“Would you care to dance?” he said, without a quake and barely a motion.
“Oh, I could hardly…,” she said, putting down her wedge of toast.
“Um…why not?” said the familiar stranger, starting to sway back and forth, anxiety and doubt starting to make themselves known.
“It’s just…in this skirt?” she asked, more out of reaction than out of thought. Yet, when she motioned to reinforce her statement, she saw her blue skirt had turned into the bottom of a blue dress. Her white sneakers had disappeared to be replaced by a pair of blue formal shoes. In surprise, she ran her hands down the cotton of the dress and noticed that her fingers looked younger, too.
He paused. Paralyzed with rejection.
“Oh, what am I saying? I’d love to,” Mary concluded aloud, going along with the game being played.
She took the hand before her and stood within the kitchen, seeing nothing but her unearthly partner. Slowly, the white tile of her kitchen gave way to the brown, white, and blue of a dance hall. Her appliances disappeared amid a flurry of true metallic music, the triumph of horns and drums that had been nearly forgotten in the distant present.
“I hope you don’t mind a slow song,” he said, gaining confidence as he led her onto the dance floor.
“Oh, no. I like slow songs. I’m not much of a dancer, never have been, but slow songs just seem easier,” she found herself saying effortlessly.
“I think they are, too,” he confessed, smiling deeply into her eyes. Gradually, his arms stretched around her, as the band regained its melody.
She gave in at once in his arms, feeling security that she had felt for the first time long ago. Her smile matched his, her soul was his for the taking (she knew now as she didn’t know then).
As they danced, the hall faded away. They were light amid a darkened space, with events and faces flashing by.
Their figures drew closer at times and distanced themselves at others, bombarded by emotions and discord somewhat out of their control. Yet, with their eyes meeting and their bodies embraced, the music could not be destroyed. At times the perception of the sound changed, but the song remained the same.
Backward to forward. Forward to backward. They were once again in each other’s arms on the dance floor. The music resumed its earthly tone, letting that moment’s dance slide gracefully to a halt, joined by applause of appreciation for the music’s makers.
For a moment, the couple remained embraced. Her cheeks dimpled with a smile. His eyes moved over her shoulder.
Slowly, his hands lowered.
“It’s a shame that’s the last song,” she said, seeing the finality in his eyes as he looked at the clock.
“There’ll be more tomorrow,” he said, with yet another grin.
“Do you think I could see you then?”
“Certainly,” she said, walking with him toward the door.
“Until then,” he remarked upon departure, walking into the balmy summer night, his thoughts and hopes as incomplete as his farewell.
As he left, she sat herself down, seeing the decorations undone around her. In her lap was a clean handkerchief someone had left on the chair next to hers.
Before her eyes, the handkerchief slowly transformed, as Mary returned to the familiar. It metamorphosized from cotton to silk to velvet to paper, from white to red to blue to yellow, until all that was left was a napkin in her lap.
Mary quickly glanced to her side, seeing the kitchen once more. Although nothing in the room had changed, she felt that some things did not seem to be the way they had been before. She centered her sight and saw Wallace again. Looking into his steady eyes, she had a feeling that he felt it, too. The music had faded, but it was there all the same, awaiting the next crescendo.
INTERSECTION
It takes a thousand people to create an accident. The man who installed the traffic sign a little askew. The woman who held the elevator for an extra moment as the driver left his office. The driver’s great-grandmother, who fell in love with the man at the hat shop. The driver’s two-thirty appointment, who had to put him on hold because of another call (his ten-year-old daughter). The technician who made the song on the radio sound so good. The television weatherman who had predicted rain.
Person after person after person…they all converge at one moment, irrevocably changing the course of a thousand more lives.
As it is with accidents, so it is with love.
Meredith and John are standing in the Elysian Fields, on the edge of Hoboken, overlooking the New York City skyline. The sky is so dark that all the lights are magical. It is late in the hour, late in the night, late in the year. And yet the air is filled with beginnings—sweet, giddy lightness and the languid feel of clocks at rest.
John and Meredith dance. They dance to the sound of the fabric-maker who made John’s sleeve so soft. They dance to the sound of their families’ arguments, and to the sound of their grandparents’ praise. They dance to the sounds that are carried in the airwaves around them—radio transmissions at lunar speed, one of which carries Meredith’s favorite song from high school, bound for another listener, miles away.
They dance to the sound of a baby’s heartbeat. They dance to the sound of their first kiss.
Somewhere back in time, a boy named Daryl broke Meredith’s heart. Somewhere back in time, John woke up driving at night, and swerved just in time to miss a tree. Somewhere back in time, Meredith’s parents said I love you. Somewhere back in time, a man said, This land should be a park. Another man’s wife named it Elysian Fields.
Right now, a man in a red Chevrolet is driving by. Right now, John’s boss is getting ready for bed—her husband rolls over and gives her a corner of his pillow. Right now, the friend who taught Meredith to kiss in fourth grade is thinking about her, wondering where she is.
Every two people cause an intersection.
Every person alters the world.
Meredith’s grandparents were married so long that their time together acquired all the time before and all the time after, so it could be truly said that they are married forever. John’s parents are much the same way.
At any given moment, there are millions of people saying their lover’s name. The words travel through the air.
Meredith leans into John, her hand loosely on his sleeve. He pushes a stray hair behind her ear and leaves his palm on her cheek. Then he retreats, and moves closer. The lights of Manhattan twinkle.
They kiss.
Maybe fate’s arithmetic is so diffuse that it’s not arithmetic at all.
The lights. The sleeve. The park. The taxpayers of Hoboken. The parents. The friends. The past. The swaying of the streetlights. The car passing. The present. The hopes. The break-ups. The conversations. The invention of the lightbulb.
It is the miracle of all these things coming together that constitutes love. The orchestra has been assembled…and now it plays.
It doesn’t have to be on Valentine’s Day. It doesn’t have to be by the time you turn eighteen or thirty-three or fifty-nine. It doesn’t have to conform to whatever is usual. It doesn’t have to be kismet at once, or rhapsody by the third date.
It just has to be. In time. In place. In spirit.
It just has to be.
Two people in a park—
They kiss.
An intersection.
One day when he was bored in physics class, David Levithan decided to write a Valentine’s Day story for his friends. With this one small decision, his future as an electromagnetic engineer was doomed…and a new story-writing tradition was born. He’s been writing stories for his friends ever since, and eventually some other people wanted to read them. A few of the stories got really long, too, and became novels. These include Boy Meets Boy, The Realm of Possibility, Are We There Yet?, Marly’s Ghost (illustrated by Brian Selznick), Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist (written with Rachel Cohn), Wide Awake, and Naomi and Ely’s No Kiss List (written with Rachel Cohn). He’s also interested in collecting other people’s stories (true or fictional), most recently in The Full Spectrum: A New Generation of Writing About Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Questioning, and Other Identities (edited with Billy Merrell), This Is PUSH, and 21 Proms (edited with Daniel Ehrenhaft).
David’s senior-yearbook entry started with a quote from Philip Roth: “And as he spoke, I was thinking, ‘the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives people turn stories into.’” He is still intrigued that his seventeen-year-old self chose those words.