Super Sad True Love Story (13 page)

The rankings of other passengers swept across the bow, the ugly, ruined men emoting their desire and despair over the rail and into the dark, relentless waves. A pink mist hovered over the mostly residential area once known as the Financial District, casting everything in the past tense. A father kept kissing his tiny son’s head over and over with a sad insistence, making those of us with bad parents or no parents feel even more lonely and alone.

We watched the silhouettes of oil tankers, guessing at the warmth of their holds. The city approached. The three bridges connecting Brooklyn and Manhattan, one long necklace of light, gradually differentiated themselves. The Empire State extinguished its crown and tucked itself away behind a lesser building. On the Brooklyn side, the gold-tipped Williamsburg Savings Bank, cornered by the half-built, abandoned glass giants around it, quietly gave us the finger. Only the bankrupt “Freedom” Tower, empty and stern in profile, like an angry man risen and ready to punch, celebrated itself throughout the night.

Every returning New Yorker asks the question: Is this still my city?

I have a ready answer, cloaked in obstinate despair: It is.

And if it’s not, I will love it all the more. I will love it to the point where it becomes mine again.

FIRE UP THAT EGGPLANT

FROM THE GLOBALTEENS ACCOUNT OF EUNICE PARK

JUNE 13

LEONARDO DABRAMOVINCI
TO
EUNI-TARD ABROAD:

Oh, hi there. It’s Lenny Abramov. Again. I’m sorry to be bothering you. I teened you a little while back and I didn’t hear from you. So I guess you’re busy and there must be all these annoying guys bothering you all the time and I don’t want to be another dork who sends you glad tidings every minute. Anyway, I just wanted to warn you that I was on my friend’s stream called The Noah Weinberg Show! and I was really really WASTED and I said all those things about your freckles and how we had bucatini all’amatriciana together at da Tonino and about how I pictured us reading books to each other one day.

Eunice, I am so sorry to drag your name through the mud like this. I just got carried away and was feeling pretty sad because I miss you and wish we could keep in touch more. I keep thinking about that night we spent in Rome, about every minute of it, and I guess it’s become like this foundation myth for me. So I’m trying to stop it and think about other things like my job/financial situation, which is very complicated right now, and my parents, who are not as difficult as yours but let’s just say we’re not a happy family either. God, I don’t know why I just constantly want to open up to you. Again, I’m sorry if I embarrassed you with that ridiculous stream and with the stuff about you reading books.

(Still) Your Friend (hopefully),

Lenny

JUNE 14

EUNI-TARD ABROAD
TO
LEONARDO DABRAMOVINCI:

Okay, Leonard. Fire up that eggplant, I think I’m coming to New York. It’s “Arrivederci, Roma” for this girl. Sorry I’ve been out of touch for so long. I’ve been sort of thinking about you too, and I really look forward to staying with you for a little while. You’re a very sweet and funny guy, Len. But I want you to know that my life blows major testes these days. I just broke up with this guy who was really my type, stuff with my parents, blah, blah, blah. So I may not always be the best company and I may not always treat you right. In other words, if you get sick of me, just throw me out on the curb. That’s what people do. Hahaha!

I’ll send you the flight info soon as I can. You don’t have to pick me up or anything. Just tell me where to go.

I hope this doesn’t make you uncomfortable, Lenny Abramov, but my freckles really miss you.

Eunice

P.S. Have you been brushing like I showed you? It’s good for you and cuts down on bad breath.

P.P.S. I thought you were pretty cute on your friend Noah’s stream but you should really try to get off “101 People We Need to Feel Sorry For.” That guy with the
SUK DIK
overalls is just being cruel to you. You are not a “greasy old schlub,” whatever that means, Lenny. You should stand up for yourself.

