Super Sad True Love Story (37 page)

I dumped the books into the cardboard boxes, Eunice quickly moving over to repack them, because I was not placing them in an optimal way, because I was useless at manipulating objects and making the most out of the least. We worked in silence for the better part of three hours, Eunice directing me and scolding me when I made a mistake, as the Wall of Books began to empty and the boxes began to groan with thirty years’ worth of reading material, the entirety of my life as a thinking person.

Eunice. Her strong little arms, the claret of labor in her cheeks. I was so thankful to her that I wanted to cause her just a tiny bit of harm and then to beg for forgiveness. I wanted to be wrong in front of her, because she too should feel the high morality of being right. All the anger that had built against her during the past months was dissipating. Instead, with each armful of books tumbling into their cardboard graves, I found myself focusing on a new target. I felt the weakness of these books, their immateriality, how they had failed to change the world, and I didn’t want to sully myself with their weakness anymore. I wanted to invest my energies in something more fruitful and conducive to a life that mattered.

Instead of returning to the Wall of Books for a fresh batch, I walked into one of Eunice’s closets. I went through her intimates, peered at their labels, mouthed what I read as if I were reciting a poem: 32A, XS, JuicyPussy, TotalSurrender, sky-blue gossamer velvet. In the shoe closet, I plucked two glittering pairs of shoes and a lesser set of some kind of shoe/sneaker hybrid that Eunice was fond of wearing to the park, and I carried them into the kitchen. I thrust them at Eunice with a smile. “We don’t have that many boxes left,” I said.

She shook her head. “Just the books,” she said. “That’s all we have room for. They’re going to take us to a place uptown because you work for Joshie.” She put down her packing tape and poured me a cup of coffee out of the French press, garnishing it with soy milk from what would soon no longer be my refrigerator.

“At least let’s make sure we get all your Mason Pearson hairbrushes,” I said, taking a sip, then passing it to her. She brushed her thick mane in acknowledgment. We kissed, two mouths, coffee breath. Her eyes were closed but I had opened mine; “No cheating!” she used to cry out when I would do that. I pressed my nose into the galaxy of freckles, some orange, some brown, some planet-sized, others the fine floating detritus of space. “How am I going to let you go?” I said.

She pulled away. “What do you mean?” she said.

“Nothing.” What
did
I mean? There was heat in my temples, but my feet were ice. The elevators were full of old people and their stuff, but we managed to get our boxes downstairs to the lobby, Eunice making sure to help the older people with their sacks of medicine, their tangles of hosiery, and all those gilt-edged family photos of big and little Jews together. We kicked my boxed library out to the building’s front lawn and toward the Hyundai Town Car.

The first of November. Or thereabouts. We were moved into two rooms on the Upper East Side, a boxy 1950s nurses’ residence on York Avenue that resembled a jigsaw puzzle left out in the rain. Other displaced Staatling-Wapachung youngsters shared the hallways, but once they peeked in and saw that every square inch of our two rooms was stuffed with books, they went into high avoidance mode, even skirting Eunice, their coeval in every way.

On the day Media showed the Grand Street co-op buildings, my sunburned brick beauties, coming down in a cloud of red bricks and gray ash, I started crying, and instead of comforting me Eunice became angry. She said when I got that emotional it reminded her of her dad whenever something bad happened to him, his loss of control, although her father would get violent instead of sad. I looked at her through swollen eyes and said, “Don’t you see the distinction between the two things? Violent and sad.”

She flared the dead smile at me. “I feel like I don’t know you sometimes,” she whispered in a way that was hardly a whisper.

“Eunice,” I said. “My apartment. My home. My investment. I’ll be forty in two weeks and I have nothing.”

I wanted her to say, “You have me,” but it was not forthcoming. I clenched into myself and waited for an hour, knowing her hatred of me would eventually change to a shade of pity. It did. “Come on, tuna-brain,” she said. “Let’s go to the park. I have an hour before work.”

We walked into the warm, pleasant day hand in hand. I watched her. I reveled in the mallard way she threw her feet forward, the pedestrian awkwardness of the born southern Californian. I saw myself in the twin spheres of her sunglasses. I grasped the reflected smile on my own face. How many people are there on this earth who have never known what I had known in the past half a year? Not just a beautiful woman’s love but her
inhabitance
.

