Читать книгу Q: A Love Story - Evan Mandery, Evan Mandery - Страница 13

After 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.”

At this suggestion, I-60 grows solemn himself. “Time travel is still in its infancy,” he says. “Many of the practical and philosophical issues surrounding it are yet unexplored. What we do know is that it is highly problematic, potentially cataclysmic, for physical objects from one period to come into contact with the same physical object in another time line.”

“So it’s okay for you to come back and talk with me, but if our watches were to encounter one another, that would be a problem.”

“Yes.”

“That makes no sense.”

“The universe is arbitrary. Just look at Jeff Goldblum.”

This doesn’t sit right with me and I let him know. “Hold on a second,” I say. “Money is fungible. The value of a dollar is a concept, not an object.”

“Unfortunately, the only form of money I possess is currency, which is physical. And since I can’t very well put dollar bills from the future into circulation, I’m stuck with a few old dollar bills, which I happened to save from my own past. I need to use these sparingly. If one of these were to come into contact with itself …” He shakes his head at this prospect and quietly says, “It’s just not a chance worth taking.”

“So I guess I’m stuck with the tab.”

“I guess,” says I-60. “Unless you can get them to accept a postdated check.”

He laughs heartily at this, as I hand the waiter my credit card.

“That’s funny,” I say, though my experience of it is quite different.