Coincidence (5 page)

“Come on, Lou,” I said, determined to drag some kind of confession out of him. “Don’t tell me you’re the one person in the
world who’s never experienced a peculiar coincidence, because I’m not going to believe you. Maybe you just don’t bother to
remember them like most people, but I’ll bet you can think of something if you try.”

Lou shrugged, like an old man who’d seen it all before: still on top of his game, a master player, no longer easy to impress
or concerned about impressing other people. His attention was focused for the moment on getting his cigar out of its cellophane
wrapper. He’d smoked the same brand as long as I’d known him and seemed never to have quite mastered the trick of getting
those wrappers off. Eventually he got it lit, then shook out his match and exhaled a cloud of rich blue smoke. (Another reason
why I suspect Lou ate there every day was that Dino’s made up its own rules about who could smoke what and where, and anybody
who didn’t like the arrangement could stay away.)

“Well, I suppose,” he said, “there was a thing one time. A few years ago I was doing some business in L.A., and as always
when I’m out there I called up an old friend of mine, a producer. We met for lunch, and he told me about something that had
happened about a month earlier. He’d been out at the Film Fair at Santa Monica, and he saw me there talking to some guy. So
he goes over and says, ‘Lou, how can you be in town and not call me?’ I mean, he was really pissed. We were friends. I always
called. But this guy just looked at him like he was crazy. It was some other guy, not me. But not some guy who looked a little
like me. According to this friend of mine, the guy was
me
.”

Lou held out his hands, palms up, his cigar clamped between two thick but perfectly manicured fingers.

“What can I tell you?”

“There you are, you see,” I said triumphantly. “Something
did
happen to you. I don’t believe there’s one person you’ll ever meet who hasn’t had some extraordinary coincidence happen to
them.”

“To be exact,” he said, “it didn’t happen to me. It happened to this friend of mine who thought he saw me. In fact, when you
think about it, it isn’t really a coincidence at all. It was a mistake—this friend of mine mistaking somebody else for me.
That’s not a coincidence.”

“Two people looking alike is a coincidence,” I said.

Lou shrugged. “They say everybody has a double.”

“Maybe. There certainly seem to be plenty of look-alikes. Think of movie stars and politicians. They all have look-alikes.”

We sat in reflective silence for a while. Lou finished his brandy and set down the glass with an air of finality. “Well,”
he said, “if this is the book you want to do, just go ahead and do it. I think we’ll hook Mike on a couple of chapters—and
probably make a better deal.”

With that, he signaled for the check, which I tried to pay, but Lou insisted it was his and scribbled his name across it.
When we parted on the sidewalk, Lou shook my hand, grasping my elbow at the same time, as he always did.

“Let me know how you’re getting on with the book,” he said. “And give my love to Sara when you talk to her.”

He walked off toward his office, still puffing great clouds of smoke from what remained of his cigar. I set off in the opposite
direction.

The actor Anthony Hopkins, asked to play a role in the film
The Girl from Petrovka,
wanted to read the novel by George Feifer on which it was to be based, but could not find a copy in any London bookshop.
Waiting for an Underground train at Leicester Square station, he came across a book left on a seat. It was a copy of the novel,
with some scribbled notes in the margin. Meeting the author later, Hopkins learned that a friend had lost Feifer’s annotated
copy of the book. It was the copy Hopkins had found.

I was standing in a secondhand bookshop that I’d strolled up to in the Village. There is something called “the library angel”
with which all writers and students are familiar. It refers to the way in which, whenever you start researching some particular
subject, relevant books and pieces of information start falling into your lap as though by magic. It’s a little like those
times that everyone has experienced, not just writers, when you come across some new and rather obscure word, then for the
next few days find it being so widely and frequently used that you can’t believe you hadn’t been aware of it before.

Anyway, there I was trawling the shelves in search of anything on coincidence or synchronicity. This 1990 book by Brian Inglis
was the first I pulled down, and the page at which I opened it carried the story about Anthony Hopkins and
The Girl from Petrovka.

The extra little bit of weird spin on all this was that
The Girl from Petrovka
was directed by Robert Ellis Miller from a screenplay by Allan Scott and Chris Bryant—all three of whom were friends of mine.

