The Rosie Project

by Graeme Simsion

  I waited. I looked at my watch. When there were fifteen seconds left, I assessed that it was likely that she was about to say no. I had nothing to lose. I pulled the small box from my pocket and opened it to reveal the ring I had purchased. I wished I had not learned to read expressions, because I could read Rosie’s now and I knew the answer.

  ‘Don,’ said Rosie. ‘This isn’t what you want me to say. But remember on the plane, when you said you were wired differently?’

  I nodded. I knew what the problem was. The fundamental, insurmountable problem of who I was. I had pushed it to the back of my mind since it had surfaced in the fight with Phil. Rosie didn’t need to explain. But she did.

  ‘That’s inside you. You can’t fake – sorry, start again. You can behave perfectly, but if the feeling’s not there inside … God, I feel so unreasonable.’

  ‘The answer is no?’ I said, some small part of my brain hoping that for once my fallibility in reading social cues would work in my favour.

  ‘Don, you don’t feel love, do you?’ said Rosie. ‘You can’t really love me.’

  ‘Gene diagnosed love.’ I knew now that he had been wrong. I had watched thirteen romantic movies and felt nothing. That was not strictly true. I had felt suspense, curiosity and amusement. But I had not for one moment felt engaged in the love between the protagonists. I had cried no tears for Meg Ryan or Meryl Streep or Deborah Kerr or Vivien Leigh or Julia Roberts.

  I could not lie about so important a matter. ‘According to your definition, no.’

  Rosie looked extremely unhappy. The evening had turned into a disaster.

  ‘I thought my behaviour would make you happy, and instead it’s made you sad.’

  ‘I’m upset because you can’t love me. Okay?’

  This was worse! She wanted me to love her. And I was incapable.

  ‘Don,’ she said, ‘I don’t think we should see each other any more.’

  I got up from the table and walked back to the entrance foyer, out of sight of Rosie and the other diners. Nick was there, talking to the maitre d’. He saw me and came over.

  ‘Can I help you with anything?’

  ‘Unfortunately, there has been a disaster.’

  Nick looked worried, and I elaborated. ‘A personal disaster. There is no risk to other patrons. Would you prepare the bill, please?’

  ‘We haven’t served you anything,’ said Nick. He looked at me closely for a few moments. ‘There’s no charge, sir. The Chablis is on us.’ He offered me his hand and I shook it. ‘I think you gave it your best shot.’

  I looked up to see Gene and Claudia arriving. They were holding hands. I had not seen them do this for several years.

  ‘Don’t tell me we’re too late,’ said Gene, jovially.

  I nodded, then looked back into the restaurant. Rosie was walking quickly towards us.

  ‘Don, what are you doing?’ she said.

  ‘Leaving. You said we shouldn’t see each other again.’

  ‘Fuck,’ she said, then looked at Gene and Claudia. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘We are summoned to a “Thank you and celebration”,’ said Gene. ‘Happy birthday, Don.’

  He gave me a gift-wrapped package, and put his arm around me in a hug. I recognised that this was probably the final step in the male-male advice protocol, indicating acceptance of the advice without damage to our friendship, and managed not to flinch, but could not process the input any further. My brain was already overloaded.

  ‘It’s your birthday?’ said Rosie.

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘I had to get Helena to look up your birth date,’ said Gene, ‘but “celebration” was a clue.’

  I normally do not treat birthdays differently from other days, but it had struck me as an appropriate occasion to commence a new direction.

  Claudia introduced herself to Rosie, adding, ‘I’m sorry, it seems we’ve come at a bad time.’

  Rosie turned to Gene. ‘A “thank you”? Thank you? Shit. It wasn’t enough to set us up – you had to coach him. You had to turn him into you.’

  Claudia said, quietly, ‘Rosie, it wasn’t Gene’s –’

  Gene put a hand on Claudia’s shoulder and she stopped.

  ‘No, it wasn’t,’ he said. ‘Who asked him to change? Who said that he’d be perfect for her if he was different?’

