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
