“Careful, darling,” she said softly, “you’re getting makeup on your jacket.”
Next morning I checked the yellow pages for a detective agency. I found an advert that read “Overseas Investigations Undertaken.”
Their address was some way downtown between Broadway and Fifth. That was good too. Less chance of being seen going in or out.
I felt quite strongly that I wanted to keep this whole thing to myself for the moment. I had decided against saying anything
even to Sara, and in fact was quite relieved that she had never asked anything more about the strange photograph I had told
her about of myself with Jeffrey Hart and Lauren Paige. Fortunately she seemed to have forgotten that whole conversation we’d
had on the day of my father’s funeral, and I was glad to leave things that way. Partly, of course, it was because I had made
up my mind to write a book about coincidence, using my own experiences over the past few days as a way into the subject. Like
most writers I had an almost superstitious fear of talking too soon about something I was working on. It’s a fact that if
you talk too much about it, you’ll never write it. I’ve known very few writers who’ve felt otherwise.
But there was another element to my thinking. I felt that the fewer people I involved at this stage, the less likely I was
to upset the delicate balance of what was going on. Something was taking its course, and I was now a willing part of the process.
I wasn’t sure how much baggage it could handle.
I called the agency; it sounded reassuring. I made an appointment. It looked reassuring. I suppose I’d half-expected men who
never took their hats off, lounged back with their feet on the desk, and tipped shots of whisky into their coffee from bottles
kept in a drawer. Instead I was greeted by a matronly receptionist with a pleasant smile who invited me to wait for a few
minutes in a comfortable room with fresh flowers and a stack of current magazines and newspapers.
The associate I saw looked like a junior partner in a midsize law firm. I explained I was tracing a family tree, but he didn’t
seem concerned about my motives. It was routine, he said. He asked one question: If these people were found, did I want them
approached? I replied no, just tell me where they were, and I’d take it from there. He asked me to give what information I
could to his assistant in another office, a Miss Shelley. Nadia Shelley, I remember. I saw the name on her desk and thought
how striking it was. Striking girl too, as I recall, but businesslike and efficient. She assured me that everything would
be passed on to their associates in London and the search would begin at once. A routine search of this kind, she said, was
really very simple. I paid a surprisingly modest retainer, which she told me they would not exceed without my written agreement.
I should expect to hear from them within a couple of weeks.
I spent much of the next few days thinking about the law of large numbers. This is the paradox at the heart of probability
theory as well as the foundation of all statistics. It is also, of course, central to the notion of coincidence. Yet, like
so many of these things, the closer you examine it the harder it is to see and the more difficult to grasp.
The paradox is this. If I toss a coin in the air, there is a 50 percent chance it will come down heads and 50 percent it will
come down tails. No matter how many times I toss it, the odds are fifty-fifty each time. But if I toss it a thousand times,
it will come down more or less exactly five hundred times heads and five hundred times tails. Why this should be so is a mystery.
To many people, I confess, it doesn’t seem like a mystery. It seems somehow—if obscurely—obvious. So try this.
Radioactive substances decay at an absolutely fixed rate, which is known as their “half-life.” This is so precise that archeologists
routinely measure the age of fossils using radiocarbon tests. Yet the decay of each individual atom composing that radioactive
substance is totally unpredictable and spontaneous. So what is the mechanism that causes large numbers of these unpredictable
and spontaneous events to average out with a smoothness that allows the overall decay of the substance they constitute to
be used as the most accurate historical clock we have yet discovered? The fact is that nobody knows.
The mathematician Warren Weaver once came up with another famous demonstration of the improbability of probability. He noted
from the New York Department of Health records that between 1955 and 1959 the average number of people reportedly bitten by
dogs each day in the city was 75.3 (1955), 73.6 (1956), 74.5 (1957), 74.5 (1958), and 72.4 (1959).
Even assuming (and it is only an assumption) that the human and dog populations of the city remained relatively stable throughout
that four-year period, how did each dog know when it was his turn, or that when he’d had one bite, or maybe two, he was not
to have a second or third?
