Heart of the City (41 page)

“Tina was vacationing in New York City, and Chris was visiting the U.S. from his native Germany when they met at the Statue of Liberty,” Holtzclaw had written. “It is only natural then, that they share an affinity for ‘Sleepless in Seattle,’ a movie in which the ultimate long-distance romance is finally brought face-to-face at another New York landmark, the Empire State Building.”

I called Holtzclaw, who had played tennis with the couple in what he called his “prechildren days,” and he graciously tracked them down. “I think you’ll like them,” he wrote in an e-mail.

When I first called Tina, she was ebullient. Some two decades later, it was clear that she still relished the story of how she and “Schwartzie” had met. In our first, brief phone conversation, I picked up on a strong sentimental streak. “I’m a person who believes in things happening for a reason,” she said. “If you put something out to the universe, the universe adapts to meet your needs. Not that our lives have been that easy. We’ve had many obstacles. But the universe always seems to provide.”

A month later, driving down to Newport News to meet the couple on a steamy July weekend, I wrestled with some of same questions Tina’s friends had: What about the big age difference? What was Chris really after? Hadn’t Tina rushed into things?

When I called on the way to offer to treat them to dinner at any restaurant in town, Tina picked Smokey Bones, a chain restaurant at the edge of a strip mall. Its motto was “Good food, good drinks and good times.” Tina had brought coupons for half-off burgers, and when the waitress came by for drink orders, she and Chris suggested a “Bucket of Beer” for the table. An ice-filled pail of Coors and Miller Lite bottles arrived a few minutes later. Within about a half hour of meeting, my skepticism had given way. This was a couple who lived in the moment, who didn’t take themselves particularly seriously, who took time to celebrate the small blessings that make life bearable. Chris is less effusive than his wife, but an abashed smile—like that of a teenager caught with a racy magazine—crossed his face when I asked what first drew him to Tina. “She was an ‘American woman’”—you could hear the quotation marks as he spoke—“and I thought she was hot.” Then he shrugged goodnaturedly, as if embarrassed that the story was no more complicated than that.

Tina, for her part, is the sort of woman who sees small miracles everywhere. She was quick with affection—she hugged me as soon we met. And she was free with tears; at various points in our interview, we stopped to give her time to collect herself. Though in wedding photos the age gap seems pronounced, two decades later it would draw no special notice. They are both of a certain age, well tanned, with a few wrinkles. Chris’s swoop of blond hair is gone—he wears his head bald. Tina, still slim, favors tank tops and spaghetti straps that lop a decade off her age.

Despite its story-book beginning, their life together has seen its share of struggles. Chris works long hours as a brick mason, spending days on the road building and remodeling homes
across Virginia. Tina retired in 2002 after thirty-two years as an elementary school teacher. To help make ends meet, she still works part-time, delivering pizzas for a local Papa John’s. In 1997, at age seventeen, her son Todd had his own son. Tina and Chris are helping to raise the boy in their own home.

More than two decades after they met, the Statue of Liberty remains a personal totem. They returned three years after their wedding to re-enact the day they met. And when the Statue of Liberty’s crown reopened on July 4, 2009, for the first time since 9/11, she and Schwartzie celebrated at home with a champagne brunch. If visitors ask nicely, Tina is happy display her Statue of Liberty beer stein and muffin tin.

In ways big and small, they see the statue—and New York—as their matchmaker.

“I’d never been to a big city,” Chris reflected when I visited the couple at their lived-in-looking home near a river in Newport News. “When you get there the first time, it’s hard to describe. You feel so small when you walk through the skyscrapers and see all these people. You are open to anything. Everything is new.”

They visit Liz and Ron on Long Island nearly every Thanksgiving and make a point of taking the upper deck of the Verrazano Bridge so they can catch a glimpse of the statue. “It takes our eyes off the road,” Tina jokes, “which you don’t want to do for too long on that bridge.”

“We say, ‘Oh, look,’” Chris says, “and sometimes talk about, ‘What are the odds of people meeting there and being together all these years?’”

“We look out at her,” says Tina, “and say, ‘There’s our Lady.’”