Well? Odd or not? At least I felt oddly encouraged in some pleasantly postprandial way. I bought a dozen or so books on the
subject that I hadn’t come across before and took a cab back to the apartment. The traffic was still as dense and slow-moving
as it had been in the morning.

That was when I saw her—Sara. My cab was turning off Third when it got caught in one of those gridlocks that fan out in all
directions. I was looking wearily around and thinking how much I would prefer to walk if it wasn’t for the parcel of books
I had to carry, when I saw her unmistakable profile in the back of another cab two rows over in the stalled traffic. At least
I thought it was unmistakable. It was just a glimpse before she turned away, talking to somebody in the cab with her whom
I couldn’t see. I was on the point of throwing a bill at my driver and getting out when whoever it was with Sara obviously
had the same idea. The far door of the cab opened and a tall, well-built man with thick blonde hair got out, bent down to
say something or maybe to plant a brief parting kiss—I couldn’t see from where I was—then shut the door and strode briskly
up the sidewalk, disappearing quickly in the crowd. My hand was on the door handle to run over and find out what was going
on, when the line of traffic that Sara was in lurched forward and was siphoned off in a fluid movement that made catching
up with her on foot impossible.

If
, of course, it was Sara. I could have been mistaken. I’d caught only a glimpse. And of course I’d just been having that conversation
with Lou about people having doubles. I was unquestionably primed, as a psychologist would say, for some fleeting misperception
of this kind to happen.

Besides, Sara was in Boston. It was inconceivable she could be back in Manhattan without my knowing.

My taxi also began moving, though hers had by now long disappeared from view. I had an idea. After taking out my mobile phone,
I auto-dialed her mobile number. She replied at once.

“Hi,” I said, “how are you? I miss you.”

“I miss you too. What are you doing?”

“I’m sitting in a cab between Lex and Park. Just had lunch with Lou.”

“How is he?”

“Fine. How are you?”

“Busy. I’ll be back tomorrow, midafternoon.”

“Where are you? Is that traffic I can hear in the background?”

“Yes. I’m in a cab too.”

“A cab where?”

“In Boston, of course.”

“Where in Boston?”

“Between… I’m not sure, let me see… just coming up to the Hancock Building. Why?”

“Oh, nothing. A coincidence, both of us being in cabs.”

“Yes, I suppose it is rather.”

“I love you, Sara.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow.”

I
spent the rest of the afternoon reading in the sleepy postprandial haze that lunch with Lou always left me in. The more I
read, drifting into a doze occasionally and waking with a start, the more I realized how elusive and unreliable the notion
of coincidence was. I had long been aware that if you were really determined to believe in something, whether mysteries, conspiracies,
or deep significance of any kind, then by and large you would always find evidence for it. When I thought about it, for example,
I realized that I could make up a dozen coincidences right there and then, just looking around my own office in the apartment.
Two identical pens lay at exactly the same angle on opposite sides of my desk. The color of a rug on my floor was reflected
in the color of a car I could see out of my window. A plane crossed the sky immediately after I glimpsed the picture of a
plane on the front page of my crumpled morning newspaper.

But things like that didn’t count. I was looking for them and I imposed the connection between them. A real coincidence has
to sneak up on you and surprise you, like the punch line of a joke, except that there’s no lead up to it, no structure. It
doesn’t make sense, yet it makes sense of an unexpected kind.

There didn’t seem to be much new or startling in any of the books I’d bought. The examples presented were mostly of the “just
fancy that”
variety
:

A man lost his engraved fountain pen in Florence, South Carolina. Three years later he and his wife were in New York City.
As they left their hotel, she spied a pen in the street. It was her husband’s, his name clearly inscribed.

Some of them were so unlikely I almost had to laugh out loud:

When his station’s phone number was changed, an English police constable accidentally gave a wrong version of the new number
to a friend. A few days later, while checking over a factory in the middle of the night, he noticed that a door was open and
a light on in the manager’s office. He went to investigate. Nobody was in the office, but while he was there the telephone
rang. He answered it. The caller was his friend, ringing the wrong number that the police constable had mistakenly given him—which
turned out to be the ex-directory number of that particular office.

