“Marry me,” I said to my wife, three weeks before she said she would, already, she would. “Marry me and let this be the second chance in our lives. Everybody is entitled to another chance, that’s America, that’s fate; that’s what the whole country believes in and I believe in it, too. I know that whatever we have suffered, whatever we have lost, whatever we feel has been denied us we can reach for again. Just say this: say that between the two of us we can make another beginning and what our history has denied us, we can make again.” I was an extremely melodramatic young man, perhaps more melodramatic than is the style nowadays but this was the late 1950’s, of course, and I had just become a college sophomore after two years in the army investigating the interior of northern Germany, and I was rather desperate. My wife — this is hard to believe — was a freshman who painted pictures and who wanted, at least once to sing art songs in a concert house in Europe. This is not ridiculous, it is the way that many people thought back in the 1950’s, and for that matter I wanted to write novels.
“I don’t know,” she said, “it’s too fast. The whole thing is too fast. I’ve just been on the campus for three months, the first time I’ve ever been away from home, the first time I’ve had to discover that there’s a person there outside of my parents, and before I even have a chance to discover that person, I find that you want to get married. I mean, it isn’t as if I’m not flattered and I do like you very much but I am only 18 — ”
“Marry me,” I said, “it’s not a question of support; I have the assistance from the government for the tuition and I can get a job. And my parents have a little money for me anytime I want it. And somehow we can manage. We can live more cheaply than the two of us could separately. It will be like saving money. And you’ll have a chance to do everything.”
“I don’t know, Walter,” she said, “I don’t know.” And she kissed me langorously, even then she knew how to kiss, oh, God how she could kiss! and we began to neck, and in due course in my old car parked up at the cliffs, we began to pet and one thing led to another although of course that was the year when “nothing went on below the waist” unless you were engaged and we were not engaged until three weeks later when something did “go on below the waist” and she decided that this would be the best thing to do.
“Marry me and change my life,” I said and so we were married and so my life was changed and so we lived happily ever after. For a time. For quite a time. It is surprising to realize how much time we had. More than we could have understood then. If not enough. But nothing is ever quite enough, to be sure, in the long run.