Super Sad True Love Story

by Gary Shteyngart

  It turned out that she was working as a contractor for the State Department, helping out with the Welcome Back, Pa’dner program.

  “But don’t get me wrong,” she said, “I’m just doing customer service. Answering questions, not asking them. That’s all American Restoration Authority.” And then, leaning toward me, in a lowered voice, her artichoke breath gently strumming my face: “Oh, what has happened to us, Lenny? I get reports on my desk, they make me cry. The Chinese and Europeans are going to decouple from us. I’m not sure what that means, but how good can it be? And we’re going to deport all our immigrants with weak Credit. And our poor boys are being massacred in Venezuela. This time I’m afraid we’re not going to pull out of it!”

  “No, it’ll be okay, Mrs. Fine,” I said. “There’s still only one America.”

  “And that shifty Rubenstein. Can you believe he’s one of us?”

  “One of us?”

  Barely sonic whisper: “A Jew.”

  “My parents actually love Rubenstein,” I said, in reference to our imperious but star-crossed Defense Secretary. “All they do is sit at home and watch FoxLiberty-Prime and FoxLiberty-Ultra.”

  Mrs. Fine made a distasteful face. She had helped drag my parents into the American continuum, had taught them to gargle and wash out sweat stains, but their inbred Soviet Jewish conservatism had ultimately repulsed her.

  She had known me since I was born, back when the Abramov mishpocheh lived in Queens in a cramped garden apartment that now elicits nothing but nostalgia, but which must have been a mean and sorrowful place all the same. My father had a janitorial job out at a Long Island government laboratory, a job that kept us in Spam for the first ten years of my life. My mother celebrated my birth by being promoted from clerk/typist to secretary at the credit union where she bravely labored minus English-language skills, and all of a sudden we were really on our way to becoming lower-middle-class. In those days, my parents used to drive me around in their rusted Chevrolet Malibu Classic to neighborhoods poorer than our own, so that we could both laugh at the funny ragtag brown people scurrying about in their sandals and pick up important lessons about what failure could mean in America. It was after my parents told Mrs. Fine about our little slumming forays into Corona and the safer parts of Bed-Stuy that the rupture between her and my family truly began. I remember my parents looking up “cruel” in the English-Russian dictionary, shocked that our American mama could possibly think that of us.

  “Tell me everything!” Nettie Fine said. “What have you been doing in Rome?”

  “I work in the creative economy,” I said proudly. “Indefinite Life Extension. We’re going to help people live forever. I’m looking for European HNWIs—that’s High Net Worth Individuals—and they’re going to be our clients. We call them ‘Life Lovers.’”

  “Oh my!” Mrs. Fine said. She clearly didn’t know what the hell I was talking about, but this woman with her three courteous UPenn-graduated boys could only smile and encourage, smile and encourage. “That certainly sounds like—something!”

  “It really is,” I said. “But I think I’m in a bit of trouble here.” I explained to her the problem I had just experienced with Welcome Back, Pa’dner. “Maybe the otter thinks I hang out with Somalians. What I said was ‘Some Italians.’”

  “Show me your äppärät,” she commanded. She raised her eyeglasses to reveal the soft early-sixties wrinkles that had made her face exactly how it was meant to look since the day she was born—a comfort to all. “ERROR CODE IT/FC-GS/FLAG,” she sighed. “Oh boy, buster. You’ve been flagged.”

  “But why?” I shouted. “What did I do?”

  “Shhh,” she said. “Let me reset your äppärät. Let’s try Welcome Back, Pa’dner again.”

  Several attempts were made, but the same frozen otter appeared along with the error message. “When did this happen?” she asked. “What was that thing asking you?”

  I hesitated, feeling even more naked in front of my family’s native-born savior. “He asked me the name of the Italian woman I had relations with,” I said.

  “Let’s backtrack,” Nettie said, ever the troubleshooter. “When the otter asked you to subscribe to the ‘Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now!’ thing, did you do it?”

  “I did.”

  “Good. And what’s your Credit ranking?” I told her. “Fine. I wouldn’t worry. If you get stopped at JFK, just give them my contact info and tell them to get in touch with me right away.” She plugged her coordinates into my äppärät. When she hugged me she could feel my knees knocking together in fear. “Aw, sweetie,” she said, a warm tribal tear spilling from her face onto mine. “Don’t worry. You’ll be okay. A man like you. Creative economy. I just hope your parents’ Credit ranking is strong. They came all the way to America, and for what? For what?”

  But I did worry. How could I not? Flagged by some fucking otter! Jesus Christ. I instructed myself to relax, to enjoy the last twenty hours of my year-long European idyll, and possibly to get very drunk off some sour red Montepulciano.

