Armed with all the weaponry in the arsenal of amour, he presses his suit. She, with an eye on the history of this particular species with her own, is naturally wary. This is well beyond Montagues and Capulets. The parental blessing? You can forget that. Still, there is something charming about the way his whiskers twitch at the sight of her. In truth, she’s had her eye on him since they met at the recycle center, outside that cozy bin at the corner of Mixed Paper and Yard Waste. Is it love, or just a strangely titillating game of cat and mouse?
***
“Irresistible Force, meet Immoveable Object. You two should know each other,” said the host. It is late in the evening, long after most other physics problems have left the party for home, or moved on to do their head scratching and beard pulling in some quiet bar near graduate student housing. Our two, never the sort to engage in small talk, nevertheless quickly find themselves locked in lively conversation. “Your eyes are a beautiful shade of lapis lazuli,” murmurs Irresistible Force. Immoveable Object is, naturally, unmoved, but feels strangely warmed. Soon, chemistry outflanks physics. Against all odds, I.F and I.O tie the knot, are fruitful and multiply, eventually begetting a houseful of small, ill-behaved paradoxes.
…
It was surely Fate that brought them together. He, slender, with that high brow and generous cranial cavity that sets the thoroughbred Homo Sapiens apart; The other, more robust but less upright, low of brow and, it must be admitted, rather short on witty repartée. The annual cave art show at Lascaux — the high point of Europe’s Ice Age social season — often brought these two branching limbs of human evolutionary history into a proximity from which each would otherwise have instinctively recoiled. Finding themselves shoulder to shoulder in the semi-darkness as they jostle for a better perspective on a deft rendition of a reindeer hunt, each feels a secret thrill. “Neanderthal he may be,” High Brow considers, “but he’s no Philistine.” “One of those thinky types” muses Low Brow. “But cute just the same.”
Later, neither could say who made the first move. People talked, of course, but by the time they bought their first grotto together, a loft on the Upper West Side of the Pyrenees with all original stalagmites, it all seemed perfectly — gloriously — normal.