The Rosie Project

by Graeme Simsion

  ‘You may have changed the tone a bit,’ she said. ‘You sort of moved the attention away from the emotional impact.’ So, I had reduced the sadness. Good.

  Monday was allocated to visiting popular tourist sights. We had breakfast at Katz’s Deli, where a scene for a film called When Harry Met Sally was shot. We went to the top of the Empire State Building, famous as a location for An Affair to Remember. We visited MOMA and the Met, which were excellent.

  We were back at the hotel early – 4.32 p.m.

  ‘Back here at 6.30,’ said Rosie.

  ‘What are we having for dinner?’

  ‘Hot dogs. We’re going to the baseball.’

  I never watch sport. Ever. The reasons are obvious – or should be to anyone who values their time. But my reconfigured mind, sustained by huge doses of positive reinforcement, accepted the proposition. I spent the next hundred and eighteen minutes on the internet, learning about the rules and the players.

  On the subway, Rosie had some news for me. Before she left Melbourne, she had sent an email to Mary Keneally, a researcher working in her field at Columbia University. She had just received a reply and Mary could see her tomorrow. But she wouldn’t be able to make it to the Museum of Natural History. She could come Wednesday, but would I be okay by myself tomorrow? Of course I would.

  At Yankee Stadium we got beer and hot dogs. A man in a cap, estimated age thirty-five, estimated BMI forty (i.e. dangerously fat), sat beside me. He had three hot dogs! The source of the obesity was obvious.

  The game started, and I had to explain to Rosie what was happening. It was fascinating to see how the rules worked in a real game. Every time there was an event on the field, Fat Baseball Fan would make an annotation in his book. There were runners on second and third when Curtis Granderson came to the plate and Fat Baseball Fan spoke to me. ‘If he bats in both of these guys he’ll be heading the league on RBI. What are the odds?’

  I didn’t know what the odds were. All I could tell him was that they were somewhere between 9.9 and 27.2 per cent based on the batting average and percentage of home runs listed in the profile I had read. I had not had time to memorise the statistics for doubles and triples. Fat Baseball Fan nevertheless seemed impressed and we began a very interesting conversation. He showed me how to mark the programme with symbols to represent the various events, and how the more sophisticated statistics worked. I had no idea sport could be so intellectually stimulating.

  Rosie got more beer and hot dogs and Fat Baseball Fan started to tell me about Joe DiMaggio’s ‘streak’ in 1941 which he claimed was a uniquely odds-defying achievement. I was doubtful, and the conversation was just getting interesting when the game ended, so he suggested we take the subway to a bar in Midtown. As Rosie was in charge of the schedule, I asked for her opinion, and she agreed.

  The bar was noisy and there was more baseball playing on a large television screen. Some other men, who did not appear to have previously met Fat Baseball Fan, joined our discussion. We drank a lot of beer, and talked about baseball statistics. Rosie sat on a stool with her drink and observed. It was late when Fat Baseball Fan, whose actual name was Dave, said he had to go home. We exchanged email addresses and I considered that I had made a new friend.

  Walking back to the hotel, I realised that I had behaved in stereotypical male fashion, drinking beer in a bar, watching television and talking about sport. It is generally known that women have a negative attitude to such behaviour. I asked Rosie if I had offended her.

  ‘Not at all. I had fun watching you being a guy – fitting in.’

  I told her that this was a highly unusual response from a feminist, but that it would make her a very attractive partner to conventional men.

  ‘If I was interested in conventional men.’

  It seemed a good opportunity to ask a question about Rosie’s personal life.

  ‘Do you have a boyfriend?’ I hoped I had used an appropriate term.

  ‘Sure, I just haven’t unpacked him from my suitcase,’ she said, obviously making a joke. I laughed, then pointed out that she hadn’t actually answered my question.

  ‘Don,’ she said, ‘don’t you think that if I had a boyfriend you might have heard about him by now?’

