Coincidence (6 page)

What I was looking at was a somewhat labored comedy scene—all dialogue and lots of theatrical arm-waving—featuring the two
people whose photographs I had found in my father’s trunk and with whom I myself had been photographed as a child sitting
on an unknown terrace wall at some equally unknown time or place.

Then something else hit me. I realized that the clothes they were wearing were the same as in that photograph. Of course,
his white tie and tails were pretty much anonymous, but it was her dress, the cut of the neckline and the orchid at the shoulder,
that convinced me.

On top of that, I then saw something else that took my breath away. Exasperated by their argument, she flounced up a short
flight of steps. He followed her, protesting, and they continued their quarrel on a terrace overlooking an ornamental but
obviously studio-bound garden. It was then that I recognized the stone balustrade on which the three of us had been photographed
together. What clinched it was the large ornamental urn visible behind me in the picture, and which, as I watched, they flounced
past several times.

I didn’t need to check it out later, though I did all the same when the credits rolled. I had been watching Jeffrey Hart and
Lauren Paige in
There’s a Spy in My Soup.

B
y three in the morning I had watched the video several times, fast-forwarding between the scenes involving either Jeffrey
Hart or Lauren Paige or both. In particular I scrutinized the scene that featured the wall on which I had apparently at one
time sat with them. Now, with the photograph in my hand and comparing it with stop-frame images, I was more than ever convinced
that I was right. At some time in my childhood, a time of which I had no recollection, I had been photographed on that studio
set with two people I had no memory of ever knowing, but who were clearly good friends of my parents.

I lay awake long into the night, turning things over in my mind, trying to make sense of what was going on. It seemed undeniable
that
something
was going on; but then again, why should it “make sense”? Nothing that I had ever read about synchronicity suggested that
its meaning was accessible to logical analysis. The very essence of “noncausal connection” amounted to a defiance of logic.
If there were any overall pattern to these random subjective events, it would emerge of its own accord and in its own time.
I felt a growing conviction that something had started and was taking its course. I had no idea what, but it was not over
yet.

As I gazed up at the dim chiaroscuro patterns on the ceiling, the prospect of what might lie ahead, where I might be going
on this journey, began to fill me with an apprehension that was not entirely pleasurable. In truth, I was beginning to be
more than a little afraid. All right, maybe I was going to get a book out of this thing, but was it worth the risks that I
felt lurked somewhere just beneath the surface? Was I unwittingly starting something that I would be unable to stop? Which
was stronger, my writer’s curiosity or this sudden inexplicable unease? I would have to make up my mind soon. But how?

Then I remembered something I hadn’t thought about in years. The
I Ching
, or Chinese
Book of Changes
. I’d come across it first of all in college, not long after first discovering synchronicity in school. At the time it was
enjoying a certain fashion that was a hangover of the sixties. Kids consulted it over their love affairs, their careers, whether
or not to major in this or that subject, where they should go on vacation. I remember even then thinking they were trivializing
something that was more deeply rooted in the fabric of reality than they realized. In fact I became aware that if you asked
it too often about trivial or irrelevant things the answers it gave would become increasingly meaningless and unhelpful. It
seemed to have an in-built resistance to being misused. But I had taken it seriously for a while, and been startled more than
once by the sharp pertinence of its answers to my questions.

The
I Ching
goes back to around 3000 B.C., and its origins are inevitably shrouded in a certain amount of myth and mystery. Some authorities
attribute the main body of its worth to one Wen Wang as early as the twelfth century B.C. It has remained always a profound
influence on Chinese thought and philosophy, but did not reach the West until the nineteenth century. Jung seized on it as
being central to his theories of synchronicity and the collective unconscious. It rests, like astrology, on the notion that
all things in the universe are interrelated, and chance is the key to our understanding of our place as individuals in the
great scheme of things.

The way the
I Ching
works is you throw three coins six times. (The Chinese originally used a more complicated system involving yarrow sticks;
many still do.) Each throw, according to the distribution of heads and tails, gives you a line that will be either unbroken,
broken, or changing. The pattern of the six lines (the hexagram) that you eventually assemble will correspond to one of sixty-four
oracular pronouncements that have evolved over the long period of the book’s use.

These pronouncements do not amount to direct answers to whatever questions or problems you may have on your mind. It is up
to you, the reader, to divine the personal meaning of your hexagram from a close perusal of and reflection on the several
pages of text that accompany each one of the sixty-four possible patterns.

To the more fundamentalist type of Western mind, with its dependence on strict logic, the whole thing smacks of empty superstition.
To anyone with an element of mysticism in their being, however, it makes an interesting kind of sense, and its use frequently
throws up startling insights and remarkable shafts of self-knowledge.

So it was that at almost four in the morning I pulled down my twenty-year-old copy of the
I Ching
from its shelf, picked out three nickels from my loose change on the dresser, and prepared to consider my fate.

