How They Met (9 page)

Dear Mr. Lewis,

I do believe I may have had something to do with it, although I hasten to add that you and your wife had the most to do with it. I await your visit with pleasure.

Fly high,
Al Schwartz

My visit? At first thought, it seemed ludicrous. But over the next few minutes, a plan took form. Las Vegas was not so far away from San Francisco; I could be there and back in a single sick day. If Mr. Schwartz had indeed made a match of me and Rory, the least I could do was visit and hear his story. I owed it to him. And I owed it to my curiosity, which (to be honest) rarely got out of the house.

I sent a letter to tell him when I was coming. I stopped short of giving him the flight information.

Ten days later I was in a rent-a-car wrestling with a map of Nevada. In truth, I didn’t have far to go. He lived five minutes from the airport.

I was early, so I drove around the flat-top neighborhood for a little while, trying not to get lost among the cookie-cutter condos. After about fifteen minutes, I spied a man in his front yard waving me down.

This, I was soon to discover, was Al Schwartz.

“Are you Mr. Lewis?” he asked once I’d pulled over.

“Yes. Mr. Schwartz?”

“Yes, sir. Now get on out of the car. The neighbors are starting to get nervous, seeing a strange car drive around and all.”

Mr. Schwartz was eighty if a day, with thick white hair that made him seem tanner than he really was. He was shorter than me, although he might have once been the same height. He walked now with a bit of a stoop, but it didn’t seem to slow him down. He was wearing an old cardigan over what could only be a pajama top, the broad soft collar reaching floppily for each shoulder.

“This way, Mr. Lewis,” he said, leading me to the front door.

“Call me Roger,” I told him.

He nodded. “Can do, Roger. But I hope you don’t mind if I stick with Mr. Schwartz. That’s what most of my friends call me, anyway.”

The house was modest on the outside; inside, it bragged. Paintings of airplanes and photographs of people fought for position against newspapers and knickknacks. The photographs showed all the younger versions of Mr. Schwartz, in work uniform and in the various guises of vacation uniform—Hawaiian shirts with matching colored cocktails, hiking gear to face the distant snowcapped mountains, black tie for a bygone nightclub. The same woman was with him in most of the photos. Her clothes and her body altered, but her hair never changed its color.

“That’s Mrs. Schwartz,” he said proudly. “She was one helluva gal. She passed three years ago. But we had great times. Real great times.” He held up his finger and showed me his wedding ring, then pulled at a thin chain around his neck to reveal another ring—hers—that he kept under his clothes.

“One for my hand, one for my heart,” he explained. There was both sorrow and pride in his voice.

He led me into a sitting room that was as cluttered as the hall. There were more photos covering the walls—some in frames, some cornered with Scotch tape.

“She’d kill me if she saw what I did to her wallpaper. But if you have photos, you should look at them, right?” He motioned for me to sit down on the lime-green couch while he lowered himself into a lounge chair surrounded by a moat of discarded newspapers and magazines. “But you didn’t come all this way for decorating tips, did you?”

I was staring at him, trying to remember that brief moment ten years ago. How long does it take to check in for a flight? Two minutes? So I was trying to recapture two minutes that happened over five million minutes ago. Which would seem ridiculous, if only I didn’t recall so many other things from that day. All of them leading to Rory.

“I’m trying to remember,” I told him, explaining my silence and my stare.

He nodded. “Seems reasonable. But I have to tell you, not many people remember. Even the most friendly people, the ones you really strike up a conversation with—our minds don’t want them to take up the space. So we forget. I’ve had a few remember, but mostly those are people who were tipped off or who retraced their steps soon after. How long did you say it was?”

“Ten years.”

He brushed the figure aside with a wave of his hand. “Well, come on then. Ten years is a long time for you. For me, it’s yesterday. But for you, it’s everything.”

He asked me if I wanted something to drink. I said water would be great. He told me he made sure to have six glasses of water a day, which (he said) was probably why he was still around to talk to me.

