My freedom is a choice now between escape to some other country and careful, slow working out this heap of broken crockery that was my empire. Richard-then made some blind decisions and stupid mistakes that Richard-now will have to pay for.
I watched Leslie studying the tax returns, jotting page after page of notes for the lawyers.
Richard-now, I thought, is not doing a damn thing. Les-lie-now is doing it, and she isn't the tiniest bit responsible for what happened. Leslie didn't get to fly the fast airplanes; she didn't even get a chance to save the empire from disaster. Leslie gets to sweep up the pieces if she can. What a reward, for making a friend of Richard Bach!
And then he gets mad at her because she raised her voice to him when he read her private poetry!
Richard, I thought, have you considered the possibility that you may in fact be a god damned worthless son-of-a-bitch? For the first time in my life, I considered that, seriously.
twenty-six
HE ONLY difference might have been that she was quieter than usual, but I didn't notice that.
"I can't believe you don't have your own airplane, Leslie. A meeting in San Diego, it's only half an hour away!" I checked the oil in the engine of the Meyers 200 that I had flown west this time to see her, checked that the fuel caps were on tight and the covers over them closed and locked.
She answered in a voice just above a whisper, as she stood in warm sun by the left wing. She wore a sand-color suit that must have been tailored for her, yet she looked ill at ease near my business-plane.
"Excuse me, wook?" I said. "I didn't quite hear you."
She cleared her throat. "I said that I've managed to get along without an airplane so far."
I put her briefcase in the back, slipped into the left seat,
helped her into the right and closed the door from the inside, talking.
"First time I saw this panel, I said, 'Wow! Look at all the dials and switches and gauges and radios and things!' The Meyers does have more than its share of instruments, but you get used to it after a while and it's pretty simple."
"Good," she said in a tiny voice. She looked at the panel about the way I had looked at the movie-set the day she had taken me to MGM. Not quite that much awe, but I could tell she didn't do this often.
'*PROP CLEAR!" I called, and she looked at me with big eyes, as though something was wrong, that I should be shouting. Not used to anything smaller than a jumbo-jet, I guessed.
"It's OK," I said. "We know there's no one near the airplane, but still we yell Prop clear! or Look out for the propeller! or something like that, so anyone hearing knows that our engine will be starting and get out of the way. An old aviation courtesy."
"Nice," she nodded.
Master switch on, mixture rich, throttle cracked a half-inch open, fuel pump on (I pointed to the fuel-pressure gauge so she could see we had fuel pressure), ignition switch on, starter button down.
The propeller spun; the engine fired at once, catching on four cylinders roughly, then five, then six, smoothing down into a lion's glad purr to be awake again. Now instrument-needles were moving all over the panel: oil pressure, vacuum gauge, ammeter, voltmeter, heading indicator, artificial horizon, navigation indicators. Lights came on to show radio ffequencies; voices sounded in the speakers. A scene I had played some ten thousand times in one airplane or another
since I was a kid out of high school, and I liked it as much now as I did then.
I got the airport takeoff information from the tower, chatted with ground control that we were a Meyers and not a baby Navion, released the brakes and we taxied half a mile to the runway. Leslie watched the instrument panel, the other airplanes taxiing, landing, taking off. She watched me.
"I can't understand a word they're saying," she said. Her hair was combed severely back, tucked under a beige tam-o'-shanter. I felt like a company pilot, with the beautiful president on board for the first time.
"It's air-language, sort of a code," I said. "We can understand it because we know exactly what's going to be said: airplane numbers, runway numbers, takeoff sequences, winds, traffic. Say something the control tower doesn't expect: 'This is Meyers Three Niner Mike, we're having cheese sandwiches please hold the mayo,' the tower-lady will come back, 'What? What? Say again?' Cheese sandwich is not a word in air-language."
So much of hearing, I thought, is listening to what we expect and tuning out the rest. I'm trained to hear air-talk; she's trained to hear music I can't even tell is there. Is it the same with seeing? Do we tune visions out of our eyes, and UFOs and ghosts? Do we tune out tastes, do we tune down our senses, until we discover that the physical world is what we expect it to be, and not a miracle more? What would our day look like if we saw in infrared and ultraviolet, or if we could train ourselves to see auras, futures unformed, pasts lingering?
She listened intently to the radio, puzzling out sudden bursts of tower-talk, and I thought for a second of the widening range of calm adventures I was having with her.
Anyone else this moment would see the trim lovely businesswoman, neatly on her way to discuss film-production finances, above-the-line costs and below-the-lines, shooting schedules and locations.,Yet narrowing my eyes I could see her as she had been an hour earlier, clad only in warm air from
two hair dryers after her shower, winking at me as I passed her door, laughing a second later when I ran into the wall.
What a shame, I thought, that such pleasures always lead to taking-for-granted, to frowns and arguments and all the wrecked shambles of marriage, married or not.
I pressed the microphone button on the control wheel. "Meyers Two Three Niner Mike's ready to go on Two-One."