My Arbitrary Valentine

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I was about to sing to you You Were Meant For Me for Valentine's Day--you remember that sentimental old song--when I came across this passage in Alice McDermott's novel Charming Billy, where the narrator hypothesizes that her father might not be her father if her mother's first fiance hadn't been kept so long overseas in the Navy, thus giving her dad his chance with her. Here's what McDermott has to say about that: "Those of us who claim exclusivity in love do so with a liar's courage: there are a hundred opportunities, thousands over the years, for a sense of falsehood to seep in, for all that we imagine as inevitable to become arbitrary, for our history together to reveal itself as only a matter of chance and happenstance, nothing irrepeatable or irreplaceable, the circumstantial mingling of just one of the so many millions with just one more."

Do you suppose she's right? Chaos theory is pretty hard to take as it is, let alone on Valentine's Day, when exclusivity in love is what's at stake. Won't you be my Valentine? My irrepeatable, irreplaceable Valentine? Surely the implication of the day is that you were meant for me, I was meant for you. That movie Sliding Doors. What was that all about if not that the right she was destined to meet the right he?

Yet the scientist--or the gambler--in us has to admit that there is something in what McDermott says. Falling in love can seem fairly random, involving routines that could be applied to anyone: stares, smiles, witty remarks, revealing remarks, endearing remarks, hands touch, lips touch. We know the drill. Bow to your partner, curtsy to your corner. Suddenly your corner becomes your partner. Are the stars out tonight? I only have eyes for you. Or is it you?

It could be that we invent the fated-lovers theme as a protection against the discovery that we could hitch up with one of a hundred or a thousand others in a lifetime of circumstantial mingling and not know the difference. Worse, that we might not care. Men (pathetic romantics that we are) tend to dream up no fewer than half a dozen one-and-onlies in a day:

I stand at the deli counter, ordering a roast beef on rye with lettuce from a knockout waitress who looks as if she comes from India. She slices the roast beef and reaches for the lettuce. My arm brushes against her wrist. We fix each other in a longing gaze. The lights in the deli go out, and then, in the sweaty summer evening, with the red neon pastrami sign flashing in the window, we roll around on the checkered linoleum among the containers of cole slaw and potato salad with chives. In the morning we run off together to set up a new deli in New Delhi. That's the way men "think." What we say is, "No mayo, please."

Still, even with men, there is the conviction that "we were meant for each other." For women it's the same old songs. "Two for tea, and you for me, alone." If we did not believe that, people would be like any other animals, spreading our feathers like the cock of the rock and waiting for the nearest, who becomes the dearest. Would any bird really do? If Romeo had turned his head at the moment Juliet passed by, would another girl have turned his head just as easily? It is the east, and Hildegarde is the sun.