by Rachel Simon
So it is that I arrived at the airport early to see this tunnel—where the light show I saw yesterday is now changing into something else. Shades of peach are rising along the walls, blushing into rose, then melting into gold. It is a rendering of a day, with hues mimicking morning, afternoon, twilight, and, to the thrum of crickets, night. Then the tunnel takes on the cacophony of a thunderstorm, complete with indigo and black and flashes of lightning. Then I’m in a rain forest, percussion synchronized to bursting reds and greens.
I’d thought yesterday that this tunnel displayed a single, vibrant show of colors. But now I see that it contains a procession of displays. Had I not granted myself the time in which to simply watch, I would have missed that the tunnel possesses a pattern meant to induce multiple experiences, perhaps to symbolize the multiple lands to be visited by the travelers within.
I start laughing. This space is even more cleverly designed than I’d thought. How I wish Hal were beside me, piecing this together at the same moment as I. But he’s in his office, making calls about that most banal of topics: kitchen cabinets. I turn around, hoping to lock eyes with an equally captivated stranger. That’s when I notice that no one is standing back along with me. Everyone is running or trudging along the moving walkways toward the escalator at the other end, and, with their cell phones in hand, or candy bars, or strollers, or iPods, few are even glancing at the aurora borealis that surrounds us. Certainly no one is glancing toward me.
A loneliness rears up inside. I’m sure I’ll still be able to savor the twenty minutes before I have to leave, but as I learned with Hal, design is more moving when we experience it in the company of another. Those William Penns and Frank Lloyd Wrights didn’t design for isolated souls, since human beings don’t live, work, and play in isolation. They designed for every way that individuals use a space—alone, in a throng, with just one other person.
And in this case, that one other doesn’t have to be a husband. It doesn’t have to be friend or family member. It could simply be a stranger. A person I’ve never seen before, and will never see again, but who was once taught, as was I, the simple willingness to see.
The crowds keep moving. No one is noticing. The tunnel has begun to feel chilly.
Though I’m hardly an expert in seeing. There are things I still miss entirely, as I remembered only two nights ago, when Hal threw himself to the bed in despair.
“But I thought you had the kitchen cabinets under control,” I said, my suitcase open as I packed for this trip. “I remember you doing the design. I FedExed the drawings.”
“Yeah, well, stuff happened.”
He explained what I hadn’t been seeing. For months he’d put in major time to ensure that we’d have environmentally responsible cabinets. This is not a simple matter, because most store-bought cabinets have, in the eyes of someone trained to understand sustainability, multiple strikes against them. So Hal designed them himself; tracked down a board product that, unlike standard products, doesn’t come from a clear-cut forest and doesn’t off-gas the carcinogen formaldehyde; and hired a cabinetmaker who’d worked with it before. With few such products in production, this all took ages. But finally everything was in place. I FedExed the drawings. Prices were set. Then he found out that the manufacturer had discontinued the product.
“What does this mean for us?”
“That we’ve hit a dead end with the cabinets just when we need to order them.”
“What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know.” He made a disheartened chuckle. “Maybe pray.”
“Right.” Hal, a lapsed-Methodist-turned-Buddhist agnostic, is not one to take entreaties to the divine seriously, and, although I’ve been known to pray, as a non-practicing-endlessly-ambivalent Jew, I’ve never felt certain that anyone’s listening. If I did, I’d take Hal up on his suggestion. But instead I just said, “Maybe we should go to a store and buy some.”
He looked at me, then turned away. Though as I learned this morning, now he agrees.
So it’s hardly surprising that, as the tunnel show continues, my thoughts have moved away from the search for a sympathetic stranger to the search for suitable cabinets. However, this isn’t only because we’re going shopping tonight. It’s also because if Hal really does dispense with his plan, it will be yet another blow in his long, frustrating journey to design.
