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"Good."
I held the phone and paced, left and right, not knowing I
moved. "Do you really want to stop everything, just like that?"
"Not everything," she said. "I hope we'll still work together on the film. I'd like to think of you as my friend, if that's OK with you. The only thing I want to stop is the hurting."
"I never wanted to hurt you." It's not possible for me to hurt you, I thought. You can't be hurt unless you first perceive yourself hurt. . . .
"Well, it hurt anyhow," she said. "I guess I'm no good at open relationships. At first it was OK, but later we were so happy together! We had such warm delight, the two of us! Why keep ripping it apart for people who didn't matter, or for abstract principles? It just didn't work."
"Why didn't it work?"
"I used to have a cat," she said. "Amber. Big fluffy Persian cat. Amber and I, every minute I was home, we'd spend together. She'd have her dinner when I did, we'd sit and listen to music together, she'd sleep on my shoulder at night; each of us knew what each other was thinking. Then Amber had kittens. Cute as could be. They took her time and love, and they took my time and love. Amber and I weren't alone together anymore, we had to take care of the kits, we had to spread our love around. I was never as close to her after the kittens came, and she was never as close to me, not until the day she died."
"The depth of intimacy we feel toward another is inversely proportional to the number of others in our lives?" I asked. Then, afraid she'd see it as mockery, "Do you think you and I should have been exclusive to each other?"
"Yes. I accepted your many girlfriends, at first. What you did when you were gone was your business. But when Deborah came along, the principle of Deborah, as you would say, I suddenly realized that you were moving your harem west, and planned to make me part of it. I don't want that, Richard.
"Do you know what I learned from you? I learned what is possible, and now I must hold out for what I thought we had. I want to be very close to someone I respect and admire and love, somebody who feels the same way about me. That or nothing. I realized that what I'm looking for is not what you're looking for. You don't want what I want."
I stopped pacing, sat on the arm of the couch. Dark slanted in the windows around me.
"What do you think I want?" I asked.
"Exactly what you have. Many women that you know a little and don't care very much about. Superficial flirtations, mutual use, no chance of love. That's my idea of hell. Hell is a place, a time, a consciousness, Richard, in which there is no love. Horrible! Leave me out of it."
She spoke as if her mind were made up and as if mine were, too. As if there were no hope of change. She was asking for nothing; she was telling me her highest truth, knowing I'd never agree.
"I've had the greatest respect and admiration for you," she said. "I thought you were the most wonderful person I ever knew. Now I'm beginning to see things about you that I don't want to see. I'd like to end it thinking you're wonderful."
"What I was scared of, Leslie, is that we were starting to own each other. My freedom is as important to me as . . ."
"Your freedom to do what?" she shot back. "Your freedom not to be intimate? Your freedom not to love? Your freedom to seek relief from joy in restlessness and boredom?
You're right ... if we had stayed together, I wouldn't have wanted you to have those freedoms."
Well said! I thought, as though her words had been a chessmove.
"You've pretty well shown ..." I said. "I understand what you're saying, and I didn't understand before. Thank you."
"You're welcome," she said.
I shifted the telephone. Someday a wizard will design a telephone that stays comfortable more than a minute. "I think there's a lot to say. Is there any way we could get together and talk for a while?"
A pause, and then, "I'd rather not. I don't mind talking on the phone, but I don't want to see you 'in person, for a while. I hope you understand."
"Sure. No problem," I said. "Do you have to go now?"
"No. I can stay on the phone."
"Is there any way you can see, that you and I could still be close? I've never met anybody like you, and your idea of friendship I think means a cordial letter and handshake at the end of every fiscal year."
She laughed. "Oh, it's not that bad. A handshake semian-nually. Quarterly, since we've been such good friends. Just because our love-affair didn't last, Richard, doesn't mean it failed. We learned from it what we needed to learn, I guess."
"Maybe the freedom I was talking about," I said, "a big part of it, maybe it's the freedom to change, to be different next week from what I am today. And if two people are changing in different directions ..."
"If we change in different directions," she said, "then we don't have any future anyway, do we? I think it's possible for two people to change together, to grow together and enrich instead of diminish each other. The sum of one and one, if they're the right ones, can be infinity! But so often one person drags the other down; one person wants to go up like a balloon and the other's a dead weight. I've always wondered what it would be like if both people, if a woman and a man both wanted to go up like balloons!"
