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“It should be easy for you to remember, even in your tired state.”
“The funny thing is, this inability to sleep on Sunday nights is entirely vestigial. Back in graduate school, when I was trying to finish my dissertation while teaching three classes at the same time, I never knew how I could get through a week. That would get me nervous, so it was understandable that I couldn’t sleep. But now I set my own schedule. I write whenever I want, and I am only teaching one class this semester, which meets on Thursdays. I have no pressure on me to speak of, and even still I cannot sleep on Sunday nights.”
“Perhaps it is something universal about Mondays, because the same thing is true for me too. I have nothing to make me nervous about the week. I love my job, and furthermore, I have Mondays off.”
“Maybe it is just ingrained in us when we’re kids,” I say.
“Or maybe there are tiny tears in the fabric of the universe that rupture on Sunday evenings and the weight of time and existence presses down on the head of every sleeping boy and girl. And then these benevolent creatures, which resemble tiny kangaroos, like the ones from that island off the coast of Australia, work diligently overnight to repair the ruptures, and in the morning everything is okay.”
“You mean like wallabies?”
“Like wallabies, only smaller and a million times better.”
I nod.
“You have quite an imagination. What do you do?”
“Mostly I dream. But on the weekends,” she adds, with the faintest hint of mischief, “I work at the organic farm stand in Union Square.”
On the following Saturday, I visit the farmer’s market in Union Square. It is one of those top ten days of the year: no humidity, cloud-free, sunshine streaming—the sort that graces New York only in April and October. It seems as if the entire city is groggily waking at once from its hibernation and is gathering here, at the sprawling souk, to greet the spring. It takes some time to find Q.
Finally, I spot her stand. It is nestled between the entrance to the Lexington Avenue subway and a small merry-go-round. Q is selling a loaf of organic banana bread to an elderly lady. She makes me wait while the woman pays her.
Q is in a playful mood.
“Can I help you, sir?”
“Yes,” I say, clearing my throat to sound official. “I should like to purchase some pears. I understand that yours are the most succulent and delicious in the district.”
“Indeed they are, sir. What kind would you like?”
At this point I drop the façade, and in my normal street voice say, “I didn’t know there was more than one kind of pear.”
“Are you serious?”
“Please don’t make fun of me.”
Q restrains herself, as she did in the theater, but I can see that she is amused by my ignorance. It is surely embarrassing. I know that there are many kinds of apples, but somehow it has not occurred to me that pears are similarly diversified. The only ones I have ever eaten were canned in syrup, for dessert at my Nana Be’s house. To the extent that I ever considered the issue, I thought pears were pears in the same way that pork is pork. Q thus has every right to laugh. She does not, though. Instead she takes me by the hand and leads me closer to the fruit stand.
This is infinitely better.
“We have Bartlett, Anjou, Bosc, and Bradford pears. Also Asian pears, Chinese whites, and Siberians. What is your pleasure?”
“I’ll take the Bosc,” I say. “I have always admired their persistence against Spanish oppressors and the fierce individuality of their language and people.”
“Those are the Basques,” says Q. “These are the Bosc.”
“Well, then, I’ll take whatever is the juiciest and most succulent.”
“That would be the Anjou.”
“Then the Anjou I shall have.”
“How many?”
“Three,” I say.
Q puts the three pears in a bag, thanks me for my purchase, and with a warm smile turns to help the next customer. I am uncertain about the proper next step, but only briefly. When I return home and open the bag, I see that in addition to the pears Q has included a card with her phone number.
On our first date we rent rowboats in Central Park.
It is mostly a blur.
We begin chatting, and soon enough the afternoon melts into the evening and the evening to morning. We do not kiss or touch. It is all conversation.
We make lists. Greatest Game-Show Hosts of All Time. She picks Alex Trebek, an estimable choice, but too safe for her in my view. I advance the often-overlooked Bert Convy. We find common ground in Chuck Woolery.
Best Sit-Com Theme Songs. I propose Mister Ed, which she validates as worthy, but puts forward Maude, which I cannot help but agree is superior. I tell her the little-known fact that there were three theme songs to Alice, and she is impressed that I know the lyrics to each of them, as well as the complete biography of Vic Tabak.