Uppermost in my mind, when I thought about it, was not the question “What is this all about?” It was, rather, “Shall I go
on with this thing or get out now?”

I felt sure that if I did go on, what it was about would be made plain to me in time, perhaps painfully so. There was a passage
of Koestler’s that I’d come across a few days earlier. Describing a brush with synchronicity, he said:

“[It is] as if some mute power were tugging at your sleeve. It is then up to you to decipher the meaning of the inchoate message.
If you ignore it, nothing at all will probably happen; but you may have missed a chance to remake your life, have passed a
potential turning point without noticing it.”

Confident that I could “ignore it” if I chose without fear of repercussions, I decided to let the
I Ching
guide my decision to stop now or go on.

I shook my coins and threw them, six times in all. My hexagram was:

The interpretation of that was “Revolution,” for which the original Chinese character meant an animal’s pelt, which was changed
in the course of the year by “molting.” It spoke of the need for change everywhere in time, but urged extreme caution.

Because three of my lines were “changing” lines, meaning I’d thrown three heads or three tails at the same time, I had an
alternative hexagram to look up before I came to a conclusion. The “changed” hexagram was:

This was “Treading”—literally treading upon something, though it is also defined as the right way of conducting oneself. I
read:

Treading upon the tail of the tiger.

It does not bite the man. Success.

I took the combination of the two hexagrams to mean that, although I was dealing with something dangerous, luck was on my
side. Things would turn out for the best.

So I decided to go on.

Did I really believe that randomness, or chance, was some sort of key to the universe? I suppose that what I thought, more
or less, was why not? The idea made as much sense as anything else. I know Einstein refused to believe that God “played dice
with the universe,” but he’s been proved wrong about other things. For example, he believed that “spooky” action at a distance
(information traveling faster than light) was impossible. But since Bell’s Theorem and the Aspect experiment in 1982, we’ve
been able to demonstrate it routinely in the lab.

The physicist John Wheeler, who taught Richard Feynman and who despises anything that smacks of superstition or the paranormal,
once suggested that the reason all electrons behave alike is that there is only one electron in the whole universe, and that
it zips back and forth painting reality as we know it like an image on a television screen.

He also came up with the idea that the Big Bang didn’t happen until consciousness evolved many billions of years later and
was able to look back through time and become aware of its own origin.

Go figure.

That was something I would try to do in the book.

S
ara got back on Wednesday afternoon as planned. Although I had intended telling her everything that had happened, including
my having spotted her almost exact double while she was away, we didn’t have a moment to talk before the evening, when we
were due to go to a charity gala at Lincoln Center. One of her wealthier clients had bought tickets and insisted we come along
as his guests. It was hard to refuse, but even harder to keep my mind on the string of celebrities paraded before us doing
their various party pieces.

There was a dinner afterward, which I got through on automatic pilot as I always did those affairs. It was when we were leaving
that I saw Sara talking to some woman I didn’t know, a statuesque blonde in an elaborate brocade dress and some ostentatious
jewelry. Not someone with a gift for understatement. Sara waved me over and introduced me.

“This is my husband, George,” she said to the woman. “George, this is Linda Coleman.” We shook hands and exchanged pleasantries.
She was a good-looking woman, but behind the fixed smile she wore as a social mask I sensed an ice-cold nature and a will
of steel. I wondered who and what Linda Coleman was. As we talked, her gaze wandered off to one side where she had seen someone.
“You must meet my husband,” she said.

I turned—and saw the tall blonde man I’d seen with Sara, or her double, the previous day.

“Darling,” Linda Coleman said, “come over and meet Sara’s husband, George.”

Steve Coleman and I shook hands. The four of us chatted for a while. I didn’t say anything about having seen him yesterday,
and of course absolutely nothing about having seen him with Sara’s double. I did, however, say that he seemed vaguely familiar.
His wife seemed pleased by that and told me proudly that I might have seen his picture in the papers or on television. He
was a lawyer who had been involved in a number of high-profile cases and was now about to enter politics. He would be a candidate
the following year for state Senate, and she managed to imply that this was only the beginning of what promised to be a glittering
career. I sensed at once that her ambitious eyes were already fixed on the ultimate prize: the White House, no less.

Sara and I didn’t talk much in the car on the short ride home. She seemed a little tense, I thought, though trying not to
show it. She was avoiding my eyes, looking out of the window, pretending to be preoccupied. At least that was how I read her
mood. It was only when we stepped into the apartment and I closed the door behind me that I said, “So that was the great love
of your life. Steve Coleman. Right?”

She turned with a gasp. “How did you… ?”

I smiled. “We’ve been married a long time, Sara. I think I’m getting to know you a little by now.”

She relaxed and smiled back. “It was a long time ago.”

“The thrusting young lawyer of legend.”

“That’s the one.”

“So what happened? He ran off with the ice queen?”

She shrugged. “It just petered out. The way these things do.”

“Lucky for me,” I said, and took her in my arms. “I love you, Sara.”