Love At First Sight

Famished and still waiting for his meal amid the fast-crowding tables, Jack’s eyes were drawn to a dark figure in the distance, from afar and at first just another silhouette strutting down the opposite side of the street, its details revealed by degrees. Light-footed and graceful with as much bounce to the bodice as her tresses, he could make out faint smiles, one for every person she passed, each answered with a bow or tip of the hat by the lucky object of her gaze. Enthralled, he leaned streetward and squinted for more: a bobbing, coal-black mane draped over soft shoulders, tiny waist, delicate legs tapering to petite ankles on low heels, and then, as her features came clear, a buttercream complexion, eyes to match the hair, and a face he’d seen only in dreams. 

Jack tossed a two-dollar bill on the table, commanded Saint to stay, and rushed into the street. Looking neither way, he quick-stepped through the median to intersect his vision, straight-arming a braking Studebaker as he hopped up to the sidewalk. After guzzling a huge breath, he slowed to accept her greeting, eyes flared and pulse rising. 

“Good mornin’, sir,” said the angel. 

At full stop, frog-eyed, with spine and legs rigid, chin flexed, and lips pursed in spasm, Jack’s mouth would not open. She returned his goggle with a crooked grin but didn’t break stride. Struck flush by the lightning this time, he staggered, blue-faced, to a nearby park bench and plopped down, at last remembering to exhale. Turning toward her wake, he watched her shrinking figure sashay down the bend and disappear into an alcove beneath a dangling sign. Barbineau’s City Fashions, it read. (p. 66)

The Behavioral Science and Psychiatric literature all but deny the existence of love at first sight. They hypothesize the origin of romantic love as the complex and gradual emergence of hormonal and neurochemical interactions, an additive algorithm which matures with time. Adrenaline, dopamine, serotonin, testosterone, oxytocin, and vasopressin are Cupid’s arrows in their theoretical quiver, but no credence is assigned to the spontaneous combustion of such chemistry. Mountains of anecdotal testimony to the contrary is dismissed out of hand by the academics, declared the spawn of romance novels and thus unworthy of scientific consideration.

Our nineteen-year-old protagonist, Jack Shea, would surely not agree, nor would his first-sight love, Belle Barbineau. Empirical experience has taught them otherwise, but the genesis of such emotion concerns Jack not at all. When he’s scolded that what he’s feeling is lust, not instant love, he doesn’t object.

“I can’t tell the difference,” Jack replies, “or why it matters.”  (P. 174)