Phil (your father-in-law)
PS I’ve got that aikido move of yours worked out. If you screw up, I will personally come to New York and beat the living shit out of you.
I gave the letter to Gene. He read it, then folded it up again.
‘Just give me a minute,’ he said. I detected emotion.
‘It seems Phil is unimpressed with me,’ I said.
Gene stood up and paced around the room. It is a habit we share when thinking about difficult problems. My father would quote Thoreau—‘Henry David Thoreau, American philosopher, Don,’ he would say as I walked around our living room working on a mathematics or chess problem—‘Never trust any thought arrived at sitting down.’
Gene closed the door.
‘Don, I want you to do an exercise for me. I want you to imagine that your baby is born, and it’s a girl, and she grows up to be ten years old. And one day Rosie crashes your car and you’re in the passenger seat because you’ve been drinking. And—you know how the story goes, and I know because you told me—but the evolutionary imperative cuts in and you save your daughter instead of Rosie. And you’re left with just the two of you.’
Gene had to stop due to emotion. I helped him out.
‘I’m familiar with the story, obviously.’ It was the story of Phil, Rosie’s mother and Rosie, with a substitution of names.
‘No, you’re not. You’ve only heard it as something that happened to someone else. The same as if you read it in the paper about a family in Kansas. I want you to imagine yourself in it. Be Phil. And then imagine your daughter marrying some guy who broke your nose and isn’t exactly average and going away to New York and getting pregnant. Then imagine yourself writing that letter.’
‘Too much imagining. Too many overlaps. Rosie is in both stories in different roles.’
Gene looked at me with an expression I had never seen him use. This was possibly because he had never been angry with me before.
‘Too much imagining? How long did it take you to get a black belt? How long to learn to bone a fucking quail? I am telling you, Don, that you will sit down and work this through no matter how long it takes until you are Phil fucking Jarman, walking around that car with a smashed pelvis to get his kid out, and then you will write that letter yourself, and then try to come to me and say, “Phil is unimpressed with me”.’
I waited a few moments for Gene to calm down.
‘Why?’
‘Because you’re about to be a father. And every father is Phil Jarman.’ Gene sat down. ‘Go and get us both a coffee. And then I want to talk to you about the anniversary. Which you’ve planned nothing for, right?’
17
Rosie’s exercise habits were random in the extreme, in violation of The Book. Medical classes were due to resume in two weeks, and now seemed like the ideal time to address the problem. My plan was to insert a workout an hour before she would otherwise have departed for university. She could then travel directly from the exercise venue. As a result of our recently improved proximity to Columbia, the net impact on waking time would be only forty-six minutes.
It all seemed straightforward, but new initiatives require piloting.
I woke Rosie forty-six minutes before her usual time. Her reaction was predictable.
‘What time is it? It’s dark. What’s wrong?’
‘6.44 a.m. It’s only dark because the curtains are closed. The sun rose approximately forty minutes ago and there would have been pre-dawn light prior to that. Nothing is wrong. We’re going to the pool.’
‘What pool?’
‘The indoor swimming pool at the Chelsea Recreation Center on West 25th. You’ll require your bathing costume.’
‘I don’t have a bathing costume. I hate swimming.’
‘You’re Australian. All Australians swim. Almost all.’
‘I’m one of the exceptions. Go by yourself and bring me back a muffin. Or the legal equivalent. I’m feeling a bit better. For this time of the morning.’
I pointed out that Rosie had limited experience of this time of the morning, that she was the person requiring the exercise and that swimming was a recommended form of exercise for pregnant women.
‘Swimming is the recommended form of exercise for everything.’
‘Correct.’
‘So why don’t you do it?’ she said.
‘I don’t like the crowds in the pool. I strongly dislike getting water in my eyes. And putting my head under.’
‘So there you go,’ said Rosie. ‘You can empathise. I won’t make you swim if you don’t make me. In fact, maybe there’s a general rule there.’
I began the Phil Empathy Exercise as I jogged to Columbia, imagining myself in his shoes, a practice also recommended by Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. It was a terrible scenario, but I could not achieve what Gene wanted. I was reaching the conclusion that the exercise would require months, and possibly the intervention of a hypnotist or bartender, when my subconscious took over.
I woke that night from the World’s Worst Nightmare. I was in command of a spaceship, typing instructions at the console. Rosie was in the scout capsule, drifting away from the mother ship, and I couldn’t bring her back. The keyboard was touch-sensitive and my fingers kept making mistakes. My frustration turned to anger and I was unable to function.
I woke up breathing rapidly and reached out. Rosie was still there. I wondered if Phil had similar nightmares and woke to find that the world was exactly as he had dreamed it.
Our first wedding anniversary was on 11 August. This year it was a Sunday. Gene’s instructions were to make a booking at a high-quality restaurant, purchase flowers and acquire a gift made from a material determined by the ordinal year of the anniversary.
‘You’re suggesting I purchase some object every year? For the duration of the marriage?’
‘The two may be related,’ said Gene.
‘Did you do this for Claudia?’
‘You have the opportunity to learn from my mistakes.’
‘Rosie agrees that we don’t require vast quantities of junk.’
‘Claudia said the same thing. I suggest you ignore it and buy something made from paper.’
‘Can it be a consumable? Disposable?’
‘As long as it’s paper. And demonstrates thoughtfulness. You may want to run it past me first. You will run it past me first.’
I began to make plans in accordance with Gene’s instructions, but they were derailed by an envelope that I found on my bathroom-office floor on the Saturday morning, the day before the anniversary. I had the door closed as I was working on the Bud sketch for Week 12; Gene or Rosie must have slipped it under the door rather than risk interrupting some bodily function. There were advantages in combining bathroom and office.
It was an invitation—identifiable by the word Invitation on the front. Inside was a small, thin notebook with a red cover. On the first page, Rosie had written:
Don: I want to give you the maximum surprise without exceeding your tolerance. Turn the pages until you’re happy. The fewer the better. Love, Rosie.