Super Sad True Love Story (4 page)

Fabrizia. The softest woman I had ever touched. But maybe I no longer
needed
softness. Fabrizia. Her body conquered by small armies of hair, her curves fixed by carbohydrates, nothing but the Old World and its dying nonelectronic corporeality. And in front of me, Eunice Park. A nano-sized woman who had likely never known the tickle of her own pubic hair, who lacked both breast and scent, who existed as easily on an äppärät screen as on the street before me.

Outside, the southern moon, pregnant and satisfied, roosted atop the outreached palm trees of Piazza Vittorio. The usual immigrant gaggle were sleeping off a long day of manual labor or tucking in their mistresses’ children. The only pedestrians were stylish Italians staggering back from dinner, the only sounds the hum of their bitter conversations and the hissing electric rattle of the old tramcar that surveyed the piazza’s northeastern side.

Eunice Park and I marched ahead. She marched, I hopped, unable to cover up the joy of having escaped the party with her by my side. I wanted Eunice to thank me for saving her from the sculptor and his stench of death. I wanted her to get to know me and then to repudiate all the terrible things he had said about my person, my supposed greed, my boundless ambition, my lack of talent, my fictive membership in the Bipartisan Party, and my designs on Caracas. I wanted to tell her that I myself was in danger, that the American Restoration Authority otter had singled me out for sedition, and all because I had slept with one middle-aged Italian woman.

I eyed Eunice’s ruined sweater and the obscenely fresh body that lived and sweated and, I hoped, yearned beneath it. “I know of a good dry cleaner that can fix red-wine stains,” I said. “There’s this Nigerian up the block.” I stressed “Nigerian” to underline my open-mindedness. Lenny Abramov, friend to all.

“I volunteer at a refugee shelter near the train station,” Eunice said, apropos of something.

“You do? That’s so
fantastic
!”

“You’re such a nerd.” She laughed cruelly at me.

“What?” I said. “I’m sorry.” I laughed too, just in case it was a joke, but right away I felt hurt.

“LPT,” she said. “TIMATOV. ROFLAARP. PRGV. Totally PRGV.”

The youth and their abbreviations. I pretended like I knew what she was talking about. “Right,” I said. “IMF. PLO. ESL.”

She looked at me like I was insane. “JBF,” she said.

“Who’s that?” I pictured a tall Protestant man.

“It means I’m ‘just butt-fucking’ with you. Just kidding, you know.”

“Duh,” I said. “I knew that. Seriously. What makes me a nerd in your estimation?”

“‘In your estimation,’” she mimicked. “Who says things like that? And who wears those shoes? You look like a bookkeeper.”

“I’m sensing a bit of anger here,” I said. What had happened to that sweet, hurt Korean girl of three minutes ago? For some reason I puffed out my chest and stood up on my toes, even though I had a good half a foot on her.

She touched the cuff of my shirt, and then looked at it more carefully. “This isn’t buttoned right,” she said. And before I could say anything, she rebuttoned my cuff and pulled on the shirtsleeve to make it less bunched up around the shoulder and upper arm. “There,” she said. “You look a little better now.”

I didn’t know what to say or do. When dealing with people my own age, I know precisely who I am. Not physically attractive, but at least well educated, decently paid, working at the frontiers of science and technology (even though I have the same finesse with my äppärät as my aged immigrant parents). On Planet Eunice Park, these attributes clearly did not matter. I was some kind of ancient dork. “Thanks,” I said. “Don’t know what I’d do without you.”

She smiled at me, and I noticed that she had the kind of dimples
that not merely puncture the face but easily fill it with warmth and personality (and, in the case of Eunice, take away some of her anger). “I’m hungry,” she said.

I must have looked like the befuddled Rubenstein at his press conference after our troops got routed at Ciudad Bolívar. “What?” I said. “Hungry? Isn’t it a little too late?”

“Um, no, Gramps,” Eunice Park said.

I took that in stride. “I know of this place on Via del Governo Vecchio. It’s called da Tonino. Excellent
cacio e pepe
.”

“So it says in my
Time Out
guide,” the impudent girl said to me. She lifted up her äppärät-like pendant, and in shockingly perfect Italian ordered a taxi to pick us up. I hadn’t felt so frightened since high school. Even death, my slender, indefatigable nemesis, seemed lackluster when compared with the all-powerful Eunice Park.

In the taxi, I sat apart from her, engaging in very idle chatter indeed (“So I hear the dollar’s going to be devaluated again …”). The city of Rome appeared around us, casually splendid, eternally assured of itself, happy to take our money and pose for a picture, but in the end needing nothing and no one. Eventually I realized that the driver had decided to cheat me, but I didn’t protest his extended route, especially as we swung around the purple-lit carapace of the Coliseum, and I told myself,
Remember this, Lenny; develop a sense of nostalgia for something, or you’ll never figure out what’s important
.

But by the end of the night I remembered very little. Let’s just say that I drank. Drank out of fear (she was so cruel). Drank out of happiness (she was so beautiful). Drank until my whole mouth and teeth had turned a dark ruby red and the pungency of my breath and perspiration betrayed my passing years. And she drank too. One
mezzo litro
of the local swill became a full
litro
, and then two
litri
, and then a bottle of something possibly Sardinian but, in any case, thicker than bull’s blood.

