Q: A Novel (4 page)

Chapter Three

I
order a porcini mushroom tart as a starter and black sea bass with Sicilian pistachio crust, wilted spinach, and pistachio oil. Older me asks for a bowl of soup and a lemonade. The waiter sneers. I am annoyed myself.

“Is that all you’re going to order?” I ask after the waiter leaves.

“Time travel doesn’t agree with the appetite.”

“Why did we come here then?”

“Restaurants come and go,” older me says, “and I have not lived in New York for many years. This is one of the few places I remembered with confidence.”

“A lemonade goes for six bucks here,” I say.

“In my time that would be a bargain.”

“Everything is relative, I suppose.”

Older me nods.

“When does time travel become possible?”

“In twenty years or so from now,” he says. “It is quite some time after that before it becomes accessible to the public, and even then it is very expensive.”

“How does it work?”

“I have no idea. You just go into a big box and walk out in a different time.”

“How do you get back?”

“You carry this thing with you. It’s like an amulet.”

Older me takes the object out of his pocket and shows me. It resembles a heart-shaped locket.

“When you want to go home, you go back to the place where you arrived. The time travel device senses the amulet and returns you to your own time. It’s as simple as that.”

“But how does it work?”

“What do you mean?”

“How does it actually work? Upon what principle does it operate?”

Older me raises his eyebrow. “Do I have some background in physics about which I have forgotten?”

“No,” I say. “I just don’t think it’s a good idea to get into a time machine without some basic understanding of how it works.”

“Well, I’m here, aren’t I? That suggests that it does work.”

“Is it enough to know that it works without knowing how?”

“Isn’t it?”

“I don’t know. It just doesn’t seem very prudent.”

“Is it really any different,” older me asks, “than getting in an airplane?”

This point is fair enough.
I fly in airplanes all the time without any idea how they work. I mean, I have seen birds fly and I have held my hand out the window while driving on a highway and felt the lift when I arch it upward and the drag when I point it downward. This is called Bernoulli’s principle. But I could never derive Bernoulli’s principle on my own. Nor could I build a mechanical wing or a jet propulsion engine. Even if someone built a jet propulsion engine for me, I could not operate it, not to save my life. That I get in an airplane and emerge in San Francisco or Sydney or wherever is, from my standpoint, a miracle.

I have thought many times about how utterly dependent I am on things that are complete mysteries to me. I routinely use cars, airplanes, and computers without any idea how they work. I suppose I could do without them. But I could not do without water and I don’t know how to get that either. I perhaps could dig a well, but it would be luck whether I dug it in the right place, and, frankly, I am not confident that I could get the water up if I were fortunate enough to find it. I suppose that in a pinch I could grow some beets. The miraculous services society provides to me—food, clean water, electric lights—are the very opposite of coat checks and valet parking.

The human mind is itself a miraculous machine. I am writing right now, but I have no idea how this is happening. I know that my brain is composed of a cerebrum, a cerebellum, and a medulla oblongata, but these are just words. I know that electrical impulses are involved somehow, but that is about the extent of my understanding of the mechanics. And while I at least have an intuition as to how an airplane works, I really have none with respect to my brain. Frankly, lots of what appears on my computer screen is as much a surprise to me as it is to you. I certainly never expected over my oatmeal and English muffin this morning to be writing about Bernoulli’s principle today. For that matter, I have no idea why I like English muffins. But I do.

Older me says,
“This place is nicer than I remember.”

“That’s because the last time we sat next to the bathroom.”

“That’s right,” he says. “The damn reservationist. Have you taken Q here yet?”

“No.”

“She would love the porcini mushroom tart.”

“Of course. It is her favorite.”

“How is Mom?”

“She’s great,” I say.

“Please tell her that I say hello and send my love.”

This request makes me worry about my mother. I do not know precisely how much older this me with whom I am having dinner is, but he has at least twenty-five years on me, I expect. I want to know that my mother is safe and happy, but I sense something ominous in his voice. It also could be nothing. The fact is that I am a worrier.