TOTAL SURRENDER

FROM THE DIARIES OF LENNY ABRAMOV

JUNE 18

Dear Diary,

Oh my God, oh my God, Oh My God! She’s here. Eunice Park is in New York. Eunice Park is in my apartment! Eunice Park is sitting NEXT TO ME on my couch while I’m writing this. Eunice Park: a tiny fragment of a human being in purple leggings, pouting at something terrible I may have done, anger in her wrinkled forehead, the rest of her absorbed by her äppärät, checking out expensive stuff on AssLuxury. I am close to her. I am surreptitiously smelling the garlic on her breath, diary. I’m smelling a lunch of Malaysian anchovies and I think I’m about to have a heart attack. Oh, what’s wrong with me? Everything, sweet diary. Everything is wrong with me and I am the happiest man alive!

When she teened me she was coming to NYC, I rushed out to the corner bodega and asked for an eggplant. They said they had to order it on their äppärät, so I waited twelve hours by the door, and when it came my hands were shaking so bad I couldn’t do anything with it. I just stuck it in the freezer (by accident) and then went out on the balcony and started to weep. From joy, of course!

On the morning of the first day of my real life, I threw out the frozen eggplant, and put on my cleanest, most conservative cotton shirt, which became a monsoon of nervous sweat before I even left for the door. To dry off a little and gain perspective, I sat down and pondered Point No. 3: Love Eunice, the way my parents always sat down before a long trip to pray for a safe journey in their primitive Russian way.
Lenny!
I said aloud.
You are not going to screw this up. You’ve been given a chance to help the most beautiful woman in the world. You must be good, Lenny. You must not think of yourself at all. Only of this little creature before you. Then you will be helped in turn. If you don’t pull this off, if you hurt this poor girl in any way, you will not be worthy of immortality. But if you harness her warm little body to yours and make her smile, if you show her that adult love can overcome childhood pain, then both of you will be shown the kingdom. Joshie may slam the door on you, may watch your heartbeat stutter to a stop in some public hospital bed, but how could anyone deny Eunice Park? How could any god wish her less than eternal youth?

I wanted to meet Eunice at JFK, but it turns out that you can’t even get close to the airport without a plane ticket anymore. The cabbie left me at the third American Restoration Authority checkpoint on the Van Wyck, where the National Guard had set up a greeting area, a twenty-foot camouflaged tarp beneath which a crowd of poor middle-class folk huddled in anticipation of their relatives. I almost missed her flight because a part of the Williamsburg Bridge had collapsed and we spent an hour trying to turn around on Delancey Street next to a hasty new ARA sign that said “Together We’ll Repare [sic] This Bridge.”

While we were pulling up to the checkpoint, my äppärät came through with another bit of wonderful news. Nettie Fine is alive and well! She teened me, using a new secure address. “Lenny, I’m so sorry if I brought you down when I saw you in Rome. My kids tell me sometimes I can be a real ‘Nervous Nettie.’ I just wanted to let you know things aren’t so bad! There’s good news on my desk all the time. There’s real change back home. The poor people thrown out of their homes are getting organized just like in the Great Depression. These ex–National Guard boys are building cabins in the parks and protesting that they don’t have their Venezuela bonuses. I can just feel a burst of bottom-up energy! Media isn’t covering it, but you go take a look in Central Park and tell me what you see. Maybe the reign of Jeffrey Otter is finally behind us! xxx, Nettie Fine.” I teened her right back, telling her that I would go see the Low Net Worth people in the park and that I was in love with a girl named Eunice Park who (I anticipated Nettie’s first question) wasn’t Jewish but was perfect in every other way.

Filled with good tidings about my American mama, I waited for the UnitedContinentalDeltamerican bus, pacing nervously until the men with the guns began to look at me funny, then retreated into a makeshift Retail space by a dumpster, where I bought some wilting roses and a three-hundred-dollar bottle of champagne. My poor Eunice looked so tired when she huffed off the bus with her many bags that I nearly tackled her in a rejuvenating embrace, but I was careful not to make a scene, waving my roses and champagne at the armed men to prove that I had enough Credit to afford Retail, and then kissed her passionately on one cheek (she smelled of flight and moisturizer), then on the straight, thin, oddly non-Asian nose, then the other cheek, then back to the nose, then once more the first cheek, following the curve of freckles backward and forward, marking her nose like a bridge to be crossed twice. The champagne bottle fell out of my hands, but, whatever futuristic garbage it was made of, it didn’t break.

