On a Tuesday evening in November — three and a half years after the faculty lounge, two and a half since he had come to New York — they were cooking dinner together in the kitchen of a slightly larger apartment on West End Avenue that they had moved into six months ago, which had room for both their desks and a real dining table and a bookshelf large enough to hold most of their combined libraries.
She was chopping vegetables with the focused confidence she always brought to cooking. He was making the pasta dough, which he had finally learned to do properly, a project of months. The kitchen smelled of garlic and something good, and the November dark was outside the window, and the apartment was warm.
He said, without looking up from the dough: 'I've been thinking about something.'
'Tell me,' she said.
'I've been thinking,' he said, 'about the faculty lounge. About the first afternoon.'
She was quiet, chopping.
'I keep coming back to the fact,' he said, 'that I was there because I forgot my reading glasses. And then I found them in my jacket pocket, which means I was never there for the reason I thought I was there. Which is — I've been thinking about what that means.'
'What does it mean?' she said.
'I think it means that the things that matter most tend to arrive without announcement,' he said. 'Without proper credentials. Disguised as ordinary afternoons.'
She put down the knife. She turned and looked at him across the kitchen.
He put down the dough. He turned and looked at her.
'Mara Cielo,' he said.
She waited.
'I am asking you,' he said, 'whether you want to marry me. Not for any reason of timing or practicality or because it seems like the thing to do. Because I would like to be your husband, and I would like you to be my wife, and I think those are words that mean something — not the ceremony, but the commitment that underlies it, the decision to keep choosing each other, which I already do, and which I would like to do with the full weight of intention behind it.'
She looked at him for a long moment. The kitchen was warm and the garlic smelled good and the November dark was outside the window and the whole apartment was quiet with the held breath of an important moment.
Then she said: 'Yes. Obviously yes. I've been waiting for you to ask.'
'You could have asked,' he said.
'I know,' she said. 'But you needed to get there in your own time, and I'm patient.' She crossed the kitchen and put her hands on his face, the gesture she always used for the most important things. 'Yes,' she said again, more quietly, with the full weight of all the things that word contained.
He covered her hands with his.
The pasta dough was forgotten for a while. When they returned to it, dinner was late, and neither of them cared.