As we kept walking through those early years together and he kept explaining architecture, Hal also informed me that because of the way architecture is practiced, many architects have limited opportunities to design buildings. “Do you want to?” I asked, as we meandered along the streets. “Most architects long to design buildings,” he said. But at the small firm where he was serving his apprenticeship, he drew door details and window schedules, parts of unexceptional buildings designed by someone else to please subdivision developers. “I might get a chance later on. Architecture is called the old man’s profession.” “Well, if you do—when you do—what kind of design style appeals to you most?” “Style isn’t the issue,” he said. “The important thing is letting form arise from listening to the client, the place, and the context.”
As the years passed, Hal worked in a succession of firms and sometimes did get the chance to design—furniture for a residence, a chapel for a retirement community, parts of a juvenile detention center, a building conversion at a university. But opportunities were intermittent, and although he reveled in them, he became increasingly disappointed about other aspects of the field. Architecture is intimately tethered to the economy, so architects have little control over whether the scope of their projects will wither, or even whether they’ll remain employed, as we discovered one sad day when Hal, working at a firm that was having trouble rustling up jobs, got laid off. And in many firms, like the one that hired him after the layoff, preposterous deadlines are sometimes imposed. There were times when he’d spend weeks working in the office until midnight and returning at 5 a.m. He began to sour on his career.
I tried to console him, but he began steeping himself in his music whenever he was home, and his career disenchantment curdled to cynicism. So whenever I wasn’t writing, I walked around our suburb alone, obsessing about the notion of true love and failing to get interested in architectural features I could now name. One night, trying to make conversation, I asked him to list his job titles over the years. He said, “Bum, Bum, Assistant Bum, Associate Bum, Project Bum.” We laughed, but he had come to feel such emptiness about his life—as I did with mine, and therefore we did with each other—that no humor could fill us. Then we broke up.
But this is also when he revived an old but neglected interest.
Hal had long been alarmed by environmental problems. When we parted ways and he had time to fill, as well as a hole in his heart, he began studying green, or sustainable, design. This rekindled his affection for architecture, particularly how it could, even in a limited capacity, influence the world. He still does very little design in his current position as a project manager overseeing design and construction at a state university. But he’s become the campus advocate for a greener way of building, and that’s helped him make his peace with his field.
So I was glad when, in the planning stage of our renovation, we thought Hal would not just have a chance to design our house, but have multiple opportunities to employ green strategies. Unfortunately, since we had to tailor the job to our budget, some of his ambitions fell by the wayside. But eco-friendly kitchen cabinets, with his simple, functional design, were one of the primary features that survived the final cut.
Until now.
Though, of course, Hal’s career disappointments are not the only reason I’m thinking of the cabinets as I watch the light show. I am also ogling an entirely unnecessary orgy of energy, and I can easily imagine that if he were here, he’d be saying the same kind of things he says when we see gleaming glass skyscrapers that were built without any consideration about solar load, or subdivisions for which long-established forests were m
owed down to the last tree. “I just can’t see this as attractive. All I can see is gross irresponsibility.” Having picked up a reasonable amount of knowledge from him, I tend not to disagree. Yet this tunnel is just so sublime that I’m willing to make an exception—and keep it to myself when I get home.
But it’s still lonely, watching the next light show begin without anyone to whom I can say “Wow.” It’s like being alone at New Year’s Eve fireworks. If only I could find just one person with whom I could share it. I’m not greedy. Just one other traveler who would pull aside the flap of privacy and ask me to enter, or be willing to step inside mine. Not only would this take my mind off my green guilt and the saga of the cabinets, but it would enhance my delight, as happens when the dream of one person widens to encompass two.
Of all the lessons I learned when I met Hal, this might be the most important of all: that none of us is truly alone. It might seem that we are for long stretches of time. But there are others out there who, though we do not know it at first glance, have something deeply in common with us. Who are, in effect, our rhymes. All we need is some tiny connection that brings us together. It can be as small as a meeting of the eyes in a bustling public space, and then, if circumstances are right and hearts willing, it can progress to a hello, then a conversation, then—well, then to a story shared with a woman in Michigan twenty-three years later. And to wondering how we find our rhymes among strangers. Is it only happenstance? Or are we somehow meant to meet?
