“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 111 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?”
“You papa,” said his wife, “as you well know, cries at telephone books.”
“No,” he said, “just one hundred 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 he didn’t. He felt his own mouth move, in silence: So long, Stan.
And they walked in opposite directions along the Champs-Elysées in the late light of an October sun.
I Suppose You Are Wondering Why We Are Here?