‘Isaac’s off to Chicago in the morning,’ said Judy. ‘Tell them what you’ll be doing there.’
‘Just a conference,’ said Isaac. He and I did not need to do a great deal of talking to ensure the conversation continued.
He did ask me one thing before we moved to the dining room. ‘What do you do, Austin?’
‘Austin runs a hardware store,’ said Rosie. ‘A very successful one.’
Judy served a delicious meal based on farmed salmon, which she assured Rosie was sustainable. I had eaten very little of the poor-quality aeroplane food, and enjoyed Judy’s meal immensely. Isaac opened some Pinot Gris from Oregon and was generous in refilling my glass. We talked about New York and the differences between Australian and American politics.
‘Well,’ said Judy, ‘I’m so glad you could come. It makes up a little for missing the reunion. Isaac was so sorry not to be there.’
‘Not really,’ said Isaac. ‘Revisiting the past is not something to do lightly.’ He ate the last piece of fish from his plate and looked at Rosie. ‘You look a lot like your mother. She would have been a bit younger than you when I last saw her.’
Judy said, ‘We got married the day after the graduation and moved here. Isaac had the biggest hangover at the wedding. He’d been a bad boy.’ She smiled.
‘I think that’s enough telling tales, Judy,’ said Isaac. ‘It was all a long time ago.’
He stared at Rosie. Rosie stared at him.
Judy picked up Rosie’s plate and mine, one in each hand. I decided that this was the moment to act, with everyone distracted. I stood and picked up Isaac’s plate in one hand and then Judy’s. Isaac was too busy playing the staring game with Rosie to object. I took the plates to the kitchen, swabbing Isaac’s fork on the way.
‘I imagine Austin and Rosie are exhausted,’ said Judy when we returned to the table.
‘You said you’re a hardware man, Austin?’ Isaac stood up. ‘Can you spare five minutes to look at a tap for me? It’s probably a job for a plumber, but maybe it’s just a washer.’
‘He means faucet,’ said Judy, presumably forgetting we came from the same country as Isaac.
Isaac and I went down the stairs to the basement. I was confident I could help with the tap problem. My school holidays had been spent providing advice of exactly this kind. But as we reached the bottom of the stairs, the lights went out. I wasn’t sure what had happened. A power failure?
‘You okay, Don?’ said Isaac, sounding concerned.
‘I’m okay,’ I said. ‘What happened?’
‘What happened is that you answered to Don, Austin.’
We stood there in the dark. I doubted that there were social conventions for dealing with interrogation by a psychiatrist in a dark cellar.
‘How did you know?’ I asked.
‘Two unsolicited communications from the same university in a month. An internet search. You make good dancing partners.’
More silence and darkness.
‘I know the answer to your question. But I made a promise that I would not reveal it. If I thought it was a matter of life or death, or a serious mental health issue, I would reconsider. But I see no reason to break the promise, which was made because the people involved had thought hard about what would be right. You came a long way for my DNA, and I’m guessing you got it when you cleared the plates. You might want to think beyond your girlfriend’s wishes before you proceed.’
He turned on the light.
Something bothered me as we walked up the stairs. At the top, I stopped. ‘If you knew what I wanted, why did you let us come to your house?’
‘Good question,’ he said. ‘Since you asked the question, I’m sure you can work out the answer. I wanted to see Rosie.’
24
Thanks to carefully timed use of sleeping pills, I woke without any feeling of disorientation, at 7.06 a.m.
Rosie had fallen asleep in the train on the way to the hotel. I had decided not to tell her immediately about the basement encounter, nor mention what I had observed on the sideboard. It was a large photo of Judy and Isaac’s wedding. Standing beside Isaac, dressed in the formal clothes required of a best man, was Geoffrey Case, who had only three hundred and seventy days to live. He was smiling.
I was still processing the implications myself, and Rosie would probably have an emotional response that could spoil the New York experience. She was impressed that I had collected the DNA, and even more impressed that I had acted so unobtrusively when I picked up the dishes to assist.
