“So am I,” she said. “Wait, am I supposed to say I’m not, to play hard to get?”
“I do not understand.” At times like this I wish I had more mastery of English, but possibly these kinds of exchanges are challenging even for fluent speakers. “Are you available or unavailable?”
She said she was available. I said, “I will shoot you an email with further details,” and she consented, and when she left I couldn’t stop myself from smiling, and in my office I even slightly punched the air with stimulation, although I contacted my fist on my desk and it hurt because I’m not used to punching, but the pain didn’t bother me, and in fact it felt good to be feeling sensations, even unpleasant sensations.
I spent Monday brainstorming for our date. Now that I had more money I could afford to take Rebecca someplace classy. Jefferson probably knew of good places, but I couldn’t ask him. So I researched places on the Internet that might impress Rebecca and made a list with pros and cons about different restaurants, e.g.:
Bavarian Haus
PRO: CON
Received 3 stars: Most non-Germans evaluate German food as low quality
It was more difficult than programming in many ways, because in programming if you can’t predict results, you can still test out new variables and use trial and error to arrive at a solution, but with people you typically have one opportunity and their motivations and reactions are more difficult to understand, especially with females.
By Tuesday afternoon I still didn’t know what to do. So I forced myself to work on my new Kapitoil-esque project instead. I made some progress, and soon I forgot about my nervousness with Rebecca and reentered the world of programming where I have ultimate control, and I worked through the night in my office, and I remembered how enjoyable it is to concentrate on a project that stimulates me, and by the end of the night I had hurdled some obstacles and received encouraging results, and once I finalize my program and presentation I will propose the concept to Mr. Schrub. If he was impressed with me initially, then this will bowl him over.
not dying to = not stimulated to proceed with an action
play hard to get = create the impression of limited supply to raise external demand
DECEMBER
JOURNAL DATE RECORDED: DECEMBER 5
I worked on the epidemiology project, but by Friday I still had no ideas for what to do with Rebecca. And then I decided to yield to my difficulties: I would simply not plan anything. It had the potential to be a growth experience. So I emailed Rebecca and told her to meet me in Central Park on Saturday at noon.
We met in Sheep Meadow. Rebecca blocked her eyes from the sun with her hand and asked, “What’s the plan, Stan?”
“I do not have a plan, Dan,” I said, because I thought she was doing a play on words with me and the only other American name I could think of that rhymed with “plan” was Dan. To boot, I now had a response for Dan when he called me “Karim the Dream.” “I thought we could walk around Central Park.” I had walked through parts of it before, but not much of it, and always by myself.
At first I wondered if we would discuss the events of Thanksgiving with each other, and because I was distracted our conversation was rigid, and I asked her several questions such as, “What did you do to entertain yourself last night?”
Rebecca said, “I know I always say this, but, really, you can let yourself go some. We’re not in the office. You can curse or whatever.”
I considered this, then said, “Fuck. Shit. Asshole.”
Rebecca laughed, and that softened the rigidity of our dialogue, and then we talked about a play she had seen the previous night that her roommate acted in, and about her brother and how he had joined his university’s newspaper, and then about how that might interest Zahira as well, as she was an excellent writer.
We entered an area called the Ramble which is known for birding. We spent several minutes watching different species, many of which we didn’t know the names of, but Rebecca made interesting analytical observations, e.g., how multiple birds frequently partner on a tree after a few birds first land there, as if the first birds are scouting to certify the tree’s safety. Although I didn’t learn as much as when I was with Mr. Schrub, it was more stimulating because I prefer problem solving to receiving data passively.
When we reached the end of the Ramble, we decided to progress to the reservoir at 96th St. By then I forgot about what happened on Thanksgiving and it was like we were still coworkers at adjacent desks, although we weren’t talking about work anymore.
At the Reservoir, Rebecca asked if I had anything else I wanted to do. “I am enjoying this,” I said. “Would you like to continue walking around?”
She said she would, and we shifted over to Riverside Park on the West Side and walked along the blue and green and gray water of the Hudson River, and through the Upper West Side aggregated with Jewish families and Asian restaurants, and finally all the way down to Chelsea and the variably angled streets and cafes of Greenwich Village and the classy and minimal clothing stores in SoHo and the less clean streets and caged athletics areas of the Lower East Side and the East Village. And although we ended up spending almost no money, minus water and some snacks (e.g., in Chinatown, where we ate dumplings and something called red-bean-paste bun), that’s not why I wanted to do it, but I’m glad we did that instead of paying for external entertainment. Sometimes merely partnering on a walk is sufficient.
When we were on Sullivan St., she was discussing her brother and the art classes he was taking at university, and I was asking her questions about art. “You know, there may be a bit of a language barrier, but you’re pretty easy to talk to,” she said. “Most people here, their conversations are intellectualized middle-school sarcasm. They’re just trying to prove how intelligent or cool they are. You’re not like that.” At first I thought she meant I wasn’t intelligent or cool, but then I understood she meant that I didn’t try to prove I had those qualities, and although I believe I am intelligent in certain modes, I’m of course not cool in any modes, so that part remains true.
We were both exhausted at 6:30 p.m. Rebecca asked if I was hungry, and I was, but so far restaurants in New York had caused problems for me with questions about halal food, and also I didn’t enjoy waiters serving me. So I proposed cooking dinner, and Rebecca suggested we do it in Brooklyn because groceries were cheaper there.
We discussed what to cook on the way there. Rebecca said she was trying to become a vegetarian, so we shouldn’t buy meat. She added, “And I’m not just saying that because it’ll be harder to find halal meat.” I told her I was glad she’d said that, and how I disliked it when Americans corrected their behavior around me. She didn’t say anything else about it.
We selected pasta with peppers and cauliflowers and a salad and divided the cost equally and took the food back to her apartment. Her roommate was out at her play. Rebecca asked if I wanted to hear music while we cooked.
“I liked the musician you played for me before,” I said. “The one who sings the line ‘Your hair upon the pillow like a sleepy golden storm.’”
“I remember,” she said.
This time she played a song called “Suzanne,” and it was equal in quality to the song she had played in her room. The line that intrigued me most was “And she shows you where to look among the garbage and the flowers,” because sometimes there is no difference between garbage and flowers, and things that people discard or ignore or forget or lose often contain the most valuable material or data, as Rebecca once said.