"That was hot damn hellacious fine music! Don't you think it was, god ... I mean, damn?"
She looked to heaven, imploring. "What have I done?" she said. "What am I creating?"
"Whatever the hell you're creating," I said, "you're doing a damn fine job of it!"
Business partners still, we insisted some work get done in those weeks together, so we chose a film to research and left early to .stand in line for the afternoon show. The traffic sighed and hummed in the street while we waited, yet the traffic wasn't there, as though an enchanted mist began at arm's-length around us, everything beyond turned ghostly as we talked on our private planet.
I hadn't noticed the woman watching us, not far away in the mist, but all at once she made a decision that frightened me. She walked directly to Leslie, touched her shoulder, demolished our world.
"You're Leslie Parrish!"
At once, my friend's bright smile changed. Still a smile, but suddenly frozen; inside she had retreated, cautious.
"Excuse me, but I saw you in The Big Valley and Star Trek and ... I love your work and I think you're beautiful. ..." She was sincere and shy, so that the walls thinned.
"Oh-thank you!"
The woman opened her purse. "Could you ... if it isnt too much trouble, would you mind signing an autograph for my daughter Corrie? She'd kill me if she knew I was this close to you and didn't . . ." She wasn't having much luck finding paper to write on. "There's got to be something here. . . ."
I offered my notebook, and Leslie nodded, accepting it. "Here we are," she said to the lady. "Thank you, sir," to me.
She wrote a greeting to Corrie and signed her name, tore off the sheet of paper and handed it to the woman.
"You were Daisy Mae in Li'l Abner, too," the woman said, as though Leslie might have forgotten, "and The Man-churian Candidate. I loved it."
"You remember, after all this time? That's so nice of you. . . ."
"Thank you, very much. Corrie will be so happy!"
"Give her a hug for me."
It was quiet for a moment after the woman went back to her place in line.
"Don't you say a word," Leslie growled at me.
"That was touching!" I said. "I'm not kidding. Really."
She softened. "She's sweet and sincere. The ones who say, 'Aren't you somebody?' I just say no and try to get by. 'No, you're somebody, I know you're somebody, what have you done?' They want you to list your credits. . . ." She shook her head, perplexed. "What do you do? There's no sensitive way to deal with insensitive people. Is there?"
"Interesting. I don't have that problem."
"You don't, wookie? You mean that you've never had one rude person crash into your privacy?"
"Not in person. To writers, insensitive people send written demands, and they send manuscripts. About one percent is that way, maybe not that much. The rest of the mail is fun."
I resented the speed of the ticket-line. In less than an hour we had to cut off our discoveries to walk into the theater on business and sit down and watch a movie. There's so much to gain from her, I thought, holding her hand in the dark, my shoulder touching hers, more to say than ever there was! And now lived the wild gentility of sex between us, changing us, completing us.
Here is a woman unequaled in my history, I thought, looking at her in the dark. I cannot imagine what it would take to shatter, to threaten the warmth of being close to her. Here is the one woman, of all the women I know, with whom there can never be any question, any doubt of the bond between us, for so long as we both shall live.
Isn't it strange, the way certainty always comes before shatterings?
twenty-two
. HERE WAS the lake once more, Florida sparkling under my windows. Seaplanes like sun-color water-moths practicing, gliding on water and air. Nothing changed about the place, I thought, laying down the garment-bag on the couch.
A movement at the edge of my eye and I jumped, to see him in the doorway, another me that I had forgotten: armored, defended and at the moment, disgusted. Like coming home from a walk in the meadow, daisies in my hair, pockets empty of apple-snacks and sugar-cubes for the deer, to find a mailed warrior standing coldly await in the house.
"You are seven weeks late!" he said. "You did not tell me where you were. You will be hurt by what I must say, and I could have saved you pain. Richard, you have seen quite enough of Leslie Parrish. Have you forgotten everything you've learned? Don't you see danger? The woman threat-