Larger than Life Read Free Page A

processing what very few observations and impressions he’d been able to acquire. “And just out of a sense of fair play, you understand, would you correct me if I go too far offbase?” He was banking on her lack of concern over what he might guess, trusting in the inevitable human leaning toward complacency.
    After a moment, she nodded slowly. “All right, Travis. If any of your guesses is glaringly wrong, I’ll point that out.”
    Mere recognition of wrongness rather than correction was not quite what he’d hoped for, but he settled for it. Gathering his thoughts, he began.
    “Saber Duncan is not the name you were born with. You’ve led—up until two years ago, at any rate—a very sheltered life. You’re very well educated, partly outside this country, I think. And two years ago, shortly after you cut your first two records, something happened to you, something that changed your voice, your style … even your life. Right so far?”
    She was smiling faintly. “Not glaringly wrong.”
    He took a deep breath and began calling forth more personal observations and perceptions. “I don’t know what happened to you during those missing months, Saber, but I’m sure it was devastating in some way. Because the lovely, fragile hot-houseflower with the sweet, passionless voice became something—someone—far more complicated. I think you walked through fire.”
    There was something now behind the serenity of her eyes, a glimpse of that part of her she kept caged offstage. But she was still smiling. “‘I am ashes where once I was fire’?” she murmured.
    He shook his head, staring into her eyes as he tried to find and catch that elusive wildness behind the silvery curtain. “No. You’re fire now … where once you were something cool and dry.”
    “And that’s what interests you, isn’t it?” Abruptly, she was distant, matter-of-fact. “What happened to the girl who became a woman? What happened to a hothouse flower to make it grow in the harsh outdoors? That’s why you’re hell-bent to write a book about me. Not because of who and what I’ve become, but because you don’t know how that happened, and you hate unsolved mysteries.”
    Travis gazed at her for a long moment. He could hardly deny the quiet accusation, because it was true. But he realized now that the man was asintrigued by her as the writer. “Will you answer one question honestly?” he asked at last.
    “I’ll have to hear it first.”
    He nodded, expecting nothing else. “Are you the Saber Duncan who recorded two records two years ago?”
    “Yes.”
    “If you’d answered no,” he said quietly, “I would have lost the desire to write about you. Because you’re quite right: what fascinates me isn’t that you’re a ‘star’ or even that now you have the most incredible voice I’ve ever heard. It’s that two years ago you were a girl with a sweet, bland voice, and now you’re a woman whose larger-than-life stage presence is matched by something I sense in you offstage. Something equally larger than life.”
    “That’s honest, anyway.” Her voice was curiously husky.
    He leaned forward intently. “I write about
people
, Saber. Fictional characters or factual lives—but always people. What motivates them, what drives them.
How
they’ve become what they are. In a way, it’s like that song of yours. There are sofew larger-than-life people, so few heroes and heroines. I write about the people who become heroic.”
    “I’m not heroic.”
    “One of the definitions of
heroic
is
larger than life.”
he said softly. “And you are that, Saber.”
    She shook her head, denying the words or any reference to herself in them.
    After a moment, he said, “I can promise that you will have final approval of the manuscript. I won’t allow anything to get into print that you don’t want in print.”
    “Then you’d have no book,” she said quietly. “Because what I don’t want in print … is most of my life.”

TWO
    T HE SILENCE