That was what the woman last night was implying when we sat in her SUV in front of the hotel, sharing the stories of our lives, finding how much we ourselves had in common. Not in an obvious way—as a mother and corporate professional who sat on the board of the disability-related organization for whom I’d just given a talk, she had a résumé of life that bore little resemblance to mine. Yet something clicked between us on the ride from the banquet hall to the hotel, and so we sat in the parking lot, one story spilling into the next, her dashboard clock turning from p.m. to a.m., and as we were marveling over the many twists of fate that had occurred in our lives, the conversation shifted, as it often does at such moments, to the question of whether life is part of some cosmic design. This is what I’d alluded to in my call with Hal, as he knows all too well. He also knows that, as an inconsistent believer in the Listener of Prayers, I’ve never made up my mind about my answer. But last night, having been through this tunnel just hours before I sat in that SUV, freshly reminded of how the designs of unknown people have shaped my moods and thoughts through my life, I found myself nodding when the woman said, “Just because we can’t see it doesn’t mean it might not be there.”
All night, I kept wondering. I’ll admit it: I did a little praying, too.
Of course, I did not wake up to an answer delivered by room service. No prophet has crossed my path this morning and said anything profound, either. All I have is this tunnel, and the parade of strangers passing me. And the story I told my late-night buddy last night—of a time when I was twenty-two, and had never met an architect, and was still not-seeing design.
That spring morning as I dressed for work, I had a secret plan. It was a very small plan, but I’d decided, as I’d formulated it over the previous weeks, to keep it to myself. I’d said nothing to the two friends with whom I was renting a Philadelphia row house. Not that they’d have laughed at me, but the plan had been giving me something to look forward to, and since I had precious little of that in my life, secrecy seemed a way to preserve that feeling. Plus, if my plan amounted to naught, which seemed highly likely, I wouldn’t have anyone to report back to.
Like my roommates, now eating breakfast as I grabbed my jacket, I’d graduated from college the year before. Unlike them, I felt miserable in my job. I was a paralegal, a position for which I was terribly mismatched. I also felt lonely and aimless when I returned to the house at night. My only pleasure was my brisk half-hour walk into the downtown every morning to reach my office, but at all other times I despaired that my life, which mattered to no one and was accomplishing nothing, lacked the tiniest semblance of meaning. Sometimes one roommate and I even debated meaning. Sitting on the green shag wall-to-wall carpet, I argued that meaning could be found through love—soul-merging, time-transcending, misery-busting love. My roommate scoffed that love was a Hollywood construct. Maybe meaning could be found, maybe it could not. But each of us, she said, was alone in the universe.
So I’d kept my plan to myself. Why emphasize any more than I already had that I harbored a fanciful view of reality?
As I’d hoped, when I stepped outside that morning onto my residential street, I felt uncommonly energetic. Yes, my little plan was foolhardy, but it was already elevating the day. This feeling continued, even though I was only tracing the same route I’d walked every weekday morning for the last seven months: down two blocks, make a left, and cross over to my favorite part of the trek: the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.
Anyone familiar with Philadelphia would understand why the Parkway was the highlight of my walk. One of the most photogenic avenues in the city, the tree-lined Parkway was based, as even I knew, on the Champs-Élysées in Paris. With its eight lanes of traffic, generous green medians, world-class museums, larger-than-life fountains, green-domed cathedral, and flags from around the world, the Parkway spans a diagonal stretch from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, two blocks from my house, to the center of the city, City Hall, two blocks from my office. I always felt a spring in my step when I turned onto the Parkway, and that day was no exception. All my senses seemed happy: the air smelled of March seedlings, the cars roaring down the Parkway seemed less noisy than usual. I felt as lithe as a ballerina, despite my sneakers and wraparound skirt. Such is the power of anticipation, I thought, and I was glad I hadn’t tinkered with that by hinting of my plan to my roommates.
