“Yes, I suppose he is,” she said draining her cocktail. “Let’s get another drink.”
I don’t think it’s possible to be with someone close in a maelstrom without weathering the same gale. This was the moment when the wormhole leading to Joe and Sophia’s parallel universe opened up next to us. Sipping my second cocktail I was already in an altered state.
The Roosevelt lounge is a facsimile version of a mid-town Manhattan bar, a lot like the old Algonquin Hotel on West 44th Street. Certainly the dim light and dark wood, the plush leather and the sprinkling of Cole Porter melodies are more about Breakfast at Tiffany’s than a bar in Kings Cross. While Jarrah would never be mistaken for Audrey Hepburn, in the soft light her slightly built frame and almond eyes made her even more beguiling than usual. After so many years of friendship she still has the ability to mesmerise me without warning, although I was careful to hide it. In the middle of a download about obsession, I didn’t want to risk the sting of sarcasm from the beautiful Dr Frankenstein.
“So tell me about this woman, what’s the big deal?” she asked, stirring her drink.
“It’s hard to describe really, but she does have a special presence.”
“She’s a minor deity?”
“She’s human, Jarrah, just unusual.”
“Unusual how? Does she glow in the dark?”
“Look, all I can tell you is that I’ve never met anyone like her before. She’s very beguiling.”
“And what does this beguiling alien do for a living?”
“She’s a violinist with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.”
“Oh I see, so she’s an obsessive compulsive?”
“You don’t know that.”
“I’ve had girlfriends in the SSO, believe me, I know.”
“Well, whatever the case, she’s an unusual woman and Joe is clearly obsessed. Other than that, I don’t know what to say.”
“Why doesn’t he just ask her out?”
“We’ve been through this – he’s worried that he might seem like a predator.”
This was too much for Jarrah. She laughed, wiping away tears. “Who is she, Little Red Riding Hood? I don’t know why we’re even talking about this.”
“I’ve got better things to do, believe me.”
“It’s ridiculous. Joe is thirty-eight years old and I presume this woman’s not a child.”
“No, definitely an adult.”
“Well, if I was you, Tim, I’d just leave them to get on with it. Or not get on with it, whatever.”
“But that’s my point, Joe can’t. Maybe he’s gone a little crazy after all.”
“Oh for God’s sake, tell him to get over himself.”
“It would be better coming from you.”
She looked at me over her martini and took another long sip. I knew she would have liked to end the conversation. Yet at the same time she knew me well enough to understand that I wouldn’t be asking for help unless I thought it was necessary.
“You know that Joe’s likely to go off the alien as quickly as he went on?” she said.
“They’d need to talk to each other properly first.”
“So I arrange for them to meet.”
“How?”
“Use your imagination, Tim.”
“The Sydney Symphony?”
“Duh. We go to a concert and afterwards the girls I know will ask us back to the green room for a drink. We’re there, Joe’s there, the alien’s there, and that’s that.”
“Will it work?”
“I’m a psychiatrist, Tim, not a dating site.”
“But you are a psychiatrist who goes on dates.”
“Hilarious. And four years of medicine and five years of psychiatry will never give me the skills to manage a deluded lover or, for that matter, an idiot twin.”
9
That week the love gods smiled. Stardust was in the air. Aphrodite and Eros had a logistics meeting and tweaked the cosmic algorithm for Sophia and Joe. It was surely the gods who made me buy Jarrah a cocktail a few days before the Sydney Symphony Orchestra launched its season of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade.
When I told Joe my cosmic theory he yelped. “Sophia playing Scheherazade? Fantastic! The Enchantress of a Thousand and One Nights.”
I don’t remember everything he said as he surged towards the Opera House for his date with Scheherazade, but I know he was adamant that the ferries scudding in and out of Circular Quay were like fireflies floating on honey. From the Botanic Gardens he noted intoxicating jasmine scent billowing on a zephyr-breeze.
It was a lovely night, no question, although it would have been nice to be in it without Joe’s live commentary. The bars along the Opera House walk, he explained, were fields showered in stardust with beautiful courting gods and angels playing for their future lives. Under the waxing moon the giant sails of the Opera House were the wings of a giant pleasure machine.
“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan,” Joe puffed as he advanced before us.
“A stately pleasure-dome decree;
“Where Alph, the sacred river, ran,
“Through caverns measureless to man
“Down to a sunless sea.”
“Oh for God’s sake!” Jarrah yelled at his back.
“Just setting the mood.”
“It’s set already, like blancmange.”
“It’s enchantment.”
“We get it, Joe, just shut up for a while, okay,” she pleaded.
“But you do know what Scheherazade means?”
“You know we don’t.”
“Scheherazade means ‘The person whose realm is free’. Isn’t that amazing?”
When he turned with a grin, I could practically see the capillaries in his eyes pulsing with stardust. “She’s a free woman, the mistress of her domain,” he added breathlessly. “She can be whoever she wants to be.”
All three of us had gone to some trouble for Sophia, whom Joe seemed to have conflated with the Persian princess. It was Jarrah and Joe who introduced me, a tee-shirt wearing surfer, to the unheard-of idea of dressing for pleasure. Jarrah was in a 1950s red silk Jacques Heim dress with a flared pleated skirt and red shoes, and Joe was in a Tom Ford-inspired charcoal bespoke suit with white shirt and silver tie.
At just over 65 kilos, Joe’s muscular welterweight body makes him an ideal model. Jarrah’s delicate frame does the same. Plodding along in their company, I felt like an expensively dressed giraffe.
All around us, citizens of a certain age were edging carefully up the steps to the Concert Hall, but Joe covered the ground in a series of bounds. When he reached the top, he spun around, grinning with very white teeth under flashing dark eyes. He spread his feet and punched the air with a left-right left-right boxing flurry. Pashmina-cloaked ladies flinched and an ancient gentleman in a cream fedora raised his cane.
When we finally slid towards our seats in the centre of the tenth row of the stalls, I feared the worst. It wasn’t just that my classical music experience began