Q: A Novel (3 page)

“That seems a bit incongruous.”

It’s true. It is. I hadn’t thought about it before. I watch as he fixes himself.

“I had broccoli for lunch,” he says.

I tell this story the next day
to Charlie Rose on the air and he is delighted. More accurately I perceive that he is delighted. In fact he has fallen asleep and, by coincidence, stirred during my telling of the Steve Martin story. I mistake this for delight.

Following my successful
appearance on
Charlie Rose
, I am invited to speak at the Gramercy Park Great Books and Carrot Cake Society. The director sends me a historical pamphlet, from which I learn that the club has paid host to many of the great writers and thinkers of the day, including Henry Miller, Gertrude Stein, S. J. Perelman, the Kinseys, and a young Norman Mailer. Reading between the lines, it appears the society was, in its day, a den of iniquity.

I have high expectations for the evening, and am further buoyed when Q accepts my invitation to come along. At the appointed time, we are greeted at the door to number 7A, 32 Gramercy Park South, by the director of the society, Shmuley Garbus, who ushers us inside the apartment. It smells of matzo brie and Bengay. The average age in the group is eighty-seven. Three of the seven remaining members of the society are on artificial oxygen. None are ambulatory. When I finally perform my piece, it becomes the second time in a week that people fall asleep at my readings. In my defense, four of the seven people here are asleep before I begin. Happily, no one expires.

The carrot cake is surprisingly disappointing. Garbus, a spry eighty-three, explains that Rose Lipschutz used to bake for the meetings, but she got the gout, and then, sadly, the shingles. So they use frozen cake now.

Frozen carrot cake can be quite good. Sara Lee’s product, from its distinguished line of premium layer cakes, is particularly delicious, with a moist cream cheese frosting that tastes as fresh and rich as anything produced in a bakery. And it is reasonable too, only $3.99 for the twelve-ounce cake, or $5.99 for the supersized twenty-four-ounce cake, which serves between eight and twelve guests.

But this isn’t Sara Lee. It is from the A&P, which is problematic since there has not been an A&P in Manhattan in more than twenty years.

“Wow,” I say to Garbus. “A&P carrot cake. I haven’t seen the A&P in ages.”

“This is all Rose’s doing,” Garbus explains. “They had a sale down at the A&P on Lexington Avenue, and Rose, who was so devoted to the society that she wanted it to go on forever, went to the supermarket specifically with us in mind and stocked up.”

“When was that?” asks Q.

“Nineteen eighty-seven,” he says.

The future of the carrot cake is assured, at least for the short term. At the end of the evening, I see Garbus wrap in aluminum foil the uneaten part of the carrot cake, which is the bulk of it, since many of the members are lactose intolerant. He places the remainder back in the freezer.

On Garbus’s plastic-covered sofa, as Q and I finish our tea, we are approached by Helen Rosenberg, of the publishing Rosenbergs, who once famously put out a collection of Albert Shanker’s pencil sketches. The teachers’ union gave my father a copy for his retirement.

“I couldn’t help but notice how much in love the two of
you are.”

Q and I smile and squeeze one another’s hands.

“You must be proud of him.”

“I am,” says Q.

Mischievously, Helen asks me, “When are you going to put a ring on that beautiful finger of hers?”

“As if she would ever have me,” I say playfully, but the truth is, the ring has been ordered, and I have a grand plan for how to propose.

“If you need a jeweler, I recommend my daughter,” Helen says, handing me a business card. It amazes me that a jeweler has a business card, though I don’t know why one shouldn’t. I have more legitimate cause to be further amazed that the card belongs to the same person who sold me Q’s engagement ring just two weeks earlier.

It is the sort of thing
that brings home to one the interconnectedness of life, and I am in these months of semi-fame more sensitive to these linkages than ever. I am contacted by all kinds of people and have all sorts of random meetings, as my universe becomes bigger than it has ever been before.