‘You’re in danger of learning some social skills.’
The hotel was perfectly comfortable. After we checked in, Rosie said she had been worried that I would expect her to share a room in exchange for paying for her trip to New York. Like a prostitute! I was highly insulted. She seemed pleased with my reaction.
I had an excellent workout at the hotel gym, and returned to find the message light blinking. Rosie.
‘Where were you?’ she said.
‘In the gym. Exercise is critical in reducing the effects of jet lag. Also sunlight. I’ve planned to walk twenty-nine blocks in sunlight.’
‘Aren’t you forgetting something? Today is my day. And tomorrow. I own you until midnight Monday. Now get your butt down here. I’m hanging out for breakfast.’
‘In my gym clothes?’
‘No, Don, not in your gym clothes. Shower, dress. You have ten minutes.’
‘I always have my breakfast before I shower.’
‘How old are you?’ said Rosie, aggressively. She didn’t wait for the answer. ‘You’re like an old man – I always have my breakfast before I shower, don’t sit in my chair, that’s where I sit … Do not fuck with me, Don Tillman.’ She said the last words quite slowly. I decided it was best not to fuck with her. By midnight tomorrow it would be over. In the interim, I would adopt the dentist mindset.
It seemed I was in for a root-canal filling. I arrived downstairs and Rosie was immediately critical.
‘How long have you had that shirt?’
‘Fourteen years,’ I said. ‘It dries very quickly. Perfect for travelling.’ In fact it was a specialised walking shirt, though fabric technology had progressed significantly since it was made.
‘Good,’ said Rosie. ‘It doesn’t owe you anything. Upstairs. Other shirt.’
‘It’s wet.’
‘I mean Claudia’s shirt. And the jeans while you’re at it. I’m not walking around New York with a bum.’
When I came down for the second attempt at breakfast, Rosie smiled. ‘You know, you’re not such a bad-looking guy underneath.’ She stopped and looked at me. ‘Don, you’re not enjoying this, are you? You’d rather be by yourself in the museum, right?’ She was extremely perceptive. ‘I get that. But you’ve done all these things for me, you’ve brought me to New York, and, by the way, I haven’t finished spending your money yet. So I want to do something for you.’
I could have argued that her wanting to do something for me meant she was ultimately acting in her own interests, but it might provoke more of the ‘don’t fuck with me’ behaviour.
‘You’re in a different place, you’re in different clothes. When the medieval pilgrims used to arrive at Santiago after walking hundreds of kilometres they burned their clothes to symbolise that they’d changed. I’m not asking you to burn your clothes – yet. Put them on again on Tuesday. Just be open to something different. Let me show you my world for a couple of days. Starting with breakfast. We’re in the city with the best breakfasts in the world.’
She must have seen that I was resisting.
‘Hey, you schedule your time so you don’t waste it, right?’
‘Correct.’
‘So, you’ve committed to two days with me. If you shut yourself down, you’re wasting two days of your life that someone is trying to make exciting and productive and fun for you. I’m going to –’ She stopped. ‘I left the guidebook in my room. When I come down, we’re going to breakfast.’ She turned and w
alked to the elevators.
I was disturbed by Rosie’s logic. I had always justified my schedule in terms of efficiency. But was my allegiance to efficiency or was it to the schedule itself? Was I really like my father, who had insisted on sitting in the same chair every night? I had never mentioned this to Rosie. I had my own special chair too.
There was another argument that she had not presented, because she could not have known it. In the last eight weeks I had experienced two of the three best times of my adult life, assuming all visits to the Museum of Natural History were treated as one event. They had both been with Rosie. Was there a correlation? It was critical to find out.
By the time Rosie came back I had performed a brain reboot, an exercise requiring a considerable effort of will. But I was now configured for adaptability.
‘So?’ she said.
‘So, how do we find the world’s best breakfast?’