We make eerie connections. During the discussion of Top Frozen Dinners, I fear she will say Salisbury steak or some other Swanson TV dinner, but no, she says Stouffer’s macaroni and cheese and I exclaim “Me too!” and tell her that when my parents went out on Saturday nights, I would bake a Stouffer’s tray in the toaster oven, brown bread crumbs on top, and enjoy the macaroni and cheese while watching a Love Boat–Fantasy Island doubleheader, hoping Barbi Benton would appear as a special guest. We discover that we favor the same knish (the Gabila), the same pizza (Patsy’s, but only the original one up in East Harlem, which still fires its ovens with coal), the same Roald Dahl children’s books (especially James and the Giant Peach). We both think the best place to watch the sun set over the city is from the bluffs of Fort Tryon Park, overlooking the Cloisters, both think H&H bagels are better than Tal’s, both think that Times Square had more character with the prostitutes. One after the other: the same, the same, the same. We sing together a euphonic and euphoric chorus of agreement, our voices and spirits rising higher and higher, until, inevitably, we discuss the greatest vice president of all time and exclaim in gleeful, climactic unison “Al Gore! Al Gore! Al Gore!”
It is magical.
I escort Q home to her apartment at Allen and Rivington in the Lower East Side, buy her flowers from a street vendor, and happily accept a good-night kiss on the cheek. Then I glide home, six miles to my apartment on Riverside Drive, feet never touching the ground, dizzy. Already I am completely full of her.
For our second date I suggest miniature golf. Q agrees and proposes an overlooked course that sits on the shore of the Hudson River. The establishment is troubled. It has transferred ownership four times in the last three years, and in each instance gone under. Recently it has been redesigned yet again and is being operated on a not-for-profit basis by the Neo-Marxist Society of Lower Manhattan, itself struggling. The membership rolls of the NMSLM have been dwindling over the past twenty years. Q explains that the new board of directors thinks the miniature golf course can help refill the organization’s depleted coffers and will be just the thing to make communism seem relevant to the youth of New York. They are also considering producing a rap album, tentatively titled, “Red and Not Dead.”
Q is enthusiastic about the proposed date and claims on our walk along Houston Street to be an accomplished miniature golfer. I am skeptical. When we arrive at the course, I am saddened to see that though it is another beautiful spring Saturday in the city, the course is almost empty. I don’t care one way or the other about the Neo-Marxist Society of Lower Manhattan, but I am a great friend of the game of miniature golf. The good news is that Q and I are able to walk right up to the starter’s booth. It is attended by an overstuffed man with a graying communist mustache who is reading a newspaper. He is wearing a T-shirt that has been machine-washed to translucence and reads:
CHE
NOW MORE THAN EVER
The sign above the starter’s booth has been partially painted over, ineptly, so it is possible to see that it once said:
GREEN FEE:
$10 PER PLAYER
The second line has been whited out and re-lettered, so that the sign now says:
GREEN FEE:
BASED ON ABILITY TO PAY
I hand the starter twenty dollars and receive two putters and two red balls.
“Sorry,” I say. “These balls are both red.”
“They’re all red,” he says.
“How do you tell them apart?” I ask, but it is no use. He has already returned to his copy of the Daily Leader.
The first hole is a hammer and sickle, requiring an accurate stroke up the median of the mallet, and true to her word, Q is adept with the short stick. She finds the gap between two wooden blocks, which threaten to divert errant shots into the desolate territories of the sickle, and makes herself an easy deuce. I match her with a competent but uninspired par.
The second hole is a Scylla-and-Charybdis design, a carryover from the original course, which has rather uncomfortably been squeezed into the communist motif. One route to the hole is through a narrow loop de loop, putatively in the shape of Stalin’s tongue; the other requires a precise shot up and over a steep ramp—balls struck too meekly will be redeposited at the feet of the player; balls struck too boldly will sail past the hole and land, with a one-stroke penalty, in a murky pond bearing the macabre label “Lenin’s Bladder.” Undaunted, Q takes the daring route over the ramp and nearly holes her putt. On the sixth, the windmill hole, she times it perfectly, her ball rolling through at the precise moment Trotsky’s legs spread akimbo, and finds the cup for an ace. Q squeals in glee.
Q’s play inspires my own. On the tenth, I make my own hole in one, a double banker around Castro’s beard, and the game is on. On the fourteenth, I draw even in the match, with an improbable hole out through a chute in the mouth of Eugene V. Debs. Q responds by nailing a birdie into Engels’s left eye. We come to the seventeenth hole, a double-decker of Chinese communists, dead even. The hole demands a precise tee shot between miniature statutes of Deng Xiaopeng and Lin Biao in order to find a direct chute to the lower deck. Fail to find this tunnel to the lower level and the golfer’s ball falls down the side of a ramp and is deposited in a cul-de-sac, guarded by the brooding presence of Jiang Qing, whose relief stares accusatorily at the giant replica of Mao, which presides over all action at the penultimate hole.
