Q: A Novel (10 page)

The press consists
of two people. The first is a gentleman wearing a flannel shirt two sizes too big and a pair of unfastened tweed pants two sizes too small. He is sporting a fedora into which has been inserted a white index card bearing the handwritten word “Press.” My best guess is that he is homeless. The second attendee is Stu Kurtzman, restaurant critic for NY1, the local television station. Kurtzman raises his hand. Ina Levenson recognizes him.

“Where is the food?” he asks.

Ina says, “There is no food, though there is a knish cart on the corner of Broadway and Church.”

“I was told there would be food.”

Ethel Lipschutz leans forward and whispers in Ina’s ear, consigliere style. She confesses that in her zeal to attract press, she may have misled Kurtzman about the nature of the event. Levenson accepts the news solemnly.

“You were given erroneous information,” Ina tells Kurtzman.

“Specifically I was told this was going to be a jambalaya jamboree.”

“No, this is a march in support of community gardening.”

“I became worried when I failed to see okra represented among your membership. It is disappointing. I quite like jambalaya.”

“I am sorry to let you down.”

“I’ll be going now.”

“I wish you would stay. This is a very important cause.”

“I am sure it is.”

“If you are hungry, I do recommend the knishes. We can send someone to get one for you.”

“No, thank you,” he says, packing his camera. “Knishes do not agree with me. And, besides, I had my heart set on jambalaya.”

Attention now focuses
on the sole remaining representative of the press, the gentleman with the flannel shirt and suspect credential. He raises his hand, and Ina Levenson points at him ceremoniously.

“Herman Louis,
Street News
,” he says.

“Mr. Louis.”

“Where did you get the rat?”

Ethel Lipschutz whispers the answer to Ina. “Kramer’s Inflatable Hatables, Chicago, Illinois.”

“How big is the rat?”

“The rat really isn’t the point of this press conference. We are here today to talk about corporate greed and to demand that the mayor step in and protect a community garden that is one of the hidden treasures of our city.”

“All the same, I’d like to know how big the rat is.”

Ina turns to Ethel Lipschutz who again whispers the answer.

“Twelve feet,” Ina announces. “The rat is twelve feet tall.”

“I have another question about the rat.”

“Yes.” Ina is peeved.

“Was the rat made with union labor?”

Ina turns to Ethel once again, but she does not know the answer to this one. Ethel turns to Q, who turns to me. I shrug my shoulders, and the group shoots a series of dirty looks in my direction. The dirtiest comes from Jill Nordberg. My inability to answer this question conclusively confirms everything she ever believed about me.

“We don’t know,” Ina Levenson announces. “We don’t know anything about the genesis of the rat.”

“It should have a sticker if it is union made,” Mr. Louis says.

Ethel Lipschutz walks over to the rat and begins a search. Unbeknown to her, one of her long, ragged nails pierces the shell.

“Do you not support the use of union labor?” asks Herman Louis.

Ina Levenson attempts to deflect the question and buy Lipschutz some time. “Of course we support unions and the use of union labor,” she says. “But we are here today to protest the failure of the government to stop the relentless progress of corporate greed. We are here to preserve the integrity of neighborhoods and maintain the connection of urban dwellers to the land upon which they rely. We are here to defend the institution of community gardening. The rat should not be the focus of our discussion.”

Sadly, this becomes impossible, as the rat begins to deflate.

Needless to say, the timing is inconvenient.

It is a slow leak
at first, and not immediately recognizable. It begins as a high-pitched squeal, near the dogs-only end of the register, almost imperceptible. Some heads turn to the sky in apparent fear of an aerial attack from a Messerschmitt bomber or a flight of mutated birds. Some look downward, for snakes. Others look behind the shrubs for concealed explosives. The enemy is everywhere.

As the hole widens and the flow of air increases, it becomes clearly identifiable as an air leak. Jill Nordberg is the first to put two and two together.

“It’s the rat!” she cries. “The asshole bought a cheap rat!”

Ina Levenson quickly processes the situation. “Get out of there, Ethel!” she screams. “For God’s sake, while there’s still time!”

