On a frigid Sunday night this past February, just after I’d put the baby to bed, the intercom buzzed.
“Did you order food?” I asked Paul, who was hunched over his laptop in our dining room.
“Nope.”
I looked to Jacob and Sasha, but neither was expecting anybody.
“Probably just the wrong apartment,” I said. The intercom buzzed again, longer this time. I went to the kitchen and pressed the button. “Hello?”
A voice—scratchy, male—asked, “Are you on the fifteenth floor?”
“Yes…”
“Do some of your windows face east?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“This is going to sound strange, but…” His name was Andrew. He was studying design. He had a girlfriend in the building facing ours, also on a high floor. She was Japanese, but her name was formed using the Chinese character for love, which was the same sound in Japanese. Or so he said. “And I made this neon sign of the Chinese character for love that I want to put in your window late Tuesday night,” he explained, “so when she wakes up on Valentine’s Day, she’ll see it. Can I come up and check out your windows?”
His story seemed too elaborate to be false. If he really wanted to rob us, a simple, “Flowers!” would have sufficed. Not that I was expecting any, but still.
“Who was that?” Paul asked.
“Some guy who wants to put a neon sign of love in our window.”
“Huh?”
“His girlfriend lives in the building across from ours. Her name means ‘love.’ Or is Love. In Chinese. Or something like that.”
“I hope you told him no.”
“Actually I buzzed him up.”
“What?”
Even my kids looked at me askance.
“Don’t worry. I’ll give him the once-over through the peephole.”
“That’s what Sharon Tate said.”
“Oh, come on! Where’s your sense of romance?”
“Where’s your sense of…sense?”
My husband had a point. But I’ve always had a soft spot for the grand romantic gesture: the man who hires a skywriter to propose or who sinks to one knee in the middle of a crowded stadium. Such acts riddle the plots of romantic comedies but rarely pierce the skin of real life, and the idea of one happening in our apartment—where the biggest romantic gesture either my husband or I could muster lately was to let the other one skip doing the dishes—was too tempting to resist.
The doorbell rang. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the hair on the backs of all of our necks stood on end. I went to the door, slid open the peephole. In the hallway, distorted by the fish-eye lens, was (if I would later have to describe him to the police, I thought) a twenty-to-thirty-year-old male, Caucasian, tall, medium build, with a tangle of dirty-blond hair.
I opened the door.
“Hi,” he said. “Thanks so much for letting me up.”
“You’re welcome.” He looked harmless enough, but I engaged him in a bit of innocuous banter to see if he breathed fire. Then I took a blind leap of faith—not wholly unlike the one I’d taken seventeen years earlier when I let my husband into my life—and ushered him into our apartment.
Andrew headed for our dining room window. “Perfect,” he said. “That’s her apartment, right there. So, on Tuesday night can I come back with my sign?”
I said he could. But what I really wanted to know was, which window was Love’s?
“That one,” said Andrew, pointing vaguely.
I strained my eyes to see. In one window sat a chubby man at his computer. In another, an older couple was puttering around in their bathrobes. Where was Love?
Later that night, as Paul and I were brushing our teeth, I saw in the mirror that he was staring at me the way he hadn’t in years. After I spat, I said, “What’s up with you tonight?”
“I was just remembering the tree I bought you.”
The week after Paul and I had met in Paris, where we were living, I had to leave for Bucharest for five weeks to cover the aftermath of the Romanian revolution. I liked him, and I must have mentioned something about wanting a plant for my apartment, but at that point in my life I’d pretty much given up on falling in love, much as the Romanians had pretty much given up on being able to speak freely: nice concept, clearly others in the world were able to do it, but heartache and the Securi-tate loomed too large.
Then Ceauşescu was shot, the iron curtain slipped off its rod, and I returned from Bucharest to find an enormous tree in my apartment. One thing led to another, and here we were, seventeen years and three children later, brushing our teeth.
Except it was more complicated than that, as love always is. There were those incidents early on that nearly nipped our tree in the bud; the period in the middle, when shards of wedding china flew like shrapnel; the present moment, when the possibilities for romance were muted by both logistics and the vicissitudes of fortune. (A weekend alone back in Paris? Sure! But who will watch the kids and which one should we starve to be able to afford it?)
The night before Valentine’s Day, I came home late to an apartment glowing warm and rosy from within. Filling our window, Andrew’s sign looked not unlike a human heart surrounded with the kind of radiating lines cartoonists use to indicate movement.
Paul was seated at his usual spot in our dining room, hunched over his computer, but when I walked in, which normally elicits a grunt and a halfhearted wave, he spun around and smiled. “Isn’t it beautiful?” he said. He rose from his chair, cranked up the iPod, and actually pulled me toward him.
“Since when do you listen to Sinatra?” I said.
“Just wait,” he said. “It’ll get to you too.” Then he waltzed me into our bedroom.