  My last Roman evening started out per the usual, diary. Another halfhearted orgy at Fabrizia’s, the woman I have had relations with. I’m only mildly tired of these orgies. Like all New Yorkers, I’m a real-estate whore, and I adore these late-nineteenth-century Turinese-built apartments on the huge, palm-studded Piazza Vittorio, with sunny views of the green-tinged Alban Hills in the distance. On my last night at Fabrizia’s, the expected bunch of forty-year-olds showed up, the rich children of Cinecittà film directors who are now occasional screenwriters for the failing Rai (once Italy’s main television concern), but mostly indulgers of their parents’ fading fortunes. That’s what I admire about youngish Italians, the slow diminution of ambition, the recognition that the best is far behind them. (An Italian Whitney Houston might have sung, “I believe the parents are our future.”) We Americans can learn a lot from their graceful decline.

  I’ve always been shy around Fabrizia. I know she only likes me because I’m “diverting” and “funny” (read: Semitic), and because her bed hasn’t been warmed by a local man in some time. But now that I had sold her out to the American Restoration Authority otter, I worried that there might be repercussions for her down the line. Italy’s government is the last one left in Western Europe that still smooches our ass.

  In any case, Fabrizia was all over me at the party. First she and some fat British filmmaker took turns kissing me on the eyelids. Then, as she was having one of those very angry Italian äppärät chats on the couch, she spread her legs to flash me her neon panties, her thick Mediterranean pubic hairs clearly visible. She took time out of her sexy screaming and furious typing to say to me in English: “You’ve become a lot more decadent since I’ve met you, Lenny.”

  “I’m trying,” I stuttered.

  “Try harder,” she said. She snapped her legs shut, which nearly killed me, and then went back to her äppärät assault. I wanted to feel those elegant forty-year-old breasts one more time. I made a few slow gyrating motions toward her and batted my eyelashes (that is to say, blinked a lot), trying, with a dose of East Coast irony, to resemble some hot Cinecittà leading lady of the 1960s. Fabrizia blinked back and stuck one hand down her panties. A few minutes later, we opened the door to her bedroom to discover her three-year-old boy hiding beneath a pillow, a cloud of smoke from the main rooms draping him twice-fold. “Fuck,” Fabrizia said, watching the small, asthmatic child crawling toward her on the bed.

  “Mama,” the child whispered. “Aiuto me.”

  “Katia!” she screamed. “Puttana! She supposed to watch him. Stay here, Lenny.” She went off looking for her Ukrainian nanny, her little boy stumbling through the Hollywood-grade smoke behind her.

  I went into the corridor, which seemed like the arrivals lounge at Fiumicino Airport, with couples meeting, coming together, disappearing into rooms, coming out of rooms, fixing their blouses, tightening their belts, coming apart. I took out my dated äppärät, with its retro walnut finish
and its dusty screen blinking with slow data, trying to get a read on whether there were any High Net Worth Individuals in the room—last chance to find some new clients for my boss, Joshie, after having found a grand total of one client during the whole year—but no one’s face was famous enough to register on my display. A sort-of well-known Mediastud, a Bolognese visual artist, sullen and shy in person, watched his girlfriend flirting ridiculously with a less accomplished man. “I work a little, play a little,” someone was saying in accented English, followed by cute, hollow female laughter. A recently arrived American girl, a yoga teacher to the stars, was being reduced to tears by a much older local woman, who kept stabbing her in the heart with one long, painted fingernail and accusing her, personally, of the U.S. invasion of Venezuela. A domestic came carrying a large plate of marinated anchovies. The bald man known as “Cancer Boy” followed dejectedly on the heels of the Afghani princess to whom he had given his heart. A slightly famous Rai actor started telling me about how he had impregnated a girl of good standing in Chile and then fled back to Rome before Chilean law could hold him accountable. When a fellow Neapolitan showed up, he said to me: “Excuse us, Lenny, we have to speak in dialect.”

  I continued to wait for my Fabrizia while nibbling on an anchovy, feeling like the horniest thirty-nine-year-old man in Rome—a very serious distinction. Perhaps my occasional lover had fallen into another’s arms during our brief separation. I did not have a girl waiting for me in New York, I wasn’t sure I even had a job waiting for me in New York after my failures in Europe, so I really wanted to screw Fabrizia. She was the softest woman I had ever touched, the muscles stirring somewhere deep beneath her skin like phantom gears, and her breath, like her son’s, was shallow and hard, so that when she “made the love” (her words), it sounded like she was in danger of expiring.

  I caught sight of a Roman fixture, an old American sculptor of small stature and dying teeth who wore his hair in a Beatlesque mop and liked to mention his friendship with the iconic Tribeca actor “Bobby D.” Several times I have pushed his drunken rotundity into a taxi, telling the cabbies his prestigious address on the Gianicolo Hill, and handing them twenty of my own precious euros.