Ethel moves as quickly as she can, but is encumbered by her zucchini costume. Her legs protrude only six inches beneath the fleshy meat of the fruit. Hence she is confined to an awkward waddle. The evacuation of helium is accelerating, surprisingly quickly, and it is clear that Lipschutz’s tedious shuffle will not get her out of danger in time. Sizing up the situation, I race to her aid. Ignoring her cries of protest, I topple her to the ground, orient her along the longitudinal axis, and rapidly roll her out of danger.

As fate has it, though, the wind changes direction, as it often does in City Hall Park, and the rat, now nearly spent and unrecognizable, falls on an unforeseen trajectory toward eighty-eight-year-old Art Vance, who has been forgotten in all the commotion.

“Art! Look out!” screams Ina Levenson, but it is too late. He has been consumed. Underneath the limp, wilted rodent, there are signs of struggle and muffled cries for aid. We begin a poorly coordinated extraction, a coterie of gourds and legumes pulling this way and that. Somehow it works, and Art Vance emerges, relatively intact. What remains of his hair is wildly unkempt, and his pince-nez has fallen down the bridge of his nose, but he could still pass for a respectable rutabaga. Ethel and Jill give Art a hand up, help him out of his costume, and Ethel helps him put on his blue blazer over the “Abzug for Mayor ’77” T-shirt he is wearing.

“Such a day, such a day,” he says.

“Such a day, such a day,” she says.

After a few minutes,
order is restored. The carcass of the rat is compacted and discarded. The portable microphone is sheathed. Costumes are collected and reboxed. The group disperses, the enthusiasm for the day, if not the cause, spent on the long march and subsequent aversion of disaster. Art Vance is placed in a cab.

“Such a day, such a day,” he says. I think it is the only thing he ever says.

Other farewells are exchanged. Ina Levenson thanks everyone for their time. Ethel Lipschutz does the same. Hugs are offered as well as vague plans for future gatherings to “regroup” and “restrategize.” I stand off to the side, removed from the scene and out of the way of the further dirty looks that are cast in my general direction.

Q and I hail a cab and head uptown.

“Thanks for coming,” she says. “It wasn’t fair for them to blame you for the rat. They could just as easily have checked them-
selves. Besides, you were doing them a favor in the first place.”

I can see the absolution is sincere. Q is too nuanced in her view of the world to ever blame a single person for a series of events. Even if she were so inclined, she trusts my good intentions. It speaks volumes about her that she has offered this assurance, that she is sensitive to my needs even in this difficult moment. Because I can see too that she is despondent about what has transpired.

“Thanks,” I say. “I’m sorry it didn’t go better.”

Q says nothing, and we spend the remainder of the taxi ride in silence.

At home, Q
and I mindlessly turn on NY1 and find to our surprise, and ultimately our chagrin, that the march is being covered on television. Unfortunately, it is being shown as a blooper cut at the top of the hour, before traffic and weather together on the ones.

The announcer says, “On his way to a jambalaya jamboree, our food critic Stu Kurtzman caught this footage of a protest at City Hall gone horribly wrong. The demonstrators, organic gardeners dressed in vegetable costumes, had one heckuva time with an inflatable rat, as you’ll see.” Then he shows the footage. Then he smiles and says, “Gives new meaning to getting squashed.” Then the station cuts to a commercial for an abdominal exerciser. It seems like a good product, the sort of thing that should work but, I presume, does not, or everyone would have washboard abs.

Q watches in silence, turns off the television, and says, “It’s over.”

“No,” I say. “There are still other things to be tried.”

“No,” she says. “It’s over. The garden is finished.”

I love her all the more for this. Because it’s true, the garden is kaput. Whatever tiny chance the group had of succeeding politically was premised upon the march making a major impression on City Hall. If they had gotten the right sort of media coverage, gotten the attention of the mayor, attracted widespread sympathy from other left-wing causes, perhaps they could have pulled it off, though even in this scenario success would have been a long shot. The way things went down trivialized their cause and made them look like crackpots. No politician will pay attention to them now. They will be pariahs, laughingstocks.

Amazingly, Q can see this reality even though she has the deepest possible emotional connection to the cause. This sober detachment is yet another admirable, alluring quality. It is a large part of what makes her a wonderful partner. But Q’s honest assessment of the situation does not include acceptance. To the contrary, she is despondent. Q mopes through the days, saying very little. At first she goes to the garden at the crack of dawn, as always, but returns too early, suggesting she is spending less and less time on her chores. I envision the garden, its demise impending, slowly deteriorating. Soon she skips days. She begins watching daytime television. One day I find a catalog for graduate school in the mail.

