Q: A Novel (5 page)

He is staring at his drink throughout most of this. Now he turns to me again. “Then when people come against the real world, against the cruel, harsh reality of it all, and see that choices have to be made, that the government cannot do everything for everyone, do you know who they blame? The rich people. Not life, not God, and sure as heck not themselves. No, they blame the fucking rich people for standing between them and everything to which they have come to believe they are entitled. That’s the true fucking legacy of the Democratic-liberal establishment to America, and their personal gift to me.” John snorts and looks back to his glass.

Finally, he catches himself and remembers who I am. We have never discussed politics before, but just as I do not need him to verbalize his disapproval of me to know that it is true, I do not need him to tell me that he believes teachers are generally liberals and writers are communists, and I, of course, am both. He has simply forgotten himself once more. At least in this instance, his prejudice is well-founded. Even though I have never told John so, I am a liberal.

We return to sitting in silence.

He orders another Glenlivet, surveys it even more closely than the first, and we wait for the women to finish with Mr. Soo.

Finally he asks, “How is your work going?” He pauses briefly after “your” and places a subtle derisive emphasis on “work” to make it clear he does not think either my job as an assistant professor at City University or my gig writing novels satisfies the definition of the word.

I tell him anyway. “I am writing a short story for
9
PM
Magazine
. It’s sort of a sequel to my novel. It begins after William Henry Harrison leaves office. He is minister to Gran Colombia and while there joins a backgammon club where he meets Simon Bolivar. They develop a friendship and over time engage in an erudite debate about democracy and the proper use of the doubling cube.”

“What’s
9
PM
Magazine
?” asks John.

“Oh, it’s a mixed-media online journal.”

“Sounds great,” he says. “I’m sure both people who read your story will love it.”

“Thanks.”

“Have you considered turning it into a movie that no one will see?”

“No,” I say quietly, and think to myself that John Deveril is a hateful man.

Part of me wants
to take this up with Q, to have her validate my view and side with me in this incipient in-law struggle. But I know she is utterly devoted to him. This has been demonstrated in innumerable ways—by the look on her face when she sees him, by the reverence with which she speaks of his work, by the way she includes him in every detail of the wedding preparations.

I wonder how this can be so. As far as I can tell, they share no values. He is on the far right of the political spectrum; she is on the left. He is a business tycoon; she tills the soil. He lives a material life; she lives a life of ideas. And, more potentially divisive than any of that, at his core, John Deveril is a nasty, bitter man. How can father and daughter be so close?

No sooner do I wonder this than I have my answer. Joan and Q walk into the bar and he is transformed. He pops out of his seat. The whiskey is forgotten. His visage, which has been a knot of tension and anger, relaxes. Q glows when she sees him, and it is as if her energy beams its way through his body, bouncing its way off this muscle and that organ, and now he is himself aglow. I barely recognize him.

“How did it go?” he asks, full of hope.

“Great,” says Q. “Simply great. We found just the right fern for the topiaries.”

“Magnificent,” says John. “Simply magnificent.”

“And what have you boys been up to?” asks Q mischievously.

John grasps my shoulder with a warm, firm hand. “Your brilliant fiancé has just been telling me about his new short story.” This sentiment cannot possibly be genuine, but it sounds as if it is, each and every word.

“It’s wonderful, isn’t it?” asks Q. Her sincerity, of course, is beyond question.

“It’s genius,” says John. “Simply genius.” He supportively kneads my shoulder. This gesture cannot be sincere, and yet it also appears to be so. I detect no derision from him, nor any suspicion of sarcasm from Q. I see no indication of winks or nods or tacit understandings of any kind. It all appears to be real.

Only two plausible hypotheses can be stated. One is that she does not see him for who he is. This is possible. Perhaps John’s kind treatment of me is part of his ruse. Perhaps he is deceiving Q. Perhaps he understands that it will not do to openly disapprove of the man who will marry his daughter. He will think of me what he likes and treat me as he will in private, but for the sake of appearances, he will maintain the pretense of affection for me. This could be true.

But I think the second possibility is more likely: she makes him a better man. If anyone could do it, surely Q could. Basking in the effulgence of her approval would warm even the coldest soul, and she has a special radiance for John Deveril. No man could resist that. No man could dare to disappoint that creature.

Indeed, as they speak with one another I see that she does not regard him as loathsome in any way. She does not treat him gingerly, placate him, or dance around his temper. She treats him like a dear father, one whom she loves beyond words. Watching their interaction, I conclusively reject the first hypothesis. She is not deceived. She has not blinded herself to the true nature of her father. She does not see it because he is not this person with her.