Q capably caroms her ball off Deng, holes out on the lower deck for her two, and watches anxiously as I take my turn. I strike my putt slightly off center and for a moment it appears as if the ball will not reach Deng and Lin—but it does, and hangs tantalizingly on the edge of the chute. Q is breathless, as am I, until the ball falls finally and makes its clattering way to the lower level. Unlike Q’s ball, however, mine does not merely tumble onto the lower level in strategic position; it continues forward and climactically drops into the cup for a magnificent ace and definitive control of the match. I walk down the Staircase of One Thousand Golfing Heroes, grinning all the while, and bend over to triumphantly collect my ball from the hole. Then I rise and hit my head squarely on Mao’s bronzed groin.
This experience is painful (quite) and disappointing (we never get to play the eighteenth hole and thus miss our chance to win a free game by hitting the ball into Kropotkin’s nose), but not without its charms: Q takes me home in a cab, tucks me into bed, and kisses me on the head. This makes all the pain miraculously disappear.
The next day, Q calls to check on me.
On the phone, she tells me that date number three will be special. This is apparent when she collects me at my apartment. When I answer the door, she is wearing a simple sundress with a white carnation pinned into her shining hair, a mixture of red and brown. She looks like a hippie girl, though no hippie ever looked quite like this. She is radiant.
“I am going to take you to my favorite place in the city,” she says, and takes me by the hand.
I am happy to be led.
We descend into the bowels of New York, catch the 2 train, change for the 1, and disembark at Chambers Street. It is early on a Wednesday morning; the streets are a-bustle with men and women in gray suits and black over-the-knee skirts hurrying to their office jobs. I, on the other hand, am unencumbered. I feel playful.
“Are we going to the Stock Exchange?” I ask. “You work in an organic market on weekends, but you’re a broker during the week, right? You’re going to take me on a tour of the trading floor. What do you trade—stocks, futures, commodities? I bet you’re in metals. Let me guess: you trade copper and tin contracts on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Oh, happy day!” I buttonhole a gentleman passerby, a businessman freshly outfitted at the Barneys seasonal sale. “The woman I am seeing trades copper futures. Can you believe my good fortune? She is that beautiful and a commodities trader!”
Q smiles and puts a finger to her lips, but I can see that she is amused.
As the man I accosted recedes into our wake, Q pulls me closer, entwines her arm with my own, and leads me down Church Street.
I am flummoxed. This is the kingdom of Corporate America, heart of the realm of the modern faceless feudal overlords who drive the economic engine of the ship of state, their domain guarded by giant sentries, skyscrapers, colossuses of steel and concrete dwarfing the peons below.
It is no place for a flower child.
But here we are, passing the worldwide headquarters of Moody’s Financial Services, and now the rebuilt 7 World Trade Center, and now the reconstruction of the towers, and now, just across the street, Century 21, the department store where I have had great success with T-shirts and belts, which can be quite dear. Somehow, Century 21 has withstood not one terrorist attack but two, as if to say to the fundamentalist Muslims, you have thrown your very best at us, twice, and still we are here, defiantly outfitting your mortal enemies, the Sons of Capitalism, with Hanes and Fruit of the Loom at surprisingly reasonable prices: God bless America! And now the Marriott, and now the hot dog stand on the corner of Liberty, of which I have partaken once, during a tenth-grade field trip to the Stock Exchange with Mr. Henderson, and became so violently ill that the doctors suspected I may have contracted botulism, and now passing a Tibetan selling yak wool sweaters off a blanket, and now turning left on Thames, and now entering, behind an old building that vaguely resembles the Woolworth, a dark alley that smells of what can only be wino-urine.
And now I am completely confused.
“What?” I say, but Q puts her hand over my mouth.
“Wait,” she says, and like a trusting puppy I am led down the dank passageway. We pass some sacks of garbage, and a one-eyed alley cat lapping at some sour milk, and arrive, finally, at a tall iron fence, the sort that guards cemeteries in slasher flicks.
“This is creepy,” I say.
“Wait,” she says again and opens the gate, which plays its role to perfection and creaks in protest. Q takes my hand and leads me inside. I look around.
“Can I cook?” she says, “or can I cook?”
It is a garden—that is the only word for it—but what a garden! The gate is covered on the inside by a thick, reaching ivy, as is the entirety of the fence surrounding the conservatory. This vine keeps the heat and moisture from escaping. The atmosphere feels different. It is slightly humid, faintly reminiscent of a rain forest, and at least twenty degrees warmer than the ambient temperature on the streets of the city. When Q closes the door behind us, the current of clammy alley air is sealed behind us, and it is as if we have entered another world, an—I don’t dare say it, it will sound clichéd, but it is the only word on my mind—Eden.