It gets worse before it gets better. One Sunday morning she goes to the grocery store, buys three dozen Stouffer’s frozen dinners, and does not leave the apartment again for more than two weeks. Many days she does not get out of her pajamas. She begins to smell and take
The Price Is Right
seriously. It is nothing less than utter devastation. As I watch her mope through those painful weeks of the late fall, eating macaroni and cheese and guessing on the Showcase Showdown, I cannot help but imagine what a real tragedy would do to her. Thus, in these days of her mourning, it gradually becomes painfully clear to me what I must do.

Chapter Ten

O
n the last Wednesday of November, Q drags herself out of bed and we travel to the Berkshires to spend Thanksgiving with her mother and father. She is still not herself, but the prospect of seeing her parents has buoyed her spirits, and each of us, for our own reasons, is happy to get out of the city.

We take the Taconic. Q doesn’t like the winding parts of the parkway in Putnam and Dutchess counties, particularly in the late afternoon when it can be difficult to see. She prefers to take the Saw Mill to 684 and then go up by Route 44 through Amenia and Pawley. This is the safer route, but I argue the payoff on the Taconic will be worth it, and Q goes along. This is an olive branch of sorts. She has not been mean to me in any way, but she recognizes that the past few weeks have been difficult on both of us. My private grieving has not helped.

I know what I am talking about, choosing this route. When the road straightens out, past Fahnestock, Q and I are rewarded with a cavalcade of color. The leaves have fallen from the trees, but not yet lost their vibrancy. The ground is awash in red and yellow and orange. A family of deer feeds by the side of the road. The fawns are four months old, maybe five. They huddle close to their mother as they nuzzle through the leaves in search of the most desirable grass. I shift into the right-hand lane and slow the car to enjoy the show. Q rolls down her window and watches with rapt attention. When the herd has receded into the distance, Q rolls up her window, turns to me, and says, “This was a good choice.”

I speed up, but not too much.

A Natalie Merchant CD
is playing. Q leans toward folksy female rockers such as Aimee Mann and Sarah McLachlan, and Liz Phair before she sold out, in Q’s view. Merchant is her favorite, even though she hasn’t produced an album in several years. I like her too. It’s the sort of music that makes one pensive and dreamy. “Life Is Sweet” in the background and the rolling countryside relax me, too much perhaps, and I introduce a topic that might be better left unexplored. At the very least it could be left for a later day when Q has more fully recovered, but it’s on my mind and it spills out.

“If you were going to die, would you want to know?”

“I know I am going to die.” This is classic Q.

“I don’t mean that. I mean if you could know how you were going to die, would you want to know?”

“I know how I am going to die,” Q says. “I am going to die of old age, in your arms, and then ten minutes later you are going to die the same way.”

“I’m being serious.”

Q looks me over carefully and sees this is in fact true.

“Wow,” she says. “You are being serious. What got this in your head?”

I lie. “I was just reading an article about privacy and genetic profiling. The question is, if someone decoded the genome of, say, Russell Crowe, would he have the right to keep this private or could a company post it on the Internet?”

“It belongs to him, doesn’t it?”

“Not any more than his appearance does. It’s one thing if someone sells Russell Crowe’s genetic code for profit. But one cannot have a privacy interest in a sequence of nucleotides any more than Jennifer Aniston can keep someone from copying her hairstyle.”

Natalie Merchant starts humming “Kind and Generous.”

“This sounds very science fictiony,” Q says, which is a shorthand way of telling me to be quiet.

Q does not
share my interest in science fiction. It’s one of the few tensions between us. Q doesn’t deal in hypotheticals, what-ifs, regrets, second guesses, or conjectures. She is a practical sort, in this sense very much her father’s daughter. John Deveril built his construction business from the ground up. He began working as a bricklayer the summer after eighth grade, left high school to start building homes full-time, then moved on to office buildings and skyscrapers. John Deveril believed in hard work, rib-eye steaks, and never making excuses. Though his daughter grew up with the trappings of luxury, and is firmly situated in postmodernity, she shares her patriarch’s basic values. She is a gardener, after all. One who fertilizes her soil with alfalfa meal, composts household waste, and drives predatory insects away with pheromone lures, but a gardener all the same—living proof that being a tree-hugger and a Calvinist are not mutually exclusive.