I worry about all sorts of things—some regarding me and many not. With respect to me, I worry, for example, that when I finally have the money to buy a hybrid car the waiting list will be years long or that hybrids will have gone the way of the wonderful electric car. I worry too about whether Indian families are contaminating the Ganges River by setting their dead afloat upon it, whether Brazil will cut down what is left of the Amazon rain forest, and whether Bill Gates will ever be able to get roads built in Africa. I worry about antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis, Asian long-horned beetles, and global warming. And, of course, I worry about my mother.

I do not know why
I am a worrier any more than I know why I like English muffins. Many people don’t worry about anything. Q has the ideal balance, and only worries about truly important matters, like her family and preserving magical urban gardens.

I expect that the reason I worry about so many things has much to do with the reasons why I write. The essential quality of a writer is empathy. It is the ability to view a situation from the standpoint of another living creature and to feel what it would feel. This is also the essential quality of a worrier. He sees no distinction between what happens to him and what happens to someone else. Nor does he see a distinction between what is and what could be.

A she-dog with a warm home and soft-pillow doggie bed is stolen from her master and brought to a farm where dogs are raised for meat. The bitch dogs are impregnated and placed in tiny crates. The she-dog feels her puppies licking at her, but cannot turn to lick the faces of the children nursing at her teats. This deprives her of satisfying the most basic maternal instinct. She is depressed and confused and dies a lonely, meaningless
death.

The writer does not need to have experienced a loss of this kind to write this story. He can put himself in the shoes of that she-dog and feel the sense of loss and pointlessness that she would feel; he can channel her frustration and anger. And it is of no consolation to the worrier that puppy dogs are not seized from their homes and raised in this way—they very well could be, as evidenced by the way man uses chickens and pigs for his eggs and meat. The worrier does not even find comfort in the fact that he is a man and not a dog. He could be a dog and suffering in this particular way. The possibility of this is all that matters.

At this moment in my life I am worried about whether I will succeed as a writer. I have managed to get my first novel published, but I hope to expand my audience beyond yentas, elderly liberals, and moribund baking societies. Someday, perhaps, more people will attend my reading than a showing of a videotape of a mime reading from his memoir. I am at that uncertain point in a writer’s career where he wonders whether he will be noticed or whether his book is fated for the ninety-nine-cent remainder shelf, its tattered carcass to be used as a doorjamb at the
7-Eleven.

Being a student
of history does not help. I know how difficult it is to get something of quality published. I know that Madeleine L’Engle’s
A Wrinkle in Time
was turned down twenty-nine times, that Ayn Rand was told
The Fountainhead
was badly written and its hero unsympathetic, that Emily Dickinson only managed to publish seven poems during her lifetime. I know that an editor of the
San Francisco Examiner
told Rudyard Kipling, “I’m sorry, but you just don’t know how to use the English language.” A reviewer rejected
The Diary of Anne Frank
because, he said, “The girl doesn’t, it seems to me, have a special perception or feeling which would lift that book above the curiosity level.” To Poe, a reviewer wrote, “Readers in this country have a decided and strong preference for works in which a single and connected story occupies the entire volume.” To Melville, regarding
Moby-Dick
: “This story is long and rather old-fashioned.” To Faulkner: “Good God, I can’t publish this.”

Diet books are published with impunity, but Orwell was told of
Animal Farm
, “It is impossible to sell animal stories in the U.S.A.” And of
Lolita
, Nabokov was informed, “This is overwhelmingly nauseating, even to an enlightened Freudian. The whole thing is an unsure cross between hideous reality and improbable fantasy. I recommend that it be buried under a stone for a thousand years.”

So I am worried.

Most immediately, I am worried about what I will write next and whether it will get published. Now I must acknowledge that in a very important sense its success would make no difference. It would not diminish my angst. Even if the next novel succeeds, I will imagine and drift into the state of misery and failure that I would experience in the absence of success. Just as I do not need the actual triumph to imagine the euphoria of a bestseller, so too I do not require utter failure to dwell in the emotional realm of the undiscovered, unappreciated writer. Furthermore, it is not as if the stories that I have told and want to tell have any particular significance. They are just a few among the infinite stories that could and will be told—some to be imagined and shared, some to be lived, some to be dreamed and forgotten.