Here are apple trees, pullulating with swollen fruit. Q nods in approval and I administer to a branch the gentlest of taps. A compliant apple falls into my greedy hands. I bite in. The fruit is succulent, ambrosial. Here is a vegetable garden—orderly rows of broccoli, squash, yams, three kinds of onions, carrots, asparagus, parsnips, and what I think is okra. Here is an herb garden—redolent with rosemary and thyme, basil and sage, mint and rue, borage already in full flower. I have the sudden urge to make a salad. Here are apricots. Here plums. Here, somehow, avocados.
Dirt pathways, well manicured, wend their way through the garden. One path leads to a pepper farm. Q tells me that ninety-seven varieties are in the ground. Another path leads to a dwarf Japanese holly that has been mounted on stone. Yet another path ends at a Zen waterfall.
I have endless questions for Q. With skyscrapers encroaching on every side, how does enough light get in to sustain the garden? Who built it? When? Who owns it now? How could its existence have been kept a secret? Why is it so warm? Why is it not overrun by city idiots, ruined like everything else? How is this miracle possible?
Q answers in the best way possible. She sits me down at the base of a pear tree—a pear tree in the middle of Manhattan!—kisses me passionately, and, oh God oh God, am I in love.
Book One
Chapter ONE
In the aftermath of the publication of my novel, Time’s Broken Arrow (Ick Press; 1,550 copies sold), a counterhistorical exploration of the unexplored potentialities of a full William Henry Harrison presidency, I experience a liberal’s phantasmagoria, what might be described as a Walter Mitty–esque flight of fancy if Thurber’s Mitty, dreamer of conquest on the battlefield and adroitness in the surgery, had aspired instead to acceptance among the intellectual elite of New York City, more specifically the Upper West Side, the sort who on a Sunday jaunt for bagels buy the latest Pynchon on remainder from the street vendor outside of Zabar’s, thumb it on the way home while munching an everything, and have the very best intentions of reading it.
I am on National Public Radio. It is putatively something of an honor because they do not often have novelists, except Salman Rushdie for whom NPR has always had a soft spot, but I know better. A friend of mine, a lawyer, has called in a favor from the host, whom he has helped settle some parking tickets. It is an undeserved and hence tainted tribute, but the moderator gives me the full NPR treatment all the same. He has read my opus cover to cover and asks me serious questions about several of the important issues raised in the book, including Harrison’s mistreatment of the Native Americans, problematic support for slavery in the Indiana Territory, and legendary fondness for pork products.
“Which was his favorite?” he asks.
“The brat,” I say.
“I have never had a brat.”
“That is too bad.”
“Is it like the knock?”
“No, it is much better.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“It is nevertheless true,” I say. “It is the best of the wursts.”
The Fantasia for Clavichord in C Minor begins playing in the background, signaling the end of the interview. “I am afraid we are out of time,” says the host. “Is this not always the case? Just as things are getting interesting, time runs out.”
“It is always so,” I say, whereupon I am ushered out of the studio to the music of C. P. E. Bach.
The following morning my book is reviewed in the New York Times. To be fair, it is not a review per se. Rather, it is an oblique reference to my novel in a less than favorable discourse on the new Stephen King novel. Specifically, the critic writes, “The new King is frivolous claptrap, utterly predictable, surprising only for its persistent tediousness and the suddenness with which the author’s once discerning ear for a story has, as if touched by Medusa herself, turned to stone. The novel’s feeble effort at extrapolating from a counterhistorical premise as a means of commenting on modern society compares favorably only with the other drivel of this sort—I dare not call it a genre lest it encourage anyone to waste more time on such endeavors—including the profoundly inept Time’s Broken Arrow, surely one of the worst novels of the year.”
My publicist calls around nine o’clock and merrily inquires whether I have seen the mention in the morning’s paper. I say that I have.
“It’s a coup of a placement,” she says. “Do you know how difficult it is for a first-time novelist to get a mention in the Times?”
“A coup? She called my book one of the worst novels of the year. It isn’t even a review of my book. It’s just a gratuitous slight. It’s actually the worst review I have ever read, and she says my book is even worse still.”
“Don’t be such a Gloomy Gus,” says the perky publicist before she hangs up. “You know, any publicity is good publicity.”
I wonder about this. It seems too convenient.
Surely a plumber would not stand before a customer and a burst pipe, wrench in hand, sewage seeping onto the carpet, and proudly proclaim, “Any plumbing is good plumbing.”