  It seemed to me entirely possible that I would not have heard about him. I had asked Rosie very few personal questions outside the Father Project. I did not know any of her friends, except perhaps Stefan who I had concluded was not her boyfriend. Of course, it would have been traditional to bring any partner to the faculty ball, and not to offer me sex afterwards, but not everyone was bound by such conventions. Gene was the perfect example. It seemed entirely possible that Rosie had a boyfriend who did not like dancing or socialising with academics, was out of town at the time, or was in an open relationship with her. She had no reason to tell me. In my own life, I had rarely mentioned Daphne or my sister to Gene and Claudia or vice versa. They belonged to different parts of my life. I explained this to Rosie.

  ‘Short answer, no,’ she said. We walked a bit further. ‘Long answer: you asked what I meant about being fucked-up by my father. Psychology 101 – our first relationship with a male is with our fathers. It affects how we relate to men forever. So, lucky me, I get a choice of two. Phil, who’s fucked in the head, or my real father who walked away from me and my mother. And I get this choice when I’m twelve years old and Phil sits me down and has this “I wish your mother could be here to tell you” talk with me. You know, just the standard stuff your dad tells you at twelve – I’m not your dad, your mum who died before you could know her properly isn’t the perfect person you thought she was, and you’re only here because of your mother being easy and I wish you weren’t so I could go off and have a life.’

  ‘He said that to you?’

  ‘Not in those words. But that’s what he meant.’

  I thought it highly unlikely that a twelve-year-old – even a female future psychology student – could correctly deduce an adult male’s unspoken thoughts. Sometimes it is better to be aware of one’s incompetence in these matters, as I am, than to have a false sense of expertise.

  ‘So, I don’t trust men. I don’t believe they’re what they say they are. I’m afraid they’re going to let me down. That’s my summary from seven years of studying psychology.’

  This seemed a very poor result for seven years of effort, but I assumed she was omitting the more general knowledge provided by the course.

  ‘You want to meet tomorrow evening?’ said Rosie. ‘We can do whatever you want to do.’

  I had been thinking about my plans for the next day.

  ‘I know someone at Columbia,’ I said. ‘Maybe we could go there together.’

  ‘What about the museum?’

  ‘I’ve already compressed four visits into two. I can compress two into one.’ There was no logic in this, but I had drunk a lot of beer, and I just felt like going to Columbia. Go with the flow.

  ‘See you at eight – and don’t be late,’ said Rosie. Then she kissed me. It was not a passionate kiss; it was on the cheek, but it was disturbing. Neither positive nor negative, just disturbing.

  I emailed David Borenstein at Columbia then Skyped Claudia and told her about the day, omitting the kiss.

  ‘Sounds like she’s made a big effort,’ said Claudia.

  This was obviously true. Rosie had managed to select activities that I would normally have avoided, but enjoyed immensely. ‘And you’re giving her the guided tour of the Museum of Natural History on Wednesday?’

  ‘No, I’m going to look at the crustaceans and the Antarctic flora and fauna.’

  ‘Try again,’ said Claudia.

  26

  We took the subway to Columbia. David Borenstein had not replied to my email. I did not mention this to Rosie who invited me to her meeting, if it did not clash with mine.

  ‘I’ll say you’re a fellow researcher,’ she said. ‘I’d like you to see what I do when I’m not mixing drinks.’

  Mary Keneally
was an associate professor of psychiatry in the Medical Faculty. I had never asked Rosie the topic of her PhD. It turned out to be Environmental Risks for Early Onset Bipolar Disorder, a serious scientific topic. Rosie’s approach appeared sound and well considered. She and Mary talked for fifty-three minutes, and then we all went for coffee.

  ‘At heart,’ Mary said to Rosie, ‘you’re a psychiatrist rather than a psychologist. You’ve never thought of transferring to Medicine?’

  ‘I came from a medical family,’ said Rosie. ‘I sort of rebelled.’

  ‘Well, when you’ve finished rebelling, we’ve got a great MD programme here.’

  ‘Right,’ said Rosie. ‘Me at Columbia.’

  ‘Why not? In fact, since you’ve come all this way …’ She made a quick phone call, then smiled. ‘Come and meet the Dean.’

