How They Met, and Other Stories

That is how we met. Within a few hours, we were sharing a cab even though we didn’t live in the same part of town. Within a week, we were planning to meet up in Boston every chance we got. Within two months, I was sure I was in love. We dated all of senior year and decided to stay together. We went to colleges in the same city, and when we graduated, she got a job teaching in San Francisco, and I followed her there. I got a job at a family-oriented Web site just when such things were big, and left to become a teacher myself right before the Web business hit its first snag. We were married nine years to the day we met. We have become—although I’d never say this out loud—something like a model couple. The secret? We like each other. I mean, we really like each other. We know when to keep our space and when to share it. We are surrounded by friends—some of them dear, some of them who come with the territory.

We always loved to say If I’d had a Monday-morning class, I never would have met you. Or If you’d been reading something else, none of this would have happened. We didn’t believe in fate, but we believed in serendipity. We felt very lucky.

We threw a party to mark the tenth anniversary of the day we met. We had it the Sunday after Thanksgiving, for all our friends who were returning from home, ready for a different kind of meal. Our friend Tyson brought his new boyfriend, Geoff, a flight attendant who we’d never met before. Our friend Gwen brought her boyfriend, Ted, an architect we were trying hard to like. And our friends Marcy and Will came alone, even though secretly we wished they had come together.

Both Rory and I like telling the airplane story—in no small part because it is our story, but also because we like to think it’s a good story as well. Somewhere toward dessert, Ted asked us how we met. Tyson, Gwen, Marcy, and Will had heard it before, but they egged us on nonetheless. (I had been roommates with Will at the time, and he always liked to add the postscript—the look on my face as I came through the door that Monday night; even before I said a word, he knew something life-changing had occurred.) So Rory and I tag-teamed the telling—from me hoping for legroom and her hoping to catch the flight, to the discovery of the book in common, to the similar meals, oncoming turbulence, and blanket-covered reading. Of the audience, Geoff seemed to like the story the most. Perhaps because he spent his days in airplanes, perhaps because he and Tyson were newly in love.

Afterward, he and I were in the kitchen, putting the dishes into the dishwasher. It had been nice of him to volunteer—more than most of Tyson’s previous boyfriends had done. I was sure Rory was pointing this out to Tyson, somewhere in the other room.

“That’s so funny, what you said about your lucky row,” Geoff said to me. “I know this is going to sound strange, but didn’t you say you’d requested row seventeen?”

I nodded. “I did. But when I checked in, it was switched. They probably made a mistake. A very lucky mistake, as far as I’m concerned.”

“And what airline was it?”

I told him the airline.

“And what airport did you leave from?”

I told him the airport.

“Hmmm…”

He’d stopped drying now and was just looking at me, doing some mental math.

“What?” I asked.

“Oh, this is crazy. It was ten years ago, you said?”

“Almost to the day.”

“Okay—now I’m going to ask you a really strange question. Do you by any chance remember what the man behind the ticket counter looked like when you checked in?”

“No. I’m not even sure it was a man. Why?”

Geoff’s eyes gleamed. He took the towel out of my hand and tilted his head to one of our kitchen chairs. “You’d better sit down a sec,” he said, “and let me tell you about Al Schwartz.”

Al Schwartz was a legend in airline circles. He wasn’t a pilot or a flight attendant. He wasn’t in management or a leader of one of the unions. No, for almost forty years he worked the ticket counter, without once missing a day of work. He was the Cal Ripken of airline employees. But even more than that—he was a famed matchmaker.

He didn’t do it often, but when he did, legend said that he almost always got it right. It worked like this: An unmarried person would arrive to check in for his flight. If he was already booked between two people and Schwartz had an instinct about him, he would be switched to a new row with an available seat next to his. Then a second unmarried person would check in. If Schwartz felt strongly that this person would get along with the first person, he would seat her in that available seat. The rest would be up to them.

At first, he did this in secret, not telling a soul. (It was rightly believed that supervisors wouldn’t take too kindly to this meddling; it was something short of a flight attendant flirting with a passenger, but it still smacked of impropriety.) After many years, however, word got out. Pilots and flight attendants leaving from Schwartz’s airport would wonder if their flights had been graced with prospective lovebirds. Bets would be made; results would be tallied. Schwartz denied everything and kept doing all he could. When his colleagues would ask him to set them up, he’d always shake his head. He only made matches when the people involved had no idea.

“But where is he now? How can I find out if he had anything to do with Rory and me?” I asked Geoff.

“He retired a while ago,” he told me. “But don’t you worry—I’m sure I can track him down. Consider it my anniversary present.”

Two weeks later I got a postcard from Paris. On the back, Geoff had scribbled an address in Nevada, adding No phone with two underlines and Good luck! with three.

I didn’t tell Rory. I know I should have, but part of me liked having this secret, wanted to be able to present her with the full story. So I kept the postcard hidden in my desk and pondered the letter I knew I had to write.

I was out of practice. I hadn’t written a true letter in an embarrassing number of years. I communicated with my friends through e-mail, and didn’t really communicate with anyone else besides my friends. I knew writing Schwartz wasn’t something I could just toss off. I knew it was something I had to do by hand.

I waited until the quietest moment possible to write. I will not recount my drafts (or even count them), but will simply say that this is what I ended up with:

Dear Mr. Schwartz,

My wife and I met on [here I gave our airline and flight number] from [the airport] on [the date]. A friend just brought it to my attention that you might have had something to do with this. I was supposed to be in the seventeenth row, but was switched at check-in to seat 14B. If you had nothing to do with this, I apologize for taking up your time. If you did in fact seat my wife (her name is Rory Wright) and me together on that day, I would appreciate it if you could respond to the address below. Either way, I thank you.

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.