A Secret Between Strangers

We met once a lifetime ago. His story will stay with me forever

Some thirty years ago I flew home from Vancouver beside a man with a secret on his mind. He needed a witness more than he knew; I'm always in the mood to hear a true story that changed the course of a life. I forgot long ago what took me to Vancouver but I think often of the seatmate who unburdened himself to me. We didn't bother to introduce ourselves. I was You to his I, and vice versa. The engine throbbed, the wine flowed into our plastic goblets. The business class cabin became our private temple of story.

Hollywood handsome, he wore the uniform of ease (expensive leather jacket, western boots). Yet it fitted him like a shell. I figured he was gay until he mentioned his first love--his grade 12 English teacher. Her pregnancy ended their "affair," as he called it. Before she left town with their baby, she made him promise not to look for either of them, ever.

The teacher was young, but old enough to know that an adult in her position should not be abusing the trust, the sexuality and the emotional health of a boy whose schoolwork she is marking. You cannot teach Shakespeare, as she must have done, without close attention to human error and its consequences. She wanted to escape the mess she'd made. So she didn't simply leave the student, she erased him. What would she tell their son about his father? She'd already settled on the answer: "He's dead."

My future seatmate was 18, riven with longing as only an adolescent can be. He thought he had a future with this woman. Something in him died that day. He didn't have to say so. I recognized the signs.

Pushing 40, he'd never known love in a relationship of equals. Home was a series of bachelor flats where he camped out while traveling the country for his job. He became the male counterpart of the abused teenage heroine of the bestselling novel My Dark Vanessa, who retreats from an "affair" with a charismatic teacher into chronic loneliness and anomie. Author Kate Elizabeth Russell leaves it unclear if Vanessa can love another human. But damaged as she is, Vanessa does manage a victory of sorts: She gives her heart to a dog.

With my seatmate, hope took a more dramatic form. Eighteen years after the teacher broke his heart, their son found a yellowed photo tucked inside a book--his mother with her arm around a smiling youth who could have been his double. He confronted his mother: "That's my father, isn't it? We've got to find him." She could have clung to the face-saving lie, but she yielded to her son's longing.

The two of them lived in Vancouver. My seatmate was returning from his first visit with the boy who'd been told, "Your father's dead." In his son, he recognized his young self. "We've got the same walk, the same temper," he said. "I think we're going to be close. You're one of the few people I've told about him." His face shone with amazement, as if he couldn't believe his good fortune--or that I, a stranger, cared enough to listen to his story.

He came to mind again yesterday, when I needed him most. I had a headful of catastrophe—women and children held hostage in Israel, Jewish families around the world either bracing for the worst kind of news or already mourning their dead. I thought of the million trapped Gazans and the desperate Ukrainians still fighting to preserve their country as the media, although you wouldn’t know it from the headlines. My brain had become a grief hospital, its halls so full of gurneys that the staff can't handle one more ambulance. As I leashed up Casey for his walk, I began to sob. The jingle of tags failed to work its usual magic;. I looked for beauty, noticed leaves and flowers turning brown. Then I thought of the artists still painting, the writers still writing, the lovers still finding each other. The people like my long-ago seatmate, discovering the tender green shoots of a second chance. What happened next I'll never know, but it doesn't matter. I got to share the sweet astonishment.

Painting: "Separation" by Edvard Munch, The Munch Museum, Oslo