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Keep talking, I thought. If we keep talking, it won't push off the cornice and plunge screaming to the pavement. Yet neither of us wanted the fugitive to live unless it turned sane and strong. Each comment, every idea we shared was a wind blown at the ledge-sometimes our future together teetered out over the streets, others it was trembled back against the wall.
How much would die if it fell! The warm hours separated from time, when we so mattered to each other, when I breathlessly delighted in who this woman is; they all will have led to nothing, worse than nothing: to this terrible loss.
The secret of finding someone to love, she had told me once, is first finding someone to like. We had been the best of friends long before we became lovers. I liked her and admired her and trusted her, trusted her! Now so much good tilted in the balance.
If our fugitive slipped, the wookies would be killed in the fall, Hoggie clutching a sundae, the sorceress, the sex-goddess; the Bantha would die, chess and films and sunsets would disappear forever. Her fingers flashing over the keyboard. I'd never listen to Johann Sebastian's music again, never hear his secret harmonies because I had learned them from her, never another composer-quiz, never see flowers without thinking of her, never anyone again so close to me. Build more walls, bolt spikes on top, and then build walls inside those, and more spikes. . . .
"You don't need your walls, Richard!" she cried. "If we never see each other again, can't you know that walls don't protect? They isolate you!"
She's trying to help, I thought. In the last minutes we pull ourselves apart, this woman wants me to learn. How can we leave each other?
"And Hoggie ..." she said, ". . . Hoggie doesn't . . . he doesn't have to die. . . . Every July eleventh, I promise ... I'll make a chocolate-chip hot-fudge sund . . . hot-fudge sundae . . . and remem ... my dearest Hoggie. . . ."
Her voice broke; I heard her press the phone into a pillow. Oh Leslie no, I thought, listening to the choking silence of the feathers. Does it have to disappear, our enchanted city of two, a mirage come once in a lifetime only to vanish into smog and the everyday world? Who is it that's killing us?
If some outsider broke upon us, tried to pull us apart, we'd turn to claws and tear him to hell. This now, it's an inside job, the outsider is me!
What if we're soulmates, I thought while she sobbed. What if we're the ones we've been looking for our whole lives long. We've touched and we've shared this quick taste of what love on earth can be, and now, because of my fears, are we going to separate and never meet again? Will I go on the rest of my days looking for the one I've already found, and was too frightened to love?
The impossible coincidences! I thought, that led us to meet at a time when neither of us was married or committed to marry, when neither of us was devoted every-waking-second to causes, when neither of us was too busy with acting or writing or traveling or adventuring or otherwise too blindly involved. We met on the same planet in the same era, we met at the same age, grown up in the same culture. Had we met years earlier, it wouldn't have happened . . . we did meet years earlier, and we went sailing past in an elevator-the time wasn't right. And it will never be right again.
I paced quietly forth and back, a half-circle on the tether of the telephone cord. If I decide in ten years or twenty that I shouldn't have let her go, where will she be then? What if I come back in ten years to say Leslie I'm sorry! and find she's Mrs. Leslie Parrish-Somebody? What if she's not to be found, her house empty, she's moved, left no address? What if she's dead, killed by something that never would have killed her had I not flown away tomorrow?
"I'm sorry," she said, back on the phone again, tears wiped away. "I'm a silly goose. I wish I had
your control, sometimes. You handle goodbyes so well, as if they don't matter."
"It's all in deciding who's in charge," I explained, glad for a change of subject. "If we let our emotions run things, then times like these aren't much fun."
"No," she sniffed. "They're not much fun."
"When you pre-live it, pretend it's tomorrow now, or next month, how do you feel?" I said. "I try that, and I don't feel better, without you. I imagine what it's like alone, no one to talk with nine hours on the telephone, run up a hundred-dollar bill on a local call. I'll miss you so much!"
"I'll miss you, too," she said. "Richard, how do you get someone to look around a corner when he hasn't reached it yet? The only life worth living is the magical one, and this is magic! I'd give anything if you could see what's there for us. ..." She paused for a moment, casting for what more to say. "But if it's out of sight for you, I guess it doesn't exist, does it? Even if I'm looking at it, it's not really there." She sounded tired, resigned. She was about to hang up the telephone.
Whether it was because I was tired or scared or both, I'll
never know. No warning; something snapped, something broke loose inside my head and it was not happy.
RICHARD! it screamed. WHAT ARE YOU DOING? ARE YOU CRAZY GONE OUT OF YOUR MIND? That's not some metaphor swaying on the ledge, that is YOU! That is your future, and if it falls you are a ZOMBIE, you are living dead, marking time till you kill yourself right! You've been playing games with her for nine hours on the telephone, WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU'RE ON THIS PLANET FOR, TO FLY AIRPLANES? You're here, you arrogant bastard, to learn about LOVE! She's your teacher, and in twenty-five seconds she is going to hang up and you will never see her again! Don't sit there, you idiot son-of-a-bitch! You've got ten seconds and she's gone! Two seconds! SPEAK!
"Leslie," I said. "You're right. I'm wrong. I want to change. We've tried it my way and it didn't work. Let's try it your way. No Perfect Woman, no walls against you. Just you and me. Let's see what happens."
There was silence on the line.
"Are you sure?" she said. "Are you sure, or are you just saying that? Because if you're just saying that, it's going to make it worse. You know that, don't you?"
"I know it. I'm sure. Can we talk about it?"
Another silence.
"Of course we can, wookie. Why don't you hang up the phone and come over here and we'll have breakfast."
"OK, sweet," I said. " 'Bye."
After she hung up I said to the empty phone, "I love you, Leslie Parrish."
In absolute privacy, no one to hear, the words that I had so despised, that I never used, were true as light.
