‘What’s up her nose?’ said Rosie. ‘You’re wearing a jacket.’ This was true, although the restaurant did not have a formal dress code. I realised it was a reference to the night Rosie and I first had dinner together. The series of events that began with me being refused entry to a restaurant due to some confusion about the definition of ‘jacket’ ultimately led to our relationship. So much had changed since then.
Bubonic Plague Woman returned with a formally dressed person whom I assumed was the maître d’.
‘Professor Tillman. Welcome. We’ve been expecting you.’
‘Of course. I made a reservation. For this time. Exactly.’
‘Yes. Now it was for two people, am I right?’
‘Correct. Was. Now three.’
‘Well, we’re very full. And the chef has gone to some trouble, I understand, to accommodate your specific requirements.’
Very full was a modified absolute. I was pleased my father was not with us. But it was obviously unacceptably rude to exclude Gene, now that he had walked to the restaurant. I turned to leave. ‘We can find somewhere else,’ I said to the maitre d’.
‘No, for God’s sake, no, we’ll sort something out. Just wait a moment.’
A couple arrived and he turned his attention to them. ‘Reservation for two at eight,’ said the man. It was now 8.34 p.m.
They did not identify themselves but the maître d’ apparently recognised them, as he made a mark on his list. I looked again. It was Loud Woman from the night I was fired from my cocktail job!
She was definitely pregnant. As far as I could tell, she was not drunk. At least the sacrifice of my job to protect her baby from foetal alcohol syndrome had not been based on a misjudgement.
Her companion spoke to her. ‘You’re going to die for the truffled brie.’
Die. His choice of word was potentially accurate. I had no choice but to intervene. ‘Unpasteurised cheeses may carry listeria and are hence inadvisable in pregnancy. You’ll be putting the foetus at risk. Again.’
She looked at me. ‘You! The cocktail nazi! What the fuck are you doing here?’
The answer was obvious and I was not required to give it, as the maître d’ interrupted.
‘Actually, we’re doing a very special degustation menu tonight. We had a customer with some unusual requirements, and in the end the chef decided to prepare the meal for the whole restaurant.’ He looked at me in an odd way and spoke slowly. ‘In order to preserve his sanity.’
‘Is the truffled brie on? What about the lobster sashimi?’ Loud Woman asked.
‘Tonight, the brie will be replaced by an artisanal local ewe’s milk cheese and the Maine lobster will be cooked in a broth enhanced by—’
‘Forget it.’
‘Madame, if I might be so bold, you might find tonight’s menu particularly appropriate for your…situation,’ said the maître d’.
‘My situation? Holy fuck.’ She pulled her partner towards the door. ‘We’ll go to Daniel.’
Twice I had saved this woman’s baby, or at least given it another chance. I deserved to be its godfather. I could only hope that Daniel would be cognisant of the risks of food poisoning in pregnancy.
Rosie was laughing. Gene was shaking his head. But a problem had been solved.
‘You now have two seats available,’ I said to the maître d’. ‘And a reduction in the crowding problem.’
We were guided to a window table.
‘They’ve guaranteed all food will be compatible with a baby under development according to the strictest guidelines and that the aggregate nutrition will be perfectly balanced. And incredibly delicious.’
‘How can they do that?’ asked Rosie. ‘Chefs don’t know about that sort of stuff. Not at your level of…detail.’
‘This one does. Now.’ I had spent two hours and eight minutes on the phone explaining, supplemented by several follow-up calls. Gene and Rosie thought it was hilarious. Then Gene raised a glass of champagne to toast Rosie’s success, and, in accordance with convention, Rosie and I raised our mineral water and champagne glasses respectively.
‘The future Doctor Jarman,’ said Gene.
‘Doctor Doctor Jarman,’ I pointed out. ‘When you’ve finished the MD, you’ll have two doctorates.’
‘Well,’ said Rosie, ‘that’s one of the things I wanted to tell you. I’m deferring.’
At last! She had listened to reason. ‘Correct decision,’ I said.
Food arrived.
‘Vitamin A,’ I said, ‘packaged in calf’s liver.’
‘You’re really taking my renunciation of pescatarianism literally, aren’t you?’ said Rosie.
‘If you want to minimise environmental impact, you eat the entire animal,’ I said. ‘And it’s delicious.’
Rosie took a bite. ‘It’s not bad. Okay, it’s good. Great. Whatever happens, I’ll never say you were insensitive about food.’
After the carob-based low-sugar petits fours and decaffeinated coffee arrived, I asked for the bill—the check, please—and Gene returned the conversation to Rosie’s plans.
‘Full-time at home with the baby? Won’t you go nuts?’
