Читать книгу Q: A Love Story - Evan Mandery, Evan Mandery - Страница 12

By 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.”

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 9PM 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 9PM 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.