Ray Bradbury Stories Volume 2

Their first year was pure myth and fable, which would grow outsize when remembered thirty years on. They went to see new films and old films, but mainly Stan and Ollie. They memorized all the best scenes and shouted them back and forth as they drove around midnight Los Angeles. He spoiled her by treating her childhood growing up in Hollywood as very special, and she spoiled him by pretending that his yesteryear on roller skates out front of the studios was not in the past but right now.

She proved it one night. On a whim she asked where he had roller-skated as a boy and collided with W. C. Fields. Where had he asked Fields for his autograph, and where was it that Fields signed the book, handed it back, and cried, ‘There you are, you little son-of-a-bitch!’

‘Drive me there,’ she said.

And at ten o’clock that night they got out of the car in front of Paramount Studio and he pointed to the pavement near the gate and said, ‘He stood there,’ and she gathered him in her arms and kissed him and said, gently, ‘Now where was it you had your picture taken with Marlene Dietrich?’

He walked her fifty feet across the street from the studio. ‘In the late afternoon sun,’ he said, ‘Marlene stood here.’ And she kissed him again, longer this time, and the moon rising like an obvious magic trick, filling the street in front of the empty studio. She let her soul flow over into him like a tipped fountain, and he received it and gave it back and was glad.

‘Now,’ she said, quietly, ‘where was it you saw Fred Astaire in nineteen thirty-five and Ronald Colman in nineteen thirty-seven and Jean Harlow in nineteen thirty-six?’

And he drove her to those three different places all around Hollywood until midnight and they stood and she kissed him as if it would never end.

And that was the first year. And during that year they went up and down those long piano steps at least once a month and had champagne picnics halfway up, and discovered an incredible thing:

‘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:

‘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.’