Little Failure (46 page)

And I think:

Oh, my God, I am not alone
.

So many miles from my parents, and there is my girlfriend in my arms, and scattered across the Eastern Seaboard, with a brief jaunt into the Pennsylvania hinterlands for Zap, are my friends.

Easy there, Shteyni-dawg
.

She has an Oldsmobile 88, a big red southern monster, and as she drives I lean over and kiss her neck. She is wearing the lavender perfume we bought from a street vendor near Fourth Avenue. I am covered in Drakkar Noir or Safari for Men or a cologne of equally debilitating pungency. Something, after all, has to announce the fact that I am still a Russian immigrant.

Or am I?

When I walked into the Sheep Meadow in Central Park after my first day of Stuyvesant, I thought a part of me broke. A connection to the past. A straight shot from Uncle Aaron’s labor camps and the bombs of the Messerschmitts to the wield of my father’s hand and the lash of my mother’s tongue to the boy who writes “Gary Shteyngart” and “SSSQ” on his Hebrew school assignments. Maybe the connection didn’t break. Maybe it just bent. And now in J.Z.’s car it is bending further. The past, which stretches indefinitely behind me, and the future, which stretches for another fifty years at best, are evenly matched. Nothing in the genetic program I’ve been given has prepared me for someone like her, for the unconditional warmth of her interethnic nose, for “Dude, there is no jokin’ around about the Mississippi River!” Nor for the deep existential melancholy that weighs us both down like the hot and wet southern summer around us.

Her mother’s home, unlike my mother’s, is unkempt, the heavy furniture sunk into carpets, every square inch haunted by a furry beast of a corgi named Tally-Dog, which, when confronted by my Drakkar Noir stink, knows only one mode: bark. To my greatest horror, three minutes into the visit, I pull an albino roach out of the sink by one of its antennae, thinking it is one of my own hairs gone prematurely gray.

But her mother is sweet and interested in me, staring out from her
large golden glasses with good cheer and an early evening buzz. She is a big woman prone to the colors purple and lavender, often layered together. And from the moment I cross her threshold, it is clear that I am welcome here, and welcome to her daughter’s love.

On the previous summer’s visit to Little Neck, J.Z. accidentally breaks my mother’s desk lamp, for which we are promptly billed eighty dollars by my no-nonsense mater. (We split the eighty, not a trifling amount for two financial aid students.) That, and the sight of my father walking down the stairs in his tight soccer shorts, his shining testicles spilling out of both sides, provide J.Z. with a quick but potent overview of Shteyngart family life in medias res.

Down here, testicles are kept away from public sight. In fact, there is a southern rule that a man must keep one foot on the floor when inhabiting a room with a woman of tender age. It is the most wonderful rule in Christendom, this tense little caveat, because when the house is cleared of her mother, J.Z. and I run for the bedroom and collapse into each other, disappearing our ugly Oberlin clothes in just a few simple motions, as David Byrne starts singing:

I know he’s singing about J.Z., about the rosiness of her body, the hard dough of her shoulders, the seriousness of her eyes. He’s singing about her and not me; he’s letting me leave myself and be with her.
And she was
.

After we shower off a little in the cramped bathroom and rejoin the Carolina humidity, we talk about death. For my twenty-first birthday, upon my request, J.Z.’s mother has given me a book called
We Don’t Die: George Anderson’s Conversations with the Other Side
, a tender little bit of hucksterism about a medium who communicates with the deceased. Ever since my first breathless encounter with asthma I have
sensed that the curtain between our world and nonexistence is as thin as a kopeck. But now that I have found a pair of depthless brown eyes to stare into mine on a frilly bed in North Raleigh, the thought of departing this earth truly breaks my heart. “I don’t want to leave you,” I say to J.Z., meaning that I don’t want to leave her in five days, when I will have to go back north. But what I really mean is that I don’t ever want to leave her, or to leave the pleasures we just had, or to leave the strangeness of David Byrne’s voice, or to leave the memories that we are putting together every day. After college we will move to New Mexico, we decide. Smoke pot and make love amid the cacti. She wants to become some sort of healer. I already know that I want to write.

Her granddaddy is southern through and through, courtly and folksy—“He’s more nervous than a cat in a room full of rockin’ chairs”—with a deer hanging in his smokehouse in Fayetteville, with enough authority to command the head of the table at his daughter’s house, and with the kindness to let a perfect stranger from New York sit by his side and be treated like an old friend. He says grace over the food, mentioning Jesus Christ, Our Lord, at which J.Z. and I give each other curt Oberlin smiles. Granddaddy, he’s
Jew
-ish.

But after dinner Granddaddy comes over to the kitchen and says, “That’s a fine division of labor you have here. She’s washing the dishes, and you’re drying them. You two are good together.” Right then and there I want to marry J.Z., marry her whole family, lighted farts and all. And when her grandpa dies of a heart attack a few years later, I will feel her pain, feel it as an extension of my own hurt, because my own grandmother is so very sick.

