Magnificent Desolation_ The Long Journey Home From the Moon - Buzz Aldrin [96]
Undaunted, Lois insisted on believing that she and I were a couple with a future. She invited me to go with her to Sun Valley for Christmas, and I accepted. I was not much of a skier, but I figured I could learn. Lois gave me a few pointers, and we were off. Of course, making your way up and down the slopes in Sun Valley is only part of the fun. Skiing there is as much a social event as recreation or physical exercise. Lois seemed to know everybody on the slopes, and they knew her. She introduced me to someone new everywhere we went.
At Lois’s condominium, she introduced me to her children, all of whom were in their mid-to late twenties—her son, Bryant, her younger daughter, Brynn, and her older daughter, Lisa, with whom she had been staying the night we first met at the Bel Air Bay Club. Lois had spoken about me in such glowing terms, Lisa was no doubt expecting some suave, smooth-talking bachelor. Imagine Lisa’s surprise when I presented a somewhat stiff and reserved demeanor, sitting on the sofa in front of the fireplace and barely engaging in any conversation. Although I was doing much better these days, the effects of depression and alcoholism from years past had taken a toll on my exuberance. Lois sat beside me, emoting over her children and emanating enough warmth and enthusiasm to fill the entire living room. Meanwhile, I barely cracked a smile as I leaned forward and pored over some scientific space papers on the coffee table. No doubt, the kids thought, Oh my! What has Mom gotten herself into with this guy? Nevertheless, I enjoyed meeting the people closest to Lois, and her children accepted me immediately and made me feel welcome.
A few weeks later, in mid-January I invited Lois to accompany me to another event, in Hawaii and Lois readily accepted. The day before we departed, however, Lois called my house, and a former girlfriend of mine answered the phone.
“Who are you?” Lois asked.
“I’m a friend of Buzz’s. Who are you?” she asked belligerently.
“Please have Buzz call me,” Lois replied, and hung up the phone. When I called, of course, it took some explaining to convince Lois that the woman who answered the telephone was a friend from my recovery group, a feature from my past, rather than a present girlfriend. Lois reluctantly accepted my apology, and agreed to go along to Hawaii for a space conference in Honolulu. Following the conference, we spent a couple of days at a good friend of mine’s hotel in Kona on the Big Island. It was the week of my fifty-sixth birthday, and Lois wanted to celebrate, but after a day or two in Kona, for no explainable reason, I felt that I was falling into a blue funk. I didn’t want to leave our hotel room; in fact, I didn’t even want to get out of bed. In Honolulu, I had presented my Mars cycler concept to President Reagan’s advisory panel on the U.S. space program. The members listened attentively, but I came away disappointed, wondering if my words had fallen on deaf ears. That partially explained my emotional turmoil. But perhaps I was also suffering from a guilty conscience, since I had planned to go see a former girlfriend in Florida following this trip to Hawaii.
Lois was baffled. Here we were, in a gorgeous, picturesque, romantic setting in Kona, and I didn’t want to go outside. So I didn’t. I stayed in bed and watched the news.
One afternoon, Lois returned from the beach and overheard me talking on the telephone: “Okay, Scott, my dear. I just wanted you to know that I’m not coming to Florida.”
Lois’s interest was immediately piqued. “Oh, are you going to Florida?” she asked. “Who were you talking to?”
“Yes, I was scheduled to go to Florida.”
“Oh, why were you going?”
“I have a friend there whom