  Rosie was now looking very upset. All of my friends (except Dave the Baseball Fan) were fighting. This was terrible. I wanted to roll the story back to New York and make better decisions. But it was impossible. Nothing would change the fault in my brain that made me unacceptable.

  Gene hadn’t stopped. ‘Do you have any idea what he did for you? Take a look in his office sometime.’ He was presumably referring to my schedule and the large number of Rosie Project activities.

  Rosie walked out of the restaurant.

  Gene turned to Claudia. ‘Sorry I interrupted you.’

  ‘Someone had to say it,’ said Claudia. She looked at Rosie, who was already some distance down the street. ‘I think I coached the wrong person.’

  Gene and Claudia offered me a lift home, but I did not want to continue the conversation. I started walking, then accelerated to a jog. It made sense to get home before it rained. It also made sense to exercise hard and put the restaurant behind me as quickly as possible. The new shoes were workable, but the coat and tie were uncomfortable even on a cold night. I pulled off the jacket, the item that had made me temporarily acceptable in a world to which I did not belong, and threw it in a rubbish bin. The tie followed. On an impulse I retrieved the daphne from the jacket and carried it in my hand for the remainder of the journey. There was rain in the air and my face was wet as I reached the safety of my apartment.

  34

  We had not finished the wine at the restaurant. I decided to compensate for the resulting alcohol deficit and poured a tumbler of tequila. I turned on the television screen and computer and fast-forwarded Casablanca for one last try. I watched as Humphrey Bogart’s character used beans as a metaphor for the relative unimportance in the wider world of his relationship with Ingrid Bergman’s character, and chose logic and decency ahead of his selfish emotional desires. The quandary and resulting decision made for an engrossing film. But this was not what people cried about. They were in love and could never be together. I repeated this statement to myself, trying to force an emotional reaction. I couldn’t. I didn’t care. I had enough problems of my own.

  The doorbell buzzed, and I immediately thought Rosie, but when I pushed the CCTV button, it was Claudia’s face that appeared.

  ‘Don, are you okay?’ she said. ‘Can we come up?’

  ‘It’s too late.’

  Claudia sounded panicked. ‘What have you done? Don?’

  ‘It’s 10.31,’ I said. ‘Too late for visitors.’

  ‘Are you okay?’ said Claudia, again.

  ‘I’m fine. The experience has been highly useful. New social skills. And final resolution of the Wife Problem. Clear evidence that I’m incompatible with women.’

  Gene’s face appeared on the screen. ‘Don. Can we come up for a drink?’

  ‘Alcohol would be a bad idea.’ I still had a half-glass of tequila in my hand. I was telling a polite lie to avoid social contact. I turned off the intercom.

  The message light on my home phone was flashing. It was my parents and brother wishing me a happy birthday. I had already spoken to my mother two days earlier when she made her regular Sunday evening call. These past three weeks, I had been attempting to provide some news in return, but had not mentioned Rosie. They were utilising the speaker-phone function, and collectively sang the birthday song – or at least my mother did, strongly encouraging my other two relatives to participate.

  ‘Ring back if you’re home before 10.30,’ my mother said. It was 10.38, but I decided not to be pedantic.

  ‘It’s 10.39,’ said my mother. ‘I’m surprised you rang back.’ Clearly she had expected me to be pedantic, which was reasonable give
n my history, but she sounded pleased.

  ‘Hey,’ said my brother. ‘Gary Parkinson’s sister saw you on Facebook. Who’s the redhead?’

  ‘Just a girl I was dating.’

  ‘Pull the other leg,’ said my brother.

  The words had sounded strange to me too, but I had not been joking.

  ‘I’m not seeing her any more.’

  ‘I thought you might say that.’ He laughed.

  My mother interrupted. ‘Stop it, Trevor. Donald, you didn’t tell us you were seeing someone. You know you’re always welcome –’

  ‘Mum, he was having a lend of you,’ said my brother.

  ‘I said,’ said my mother, ‘that any time you want to bring anyone to meet us, whoever she or he –’

  ‘Leave him alone, both of you,’ said my father.

