Coincidence (3 page)

Sara and I had lunch in a little place we found in the restaurant guide that we had in the car. It was rustic-pretentious
and the chairs were like a whole booth to yourself, but the food was surprisingly good. I had the best coq au vin since we’d
been in France the previous year, Sara had the best grilled tuna steak she’d tasted in even longer. We had a bottle of Burgundy,
which was excellent, and we drank a toast to my dad. Poor lost miserable son-of-a-bitch. A loser. Big time. Sara reached across
the table and squeezed my hand. She knew what I was thinking and feeling.

“Fuck him,” I said, “he made his choices and he got mad if I even tried to talk to him about them. I’d have liked him to know
that I admired him in a way. Not in the same way that I despised him. Whatever that means.”

She reached for the bottle and topped up my glass.

“I’m getting a little drunk,” I said.

“Why not? As a matter of fact, so am I.”

I looked at her. I sometimes asked myself what a woman like that was doing with me. Not that I’m too embarrassing to be seen
with, at least so I like to think. Hair beginning to streak with a little gray, but plenty of it still hanging in there, thank
God. Moustache comes and goes, but at least that’s a matter of choice. I suppose I look like what I am, or was, or maybe still
am at heart: a kind of absentminded college professor. Except I dress a little better than I used to.

It all started for me the night that the college president (I was still teaching law in those days) called me in as a replacement
dinner guest for someone who had the flu. The dinner was for a group of people who had contributed serious bucks to the library
extension. Sara was among them. Her father was the establishment’s most luminous alumnus, an engineer who came up with some
small mechanical refinement of something no one had heard of that made him the darling of the military, and ultimately one
of its biggest suppliers. I had been dazzled by her, and a little afraid. I hadn’t even thought of falling in love with her.
It was obviously impossible. She was beautiful, clever, and rich. Out of my class.

Yet—you know how it is—I’d fantasized that I could give her something she needed, something her life was lacking, something
unconditional. We talked, she was staying over with the president and his wife, and we had dinner the following night. When
the semester ended a week later I went to New York. We were married three months later.

It’s a truism I’ve always accepted that in any relationship one partner loves more than the other. Not that the other doesn’t
love at all, just that one would be more destroyed than the other if the relationship were to end. The irony is that it’s
often the “unconditional” lover who’s the happier—as long as that love is accepted, of course. I felt lucky and privileged
that mine had been.

“You know,” I said, “the strangest thing happened yesterday. I was going through some stuff my father had left in an old trunk.
There were a lot of old photographs, holidays and so on, all of which I remember. But there was one of me about age ten with
a couple of people I don’t ever remember meeting.”

“That’s happened to me. You don’t even know the picture’s been taken, and someone you’ve just said a casual word to while
you’re crossing the room looks like your oldest friend.”

“But this one’s posed, everyone smiling at the camera. And they’re in evening dress.”

“And you?”

“Short pants and a sports shirt. But they were actors.”

“How d’you know?”

“Because there’s a piece about their marriage in an old copy of
Variety
that was also in the trunk. It’s really strange.”

“D’you have the picture with you?”

“It’s back at the hotel. I’ll show you later.”

I never did. By the time she dropped me off at the hotel we’d moved on to other topics of conversation. Besides, it was getting
late and she had to start for Boston.

“I’ll only be two days, three at the most. I’ll send Rauol back to New York with the car and take the shuttle.”

It was starting to rain as we kissed goodbye under the log-built portico of the hotel. I watched, waving, till the car disappeared
down the drive. Then I walked into the lobby and booked a cab to take me to the station in an hour.

I
’ve never been a big movie fan. Sara was somewhat more so than I, but neither of us owned any reference books in which I could
check out the film careers of my mysterious childhood friends. However, I had noticed a specialist movie shop a few blocks
from where we lived, and I walked over to it the next morning.