There are many such intriguing examples. Most interesting to me was the idea that the law of large numbers seemed to be the
only thing running seamlessly from the microscopic world and into the macroscopic. We are told that subatomic particles behave
according to quantum indeterminacy: In other words, their behavior is inherently unpredictable. However, when there are enough
of them, the law of large numbers causes them to average out sufficiently to constitute the atoms and cells that make up,
say, a chair and table, a horizontally revolving wheel, and a human being sitting at the table watching the wheel spin as
he plays roulette.
Why this should be so also remains obscure.
We are further told that by the time we get to the level of the macroscopic world (the casino in which the game of roulette
is being played), the quantum fluctuations on the microscopic level of reality are too small to be of significance. And yet
the game of roulette (like all games, including the insurance business) is governed by the same principle—the law of large
numbers—that has assembled the casino and the player out of their anarchic fundamental elements in the first place.
All
gambling is a quixotic joust against the odds, and the odds are no more than another manifestation of the law of large numbers.
But the roulette ball does not know that, in the long run, zero must come up once every thirty-seven times if the casino is
to stay in business. Yet, in reality, on average, that is what it does.
Again, go figure.
S
ara was going to Philadelphia the following morning, which was a Saturday. I had been sleeping badly, and that night was no
exception. I lay in the dark, watching her, listening to her breathe. I don’t know why, but suddenly I knew she was awake.
And I knew she knew that I was awake. Which meant that she was pretending to sleep to avoid talking to me. I knew in that
moment that I knew a great deal, and had known it for some time. I just hadn’t been willing to admit it to myself.
As though she read my thought, or perhaps she merely sensed my stillness and divined what lay behind it, she opened her eyes
and turned to look at me. The words came from my mouth through no conscious decision on my part. It was as if they had spoken
themselves.
“It’s Steve, isn’t it?” I heard myself say.
“Yes,” she said simply.
There was silence. I remember I lowered my head slightly. She may have taken it for, and perhaps it was, a nod of acquiescence,
a passive acceptance of the worst blow that had ever been dealt me. My mouth was dry. I swallowed hard. She began to speak.
She was trying to apologize, telling me how sorry she was. I cut her short. I couldn’t bear to hear it. I didn’t want to think
about it. I was numb and I wanted to stay that way.
Then she said she thought we ought to separate. I looked at her, still hardly able to believe that this was happening. “I’ll
move out,” I said. “While you’re away I’ll find somewhere. I’ll arrange it.”
“Yes,” she said in a voice that was barely a whisper, “perhaps that’s best.”
I don’t remember much else. I recall making some kind of promise not to cause trouble, at the same time wondering why I wasn’t
raging and breaking things and threatening to kill them both. This sense of inner dislocation between what I wanted to do
and what I was actually doing served only to heighten the unreality of the moment. What was happening was impossible. And
perhaps because it was impossible I didn’t believe that it was happening. I moved through events as though they were unreal,
a dream from which I would awaken and everything would once again be normal. I moved from our bedroom into one of the guest
rooms. I took a sleeping pill, and then another one, because I wanted oblivion. More than that, I
needed
it, because I feared without it that I might go mad.
Next morning I woke abruptly just after seven. My head was clear, in fact unusually so, and I remembered everything that had
happened. I still felt strangely distanced from it all, like a sleepwalker going through the motions but not connecting with
the world around me.
I shaved, dressed, and made coffee. When Sara came into the kitchen, I had breakfast ready. She looked at me curiously, almost
distrustfully, as though she feared some hidden motive behind my calmness. I reassured her that everything was going to be
all right, that I was fine, although in fact I felt like I were bleeding to death inside.
She looked at her watch and said her cab would be arriving any second. Rauol had the weekends off unless we wanted him for
something particularly important, and she had no wish to go by road to Philadelphia, so she was going by train and had ordered
a cab to take her to the station. It was raining, so I went down with her, carrying an umbrella.