Confronted with this kind of crazy love, Eunice didn’t withdraw, nor did she return my ardor. She smiled at me with those full, purple lips of hers and those tired young eyes, abashed, and made a motion with her arms to indicate that the bags were heavy. They were, diary. They were the heaviest bags I’ve ever carried. The spiky heels of ladies’ shoes kept stabbing my abdomen, and a metal tin of unknown provenance, round and hard, bruised my hip.

The cab ride passed in near silence, both of us a little ashamed of the situation, each probably feeling guilty of something (my relative power; her youth), and mindful of the fact that we had spent less than a day together in total and that our commonalities had yet to be determined. “Isn’t this ARA shit totally crazy?” I whispered to her, as yet another checkpoint slowed us to a crawl.

“I don’t really know much about politics,” she said.

She was disappointed by my apartment, by how far it was from the F line and how ugly the buildings were. “Looks like I’ll get some exercise walking to the train,” she said. “Ha ha.” This was what her generation liked to add to the end of sentences, like a nervous tic. “Ha ha.”

“I’m really glad you’re here, Eunice,” I said, trying to keep everything I said both clear and honest. “I really missed you. I mean, it’s kind of weird.…”

“I missed you too, nerd-face,” she said.

That single sentence hung in the air between us, the insult wedded to the intimacy. She had clearly surprised herself, and she didn’t know what to do, whether to add a “ha!” or a “ha ha” or just to shrug it off. I decided to take the initiative and sat down next to her on my chrome-and-leather couch, the kind that once graced luxury cruise ships in the 1920s and ’30s and made me wish I was someone else. She looked at my Wall of Books with a neutral expression, although by now my volumes mostly stank of Pine-Sol Wild Flower Blast and not their natural printed essence. “I’m sorry you broke up with that guy in Italy,” I said. “You said on GlobalTeens he was really your type.”

“I don’t want to talk about him right now,” Eunice said.

Good, I didn’t either. I just wanted to hold her. She was wearing an oatmeal sweatshirt, beneath which I could espy the twin straps of a bra she did not need. Her rough-hewn miniskirt made out of some kind of sandpaper fiber sat atop a pair of bright-violet pantyhose, which also seemed unnecessary given the warm June weather. Was she trying to protect herself from my roving hands? Or was she just very cold at her center? “You must be tired from the long flight,” I said, putting my hand on her violet knee.

“You’re sweating like crazy,” she said, laughing.

I wiped at my forehead, coming away with the sheen of my age. “Sorry,” I said.

“Do I really excite you that much, nerd-face?” she asked.

I didn’t say anything. I smiled.

“It’s nice of you to let me stay here.”

“Indefinitely!” I cried.

“We’ll see,” she said. As I squeezed her knee and made a slight movement upward, she caught my hairy wrist. “Let’s take it easy,” she said. “I just had my heart broken, remember?” She thought it over and added, “Ha ha.”

“Hey, I know what we can do,” I said. “It’s, like, my favorite thing when the summer comes.”

I took her to Cedar Hill in Central Park. She seemed disturbed by the ragged project-dwellers walking and wheeling their way down my stretch of Grand Street, the old Dominicans leering at her and shouting “
Chinita!
” and “You better spend some money, China honey!” in what I hoped was a not-too-threatening way. I made sure to avoid the block where our resident shitter did his business.