Unfortunately, this approach doesn’t leave much time for flights of fancy, whether it be Derrida or science fiction. I try, unsuccessfully, to turn Q on to
The Twilight Zone
. I show her one of my favorite episodes, “The Long Morrow.” The premise is that astronaut Douglas Stansfield, played by Robert Lansing, falls in love with Sandra Horn, played by a radiant Mariette Hartley, just before he is about to leave on a forty-year-long deep-space mission. The plan is for Captain Stansfield to spend almost the entirety of the trip in suspended animation. Love-struck, Stansfield cannot bear the thought of returning to Earth as a young man. Horn will have aged normally during his journey, and Stansfield believes the resulting age difference will make their relationship impractical. So, in a dramatic act of devotion, Captain Stansfield disables his suspended animation chamber so that he will age normally during his voyage. When he returns to Earth, after having spent forty years doing nothing, he learns to his dismay that Horn, in her own act of zealous passion, placed herself in suspended animation. When the old and wrinkled Stansfield emerges from the spaceship, he finds Sandra Horn waiting for him, as young and pulchritudinous as she was on the day he left for space. Sadly, she is no longer interested.

“Isn’t that wonderful,” I say at the end of the show. “The episode only hints at the full extent of the sacrifice Captain Stansfield made. Since he did not expect to be awake for much of the journey, he probably didn’t pack much to eat. He would have had to ration out his food wafers and water to last for forty years. And he almost certainly had no reading material. He just thought about her for four decades. How romantic is that?”

“It’s okay,” Q says, matter-of-factly, “but they should have talked beforehand.”

“What do you mean?”

“He could have just said to her, ‘I’m thinking of taking myself out of suspended animation,’ and then she could have just said, ‘That’s silly. I’ll just put myself in suspended animation.’ Problem solved, star-crossed lovers’ disaster averted.”

“Well, suppose they didn’t have time to talk. Suppose he had to leave in a hurry.”

“You mean it was one of those last-minute forty-year space flights?”

“Just suppose.”

“Well, then, he shouldn’t have taken himself out of suspended animation. If she didn’t think to do it herself, then he could have put her into suspended animation when he got back, lived out forty years, and then they’d be the same age. This way he could have done his waiting on Earth instead of in a metal box with nothing to read.”

Hers is a very sensible solution, though it would not have made much of a story. “So it’s that simple,” I say.

“Just a matter of common sense,” Q says.

This is the last time we watch science fiction. It is not much of a problem since we have lots of other common ground. We both like sitcoms and political dramas and action movies. Q will even indulge me and watch a poker show on occasion. She doesn’t understand the strategy, but she has strong feelings about the morality of the players. In Q’s view, it is ethical to lie, but unethical to lie about lying. She thus accepts bluffing as a legitimate part of the game, but not the posturing misrepresentations that occur during the denouement of a hand. Daniel Negreanu is her favorite player because he is honest by her peculiar definition, and also a vegan, a Democrat, and a fine dresser. This is a winning trifecta in Q’s book. I like him too, and all in all, we have a happy television life.

One notable exception surrounds the fourth-season finale of
Battlestar Galactica
, just as the humans and Cylons, joined temporarily in a tenuous alliance, are about to reach Earth. I look forward to it for weeks but am crestfallen when, on the morning of the big day, Q tells me she is looking forward to watching a special anniversary rebroadcast of the finale of
Brideshead Revisited
that evening. We have only one television, and I explain the dilemma. Q says it is not a dilemma. She happily reports that she has purchased a special attachment to our DVR, which will allow us to watch one program while taping the other. We can thus watch
Brideshead
while it’s on, and I can watch
Battlestar
later in the evening. It is a reasonable resolution, but I am disappointed at not being able to watch the program live.

I wonder why
we like watching things live. Any devoted television watcher will tell you that watching something on tape or DVR just isn’t the same as watching when it airs. Live, we can’t know what commercials are coming or skip past them if we have seen them before. We are open to the unbidden.

