Q: A Love Story
In a gripping tale of time travel and true love, a successful writer meets his future self, who advises him not to marry Q, the love of his life.Would you give up the love of your life on the advice of a stranger?A picturesque love story begins at the cinema when our hero – an unacclaimed writer, unorthodox professor and unmistakeable New Yorker – first meets Q, his one everlasting love. Over the following weeks, in the rowboats of Central Park, on the miniature golf courses of Lower Manhattan, under a pear tree in Q’s own inner-city Eden, their miraculous romance accelerates and blossoms.Nothing, it seems – not even the hostilities of Q’s father or the impending destruction of Q’s garden – can disturb the lovers, or obstruct their advancing wedding. They are destined to be together.Until one day a man claiming to be our hero’s future self tells him he must leave Q.In Q, Evan Mandery has fashioned an epic love story on quantum foundations. The novel wears its philosophical and narrative sophistication lightly: with exuberant, direct and witty prose, Mandery brings an essayist’s poise to this fabulous romance. And, finally, Q has an ending that will melt even the darkest heart.
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Q
A Novel
Evan Mandery
Dedication
For V, my Q
Epigraph
What is the point of this story?
What information pertains?
The thought that life could be better
Is woven indelibly into our hearts and our brains.
PAUL SIMON, “TRAIN IN THE DISTANCE”
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Fair
Book One
Good
Chapter One
In the aftermath of the publication of my novel, Time’s…
Chapter Two
It is no easy matter to arrange a table at…
Chapter Three
I order a porcini mushroom tart as a starter and…
Chapter Four
By this time, Q and I are far along in…
Chapter Five
After the ominous admonition that I must not wed Q,…
Chapter Six
I harbor suspicions, intensified by this conversation at the end…
Chapter Seven
You have been following me.” I-60 says this directly, matter-of-factly,…
Chapter Eight
To me this is all a dream, the worst of…
Chapter Nine
During the weeks following our dinner at La Grenouille and…
Chapter Ten
On the last Wednesday of November, Q drags herself out…
Chapter Eleven
Even by her lofty standards, Joan Deveril has outdone herself…
Chapter Twelve
Tristan Handy seems out of time. He rises as he…
Book Two
Better
Chapter Thirteen
The Monday following the fateful Thanksgiving dinner, I move out…
Chapter Fourteen
Getting a table at Jean-Georges is challenging. Getting a table…
Chapter Fifteen
Freud woke gently, the rising sun streaming in off the…
Chapter Sixteen
The courtship of Minnie Zuckerman begins in earnest over fondue.
Chapter Seventeen
I am shocked when I-50 tells me his age. He…
Chapter Eighteen
In Frewin Court, off Cornmarket Street, the Oxford Union was…
Chapter Nineteen
The morning after I finish writing the Spencer-Freud debate chapter,…
Chapter Twenty
In 2024, John Henry Adams won the Pulitzer Prize for…
Chapter Twenty-One
I-77 is quick to condemn my short story about the…
Chapter Twenty-Two
The decision to attend law school sits fine with me.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Back home in New York, I begin a concerted program…
Book Three
Best
Chapter Twenty-Four
When time travel is discovered, I am not surprised. I…
Chapter Twenty-Five
Even after the prices come down, time travel is expensive,…
Chapter Twenty-Six
The bus to Rhinebeck wends its way up the Taconic…
Acknowledgments
Other Books by Evan Mandery
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
FAIR
Q’ Quentina Elizabeth Deveril, is the love of my life. We meet for the first time by chance at the movies, a double feature at the Angelika: Casablanca and Play It Again, Sam. It is ten o’clock on a Monday morning. Only three people are in the theater: Q, me, and a gentleman in the back who is noisily indulging himself. This would be disturbing but understandable if it were to Ingrid Bergman, but it is during Play It Again, Sam and he repeatedly mutters, “Oh, Grover.” I am repulsed but in larger measure confused, as is Q. This is what brings us together. She looks back at the man several times, and in so doing our eyes meet. She suppresses an infectious giggle, which gets me, and I, like she, spend the second half of the movie fending off hysterics. We are bonded. After the film, we chat in the lobby like old friends.
“What was that?” she asks.
I don’t know,” I say. “Did he mean Grover from Sesame Street?”
“Are there even any other Grovers?”
“There’s Grover Cleveland.”
“Was he attractive?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Was anybody in the 1890s attractive?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“It serves me right for coming to a movie on a Monday morning,” Q says. Then she thinks about the full implication of this reflection and looks at me suspiciously. “What about you? Do you just hang out in movie theaters with jossers all day or do you have a job?”
“I am gainfully employed. I am a professor and a writer,” I explain. “I am working on a novel right now. Usually I write in the mornings. But I can never sleep on Sunday nights, so I always end up being tired and blocked on Monday mornings. Sometimes I come here to kill time.”
Q explains that she cannot sleep on Sunday nights either. This becomes the first of many, many things we learn that we have in common.
“I’m Q,” she says, extending her hand—her long, angular, seductive hand.
“Your parents must have been quite parsimonious.”
She laughs. “I am formally Quentina Elizabeth Deveril, but everyone calls me Q.”
“Then I shall call you Q.”
“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.”
