Sexes: The Marriage Dialogues

The Thrower and the Keeper

66 The Thrower and the Keeper It’s best when casual—a quick “I love you” while the coffee cools or when we pass each other in the hall. Skywriting lovers who proclaim “I love you” to the world mistake publicity for praise. Better the ways of Cyrano who saved his praises for Roxanne alone. No Cyrano, I do my best to thank you for your bravery of heart, your sense of who’d be hurt by what is said or left unsaid, your rage when something totally unjust is totally ignored. On basics we agree. On trivia, not always. I claim the Iroquois were right— “Travel light, travel far.” You say the things we chuck today we just might need tomorrow. So there we are—the chucker and the saver—now against mañana. On trips you pack for three eventualities—delay, disaster, and death. 67 I pack the clothes I plan to leave behind, the socks I’ll never wear again, the books I bring to give away . . . To be exact, you’re two-thirds right. When I need dimes for tolls or parking meters, presto! you produce them from the pocket of your coat. If I need dollars, presto! out they pop like Kleenex from the selfsame coat. And that trick works with any coat. You keep a history of birthdays, wedding dates, and anniversaries, and twice that saved us from the worst of all embarrassments. You store for years the sales receipts I’d throw away, and once that spared us a calamity. I doubt we’ll change. What leaves me edgy makes you more assured, so why adjust? I’ll keep on lightening our overload of blankets, towels, issues of the National Geographic, Christmas ribbons, drinking glasses from a dozen different sets, galoshes, photographs, 68 and stubs, discarding, I concede, some quality in all that quantity. You’ll go on saving snapshots, rubber bands, old programs from Toronto and New York, cancelled stamps from Italy and Belgium, shillings, francs, a ring too tarnished to be worn, door keys for God-knows-which hotels, outdated medicines and, finally, I gratefully admit, some quality in all that quantity, including, in the process, me. ...