She's the One

A chance encounter on a hot New York night changed ARIEL LEVY’s life forever.

We met in the middle of a blackout. It was searing hot and there wasn’t any running water and New York City had lost its mind. People were sweaty and edgy, thronging the streets, leaking heat and anxiety. Traffic lights dangled dead over the intersections; taxis lurched through the dark. The ATMs didn’t work and bodegas were charging insane amounts for bottled water and I was thirsty, hungover, and almost out of cash. I felt defenseless every time I walked up the ten flights to my apartment carrying a lit candle in the ghostly stairwell.

I was nearing panic when a friend called and told me he had the water back on in his building down by City Hall, and a grill out on the balcony. As I walked there, on the cobblestone streets just north of Washington Square Park, past an intersection where a woman in a sundress was directing traffic, down into the lighting district— window after window teeming with powerless, shimmering chandeliers, the people in the apartments above drinking beer on the fire escapes—the city seemed less like a nightmare and more like a carnival.

My friend had said he had a house guest in town, visiting from California: Lucy. She was golden-skinned and green eyed in her white shirt, and she smiled with all the openness in the world when I walked in the door. She had the radiant decency of a sunflower.

It felt as if I had conjured her out of the dark. Not just the bewitched darkness of the blackout, but all the nights that had come before then, when I went to bars and parties, searching for someone who wasn’t there.