Heart of the City (39 page)

It was not an invitation—even Sarah could see that. Still, she got into her car one morning in Maryland and drove to New York. Pulling to the curb on some Midtown street, taxis bleating as they careened past, she picked up her cellphone and dialed The Carlton Arms. If he had decided to stay there, she told
herself, it would mean something. Wouldn’t it? “Daniel Letourneau, please,” she told the operator.

And then there was his voice, at once alien and familiar.

“Sarah?”

“I’m here.”

“Where?”

“Here.”

She found him in their old room—the one whose closet they’d etched their names in two years before—and tumbled with him onto the bed. But by the morning after the second night, the chill had returned. Their rituals felt like words repeated too many times.

The next winter, Sarah’s mother fell ill again. Sarah was still grieving over Daniel when the news came, and it plunged her into a paralyzing depression. She was a semester away from a bachelor’s degree at the University of Maryland, where she’d transferred from NYU, but couldn’t summon the will to go to class. More worryingly, she was losing interest in the one thing that had never failed her: dance. She was technically in peak form. Her company was embarking on a daring new work. But dancing no longer brought any satisfaction. She lost so much weight that her mother and sister began to fear for her health.

Where once she was weightless, boneless, now she was all stone. Doubts bore down on her like a murderous mob. Can I abandon my mother, even as her condition worsens? Should I quit school, again, when I’m closer than ever to graduating? Can I leave the dance company I love and start again in a new place? Some evenings, after turning off the reading light in her bedroom, she cried inconsolably. Her family could see her heartache. Her Great Aunt Sule, from Puerto Rico, looked at her one day and said, “Tienes tristeza saliendo por los ojos.”
You have sadness pouring out of your eyes.

Then, from her sick bed one morning, Sarah’s mother looked up and squeezed her daughter’s hand. “Go to Ithaca,” her mother
said. She had grown fond of Daniel during his summer visit a couple of years earlier. “But go as an explorer. Give yourself permission to fail. Talk to him. See if you can untangle things. If not, your whole life is in front of you.”

“What about you, Mom?”

“Your sister and I will manage fine.”

Later that same day, Sarah answered the phone and heard a long-absent voice: her father’s. Since leaving Milwaukee, where her parents had lived before the divorce, Sarah had seen him perhaps once or twice a year. He rarely called the house now, mostly because he worried that his former wife would answer.

“Hey, sweetie, it’s your dad, I have a quick question for your sister,” he said, with that Wisconsin accent. “But hey, it’s been a while, how ya’ doin’?”

Sarah burst into tears. They hadn’t spoken in months. She had never before confided in him. But her misery over the breakup with Daniel was so consuming that she told her father everything.

“Oh, sweetie,” he said with a tenderness she hadn’t heard before. “Well, what are you going to do about it?”

“I think I should go to Ithaca. To be with him.”

She felt sure her father would respond with his hallmark pragmatism, saying he didn’t think she should give up school or dance for a crapshoot. But then he spoke, and she felt a little breathless. His advice was a mirror of her mother’s. He even used the same metaphor about going “as an explorer.” Up to that point, she had never understood how her parents were ever together. Now, for the first time in her life, they seemed to agree on something.

She drove to Ithaca on a cold and cloudy day in February 2003 and carried her bags into Daniel’s two-bedroom apartment, which overlooked an icy Cayuga Lake. He helped her unpack, and for dinner he made
cocido
, a hearty Spanish stew of meat, garbanzo beans, carrots, and potatoes. He had cooked it before, on days he knew Sarah needed bucking up.

“Did I ask you to make this?” Sarah asked, holding back tears.

“I knew.”

AT FIRST, nothing came easy. They had sprinted, but never walked, and the slow-and-steady tested them, as did the long road. But there was comfort in nearness. You could make mistakes when you lived together because you knew you’d wake up the next morning with another chance. Nearness. It was the sole, unaccountable reason for their ever meeting. Without nearness, she and Daniel would have nothing.

As the days turned to weeks, they found a precarious footing. He cleaned and cooked. She shopped for groceries and washed the clothes. While Daniel worked on his PhD, Sarah took classes in massage and began making friends. Over the next few months, little by little, they built a foundation that no number of steamy nights in a hotel room could equal.

Sarah had long ago told herself that she would never fall in love, let alone marry. Such was the fate of weightless children. But slowly, as fall turned to winter and winter to spring, something was growing inside her—and between her and Daniel—that felt unfamiliar but powerful and good.

New York City demands engagement with strangers. The side-walks and subways are so crowded that we have no choice but to overhear private conversations and see faces at distances normally reserved for intimates. We are often close enough to see the crow’s feet taking hold on a young face, smell the kimchi wafting from the paper bag, spot the flask in the back pocket. We are privy to strangers’ ambitions, fears, and preoccupations in an almost unnatural way. When we accidentally knock into someone, we know, whether or not we apologize, to expect at least partial forgiveness.

The people who live in New York City share these bonds deeply. The rigors of daily life in a place with twenty-eight thousand residents per square mile—seventy-one thousand per square mile in Manhattan—make New Yorkers family, even if they have not yet spoken to the neighbor across the hall. But the city leaves no less of an imprint on visitors, for whose necks it reserves its hottest breath. The tourists emerging from the subway in Times Square freeze, like startled animals, for only a moment, before surrendering themselves—and a measure of privacy—to the will of the crowd.

