How They Met, and Other Stories(22)
Author: David Levithan

Sincerely,

Roger Lewis

Ten days later, I received this response on a clean white notecard:

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.