Hard to say who saw who first. The place was crowded. First a couple of eye contacts across the crowded dance floor. When they were dancing together they shouted at each other without really understanding more than a word over the band.
But somehow they both got the message that here was a person with pretensions to intelligence above the common run. Someone they might like to know. So they went out into the night and they walked and talked.
``I have a thousand things to ask you,'' he said.
Of course he didn't ask. He told. And she fell in love with him as he talked about Goethe and Swiss lake dwellers and Pogo cartoons and his childhood and his problems. And if he didn't fall in love with her perhaps it was because he was too busy talking.
They saw each other often. She loved his ears, his sharp blue eyes, the way he spoke. He loved the way she listened. They became lovers and when the rainy season started they saw many movies and he analyzed them afterwards in closing coffee shops.
It was when she began to get a word in edgeways that he suspected triviality.
He became quieter.
She talked more.
He recoiled from what he took for mediocrity.
She was oblivious. Happy.
Then he was gone.