Central Park was filled with people of at least two castes, tourists and occupiers, enjoying the day. The trees held fast, but the cityscape was in constant flux. The skyscrapers framing the lower half of the park looked tired of their history, stripped of commerce, the executive upper floors staring down into empty lobbies and concrete plazas where lamb kebabs and hummus spreads once fueled the world’s most storied white-collar workforce. Soon they would be replaced with curt, smart residential units with Arab, Asian, and Norse designations.

“Do you remember,” I said to Eunice, “the day you came back from Rome? It was June 17. Your plane landed at one-twenty. And the first thing we did was take a walk in the park. I think that was around six. It was getting dark, and we saw the first LNWI camp. The bus driver who later got killed. Aziz’s Army. Whatever happened to that? Jesus. Everything changes so fast. Anyway, we took the subway uptown. I paid for business class. I was
so
trying to impress you. Do you remember?”

“I remember, Lenny,” she said, briskly. “How could you think I would ever forget that, tuna?” We bought an ice cream from a man dressed like a nineteenth-century carnival barker, but it melted in our hands before we even opened it. Not wanting to waste the five yuan, we drank it straight from the paper wrap, then wiped the patches of chocolate and vanilla from each other’s faces.

“Remember,” I tried again, “the first place we went to when we came to the park?” I took her by the hand and led her past the throng-choked Bethesda Fountain, the
Angel of the Waters
statue, lily in hand, blessing the tiny lakes below. Once the familiar Cedar Hill was in our sights, she turned around so quickly my arm cracked within its socket. “What’s the matter?” I said. But she was already taking me away from my nostalgia, walking toward safer emotional climes.

“What is it, honey?” I tried again.

“Don’t, Lenny,” she said. “You don’t have to keep trying.”

“We can get out of here!” I almost shouted. “We can go to Vancouver. We can get Stability-Canada residency.”

“Why, so you can be with your
Grace
?”

“No! Because this place …” I gestured a full two hundred degrees with one spastic arm, trying to encompass the totality of what had become of my city. “We won’t survive together in this place, Eunice. No one can anymore. Only people with blood on their hands.”

“So dramatic,” Eunice said. The way she said it, her tone not just compassionless but assured, made me fear the worst. She was in possession of something I didn’t know about, or maybe knew too well.

We went in a southerly direction via a cemented road, avoiding the Sheep Meadow, where we had taken our first long kiss in New York, and all the other snug, green, tender-hearted places where we had found love. At Central Park South, before the row of reconfigured Triplexes that used to be the mansard-roofed Plaza Hotel, surrounded by the piles of horse shit that demarcated the grass and trees from the difficult city, we both looked back at the park.

“I have to go,” she said.

“Let me take you to work.” I stood there, not wanting to lose a minute with her, feeling the end drawing near. “Look, the cabs are back! Hallelujah! Let’s get one. My treat.”

I let her go at Elizabeth Street, at the Retail place where, courtesy of Joshie’s connections, Eunice now sold recyclable leather wristbands featuring avant-garde representations of decapitated Buddhas and the words
RUPTURE NYC
for two thousand yuan apiece. I hid behind the trunk of an exhausted urban tree and watched. She worked alongside another girl, a dark-haired and voluptuous member of Boston’s Irish diaspora, and the store’s manager, a much older woman who intermittently showed up to stick her finger in the chests of her underlings and to growl at them in Argentine-accented English. I watched Eunice work—diligently sweeping the store with a lovely Thai straw broom, anticipating the questions of the adventurous Chinese and French tourists who stopped by, and parrying them with a toothy smile, tallying up the sales on an old äppärät at the end of the day, and then, when the last yuan and euro were accounted for, waiting for the store’s shutters to close so that she could stop smiling and put on her usual face, the face of a grave and unmitigated displeasure.

A Town Car pulled up to the curb, aggressively stubbing its nose between two parked cars. A man sprang out from the back seat, powerful legs carrying him into the store. Was it him? The back of the head, shorn, globular, rosy. A cashmere sport coat, a little too formal and expensive. The gait? That uncertain balance that had first made me fall for him? I wasn’t sure. But so what? So what if he had come to see her? He had got her the job after all. He was just checking up on his investment. In the store I saw her speaking to the man, looking up at him. Those eyes. When they took in important information they narrowed and refused to blink. Then there was the tilt of the chin. Worshipful.