In late January 2003, four months after her return from the Philippines, Chesa Sy married Milton Jennings (pseudonyms) at Brooklyn Borough Hall. Chesa wore a long-sleeved red dress; Milton,
a navy suit with a red tie. The only guests were Milton’s parents and brother, the apartment building superintendent, and a couple of Milton’s friends. Chesa’s family could not afford the trip. Back at his apartment afterward, Milton handed Chesa a ring—a new one, given at the proper time.

Milton remains a classical music reviewer and editor. Chesa took college classes in accounting, worked for five years as a cashier at a bookstore, and is making plans to open her own business. In September 2009, at the federal courthouse in Brooklyn, she became a U.S. citizen. The couple now live together in an only slightly bigger apartment, in Jackson Heights, Queens.

The day before her citizenship interview in 2009, Chesa and Milton revisited the places where their lives together began: the streets of Chinatown, the rundown hotel where she spent her first night, the restaurant in the Bowery where they met after she called and said he was the only person she knew in America. It was a last homage to the improbable places that drew them closer. They saw no need to re-ride the A train. Its riddles, they felt, were far easier to fathom: on a train car, particularly an empty one, people have little choice but to notice one another. The couple joked that they were grateful for the train’s noisy wheels. If the train were quieter, they might not have needed to sit so close to hear each other.

All the same, Chesa credits their union to the mysteries of the zodiac. “Fate,” she said, when I met the couple at a coffee shop near their apartment in March 2009.

Milton is more earthbound. “I think about it a lot.” He touched the side of his coffee cup and flashed Chesa a smile. “You look at it in hindsight, and it all seems remarkable. But at the time, it was just one disjointed thing after another.”

Finding couples who married atop the Empire State Building is easy: the building’s marketing team and
brides.com
host an
annual essay contest for couples who wish to wed hundreds of feet above the street. (The couples are married in back-to-back half-hour ceremonies that begin at 7 a.m. on Valentine’s Day.) But how to find couples who actually met there? I started plugging different combinations of search terms—“met,” “married,” “wedding,” “Empire State Building”—into Google. Deep in the search results was a link to a November 2008 speech that one Tom Nisonger gave to Indiana University’s chapter of Beta Phi Mu, an honor society for librarians. While warming up the audience with a few information science jokes, he mentioned that he and his wife, Claire, had “met at the Empire State Building, but I was an hour late because I left my wallet in a library. She says it was a portent of things to come.”

Bingo. I found Nisonger’s e-mail address on the university website, and he wrote back a few days later. “I will share with you the more detailed description that I used to tell my students in class, as well as some additional information,” he wrote. “As you will notice, there are amusing as well as romantic aspects to the story.”

There was a nebbishy earnestness that immediately charmed me. I soon made plans to visit their home, near the campus of Indiana University, where Tom worked for two decades as a professor of library sciences and where Claire still teaches molecular biology.

When we met in the summer of 2009, Tom, sixty-six, looked every bit the professor emeritus. Crystal blue eyes gazed through thick glasses, and a wiry white beard looked trimmed perhaps less assiduously than it had been during his working days. Claire, at seventy, is still slim, tall, and quick-witted. They live at the edge of Bloomington, in a leafy subdivision down the street from the city’s visitor’s center. Their home is decorated with bric-a-brac from their world travels—tapestries, masks, figurines—and surrounded by dogwood and ash trees. Two cats, Tesla (after the scientist) and Tressel (after the Ohio State football coach), roam the house.

Within minutes of arriving, Tom handed me a timeline of their courtship that he’d prepared in anticipation of my visit. It
included precise dates, names of shows and restaurants, and selected quotes from their love letters. He had also printed out the weather page from the September 27, 1969,
New York Times
, so I could accurately describe conditions on the day they met. Before heading to my hotel after dinner, Tom gave me yet more homework: a stack of letters from their courtship, a 1969 calendar in which Claire had recorded their first dates, and the scrap of paper (Tom had kept it) on which Claire first wrote her phone number and address the weekend they met.

“Can you tell he’s a librarian?” Claire asked.