We fight. The truth is I don’t know how to do anything—drive a car, fry an egg, be a man—and as progressive as we are, she still wants me to be strong for her. Eventually, when we drive from North Carolina to her sister’s house in Dallas, Texas, she will order me behind the wheel, and, somewhere in Alabama, I will drive the Oldsmobile 88
directly into the wall of a Shoney’s franchise. J.Z.’s favorite phrase, spoken with a well-practiced scowl, those dark Armenian eyes sheltering a yellow flame: “Well,
that’s
ridiculous.”

But instead of being contrite, I go on the offensive. I’m a New Yorker. Why shouldn’t I be able to drive an Oldsmobile from Raleigh to Dallas without hitting some disgusting southern chain restaurant? Even if they did reward my vehicular assault on their dining room with a signature Monte Cristo sandwich (“Y’all must be tired”). Wasn’t she there with me and her friend Michael when we watched Woody Allen’s
Manhattan
together? Didn’t she guzzle down Michael’s martinis and whiskey sours as he and I cracked Jewishly about the artist Sol LeWitt? Isn’t this the life she signed on for with a New York intellectual in the making?

Apparently not. For here I am trying to climb the sheer cliff face of North Carolina’s Grandfather Mountain, using the ladders and cables to try to hang on to the damn thing, as cloud cover swirls
beneath me
, promising a truly sharp and jagged death if I let go of the rope. I am a classic acrophobe, worried that a part of me
wants
to let go of the rope. But I know that if I can’t drive a car or ride a bike or play fetch with a disgruntled Welsh corgi, I should at least climb a mountain with this nimble countrywoman, who even now is bounding up the wall of rock with mountain lion dexterity.

Or, as I’ll write to her after I get back to Little Neck: “I’m not good at adjusting to a new environment, especially when I feel like I can lose you by doing something wrong.”

Or, as I’ll write to her after we break up: “When I think of the most important moments of our relationship, I seem to see myself staring at the dashboard of your car.”

Yes, in the passenger’s seat, staring at the clicking odometer on that enormous chrome dashboard, staring at the passage of trees and hills and the Blue Ridge Mountains, staring at the scenery of the country that’s been promised to me on my certificate of naturalization. And there she is, driving for me, one of her hands on the wheel, the other maneuvering the drinking straw to her lips, the perspiring, transparent
cup full of southern ice tea, which, for those not in the know, is the best ice tea in the world.

And at night, in the half-deflated tent that I have failed to correctly pitch, in some national park, with the last sparks of our lovemaking extinguished, with our stomachs filled with hush puppies and grits and fried haddock, I lie there reading
We Don’t Die: George Anderson’s Conversations with the Other Side
by flashlight, hoping against hope that everything Stuyvesant and Oberlin have taught me—the immateriality of our personalities, the quickness of our time on this earth—is not altogether true.

So ready for heartbreak
.

I
N THE MIDDLE OF ALL THAT
J
ENNIFER
, something else happens, which, I suppose, can be called college. When I close my eyes, I see myself walking down the ramp of the Mudd library, a kind of postmodern academic fortress, replete with moat, my backpack burdened down with statistics on Khrushchev-era barley harvests. My senior thesis in the politics department will be called “Back in the USSR: The Evolution of Current Reintegrationist Trends,” anything to take me back to the country that has just fallen apart so unceremoniously. When I keep my eyes closed for a few beats more, I see Big Blue, the bong I am athletically smoking as Ice Cube instructs his nonexistent female audience:
Bitch … you should have put a sock on the pickle
. When
I keep my eyes closed for another second longer (I promise you, I will open them soon), I am back in the West Village with my roommate, C-cup Irv, the two of us tripping out on ’shrooms at his parents’ house, as those fascinating new fractal patterns bloom and die on the screen of his Mac desktop.

“Dude, this guy in the Con[servatory of Music] fucked me,” Irv tells me.

Me, nonjudgmental, used to anything by now: “Cool. How did it feel?”

“Pretty good. Like I had a piece of shit up my ass.”

All this is leading somewhere.

Now that I have true friends who tell me about what goes inside their asses, now that I am able to talk honestly about my life with a woman who loves me (“I love you, Gary,” to quote yet again from her letter), I can finally begin to think of myself as a serious person. And that seriousness will not lead to Fordham Law School, where I would most certainly clown around for the first two difficult years and then fall into a disastrous cocaine-fueled tailspin by the third. For me, this means the one thing I pursue with competence and with passion. I write.

Let me reiterate: I don’t know how to do anything. No fried egg, no coffee, no driving, no paralegaling, no balanced checkbook, no soldering a fatherboard onto a motherboard, no keeping a child warm and safe at night. But I have never experienced that which they call writer’s block. My mind is running at insomniac speed. The words are falling in like soldiers at reveille. Put me in front of a keyboard and I will fill up a screen. What do you want? When do you want it? Right now? Well, here it is.