The Rosie Project

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 f*cked-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 ‘f*cked-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.