Enormous plates of food were needed to mop up this overindulgence. We thoughtfully chewed on the pig jowls of the
bucatini all’amatriciana
, slurped up a plate of spaghetti with spicy eggplant,
and picked apart a rabbit practically drowning in olive oil. I knew I would miss all this when I got back to New York, even the horrible fluorescent lighting that brought out my age—the wrinkles around my eyes, the single long highway and the three county roads that ran across my forehead, testaments to many sleepless nights spent worrying about unredeemed pleasures and my carefully hoarded income, but mostly about death. This particular restaurant was favored by theater actors, and as I stabbed with my fork at the thick hollows of pasta and the glistening aubergines, I tried to remember forever their loud, attention-seeking voices and the vibrant Italian hand gestures that in my mind are synonymous with the living animal, and hence with life itself.

I focused on the living animal in front of me and tried to make her love me. I spoke extravagantly and, I hope, sincerely. Here’s what I remember.

I told her I didn’t want to leave Rome now that I had met her.

She again told me I was a nerd, but a nerd who made her laugh.

I told her I wanted to do more than make her laugh.

She told me I should be thankful for what I had.

I told her she should move to New York with me.

She told me she was probably a lesbian.

I told her my work was my life, but I still had room for love.

She told me love was
out of the question
.

I told her my parents were Russian immigrants who lived in New York.

She told me hers were Korean immigrants who lived in Fort Lee, New Jersey.

I told her my father was a retired janitor who liked to go fishing.

She told me her father was a podiatrist who liked to punch his wife and two daughters in the face.

“Oh,” I said. Eunice Park shrugged and excused herself. On my plate, the rabbit’s little dead heart hung from within his rib cage. I put my head in my hands and wondered if I should just throw some euros down on the table and walk out and leave.

But soon enough I was walking down ivy-draped Via Giulia, my
arm around Eunice Park’s fragrant, boyish frame. She was seemingly in good spirits, both loving and goading: promising me a kiss, then chastising my poor Italian. She was shyness and giggles, freckles in the moonlight and drunken, immature cries of “Shut
up
, Lenny!” and “You’re such an idiot!” I noticed she had released her hair from the bun’s captivity and that it was dark and endless and as thick as twine. She was twenty-four years old.

My apartment could accommodate no more than a cheap twin-sized mattress and a fully opened suitcase, brimming with books (“My text-major friends at Elderbird used to call those things ‘doorstops,’” she told me). We kissed, lazily, like it was nothing, then roughly, like we meant it. There were some problems. Eunice Park wouldn’t take off her bra (“I have absolutely no chest”), and I was too drunk and scared to develop an erection. But I didn’t want intercourse anyway. I talked her out of her pants, cupped the twin, tiny globes of her ass with my palms, and pushed my lips right inside her soft, vital pussy. “Oh, Lenny,” she said, a little sadly, for she must have sensed just how much her youth and freshness meant to me, a man who lived in death’s anteroom and could barely stand the light and heat of his brief sojourn on earth. I licked and licked, breathing in the slight odor of something authentic and human, and eventually must have fallen asleep with my face between her legs. The next morning, she was kind enough to help me repack my suitcase, which refused to close without her help. “That’s not how you do it,” she said, when she saw me brushing my teeth. She made me stick out my tongue and roughly scraped its purple surface with the toothbrush. “There,” she said. “Better.”

During the taxi ride to the airport, I felt the triple pangs of being happy and lonely and needy all at once. She had made me wash my lips and chin thoroughly to obliterate all traces of her, but Eunice Park’s alkaline tang still remained on the tip of my nose. I made great sniffing motions in the air, trying to capture her essence, thinking already of how I would bait her to New York, make her my wife, make her my life, my life eternal. I touched my expertly brushed teeth and petted the flurry of gray hairs sticking out from beneath
my shirt collar, which she had thoroughly examined in the morning’s weak early light. “Cute,” she had said. And then, with a child’s sense of wonder: “You’re old, Len.”

Oh, dear diary. My youth has passed, but the wisdom of age hardly beckons. Why is it so hard to be a grown-up man in this world?

SOMETIMES LIFE IS SUCK

JUNE 1

Format: Long-Form Standard English Text

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EUNI-TARD ABROAD
TO
GRILLBITCH
:

Hi, Precious Pony!

What’s up, twat? Missing your ’tard? Wanna dump a little sugar on me? JBF. I am so sick of making out with girls. BTW, I saw the pictures on the Elderbird alum board with your tongue in Bryana’s, um, ear. I hope you’re not trying to get Gopher jealous? He’s had way too many threesomes. Respect yourself, hoo-kah! So—guess what? I met the cutest guy in Rome. He is exactly my type, tall, kind of German-looking, very preppie, but not an asshole. Giovanna set me up with him he’s in Rome working for LandO’LakesGMFordCredit! So I go to meet him in the Piazza Navona (remember Image Class? Navona the one with all the tritons) and he’s sitting there having a cappuccino and streaming Chronicles of Narnia! Remember we streamed that at Catholic? So adorable. He kind of looked a little like Gopher but much thinner (ha ha ha). His name is Ben, which is pretty gay, but he was SO NICE and so smart. He took me to look at some Caravaggios and then he kind of like touched my butt a little and then we went to one of Giovanna’s parties and made out. There were all these Italian girls in Onionskin jeans staring at us, like I was stealing one of their white guys or something. I fucking hate that. If they mention my “almond eyes” one more time, I swear. Anyway, I NEED YOUR ADVICE because he
called yesterday and asked if I wanted to go up to Lucca with him next week and I was playing hard to get and said no. But I’m going to call him and say yes tomorrow! WHAT SHOULD I DO? HELP!!!