How They Met, and Other Stories(23)
Author: David Levithan

“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.