The only “Harts” I could find any trace of in all the books on the shelves were Dolores Hart, Harvey Hart, Moss Hart, and
William S. Hart. There had been a Mary Hart in B-pictures in the thirties, who had later changed her name to Lynne Roberts.
Of course there was Lorenz Hart, the song lyricist, who died in 1943. He had been popularly known as “Larry,” just as Lauren
Paige had been nicknamed “Larry,” so that after her marriage she would presumably have been known as “Larry” Hart. But that
was a pretty tenuous connection. In fact not a connection at all, just a vague coincidence. As to the careers of either Jeffrey
Hart or Lauren Paige, there was nothing.

I asked the graying ponytailed man in charge if there were other sources I might consult. He produced a couple of tomes that
specialized in obscure cult movies, but we drew a blank there too. He himself had never heard of Jeffrey Hart or Lauren Paige,
or any variations thereof. Refusing to be defeated, he withdrew to the computer behind his desk and began a search of the
Web. A few minutes later, he handed me a printout listing five movies starring Jeffrey Hart, four of which costarred Lauren
Paige.

The information on the sheet of paper that he’d given me was minimal to say the least. Titles, stars, director, and in one
case the writer. No plot descriptions, no critical comments or biographical information.
Spring in Piccadilly
was dated 1953 and starred both of them, as did
Whistling Through
in 1958. They appeared in support of a pop star trying to break into acting in
Girl Scout Patrol
in 1963, then in
There’s a Spy in My Soup
in 1967. Jeffrey alone played a small role in
The Silver Spoon
in 1973.

Little though I knew or cared about the cinema, I formed the impression that this amounted to a less-than-glittering career.
The “rising heartthrob” written about in
Variety
had risen, it seemed, not very far. Whether he and Ms. Paige were still alive I had no idea, though I imagined that if they
were it would not be impossible to track them down. But just to find out when and where I had been photographed with them?
It hardly seemed worth it.

It was a bright clear morning when I left the movie shop, not long after eleven. I was crossing Amsterdam at Eighty-seventh,
going east when, as I reached the far side, my attention fell, quite by chance, on something lying in the gutter. It was a
playing card: the ace of hearts.

It wasn’t the word-play, the pun of “Harts” and “hearts,” that drew my attention to it. What made me stop and pick up the
card was a memory that it triggered, which had lain dormant for many years. It was a memory of a literary agent I’d once known
who’d since moved out to Los Angeles. Her name was Vanessa White. She had never been my agent but she represented a couple
of other writers I knew well. Maybe it was the association of Los Angeles and Hollywood and the movie bookshop I’d just stepped
out of that made the connection, I don’t know. All I know is I saw that playing card and thought of Vanessa White.

She was an attractive and sophisticated young woman who delighted in telling the filthiest jokes I’d ever heard. I never figured
out whether she was trying to shock people or whether gross-out was the only thing she found genuinely funny. It was an odd
contrast with her svelte appearance and normally rather delicate manner. She was a thoughtful, reflective woman. I remember
her telling me once that she used to collect odd little things that struck her as signs pointing in a certain direction. She
showed me a pocket at the back of her “organizer” where she kept small items cut out of newspapers and magazines, a stranger’s
scribble on some hotel phone pad, a pressed flower, and a playing card she’d found under a restaurant table. These things,
she said, tended to lead her on to other things, to guide her life along a certain course that was for some reason the right
way for her to go.

I never pretended to understand what she was talking about, nor did she explain it very clearly. But there had been something
fascinating and oddly compelling about the way she talked about the phenomenon, and it obviously held some deep personal significance
for her. And there I was, finding a playing card in the street and thinking about her for the first time in years. Vanessa,
of course, would have picked up the card and kept it, convinced that it would in some way lead her on to something else.

Impulsively, and I still don’t know why I did this, I bent down, picked up the card, and slipped it into my wallet. As I did
so I felt a self-conscious, slightly skeptical smile spread across my face as I imagined the odds against running into Vanessa
herself in a couple of blocks, or maybe just into one of those friends of mine that she used to represent. That would have
been a coincidence worth, as the saying goes, writing home about. Or at least, perhaps, writing about.

