When Shared Memories Become Stories We Tell Alone
Briggs’s Bicycle Ballet in London
One New Year’s Eve in L.A., my wife Briggs and I rode our bicycles from bars to pubs to Santa Monica Beach. We did everything on them, from supermarket runs to arriving at premieres in evening dress.
We were on bikes in London the last time I remember Briggs completely physically free before she got cancer. It began with us sitting in the Shaftesbury Theatre, one of the largest theatres in the West End. We were in the office of the chief executive of the theatre and television production company that owned it. He was telling us that he’d discussed a play of ours with the owner of the company. It was a comedic paean to Peter O’Toole and Richard Harris’s era of hellraising actor.
He wanted to make it their first production under his new regime. He knew we had another prominent West End/Broadway producer interested. He said he was offering us a production, and if there was a bidding war, that wasn’t an obstacle. Below the desk, Briggs was pressing her foot down on mine in her excitement. After talk of possible stars for the leads and finishing our coffees, we left the office all grins.
We’d bought a couple of second-hand bikes for our six weeks there. Friends of ours had a house in Battersea, on the other side of the Thames. We had the use of it while they stayed in our apartment in Beverly Hills. The middle part of our ride back to the house was along the Mall, the long tree-lined roadway that leads to Buckingham Palace. As we turned onto it, we were still elated. We’d been talking animatedly the whole way.
Suddenly we were aware that the Mall was strangely deserted, especially for that time of day. We slowed up, taking it in, and looked to each other. Then Briggs struck a pose that let me know I was supposed to watch what she was going to do. As she took off, I came to a stop…and she began performing a ballet on bicycle.
She had studied ballet and designed costumes for ballet pieces. She’d taken a course in the history of ballet in Copenhagen. And except for in summer, she’d usually have on dancers’ legwarmers. Now here all of it was melded together into something I couldn’t believe I was seeing.
It was as if the bicycle was riding itself as she extended her arms and legs into impossibly beautiful positions. She pointed her shoes into becoming toeshoes. As the bicycle curled beneath her, her lovely hands were guiding me through it all. She glided back past me as if “Swan Lake” had been inspired by her. She danced on past bits of sky gouached into the trees, as she herself might have painted them.
Then that leafy blue-and-green flickered at the edges of her arms until the broad, open, solid Mall held onto the final sweeping grace of her shoulders and waist. As she came back to me, she seemed to be ethereally hardly pedaling at all. My mouth had been open the whole time. She came to a stop and I said, “You know that’s impossible, what you just did.” She just grinned that incredible grin of hers.
We smiled deeply into each other’s eyes and, cherishing each other and the moment, we resumed riding up the Mall together…lingeringly, catching each other’s eyes as we rode.
A year later Briggs was hit on her bicycle in L.A., our first months-long experience with doctors and hospitals ahead of her cancer. The owner of the production company changed his mind because of “economic conditions.” The chief executive resigned. The other prominent producer postponed meeting with us in Beverly Hills twice. Then he got miffed at our broaching the possibility of a co-production between the chief executive and him.
In that perfect memory of Briggs, though, the world allowed her the full extent of her capacity for happiness. We could have ridden our bicycles not just past Buckingham Palace and over the Thames to Battersea but on over the setting sun to Briggs’s beloved Saturn. When we were first getting involved in Brooklyn, she had told me she wanted to sit on its rings and dangle her legs.
Since losing her, after fighting her cancer together through four centres in Manhattan, that day on the Mall and so many other cherished moments are no longer shared memories; just stories I tell alone.
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Paul Sanderson is the author of “Briggs: Love, Cancer, and the Medical Profession”. His related petition has been signed by 35 stars, legends, and professors, and a challenge to get signatures taken by 20 tennis and squash greats. He has written associated articles for Fortune, HuffPost, and the Medical Journal of Australia’s MJA InSight. He is currently finishing up an in-depth piece proposing a U.S.-UK-Australia alliance on a new era in cancer and writing the final draft of an action-thriller in which the female lead has a hidden agenda aimed at Washington and issues in his campaign. With America’s mounting gun crisis, guns also feature, and are questioned, in it; as in his recent article, “‘The Mentality of the Gun’ in America”.
