52

Sunday morning I pace. I tell myself calm. I tell myself elegant slowness.

So why am I not calm? Why am I not elegant? Slow?

I should call her, call her and, well, just suggest a movie maybe. Bullets over Broadway, eight forty-five tomorrow, Village Twin, coffee first, New Farm Deli, eight.

I don’t call. I pace. I unpack a box with inconsequential contents. I walk onto the front verandah with a can of paint and a brush. I walk up to the unfinished railing third from the far left. I walk back inside.

What’s going on? I haven’t been like this for years, not even with the girl at uni. It’s like I’m back at school staring down at the mesmerising patterns of the wave tank, thinking, well, if I’m going to fail physics I might as well do it with an erection, and thinking about some girl I met at a dance. And since then? Half the time since then was the girl at uni (and that’s appalling in itself, half of my adult life so far, such as it is, used up so pointlessly). The other half seems, now that I think about it, to have involved me falling into relationships with people I knew. Even Anna. I knew Anna through other people for a while before we started doing anything together. So this is my first good old-fashioned crush in ten years.

And it has all the parts of the crush. The excitement, the fear, the ridiculous inability to get on with life (not that that’s anything new), but also the tenuousness of association. And that’s important. If you take an interest in the friend of a friend, someone you meet at a friend’s party, something like that, there are channels available. Not the same urgency. Not that school dance thing, where any meeting might be your last. This is more like that, a force that pushes hard against elegant slowness.

So. Twenty-eight and a crush. Twenty-eight and a big fat crush. And like any crush, I’m making up the magical, powerful, clever, funny Rachel Vilikovski from the hints I’m given. And, a crush being based at least as much on what you don’t know as what you do, I’m creating a hell of a Rachel Vilikovski, and I have no idea if it’s like the real thing.

The phone rings. It’s going to be Jeff, calling to see if I’ve called her yet. And I’ll tell him I haven’t got round to it. And I’ll try to make it sound casual, and he’ll recognise that for the crap it is. I get to it just before the answering machine cuts in.

Hi. It’s Rachel. The magical, powerful, clever, funny Rachel Vilikovski even though I’m not ready for her yet. Rachel Vilikovski, the woman who comes with more adjectives than some languages, and she doesn’t even know it.

Hi.

So how are you?

Good. Fine. Just doing some renovating.

Really? I didn’t see you as much of a renovator.

No. It’s a problem. As a renovator, perhaps like many other things, I’m a theorist rather than a practitioner.

Why does that not surprise me?

Hey, where would we be without theorists? We’d all just do things. We’d all just make things happen. And what sort of a place would this be then?

So do you ever do anything, or do you always just think about it?

But thinking’s the best kind of doing, isn’t it? Once you carry anything through you really start to limit the possibilities. Anyway, I was just about to actually do some renovating and then I thought I’d call you instead.

That’s easy for you to say now.

No, I was. I’ve got friends who’ll back me up.

Friends? Friends who’ll back you up? You have a support crew?

And you don’t? Friday night you didn’t have a support crew? They didn’t seem like they were rushing to play on my team.

It’s good for you. You need toughening up. So what do your friends think? Now that you’ve all got together and worked this through, somewhere down behind the tuck shop after school. What’s the plan?

There’s no plan. I just have friends. Friends who asked what I did on Friday night, etcetera. And I might have said to them that I might be going to call you today.

No plan?

No plan.

So what were you going to say when you called me?

Okay. Well, I’d had an idea …

As distinct to a plan.

Exactly. An idea. It involved a movie, possibly Bullets over Broadway some night this week. Of course, you might have already seen Bullets over Broadway, in which case, this being merely an idea, that’s not a problem, and we could see something else. If you wanted to. And if you haven’t seen Bullets over Broadway, and you want to, we could see it. Maybe early-ish this week, since I might have work things on later.

Okay, okay. So when-ish? When-ish is early-ish?

Maybe, you know, maybe even Monday. Ish.

That’s tomorrow.

Well, some other time then.

Tomorrow’s fine.

Fine? Good. Well, maybe eight forty-five. There’s an eight forty-five session.

Have you got the paper open in front of you?

No. Yes. Well, not exactly in front of me, but I can see it from here. So I could see there was an eight forty-five session. I think it says eight forty-five. Let me just get closer and check.

Respectable pause. Sounds of movement.

Yeah, eight forty-five. I must have just left it open at that page, reading the reviews or something.

Yeah. Lucky.

Yeah. So, maybe we could meet for coffee before-hand. Maybe at the New Farm Deli.

Sure.

What? About eight o’clock?

Yeah. Good. Okay, well, I’ll see you there.

So she leaves me to get back to my not renovating. And trying to convince myself that that was all fine, that she knows me to be a sophisticated man who happened to have a newspaper near him when he needed it. And I trust she has an appreciation for the elegance, the slowness of it all.