I eagerly anticipate the tiny and large surprises that each morning brings. And the days never disappoint, in particular the one on which I receive a note asking me to arrange a table for dinner the following evening at Jean-Georges.

Of all the remarkable chance encounters, this is the most remarkable and exciting of all, because I can tell from the unmistakable handwriting that this note is from, of all people, myself.

Chapter Two

I
t is no easy matter to arrange a table at Jean-Georges, even at lunch. It is a popular spot for people on their way to the theater or the New York City Opera or the Philharmonic. I call and ask for a table for the next day. The woman on the phone says that nothing is available. I say who I am. “The novelist,” I explain. “I am meeting myself for an early supper.”

“We cannot accommodate the two of you,” she says, “though we do have a table available in early March.”

It is September.

“I don’t think that will work,” I say.

“Well,” the reservationist says firmly. “That’s the best we
can do.”

I let the matter drop with her. Instead I telephone my best friend, Ard Koffman, who is a big shot at American Express, which has deals with a lot of these fancy restaurants. Ard has the Amex concierge call the Jean-Georges reservationist and the table is secured. I am grateful for his help, but it is frustrating that the process is not more egalitarian and the reservationists more accommodating.

I know that
the people who make the bookings at Jean-Georges refer to themselves as reservationists, and that they are not to be challenged lightly, because I have eaten there once before, during Restaurant Week. For seven days each year, during the hottest part of August, several of the fancy restaurants in New York City offer a cheap lunch to lure the few people who aren’t in the Hamptons out of their air-conditioned offices and apartments. In 1992, the first year of the promotion, lunch cost $19.92. It has gone up a penny each year since.

One summer, several years ago, I decided to take my mother to Jean-Georges for lunch. When I called to make the booking, the receptionist switched me to a person whom she identified as a reservationist.

“Is that really a word?” I asked when the person to whom I was transferred answered the phone.

“What’s that?”

“Reservationist.”

“You just used it, so it must be.”

“Just because someone uses a word doesn’t make it a word,” I say. “Besides, I only said it because the woman who transferred me to you used it.”

“What is it, then . . . a fruit?”

“It’s not a word unless it’s in the dictionary.”

“That seems very narrow-minded of you.”

“All the same.”

“Well, someone who receives visitors is a receptionist. So I am a reservationist. You should look it up in your dictionary.”

“It won’t be there.”

“You might be surprised.”

What doesn’t surprise me is that when I arrive for lunch, two months later, I am seated with my mother at the table nearest the men’s room. I ask to be moved, but the maitre d’, no doubt in cahoots with the reservationist, perfunctorily says, “That would not be possible.”

For whatever it is worth, I look up “reservationist” in the dictionary and it is not a word. I do learn, though, that “reserpine” is a yellowish powder, isolated from the roots of the rauwolfia plant, which is used as a tranquilizer. I since have yet to have occasion to use this word in conversation, but I am still hopeful.

At first glance,
twenty dollars for lunch at a five-star restaurant seems like a great deal, and a penny per year is unquestionably a modest rate of inflation, but what they don’t tell you about Restaurant Week is that nothing is included with the lunch other than the entrée. My mother and I made the mistake of ordering drinks (Diet Coke with lemon for me; club soda with lemon for my mother), sharing a dessert (a sliver of chocolate torte), and ordering coffee (decaffeinated). When the check arrived, I learned that a Diet Coke at Jean-Georges costs $5.75. It isn’t even a big Diet Coke. It is mostly ice, and on the day I ate there with my mother, they gave me a lime instead of a lemon, as if they taste at all the same. When I asked the waiter to correct the error, he said, “That would not be possible.”

Everything at the restaurant is miniaturized. Even the entrée—we each had pan-seared scallops in a cabernet reduction—though concededly delicious, was alarmingly small. I figured I would need to get a sandwich after lunch, which would have been within my budget if I had spent only the forty dollars I had expected to spend on the meal. But after the soft drinks, the dessert, and the coffee were added in—and tax and tip, which somehow slipped my mind—lunch came out to more than one hundred dollars.

