She didn't protest. I lay down on the carpet, closed my eyes. One deep breath.
My body is completely relaxed. . . .
Another deep breath.
My mind is completely relaxed. . . .
Another.
I am standing at a door, and the door is opening into a different time. . . .
The trailer. Sunset. Leslie curled in a defensive shell on the far side of the couch, real as a three-dimension film.
"Oh, Richard," she said, bleak and tired. "I want it to work, being together. Do you want it to work?"
"Yes, I do." I do if you'll let me be who I am, I thought. I'll never stand between you and anything you wish; why can't you say the same for me?
She uncurled and sat at the far end of the little couch, silent. No more tears, but there was the weight in the air of so much disagreement between us, such a distance between our two islands.
"Are you sure? Are you sure you want it to work?"
"No! To be honest with you, I'm not sure. I don't think I can put up with these ropes, I feel like I'm caught in a rope-storm! Move this way and you don't like it, move that way and you shout at me. We're so different, you scare me. I've given this experiment a fair try, but if you can't let me go off and be alone for a couple of weeks, I'm not sure I do want it to work. I can't see much future."
She sighed. Even in the dark, I could see her walls going up, me on the outside. "I can't see any future either, Richard. You told me you w
ere selfish, and I -didn 't listen. We tried, and it didn 't work. Everything had to be your way, exactly your way, didn't it?"
" 'Fraid so, Leslie." I almost called her wookie, and when I didn't, I knew that the last time I had used the word had been the last time ever. "I can't live without the freedom ..."
"Not your freedoms again, please. No more soapboxes. I should never have let you talk me into one more try together. I give up. You are who you are."
I tried to lift some of the weight. "You did solo the glider. You'll never again be afraid to fly."
"That's right. Thank you for helping me do that." She stood, turned on the light, looked at her watch. "There's
a late plane back to Los Angeles tonight, isn't there? Can you drive me to Phoenix to catch the late plane?"
"If that's what you want Or we can fly back ourselves, in the Meyers."
"No, thanks. The late plane will be fine."
She packed her clothes in ten minutes, crammed everything in two piles, shut lids over them.
Not a word between us.
I set the suitcases in the truck, waited for her in the desert night. There was a slim quarter-moon, low in the west. A baby moon, laughing sideways, she had written. Now the same moon, just a few turns later, dim and mourning.
I remembered our nine-hour phone call, when we barely saved our life together. What am I doing? She is the dearest, wisest, most beautiful woman ever to touch my life, and I'm driving her away!
But the ropes, Richard. You have given it a fair try.
I felt a lifetime of happiness and wonder, learning and joy with this woman break away, shift and fill like a giant silver sail under the moon, flutter once, fill again, and fade, and fade, and fade. . . .
"Do you want to lock the trailer?" she said. The trailer was my place now, not hers.
"Doesn't matter."
She left it unlocked.