I went to a neighboring bar, which boasted some kind of idiotic Gallic theme, and began to drink with some assholes, one of whom also had parents from the former Soviet Union and was also named Lyonya in Russian and Lenny in English. He was a gemologist with both Belgian and HolyPetroRussia citizenship, a big guy with oddly delicate hands and the kind of obvious humor and natural rapport that had always been denied me. The night ended with my doppelgänger punching me twice in the stomach, like the older brother I never had—coincidentally, we had argued about the role of family in our lives—and then graciously putting me into a cab, from which I alighted directly onto an innocent Upper East Side hedge outside the former nurses’ dormitory where we were housed, and there, amidst the early-November gloom, enjoyed a brief coma, my first real sleep in weeks.

Fall arrived, the Indian summer finally at an end, the damaged city straining to regain lost glory. Along those lines, my employers were to throw a shindig to welcome the visiting members of the Politburo Standing Committee of the Chinese People’s Capitalist Party. The event would be held at the Triplex of one of our Staatling board members, and would double, trendily, as a kind of art opening.

Eunice and I woke up late on the day of the party, and she crawled on top of me and pressed her rib cage into my face and started to close the last juncture between us. It had been a while. The past week, I had been too sad even to think of physical love, and our new gray surroundings were too depressing. “Euny,” I said. “Baby.” I tried to turn her around, to go down on her, because that’s what I do best, because I wasn’t sure I could deal with seeing her morning face so close to mine, the slight imperfections of sleep around the eyes, the unedited private version,
my
Eunice Park. But she clasped her legs around my swollen torso, and we were instantly together, two lovers on a tiny bed surrounded exclusively by boxes of books, weak light from the square porthole of a window illuminating nothing about us, save for the fact that we were one.

“I can’t do this,” I remember saying to myself in the mirror a few minutes later, while Eunice fiddled with the lousy shower. She grabbed my hand, took me inside the bath, and soaped up the great twin confluences of my chest and pubic hair. I tried to wash her down too, but she had her own way of doing it, gingerly and with a loofah. Then I did some things wrong with my soap and Cetaphil skin cleanser and she re-did them for me. She put a great mess of conditioner into what’s left of my mane and stroked it alive. How vulnerable her body looked under the water; how translucent. “I can’t do this,” I said once more.

“It’s okay, Lenny,” she said, looking away from me. She clambered out of the shower. “Breathe,” she said. “Breathe for me.”

The art opening/Chinese welcoming party was more formal than I had thought. I guess I should have read the invite more carefully and dressed in something hipper than the dress shirt and slacks I’ve been trotting out since I was a white-collar dork at age twenty. I can’t remember the name of the featured artist (John Mamookian? Astro Piddleby?), but I was moved by his work. He had done a series of extreme satellite zoom-ins of the deadly conditions in parts of the middle and the south of our country. The canvases were these rustling silky things, hung like meat off two or three hooks that descended from the hundred-foot-tall ceilings of the Triplex, and the works actually fluttered a tiny bit when people walked by, so that their presence next to you felt like that of a friend with a wisp of a secret.

Dead is dead, we know where to file another person’s extinction, but the artist purposely zoomed in on the living, or, to be more accurate, the forced-to-be-living and the soon-to-be-dead. Grainy close-ups of people using people in ways I had never openly considered, not because murder doesn’t run through my veins, but because I grew up in an era when the baroque was safely held at bay. An old man from Wichita without eyes, with the eyes physically removed, with one of the eyeholes being forced open by a laughing young man. A woman on a bridge, naked, frizzy-haired, something of our former civilization represented by an ancient NPR tote bag at her feet, a smashed-in nose atop a bleeding mouth, forced to hold her arms up as something trickled from one armpit and a whole crowd of men all wearing these makeshift uniforms (on which one could see the insignia of a former pizza-delivery service) cheering blatantly around her, assault weapons pointed at her nakedness, an almost bohemian joy on their unshaven faces. All the works had these disarming titles, like
St. Cloud, Minnesota, 7:00 a.m
., which made them even worse, even scarier. There was one called
The Birthday Party, Phoenix
, with five adolescent girls, anyway, I don’t want to talk about this anymore, but these works were amazing to see—real art with a documentary purpose.