So, why worry?

But this is how it is with worriers. It is a compulsion. I am even worried about worrying. Abundant empirical evidence suggests that worrying can adversely affect health and digestion. This really worries me. I’d like to get some relief, and the future me could provide it, if only he would tell me where my writing career is headed and how my mother is doing. I want to ask, but I worry that doing so will have problematic, if not disastrous, consequences for the universe.

Most of what I know
about the ethics and implications of time travel comes from
Star Trek
, in particular the classic episode “The City on the Edge of Forever,” written by Harlan Ellison and starring Joan Collins as Edith Keeler, the saintly operator of a soup kitchen in lower Manhattan. In the episode, Dr. McCoy jumps through a time portal and changes history by saving Ms. Keeler from a car accident. Her life spared, Keeler leads a prominent pacifist movement, earns an audience with FDR, and delays America’s entry into the war. This gives Hitler the edge he needs. Germany develops the first atomic bomb and history is changed. In the new time line, the Nazis win and the development of space travel and the flush toilet are substantially delayed. It is then up to Kirk and Spock to go back and set everything straight, which they do, but not without considerable heart-
ache.

I fear that if I ask the wrong sort of question I may have the same sort of butterfly effect on history. I like flush toilets, and I can take or leave Joan Collins, but no one likes the Nazis.

I think I have a way to finesse the problem, though.

“How does the writing go?” I ask.

I regard this question as strategic and clever. I am asking what he is doing, as opposed to what he has done, thereby avoiding an intertemporal catastrophe.

“You mean do we have any success?”

The ruse is exposed.

“I suppose,” I say with trepidation.

“Not as much as you hope,” older me says. “But not as little as you fear.”

I look around the room. This is a direct enough answer, but history does not appear to be changed. I notice that my Diet Coke has a lime in it and not lemon as I asked. This could be a change since I did not pay careful attention to the fruit when the drink was delivered. It’s possible the waiter got it right and history has been altered. But, all things being equal, I think it is more likely the waiter made a mistake and history has remained the same. I am not sure why waiters think lemons and limes are interchangeable, but they do.

The fabric of the universe
apparently intact, I am emboldened to ask another question.

“What are you writing now?”

My eyes betray me. They drop to the table. When they do not meet mine, I know that this means I am either about to lie or to deliver bad news.

“I don’t write anymore,” older me says.

If the sad expression and laconic answers to my questions had not told me before, I know now that something has gone wrong, terribly wrong with my life. For me writing, like worrying, is a compulsion. The desire to express myself to others, to write, is an integral and irrepressible component of who I am. I cannot imagine not doing it. Something horrible has happened.

The waiter arrives. The porcini tart is redolent and seductive, but I need to know then and there what the problem is. This is also how it is with worriers. We fret about so much that is beyond our control that when something manageable comes within our gravity we feel an irresistible urge to put a chokehold on it and pull it close.

“What is it?” I ask. “What have you come to tell me?”

Older me smiles thinly, no doubt because he recognizes my passion as his own. He remembers the need to get to the heart of every matter without delay. His sad eyes look down to the soup and then to me.

“It is Q,” he says. “You must not marry Q.”

Chapter Four

B
y this time, Q and I are far along in the preparations for our wedding. All of the major arrangements have been made—the reception hall, the choice of entrée, the entertainment. The vows have been written, compromises struck on how present God shall be and which God to choose. The honeymoon will be in Barcelona with a side trip to Pamplona to watch the running. Only trifling matters remain such as coordinating the flowers for the centerpieces with the boutonnières of the groomsmen and the music to be played at the reception.

The wedding is to be held in Lenox, Massachusetts. The Deverils are New Yorkers through and through—lifelong Manhattanites—but they have summered for the entirety of Q’s existence at their home on the Stockbridge Bowl, in the heart of the Berkshires, with the appropriate subscriptions to Tanglewood and Jacob’s Pillow. We are to be married at the inn where John and Joan Deveril stayed on their first visit to the Berkshires more than twenty-five years ago. It is intimated at a celebration-of-the-engagement dinner during an alcohol-induced, way-too-much-information moment that Q was conceived at this inn.

