The Rosie Project (Don Tillman #1)(41)

Gene said something to Rosie, presumably to prevent inappropriate public anger, and she seemed to calm down.

Bianca returned to her seat, but only to collect her bag.

‘The problem was synchronisation,’ I tried to tell her. ‘The metronome in my head is not set to the same frequency as the band.’

Bianca turned away, but Rosie seemed prepared to listen to my explanation. ‘I turned off the sound during practice so I could focus on learning the steps.’

Rosie did not reply and I heard Bianca speaking to Stefan. ‘It happens. This isn’t the first time, just the worst. Men say they can dance …’ She walked towards the exit without saying goodnight to me, but Gene followed and intercepted her.

This gave me an opportunity. I righted my glass, and filled it with wine. It was a poorly made gordo blanco with excessive residual sugar. I drank it and poured another. Rosie got up from her seat and walked over to the band. She spoke to the singer, then the drummer.

She returned and pointed at me in a stylised manner. I recognised the action – I had seen it twelve times. It was the signal that Olivia Newton-John gave to John Travolta in Grease to commence the dance sequence that I had been practising when Gene interrupted me nine days earlier. Rosie pulled me towards the dance floor.

‘Dance,’ she said. ‘Just f*cking dance.’

I started dancing without music. This was what I had practised. Rosie followed according to my tempo. Then she raised her arm and started waving it in time with our movements. I heard the drummer start playing and could tell in my body that he was in time with us. I barely noticed the rest of the band start up.

Rosie was a good dancer and considerably easier to manipulate than the skeleton. I led her through the more difficult moves, totally focused on the mechanics and on not making errors. The Grease song finished and everyone clapped. But before we could return to the table, the band started again and the audience clapped in time: Satisfaction. It may have been due to the effect of the gordo blanco on my cognitive functions, but I was suddenly overwhelmed by an extraordinary feeling – not of satisfaction but of absolute joy. It was the feeling I had in the Museum of Natural History and when I was making cocktails. We started dancing again, and this time I allowed myself to focus on the sensations of my body moving to the beat of the song from my childhood and of Rosie moving to the same rhythm.

The music finished and everyone clapped again.

I looked for Bianca, my date, and located her near the exit with Gene. I had presumed she would be impressed that the problem was solved, but even from a distance and with my limited ability to interpret expressions, I could see that she was furious. She turned and left.

The rest of the evening was incredible, changed totally by one dance. Everyone came up to Rosie and me to offer compliments. The photographer gave us each a photo without charging us. Stefan left early. Gene obtained some high-quality Champagne from the bar, and we drank several glasses with him and a Hungarian postdoc named Klara from Physics. Rosie and I danced again, and then I danced with almost every woman at the ball. I asked Gene if I should invite the Dean or her partner, but he considered this to be a question beyond even his social expertise. In the end I did not, as the Dean was visibly in a bad mood. The crowd had made it clear that they would rather dance than listen to her scheduled speech.

At the end of the night, the band played a waltz, and when it was finished I looked around and it was just Rosie and me on the dance floor. And everyone applauded again. It was only later that I realised that I had experienced extended close contact with another human without feeling uncomfortable. I attributed it to my concentration on correctly executing the dance steps.

‘You want to share a taxi?’ asked Rosie.

It seemed a sensible use of fossil fuel.

In the taxi, Rosie said to me, ‘You should have practised with different beats. You’re not as smart as I thought you were.’

I just looked out the window of the taxi.

Then she said, ‘No way. No f*cking way. You did, didn’t you? That’s worse. You’d rather make a fool of yourself in front of everyone than tell her she didn’t float your boat.’

‘It would have been extremely awkward. I had no reason to reject her.’

‘Besides not wanting to marry a parakeet,’ said Rosie.

I found this incredibly funny, no doubt as a result of alcohol and decompensation after the stress. We both laughed for several minutes, and Rosie even touched me a few times on the shoulder. I didn’t mind, but when we stopped laughing I felt awkward again and averted my gaze.

‘You’re unbelievable,’ said Rosie. ‘Look at me when I’m talking.’

I kept looking out the window. I was already over-stimulated. ‘I know what you look like.’

‘What colour eyes do I have?’

‘Brown.’

‘When I was born, I had blue eyes,’ she said. ‘Baby blues. Like my mother. She was Irish but she had blue eyes. Then they turned brown.’

I looked at Rosie. This was incredible.

‘Your mother’s eyes changed colour?’

‘My eyes. It happens with babies. That was when my mother realised that Phil wasn’t my father. She had blue eyes and so does Phil. And she decided to tell him. I suppose I should be grateful he wasn’t a lion.’

I was having trouble making sense of all that Rosie was saying, doubtless due to the effects of the alcohol and her perfume. However, she had given me an opportunity to keep the conversation on safe ground. The inheritance of common genetically influenced traits such as eye colour is more complex than is generally understood, and I was confident that I could speak on the topic for long enough to occupy the remainder of our journey. But I realised that this was a defensive action and impolite to Rosie who had risked considerable embarrassment and damage to her relationship with Stefan for my benefit.