thing! And you didn't say a word. Far as you knew, those were the last few minutes of your life, getting into the Meyers, weren't they?"
She nodded in my shoulder. "What a brave, brave girl you are!"
More nodding.
"And now it's all over! All that fear flown away and everywhere we go from now on we'll fly and you'll learn to fly and get your own little airplane. . . ."
She had been nodding until "everywhere we go from now on," at which point she stopped, moved back from my hug to look at me in anguish, eyes huge, chin trembling as I went on. We both melted laughing.
"But Richard, really! I'm not kidding! I'm more scared of flying than anything in the world! Now you know how I feel about my friend Richard. . . ."
I led the way to the kitchen and opened the freezer, piled ice-cream and fudge on the counter.
"This calls for a celebration," I said, to-cover my confusion over what she had said: "Now you know how I feel about my friend Richard." To overcome such a fear of flying
would require a trust and affection as strong as love itself, and love is a passport to disaster.
Every time a woman said she loved me, we were on the road to the end of our friendship. Would my beautiful friend Leslie be lost to me in the firewind of jealous possession? She had never said that
she loved me, and I'd never say that to her in a thousand years.
A hundred audiences I had warned: "Whenever somebody says they love you, look out!" No one had to take my word, anyone could see it in their own lives: parents battering children, shouting how they love them; wives and husbands who murder each other verbally, physically in knife-edge arguments, loving each other. The running put-downs, the eternal discounting of one person by another who claims to love. From such love, please, may the world be delivered. Why had such a promising word been crucified on the tree of obligation, thorned by duties, hanged by hypocrisy, smothered by custom? Next to "God," "love" is the word most mangled in every language. The highest form of regard between human beings is friendship, and when love enters, friendship dies.
I poured the hot fudge for her. Surely that is not what she meant. "Now you know how I feel" speaks of trust and respect, of those loftiest peaks that friends can climb. She couldn't have meant love. Please, no! How I would hate to lose her!
twenty-seven
THE STARS are always and constant friends, I thought. A hatful of constellations, learned when I was ten; those and the visible planets and a few stars, friends today as though not a night had passed since we met.
Luminous soft greens twisted and curled in the wake of the sailboat through midnight ink, tiny bright whirlpools and tornadoes glowing for an instant, fading away.
Sailing alone down the west coast of Florida, south from Sanibel to the Keys, I brought the boat a point starboard, to fit the constellation Corvus tight to the mast, a sail of stars. Too small a sail to add much speed.
Smooth black breeze, east-northeast.
Wonder if there are sharks in the water. Hate to fall overboard, I thought automatically, and then-would I really hate to fall overboard?
What's it like to drown? People who have been through