Lenox is neither Q’s first choice for the wedding nor mine. All of our friends are New Yorkers and we would prefer, all things being equal, to have a city wedding, preferably on the Lower East Side, where Q and I have settled together. But John Deveril is a powerful and obstinate man. His construction company is the eighth largest in the country and, as he eagerly tells anyone who will listen, responsible for two of the ten tallest buildings in Manhattan. More relevantly, Q is utterly devoted to John, and he is quite wedded (pardon) to the idea of a Berkshires marriage. He thinks it will lend symmetry to his daughter’s life. All things considered, it seems best to let him have his way. I joke to Q that we should arrange funeral plots for ourselves in Great Barrington. She finds this quite funny.

Mr. Deveril’s mulishness is nowhere more evident than in the discussion of the music to be played at the wedding. A swing band will provide the bulk of the entertainment, but a DJ is retained to entertain during the band’s rest breaks and offer something for the younger set. For the unlucky disc jockey, John Deveril prepares an extensive array of directives. These guidelines, seventeen pages in all, contain a small set of favored songs, including the Foundations’ “Build Me Up Buttercup,” the Mysterians’ “Ninety-Six Tears,” and anything by Jerry Lee Lewis; a list of disfavored songs, which includes anything by anyone whose sexuality is ambiguous or otherwise in question—thus ruling out Elton John, David Bowie, and Prince (despite my argument that the secondary premise is faulty); any music by any artist who has ever broadcast an antipatriotic message—thereby excluding, to my great dismay, Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, and Green Day; any song written between the years 1980 and 1992; and a final list of songs, appended as Appendix A to the personal services contract between the DJ and the Deverils, the playing of any of which results in irrevocable termination of the agreement and triggers a legal claim for damages by the Deverils against the disc jockey, said damages liquidated in the amount of $100,000. For further emphasis, as if any is required, at the top of Appendix A, Mr. Deveril handwrites: “Play these songs and die.” The list includes the Chicken Dance, the Electric Slide, and anything by Madonna, Neil Diamond, and Fleetwood Mac.

I happen to like Fleetwood Mac and Neil Diamond. As far as I can tell, John Deveril has nothing against either artist’s music. Rather, he has a long memory and recalls that Bill Clinton used “Don’t Stop (Thinking About Tomorrow)” as the theme song for his campaign in 1992 and that Mike Dukakis used “America” during his race in 1988. John hates all Democrats, but he has a special loathing for Clinton and Dukakis.

I get it with respect to the Chicken Dance and the Electric Slide, and even with respect to Clinton, but the virulent loathing of Dukakis is excessive. It seems to me Dukakis paid a steep price for his concededly ill-advised photo-op in the M1 Abrams tank. The later newspaper photographs in the 1990s of Dukakis walking across the streets of Boston to his professor’s office at Northeastern were a bit more poignant than I could handle. Now one hardly hears of him or Kitty at all. I feel protective. Of course, I am not fool enough to admit my affection for Michael Dukakis to John Deveril. Instead I point out the unfairness of the association with Neil Diamond, whom I greatly admire. I’d like “Cracklin’ Rosie” to be played at the reception.

One evening, at a dinner with Q and her parents to discuss wedding plans, I sheepishly raise the issue. “You know Neil Diamond never actually sang ‘America’ at a Dukakis event,” I say timidly. “Actually, he never sang for Dukakis at all. Furthermore, according to federal campaign contribution reports, he never gave any money to Dukakis.”

At this point, John looks up from his meat.

“Well, if he didn’t want the song played, he could have called up the campaign and told them not to play it, right?”

“I suppose.”

“I mean they wouldn’t have played it against his wishes. They wouldn’t have played it if Neil Diamond had called the newspapers and said, ‘Dukakis is a moron, and Bentsen too.’ The campaign wouldn’t have played the song then, right?”

“Right.”

“So it was a choice.”

