The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story

Lianne cared not a whit for degrees, or for jobs. She wanted to be married, and the best way to be married was to be seen with me so that her ex-husband would turn jealous and want her again. Up from jealousy would come happiness.

Tamara loved money, and so dazzling was she in her way that she was a fine woman for the price. An artist's-model face, a mind that calculated even while she laughed. Well-read, well-traveled, multi-lingual. Her ex-husband was an investment broker, and now Tamara wanted to start her own broker's shop. A hundred thousand dollars would be enough to get her business off the ground. Just a hundred thousand, Richard, can you help me?

If only, I thought. If only I could find a woman with Charlene's face but with Lianne's body, and Jacqueline's gifts and Jaynie's charm and Tamara's cool poise-there I'd be looking at a soulmate, wouldn't I?

Trouble was that Charlene's face had Charlene's fears, and Lianne's body had Lianne's troubles. Each new meeting was intriguing, but after a day the colors turned dull, intrigue vanished in the forest of ideas that we didn't share. We were pie-slices for each other, incomplete.

Is there no woman, I thought at last, who can't prove in a day that she's not the one I'm looking for? Most of the ones

I was finding had difficult pasts, most were overwhelmed with problems and looking for help, most needed more money than they had on hand. We allowed for our quirks and flaws and, just-met, untested, we Called each other friends. It was a colorless kaleidoscope, every bit as changing and as grey as it sounds.

By the time television tired of me, I had bought a short-wing, big-engine biplane to be company for the Moth. I practiced arduously, and later began flying acrobatic performances for hire.

Thousands of people crowd summer airshows, I thought, and if I can't find her on television, perhaps I can find her at an airshow.

I met Katherine after my third performance, in Lake Wales, Florida. She emerged from the crowd around the airplane as though she were an old friend. Smiled a subtle intimate smile, cool and close as could be.

Her eyes were steady level calm even in the glare of bright noon. Long dark hair, dark green eyes. The darker our eyes, it is said, the less we're affected by sunbright.

"Looks like fun," she said, nodding to the biplane, oblivious to the noise and the crowd.

"Beats getting crushed to death by boredom," I said. "With the right airplane, you can escape an awful lot of boredom."

"What's it like to zoom around upside-down? Do you give rides, or just show off?"

"Mostly show off. Not many rides. Sometimes. Once you trust you're not going to fall out, it's fun, zooming around."

"Would you give me a ride," she said, "if I asked in the right way?"

"For you I might, when the show's over." Never saw eyes so green. "What's the right way to ask?"

She smiled innocently. "Please?"

She was not far away the rest of the afternoon, disappeared in the crowd from time to time, then back again, the smile and a secret wave. When the sun was nearly set she was the last one left by the airplane. I helped her into the front cockpit of the little machine.

"Two safety belts, remember," I said. "One by itself will hold you in the airplane no matter what aerobatics we do, but we like to have two, anyway."

I told her how to use the parachute if we had to bail out, smoothed the padded shoulder harness snug over her shoulders, down to lock into the second safety belt. You have beautiful breasts, I nearly said, by way of compliment. Instead: "You want to make sure your harness is pulled as tight as you can get it. Soon as the airplane rolls upside-down, it will feel a whole lot looser than it does now!" She grinned up at me as though I had chosen the compliment.

From the sound of the engine to a sun tilted afire on the rim of the world, from hanging inverted above clouds to floating weightless mid-air to crushing three Gs in loops, she was a natural flyer, she adored the ride.

Landed in twilight, she was out of her cockpit by the time I had the engine stopped and before I knew it she threw her arms around my neck and kissed me.

"I LOVE IT!" she said.

"My goodness ..." I said. "Why, I don't mind that, myself."

"You're a grand pilot."

I tied the airplane to cables in the grass. "Flattery, Miss, will get you anywhere you want to go."

She insisted on taking me to dinner to pay for her ride; we talked for an hour. She was divorced, she told me, and worked as a hostess in a restaurant not far from the lake-house I had bought. Between her job and alimony, she had enough money to get along. Now she was thinking about going back to school to study physics.

"Physics! Tell me what happened to lead you into physics . . ." Such an arresting person-positive, direct, motivated.

She reached for her purse. "You don't mind if I smoke, do you?"

If her question startled, my answer flattened me numb.