  There was a pause, and some conversation in the background. Then my brother said, ‘Sorry, mate. I was just having a go. I know you think I’m some sort of redneck, but I’m okay with who you are. I’d hate you to get to this age and think I still had a problem with it.’

  So, to add to a momentous day, I corrected a misconception that my family had held for at least fifteen years and came out to them as straight.

  The conversations with Gene, Phil and my family had been surprisingly therapeutic. I did not need to use the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale to know that I was feeling sad, but I was back from the edge of the pit. I would need to do some disciplined thinking in the near future to be certain of remaining safe, but for the moment I did not need to shut down the emotional part of my brain entirely. I wanted a little time to observe how I felt about recent events.

  It was cold and the rain was pouring, but my balcony was under shelter. I took a chair and my glass outside, then went back inside, put on the greasy wool jumper that my mother had knitted for a much earlier birthday and collected the tequila bottle.

  I was forty years old. My father used to play a song written by John Sebastian. I remember that it was by John Sebastian because Noddy Holder announced prior to singing it, ‘We’re going to do a song by John Sebastian. Are there any John Sebastian fans here?’ Apparently there were because there was loud and raucous applause before he started singing.

  I decided that tonight I was also a John Sebastian fan and that I wanted to hear the song. This was the first time in my life that I could recall a desire to hear a particular piece of music. I had the technology. Or used to. I went to pull out my mobile phone and realised it had been in the jacket I had discarded. I went inside, booted my laptop, registered for iTunes, and downloaded ‘Darling Be Home Soon’ from Slade Alive!, 1972. I added ‘Satisfaction’, thus doubling the size of my popular music collection. I retrieved my earphones from their box and returned to the balcony, poured another tequila and listened to a voice from my childhood singing that it had taken a quarter of his life before he could begin to see himself.

  At eighteen, just before I left home to go to university, statistically approaching a quarter of my life, I had listened to these words and been reminded that I had very little understanding of who I was. It had taken me until tonight, approximately halfway, to see myself reasonably clearly. I had Rosie, and the Rosie Project to thank for that. Now it was over, what had I learned?

  I need not be visibly odd. I could engage in the protocols that others followed and move undetected among them. And how could I be sure that other people were not doing the same – playing the game to be accepted but suspecting all the time that they were different?

  I had skills that others didn’t. My memory and ability to focus had given me an advantage in baseball statistics, cocktail-making and genetics. People had valued these skills, not mocked them.

  I could enjoy friendship and good times. It was my lack of skills, not lack of motivation that had held me back. Now I was competent enough socially to open my life to a wider range of people. I could have more friends. Dave the Baseball Fan could be the first of many.

  I had told Gene and Claudia that I was incompatible with women. This was an exaggeration. I could enjoy their company, as proven by my joint activities with Rosie and Daphne. Realistically, it was possible that I could have a partnership with a woman.

  The idea behind the Wife Project was still sound. In many cultures a matchmaker would have routinely done what I did, with less technology, reach and rigour, but the same assumption – that compatibility was as viable a foundation for marriage as love.

  I was not wired to feel love. And faking it was not acceptable. Not to me. I had feared that Rosie would not love me. Instead, it was I who could not love Rosie.

  I had a great deal of valuable knowledge – about genetics, computers, aikido, karate, hardware, chess, wine, cocktails, dancing, sexual positions, social protocols and the probability of a fifty-six-game hitting streak occurring in the history of baseball. I knew so much shit and I still couldn’t fix myself.

  As the shuffle setting on my media player selected the same two songs over and over, I realised that my thinking was also beginning to go in circles and that, despite the tidy formulation, there was some flaw in my logic. I decided it was my unhappiness with the night’s outcome breaking through, my wish that it could be different.

  I watched the rain falling over the city and poured the last of the tequila.

