Heart of the City (42 page)

Marcel was hired by a local ambulance company and rose quickly to a supervisory position. He continues to work in the public safety field.

In March 2008, their first child, a daughter named Sarah, was born. In May 2010 came Sophia.

Marcel has come around to the gentler rhythms of his adopted home but has yet to fully abandon his “New York defenses.” When motorists flash their headlights at him, he says only half-jokingly, it still takes him a moment to realize they aren’t gangsters looking for a fight but friendly neighbors saying hello.

In their living room, the bookshelves by the fireplace are lined with the photos of Times Square that Robin had taken the night they met. Robin has tried in other ways to ease her husband’s occasional homesickness. She hung up a shower curtain emblazoned with a map of Manhattan and sewed the circular symbols of the A, C, and E subway lines into a set of bathroom towels.

When I asked whether Times Square had played any role in their coming together, she said it had “opened her senses.”

“I compare it to waking up at Christmas, before opening presents,” she told me. “The excitement of not knowing, of being like a child, when even little things excite you. The neon lights in Times Square were like wrapping paper, and the feeling you get inside is just of happiness and discovery. You don’t know what’s going to be around the corner.”

It was a feeling she found nowhere else in city. “Even though I’d never been there, Times Square felt very comfortable, very safe. It was so well lit, and everyone around you, they’re all in similar frames of mind: it’s all about fun and relaxation and having a good time. There’s that famous kiss from World War II, and you can understand it: there’s this energy that goes through your body.”

Had the setting been different, she told me, she wasn’t sure she would have felt comfortable buttonholing a big-city police officer—certainly not to ask for restaurant advice. “In Times Square, when I started talking to Marcel for the first time, I felt in some ways like I already knew him.”

It was Marcel’s job to talk to strangers, all kinds. On a typical shift in Times Square, he fielded dozens of questions from tourists. The crowds and chaos of Times Square kept him in a
hyper-alert state, but the clincher for him was less the place than the person. “I used to tell Robin that she’s from the ‘Land of Make Believe,’ where everything is cheery and everyone’s on the same level and everyone’s good.” But then he saw her more clearly, as a person who discounted material things, loved her family, and felt connected to the world through faith. “What you see on her outside was what I had kept inside,” Marcel told me on the phone one day. “She is who I was, or wanted to be, before I was tainted and desensitized by my occupation. I can be like that now, with her.”

When the Koppels first told me the name of the exhibit where they met—“Patterns of Collecting”—I was struck by its resonance with their love story. Bob, after all, had been wandering through a collection of the world’s most beautiful objects when he spotted yet another one, and had to have her. Mara, however, would be no one’s collectible, which only heightened Bob’s desire.

What none of us knew then was that the exhibit’s creator had invited just such comparisons. In November 2009 I took an elevator down to the library on the Met’s ground floor and asked for the files on “Patterns of Collecting,” which had long ago been taken down. The files led me to a 1975 book,
The Chase, the Capture
:
Collecting at the Metropolitan
, that the Met’s then-director, Thomas Hoving, co-wrote as a companion to the exhibit. “The chase and the capture of a great work of art,” Hoving begins, “is one of the most exciting endeavors in life—as dramatic, emotional, and fulfilling as a love affair. And love affairs, at least some of them, should be told about.” Could Hoving have imagined that one such affair would begin right there in his exhibit?

Bob and Mara left New York less than a year after marrying, moving briefly to the Berkshires, in Massachusetts, and then, in
1978, to Chicago, where Bob’s brother worked in finance. Bob learned the trade and joined the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, becoming a successful commodities trader and writing a half dozen books on the psychology of trading and investing. (His latest is
Investing and the Irrational Mind
.) He also raises money for nonprofit groups.

Mara helped establish an after-school program at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. She paints out of a home studio and works in the gift shop at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. In 1998, she published a book called
Women of the Pits
, a collection of stories about the then-small sorority of women who had broken into the male-dominated world of trading.

