Super Sad True Love Story (36 page)

OCTOBER 21

CHUNG.WON.PARK
TO
EUNI-TARD:

Eunhee,

Today we got application for Lao Wai passport thank to you! Mr. Shu even call us and tell us that it just formal application and we already guarantee to move New York. Daddy and me so proud of you. Smart daughter! We always know. Even in Catholic when you get good grade and then go Elderbird. Remember how art teacher in school praise your spatial skill and we think she say SPECIAL skill and we always wonder what it is?
We saw your new friend Joshie Goldman, and he is very handsome for old man much younger look than Roommate Lenny. We are proud also you have such important friend. Lenny he is not able to help you. He is Russian. Maybe he is communist? All Russians in old time were communist before oil. But if you like older man we know in Toronto Mrs. Choi’s son who is 31, tall and very musheesuh and work good job in medical tool industry. Thank you Eunhee for thinking of your family. Please forgive you do not understand my English. God bless you always.

Love,

Mommy

OCTOBER 22

SALLYSTAR:
I got the student visa. I don’t know what to say, Eunice, just that I love you. I know you’ll always have my back, and not just because you’re my older sister. You don’t want to hear this, but I pray for you every day. I pray that you’re happy and at peace with yourself. Remember how happy we were as kids when we’d get H-Mart ddok and mandoo after church? Remember how you’d stuff your face and cry later because you thought you gained weight?

EUNI-TARD:
You don’t have to thank me, Sally. I’m just glad you’re safe. I can’t believe you had to hide in the basement for a whole week. I can’t believe what happened to the Kim’s daughter, what’s her name?

SALLYSTAR:
I don’t think I want to talk about that right now.

EUNI-TARD:
I just feel guilty that I wasn’t there with you.

SALLYSTAR:
It’s the kind of thing that makes you focus. And now I know why I’m alive. For you and for Mommy and for Daddy. I’m going to be quiet, I’m not going to act out Politically, and I’m going to make sure that nothing like what happened to Sarah Kim is going to happen to any of us. You really are a “roll” model for me, Eunice, just like Mommy says.

EUNI-TARD:
Are you going back to Barnard?

SALLYSTAR:
They’re closing Barnard for the year, but that’s fine. I have to take more Mandarin and Norwegian classes all year long anyway.

EUNI-TARD:
You’ll do great, Sally. You can do anything you set your mind to.

SALLYSTAR:
What about you?

EUNI-TARD:
Huh?

SALLYSTAR:
What do you think you want to do next with your life?

EUNI-TARD:
I don’t know. Joshie can get me a great Retail job, but I might do art-finance college in London.

SALLYSTAR:
So things are pretty serious with him? Have you told Lenny yet?

EUNI-TARD:
No.

SALLYSTAR:
You shouldn’t lie to him anymore, Eunice. I never told you this but I think Lenny’s a very nice man, the one time I met him anyway. He really tried with Mom and Dad.

EUNI-TARD:
I know. You don’t have to tell me. But he’s not perfect. He only cares about me when I’m pissed at him. Anyway, I’m sure he’ll find another Korean girl, like the hundred he’s already dated. A real nomo cha-keh girl, not like me. Oh, and I saw some Images of his exes broke-ass faces. Lenny’s one of those white guys who can’t tell a good-looking Asian girl from an ugly one. We all look the same to them.

SALLYSTAR:
It’s none of my business, but I think you should be really kind to Lenny, even if you break up with him. You want to be fair to him.

EUNI-TARD:
I know, Sally. I’ll be honest. I don’t know if I CAN break up with him. I still love him. He’s just so clueless. My poor Leonardo Dabramovinci. He’s sitting next to me now and trimming his toenails, smiling at me for no good reason. I don’t know why, but I think that’s really sad when he smiles like that. And I get kind of angry too, that he can still have that kind of effect on me.

OCTOBER 24

GOLDMANN-FOREVER
TO
EUNI-TARD:

Eunice, we have to talk. I know you love me, but sometimes you really don’t treat me well. One day you tell me I’m “the bestest boyfriend ever” and the next day you’re not sure, you want us to take some time off from each other, you want to relax things a little. And that makes me feel like I’m some kind of needy asshole, pushing you to tell Lenny about us, pushing you to move in with me, pushing you to take this relationship as seriously as I take it. You seem to get me confused with Joshie Goldmann the high-profile guy who’s trying to change the world and whom everyone worships. I’m a different man with you. I’m just a human being who’s in love and nothing more.

I don’t like it when you make me feel guilty about all the old people who are going to be thrown out of Lenny’s buildings. That’s not my department, Eunice. I can help you with your parents and your sister, but I can’t exactly keep over a hundred unneeded people in New York. The IMF calls the tune now. I think I’ve done about all I can for them over the last months, sending down food and water.