Of course, television is not live in any meaningful sense. The shows have all been recorded weeks ahead of time. The same is true for the commercials. And it is not as if a DJ is cueing them up; the order has been prearranged. Even “live” television is not live. Live sports are delayed by a few seconds, lest the commentators say something imprudent. Even if you get the direct feed, what you see is delayed by the time it takes for the images to beam up to the satellite and back.

Yet the commentators all speak in the present tense, though they know that by the time you’re watching the program everything they are describing will be in the past. They even do this when describing things they themselves are seeing on tape. Take, for example, the poker programs, of which I am so fond. Poker tournaments can take days or weeks. After a tournament ends, the producers find the thirty or forty most interesting hands and edit them down into a two-hour show. The commentators then add voice-over to explain the action. These commentators are watching the hands on tape. Everyone knows they are watching the hands on tape. The tournaments are broadcast weeks or months after they are finished, and the results are all public. Yet the announcers describe the action as if it is happening live: “Daniel Negreanu hits an ace on the river!”

I wonder about this aversion to past tense and the past in general. Why has it become so passé?

In the car,
I continue to press Q. I ask, “If it were cancer or ALS, would you want to know?”

“Could I do anything about it?”

“Not if it’s ALS.”

“What about the cancer? If it were detected early, would it make a difference? Because if it would make a difference, then I would obviously want to know.”

“No, it’s terminal. Otherwise there wouldn’t be a dilemma.”

“Why does there have to be a dilemma?”

“There doesn’t have to be a dilemma,” I say. “It just isn’t interesting to discuss unless there is a dilemma.”

“It seems silly to go out of one’s way to turn an easy situation into a difficult one.”

“All the same, suppose it were an incurable cancer. Suppose someone tells you that you’re going to die on this or that day from a certain type of cancer, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Would you want to know?”

“So the entire benefit is that I know when and how I’m going to die.”

“Right.”

“But there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“Right.”

“Well, then, no, I wouldn’t want to know.”

I’m incredulous. “How can you say this so easily?” I ask. “Think of all the advantages of foreknowledge. You could put your affairs in order. You could make sure to do something you always wanted to do. You could make peace with your friends and family.”

“You asked me my opinion,” Q says flatly.

I have more to say, but before I can get out more of my litany of reasons why one must answer my hypothetical affirmatively, Q turns the music up, making it clear that the conversation has ended. Merchant is singing “The Gulf of Araby.” I know better than to talk during “The Gulf of Araby.”

By the end of the song
the conflict has passed. With Q, there is no interpersonal drama. She does not require apologies or cooling-off periods or the reconstruction of events. Something happens, it ends, life resumes. Closely related to her rationality, it is her most appealing and enviable quality.

“My mother is experimenting with a new stuffing this year,” she says, signaling that she has moved on.

“What’s in it?”

“She says it contains andouille sausage, oysters, onions, chanterelle mushrooms, and apples in a white roux.”

Q’s mother is an accomplished and adventuresome chef and insists on making Thanksgiving by herself each year for a dozen or so friends and family. She does not need to; the Deverils have more than ample help. One could question Q’s mother’s motivations in doing this. It may be that she simply likes to cook. I believe it is the only socially acceptable context in which Joan Deveril can assert her personality against the relentless, uncompromising force that is her husband. Whatever her impetus may be, Joan’s results are beyond reproach. I anticipate the meal for weeks and dream about it for months after. It is the one day a year Q abandons vegetarianism. Joan’s Thanksgiving meals are more than any human being can resist.

“That sounds exquisite, and you know no one is a bigger fan of your mother’s cooking than I am, but even I have my reservations about stuffing meat with meat.”

Q nods. “How much longer do you think it will be?” she asks.

I look for a sign. We’re near Lafayetteville.

“About an hour and a half.”

“Then I’ll need to go to the bathroom.”

The Taconic doesn’t have any rest stops, so this means we’ll have to get off the highway and drive a bit. I consider a nearby McDonald’s, which we have been to before, but then I have a better idea. We’re about a twenty-minute drive from one of Q’s favorite towns. It has antique shops, small bookstores, and, on Sundays, a farmer’s market. It would be just the thing to further buoy Q’s spirits.

“Are we in a rush to get to your parents’?”

“Not really.”