“I guess.”

“Just like Dukakis could have chosen to shave those eyebrows, right?”

“Right,” I say quietly, and that’s the end of that.

The truth is, I also like Bill Clinton, but I raise no objection to excluding Fleetwood Mac on the basis of its tenuous connection to the philandering former president. Neither do I protest the venison that will be served at dinner, or the tulips that have been ordered for the reception hall despite my allergist’s strict instructions to the contrary, or the presidential look-alikes (needless to say, all Republicans) who have been hired to mingle with the crowd and sit at the dinner tables corresponding to their numerical order in the presidency. It is objectionable enough to have people resembling Nixon and Ford and Bush (forty-one; John Deveril has no tolerance for forty-three) circulating among the crowd, but I wonder, as a purely practical matter, what the people seated at tables 19 and 34 will have to talk about at dinner with doppelgangers of Chester Arthur and John Deveril’s favorite president, Calvin Coolidge.

This is all quite different
than the wedding I envision. In mine, we are married by a Scientologist on the eighteenth hole of a miniature golf course. The minister reminds me that girls need “clothes and food and tender happiness and frills: a pan, a comb, perhaps a cat.” I am asked to provide them all. Q is told that “young men are free and may forget” their promises. Our guests look on in horror. Then the ruse is revealed. A simple civil service follows. We exchange vows that we have written ourselves. Glasses of Yoo-hoo are poured, a toast is made, and the bottle of chocolate drink is broken with a cry of “Mazel tov!” Rickshaws take our friends to a nearby bowling alley, where they are immediately outfitted with rental shoes and given the happy news that they can bowl as much as they like for free. Professional bowler Nelson Burton Jr. has been retained for the day to give lessons in bowling and the mambo. Q and I make a grand entrance as a klezmer band plays the Outback Steakhouse theme song, my favorite. We have our first dance to John Parr’s “Naughty Naughty.” People bowl and shoot pool. They play darts and video games, and eat popcorn and miniature hot dogs. For a few hours, our friends forget that they are adults. They stay long into the night, drunk on Miller Lite and chocolate cake, and sit Indian-style on the lanes telling stories about Q and me, many of which we have never heard about each other before, including the surprising fact that Q had a poster of Brian Austin Green over her bed until she was twenty-four. It is a magical evening.

I nevertheless raise
no objection to the wedding plans because I am on tenuous ground with John Deveril. I believe he thinks Q could do better. No one ever says this, of course. Q certainly does not. But I believe it all the same. This is confirmed for me, shortly before my older self’s arrival.

One day John and I are left alone in the bar of the Red Lion Inn. Q and her mother are meeting in a conference room with Mr. Cheuk Soo, the florist, or “floral engineer,” as he calls himself. It is at least the sixth such meeting. Each is a mind-numbing exegesis on color, aroma, and feng shui. Mr. Soo seems to have an opinion about everything. Somehow he has become passionately committed to the position that if Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” is played there can be no hyacinth in the bouquet or that if hyacinth is used in the bouquet, then the Mendelssohn cannot be played.

“But purple must be present,” says Joan Deveril.

“Purple is not the problem per se,” says Cheuk Soo.

“What about lisianthus? Could we use lisianthus?”

“Nooooo,” cries Mr. Soo, in obvious pain. “Bell-shaped flowers are so dipolar.”

Q’s mother solemnly nods her head in agreement. “Of course,” she says. “Dipolarity will not do.”

I am staring out the window, watching tourists wander around Stockbridge, daydreaming, as I do throughout most of these sessions, but this arouses me. “It’s not a word!” I scream silently. “Dipolarity is not a word!” I know better than to say this aloud. It will only lead to a disquisition on dipolarity, and I will be trapped in the conference room even longer than I otherwise would be. Instead, I resume staring at the pedestrians on Main Street.

“What about vanda?” says Mr. Soo, as if he has had an epiphany. “It is a rare orchid. It might be just the thing.” He shows them a picture.

“It is so elegant,” says Joan.

“It has a very strong qi,” Soo adds.