One or two were a little spooky:

In 1838 Edgar Allan Poe wrote a story called “The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym,” describing how three survivors of a shipwreck
killed and ate the ship’s cabin boy, whose name was Richard Parker. In 1884
The Times
reported the trial of three survivors of a shipwreck on charges of murdering and eating the ship’s cabin boy—whose name was
Richard Parker.

This one was perhaps my favorite:

In 1893 Henry Ziegland of Honey Grove, Texas, jilted his sweetheart, who killed herself. Her brother tried to avenge her by
shooting Ziegland, but the bullet only grazed his face and buried itself in a tree. The brother, thinking he had killed Ziegland,
committed suicide. In 1913 Ziegland was cutting down the tree that the bullet had hit. He had trouble getting the tree down,
so in the end he used dynamite. The bullet was still lodged in the tree, and the explosion sent it through Ziegland’s head—twenty
years after it had been fired with intent to kill him.

Toward dusk I began to feel restless and decided to take a walk. I’d already made up my mind to skip dinner, but thought I
might drop into a bar I liked over on Broadway and have a couple of drinks. As I walked, I turned over in my mind an argument
I had been reading about between Freud and Jung. Freud regarded all talk of the paranormal—including things like synchronicity—as
nonsense. Jung, on the other hand, always had an open mind, refusing, as he put it, “to commit the fashionable stupidity of
regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud.” He grew increasingly frustrated as he listened to Freud ranting on against
ESP, eventually feeling what he described as:

“a curious sensation… as if my diaphragm was made of iron and was becoming red-hot…. At that moment there was such a loud
report in the bookcase, which stood right next to us, that we both started up in alarm, fearing the thing was going to topple
over us.”

Freud refused to believe there was any connection between this phenomenon and Jung’s pent-up emotions. Jung insisted that
there was, and to prove his point he predicted that in a moment it would happen again.

“Sure enough, no sooner had I said the words than the same detonation went off in the bookcase.”

At that moment I felt as though I’d jumped about a foot off the sidewalk—because just as I imagined that second “detonation”
in Jung’s bookcase, a car backfired in front of me.

At least I think it was the car in front of me. It had stalled and the man behind the wheel appeared to be having some trouble
getting it going. An older man with him was giving him advice, repeating a small and precise movement with his hand.

I didn’t know that cars were still able to backfire. I thought that the well-timed backfire went out as a dramatic device
with old black-and-white thrillers on late-night television. But then I asked myself, what did it matter if it wasn’t a backfire?
What if it had nothing to do with that car at all? It was a noise, a loud noise, a detonation. It came from somewhere, and
it happened just then, at the very moment I was thinking about one.

As I walked on, I replayed the incident in my head, recreating it as exactly as I could from the still-fresh memory. I realized
there was something I’d overlooked in my anxiety, however unconscious, to find another coincidence. There had been other noises
in the air—all kinds of noises, a rich tapestry of noises all happening at the same time. It just so happened that the one
I’d heard was the nearest and loudest. Had it not occurred, I was quite sure when I thought back on it that I could have picked
out any one of a number of other noises going on around me and chosen to synchronize it with the story I was telling in my
imagination. The whole incident was, on reflection, a clear example of how careful you have to be before claiming some perfectly
normal phenomenon as a paranormal one. I went on my way, reassured in my skepticism.

It couldn’t have been Sara I had seen that afternoon, I told myself. It was out of the question. A near double, that’s all.
Like Lou and his friend in California. A coincidence. Without significance.

I had a couple of drinks at the bar as planned, then a couple more. As I was leaving I ran into some friends who insisted
I join them for dinner. It was still early and I had nothing else to do, so I abandoned my pledge not to eat and had scrambled
eggs and smoked salmon while they had steaks and roast potatoes. I was in bed by eleven and dozing fitfully as I watched the
late-night talk shows. Before finally switching off the TV and going to sleep, I made a last desultory flip through the cable
channels and came across an image that at once had me sitting bolt upright, not sure at first whether I was awake or dreaming.
An instant later I was out of bed and flying across the room to shove a tape into the VCR and hit the record button.