The story of their meeting, he told me, was part of his campus persona. Each semester, on the first day of class, he told it to students as an icebreaker. The library angle was a plus. “When I went back to the circulation desk at the Barnard Library, my wallet was still there and the money was still in it,” he’d say, setting up the punch line. “This tells you something about the integrity of librarians. In many places in New York City it would have been, Bye-bye wallet.”

Claire’s take on the lost-wallet story has less to do with librarians than with her husband’s generally unhurried pace. “It was a portent of things to come,” she says, “because I’ve been waiting on him ever since.”

Tom and Claire were married on July 5, 1970, at the Wesley United Methodist Church in Claire’s hometown of Trenton, Missouri. A wedding notice in the newspaper noted that “the bride wore a gown she made herself of white silk organza over satin peau de soie.” (Chuck, who served as an usher, married an accountant and taught at community colleges around Washington, D.C. He lost his wife to ovarian cancer in 1983 and died of diabetes in 2001, at the age of fifty-eight. Myrna, for her part, married her boss, the bank executive.)

Soon after their engagement, Claire quit her position at Tougaloo and got a job at a Columbia research lab while Tom finished his dissertation. With the academic job market for political
scientists tight, Tom moved with Claire to Pittsburgh to pursue a master’s in library science. He got his first job at the University of Manitoba in Canada, where they adopted two young children.

He worked for eight years as the head of library acquisitions at the University of Texas, Dallas, before landing a tenure-track job, in 1988, at Indiana University. He wrote three books and scores of articles and won several teaching awards before retiring in 2008 as director of the campus’s Master of Library Science program. He now spends his days traveling with Claire, studying genealogy, and working on a sprawling family tree. In addition to teaching, Claire mentors underprivileged students and helps administer a summer program that brings minority high school students to campus to study science.

The couple still thrill to the idea that their relationship—with all its small private moments—took root in one of the world’s most illustrious buildings. Their pride in the Empire State Building is palpable, as if its fate were entwined with their own.

“We have always considered the Empire State Building ‘our building,’” Tom wrote to me an e-mail, “and humorously thought that while some couples have a ‘song’ we have a ‘building.’”

They returned to the observation deck on July 4, 1970, the day before their first anniversary, to watch fireworks crackle over New York. On later anniversaries, they rented movies that exalted the building:
King Kong
,
An Affair to Remember
,
Sleepless in Seattle
. An anniversary in the mid-1990s was a little less romantic. They had heard that the Empire State Quarry, the source of the building’s exquisite limestone façade, was just a half hour from their home in North Bloomington. The quarry was private and did not give tours, nor was its precise location noted on maps. With the help of reference librarians at Indiana University, however, Tom and Claire were able to determine its rough coordinates.

If the Empire State Building was the birthplace of their relationship, Tom thought, wouldn’t it be nice to visit the building’s
birthplace? Not so much, they discovered. They scrabbled up a small hillside in the woods and soon found themselves looking out across a ragged landscape of exposed rock. Then they heard gunshots. “Some rednecks nearby were doing target practice with rifles,” Claire recalled. They turned back to their car a few minutes later.

“The people shooting guns took away something,” Tom said, dryly. “Still, I thought we had a sense of accomplishment just having seen it.”

“It’s a big deserted hole in the ground,” Claire said, demurring.

“Let’s put it this way,” Tom added, “the quarry is not nearly as romantic as the building.”

After leaving New York, Robin and Marcel Sim bought a half acre of land in Moorhead, Minnesota, a ten-minute walk from her parents. Robin drafted blueprints for her first freestanding residential structure: their own house. It was a custom two-story craftsman-style home with a large front porch and flower boxes in the windows. The couple tiled the floors, painted the interiors, and finished the basement with their own hands.

Robin got a job with an architecture firm in Fargo, where she helped build and remodel courthouses, hotels, and offices. By 2009, she had made enough of an impression to be named “Intern Architect of the Year” by North Dakota’s chapter of the American Institute of Architects. In January 2010, after completing the last of nine exams, she became a fully licensed registered architect.