BEFORE WE WERE FOREVER

The Proposal

It was foolish, by any reasonable measure, to propose marriage to a woman he had known for barely four hours, and Davou understood this perfectly well even as the words were leaving his own mouth, standing with Talatu near the edge of the wedding celebration's winding-down chaos, the afternoon light beginning its slow retreat toward evening, throwing long gold bars across the dust between them.

He had followed her out here under the thin pretense of fetching more chairs, and found, once they were alone at the compound's quieter edge, that every reasonable sentence he had spent the last hour privately rehearsing had simply evaporated, leaving behind only the one true thing sitting, unguarded, at the very center of his chest.

“I would like to marry you,” he said, with a directness that startled them both equally, though only one of them had the presence of mind to properly hide it.

The words hung there in the space between them, absurd and irreversible, and Davou felt his own pulse in his throat, in his palms, in the sudden, foolish conviction that he would rather have said this one true thing badly than never said it at all.

Talatu studied him for a long moment, an expression crossing her face that Davou would later come to recognize as her particular, careful way of deciding exactly how seriously a statement deserved to be taken before offering any response at all — her dark eyes moving over his face with a thoroughness that made him feel, absurdly, as though he were being read like a page of close print. “You have known me for four hours,” she said finally.

“I am aware of the considerable brevity of our acquaintance,” Davou said, and heard, even as he spoke, how thin the words sounded against the size of what he actually felt. “I am simply telling you, honestly, what I already know to be true, regardless of how brief the acquaintance has been.”

“That is not knowledge,” Talatu said, with a bluntness that struck Davou as considerably more devastating than any gentler refusal would have managed, though something in her voice, some small, careful softness beneath the bluntness, suggested the refusal cost her something too. “That is infatuation, which is a very different thing, however sincerely you currently believe otherwise. I think you are a foolish young man, Mr. Yilkes, proposing to a woman you barely know at her own sister's wedding, and I have no intention of building a marriage on a foundation as thin as a single afternoon's acquaintance.”

The refusal, delivered with such calm, unhurried certainty, landed with a force that Davou had not properly prepared himself for, having spent the preceding hour convincing himself, with the particular confidence of a young man unaccustomed to genuine rejection, that his own evident sincerity would be sufficient to carry the day. He felt it land somewhere beneath his ribs, a small, clean wound he suspected he would go on feeling for considerably longer than the afternoon itself lasted.

“I understand,” he said, recovering what dignity he could manage. “Though I hope you will permit me to say that my own assessment of the matter has not changed, whatever you have decided about the wisdom of proposing it so quickly.”

“You may hold whatever assessment you like privately,” Talatu said, though something in her tone had softened marginally, some small c***k of amusement showing through her otherwise composed refusal, there and gone again before he could be certain of it. “I would simply ask that you not repeat it to me again for at least a considerable while, given how poorly the first attempt has evidently landed.”

She turned then, and walked back toward the lantern light and the accordion and the last of the wedding's noise, and Davou stood alone at the compound's quiet edge for a long moment, feeling the particular, hollow ache of a man who has just been handed, in the same breath, both a genuine no and an unmistakable invitation to try again properly.

He walked home from that wedding turning the entire humiliating exchange over in his mind with a persistence that surprised him, the whole three miles of dark road offering no relief from the exact, replaying sound of her voice — that is not knowledge — arriving, by the time he reached his own family's compound well after dark, at a conclusion that would shape the following three years of his life more thoroughly than any single decision he had made before or would make again: that he did not, in fact, intend to simply accept the refusal as final, however soundly delivered, but that he understood, with a clarity that felt almost like relief, exactly what kind of correction his approach actually required.

“You look like a man who has just lost an argument,” his own father observed, finding him sitting alone on the veranda later that evening, still turning over the day's events with a concentration that had not gone unnoticed by the rest of the household.

“I have lost several arguments today, Papa,” Davou admitted. “Though I believe I have also, somewhat inconveniently, found the woman I intend to marry.”

His father, a patient, unhurried man himself, considered this information with more amusement than alarm. “And does she share your intention?”

“Not presently,” Davou said. “She has informed me, quite directly, that she considers me a fool.”

“She may well be correct,” his father said, though not unkindly. “What do you intend to do about her assessment?”

Davou considered the question with more seriousness than his father's light tone perhaps invited, watching the last color drain out of the sky beyond the compound wall. “I intend to prove her wrong,” he said finally. “Though I confess I do not yet know precisely how one goes about proving such a thing to a woman who has already made plain she does not trust words alone.”

“Then you will need to offer her something other than words,” his father said, with the particular quiet wisdom Davou would only fully appreciate many years later, once he had properly lived out its practical application. “Words are cheap, Davou, and any fool can offer them convincingly for an afternoon. If you are serious about this woman, you will need to offer her time, patience, and considerable evidence of your actual character, sustained over a period long enough that she cannot reasonably dismiss it as performance. That is, I suspect, precisely what she is actually asking of you, whether or not she said so directly.”

It was advice Davou carried with him in the weeks that followed, turning it over with the same careful thoroughness he applied to his clerical work, the memory of her face — that unhurried, appraising stillness, the almost-smile he had not properly earned yet — refusing to loosen its hold on him no matter how firmly he tried to reason himself back into ordinary composure. It resolved, eventually, into an actual plan: modest, patient, and entirely unglamorous, but one he intended to pursue with a discipline that would surprise even himself, given how little discipline his own impulsive proposal had initially demonstrated.