The Toynbee Convector

“I think it’s our mouths,” he said. “Until I met you, I never knew I had a mouth. Yours is the most amazing in the world, and it makes me feel as if mine were amazing, too. Were you ever really kissed before I kissed you?”

“Never!”

“Nor was I. To have lived this long and not known mouths.”

“Dear mouth,” she said, “shut up and kiss.” But then at the end of the first year they discovered an even more incredible thing. He worked at an advertising agency and was nailed in one place. She worked at a travel agency and would soon be flying everywhere. Both were astonished they had never noticed before. But now that Vesuvius had erupted and the fiery dust was beginning to settle, they sat and looked at each other one night and she said, faintly:

“Goodbye….”

“What?” he asked.

“I can see goodbye coming,” she said.

He looked at her face and it was not sad like Stan in the films, but just sad like herself.

“I feel like the ending of that Hemingway novel where two people ride along in the late day and say how it would be if they could go on forever but they know now they won’t,” she said.

“Stan,” he said, “this is no Hemingway novel and this can’t be the end of the world. You’ll never leave me.”

But it was a question, not a declaration and suddenly she moved and he blinked at her and said,

“What are you doing down there?”

“Nut,” she said, “I’m kneeling on the floor and I’m asking for your hand. Marry me, Ollie. Come away with me to France. I’ve got a new job in Paris. No, don’t say anything. Shut up. No one has to know I’ve got the money this year and will support you while you write the great American novel—”

“But—” he said.

“You’ve got your portable typewriter, a ream of paper, and me. Say it, Stan, will you come? Hell, don’t marry me, well live in sin, but fly with me, yes?”

“And watch us go to hell in a year and bury us forever?”

“Are you that afraid, Ollie? Don’t you believe in me or you or anything? God, why are men such cowards, and why the hell do you have such thin skins and are afraid of a woman like a ladder to lean on. Listen, I’ve got things to do and you’re coming with me. I can’t leave you here, you’ll fell down those damn stairs. But if I have to, I will. I want everything now, not tomorrow. That means you, Paris, and my job. Your novel will take time, but you’ll do it. Now, do you do it here and feel sorry for yourself, or do we live in a coldwater walk-up flat in the Latin Quarter a long way off from here. This is my one and only offer, Stan. I’ve never proposed before, I won’t ever propose again, it’s hard on my knees. Well?”

“Have we had this conversation before?” he said.

“A dozen times in the last year, but you never listened, you were hopeless.”

“No, in love and helpless.”

“You’ve got one minute to make up your mind. Sixty seconds.” She was staring at her wristwatch.

“Get up off the floor,” he said, embarrassed.

“If I do, it’s out the door and gone,” she said. “Forty-nine seconds to go, Ollie.”

“Stan,” he groaned.

“Thirty,” she read her watch. “Twenty. I’ve got one knee off the floor. Ten. I’m beginning to get the other knee up. Five. One.”

And she was standing on her feet.

“What brought this on?” he asked.

“Now,” she said, “I am heading for the door. I don’t know. Maybe I’ve thought about it more than I dared even notice. We are very special wondrous people, Ollie, and I don’t think our like will ever come again in the world, at least not to us, or I’m lying to myself and I probably am.

But I must go and you are free to come along, but can’t face it or don’t know it. And now—” she reached out. “My hand is on the door and—”

“And?” he said, quietly.