Q: A Love Story. Evan Mandery
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