Ray Bradbury Stories Volume 2. Ray Bradbury
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:
‘Good-bye …’
‘What?’ he asked.
‘I can see good-bye 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, Ollie, will you come? Hell, don’t marry me, we’ll 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 fall 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 cold-water walk-up flat in the Latin Quarter a long way off from here? This is my one and only offer, Ollie. 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.
‘I’m crying,’ she said.
He started to get up but she shook her head.
‘No, don’t. If you touch me I’ll cave in, and to hell with that. I’m going. But once a year will be forbearance day, or forgiveness day or whatever in hell you want to call it. Once a year I’ll show up at our flight of steps, no piano, same hour, same time as that night when we first went there and if you’re there to meet me I’ll kidnap you or you me, but don’t bring along and show me your damn bank balance or give me any of your lip.’
‘Stan,’ he said.
‘My God,’ she mourned.
‘What?’
‘This door is heavy. I can’t move it.’ She wept. ‘There. It’s moving. There.’ She wept more. ‘I’m gone.’
The door shut.
‘Stan!’ He ran to the door and grabbed the knob. It was wet. He raised his fingers to his mouth and tasted the salt, then opened the door.
The hall was already empty. The air where she had passed was just coming back together. Thunder threatened when the two halves met. There was a promise of rain.
He went back to the steps on October 4 every year for three years, but she wasn’t there. And then he forgot for two years but in the autumn of the sixth year, he remembered and went back in the late sunlight and walked up the stairs because he saw something halfway up and it was a bottle of good champagne with a ribbon and a note on it, delivered by someone, and the note read:
‘Ollie, dear Ollie. Date remembered. But in Paris. Mouth’s not the same, but happily married. Love. Stan.’
And after that, every October he simply did not go to visit the stairs. The sound of that piano rushing down that hillside, he knew, would catch him and take him along to where he did not know.
And that was the end, or almost the end, of the Laurel and Hardy love affair.
There was, by amiable accident, a final meeting.
Traveling through France fifteen years later, he was walking on the Champs Elysées at twilight one afternoon with his wife and two daughters, when he saw this handsome woman coming the other way, escorted by a very sober-looking older man and a very handsome dark-haired boy of twelve, obviously her son.
As they passed, the same smile lit both their faces in the same instant.
He twiddled his necktie at her.
She tousled her hair at him.
They did not stop. They kept going. But he heard her call back along the Champs Elysées, the last words he would ever hear her say:
‘Another fine mess you’ve got us in!’ And then she added the old, the familiar name by which he had gone in the years of their love.
And she was gone and his daughters and wife looked at him and one daughter said, ‘Did that lady call you Ollie?’
‘What lady?’ he said.
‘Dad,’ said the other daughter, leaning in to peer at his face. ‘You’re crying.’
‘No.’
‘Yes, you are. Isn’t he, Mom?’
‘Your papa,’ said his wife, ‘as you well know, cries at telephone books.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘just one hundred and fifty steps and a piano. Remind me to show you girls, someday.’
They walked on and he turned and looked back a final time. The woman with her husband and son turned at that very moment. Maybe he saw her mouth pantomime the words, So long, Ollie. Maybe