As I leave the apartment, telling Q that I am off to meet a friend, I can’t help but wonder how much dinner is going to run.

I have a thing
about being late so I get to the restaurant a few minutes before six o’clock. I am not surprised to find that I have already arrived. I am seated on a sofa in the vestibule reading a Philip Roth novel that I immediately recognize has not yet been written. I say hello softly and my future self rises to meet me.

I am disappointed by how I—the older I, that is—look. I do not look terrible, but I do not look spectacular either. I am particularly dismayed that my body proves susceptible to some ravages of age from which I thought I would be immune. I understand that I will grow old, of course, but I exercise quite regularly and eat right, and like to believe that I will be able to keep my weight down until my knees give out and maybe even for some time after that. But here I am, not much more than sixty, I think, and already I have something of a paunch. I am also a bit jowly. This is alarming.

I am, furthermore, not as well groomed as I am now. We are each dressed in a blue oxford and khaki pants, but the older me’s collar is worn past a point that I would now allow. I note that collars have grown wider again, presuming of course that I am continuing to keep up with fashion trends. This strikes me as a change for the worse, but of course styles will come and go.

In other subtle ways, I have allowed myself to deteriorate further. I have a few coarse ear hairs that require frequent attention; these have been allowed to have their way. My nails could use a clipping. I have psoriasis in some spots. It is manageable, but I note that this is not being tended to either: my hands are dry and flaky.

It is me and not me.

I do not consider myself extraordinarily vain. I look at myself in the mirror when I shave or after I get back from the gym, but I do not spend all that much time examining the vessel in which I reside. Still, I know myself well enough. What is most disturbing about this future version of me is that it is obvious, at least to me, that I am deeply and profoundly sad.

“Shall we go
to our table?” I ask.

“That sounds fine,” says older me, and we present ourselves to the maitre d’, who finds our name in the reservation book.

“I’ll be happy to take your coats,” he says.

I see a disgruntled look on my older face as he hands the coat over to the captain. I am peeved myself and reluctantly relinquish my own. Mine is a thin, cotton autumn jacket—the weather has not turned too cool yet. The jacket could easily rest on the back of my chair. Nor is it an expensive coat. I purchased it for forty dollars or so, on sale at Filene’s Basement. If it were to get stained, life would not end. And it most decidedly will not get in anyone’s way. Still, they require that the coat be checked.

This service is putatively free, and if it really were, I might not mind so much. But at the end of the meal, when the coat is delivered, there is the obligation of tipping the coat check person. I never know how much to give. On the one hand, I generally feel bad for coat check people. They have to stand for hours in a dreary closet, which in nightclubs is always in the basement and too close to the bathroom. The patrons are often drunk, and they always have just one more thing, a hat or gloves that can just go in the sleeves but are inevitably mislaid, or a bulky handbag, or, too often, something unreasonable, like a humidifier, which I once saw someone check on a Saturday night. All this to collect a tin of dollar bills. The job seems like a raw deal and the attendants have my empathy. On the other hand, it is a service that I neither need nor want and to which I therefore, as a matter of principle, demur.

I feel this way
about many services. I do not mind paying a blacksmith or a gastroenterologist because I cannot make horseshoes or perform colonoscopies myself. I am, however, perfectly capable of draping my jacket over the back of a chair. I am highly capable, too, of parking my car in a lot. I do not need someone to drive it from the front door to a spot fifty feet away, at a cost of two or three dollars. Nor do I need someone to wash my clubs with a towel after a round of golf—setting me back five dollars for two minutes work on his part.

I am particularly uncomfortable with the concept of the bathroom attendant. This person provides no direct assistance, of course, and it makes me uncomfortable to have someone squirt soap in my hands and offer me a towel. I do not use any of the sundries spread across the counters of upscale bathrooms. I do not use cologne, I do not groom myself in public bathrooms and thus do not require aftershave lotion or styling gel, and I would never consider, not even for a second, taking a sucking candy or a stick of gum from a tray near a row of urinals.