  35

  I was still in the chair when I woke the next morning. It was cold and raining and my laptop battery had exhausted itself. I shook my head to test for a hangover but it seemed that my alcohol-processing enzymes had done their job adequately. So had my brain. I had unconsciously set it a problem to solve and, understanding the importance of the situation, it had overcome the handicap of intoxication to reach a solution.

  I began the second half of my life by making coffee. Then I reviewed the very simple logic.

  I was wired differently. One of the characteristics of my wiring was that I had difficulty empathising. This problem has been well documented in others and is, in fact, one of the defining symptoms of the autism spectrum.

  A lack of empathy would account for my inability to respond emotionally to the situations of fictional characters in films. This was similar to my inability to respond as others did to the victims of the World Trade Center terrorist attacks. But I did feel sorry for Frank the fire-fighter guide. And for Daphne; my sister; my parents when my sister died; Carl and Eugenie because of the Gene–Claudia marriage crisis; Gene himself, who wanted to be admired but had achieved the opposite; Claudia, who had agreed to an open marriage but changed her mind and suffered as Gene continued to exploit it; Phil, who had struggled to deal with his wife’s infidelity and death and then to win the love of Rosie; Kevin Yu, whose focus on passing the course had blinded him to ethical conduct; the Dean, who had to make difficult decisions under contradictory rules and deal with prejudice about her dress and relationship; Faith Healer, who had to reconcile his strong beliefs with scientific evidence; Margaret Case, whose son had committed suicide and whose mind no longer functioned; and, critically, Rosie, whose childhood and now adulthood had been made unhappy by her mother’s death and her father problem and who now wanted me to love her. This was an impressive list, and, though it did not include Rick and Ilsa from Casablanca, it was clear evidence that my empathy capability was not entirely absent.

  An inability (or reduced ability) to empathise is not the same as an inability to love. Love is a powerful feeling for another person, often defying logic.

  Rosie had failed numerous criteria on the Wife Project, including the critical smoking question. My feelings for her could not be explained by logic. I did not care about Meryl Streep. But I was in love with Rosie.

  I had to act quickly, not because I believed the situation with Rosie was likely to change in the immediate future, but because I needed my jacket, which was, I hoped, still in the rubbish bin where I had thrown it. Luckily I was already dressed from the previous evening.

  It was still raining when I arrived at the bin, just in time to
see it emptied into a garbage truck compactor. I had a contingency plan, but it was going to take time. I turned the bike around to head for home and crossed the road. Slumped in a shop doorway, out of the rain, was a hobo. He was fast asleep, and he was wearing my jacket. I carefully reached into the inside pocket and extracted the envelope and my phone. As I remounted my bike, I saw a couple on the other side of the street watching me. The male started to run towards me, but the woman called him back. She was making a call on her mobile phone.

  It was only 7.48 a.m. when I arrived at the university. A police car approached from the opposite direction, slowed as it passed me, then signalled a U-turn. It occurred to me that it could have been summoned to deal with my apparent theft from the hobo. I turned quickly down the bicycle path, where I could not be followed by a motor vehicle, and headed towards the Genetics building to find a towel.

  As I opened the unlocked door of my office it was obvious that I had had a visitor, and who that visitor had been. The red roses were lying on my desk. So was the Father Project file, which had been removed from its home in the filing cabinet. The list of father-candidate names and sample descriptions was on the desk beside it. Rosie had left a note.

  Don, I’m sorry about everything. But I know who Table-Napkin Man is. I’ve told Dad. I probably shouldn’t have but I was very upset. I tried to call you. Sorry again. Rosie.

  There was a lot of crossed-out writing between Sorry again and Rosie. But this was a disaster! I needed to warn Gene.

  His diary indicated a breakfast meeting at the University Club. I checked the PhD area, and Stefan was there, but not Rosie. Stefan could see that I was highly agitated, and followed me.

  We reached the club, and located Gene at a table with the Dean. But at another table, I saw Rosie. She was with Claudia and seemed very distressed. I realised that she could be sharing the news about Gene, even prior to a DNA ratification. The Father Project was ending in total disaster. But I had come for something else. I was desperate to share my revelation. We could resolve the other problem later.