As I walked through Manhattan on a recent April day, I wondered how much of all this played into the love stories I’d been writing. The conventional wisdom is that enforced physical proximity prompts us to raise our guard. We walk fast and avoid eye contact to protect the only privacy left us in a place where so
much of who we are, what we eat, and where we shop is out there for all to see. As true as that may be most of the time, I wonder if it neglects something crucial. When someone attractive enters our orbit in New York, that same enforced proximity offers opportunity. A man on the subway is already close enough to that interesting-looking woman to casually strike up a conversation. If she rejects him, he doesn’t lose face. He hadn’t ventured anything, he can tell himself. He hadn’t walked across the bar to hit on her; he hadn’t just bought her a drink. He was there anyway, and, well, to make small talk was only friendly. The woman, for her part, needs make no explanation or apology to excuse herself. This is her stop; no one stays on a train forever. But if the woman finds the man attractive—and hadn’t already started the conversation herself—you have the start of a New York love story.

I couldn’t help think of Tina Wagenbrenner asking Chris Holter about his accent on the crowded upper deck of the Statue of Liberty ferry, or Jean Westrum letting that good-looking sailor Danny Lynch sit next to her on that jammed midnight train out of Grand Central. Chris found Tina simply because there was no other place to sit. Were that train to New England any less full, Danny, who was shy, would have lacked an innocent excuse to ask Jean for the seat beside her. He might have simply deposited her bag, bid goodnight, and retreated to an empty row somewhere to sleep. Crowded places give us more chances—and better cover—to reach out to the person next to us.

In the introduction, I wrote about research on the role of adrenaline and dopamine in stirring feelings of attraction between strangers. Psychologists have found that when people are excited, afraid, or worked up by physical exercise or some novel situation, they are more likely to feel attraction. As I looked back over the stories, it was hard not to see just these sorts of precursors. Daniel Letourneau had abandoned a job search and had just finished a three-hour stroll through springtime Manhattan when he entered Washington Square Park and set eyes on Sarah
Cross. Sofia Feldman was walking through an unfamiliar part of Midtown at night when she tripped and bumped into Matt Fitzgerald, himself reeling from a failed engagement. Claire Witten, a small-town Missouri girl, was atop the Empire State Building, worried about her missing friend, when she met Tom Nisonger. Chesa Sy had arrived in America at midnight, anxious and alone, when she asked Milton Jennings directions to Chinatown. Officer Marcel Sim was working a demanding nighttime detail when he was approached by Robin Miller, a young Minnesota woman both rattled by a tough workday and enraptured by the spectacle of Times Square. And Joey Filip was hungry and heartbroken on that gusty afternoon in Central Park when Quartermaster Third Class Willis Langford sauntered up with advice on lighting a cigarette.

But what of the other couple? Neither crowds nor adrenaline appear to tell us much about Bob Koppel and Mara Gailitis. Both were New York City residents and regulars at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The museum was close to their apartments on the Upper East Side. It wasn’t crowded, and nothing particularly dramatic happened before their meeting. But a few facts stand out. The Met is in many ways the ultimate “beautiful room,” an aesthetic showplace where the psychologists Abraham Maslow and Norbett Mintz might well have expected visitors to rate others’ appearances highly. What’s more, few places in New York gave Bob or Mara more emotional satisfaction. Both were well-read intellectuals with a studied appreciation of art. The museum was for them a kind of playground. In the 1960s, the psychologists Albert Mehrabian and James A. Russell, whose research I cite in the introduction, identified “pleasure” as the best predictor of “affiliation among strangers.” When people are in a place that makes them feel good, they are more apt to feel friendly toward nearby strangers. For Bob and Mara—and perhaps also for the inimitable Mrs. Silverman—the Met was such a place. But there was another factor, too: what the urbanist William Whyte
called “triangulation.” The Met is a giant showcase of triangulating objects, or conversation pieces, that permit strangers to trade observations while keeping the focus off themselves.

None of this is to suggest the inevitability of any of these unions. Nearly all of the men and women I interviewed seemed achingly aware of the improbability of their meeting, let alone marrying. Several at first lied to relatives about how they met, fearful of how it might look. Some returned to the places they met, reenacting their movements like accident investigators at the scene of a crash. Others found ways to sanctify chance, to ritualize the randomness, as if by giving it a familiar stamp they might wrest back control from the unknowable forces that shape our lives. The Holters married on Valentine’s Day, the Sims on September 11. The Langfords married on Thanksgiving, as did the Koppels. The Letourneaus named their daughter Valentina. Jean Lynch wrote up her how-we-met story for the local newspaper as a fiftieth-anniversary present to her dying husband. The Fitzgeralds devoted a page of their wedding program to a fairy-tale retelling of the night they met, as if the unlikeliness of their love story were as ancient as time.

I’M NOT blind to the dark side of public spaces. Parks and squares have also seen plenty of thefts, drug deals, and worse. The anonymity of crowds can invite predators. Ethnic tensions can explode in violence. But urban pathology is not the subject of this book. Nor do I think it reflects most of what goes on in public spaces, certainly not the best-designed ones. I suspect that the “broken windows” theory—that poorly maintained places invite crime—is as applicable to public spaces as it is to private ones. If a space is designed well and looks cared for and loved, troublemakers will think twice before entering. William Whyte proved as much in the 1980s with his work on the redesign of Bryant Park, an eight-acre green behind the New York Public Library.
By the 1970s, Bryant Park had been dubbed “Needle Park,” a nest of drugs and prostitution so dangerous that police patrolled it in pairs. In came Whyte. His recommendations led designers to widen its narrow entrances, install food kiosks, and take down a perimeter of hedges that had made the park invisible from the sidewalk. Today it is one of the most successful urban parks in America, a Midtown oasis that in warm months draws some twenty thousand visitors a day.