The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story by Richard Bach

role she played in the drama onstage. She didn't miss a line. Watching her at work was watching a friend who was at the same time a stranger. I felt
    a curious warm apprehension-my own sister, centered in lights and cameras!
    Does it change the way I feel about her, I thought, to see her there?
    Yes. There is something magical going on. She has skills and powers I haven't learned, and never will. I wouldn't have liked her less if she weren't an actress, but I did like her more because she was. There has always been electricity for me, pleasure hi meeting people who can do things that I can't. That Leslie was one of them pleasured me indeed.
    Next day in her office, I asked a favor. "Can I borrow your telephone? I want to call the Writers' Guild. ..."
    "Five five oh, one thousand," she said absently, pushing the phone toward me as she read a financing proposal from New York.
    "What's that?"
    She looked up. "The telephone number of the Writers' Guild."
    "You know the number?"
    "M-hm."
    "How come you know it?"
    "I know lots of numbers." She went back to the proposal.
    "What does that mean, 'I know lots of numbers'?"
    "I just know lots of numbers," she said sweetly.
    "What if I wanted to call . . . Paramount Studios?" I said suspiciously.
    "Four six three, oh one hundred."
    I squinted at her, sideways. "A good restaurant?"
    "Magic Pan's good. It has a no-smoking section. Two seven four, five two two two."
    777
    I reached for a telephone book, turned to a listing. "Screen Actors Guild," I said.
    "Eight seven six, three oh three oh." She was right.
    I began to understand. "You haven't . . . Leslie, the script yesterday, you don't have a photographic memory, do you? You haven't memorized . . . the entire telephone book?"
    "No. It's not a photographic memory," she said. "I don't see, I just remember. My hands remember numbers. Ask me for a number and watch my hands."
    I opened the huge book, turned pages.
    "City of Los Angeles, Office of the Mayor?"
    "Two three three, one four five five."
    The fingers of her right hand moved as though she were dialing a push-button telephone in reverse, taking numbers off instead of putting them in.
    "Dennis Weaver, the actor."
    "One of the sweetest human beings in Hollywood. His home number?"
    "Yes."
    "I promised I'd never give it out. How about The Good Life, his wife's health-food store?"
    "OK."
    "Nine eight six, eight seven five oh."
    I looked up the number; of course she was right again. "Leslie, you're scaring me!"
    "Don't be scared, wookie. It's just a funny thing that happens with me. I memorized music when I was little, and every license plate in town. When I came to Hollywood, I memorized scripts, dance routines, phone numbers, schedules, conversations, anything. The number of your pretty yellow jet airplane is N One Five Five X. Your hotel number
    is two seven eight, three three four four; you are staying in room two one eight. When we left the studio last night you said, 'Remind me to tell you about my sister in show business.' I said, 'Can I remind you now?' and you said, 'I think you might as well because I really want to tell you about her.' I said, 'Do I know . . .'" She broke off remembering and laughed at my astonishment. "You're looking at me as if I'm a freak, Richard."
    "You are. But I like you anyway."
    "I like you too," she said.
    Late that afternoon, I was working on a television screenplay, rewriting the last few pages, knocking them out on Leslie's typewriter while she slipped into the garden to care for her flowers. Even there, so diflerent we were. Flowers are pretty little things, all right, but to put so much time into them, to have them depending on you to water them and feed them and wash them and whatever else flowers need . . . dependence is not for me. I'd never be a gardener, she'd never be otherwise.
    There among the plants in her office were shelves of books reflecting mists of the rainbow that she was, there above her desk the quotes and ideas that mattered to