Whether I am right or wrong, no good could come of standing between these two. If it is a deception, then she will resent me for exposing it. If it is reality, then I am lucky to be permitted into her life, because this bond is special and strong.

Q and I are heading back to New York and we say our good-byes. Joan kisses us each on the cheek. John gives his daughter a kiss and a bear hug. He shakes my hand and wishes me a safe trip. Q kisses me and whispers, “Let’s get ice cream for the road.”

I feel my anger slip away.

The truth is, none of it matters. Not John Deveril’s judgment of me, not the prohibition against Neil Diamond, not the allergic flowers. None of it.

Only her love.

Chapter Five

A
fter the ominous admonition that I must not wed Q, I pepper myself with questions—why? what goes wrong? how could this possibly happen?—but I am unwilling to pursue the conversation. I insist that these answers must wait, that it is enough for one evening to learn that time travel is possible, that a glass of lemonade costs more than six dollars, and that Roth has written yet another Zuckerman novel. I suggest that we meet again two nights later and, for our second tête-à-tête, propose Chef David Bouley’s legendary eponymous eatery in TriBeCa.

Now when I say that “I” propose that we meet at Bouley, I mean specifically that my future self proposes that we meet at Bouley. I—the real-time me—would much rather eat at a diner. The nomenclature has become confusing, even in my own mind. Sometimes I think of the visitor as “I,” other times as “older me,” other times as an utter stranger. It appears to depend on whether I am finding him sympathetic or annoying. I am utterly inconsistent.

To avoid further confusion, I propose hereafter to reserve the use of the simple pronoun “I” for references to myself in the present moment (which, of course, is long past by the time you are reading this) and to designate the future version of myself as I-60. As occasions present where additional pronouns are required, I shall refer to I-60 as “he,” unless the story takes a substantial and unexpected twist.

I adopt these conventions with two reservations. The first is whether this nomenclature embraces a meaningful conception of self. In the past, I jointly taught a class on the history of justice with Phil Arnowitz, a former attorney who used to litigate death penalty cases before becoming an academic. On the first day of class, he would present to students the curious case of Hugo, a heartless serial killer who, while being escorted to the electric chair, is struck on the head by a falling brick. Hugo is taken to the hospital and lapses into a coma. When he wakes up—forty years later—Hugo is a changed man. He is sweet and docile and has no recollection of his murderous rampage. When told of his crimes, Hugo is incredulous and apologetic. A team of neurologists examine Hugo and determine that he has suffered damage to the frontal lobe of his brain, which has caused his amnesia and permanently changed his formerly aggressive personality. The doctors unanimously agree that Hugo now poses no threat to society. Professor Arnowitz dramatically asks, “Should Hugo still be electrocuted?”

Most of the students say yes: he committed the crime, he should pay. This was originally my answer too. But who is “he”? asks Arnowitz. The man society proposes to execute is forty years older than the man who committed the crime. Hugo is organically different, has a changed disposition, and is genuinely contrite. How does it make sense to think of him as the same person who committed the crime?

I ask the same question here. I-60 is not exactly I, and I am not exactly I-60, but we do have the same name and occupy the same corporeal space, which, as in the case of Hugo, makes things more than a little bit confusing.

The second reservation is that the convention may cause substantial confusion with references to certain highways. Hereafter, where major freeways are involved in the story, I shall refer to these routes by their full Christian names, thus avoiding confusion between, for example, the road from Florida to Maine, Interstate 95, and my ninety-five-year-old self.

Whether we are the same
person or not, I-60 has developed some expensive tastes. My friend Ard again pulls some strings and is able to arrange a table at Bouley. I-60 arrives precisely on time, as I do, and is wearing a checkered oxford shirt and khaki pants, as am I. He orders chicken consommé and a seltzer with lime, which would be free at the diner, but at Bouley costs an astonishing $7.50.

“So no doubt you want to know what happened,” he says, “or from your perspective, what is going to happen.”

“Of course,” I say. My heart is racing.

“Well, then, I should tell you.” He takes a sip of seltzer and sucks on the lime. It is a repulsive habit, and I wonder when this begins.

“The wedding comes off well,” he says. “It is not the wedding that you imagine for yourself—there are no professional bowlers among the guests, and Miller Lite is not served—but for a rich WASP affair, it is refreshingly homey. You and Q write your own vows, debut to a cha-cha, and hold hands for the entire day. Everyone remarks how much in love the two of you are.