Their two children, Lily and Niko, live in New York City. Both are writers.

One of Mara’s favorite paintings hangs above a desk in Lily’s Manhattan apartment: it is oil and ink, on unstretched canvas, and depicts the Great Hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. On its face, it is a straightforward, if slightly whimsical, rendering of the museum’s majestic marble entrance hall. But look closer—in the center of a rosette, on the side of an urn, at the base of a column—and you’ll find the names “Bob,” “Lily,” and “Niko” hidden, like some runic code, in the architectural details.

“It was a birthday present for Bob,” Mara, still lithe and lovely at sixty-eight, told me when I visited the couple in May 2010 in Chicago’s historic Old Town. The walls of their condo, on the second floor of a late nineteenth-century former parish house, are covered with Mara’s art: a painting of a trio of wild-eyed New Guinea Mudmen, a man in a leopard-print leotard fighting off a lion, a disembodied eye floating in a sea of tears. At first glance, a pen-and-ink in Bob’s office looks like a tree in full bloom. But if you come in closer, you see that every leaf and branch is made up of tiny repetitions of her husband’s first name.

“I really believe life is very accidental,” Mara said as we settled onto couches in the living room with dessert after a lunch of
home-cooked softshell crabs, heirloom tomatoes, and white wine. “If you wait a second one way or another, your entire life is different. The fact that Bob and I met in this place, that our paths just intersected, made all the difference. When I saw him, it was a moment of recognition. It was like everything in life was revealed in this one moment.”

Bob, who still wears his hair, white now, in rakish waves, was dressed in a zip-up cardigan sweater, a striped dress shirt, and a loosely knotted green tie printed with images of a stork. His vocal cadences bear a striking resemblance to those of Woody Allen. “Was it Robert Pirsig, in
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
, who said something like, ‘Truth knocks at the door, and you act as if no one is home’? It’s strange how a lot of people just live their lives that way. We’ve commodified every aspect of American life. People believe if they have something more expensive, bigger, life will be better. We’re not geared to think, ‘Wow, I found this truth or this person who is really amazing.’ We can’t be satisfied with that. To be in love, contrary to what is generally thought in this society, is to find someone who you really are happy with and to just allow the both of you the freedom to let that love reveal itself over time.”

Sarah Cross and Daniel Letourneau (pseudonyms) were married on July 18, 2004, at a white-clapboard eighteenth-century inn overlooking Cayuta Lake, just outside Ithaca.

The end of their courtship—and the start of something more—had none of the drama of its chance start in Washington Square Park some four years earlier. Every few weeks, over breakfast in Ithaca, they would take the relationship’s measure with a simple question. “So, do you think we should get married?” one would ask the other.

“I’m not sure. What do you think?”

The banter became a kind of inside joke, a way of expressing confidence in their progress while still waiting for all the pieces to fall into place. Then, on a bright Sunday morning, in the fall of 2003, they awoke and gazed out their bedroom window onto a campus strewn with brightly hued fallen leaves.

“So, do you think we should get married?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

“Can we call our parents?”

“Yes.”

“Now?”

“Yes.”

The celebration spanned three days, with some sixty of Daniel’s relatives and friends flying in from France to join one hundred of Sarah’s. Daniel’s cousins sang a French choral song they had written in honor of the couple. Sarah took his relatives into town for real American cheeseburgers. Wary of American cooking standards, the French ordered their burgers “extra, extra rare.”

Cornell awarded Daniel a PhD in the spring of 2008 and soon hired him. He is now an assistant professor of real estate finance at the university’s School of Hotel Administration. Sarah worked as a massage therapist for three years, until their first child, a daughter they named Valentina, was born, in February 2007. She now takes care of her daughter full-time.

Sarah can recall the sensory details of that day in June 2000 when she and Daniel met, but mainly in impressions. “I felt like there were bright colors,” she said when I interviewed her in the spring of 2009 at a café in Washington, D.C., where she was visiting her sister. “It felt bright and vibrant. People looked beautiful.”

