He pulled up in front of her apartment and sat in his car trying to slow his breathing, waiting for his knees to stop shaking, but when it became clear that wasn’t going to happen, he gave up and rang her bell. When she opened the door and he saw her, Penn said, “Oh.”
It wasn’t that Rosie was so beautiful, though she was, that is, he thought she was, that is, he felt she was. He had to rely on this vague sense of what she looked like because he couldn’t see her. It was as if she were backlit, bright sun behind her preventing his eyes from adjusting so he could see her properly. Or it was as if he were fainting, the black bits at the sides folding his vision into smaller and smaller origami boxes. But it was none of those things. It was like when your car spins out on an icy road, and your senses turn up so high that time seems to slow because you notice everything, and you just sit in your spinning car waiting, waiting, to see if you’re going to die. He couldn’t look at her because every sense and every fraction of a moment and every atom of his body was being in love with her. It was weird.
Penn was getting an MFA, yes, but he was a fiction writer, not a poet, and he did not believe in love at first sight. He had also congratulated himself in the past for loving women for their minds and not their bodies. This woman had not yet spoken a word to him (though he assumed since she was a doctor that she was probably pretty smart), and he couldn’t get himself to concentrate on what she looked like, but he seemed to love her anyway. She was wearing—already—a hat, a scarf, and a four-inch-thick down parka that came all the way down to her boots. There was no way to fall in love with a woman just for her body in Wisconsin in January. He reminded himself though, still standing dumb in her doorway, that it wasn’t love at first sight. It seemed to have happened quite a bit before that. He seemed to have fallen in love about an hour and a half earlier on his sofa in the middle of “Canto V” before ever laying eyes on Rosie. How his body had known this, foreknown this, he never did figure out, but it was right—it was quite right—and very quickly, he stopped caring.
So at the restaurant, he was a little off his game. For one, he was distracted. For another, he knew. He had already decided. He was in—they could dispense with the small talk. So when Rosie, glowing, luminous, unpeeled from all her layers, lovely underneath, smiling shyly at him Rosie, said she was sorry he was an only child, that’s what he said first: it’s okay. Then a few seconds later, when his brain caught up, he added, “Wait. No. What? Why are you sorry I’m an only child?”
She blushed. He would have too, but his blood flow must already have been at capacity. “Sorry,” she said. “I always think … My sister, um … Weren’t you lonely?”
“Not really.”
“Because you were really close with your parents?”
“Not really that either.”
“Because you’re a writer? You like to be alone in the dark brooding by yourself deeply?”
“No!” He laughed. “Well, maybe. I don’t know. I don’t think I was brooding alone in the dark. But I don’t think I was lonely either. How about you? I take it you had brothers and sisters?”
Rosie’s glow clouded over, and Penn was immediately sorry all the way down to his toes. “I had one sister. She died when I was twelve and she was ten.”
“Oh Rosie, I’m sorry.” Penn knew he’d said the right thing that time.
She nodded at her roll. “Cancer. It sucks.”
He tried to think what to add, came up with nothing, reached for her hand instead. She grasped him like someone falling off something high. He gasped at the sudden sharp pain of it, but when she tried to ease off, embarrassed, he squeezed back harder. “What was her name?” he asked gently.
“Poppy.” Then she laughed, a little bit embarrassed. “Rosie. Poppy. Get it? My parents were into gardening. She’s lucky they didn’t name her Gladiola. Gladiola was totally on the table.”
“Is that why you think only-childhood is so sad?” He was glad to see her laughing again, but no one he’d ever met had treated the fact that he lacked siblings as a tragedy. “Because it was for you?”
“I guess.” She shrugged. “Maybe that’s why I like you already. We’re both only children.”
He tried to stay with her, but all he heard was she liked him already.
Later, much later, she said the same, that it was love pre first sight, that she’d walked around that whole morning and afternoon somehow knowing that this would be the last first date of her life. Whereas this had made him nervous as hell, it had made her calm. Whereas he’d felt impatient with the small talk, she knew they had all the time in the world. To the extent that time was guaranteed in the world. Which it was not.
Later, less later, Penn lay in his own bed, grinning at the ceiling in the dark. He tried to stop himself, he did, and he made fun of himself for doing it, but he couldn’t help it. He could not keep down, keep away, keep at bay what felt like a tiny seed of secret, certain knowledge, stable as a noble gas, glowing as gold: Poppy. My daughter will be named Poppy. Not a decision. A realization. Something that had long been true—since Rosie was twelve, half his lifetime ago—except he hadn’t known it yet.
Residency
Penn could never remember the name of the friend of the friend who knew a doctor who was interested in dating a poet. Maybe he never knew it. He could never remember the friend either, though he clearly owed her. Rosie was only just barely a doctor, as it turned out. She was in year one of an emergency medicine residency. She did not have the time to have a boyfriend. She did not have the brain space to have a boyfriend. Penn had not been aware that having a boyfriend took up brain space, but he could see how there were a great many facts, terms, drugs, treatments, protocols, and patient scenarios to memorize, none of them remotely familiar, all of them life-and-death important, and it was clear that this would be stressful.
“Then why did you want to date a poet?” he asked her when she explained that it wasn’t personal, she just didn’t have time for any boyfriend. If she were going to have a boyfriend, it would be him. But she wasn’t.
“I didn’t say I wanted to date a poet. I said one should date a poet. A theoretical one. A theoretical poet. Everyone in my program is hooking up with everyone else in my program, and then you’re dating some overcaffeinated, overextended, exhausted egomaniac who finally gets a day off and uses it to study. My point was date someone who sleeps instead, someone who thinks slowly and deeply and talks in words that don’t need to be memorized from flash cards. A poet. But I didn’t mean it. I don’t have the energy or the time. That’s why residents are always sleeping with each other. They’re the only ones who fit into each other’s schedules.”
“Then why did you say yes?” Penn asked.
“You sounded nice when you called.” Rosie shrugged. “And I was bored of doing patient charts.”
Penn was going to be irritated by this except that he recalled he only went out with her for writing material. Besides, this meant she was going to need wooing after all. He was delighted. Penn was a student of narrative and knew that lovers should be wooed, relationships fought for, that anything too easily won was soon lost or else not worth winning. He suspected she was worth winning. He was up for the challenge. It would—he’d been right all along—make for good writing fodder. She may have been studying the human heart. But so was he.