We found the World’s Best Breakfast round the corner. It may have been the unhealthiest breakfast I had ever eaten, but I would not put on significant weight, nor lose fitness, brain acuity or martial-arts skills if I neglected them for two days. This was the mode in which my brain was now operating.
‘I can’t believe you ate all that,’ said Rosie.
‘It tasted so good.’
‘No lunch. Late dinner,’ she said.
‘We can eat any time.’
Our server approached the table. Rosie indicated the empty coffee cups. ‘They were great. I think we could both manage another.’
‘Huh?’ said the server. It was obvious that she hadn’t understood Rosie. It was also obvious that Rosie had very poor taste in coffee – or she had done as I had and ignored the label ‘coffee’ and was enjoying it as an entirely new beverage. The technique was working brilliantly.
‘One regular coffee with cream and one regular coffee without cream … please,’ I said.
‘Sure.’
This was a town where people talked straight. My kind of town. I was enjoying speaking American: cream instead of milk, elevator instead of lift, check instead of bill. I had memorised a list of differences between American and Australian usage prior to my first trip to the US, and had been surprised at how quickly my brain was able to switch into using them automatically.
We walked uptown. Rosie was looking at a guidebook called Not for Tourists, which seemed a very poor choice.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked.
‘We’re not going anywhere. We’re there.’
We were outside a clothing store. Rosie asked if it was okay to go inside.
‘You don’t have to ask,’ I said. ‘You’re in control.’
‘I do about shops. It’s a girl thing. I was going to say, “I suppose you’ve been on Fifth Avenue before”, but I don’t suppose anything with you.’
The situation was symmetrical. I knew not to suppose anything about Rosie, or I would have been surprised by her describing herself as a ‘girl’, a term that I understood to be unacceptable to feminists when referring to adult women.
Rosie was becoming remarkably perceptive about me. I had never been beyond the conference centres and the museum, but with my new mind configuration, I was finding everything fascinating. A whole shop for cigars. The prices of jewellery. The Flatiron Building. The sex museum. Rosie looked at the last of these, and chose not to go in. This was probably a good decision – it might be fascinating, but the risk of a faux pas would be very high.
‘Do you want to buy anything?’ said Rosie.
‘No.’
A few minutes later, a thought occurred to me. ‘Is there somewhere that sells men’s shirts?’
Rosie laughed. ‘On Fifth Avenue, New York City. Maybe we’ll get lucky.’ I detected sarcasm, but in a friendly way. We found a new shirt of the same genre as the Claudia shirt at a huge store called Bloomingdale’s, which was not, in fact, on Fifth Avenue. We could not choose between two candidate shirts and bought both. My wardrobe would be overflowing!
We arrived at Central Park.
‘We’re skipping lunch, but I could handle an ice-cream,’ said Rosie. There was a vendor in the park, and he was serving both cones and prefabricated confections.
I was filled with an irrational sense of dread. I identified it immediately. But I had to know. ‘Is the flavour important?’
‘Something with peanuts. We’re in the States.’
‘All ice-creams taste the same.’
‘Bullshit.’
I explained about tastebuds.
‘Wanna bet?’ said Rosie. ‘If I can tell the difference between peanut and vanilla, two tickets to Spiderman. On Broadway. Tonight.’
‘The textures will be different. Because of the peanuts.’
‘Any two. Your choice.’
I ordered an apricot and a mango. ‘Close your eyes,’ I said. It wasn’t really necessary: the colours were almost identical, but I didn’t want her to see me tossing a coin to decide which one to show her. I was concerned that with her psychological skills she might guess my sequence.
I tossed the coin and gave her an ice-cream.
‘Mango,’ guessed Rosie, correctly. Toss, heads again. ‘Mango again.’ She picked the mango correctly three times, then the apricot, then the apricot again. The chances of her achieving this result randomly were one in thirty-two. I could be ninety-seven per cent confident she was able to differentiate. Incredible.
‘So, Spiderman tonight?’
‘No. You got one wrong.’
Rosie looked at me, very carefully, then burst out laughing. ‘You’re bullshitting me, aren’t you? I can’t believe it, you’re making jokes.’