  As we walked back to the Medical building, Rosie said to me, ‘I hope you’re suitably impressed.’ We arrived at the Dean’s office and he stepped out to meet us.

  ‘Don,’ he said. ‘I just got your email. I haven’t had a chance to reply.’ He turned to Rosie. ‘I’m David Borenstein. And you’re with Don?’

  We all had lunch at the faculty club. David told Rosie that he had supported my O-1 visa application. ‘I didn’t lie,’ he said. ‘Any time Don feels like joining the main game, there’s a job for him here.’

  Coal-oven pizza is supposedly environmentally unsound, but I treat statements of this kind with great suspicion. They are frequently emotionally based rather than scientific and ignore full life-cycle costs. Electricity good, coal bad. But where does the electricity come from? Our pizza at Arturo’s was excellent. World’s Best Pizza.

  I was interested in one of the statements Rosie had made at Columbia.

  ‘I thought you admired your mother. Why wouldn’t you want to be a doctor?’

  ‘It wasn’t my mother. My father’s a doctor too. Remember? That’s what we’re here for.’ She poured the rest of the red wine into her glass. ‘I thought about it. I did the GAMSAT, like I told Peter Enticott. And I did get seventy-four. Suck on that.’ Despite the aggressive words, her expression remained friendly. ‘I thought that doing Medicine would be a sign of some sort of obsession with my real father. Like I was following him rather than Phil. Even I could see that was a bit fucked-up.’

  Gene frequently states that psychologists are incompetent at understanding themselves. Rosie seemed to have provided good evidence for that proposition. Why avoid something that she would enjoy and be good at? And surely three years of undergraduate education in psychology plus several years of postgraduate research should have provided a more precise classification of her behavioural, personality and emotional problems than ‘fucked-up’. Naturally I did not share these thoughts.

  We were first in line when the museum opened at 10.30 a.m. I had planned the visit according to the history of the universe, the planet and life. Thirteen billion years of history in six hours. At noon, Rosie suggested we delete lunch from the schedule to allow more time with the exhibits. Later, she stopped at the reconstruction of the famous Laetoli footprints made by hominids approximately 3.6 million years ago.

  ‘I read an article about this. It was a mother and child, holding hands, right?’

  It was a romantic interpretation, but not impossible.

  ‘Have you ever thought of having children, Don?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, forgetting to deflect this personal question. ‘But it seems both unlikely and inadvisable.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Unlikely, because I have lost confidence in the Wife Project. And inadvisable because I would be an unsuitable father.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I’d be an embarrassment to my children.’

  Rosie laughed. I thought this was very insensitive, but she explained, ‘All parents are an embarrassment to their kids.’

  ‘Including Phil?’

  She laughed again. ‘Especially Phil.’

  At 4.28 p.m. we had finished the primates. ‘Oh no, we’re done?’ said Rosie. ‘Is there something else we can see?’

  ‘We have two more things to see,’ I said. ‘You may find them dull.’

  I took her to the room of balls – spheres of different sizes showing the scale of the universe. The display is not dramatic, but the information is. Non-scientists, non-physical-scientists, frequently have no idea of scale – how small we are compared to the size of the universe, how big compared to the size of a neutrino. I did my best to make it interesting.

  Then we went up in the elevator and joined the Heilbrunn Cosmic Pathway, a one-hundred-and-ten-metre spiral ramp representing a timeline from the big bang to the present. It is just pictures and photos and occasional rocks and fossils on the wall, and I didn’t even need to look at them, because I know the story, which I related as accurately and dramatically as I could, putting all that we had seen during the day into context, as we walked down and round until we reached the ground level and the tiny vertical hairline representing all of recorded human history. It was almost closing time now, and we were the only people standing there. On other occasions, I have listened to people’s reactions as they reach the end. ‘Makes you feel a bit unimportant, doesn’t it?’ they say. I suppose that is one way of looking at it – how the age of the universe somehow diminishes our lives or the events of history or Joe DiMaggio’s streak.