But nothing happened. No familiar faces, nobody I even vaguely knew.

I walked on for several blocks.

Then something happened.

I think the image had reached my brain and my body had responded before I was fully conscious of what was in front of me.
All I remember is finding that I’d stopped and was gazing into the window of one of those specialist cake shops that will
make any kind of cake in any design of your choice. There, right in the middle of the window, was an ornate and sugary creation
in the shape of a playing card. It was the ace of hearts.

As I’ve mentioned, it was early fall, a long way from Valentine’s Day. If it had been February 14, it would hardly have qualified
as a coincidence. New York would have been wall-to-wall hearts. But what was a cake like that doing in the middle of a shop
window in the fall? And how did I happen to chance on it just a few minutes after picking up that playing card?

My first instinct was to find a rational explanation. Suppose, for example, that whoever had ordered the cake had used a playing
card to show people in the shop exactly what he wanted. It was conceivable, although unlikely: After all, who in the world
doesn’t know what the ace of hearts looks like anyway? But supposing that was what had happened. Then whoever it was had walked
a couple of blocks north and either dropped the card or thrown it away. It was a reasonable explanation.

But then most people would think that coincidence was a reasonable explanation. The point where things got interesting, it
occurred to me, would be where coincidence was not a reasonable explanation but something remarkable.

I walked on. Although the subject had been buzzing around at the back of my mind for the last few days, it was only then,
I think, that I made the conscious decision to make coincidence the subject of my next book.

I
wasn’t starting on the subject from absolute zero. I’d been briefly interested in the strangeness of coincidence years earlier.
The first time I really wondered about it was in school, when I came across a list of remarkable similarities between the
assassinations of presidents Lincoln and Kennedy. It went like this:

Lincoln was elected to Congress in 1847, Kennedy in 1947. The names Lincoln and Kennedy both contain seven letters. The wife
of each president lost a son while she was first lady. Both presidents were shot in the head from behind on a Friday while
sitting beside their wives; both were succeeded by a southerner named Johnson, and the two Johnsons were born a hundred years
apart. Both their killers were themselves killed before they could be brought to justice. The names John Wilkes Booth and
Lee Harvey Oswald both contain fifteen letters. Booth was born in 1839, Oswald in 1939. Lincoln had a secretary called Kennedy;
Kennedy a secretary called Lincoln. Lincoln was killed in the Ford’s Theatre; Kennedy was killed in a Ford Lincoln.

Since then I’ve seen many variations of the same list, often longer and embellished with obsessive and borderline-insane detail.
People have made careers out of investigating this single aspect of the Kennedy myth.

But then you’d expect a thing like that to attract the cranks.

I don’t suppose anybody can remember the first coincidence that ever happened to them. I know I can’t. By the time you become
aware of coincidence it’s already a fact of life, something you’ve always taken for granted because it’s just been there,
like the weather. A friend telephones as you’re about to call them. You bump into some stranger who knows your cousin on the
far side of the world. You have an amazing run of luck—which, after all, is just a chain of coincidences—at some game of chance.

There is no explanation for such things, and most people would probably say no need for one. A coincidence can be trivial,
in fact usually is; or it can change your life—like the woman who picked up a phone and got a crossed line, and found herself
listening to her husband calling his mistress from the office.

One man I know was given a coded flight reservation that was the same number as the license plate of his car, which he’d totaled
the previous week. (He took the flight: Nothing happened.)

When Sara and I first met she had two cats named Daisy and Alice, which also happened to be the names of my two nieces. We
laughed about the coincidence, but didn’t regard it as an omen or anything like that.

But what is coincidence? Is it anything more than fluke? Blind chance, indifferent and unconscious of the human fates that
may hinge on it?