Look, I know I’m asking you to take enormous steps, and I know Lenny represents a kind of “emotional” safety net, and that’s why you’re sticking up for him. But don’t forget that I’m ultimately the one that can assure your safety. And I know that Lenny pursued you in this ridiculous overbearing way and I don’t want to repeat that mistake. Though I may not act it sometimes, let’s not forget that I’m seventy. And one thing I can tell you from my experience, Eunice, is that you’ll only get one youth. And you better spend it with someone who can maximize it for you, who can make you feel good and cared for and loved and, in the long run, someone who won’t die a long time before you, like Lenny will. (Statistically, given that he’s a Russian male and you’re an Asian female, he’ll be gone about twenty years before you.)

Am I scared of how fast things are going with us? You better believe it! I look at us in the mirror sometimes and I can’t believe who I am. Every week we come closer together, and then every week you do something to make me feel like I’m not deserving of you. You push me away. Why? Is it just in your nature to be cruel to men? Then maybe you can change that part of your nature before it’s too late.

I think about you all the time, Eunice. Sometimes you’re the only thing in this world that still makes sense to me. Now YOU have to start thinking of ME. I’m up here on the good old Upper West Side, thumping my chest and making sad ape sounds and dreaming of the day when you will treat me the way I deserve to be treated. We’ve got many years ahead of us, my sweet bumblebee. Let’s not waste a moment of precious time. Sogni d’oro, as you like to say. Golden dreams to you.

FOREVER YOUNG

FROM THE DIARIES OF LENNY ABRAMOV

NOVEMBER 10

Dear Diary,

Today I’ve made a major decision:
I am going to die
.

Nothing of my personality will remain. The light switch will be turned off. My life, my entirety, will be lost forever. I will be nullified. And what will be left? Floating through the ether, tickling the empty belly of space, alighting over farms outside Cape Town, and crashing into an aurora above Hammerfest, Norway, the northernmost city of this shattered planet—my data, the soupy base of my existence uptexted to a GlobalTeens account. Words, words, words.

You, dear diary.

This will be my last entry.

A month ago, mid-October, a gust of autumnal wind kicked its way down Grand Street. A co-op woman, old, tired, Jewish, fake drops of jade spread across the little sacks of her bosom, looked up at the pending wind and said one word: “Blustery.” Just one word, a word meaning no more than “a period of time characterized by strong winds,” but it caught me unaware, it reminded me of how language was once used, its precision and simplicity, its capacity for recall. Not cold, not chilly, blustery. A hundred other blustery days appeared before me, my young mother in a faux-fur coat standing before our Chevrolet Malibu Classic, her hands protectively over my ears because my defective ski hat couldn’t be pulled down to cover them, while my father cursed and fumbled with his car keys. The streams of her worried breath against my face, the excitement of feeling both cold and protected, exposed to the elements and loved at the same time.

“It
is
blustery, ma’am,” I said to the old co-op woman. “I can feel it in my bones.” And she smiled at me with whatever facial muscles she still had in reserve. We were communicating with words.

I returned from Westbury to find Eunice in one piece, but the Vladeck Houses turned into shells, their orange carapaces burned black. I stood in front of the houses with a posse of still-employed Media guys in expensive sneakers, as we evaluated the jagged lines of windows past, made poetry out of a lone Samsung air conditioner dangling back and forth on its cord in the shallow river breeze. Where were the project dwellers? The Latinos who had once made us so happy to say we were living in “downtown’s last diverse neighborhood,” where had they gone?

A Staatling truck full of five-jiao men pulled up. The men clambered out and were immediately presented with tool belts, which they eagerly, almost happily, tied around their shrunken waists. A rural log truck pulled up behind the first. But these weren’t logs stacked five to a row, these were Credit Poles, blunt and round, lacking even the adornments of their predecessors. They were up within a day, a new slogan billowing from their masts, the outline of the new Parthenon-shaped IMF headquarters in Singapore, and the words:

“Life Is Richer, Life Is Brighter! Thank You, International Monetary Fund!”

I met Grace for a picnic lunch in the park. She was sitting on a comfortable rock outcropping in the Sheep Meadow, a glacier-era chaise longue. Less than half a year ago, the blood of a hundred had washed over the neighboring pillows of grass. In a white cotton dress loosely draping her shoulders, in a perfect curve of hair draping the concentration of her face, deeply pregnant yet elegant in repose, she seemed, from afar, a vision of something incomprehensibly right in the world. I walked toward Grace slowly, gathering my thoughts. Now I would have to figure out how to adjust our friendship to include someone else, someone even smaller and more innocent than her mother.

