Adam Levin - The Instructions

“And how will I know who she is?” said my father, brimming with indignation despite the Rebbe’s notoriously calming presence, despite the evidence that he was worth time out of the dreamlife of Menachem Schneerson, and despite being told what anyone else, faithful or not, would smile at having been told by any revered seer: that there was someone he was actually meant to be with… Just despite and despite and despite some more, my father. His soul was so bright with defiance that if he had not, with all his heart, believed there was such a woman as the Rebbe spoke of (despite himself , my father did believe there was such a woman, and with all his heart, and exactly as the Rebbe envisioned her, however the Rebbe envisioned her), he would have prayed to Adonai — Who at that time he did not love at all — to create her, for how could he ever get to experience the thrill of disobediently scorning her if she didn’t exist?

He asked Rebbe Schneerson, “How will I know who she is?” and Rebbe Schneerson who, signposts pointed to and message delivered, was already making his way back to the chupa, looked over his shoulder and said, “I’ve told you everything already. You’ll know.”

So it was a great blessing that my parents fell in love at a distance. From 11:30 to 11:40 a.m. each Monday and Wednesday of the fall quarter of his first year at law school, my father’s blood would jump and jump as he, on a bench across the street, pretending to prep for his 11:45 Introduction to Contracts class, watched my mom smoke cigarettes at the corner of 57th and Ellis while she waited for the university shuttle to take her to her field-placement at the hospital.

“The sight of her made me stupid,” he begins, whenever I get him to tell me the story. “Twice a week for eight weeks, I’d spend ten minutes convinced I would die if she boarded the shuttle before I had a chance to speak to her, but at the same time, the idea that I could, in some complete and final way, screw up by saying the wrong thing kept me haunted in stillness on my bench. She made me so stupid, your mother, that it didn’t even occur to me that I could get closer to her without saying anything — I mean, she was at a shuttle stop. Why did I not think to cross the street and wait beside her for the shuttle and let things ‘take their course’? That would have been the smart thing to do. If I crossed the street and nothing took its course, then I could worry about what to say and how to say it, you know? But I was so stupid I didn’t even think to act like I had a shuttle to wait for… And I don’t mean to give you the impression that I didn’t think your mother was interested in me. If I’d thought she was uninterested, I never would have worried so much — the prospect of screwing some thing up is much more daunting than that of screwing nothing up. I definitely thought there was something there, and so there was something to lose, you see. But she was such a cool character, your mother, and with the carriage of a princess, that long striking neck of hers, the perfectly straight posture that nonetheless seems relaxed, like her skeleton is made of something stronger than bones. She’d light her cigarettes in strong winds, yet it never took more than a single match. I thought about that a lot. On the third or fourth Monday — we’ve never been able to agree on which it was — she switched to a disposable lighter, and I thought that was such a shame.”

On the ninth Monday, my mother couldn’t seem to get her cigarette lit. She flicked and flicked at her lighter, and no flame arose, and she bit her lip and glared at the lighter, as if trying to scare it into working. After a minute of glaring, she flicked some more, but still no flame arose and she bit her lip and tried more glaring.

It was only after my mother’s third failure to light her cigarette that my father — by now resigned almost to the point of total blindness by the “stupid” idea that he’d need to come up with the right thing to say before approaching her — felt a poke in his finger from the ballpoint in his pocket with which he’d stabbed himself while replacing the lighter he’d only just a few seconds earlier used on the cigarette presently stuck between his lips — a cigarette he hadn’t even realized he was smoking — and saw his moment. Lighter in hand, he leapt from his bench, raced across the street, stumbled on the curb.

My mother started laughing.

My father got his footing, glowed red through his beard. “You had better luck with matches,” he said to my mother. He held out his lighter.

My mother lit up — one flick — with her own.

“Understand, Gurion,” my mother once explained, “that most things between people do not work out according to plan, and so when they do, it can fill you with joy. I was not laughing at your father for stumbling. I was laughing because I had been waiting for weeks for him to approach me and—”

Why didn’t you approach him? I said.

“Because I did not want to. Men approach women all the time. That is how men are. If a man approaches a woman, she will only welcome him if she is interested in him . If a woman approaches a man, though, the man may become interested by the fact of the approach itself, and I did not want your father to ever wonder if it was because I approached him that he fell in love with me. I wanted for him to have no doubts. So you see, I was laughing because we had been noticing one another for eight weeks, and still he had not approached me, and it had been making me crazy since the Wednesday of the third week, at which time I saw he needed an impetus to approach, and I developed my plan. I decided to use a lighter for my cigarettes, thinking: If I use a lighter, my lighter can run out of fuel. If my lighter runs out of fuel, he can come across the street and offer to light my cigarette with his lighter.”

I said, I don’t get why you couldn’t just run out of matches, though.

She said, “If you use an opaque lighter, such as the one I was using, you cannot tell how much fuel it contains, and so it says little about you if you run out of fuel. On the other hand, it is stupid to run out of matches, Gurion. It is no hard problem to look in the box before you leave the house and count your matches. If you do not have enough matches, you take more matches or you buy more matches or you suffer your stupidity. I did not want to look stupid. Now, if during those first three weeks, I had not felt, from all the way across the street, a certain thrill pass through your father whenever I lit a cigarette, then I might have dropped my matches in a puddle, rendering them useless, but I suspected — and correctly, according to him — that the source of his thrill was the vision of grace that is witnessed in any person — let alone one who you are falling in love with — who can light a cigarette on the first try with a match in the wind. It always impressed me — that is why I learned to do it. To drop my matches in a puddle, though — that would be clumsy. And clumsiness, though it can at times be endearing, as it was when your father stumbled on the curb, can at other times, especially if the person who is clumsy has previously struck you as graceful, be very disappointing. In any case, ever since switching to the lighter, I had been waiting for it to run out of fuel. I never used a lighter habitually, and I assumed, for whatever reason, that they could not possibly last longer than two or three weeks. I assumed that after two or three weeks, it would be plausible for my lighter to run out of fuel at the shuttle-stop. Five weeks later though, it was still going, and on that ninth Monday, I saw how stupid I was being, how stupid your father had made me: The lighter did not need to actually run out of fuel. It only needed to seem as if the lighter had run out of fuel. Plausibility was not an issue. In a million years, your father would not suspect that I would go to all the lengths I had gone to in order to get him to come across the street. If my lighter seemed to run out of fuel, he would assume that it was a dud or an old lighter. And that is why, when he finally did come across the street, I lit my cigarette with my lighter — not to make him feel like a fool who had fallen for a trick, but rather because he had said, ‘You had better luck with matches,’ when in fact I had not. It was not matches that brought him across the street. It was matches that kept him on the bench.”