  But Rosie’s response was a verbal version of mine. ‘Wow,’ she said, very quietly, looking back at the vastness of it all. Then, in this vanishingly small moment in the history of the universe, she took my hand, and held it all the way to the subway.

  27

  We had one critical task to perform before leaving New York the following morning. Max Freyberg, the cosmetic surgeon and potential biological father of Rosie, who was ‘booked solid’, had agreed to see us for fifteen minutes at 6.45 p.m. Rosie had told his secretary she was writing a series of articles for a publication about successful alumni of the university. I was carrying Rosie’s camera and would be identified as a photographer.

  Getting the appointment had been difficult enough, but it had become apparent that collecting the DNA would be far more difficult in a working environment than in a social or domestic location. I had set my brain the task of solving the problem before we departed for New York, and had expected it to have found a solution through background processing, but it had apparently been too occupied with other matters. The best I could think of was a spiked ring that would draw blood when we shook hands, but Rosie considered this socially infeasible.

  She suggested clipping a hair, either surreptitiously or after identifying it as a stray that would mar the photo. Surely a cosmetic surgeon would care about his appearance. Unfortunately a clipped hair was unlikely to yield an adequate sample – it needed to be plucked to obtain a follicle. Rosie packed a pair of tweezers. For once I hoped I might have to spend fifteen minutes in a smoke-filled room. A cigarette butt would solve our problem. We would have to be alert to opportunities.

  Dr Freyberg’s rooms were in an older-style building on the Upper West Side. Rosie pushed the buzzer and a security guard appeared and took us up to a waiting area where the walls were totally covered with framed certificates and letters from patients praising Dr Freyberg’s work.

  Dr Freyberg’s secretary, a very thin woman (BMI estimate sixteen) of about fifty-five with disproportionately thick lips, led us into his office. More certificates! Freyberg himself had a major fault: he was completely bald. The hair-plucking approach would not be viable. Nor was there any evidence that he was a smoker.

  Rosie conducted the interview very impressively. Freyberg described some procedures that seemed to have minimal clinical justification, and talked about their importance to self-esteem. It was fortunate that I had been allocated the silent role, as I would have been strongly tempted to argue. I was also struggling to focus. My mind was still processing the hand-holding incident.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Rosie, ‘but could I
bother you for something to drink?’

  Of course! The coffee swab solution.

  ‘Sure,’ said Freyberg. ‘Tea, coffee?’

  ‘Coffee would be great,’ said Rosie. ‘Just black. Will you have one yourself?’

  ‘I’m good. Let’s keep going.’ He pushed a button on his intercom. ‘Rachel. One black coffee.’

  ‘You should have a coffee,’ I said to him.

  ‘Never touch it,’ said Freyberg.

  ‘Unless you have a genetic intolerance of caffeine, there are no proven harmful effects. On the contrary –’

  ‘What magazine is this for again?’

  The question was straightforward and totally predictable. We had agreed the name of the fictitious university publication in advance, and Rosie had already used it in her introduction.

  But my brain malfunctioned. Rosie and I spoke simultaneously. Rosie said, ‘Faces of Change.’ I said, ‘Hands of Change.’

  It was a minor inconsistency that any rational person would have interpreted as a simple, innocent error, which in fact it was. But Freyberg’s expression indicated disbelief and he immediately scribbled on a notepad. When Rachel brought the coffee, he gave her the note. I diagnosed paranoia and started to think about escape plans.

  ‘I need to use the bathroom,’ I said. I planned to phone Freyberg from the bathroom, so Rosie could escape while he took the call.

  I walked towards the exit, but Freyberg blocked my path.

  ‘Use my private one,’ he said. ‘I insist.’

  He led me through the back of his office, past Rachel to a door marked ‘Private’ and left me there. There was no way to exit without returning the way we had come. I took out my phone, called 411 – directory assistance – and they connected me to Rachel. I could hear the phone ring and Rachel answer. I kept my voice low.

  ‘I need to speak to Dr Freyberg,’ I said. ‘It’s an emergency.’ I explained that my wife was a patient of Dr Freyberg and that her lips had exploded. I hung up and texted Rosie: Exit now.