I could see the child already. Whatever her nature would impress upon him (I was told it would be a boy), he was sure to have at least some of Vishnu’s furriness, his bumbling nature, his kindness and naïveté. It was strange for me to consider a child the product of
two
people. My parents, for all their temperamental differences, were so alike that at times I consider them a uni-parent, made heavy with child by a Yiddish Holy Ghost. What if Eunice and I had a child together? Would it make her happier? She seemed, in recent days, distant from me. Sometimes even when she was viewing her favorite anorexic models on AssLuxury, it would appear Eunice’s gaze was boring right through them into some new dimension devoid of hip and bone.

Grace and I drank watermelon juice and ate freshly sliced kimbap from 32nd Street, the pickled daikon radish crunching smartly between our teeth, rice and seaweed coating our mouths with sea and starch. Normalcy, that’s what we were going for. After some jokey preliminaries, she put on her serious face. “Lenny,” she said, “there’s something a little sad I have to tell you.”

“Oh, no,” I said.

“Vishnu and I got permanent residency in Stability. We’re moving to Vancouver in three weeks.”

I felt the rice expanding in my throat and coughed into my hand. I beheld the terms I was given.
Grace
. The woman who had loved me the most. Had listened to me for the past fifteen years, me with all that melancholy and dysthymia.
Vancouver
. A northern city, far away.

Grace’s arms were around me, and I breathed in her conditioner and her impending motherhood. She was abandoning me. Did she
still
love me? Even Chekhov’s ugly Laptev had an admirer, a woman named Polina, “very thin and plain, with a long nose.” After Laptev marries the young and beautiful Julia, Polina tells him:

“And so you are married.… But don’t be uneasy; I’m not going to pine away. I shall be able to tear you out of my heart. Only it’s annoying and bitter to me that you are just as contemptible as every one else; that what you want in a woman is not brains or intellect, but simply a body, good looks, and youth.… Youth!”

I wanted Grace to hiss similar words at me, to confront me once again for loving someone so young and inexperienced, and to make me consider being with her instead of Eunice. But, of course, she didn’t.

And that made me angry.

“So how did you guys get Canadian residency?” I asked her, not even bothering to modulate the acidity of my tone. “I thought it was impossible. The waiting list is over twenty-three million.”

“We got lucky,” she said. “And I have a degree in econometrics. That helps.”

“Gracie,” I pressed on, “Noah told me a while ago that Vishnu collaborated with the ARA, with the Bipartisans.”

She didn’t say anything, ate her kimbap. A man and woman conversing in a rolling foreign language walked behind a dirty mountain of a Saint Bernard whose tongue was dragging along the ground from the Indian-summer heat. Behind a scrim of trees a group of five-jiao men were digging a ditch. One had clearly disobeyed, because his leader was now approaching him bearing something glinty and long. The five-jiao guy was on his knees, his hands covering his long, matted blond hair. I tried to shield Grace’s view with my plastic cup of watermelon juice and prayed there wouldn’t be violence. “I’m sure it’s not true,” I continued, picking grass off my jeans as if this were any other conversation. “I know Vishnu’s a good guy.”

“I don’t want to talk about these things,” Grace said. “You know, the three of you were always pretty strange friends.
The boys
. Like in books. With all that swagger and camaraderie. But that was never going to work. When you were apart you were real people, but when you were together you were like a cartoon.”

I sighed and put my head in my hands.

“I’m sorry,” Grace said. “I know you loved Noah. That’s no way to speak of the dead. And I don’t know what happened with the ARA and who did what. I just know that there’s no future for us here. And there’s no future for you either, when you think about it. Why don’t you come to Canada with us?”

“I don’t seem to have your connections,” I said, too roughly.

“You have a business degree,” she said. “That could put you at the front of the list. You should try to get to the Quebec border. You can take an armored Fung Wah bus. If you make it across legally, the Canadians have a special category. I think it’s something like ‘Landed Immigrants.’ We can hire a lawyer on the other side to get to work for you.”

“They’ll never let Eunice in,” I said. “Her education is worthless. Major in Images, minor in Assertiveness.”

“Lenny,” Grace said. Her face was near mine, and her vocal breathing kept pace with the exhale of the wind and the trees. Her hand was upon my cheek, and all the worries of my life were cupped and held within. A dull thud echoed behind the trees, metal connecting with scalp, but there was no whimper, just the distant, mirage-like sight of a body fully lowering itself to the ground. “Sometimes,” she said, “I think you’re not going to make it.”