A friend lives a block from Washington Square Park, and when Sarah and Daniel visit, they often stroll through, looking for the tree they were under when they first locked eyes. As the years pass, though, the setting has felt less a part of her story than the
city’s. “It’s never had the same kind of vibe as it did that day,” she told me. “I visit this place where this huge thing happened to us, and there’s no sign of it. Millions of people have been through since and have been sitting in those same spots. It captures something about the feel of New York City. The multitudes of people and the stories that happen every day that are anonymous. Many moments are come-and-go, but some completely change the course of a person’s life. Now, when I’m there, I think, How many stories have happened in this park? How many people have had their lives change course in this place?”

Daniel’s memory of the day they met is more vivid. When I visited the couple in Ithaca in October 2009, I brought a map of the park. Daniel zeroed in instantly on the tree they had been sitting under, then traced his movements around the fountain and along the walks. For him, Washington Square Park remains nothing more or less than the birthplace of their relationship. The thirty minutes they’d spent studying each other’s faces, before exchanging a single word, remains for him a moment of silent poetry.

“There was an entire wordless conversation between two strangers,” he told me. “I was not tempted at all to talk. It felt like we
were
talking. We were probably a little too far apart for a conversation to take place naturally, and it would have been very awkward to break the intimacy of the moment with words. So one of us would smile, and the other would smile back. It felt like it was an entire life. After thirty minutes, we’d said everything. I was left with the feeling that maybe there was nothing else to say.”

Sarah told me she had returned his gaze only to challenge him. “First it was kind of me being, Okay, who are you and what are you doing?” she told me. “Then it very quickly changed, and I would say it was the look on Daniel’s face that made it change. He was completely exposing himself emotionally. He was, ‘This is who I am.’”

We were sitting at their dining room table, and Valentina came running in from the next room, where she’d been watching a children’s movie. She clutched at her father’s knee, and he hoisted her into his lap. “My life was set on a very different path,” Daniel said, looking across the table at Sarah. “I don’t think we had any reason to meet, except for randomness. Except for just luck. The way we met has given me certainty that I know nothing. I’d been for eleven years in a relationship with Elena, and I was sure I was going to marry her. Then, in twenty minutes, my life was just upside down.”

My first book,
My Father’s Paradise
, a family saga published in 2008, was a labor of love. It recounted my father’s immigrant journey from the back roads of Kurdish Iraq to the freeways of Los Angeles, and took readers across three continents and three thousand years of history. This book is admittedly a lighter undertaking, but one with no less heartfelt a purpose.

I am indebted to the following people for helping shape my thinking on the interplay of environment and behavior. Fred Kent, the founder and president of Project for Public Spaces, took time out of his frantic schedule to sit for an interview at his Manhattan offices. Helen Fisher, a research professor at Rutgers University, gave me a crash course on the neurochemistry of love. Andrew Stuck, an urban designer in London, shared fascinating reports from the “Romantic Walkshops” he has led through cities around the globe. Arthur Aron, a prominent social psychologist now at Stony Brook University, sharpened my understanding of his seminal work on the link between arousal and attraction. Los Angeles architect Steven Lopez, a family friend, cast light on why some public spaces rouse while others alienate. Beatrice Wright, a retired psychology professor at the University of Kansas, shared memories about her late colleague and friend professor Roger Barker.

Though I never met them, I am thankful for urban visionaries like William H. Whyte, Jane Jacobs, and Ray Oldenburg. They have written with greater eloquence than I could ever muster
about why Americans must care about the life of cities. I learned a great deal about the environmental preconditions for attraction from the writings of social psychologists like Albert Mehrabian, James Russell, Ellen Berscheid, Elaine Walster, Paul Amato, and Ayala Malach Pines. Sociologists Erving Goffman and Lyn Lofland wrote groundbreaking books on the behavior of strangers in public, and I am grateful to have read them.