“Why do you live here?” Eunice Park asked, perhaps not understanding that real estate in the rest of Manhattan was still grossly unaffordable, despite the last dollar devaluation (or perhaps because of it; I can never figure out how currency works). So, to compensate for my poor neighborhood, I paid the extra ten dollars each at the F train stop and got us into the business-class carriage. As Vish had drunkenly told me the other night, our city’s dying transit is now run on a for-profit basis by a bunch of ARA-friendly corporations under the slogan “Together We’ll Go Somewhere.” In business class, we had the run of the cozy, already slightly browned sofas and the bulky äppäräti chained to a coffee table and dusted with fingerprints and spilled drinks. Heavily armed National Guardsmen kept our carriage free of the ubiquitous singing beggars, break-dancers, and destitute families begging for a Healthcare voucher, the ragtag gaggle of Low Net Worth Individuals who had turned the regular cars into a soundstage for their talents and woes. In business, we were allowed a thousand discrete moments of underground peace. Eunice scanned
The New York Lifestyle Times
, which made me happy, because even though the
Times
is no longer the fabled paper of yore, it’s still more text-heavy than other sites, the half-screen-length essays on certain products sometimes offering subtle analysis of the greater world, a piece on a new kohl applicator giving way to a paragraph-long snapshot of the brain economy in the Indian state of Kerala. There was no denying that the woman I had fallen for was thoughtful and bright. I kept my eyes on Eunice Park, at her sun-browned little arms floating above the projected data, ready to pounce when an item she coveted was unfurled on the screen, the green “buy me now” icon hovering beneath her busy index fingers. I watched her so intently, the overlit subway stops flashing meaninglessly outside the windows, that we missed our own stop and had to double back.

Cedar Hill. This is where I start my walks in Central Park. Many years ago, after a violent breakup with an earlier girlfriend (a sad Russian I had dated out of some kind of perverse ethnic solidarity), I used to go to a young, recently accredited social worker just one block over on Madison. For under a hundred dollars every week, someone cared for me in these parts, even if, in the end, Janice Feingold, M.S.W., could not cure me of my fear of nonexistence. Her favorite question: “Why do you think you would be happier if you could live forever?”

After my sessions, I would decompress slowly with a book or an actual printed newspaper amidst the brilliant greenery of Cedar Hill. I would try to assimilate Ms. Feingold’s therapeutic view of me as someone worthy of the colors and graces of life, and this particular stretch of Central Park nicely brought home the point of all her good work. Depending on your viewing angle, the Hill can appear a collegiate New England lawn or a dense coniferous forest, gray rocks spread out glacially, cedars cautiously intermingling with pines. The Hill descends eastward to a tiny green valley, unfurling a cast of strollers, long-haired dachshunds wearing polka-dot bandanas, dexterous Anglo-Saxon children in full swing, dark-skinned caregivers, tourists on ethnic blankets enjoying the weather.

What a day it was! The middle of June, the trees coming into their own, the boughs filling abundantly. Everywhere youth for the taking. How to contain the natural reflex to stand up on one’s hind legs and sniff poignantly for the warmth of the sun? How to keep one’s mouth from finding Eunice’s and burrowing inside?

I pointed out a park sign that said “Passive Activities Encouraged.” “Funny, huh?” I said to Eunice.

“
You’re
funny,” she said. She looked at me directly for the first time since she’d landed. There was her customary sneer curling the left side of her lower lip, but, per the sign’s directions, it was entirely passive. She put her hands forward, and the sun stroked them before they met the shadow of my own. We held hands briefly and then she looked away from me.
Small doses
, I thought.
This is enough for right now
. But then my mouth started talking. “Boy,” it said, “I could really learn to love—”

“I don’t want to hurt you, Lenny,” she interrupted me.

Easy. Easy does it
. “I know you don’t,” I said. “You’re probably still in love with that guy in Italy.”

She sighed. “Everything I touch turns to shit,” she said, shaking her head, her whole face suddenly older and unforgiving. “I’m a walking disaster. What’s
that
?”

It hurt my eyes to part company with her face. But I looked as directed. Someone had built a little wooden shack at the crest of the hill, adding to its rustic appeal. We languidly went up to investigate, I relishing the opportunity to observe her behind, which sat humbly, almost unnecessarily, atop two sturdy legs. I wondered how she would survive in the world without an ass. Everyone needs a cushion. Maybe I could be that for her.