“You are a genius,” says Joan. “Now what to accent it with?”

Q asks, “How about irises?”

“Nooooooo,” cries Mr. Soo, his pain returned. “The bouquets will block and we will have sha qi for sure.”

“That will not do,” Joan Deveril says quietly. “Sha qi is very bad.”

So it goes. When Q tells me that we are returning to the Red Lion for yet another meeting, I am incredulous. It hardly seems possible after all this time that anything could be left to discuss. I put this to Q.

“We are reconsidering the centerpieces,” she says. As far as I can tell, Q, her mother, and Mr. Soo have debated the composition of the centerpieces with Jesuitical precision. When I ask what is at issue, Q says they are considering topiaries and all the implications of that.

“What’s a topiary?” I ask.

Q reacts as if I am a biology student who, during the review session for the final exam, asks, “What is a cell?” It is embarrassing, but the happy consequence is that I am excused from subsequent meetings with Mr. Soo. At no point has there even been the pretense that John Deveril could be placed in the same room with a floral engineer. So it comes to pass that John Deveril and I are left alone to share a drink in the basement bar of the Red Lion. I order a tomato juice. He orders a double Glenlivet. As the bartender pours, it occurs to me that this is the first time I have ever been alone with Q’s father. I have not even the faintest idea where to find common ground.

John takes a hearty sip of the scotch. I can’t drink scotch without wincing, but he downs it like a man, savors it, stares into the glass as he stirs the residual. He is a professional.

“Rough day?” I ask.

“Like you wouldn’t believe,” he says. It is the rare moment in which John Deveril lets down his guard with me. In fact it is the only moment in which he has ever let down his guard with me.

“Want to talk?”

John turns to me. The look on his face is in equal measure indignant and quizzical. He is put off by my question, of that there can be no doubt. He is not the sort of man who talks, and certainly not to me; it is effrontery for me to presume otherwise. But I think he searches his memory and sees that he has invited my advance. This is confusing to him. He is also not the sort of man to invite others into his life, and, for a moment, he appears paralyzed. He wonders why he has slipped in this way. Then, to his surprise and mine, he talks. Perhaps it is the scotch, perhaps it is the spirit of the wedding, perhaps it is the bond we have formed through our innumerable visits in support of the women we love to florists and tailors and caterers, with the associated stays on the well-appointed man couches.

Or maybe he just needs to talk. Whatever the reason, he does.

“I’m about to get started on the most important project of my career. It’s a huge, mixed-use building with high-end retail, residential, and office space. We have a Fortune 100 company signed on as an anchor tenant. The architectural plans are fantastic. Everything is in place. It’ll make me millions when it’s done. But we can’t get the fucking land.”

“What’s the problem?”

“The fucking communists, the fucking tree huggers, the fucking Democrats—that’s what’s the problem. They don’t give a shit about what I do. As far as they are concerned, the environmental surveys should take twenty years and cost ten million dollars. “Then, after the studies are done you should have to spend another ten million on lawyers so you can argue about the impact a new building will have on some snot-nosed beaver three hundred miles away. The environmentalists don’t give a shit whether people have a place to live—especially rich people. For all the pinkos care, the rich can live in boxes—just so long as they recycle the boxes when they die. And whatever you do, don’t try to give them money. Heaven forbid you suggest resolving a dispute by offering them compensation—the sanctimonious assholes look at you as if you’re the devil himself. No, no, no, it’s far fucking better to litigate the issue for a decade or two. This way the lawyers get rich and nobody gets what they want. That’s much fucking better.”

“Could you go to your city councilman or congressman?” I ask.

“The politicians?” He laughs. “Don’t get me fucking started about the fucking politicians. They are so paralyzed by the idea of offending even a single voter that they indulge every one of those wackos, every single fucking one of them. Because that’s what the left does—it coddles. That’s its MO. Instead of telling people that life is hard and that not everyone can have exactly what they want, instead of telling them that sometimes choices have to be made, they preach that everyone is equal and equally entitled. Everything is possible! That’s what they tell them. Everyone can go to college. Everyone can have a job. Everyone can have health care.”