How They Met, and Other Stories

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.

“Just out of curiosity,” he said, resting his hand on a photo of his wife, “did you change your lucky number?”

“No,” I told him. “It’s still seventeen.”

“Good,” he replied, visibly pleased. “You should never change your lucky number.”

I made in onto an earlier flight home. At the ticket counter, I was sure to be friendly, and sure to show my wedding ring. I got to our house a little later than I would have from school. Rory’s car was in the driveway. When I got inside, I called out to her. She called back from the kitchen, saying she was on the phone.

I put my bag down, home for the day, and went to where she was. She smiled when she saw me, then went back to talking to a fellow teacher about faculty-room gossip. The phone must have rung as soon as she got in the house. Her shoes were off, but they were still at her feet. She kicked them lightly as she talked. She took off her earrings.

I felt love. Right there, in the kitchen. And I felt relief. Because a part of me had worried that the truth would somehow change things. But now I saw her and knew that nothing had changed. Nothing would change. Only the story would change.

When she was off the phone, I was going to tell her about the beginning we’d never known we’d had.

I was going to tell her a story of how we met.

ANDREW CHANG

I guess I’ll start with this fact: I still to this day have no idea what my father does for a living. I’m sure he and my mother would say that this is a failure on my part. My brother would know, because they would tell him and not me. When I was a kid, I was told that my father was in “import/export.” From what I could tell, the only thing he exported were long-distance phone calls, and the only thing he imported were business partners.

The only way I could tell the difference between the business partners in China and the business partners in America was the amount of static on the phone when they called. And they called almost every hour of the day. Every time I used the phone, my parents looked at me like I was jeopardizing the family business. Whenever the call waiting beeped, I knew I’d have to get off the line. Because it was always Mr. Chen or Mr. Yang or Mr. Wei or some other monosyllabic partner. They never acknowledged my existence—they simply said my father’s name and held there until I got him.