‘I’ll get a part-time job so that we’re self-sufficient. I’m thinking about different options. I might go home for a while. To Australia.’
There was a contradiction in the sentence. So that we’re self-sufficient. I might go home. My hope that Rosie might simply have made a grammatical error was extinguished when I realised that we must be referring to her and Bud. If we referred to Rosie and me, or to Rosie, me and Bud, our aggregate self-sufficiency did not require her to have a job. Nor had she consulted with me about moving back. I was stunned. The waiter brought the bill and I automatically put my credit card on it.
Rosie took a deep breath and looked at Gene, and then at both of us. ‘I guess that sort of brings me to the other thing I wanted to talk about. I mean, I don’t think it’s any secret—you don’t have many secrets living in the same house…’
She stopped as Gene stood up and waved at the waiter who approached our table with my credit card on a silver tray. I calculated the tip and filled it out, but Gene took the tray from me before I could sign.
‘What sort of tip is that?’ he said.
‘Eighteen per cent. The recommended amount.’
‘Exactly, judging by the odd cents.’
‘Correct.’
Gene crossed out my writing and wrote something else.
Rosie started to speak. ‘I really need to say—’
Gene interrupted. ‘I think we owe them a little more, tonight. They’ve given us a pretty special, and slightly crazy evening.’ He raised his coffee cup. I had never seen a coffee cup used in a toast, but I copied his action. Rosie did not raise her cup.
‘To Don, who put so much into this evening and who makes life just a little bit crazier for all of us.’ There was a pause. Rosie slowly lifted her cup and clinked it with Gene’s and mine. No one spoke.
As we left the restaurant, we were assaulted by the flashing of cameras. A group—a
pack—of photographers was photographing Rosie!
Then one called out, ‘Wrong one. Sorry guys.’ We caught a cab home and went to our separate bedrooms.
26
Gene confirmed my analysis the following evening. Rosie had been planning to end our marriage.
‘It was only because last night at the restaurant reminded her why you two got together in the first place that she stopped short. But that’s not the problem.’
‘Agreed. The problem is not my suitability as a partner. It’s my suitability as a father.’
‘I’m afraid you’re right. Claudia would say they’re inseparable, but Rosie seems to have made the separation.’
Rosie was in bed. Rosie, who had encouraged me to look beyond my limitations, who was the reason for my life being more than I had ever envisioned. I was sitting with my best friend on a balcony in Manhattan, looking over the Hudson River to the lights of New Jersey, with the world’s most beautiful woman and my potential child asleep inside. And I had almost lost it. I was still at risk of losing it.
‘The trouble,’ said Gene, ‘is that the things that Rosie loves you for are exactly the things that make her think you’re too…different…to be a father. She may be a risk-taker with relationships, but no woman’s a risk-taker with her kids. In the end it’ll come down to persuading her you’re…average enough to be a father.’
It seemed like a sound analysis. But the solution remained the same. Work hard on fatherhood skills.
Although I had made enormous progress, thanks to my obstetric studies, supplemented by delivering Dave the Calf and the work with the Lesbian Mothers Project, my new skills had not been visible to Rosie due to the absence of a baby to apply them to. Other initiatives, such as the pram, had had an unexpectedly negative impact.
I anticipated that things would improve after the birth, but was now faced with a challenge to survive the final fourteen weeks of the pregnancy without Rosie rejecting me. One inadvertent error could make the difference: given my propensity to make such errors, it was vital that I create a buffer zone.
I needed expert input to create the optimum survival plan.
Dave was shocked.
‘You and Rosie? You’re kidding me. I mean, I knew you were having some problems, but no worse than Sonia and me.’
‘She’s prioritised the baby over our relationship. Which is leading to marriage failure.’
George laughed.
‘Sorry, not laughing at you. But welcome to the real world. I wouldn’t say your marriage is over just because she’s behaving like every other woman. It’s in their genes, isn’t it, Gene Genie?’
‘I’m not going to win a Nobel Prize for telling you that women are programmed to focus on the baby. But I think Don does have a problem.’ Gene looked at me. ‘It started when he didn’t go to the sonogram.’
‘Shit,’ said Dave. ‘I took time off for that and I never take time off. You missed something, Don.’
‘I saw the hardcopy of the image.’ I was feeling defensive. I had screwed up.
‘It’s different. We could see the baby moving around and—I mean—after all the effort, there it was.’ Dave was showing signs of emotion.
George pulled a bottle from under the table, and I applied my corkscrew. The baseball season was long over and we were at Arturo’s Pizza in Greenwich Village. George’s extreme tipping allowed us to violate the rules and bring his ludicrously expensive Tuscan wines, which he now claimed to prefer to English ale. The break in conversation allowed some time for thinking.
