Page 475 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 445

high-wire act of human life.
“Who the hell are you?” he repeated.
I tried his movie game, toying with his taste for ambiguity, coaxing
him into perspective. “Maybe Bergman,” I said, “can tell you.”
“Ingrid or Ingmar? I’ve fallen through the silver screen, Magnus.
What...movie...am...I?”

16

The TV news called it the eclipse of the century. In Sonoma County,
that Fourth of July weekend, Ryan sat in the moon-washed field where
Kick’s helicopter had landed that long-ago afternoon. Far to the east,
over Santa Rosa, fireworks shot up through the early twilight and fell like
burning confetti across the full face of the huge moon sitting on the ridge
of the far-off hills.
“I’ll look at the moon,” Charley-Pop had always said to Annie Laurie
during their courtship and finally before he died, “and I’ll be seeing you.”
Ryan had said the same line so often to Kick driving away in the red
Corvette that Kick had learned to say it too. He lay in the tall grass won-
dering if Kick might still remember looking at the moon, especially this
night, with the moon’s clear face tilted to the right and its mouth in the
perpetual pout of O, as if in wonderment, especially this night of relativity,
when over the land and the sea, and through the sky, the Earth, moon, and
sun all were to converge in a straight line of gravity’s pull showing who is
what to whom and where.
Ryan, less than two weeks before, on the summer solstice, the day
of the year’s longest light, had turned forty. He had heard nothing from
Kick in three years. His head told his heart that the hurt in him must stop.
Out there in the stars, extraterrestrials kept their distance from Earth. Its
humans seemed so odd, dragging their hearts around, pining, wearing
their hearts on their sleeves, sending radio waves of Top Ten heartbreak
out into the bounce of space.
How can love be explained to creatures of intelligence?
Ryan was in one of his cosmic moods that night, blazing with the last
pinwheels and rockets of the Independence Day weekend. The time had
come, he knew, to let go—not of the memory of Kick, but of the madness
of the last six years. He lay back in the dry grass, feeling sad and ironic,
bitter-sweet, about all that had happened. The night fit his place in the
universe. Appropriate, he decided. It was appropriate that, in the dark of
the moon, in the slow creeping eclipse of the moon’s face, as the huge plate

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