Late October. A few days after my lunch with Grace, Eunice verballed me at work and told me to come down immediately. “They’re throwing us all out,” she said. “Old people, everyone. That asshole.” I did not have time to ascertain who the asshole was. I hijacked a company Town Car and raced downtown to find my inglorious red-brick hulk of a building surrounded by flat-bottomed young men in khakis and oxfords, and three Wapachung Contingency armored personnel carriers, their crews lounging peaceably beneath an elm tree, guns at their feet. My aged fellow cooperators had filled the ample park-like grounds around our buildings with their helter-skelter belongings, heavy on decrepit credenzas, deflated black leather couches, and framed photographs of their chubby sons and grandsons attacking river trout.

I found a young guy in the standard-issue chinos and an ID that read “Staatling Property Relocation Services.” “Hey,” I said, “I work for Post-Human Services. What the fuck? I live in one of these units. Joshie Goldmann’s my boss.”

“Harm Reduction,” he said, giving me an actual pout with those fat red lips.

“Excuse me?”

“You’re too close to the river. Staatling’s tearing these down tomorrow. In case of flooding. Global warming. Anyways, Post-Human has space for its employees uptown.”

“That’s bull crap,” I said. “You’re just going to build a bunch of Triplexes here. Why lie, pal?”

He walked away from me, and I followed through the jumble of old women propelling themselves out of the lobby on walkers, some of the more able-bodied babushkas pushing the wheelchair-bound, a collective crooning, heavier on depression than outrage, forming a kind of aural tent over the exile-in-progress. All the younger, angrier people who lived in the co-ops were probably at work. That’s why they were throwing us out at noon.

I was ready to grab the young Staatling guy’s head and to start bashing it against the cement of my beloved building, my homely refuge, my simple home. I could feel my father’s anger finding a righteous target. There was something Abramovian in this buzz in my head, in the continual teetering between aggression and victimhood. “The Joys of Playing Basketball.” Masada. Grabbing the young man by one skinny shoulder, I said to him, “Wait a second, friend. You don’t own this place. This is
private property
.”

“Are you kidding, Grandpa?” he said, easily throwing off my almost-forty-year-old grip. “You touch me again, I swear I’ll ass-plug you.”

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s talk about this like human beings.”

“I
am
talking like a human being. You’re the one being a bitch. You’ve got one day to get all your shit out or it’s going down with the building.”

“I’ve got books in there.”

“Who?”

“Printed, bound media artifacts. Some of them very important.”

“I think I just refluxed my lunch.”

“Okay, what about
them
?” I said, pointing to my elderly neighbors, shuffling out into the sunlight, widows in straw boaters and sundresses with perhaps but a few years to live.

“They’re being moved into abandoned housing in New Rochelle.”

“New Rochelle? Abandoned housing? Why not just take them straight to the abattoir? You know these old people can’t make it outside New York.”

The young man rolled his eyes. “I can’t be having this conversation,” he said.

I ran into my familiar lobby, with the twin pines of the cooperative movement inlaid into the shiny, carefully waxed floor. Old people were sitting atop tied-up bundles, awaiting instructions, awaiting deportation. Inside the elevator, two uniformed Wapachung men were carrying out an old woman, Bat Mitzvah–style, on the very chair she had been sitting on, her puffy, sniffling visage too much for me to bear. “Mister, mister,” some of her friends were chanting, withered arms reaching out to me. They knew me from the worst of the Rupture, when Eunice used to come and wash them down, hold their hands, give them hope. “Can’t you do something, mister? Don’t you know somebody?”

I could not help them. Could not help my parents. Could not help Eunice. Could not help myself. I ignored the elevators and ran up the six flights of stairs, stumbling, half alive, into the noontime light flooding my 740 square feet. “Eunice, Eunice!” I cried.

She was in her sweatpants and Elderbird T-shirt, heat rising from her body. The floor was covered with cardboard boxes she had assembled, some of them half filled with books. We hugged each other and I tried to kiss her at length, but she pushed me away and pointed to the Wall of Books out in the living room. She made me understand that she would put together more of these boxes and that I was to continue packing them with books. I went back to the living room to face the couch where Eunice and I had made love for the second and third time (the bedroom had won the first round). I walked up to the bookcase, picked up an armload of volumes, some of the Fitzgeraldian and Hemingwayesque stuff I had swallowed along with an imaginary glass of Pernod as an NYU undergrad; the musty, brittle Soviet books (average price one ruble, forty-nine kopecks) my father had given me as a way to bridge the unfathomable gap between our two existences; and the Lacanian and feminist volumes that were supposed to make me look good when potential girlfriends came over (like anybody even cared about texts by the time I got to college).