The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story

we've done this lifetime-Hollywood, living in the trailer, fighting to save the forest-what will they matter in a thousand years, what does it matter tonight, except what we've learned? What we've learned is everything! I think we've got a nice start, this time. Let's not be harp-seals yet." She stirred, shivered. "Would you like a blanket, or a fire?"

I was thinking about what she had said. "Either," I murmured. "Do you want me to fix it?"

"No. Just needs a match. . . ."

The tiny light shed warm glows from the wood-stove into her eyes, her hair.

"For right now," she said, "if you could do anything you wanted, what would it be?"

"I CAN do anything I want."

"What would it be?" she insisted, curling down near me again, watching the fire.

"I'd want to say. what we've learned." My own words made me blink. Isn't that strange, I thought. Not finding answers anymore, but giving them away! Why not, when we've found our love, when we know at last how the universe works? Or how we think it works.

She looked from the fire into my eyes. "What we've learned is the only thing we have left. You want to give that away?" She turned back to the fire and smiled, testing me. "Don't forget you're the one who wrote that everything you say could be wrong."

"Could be wrong," I agreed. "But when we listen to somebody's answers, we're not really listening to the somebody, are we? We're listening to ourselves while they talk; it's ourself says this part's true and that part's crazy and that part's true again. That's

the fun of listening. The fun of saying is to be as little wrong as we know how to be."

"So you're thinking about giving lectures again," she said.

"Maybe. Would you be on stage with me, we'll say what we've found together? Not be afraid to talk about the bad times or the beautiful? Talk to the ones searching, the way we were, give them hope that happily-ever-after really can be? How I wish we could have heard that, years ago!"

She answered quietly. "I don't think I could do it with you. I can make the arrangements, I'll organize things for you, but I don't want to be on stage."

Something was very wrong. "You don't? There are things that we can say together that neither one of us can say alone. I can't say what you were going through as well as you can; the only way we can do it is together!"

"I don't think so," she said.

"Why not?"

"Richie, when I talked against the war, the crowds were so hostile I was terrified to stand up in front of them. I had to do it, but I promised myself when it was over I would never speak from a stage again. Ever. For any reason. I don't think I can do it."

"You're being silly," I told her. "The war is over! We're not talking about war, now, we're talking about love!"

Her eyes filled with tears. "Oh, Richie!" she said, "Love is what I was talking about then!"

forty-eight

"WHERE DO you get your crazy ideas?" asked the gentleman twenty rows back, the first question in the second hour of the lecture.

There was a mass low chuckle from the couple-thousand people in the Civic Auditorium ... he was not the only one curious about that.

Leslie sat lightly, looking cool and at ease, on the tall stool next to mine on the stage. For the moment I had walked to the footlights with a cordless microphone, choosing from among the hands raised, remembering to repeat the question so the balcony could hear, and so I could have time to think what to say.

" 'Where do I get my crazy ideas?' " I repeated. In half-seconds, an answer materialized, then the words I needed to say it.

"Same place I get the reasonable ones," I said. "Ideas

come from the sleep-fairy, the walk-fairy, and, when I'm irrevocably wet and unable to write notes, from the shower-fairy. What I've always asked from them is Please give me ideas that do no violence to my intuition.

"I know intuitively, for instance, that we are creatures of light and life, and not of blind death. I know that we are not bolted together out of space and time, subject to a million changing heres and nows, goods and bads. The idea that we are physical beings descended from primeval cells in nutrient soups, that idea does violence to my intuition, stomps all over it with football-shoes.

"The idea that we are descended from a jealous God who formed us out of dust to choose between kneel-and-praying or fires-of-damnation, that stomps me worse. No sleep-fairy ever brought me those for ideas. The whole concept of descent, for me, it's wrong.

"Yet no one place I could find, no one person anywhere who had my answers except the inner me, and the inner me I was afraid to trust. I had to swim through my life like a baleen whale, taking in great flooding seawater mouthfuls of what other people wrote and thought and said, tasting and keeping bits of knowing the size of plankton, that fit what I wanted to believe. Anything to explain what I knew was true, that's what I was looking for.