The cost can mount up. It gets particularly expensive when one does not have small bills and thus faces the Hobson’s choice of either leaving an absurdly big tip or rummaging through the collection plate for change. In this situation I will usually just hold it in, although on more than one occasion, I have paid five bucks for a pee. Inevitably, this is later a source of regret.

I see that the older version of myself feels precisely as I do about the coat, and a bond is forged between us.

“What do you tip for a coat?” asks older me.

“Two dollars?” I say. “You?”

“Ten dollars.”

“Jesus.”

“Inflation is a bitch.”

I nod.

All of this is depressing, but it seems silly to allow it to spoil the meal, and I resolve to enjoy myself. It is a nice table, much nicer than the one that I had with my mother years before, and far away from the men’s room. I try to recall whether the restaurant maintains a bathroom attendant on duty. I think that it does and resolve, therefore, to limit myself to one Diet Coke.

After we sit down,
I ask about the Roth novel.

“It is a Zuckerman story, set late in his life, in a hospice in fact.”

“I thought he was done with Zuckerman, after
Exit Ghost
.”

“He cannot resist Zuckerman. He came back to him one more time.”

“Is the book good?”

“Brilliant,” says older me. “It is about the loneliness of death and, ultimately, the impossibility of making peace with one’s life. It is, I think, the defining book of our generation.”

I nod.

I say, “One writer to another, it is funny how writers keep coming back to the same themes.”

Older me says, “One writer to another, you don’t know the half of it.”

He asks, “How is Q?”
She is obviously on his mind.

“She is magnificent,” I say. The older me nods.

“The garden is having some problems. There is a developer who wants to build on the land. He has money and political support. Q and her colleagues are worried. But other than this, she is as wonderful as ever—beautiful, brilliant, principled.”

The older me nods again. I have the sense he doesn’t say very much.

“I have been wearing flat-front pants, at her suggestion. I am wearing a pair she bought me right now. I don’t know how I feel about them. They are unquestionably stylish and thinning, but I feel uncomfortable without the pleats. Sometimes I almost feel as if I’m naked. Q says no one needs all that material hanging around. She’s undoubtedly right, but I have been doing things the same way for a very long time, and it’s hard to change. You know what I mean?”

Older me nods once more. He says, “If I have my dates straight, you and Q moved in together not long ago.”

“Yes, into a one-bedroom on Mercer Street.”

“How are you enjoying the East Village?”

“It’s quite a change. I feel a bit out of place, but I think it’s good for me.”

“I’m sure it is. And you were recently engaged, yes?”

This makes me smile. “About six months ago,” I say. “I proposed to her at the Museum of Natural History under the giant whale. She’s loved the whale since she was a child.
Free Willy
was her favorite movie. So I took her to see the frogs exhibit, and when we were done, we went downstairs and I got down on my knee to propose, and before I could pull out the ring, a little boy came over to me and gave me a quarter. He thought I was a beggar. Then everyone was watching, and I asked her to marry me, and she said yes and kissed me, and the people watching from the balcony began to applaud. It was the happiest day of my life.”

Finally I catch myself. Obviously I don’t need to tell
him
all this.

“Sorry,” I say. “I lost myself for a moment.”

“Don’t worry about it.” He smiles. “But it was a little girl, not a little boy.”

“What’s that?”

“The child who thought you were a beggar was a little girl, not a little boy.”

“I’m quite sure it was a boy. He was wearing a SpongeBob SquarePants T-shirt and plaid shorts.”

“He was wearing a SpongeBob SquarePants T-shirt and plaid shorts, but it was a little girl, not a little boy.”

I find his insistence astonishing. This is ancient history to him, but fresh in my mind. How could he possibly think that he remembers better than I do? If I were more thin-skinned, I might even find it insulting.

“I’m quite sure of what I remember.”

“I’m sure you are, but all the same.”

The waiter comes over to take our order, and I think to myself, this is going to be an ordeal.