Around 3:00 A.M., the baby started moaning in his crib. I stumbled out of bed and felt his forehead. “Oh no,” I said. “Leo’s hot.”
Paul offered to fetch some cold water, but feeling unusually generous, I said I’d get it myself. I carried Leo down the hallway into that surprising pink glow.
Upon seeing the sign, he said, “Oohf,” which is as big a compliment as they come, and he instantly calmed down. Leo was not exactly planned, and sometimes I find the task of caring for him, eleven and nine years after his siblings, exhausting. But that night I looked at his glowing cheeks and thought, My God, how I love this beautiful baby!
Then I carried him to the kitchen and realized he was not actually glowing from the neon, but rather from a frightening-looking rash. The next day he’d be diagnosed with fifth disease (a viral illness also known as “slapped cheek,” because of the way the rash breaks out across the cheeks), but that night, I nursed him to sleep in the glow of Love’s light, and he spared us more wails until morning.
When dawn broke, I wandered into the still-pink dining room to feed Leo his cereal. I stared out at the falling snowflakes and across the way to Love’s apartment building. Was she awake yet? Had she actually seen the sign the night before, or had Andrew figured out some clever way to shut out the world until daybreak?
As I spooned oatmeal into Leo’s mouth, I imagined the two of them waking and staring out at the pink neon sign. “Oh my God,” Love would say. “I can’t believe you did that.”
“I love you,” he’d say, to which she would answer, disrobing, “I love you too.”
Yes, she had to be at work, and he had to be at school, but there were no children needing oatmeal spooned or gym shorts laundered or lunch boxes filled. I pictured their young skin, unmarred by stretch marks or wrinkles, his fingers reaching, their thighs entwined.
“That was nice last night,” Paul said, kissing the top of my head.
Jacob and Sasha came into the dining room, shouting, “Wow!” and “Cool!” when they spotted the sign. Moments later, Sasha said, “Jacob, you made such nice Valentine’s Day cards. Your friends will love them.”
“Thanks!” he replied.
Had my family been replaced by aliens? Leo, though wracked with a viral rash and high temperature, was cooing and gulping down lukewarm mush. My older children were trading kindnesses. My husband had kissed me on the forehead. It was as if, via the amorous couplings across the way, Paul and I were reaping the benefits of an extramarital affair—a rise in ardor, a distraction from reality, a reawakening of what it means to be alive—without the guilt and lies.
We had long ago relegated Valentine’s Day to the dustbin of the ridiculous, but that night Paul showed up with roses and wine. We lighted candles and abandoned screens, friends, and responsibilities to gather in the dining room for a languorous family dinner and several rounds of Boggle. We tucked the kids into bed early and found our way to each other for the second night in a row.
The privations of city life, the constant visual, physical, and psychological barrage of the other—other parents, other people, living in tiny boxes on top of one another, puttering around in their half-closed bathrobes for all to see—can so often be draining, but this other, this complete and utter stranger had walked into our apartment and ushered Love into our lives. Suddenly, our city of eight million felt intimate, cozy.
When Andrew showed up as promised on Friday morning to dismantle his sign, we waited for him to tell us about the happy moment he’d shared with Love. But as we ate our breakfast, he silently went about his task. Finally, unable to take the suspense, my daughter said, “So what happened? Did your girlfriend like the sign?”
“I’m not sure.” He pulled the plug, and the pink glow vanished. “She never said anything.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. How could Love not (at the very least!) have acknowledged her sign and all the planning and forethought that had gone into it?
“Well,” Andrew said, “I’d made us a reservation at Roth’s Steakhouse, and I waited over an hour for her to come, but she never showed up.”
“Where was she?” I imagined Love being held up at work or stuck in a subway car. She couldn’t possibly have stood up her boyfriend on Valentine’s Day.
“I don’t know. She just…never came.”
“But she saw the sign later, right?”
Leo was screaming now, a big wad of mucous extruding from his nostril. When I reached for a tissue to wipe it, I knocked over a glass of orange juice, which spilled onto the table and floor.
“I assume so.” Andrew shrugged, and in that shrug I saw the death of hope. After packing the sign back up into its Bubble Wrap and cardboard box, he muttered, “Thanks again,” and slipped out our door.
My older son looked as if he were about to cry. My daughter sat down at the piano to play something doleful. Leo was apoplectic, rubbing the contents of his rheumy eyes and nose all over his rash-covered cheeks before vomiting on the tray of his high chair, where my arm happened to be resting. My husband walked into the kitchen, took one look at this gorgeous tableau, and picked a fight over whose turn it was to clear the dishes.
I reconsidered Andrew’s story. Had he completely deluded himself into thinking Love was his? Or was he a stalker, and we’d aided and abetted his harassment? Or what if Love was actually a figment of his imagination, which even the brightest, pinkest, most realistically human heart–shaped sign of affection could never rouse from the realm of fantasy?
It was something to think about while I mopped up the mess.