Blue Rose In Chelsea by Adriana Devoy Page A

sincerity!”  I shuffle closer to the storefronts, to garner more reliable shelter from the overhang of awnings.
         He guffaws, seeming to delight in the debate.  “You see, in the Old World, we accept our fate.  You Americans are constantly battling yours.”
         “In America we make our own fate.”  I hug the Dreamcoat about me, wondering where Careen got the notion that he was whimsical.
         “Ah, there it is again.  Very American.”  He grins.
         “What?”  I am irritated that he views my thoughts as not being my own, but rather part of some cultural group-think.
         “You Americans are all so cheerful, so optimistic, you think you can change the world.”
         “We do change the world.  You’d be speaking German if it wasn’t for us.”
         “Oh, yes, I suppose the Battle of Britain was all just smoke and mirrors!”
         He laughs interminably at his own joke, as if there was no end to the amusement he can squeeze out of his comeback.  The city swirls around us, a cyclone of color and movement.  I’m driven to some comfort food.  I stop for a salted pretzel at a vendor.  The pretzel has annexed the scent of its sister-food, roasted chestnuts, and I inhale the salty creation like smelling salts.  Warm dough is apparently beneath David, as he wrinkles his nose when I break off a piece and offer it to him.
         “We look at it a bit differently.  The English like to think we did all the difficult work, and America showed up at the end to claim the glory.”  He seems to have toned down his opinions, perhaps because I’ve taken to trying to outdistance him, as if he were a stalker.
         “The Battle of Britain was impressive.  I’ll give you that,” I call over my shoulder, crunching salt.
         “Thank you.  I believe the Queen would agree,” he says, with a mischievous smirk and spin of his brollie.
         For some inexplicable reason, he seems to want to extend the date, and so we head downtown.  Despite his prim clothing—navy slacks and black leather shoes that are so worn one wonders if he was born with them welded to his feet, and his tweed blazer with the dark patches over the elbows—he has a certain boyish awkwardness that is refreshing, and a laugh like a snorting horse that is a welcome reprieve from his serious nature.
         “Are you going to show me the sights?”
         “The sights?” I say wearily.  “Which sights?”
         He ticks off names of The Statue of Liberty, The Empire State Building, The Museum of Natural History.
         “Those are the sort of places New Yorkers visit on school trips when they are ten years old, and then never visit again.”
         “Unless, of course, they have good cause?”
         “I’m not a tour guide.  Get yourself a Fodor’s.”  I add a softer, “we’ll see.”
         David remarks that the city is not at all what he expected, that in Europe they imagine it to be some Emerald City, the streets paved with gold, the buildings cast in silver.  No one in his family has ever been to The States.  This distinguishes him from among them as a bit of an adventurer, a role he relishes, though never envisioned.  David secures a promise from me that I will accompany him to the top of the Empire State Building one day.  He harps on the subject of my fear of elevators, which only brings Evan to mind, and his easy acceptance of my fears.
         “It all looks so temporary, as if everything could be torn down at any moment,” he remarks of some of the slipshod storefronts.
         “We’re a young country.”  I sigh.  Defending my culture is becoming tedious.  I ask him about his work.  He attempts to explain the difference between a theoretical physicist and an experimental physicist.
         “So, you think up the ideas, and the experimental physicists are stuck with the plebian task of having to implement a lot of