“The capon is free-range, the product of an eleventh-hour compromise with John Deveril. His position is that any wedding of his daughter will feature roosters. Q is reluctant to challenge him, but she, of course, is averse to causing any kind of suffering, and you take up the issue on her behalf. One week before the event, you find a farm that caponizes its chickens using hormones, allows the birds to roam free, and kills them humanely. John calls this “gay capon,” but he accepts the settlement. Q does too. Mostly, she is happy that her father is happy.

“The entrée is one of several potential powder kegs, and John Deveril is like a dry match on the day of the wedding, flitting about the reception looking for a reason to go off. But somehow, impossibly, nothing ignites. John even leaves satisfied with the disc jockey, who pleases him by playing a prolonged set of ZZ Top songs.”

“Why ZZ Top?”

“They’re Republicans.”

“I had no idea.”

I-60 nods. He says, “The only real disaster occurs when your Aunt Sadie spills tomato juice on her dress, and even this is not as bad as it might have been. The waiter comes quickly with seltzer. The blouse is lost but the dress is preserved. Sadie is satisfied, if not happy, which really is about as much as one can ever hope for with Sadie.”

I nod. This rings true. Sadie is difficult.

I-60 sucks the lime then continues. “On Q’s whim, you make a late change and honeymoon in the Galápagos. You set sail from Valparaiso, Chile, on a catamaran, which takes you to visit the main islands of the archipelago, and then deposits you at an eco-resort on Isabela. It is a magical place. You spend three weeks there, long enough to befriend a giant tortoise and a Galápagos penguin who rides on his back. They come by each morning for breakfast and return again in the evening to sit by the fire and exchange stories. The tortoise says little, but he is old and wise and his presence is nurturing. The penguin is chattier. Q cries when the time comes to leave; the tortoise and penguin also are unmistakably sad. But life goes on, and when one lives for hundreds of years, as does your tortoise friend, he must learn to adapt. Q does, and so do you.

“Back home, you buy a small loft in TriBeCa, which Q fills in an economical and environmentally friendly manner with midcentury modern furniture, all Swedish and all constructed with sustainably forested wood. You have an energy-efficient espresso maker, a low-water toilet, and maintain a compost bin under the kitchen sink. Q adorns the walls with prints of Monet and Matisse, and, though you harbored doubts about the apartment, in no time at all it feels like home. Together, you and Q live the modestly indulgent, culturally sensitive bohemian life of the postmodern liberal—you read the
Times
online, bicycle to the Cloisters Museum, and flush only out of necessity. On the windowsill Q maintains a flourishing herb garden. In the evenings you watch old movies and eat vegetarian takeout.”

I-60 pauses, and sucks the lime yet again. “Your second novel is a modest success,” he says. “It is neither bestseller material nor enough to make you rich, but you develop a small but loyal following, enough to ensure that your third book sells. This response is more than enough to keep you fulfilled and engaged in your writing. Q abandons professional gardening but turns to teaching ecology and conservation at the New School, which she finds satisfying. You and she have a constructive existence and are each intellectually engaged, both individually and with one another.”

“That all sounds quite nice,” I say.

“It is,” says I-60. “It is a very good life. This is the happy part of the story.”

The sucking on the lime
really bothers me. It would be one thing if I-60 just did it once or twice, but this is not the case. He repeatedly pulls the slice out of his drink, sucks it, spits it back into the seltzer, and then smacks his lips three times in succession. I could probably tolerate this were it not for the lip smacking. This is over the top, and why three times? I have no idea when and where this behavior originates. I am far from a perfect person, but I surely have no habit as annoying as this.

Even the choice of lime bothers me. I am committed to lemon in my drinks and have been for years. The trouble with lime is not the taste—this I could take or leave—it is the social statement made by ordering it. Lime is an affected fruit. Asking for it is not out of place at the fancy eateries I-60 seems to favor. In the real world, however, it raises eyebrows. Joe the Plumber doesn’t order lime with his drink, of that one can be sure, and no diner serves lime with a Diet Coke. I suppose it’s possible that I-60’s palate has evolved, but even still, he knows how invested I am in lemons. It’s a real statement he is making, and I don’t like it one bit.

This is still the happy part of the story, but I nevertheless experience I-60 as exceedingly unpleasant.