While he went to the kitchen, I looked around the room some more. By my feet, there was a long wooden coffee table covered with more framed photos, maybe two dozen or so. These, however, weren’t of Mr. and Mrs. Schwartz. They were of weddings and babies, or of babies grown up into kids. Black kids, Asian kids, white kids. An assemblage of smiles and poses, some with Woolworth backdrops and some in backyards and bedrooms.

Behind me, Mr. Schwartz said, “My children. From all across the world. All different mothers, and I was never unfaithful to Mrs. Schwartz. Quite a trick, no?”

“How did it start?” I asked.

Mr. Schwartz handed me a glass of water and sat down. He made himself comfortable in the chair and leaned over to me.

“You’re not going to believe this, but flying used to be quite romantic. To fly—people couldn’t believe it. You only get that in little kids now. But back at the start, there was this sense of the future about flying. You were buying a ticket to this experience, this wonderful thing. Sure, people were nervous then. But that made it even more exciting. There was this expectation that something thrilling would happen, that being off the ground could take you out of your world for a few hours. I felt that way the first times I flew. I was already married to Margie then, but every liftoff—for fifty years—we would hold hands when we took to the air. Not out of fear. Out of wonder.

“I’d see it in people’s eyes when they came to me for their seats, with their tickets and their luggage. I never intended to do what I ended up doing. But there was this one time, this man—a real friendly guy, and clearly a brain, too—he told me he had flown dozens of times, but it was always like the first. I liked him, in the way you can like someone after talking to him for a minute. We struck up a conversation and he mentioned he wasn’t married, and I thought,
Well, that’s a pity.
He leaves, and maybe two minutes later this young woman—about his age—comes up. A looker, but not real aware of it. Her hand is shaking a little when she hands over her ticket, and I can tell she’s a little nervous. She’s very sweet and I can see she isn’t wearing any wedding ring. Miss Jane Halstead, her ticket says. She has the luggage of a society girl, but she doesn’t carry herself that way. So I don’t know where it comes from, but I get to thinking—what would happen if I sat Miss Jane Halstead next to the man I’d just been talking to? No harm done if nothing comes of it. And maybe, just maybe, they’ll strike up a conversation and he’ll help her be less nervous about the flight. That’s all I was thinking. Nothing beyond that.

“So I changed her seat and sent her on her way. Wouldn’t have thought anything of it. But then, not three months later, I see that name again—Miss Jane Halstead. And this time it’s in the paper, in the wedding announcements. I look at the photo, and sure as I’m sitting here, I see her all decked out, standing next to the guy from the plane. Mrs. Schwartz and I had a laugh about that, I tell you. Then the same situation came up again. And again. Sometimes the man’s nervous. Sometimes it’s the woman. Sometimes they’re both okay with it, but I see that’s not all. People want to be together.

“It’s the story of life, I tell you—you do something small, and it just gets bigger. Now, don’t get me wrong—a lot of the times I matched people up, it probably didn’t hold. It’s not like I kept score. Probably have an average that would get me kicked out of the minors. But every now and then, there’d be something in the paper. Or word would get back. People would find out and would find me.”

“Like me,” I said.

“Well, that remains to be seen.”

“Geoff, the flight attendant who told me about you, said you were a kind of legend.”

“Pshaw,” Mr. Schwartz exhaled dismissively. “I was probably just trying to jazz up my job during slow periods. I really did love it, though. Not this matchmaking business, but being behind the counter, talking to people. I mean, I met hundreds, if not
thousands,
of people each day. Sometimes it would kick the stuffing out of me. But most of the time I could come home to Mrs. Schwartz with a story or two to tell. You can’t ask for much more than that—a good woman and a story to tell.”

“I know what you mean.”

A nod. “I’m glad that you do. So many don’t. I was starting to get sad. This was before Mrs. Schwartz passed. The job was getting to me. I didn’t want to admit it, but the lifting was shooting my back to hell. Knees, too. And the people had changed. Everyone was in a rush. Everyone. I was something getting in their way. Margie could see this better than I could. People don’t know how to fly. It’s something that was once magical, but now we’re afraid of it.”

I thought, at that moment, of Rory. I thought about how she didn’t know where I was at this moment, and how it would drive her crazy if she knew she didn’t know. If she called and I wasn’t there. If we were that kind of apart.

