“Are you a good singer?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “If you consider the anguished cries of a fatally wounded dolphin ‘good.’”
She opened a bottle of white wine and poured herself a glass but she didn’t make any comments about how I could have some if I wanted. So I finished my glass of water and poured myself some as well.
We ate dinner in her living room, and when we finished we drank more wine, although I was careful to drink just a small amount. I discovered if I drank at the rate of 0.75 glasses/hour it slightly relaxed me but didn’t negate my control, which was optimal, especially in a situation like this.
In fact, I was still very nervous. When I kissed her previously, it happened because I temporarily didn’t strategize. Now I was strategizing too much, with ideas such as (1) the lighting was too bright; (2) we were both holding glasses of wine and a sudden movement could spill them (even though it was white wine and therefore less permanent); and (3) we were one foot apart from each other on the couch and moving closer to her would take too long.
I understood why movies about romance, such as the one I partially watched on television on Monday night, are so popular in the U.S., because they present high quantities of conflict, although I typically dislike the way those movies depict romantic conflicts, as they result either from simple misunderstandings or because the two main characters initially hate each other before falling in love, and although I am a novice at these situations, even I know that that conversion is illogical. In fact, frequently it is the opposite: People fall in love soon after they meet, and over time they lose it.
I said, “This wine has some pear notes.”
She smiled slightly and didn’t respond, and I had no other evaluations of the wine. Then I remembered my gift. “I have something for you,” I told her, and I retrieved my coat and depocketed R #1.
“It is an algorithmic drawing,” I said. “I created it using the discrete Fourier transform, by mapping each spatial frequency band of a picture of a watermelon to its own color—”
She linked her arms around my neck and said, “Thank you.”
I was still nervous about what to do, but then I thought: You have to accept responsibility for your own decisions. She may reject you, but you will not know until you try, and if you do not even try, then it is as if you are rejecting yourself.
And then I shifted my head and kissed her, and she kissed me, and we stayed like that for a long time on the soft couch, and I thought how strange it was that two people could enjoy contacting their lips and tongues and hands for so long when most of the time we avoid contact.
She brought me to her bedroom, and our actions didn’t equal what I did on Halloween, but it was still stimulating. We enjoyed each other’s bodies but we didn’t say anything about it, as I did with Melissa. Rebecca wasn’t as thin as Melissa, but I preferred that. In addition, when I had difficulty releasing her bra, she whispered “It’s okay,” and did it herself. I also accidentally crashed my hand against her glasses at one point and they became asymmetrical on her nose. I apologized and was slightly humiliated by my poor dexterity, but she said “Look,” and intentionally made the glasses even more asymmetrical, then put her hands out in the air and rotated her head and eyes rapidly as if she could not see anything and was panicked. It was humorous, so I laughed, and she said, “Thank God glasses are sort of in now and being a nerd is almost cool. It was a rough stretch there in high school for people like us, right?” Initially I disliked how she accurately classified me as a nerd, but then I valued how she did not mind calling herself one and therefore I was careless that I was a nerd as well.
When we were finished we didn’t say anything for a few minutes, until I asked, “Goldman is a Jewish surname, correct?”
“Yeah,” she said. “My family isn’t really religious, though. Is yours?”
“We are. My father is the most,” I said. “Both your parents are Jewish?”
“Just my father,” she said. “But he’s not really anything.”
“What is his job?”
She yawned and turned her body away from me. “He’s a surgeon.”
I was asking about a subject that wasn’t my business, but I didn’t stop. “Why do you not see him anymore?”
“Are you trying to find out if I have daddy issues?” she said.
I said I didn’t know what daddy issues were, and that I merely wanted to know why she didn’t see him, but if she didn’t want to discuss it, then I understood.
She turned to face me again. “He wasn’t abusive, he wasn’t an alcoholic, he wasn’t a philanderer,” she said. “Hope I’m not disappointing you with a mundane tale of middle-class neglect. He was a workaholic and never really paid attention to my mother, or my brother, or me. Sorry — he paid attention when he thought I would become a doctor, and when I accidentally-on-purpose failed bio, he gave up. They finally divorced when I was seventeen, which made for a fun senior year, we moved in with my grandmother in Wisconsin, he remarried, and I stopped talking to him four years ago because he never really seemed to care about talking to me. Satisfied?”
I didn’t say anything for a while. Then I said, “I have some daddy issues as well, although they are different.” I didn’t say anything about my mother, though, because it would seem like we were exchanging personal data for the sake of exchanging it. I would also ask her another time about why she took Zoloft, which I had researched and learned was for depression and/or anxiety, because it was not necessarily caused by her relationship with her father, e.g., that is why I don’t tell people about my mother, because they might think everything I do is caused by that, when human actions are the result of infinite factors and are complex and sometimes impossible to decipher.
connoisseur = expert in a field
daddy issues = conflict with one’s father
philanderer = a husband who is disloyal to his wife
workaholic = someone who works constantly to avoid the remainder of his life
JOURNAL DATE RECORDED: DECEMBER 12
Rebecca and I didn’t see each other at all the next few days, as I was busy with Kapitoil and the Y2K project was ramping up. My test results were enhanced, and I believed that with some additional work and more specific knowledge of epidemiology, which I lack, it might truly have value.
However, to apply it to other fields would require opening up the code and the idea to others who have more specialized knowledge, e.g., via an academic paper. And this would mean the termination of Kapitoil, because Schrub would no longer have a monopoly on it, and if everyone had access to the same predictive patterns, then they would cancel out on the market.
I considered that (1) I was performing very well with Schrub now and was getting to know Mr. Schrub more; (2) possibly it would be foolish to interrupt my progress with an idea that might hurt the company’s prospects; and (3) Kapitoil, for oil futures, was the best program I had ever created, and even if it worked well in another area, I would destroy its perfect value for oil futures, and it is rare for something so ideal to exist in the world.
So I decided to be quiet about my program for now, and if I was 100 % certain it functioned and I felt I was close enough to Mr. Schrub later, then I would bring it up.
Shortly after 5:00 p.m. on December 7 there was a small bombing in Jordan at a U.S.-owned hotel. Ramadan had just started there. Kapitoil would benefit again from the volatility in the market.
The next night I went to the mosque after work to pray. December 8 was also the day John Lennon was killed. At home I played some of his Beatles and non-Beatles songs, including “Imagine,” which my mother adored. I enjoyed it, as I always did, but when I heard the line “Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too,” I replayed it several times. Lennon was correct in that religion has caused some wars, but it has also created alliances where there might have been other wars, in the same way that countries fight with each other, but they also restrict potential fighting within their borders.