Rendezvous
Rindu was the ache of the absent. This is the other door: the appointment with presence, and the machinery for keeping it.
The word gives itself away if you listen to it in French. Rendez-vous. It is not, originally, a thing. It is a command, second person plural, the grammar of an order shouted across a courtyard: present yourselves. Report. Be there. The French had it as a military term first, four hundred years ago, the appointed place where scattered troops were to reassemble, and then love did what love always does with the vocabulary of war, which is to steal it and keep the discipline.
English borrowed the word and sanded the verb off it. In English a rendezvous is a noun, a thing that happens to you, romantic weather. In French you can still hear the imperative underneath, and the imperative is the point. A meeting can happen by accident. Two people in the same lift. A rendezvous cannot. It requires two people to make the same promise separately, in different rooms, on different sides of a city or an ocean, and then to keep it, alone, each one unable to verify the other, until the agreed minute in the agreed place.
The last essay in this journal was about rindu, the ache of what is absent. Rindu is what you feel about a presence that has become memory. A rendezvous is the machinery for turning it back.
A meeting can happen by accident. A rendezvous is a promise with coordinates.
Every language keeps its own appointment book
As with longing, so with meeting: each culture built its own room for the idea, and the furniture is different in every one. Tap them.
Notice the pattern again. Where the words for longing were all ache, the words for meeting are all debt, vow, covenant, collision. Every language that looked closely at two people agreeing to be in the same place at the same time concluded that something binding had occurred, and reached for the vocabulary of obligation. The feeling is universal. So, apparently, is the invoice.
The mathematics of meeting
In 1960 an economist named Thomas Schelling asked his students a strange question. You must meet a stranger in New York City. You have not agreed on a place or a time, and you cannot communicate. Where do you go, and when? The question should be impossible. It is not. A clear majority gave the same answer: the information booth at Grand Central Terminal, at noon. Nobody chose it because it is optimal. They chose it because they guessed the other person would guess it, and the other person did.
Schelling called these focal points, and once you have the idea you see that every love affair runs on them. The usual table. The third bench. Depan Sarinah. A culture is, among other things, a vast shared appointment book of places that mean meet me here without anyone having to say it. And when someone says the usual place and you know exactly where that is, the two of you own a private focal point, a set of coordinates that exists in precisely two heads in the entire universe. That is not logistics. That is intimacy with a map reference.
Mathematicians later made the problem crueller and called it, in the literature, the rendezvous problem: two people lost in the same park, each searching for the other. Should you move, or stay still? Because if both of you search, you can orbit each other forever, always arriving where the other has just left. The formal solutions are ingenious and the informal one is the same in every language: someone has to stop. Someone has to become the landmark and trust the other to do the finding. Every long friendship settles this without discussing it. One of you is the fountain. One of you is the search party.
And then, in December 1965, the word was taken off the boulevard and fired into orbit. When the engineers of the American space programme needed a term for two spacecraft meeting above the Earth, they kept the French word: rendezvous. Gemini 6 and Gemini 7, two small capsules, closed on each other at twenty-eight thousand kilometres per hour and came to rest a foot apart, flying in formation over the night side of the planet. The physics of it is the best metaphor this house has ever been handed for free. In orbit you cannot chase what you love. Speed up toward it and you rise into a higher, slower orbit and fall behind. To catch something ahead of you, you must drop lower and be patient. You do not pursue.
You do not chase what you love. You change your own altitude, and let the mathematics bring you together.
Cinema is a machine for keeping and missing appointments
Film loves a rendezvous the way music loves a held breath, and for the same reason: it is suspense with a human face. Someone promised. The clock is running. The camera waits with you.
The most literal film ever made about this word. A camera bolted to the front of a car, Paris at dawn, no permits, no cuts, red lights run at full speed past the Opéra and up through the grey streets to the top of Montmartre, where a woman is standing on the steps, waiting. The entire film is the gap between a promise and its keeping, with an engine attached. Everything is risked, the licence, the car, arguably the driver, for one thing only: to arrive on time. It is reckless and indefensible and it understands the word better than any essay, including this one.
Two strangers spend one night walking around Vienna and make the purest rendezvous in modern cinema: same platform, six months from now, no numbers exchanged, no addresses, nothing but the promise. The first film ends without telling you what happens. The second, nine years later, is the reckoning: he came. She could not, and the reason is the kind the universe specialises in, a funeral, a grandmother, a date that could not be moved.
The missed rendezvous curdles into nine years of rindu, and then a bookshop in Paris accidentally reschedules it. Watch the two films together and you have both essays of this journal in four hours: the appointment, the miss, the ache, and the second appointment that the first one paid for.
The most famous rendezvous in Hollywood, and the cruellest lesson about them. Six months, the top of the tallest building in New York. He waits until midnight. She was crossing the street to keep the promise, looking up at the building instead of at the traffic. The cruelty is structural: a rendezvous cannot explain its own failure. The one who waits is given no information at all, only the time, passing. Every person who has ever stood at a meeting point past the agreed hour, telling themselves five more minutes, is standing on top of that building.
She did not come to the station. The rain ruined the note. And yet the film ends with the most generous accounting of a broken appointment ever written, one line about a city they can keep. Paris becomes an appointment they honour retroactively, forever, every time either of them remembers it. Some meeting places are not ahead of you. Some are behind you, permanently open, and you visit them without moving.
A film made almost entirely of still photographs, about a man haunted by one image from childhood: a face at the end of the observation pier at Orly airport. Sent through time, he keeps returning to her, appointment after appointment across the wreckage of the future, until the final rendezvous, the one on the pier, where he understands what the image was. The warning inside it is the same one Solaris carried in the last essay: some appointments were always with the past, and the past keeps them perfectly, every time, because it does not have to travel.