“Experience” is a Q word,
one of several that seep into my vocabulary. Pre-Q, I would simply have said “Bob is annoying” or something analogously direct, but post-Q I recognize the gross difference between the putatively objective claim that someone is something and a more humble, affirmation-of-the-subjective-experience-of-reality-type assertion, such as, “I perceive Bob as having certain characteristics that any reasonable person would find excruciatingly annoying.”

Q picked up the term in a sociology course, “Deconstruction of Post-Modern Society,” which she tells me about on our sixth date, after we see
The Seventh Seal
at a Bergman festival at Lincoln Center. The gist of the course—shorthanding here through the Nietzsche and Heidegger—is that meaning is entirely subjective and life pointless. The syllabus piloted the students on a grim march through the dense thicket of deconstruction literature, including the entire oeuvre of the legendary French philosopher Jacques Derrida, whose work could be comprehended by no more than a dozen living humans, excluding, apparently, Derrida himself, who, when asked to define “deconstruction”—a term he had coined—said, “I have no simple and formalizable response to this question.”

All that could be said conclusively was what deconstruction was not. The professor, Bella Luponi, a languid, phlegmatic type who had taken twenty-seven years to finish his dissertation, devoted each session of the course to disposing of a different thing that deconstruction might potentially be. Proceeding thusly, Professor Luponi established that deconstruction is neither an analysis nor a critique. It is also not a method, an act, an operation, a philosophy, a social movement, a revolution, a religion, an article of faith, an anthropological fact, a moral code, an ethic, an idea, a concept, a whim, a verb, a noun, or, properly speaking, a synonym for “destruction.”

At the start of the last class before Thanksgiving, one of Q’s friends left a nectarine on the professor’s desk. Luponi entered the near-empty lecture hall and obligingly asked, “What’s this?”

“It’s a nectarine,” said Q’s friend. “Is deconstruction a nectarine?”

“Heavens, no,” said Luponi.

“Well, that’s the last thing I could come up with,” the student said. Then he picked up his nectarine and left the class forever.

In the last days of the semester Professor Luponi argued that deconstruction is best understood as a type of analysis, in the sense of the word that Freud employs, and that the interpretation of words and experiences says as much about the listener as about the speaker.

It was during this lecture that Q resolved to become an organic gardener.

As I-60 continues
with his Shangri-la tale of newlywed progressives in love, an engaging narrative of Lévi-Strauss reading groups and gluten-free vegan dinner parties, I feel what is at first a pang of resentment in my stomach, which swells into a more palpable aversion, and finally bursts into genuine loathing. This occurs shortly after I-60 delivers the news that he is, and thus I am or will be, the father of a beautiful baby boy. “You and Q name the baby after yourselves,” he says. “Quentin Evangeline Junior. This is not an act of hubris; it is solely for his nickname, QE II.”

This is ostensibly happy news, but I-60 relates this part of the story solemnly, and I can tell from his manner that this event, for better or worse, is the transformative moment of my unlived life. I know it cannot be good and brace for the worst. The mere prospect of grief in my future life unnerves me. I don’t like pain, whether it’s mine or anyone else’s. I cried at the end of
Titanic
.

Instead of simply telling me what happens, however, I-60 proposes that we meet for yet a third time, at La Grenouille no less, for him to deliver the third chapter in the never-ending tale of How My Life Went Horribly Wrong. I understand this is serious business, and that he has traveled a long way, but I am annoyed all the same. I will now be out for three dinners.

Needless to say, when the bill arrives I-60 does not make so much as a gesture in its direction. This is particularly frustrating because, presuming even a modest rate of inflation, the check, which represents more than two days of my salary, would cost someone spending 2040 dollars something like ten bucks.

“Perhaps if this is going to be a semiregular thing,” I say as I reach for the check, “we could undertake to share the damage. I imagine you have some recollection of what a young professor earns.”

“Not much, that’s for sure. And you ain’t getting rich from your novels.”

“Well, then?”

“You know what our mother used to say,” I-60 says, smiling. “It all comes from the same
pishka
.”

“Seriously,” I say. “This is the second time we have had dinner together and now there is going to be a third meal. I really don’t make very much, as you recall, and money is very tight. Q and I are trying to save as much as we can. Her parents are covering the wedding, but we don’t want to rely on them for anything more than that. We’re trying to save for our honeymoon and for an apartment. I certainly don’t have enough spare money to be eating meals at Bouley and Jean-Georges.” I cast him a serious look. “It would be great if you could help me out.”