Gene tasted the wine.
‘What do you think?’ asked George.
‘About the wine? Only one of the ten best bottles I’ve ever tasted. And I’m with three blokes in a pizza parlour. I shouldn’t have ordered the diavolo. But about Don and Rosie…’
Gene swirled his wine around in the glass, which was too small for fine-wine appreciation.
‘There’s no point sugar-coating the pill with Don. Rosie doesn’t think he can cut it as a father. Think about repeating patterns. Rosie was brought up by a single parent, so maybe she sees that as her destiny as well.’
Gene’s insight was of no practical use to me. I could not change the past.
Dave had been silent, finishing the first shared pizza.
‘I’m trying to make this refrigeration business work. It’s like playing baseball,’ he said. ‘All I can do is try to execute right every day and hope the results come. And that Sonia doesn’t give up on me in the meantime. All Don can do is try to be the best he can and hope that Rosie comes around.’
Dave was right. I needed to do everything I could to be the best father I was capable of being. I had made a start. Unknown to Rosie, I had interacted so successfully with a baby that I had raised its oxytocin levels. But I needed to do more.
I had obtained input on the crisis from 42.8 per cent of my friends, including my new friend George. I had distilled their messages into: There is a problem and Don’t give up.
I decided not to call the Eslers. I did not want them to join Rosie, Gene, George, Dave, Sonia and Stefan—Stefan!—in knowing there was a problem.
That left Claudia. World’s best psychologist.
This time she decided to use voice rather than text when I connected with her on Skype. I had not yet worked out what determined her preference, but the speed of voice communication allowed me to explain the problem in less than an hour.
Claudia delivered her analysis almost as soon as I had finished. ‘She’s looking for perfect love. She’s idealised something that she lost before she could understand that love is never perfect.’
‘Too abstract.’
‘Her mother died when she was ten. Even if her mother—her mother’s love—wasn’t perfect, Rosie had no chance to find out. So she went off looking for a perfect father, who didn’t exist, of course, and then she found a perfect husband.’
‘I’m not perfect,’ I said.
‘In your own way, you are. You believe in love more than any of us. There’s no grey with you.’
‘You’re suggesting I’m incapable of dealing with continuous concepts; that my mind is somehow Boolean?’
‘You’re never going to cheat on Rosie, are you?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s not right.’ I realised what I was saying. ‘Unless you have an open marriage, of course.’
‘Let’s not go there, Don. This is about you and Rosie. But at some point Rosie will have discovered that you’re human. You forget an anniversary, you don’t read her mind.’
‘It’s unlikely I would forget a date. But mind-reading is not my strongest attribute.’
‘So now she’s on another quest for perfect love.’
‘Repeating patterns,’ I said.
‘Where did you get that from? Don’t bother answering. But it’s valid in this case. And from what you’re saying, she’s not seeing you as part of that perfect love. Being yourself probably works beautifully with just the two of you, but not so well with a baby. In her mind.’
‘Because I’m not an average father.’
‘Perhaps. But average may not be enough. Her picture of a father is problematic. She had a lot of issues with her own father, didn’t she?’
‘The problems with Phil have been resolved. They’re friends.’ Even as I said it, I remembered Gene’s observation about childhood problems.
‘It doesn’t change the past. It doesn’t change her subconscious.’
‘So what do I do?’
‘That’s always the hard part.’ I was reaching the conclusion that psychology researchers needed to give more attention to problem-solving. ‘Keep working on being a father. Maybe try to discuss the issue with Rosie. But not in the terms I’ve used.’
‘How can I discuss it without using the terms you’ve used to explain it?’ It would be like trying to explain genetics without mentioning DNA.
‘You’ve got a point. Maybe just keep trying and let her know you’re committed.’
There’s a problem. Don’t give up.
‘And Don.’
I waited for Claudia to finish the sentence.
‘I’d rather you didn’t say anything to Gene, but I’m seeing someone. I’m in a relationship with a new man. So I think the time has passed for you to worry about getting Gene and me back together.’
The conversation appeared over, so I terminated the call. Claudia obviously had not finished. She sent me two text messages.
Good luck, Don. You’ve surprised us all so far.
Then: I think you know the new man in my life. Simon Lefebvre—Head of the Medical Research Institute.
The data-gathering stage of the Lesbian Mothers Project was complete, and I had reviewed the initial draft paper. At my request, B3, the helpful nurse, had sent me the raw data, and I had undertaken my own analysis. The results were fascinating and definitely a useful contribution to the field. There were numerous ways to improve the paper, and I sent my notes to B2. She did not respond, but B1 demanded a meeting with the Dean who invited me to join them.