He rents a hotel room so they can write together, and the room number becomes a standing rendezvous, a door that is always the same door. The film is built out of rehearsals, two people practising conversations they must never actually have, meeting in order to prepare for meetings. It is what happens when a rendezvous is fully arranged, fully kept, and deliberately never allowed to arrive: the appointment becomes the relationship, and the room outlives them both by one film.
This one is not a metaphor, which is why it is unbearable. In Tokyo, a dog named Hachikō met his professor at Shibuya station at the same hour every evening, and when the professor died at work one afternoon, the dog continued to meet the train. For nine years. The station eventually raised a statue on the spot, and the statue is now the most famous meeting point in Japan, which means this: an appointment outlived one of its parties, and then became the place where millions of strangers make theirs. That is the full life cycle of a rendezvous, from a promise between two, to a debt kept by one, to a landmark belonging to everyone.
Why perfume is the art of the appointment
Here is a fact hiding in plain sight: perfume is the only art you finish before the moment begins. The painting is made in the studio and seen later, yes, but the painter was not painting for one specific hour. A perfume, on the evening it matters, is applied at a quarter to six for something that happens at seven. It is composed, deliberately, in advance, for an encounter that does not exist yet. Every other act of grooming maintains you. This one addresses someone. A fragrance worn for a particular person is a letter posted before you leave the house, a sentence written for a conversation that has not happened.
The last essay said that smell is the sense wired straight into memory, arriving before the part of the brain that names things has had a chance to look up. That wiring runs in both directions. Smell is also how a kept rendezvous confirms itself. Watch what actually happens at an arrivals gate, at a station, at the door of a restaurant: the eyes find the person, the arms do their work, and then, inside the embrace, before a word, the nose reports. It is them. The scent of a person is the last credential checked and the only one that cannot be forged, and every reunion in your life has ended with this invisible verification, three centimetres from a collarbone.
And sillage, the French word this industry uses for the scent trail a person leaves behind, has a twin nobody named: the scent that arrives ahead. In a crowded room, the perfume of someone you know walks in seconds before they do, crosses the room first, and holds the door. Rindu, the last essay said, is being visited by a scent from the past. A rendezvous is the opposite motion: the scent as advance party, the future announcing itself, the meeting beginning before either of you has spoken.
A local catalogue of waiting and arriving
Because a rendezvous is not abstract either. In this city it has a specific set of smells, and they divide neatly into the smells of the interval and the smells of the arrival.
What a perfume can and cannot do
The honesty first, as before, because a house that sells beautiful bottles has an interest in overstating them. A perfume cannot make the other person arrive. It cannot hold a train, undo the traffic, mend a nerve, or make anyone braver than they are. The bottle has no influence whatsoever over the other half of the appointment, and anyone who sells it as a love spell is selling superstition in an atomiser.
Here is what it can do. It can make you arrive. Fully, deliberately, on purpose. It is the one part of the encounter that cannot be taken from you by circumstance: whatever the evening does, you came to it composed, wearing a decision. And it does one thing more, quietly, in the background, which is the whole business of this house. If the rendezvous is kept, the scent is soldered to the evening forever, and becomes the door that will reopen it on some far-off Tuesday. If it is not kept, the scent keeps the appointment anyway. It waits in the bottle with the whole intact evening inside it, the one that never happened, and years later one spray will hand it back to you, unspent.
Which is where the last essay began. Rindu and rendezvous are the same door, pushed from opposite sides. One is the scent that returns you to a room. The other is the scent you wear toward a room that does not exist yet. Every perfume in this catalogue is both, and simply waits to find out which one you needed.
Rindu and rendezvous are the same door, pushed from opposite sides.
Keep the appointment
There is a modern wisdom, very fluent and very confident, that treats commitment as a design flaw. Keep it loose. Stay flexible. Confirm on the day. It has its reasons, and it has quietly abolished something: the specific gravity of a promise with coordinates. A calendar invitation can be declined with one tap and no debt is felt anywhere. Janji adalah hutang has been refactored into janji adalah opsi.
So this essay ends with a recommendation as unfashionable as the last one. Make the appointment. Make it specific, a place and a minute, and then keep it with slightly more ceremony than the occasion requires. Be the fountain or be the search party, but decide which. Arrive early enough to smell the lobby. Wear something composed for the person you are meeting, because a scent chosen for someone is a sentence they will receive before you speak, and because whatever happens next, you will want this evening to have a door.
That, for what it is worth, is the other half of the name of this house. Harum oleh memori. Fragrance, through memory. But memory has to be manufactured somewhere, and it is manufactured here, at the appointed place, at the agreed minute, when the door opens and the scent crosses the room first.
“You do not chase what you love. You change your own altitude, and let the mathematics bring you together.”
- C’était un rendez-vous (1976), Claude Lelouch.
- Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004), Richard Linklater.
- An Affair to Remember (1957), Leo McCarey.
- Casablanca (1942), Michael Curtiz.
- La Jetée (1962), Chris Marker.
- In the Mood for Love (2000), Wong Kar-wai.
- Hachi: A Dog’s Tale (2009), Lasse Hallström, after the life of Hachikō, Shibuya, 1925 to 1935.
- On focal points: Thomas Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (1960). On the rendezvous problem: the work of Steve Alpern. On orbital rendezvous: Gemini 6A and Gemini 7, December 1965.
- On the words: janji, yakusoku, cita, Verabredung, encontro, mawʿid.
- The companion essay: Rindu, in this journal.