“So tell me why you’re here,” Mr. Schwartz continued, after taking a sip from his glass of water. He leaned forward in his chair and said, “Give me the details.”

So I told him the story—our story—the story of how we met. I started with my family’s Thanksgiving and my lucky number seventeen. I told him everything I could remember, from the red sweater and the green eyes to the passage of Forster to which I had briefly turned. He didn’t say a word, just took it all in.

After I had finished—after Rory and I had taken the cab home together, after Rory and I had said our first “I love you,” after we’d been married and had created our ongoing life—this old man in front of me, this matchmaker of the skies, nodded and asked me if I still had the boarding pass.

Of course I had the boarding pass. I had kept it as a permanent bookmark in my copy of
A Room with a View,
just as Rory (unbeknownst to me until the first time I saw her apartment) had done with hers. Now the two books sat side by side in our bedroom, our most prized possessions.

Under Al Schwartz’s expectant gaze, I reached into my bag. For the first time in ten years, I separated the boarding pass from the book. As I handed it over, he reached under his sweater, into his pajama-top pocket for his reading glasses. It only took him a second’s glance to know.

He took off his glasses and looked at me straight before speaking.

“I know I wrote this in my letter to you, but I must repeat it now: After all is said and done, you have to remember that it was you and your wife who made all of this possible. I may have been the one to sit you next to each other—in fact, I’m sure I did. But you took it from there. I have nothing to do with all that.”

“So it was you behind the counter?” I asked. I was no longer surprised by this turn of events; I hadn’t been, really, since we’d started talking. “How do you know?”

He handed the boarding pass back to me. “Look at the seat assignment. What do you see?”

I looked down. “It’s circled in green,” I said.

“Aha. Look again. Is it really circled?”

I looked again. The green pen, rounding around the number. A circle. Only…

“It’s an ‘a’?” I asked.

Mr. Schwartz smiled. “You’ve cracked it.”

“It’s a green ‘a,’” I said, clear now.

“That’s what I’d do. I used the green for everything, but only the people I thought might be right for each other got the ‘a.’ I’m amazed nobody picked up on it; they all thought it would be a color thing, or I’d initial it somewhere else. Do you have your wife’s pass?”

I nodded, then took it out. Sure enough—another “a.”

“That’s amazing,” I said.

Mr. Schwartz laughed. “Actually,” he said, “it’s not amazing at all. Or at least my part of it isn’t.”

“But all along we thought it was random.” Chance. Luck.

Mr. Schwartz looked serious now. “But it
was
random, can’t you see? I need you to see that. Why did you arrive at the counter before her? There were at least five check-in windows at that airport for our airline—how did the two of you both end up at mine? Love weaves itself from hundreds of threads. Happenstances. I just happened to be one of them.”

“An important one.”

“Yes, I’ll grant you that. But not the most important. Not by a long shot. You’re together because you spoke to each other…because you
liked
each other. That’s the greatest leap of all. I didn’t push you. I didn’t even give you a nudge. I just created the nearness and you did the rest.”

It still felt different. How could I describe it to him? I still felt lucky…but now I had someone to thank for the luck.

“Anyway,” he added, “if the two of you hadn’t been nice to me at the ticket counter, I never would’ve given you the ‘a’!”

He stood up from his chair, and I immediately sensed our time together would soon be over. Gratitude is not something that should impose itself, so I stood, too.

“I’m a lucky man,” Mr. Schwartz said, putting his hand on my arm. “One of my old pals from the airline is the boss out at the airport here, and he lets me walk around sometimes, talking to people. And, believe me, I’ve heard stories of other ticket counter personnel finding out about what I did and trying it out themselves. You’d be surprised, I tell you, the number of people who meet on airplanes.”

I thanked him for seeing me, and then tried to thank him for what he’d done ten years before.

“It was—and still is—my pleasure,” he interrupted. “Say no more. Just drop me a line every now and again. Bring your wife by if you’re ever in the neighborhood.”

I promised I would. We made a little more small talk as he walked me to the door. We said our good-byes, and then, just as I was walking through the door, Al Schwartz asked me one more question.