I stood there watching as her cab disappeared into the traffic. As she, Sara, disappeared. From my life. Forever. It was then
that I felt for the first time a sense of panic. But it passed. I mastered it. I kept telling myself that I had to stay in
control, that I couldn’t afford not to. Because if I lost control, anything might happen.
The mailman was emerging as I went back into the lobby—the lobby of what had been
our
building, I remember thinking, but was now
her
building. I had my key ring so I opened the box. There were half a dozen letters for Sara, a couple of things for me. One
of them was a long white envelope that bore the name of the detective agency I’d visited the previous week. I opened it right
away and read it in the elevator. When I reached my floor, the doors had opened and closed again before I moved.
I didn’t understand what had just happened to me. Not just that the elevator was moving again. It was what I read, and now
read again, that had stunned me.
Dear Mr. Daly,
I write to inform you of the conclusion of the recent inquiry you commissioned this office to undertake on your behalf.
Records in the United Kingdom show both Jeffrey Hart and Lauren Paige to be deceased, she in 1978, he in 1984. Further inquiry
has established that their only living relative is a son, Laurence Jeffrey Hart. Mr. Hart is an author and journalist living
in Manhattan. His address came to us as something of a surprise.
Perhaps you may be able to throw some light on this coincidence.
The address given for Larry Hart was my own.
N
o matter how many times I reread it, it didn’t change. Nor did the phone number. They had written a letter to me at my address,
telling me that the man I was looking for lived there.
But there was no man at my address apart from myself. Nobody who, for example, could have been living under a false identity.
It made no sense.
I became aware that the elevator had stopped again, and saw I was back on my floor. I stepped into the corridor and sleepwalked
to the apartment, then stood looking out over the park, my head spinning.
Was it a joke of some kind? If so, whose?
Instinctively I picked up the phone to call the agency before remembering it was Saturday. I dialed all the same in case there
was somebody there or an emergency number. All I got was an answering machine, with nothing to indicate when messages would
be picked up. I asked that someone call me as soon as possible.
I looked at the envelope. The letter had been posted yesterday, Friday. Why hadn’t they called me? Didn’t they foresee how
great a shock this information would be to me? Didn’t it occur to them that I might need to talk about it? Or did they think
I was simply some kind of crackpot who should be kept at arm’s length? They enclosed an account of their fees and expenses,
which they said were covered by the retainer I’d paid. It wasn’t a lot of money. At the same time they listed all the other
services they could provide or advise on, including insurance and finance generally. Maybe they hoped to do more business.
If so, they were going about it the wrong way. I intended to let them know that I was unhappy and angry about this.
At some point (I hadn’t noticed when) my head had started throbbing painfully. Only now did I become aware of it and went
to my bathroom in search of something to take for it. I discovered as I struggled with the childproof cap on the bottle that
my hands were shaking uncontrollably. I caught sight of my reflection in the mirror and for a surreal moment failed to recognize
the hollow-eyed, drawn face that stared back at me. Then I thought it was little wonder I should look so terrible. In the
space of only a few hours I had lost my wife and perhaps, if this letter was to be taken seriously, was now in the process
of losing my sanity.
How could this be? How could any of it be? I knew only that I needed help, and it would have to come from someone who stood
outside this whirlwind that was threatening to tear my life apart. But who was there? One or two friends at most I could call
up and say my wife has left me and I’m falling apart. One or two only, but at least they were there—except when I came down
to it I had to admit that I didn’t really want to talk to them at all. I couldn’t face any of it—the explaining, the sympathy,
the empty words of reassurance. On top of that I wasn’t even sure I could keep my mind on one thing long enough to talk coherently.
Sara’s announcement that she was in love with this man Steve had sent me reeling; on top of that the arrival of this extraordinary
letter, which appeared somehow to be the culmination of a string of odd and often meaningless coincidences, had scrambled
my brains completely. I was in no fit state to be with anyone.