Her search was rewarded by the discovery of a very blond young man with pale blue eyes, who, on the other side of Washington's statue, appeared to be dissembling himself in front of the statue pedestal's text. Rosemary's eye brightened, and a faint smile relaxed the drawn lines of her mouth. She had known that Mr. Jack Brannigan was to be at Federal Hall, but she had not counted on the luck of having him to herself for the afternoon; and the fact banished all perturbing thoughts of her employers. Perhaps, after all, the day was to end more favorably than it had begun.
She began to gravitate toward some Japanese tourists, tranquilly studying her prey through downcast lashes while she organized a method of attack. Something in his attitude of conscious absorption told her that he was aware of her presence: no one had ever been quite so engrossed in a faded engraving! She guessed that he was too shy to come up to her, and that she would have to devise some means of approach which should not appear to be an advance on her part. It amused her to think that any one as handsome as Mr. Jack Brannigan should be shy; but she was gifted with treasures of indulgence for such idiosyncrasies, and besides, his timidity might serve her purpose better than too much assurance. She had the art of giving self-confidence to the embarrassed, but she was not equally sure of being able to embarrass the self-confident.
She waited till the tourists had caught sight of her and determined that she would be most likely to humor their query. Then, as she offered her erroneous answer to the question of which building it was that King Kong was climbing in the movie, she slowly led the crowd within meters of her target. As Jack approached mouthing an objection, the circle of tourists pressed Rosemary towards him, and he was aware of a slender hand brushing the back of his arm. He stopped dead in his tracks, his ingenuous face looking as though it had been dipped in crimson: even the roots of his platinum blond hair seemed to redden. The circle surged again, almost flinging Rosemary into his arms.
She steadied herself with a laugh and drew back; but he was enveloped in the scent of her jacket, and his shoulder had felt her fugitive touch.
"I'm so sorry; were you saying something?"
She held out her hand as the circle finally managed to accommodate him, and they stood exchanging a few words amid the crowd. Yes-—he just said it was the Empire State Building. The Chrysler building was in Godzilla-he blushed again as he asserted himself. Godzilla? Couldn't be!
But at this point one or two tourists tried to interrupt the conversation with questions about the buildings' location, and Rosemary had to intensify the argument.
"The Chrysler Building's Art Deco crown best represents the industrialized human civilization that's contrasted with King Kong throughout the movie," she said over the tourists; and Jack, with considerable embarrassment, succeeded in articulating that while he did not know anything about Art Deco, he was quite certain that Kong had climbed the Empire State.
"Ah—well the tourists just got tired of us, so perhaps we can go to the Skyscraper Museum to settle this."
She gestured to the vacated space around them, and in a moment, with the ease that seemed to attend the fulfillment of all her wishes, they had set off for Battery Park City, and she was lecturing him on the finer points of Manhattan architecture.
As they passed each skyscraper he watched her in silent fascination while her hands flitted above their heads, looking miraculously fine and slender in contrast to the boxy buildings' towering bulk. It seemed wonderful to him that anyone should perform with such careless ease the difficult task of playing Lower Manhattan tour guide while maintaining a coherent argument. He would never have dared to explore downtown himself, lest he should find himself exposed to novel experiences well outside his comfort zone; but, secure in the shelter of her guidance, he gazed up at the otherwise nondescript skyscrapers with a delicious sense of exhilaration.
Rosemary, with the iconic skyline of midtown Manhattan on her mind, had no great fancy to group it with the current cookie-cutter towers which seemed such marvels to her companion; but, rightly judging that one of the charms of architecture is the fact of observing it together, she proceeded to give the last touch to Jack's enjoyment by smiling at him across her lifted hand.
"Do you get it now-why King Kong had to have climbed the Chrysler Building?" she asked solicitously; and he replied with conviction that he had never been more convinced otherwise.
"At least you're consistent," she reflected; and her imagination was fired by the thought that Jack, who might have sounded the depths of the most complex self-indulgence, was perhaps actually taking his first journey alone with a pretty woman.
It struck her as providential that she should be the instrument of his initiation. Some girls would not have known how to manage him. They would have over-emphasized the novelty of the adventure, trying to make him feel in it the zest of an escapade. But Rosemary's methods were more delicate. She remembered that her preliminary notetaking had defined Jack as the young man who would promise his commanding officer never to go out in the rain without first completing the simulation for it; and acting on this hint, she resolved to impart a gently rehearsed air to the scene, in the hope that her companion, instead of feeling that he was doing something reckless or unusual, would merely be led to dwell on the advantage of always having a companion to schedule more mundane activities into the predictable routine of his life.
But in spite of her efforts, conversation flagged after the museum was found to be closed, and she was driven to take a fresh measurement of Jack's limitations once they parted ways.