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,