Of course, they already knew about my quirky habits when it came to my walk every morning. I’d long ago admitted to them that the grandeur of the Parkway so reliably washed away my despair that I’d invented mental amusements to make my thirty minutes even merrier. I memorized the identity of the flags that snapped in the breeze. I timed myself, trying to set new records to reach the Rodin Museum every day, where I’d check my watch against the huge clock on the distant billboard for the Stroehmann Bakery.
Today’s secret plan was a new game—which, unlike my other games, required another person. Over the months of forging my routine, I’d noticed that although most of the other walkers I saw proceeded in the same direction as I, a handful of pedestrians walked against the flow, away from downtown rather than toward. There was the bushy-haired man I often saw near the Art Museum, where foot traffic was scant. There was the familiar-looking fair-haired man I’d see blocks later, close to the fountain of Logan Square, where the crowd grew denser. My plan was to arbitrarily select one of these salmon swimmers and start saying, “Good morning.” With luck the stranger would say it back, and I’d have one more early-morning treat to enliven my life-deadening day.
And lo! Everything was going according to plan: as soon as I passed the Art Museum, I saw the bushy-haired man. As always, he was walking toward me. As always, no one was on the sidewalk but us. He also looked exactly as he had for months: he wore jeans, a brown jacket, and a stern expression. His arms moved stiffly, as if he was disinclined to reach his destination.
I strolled toward him. I glanced at him. I opened my mouth. His eyes glared ahead.
I walked by.
Chicken, I scolded myself. Good thing you didn’t tell anyone your plan.
The blocks passed. The flow of pedestrians picked up. I engaged in my usual pastimes—acknowledging the flags of Spain, Nigeria, Finland, Chile. I timed myself at the Rodin Museum. I watched the pigeons roost at the Free Library. I crossed to the south side of the Parkway at the Franklin Institute, and looked up to the majestic, three-statue fountain in the center of Logan Square.
Then I entered a catwalk around a large construction site. Eventually a fo
ur-star hotel would rise at this location, but at the moment it was a hole in the ground, and a throng of pedestrians was passing along the walkway, just wide enough for a single file in each direction. In among the crowd surging toward me, I saw the fair-haired man. As always, he wore more professional clothes than the other one, and as always he also possessed a hint of humor and originality: his tie was unusual, he carried a shoulder bag rather than a briefcase, and his face was boyishly cute. The aura of familiarity I’d always felt when I passed him had convinced me that he must have been in one of my college classes. How else could I be so well-versed in his face? This was why, I suddenly understood, I had initially selected the bushy-haired man. The rules of the game were, apparently, that I speak only to a stranger. Yet I had not been able to address the first man, and I now understood why. He had looked uninviting, perhaps even hostile. The fair-haired man wore openness on his face, and carried tenderness in his eyes.
We reached each other on the catwalk, me on the right, him on the left. His eyes were ahead. My eyes were on him.
“Good morning,” I said brightly.
He glanced at me, startled. For a moment he stopped, then gave a small smile. “Good morning,” he mumbled back, and we walked on.
I felt triumphant. I had a new game for my mornings! It would be my little secret. Mine, and the fair-haired man’s.
For seven months, the good mornings continued. I grew accustomed to knowing I’d see him, though sometimes we missed each other if I left early, or he passed on the south side of the Parkway before I’d crossed over from the north. But always, when I caught sight of him, I called out a boisterous, “Good morning!” He replied in kind, his tone matching my own. Every so often I’d add, “That’s a fine tie.” Sometimes he’d say, “That’s a fine skirt.” We always smiled broadly as soon as we saw each other. But we exchanged no other words than that.