She gave me an ice-cream. ‘Since you don’t care, you can have the apricot.’
I looked at it. What to say? She had been licking it.
Once again she read my mind. ‘How are you going to kiss a girl if you won’t share her ice-cream?’
For several minutes, I was suffused with an irrational feeling of enormous pleasure, basking in the success of my joke, and parsing the sentence about the kiss: Kiss a girl, share her ice-cream – it was third-person, but surely not unrelated to the girl who was sharing her ice-cream right now with Don Tillman in his new shirt and jeans as we walked among the trees in Central Park, New York City, on a sunny Sunday afternoon.
I needed the hundred and fourteen minutes of time-out back at the hotel, although I had enjoyed the day immensely. Shower, email, relaxation exercises combined with stretches. I emailed Gene, copying in Claudia, with a summary of our activities.
Rosie was three minutes late for our 7.00 p.m. foyer meeting. I was about to call her room when she arrived wearing clothes purchased that day – white jeans and a blue t-shirt thing – and the jacket she had worn the previous evening. I remembered a Gene-ism, something I had heard him say to Claudia. ‘You’re looking very elegant,’ I said. It was a risky statement, but her reaction appeared to be positive. She did look very elegant.
We had cocktails at a bar with the World’s Longest Cocktail List, including many I did not know, and we saw Spiderman. Afterwards, Rosie felt the story was a bit predictable but I was overwhelmed by everything, in a hugely positive way. I had not been to the theatre since I was a child. I could have ignored the story and focused entirely on the mechanics of the flying. It was just incredible.
We caught the subway back to the Lower East Side. I was hungry, but did not want to break the rules by suggesting that we eat. But Rosie had this planned too. A 10.00 p.m. booking at a restaurant called Momofuku Ko. We were on Rosie time again.
‘This is my present to you for bringing me here,’ she said.
We sat at a counter for twelve where we could watch the chefs at work. There were few of the annoying formalities that make restaurants so stressful.
‘Any preferences, allergies, dislikes?’ asked the chef.
‘I’m vegetarian, but I eat sustainable seafood,’ said Rosie. ‘He eats everything – and I mean everything.’
I lost
count of the courses. I had sweetbreads and foie gras (first time!) and sea urchin roe. We drank a bottle of rosé Champagne. I talked to the chefs and they told me what they were doing. I ate the best food I had ever eaten. And I did not need to wear a jacket in order to eat. In fact, the man sitting beside me was wearing a costume that would have been extreme at the Marquess of Queensbury, including multiple facial piercings. He heard me speaking to the chef and asked me where I was from. I told him.
‘How are you finding New York?’
I told him I was finding it highly interesting, and explained how we had spent our day. But I was conscious that, under the stress of talking to a stranger, my manner had changed – or, to be more precise, reverted – to my usual style. During the day, with Rosie, I had felt relaxed, and had spoken and acted differently, and this continued in my conversation with the chef, which was essentially a professional exchange of information. But informal social interaction with another person had triggered my regular behaviour. And my regular behaviour and speaking style is, I am well aware, considered odd by others. The man with the piercings must have noticed.
‘You know what I like about New York?’ he said. ‘There are so many weird people that nobody takes any notice. We all just fit right in.’
‘How was it?’ said Rosie as we walked back to the hotel.
‘The best day of my adult life,’ I said. Rosie seemed so happy with my response that I decided not to finish the sentence: ‘excluding the Museum of Natural History.’
‘Sleep in,’ she said. ‘9.30 here and we’ll do the brunch thing again. Okay?’
It would have been totally irrational to argue.
25
‘Did I cause any embarrassment?’
Rosie had been concerned that I might make inappropriate comments during our tour of the World Trade Center site. Our guide, a former firefighter named Frank, who had lost many of his colleagues in the attack, was incredibly interesting and I asked a number of technical questions that he answered intelligently and, it seemed to me, enthusiastically.
The Rosie Project Page 17