  I had almost failed to notice the young woman in front of him, a small Korean (I’ve dated two previously, both delightfully insane), with her hair up in a provocative bun so that she resembled vaguely a very young Asian Audrey Hepburn. She had full shiny lips and a lovely if incongruous splash of freckles across her nose, and could not have weighed more than eighty pounds, a compactness which made me tremble with bad thoughts. I wondered, for example, if her mother, probably a tiny, immaculate woman humming with immigrant anxiety and bad religion, knew that her little girl was no longer a virgin.

  “Oh, it’s Lenny,” the American sculptor said when I came around to shake his hand. He was a High Net Worth Individual, if barely, and I had tried to court him on several occasions. The young Korean woman glanced at me with what I took to be serious lack of interest (her default position seemed to be a scowl), her hands clenched tightly before her. I thought I had blundered onto a new couple and was about to make my apologies, but the American was already starting to introduce us. “The lovely Eunice Kim from Fort Lee, New Jersey, via Elderbird College, Mass.,” he said in the brawling Brooklyn accent he thought was charmingly authentic. “Euny’s an art-history student.”

  “Eunice Park,” she corrected him. “I don’t really study art history. I’m not even a college student anymore.”

  I was pleased by her humility, acquiring a steady, throbbing erection.

  “This is Lenny Abraham. He helps old stockbrokers live a little longer.”

  “It’s Abramov,” I said, with a subservient bow to the young lady. I noticed the glass of inky Sicilian red in my hand and drank it in one go. All of a sudden I was sweating all over my freshly laundered shirt and ugly loafers. I took out my äppärät, flicked it open in a gesture that was au courant maybe a decade ago, held it stupidly in front of me, put it back in my shirt pocket, then reached for a nearby bottle and refilled my glass. It was incumbent upon me to say something impressive about myself. “I do nanotechnology and stuff.”

  “Like a scientist?” Eunice Park asked.

  “More like a salesman,” the American sculptor rumbled. He was notoriously competitive over women. At the last party, he had championed over a young Milanese animator to get a blow job from Fabrizia’s nineteen-year-old cousin. In Rome this passed for breaking news.

  The sculptor made a half-turn toward Eunice, partly obscuring me with one thick shoulder. I took that as my sign to leave, but whenever I began to do so, she would glance my way, casually tossing me a lifeline. Maybe she was scared of the sculptor herself, worried she would end up on her knees in a dimly lit room.

  I drank heavily, eyeing the sculptor’s broad attempts to impress the thoroughly unimpressible Eunice Park. “So I says to her, ‘Contessa, you can stay in my beach house in Puglia until you get back on your feet.’ I don’t have time for the beach anyway. They want me to take up a commission in Shanghai. Six million yuan for two pieces. That’s what—fifty million dollars? I says to her, ‘Don’t cry, contessa, you sly old bird. I’ve been down to nothing myself. Not a centavo to my name. Practically grew up in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. First thing I remember was a sock to the face. Bam!’”

  I felt sad for the sculptor, and not just because I doubted his chances with Eunice Park, but because I realized he would soon be dead. From an ex-lover of his I had learned that his advanced diabetes had almost cost him two toes, and the heavy cocaine use was maxing out his aging circulatory system. In the business we called him an ITP, Impossible to Preserve, the vital signs too far gone for current interventions, the psychological indicators showing an “extreme willingness/desire to perish.” Even more despairing was his financial status. I’m quoting directly from my report to boss man Joshie: “Income yearly $2.24 million, pegged to the yuan; obligations, including alimony and child support, $3.12 million; investible assets (excluding real estate)—northern euro 22,000,000; real estate $5.4 million, pegged to the yuan; total debts outstanding $12.9 million, unpegged.” A mess, in other words.

  Why was he doing this to himself? Why not keep off the drugs and the demanding young women, spend a decade in Corfu or Chiang Mai, douse his body with alkalines and smart technology, clamp down on the free radicals, keep the mind focused on the work, beef up the stock portfolio, take the tire off the belly, let us fix that aging bulldog’s mug? What kept the sculptor here, in a city useful only as a reference to the past, preying on the young, gorging on thick-haired pussy and platefuls of carbs, swimming with the prevailing current toward his own nullification? Beyond that ugly body, those rotting teeth, that curdled breath, was a visionary and a creator, whose heavy-handed work I sometimes admired.

  As I buried the sculptor, marching behind the pallbearers, comforting his beautiful ex-wife and cherubic twin sons, my eyes watched Eunice Park, young, stoic, and flat, nodding along to the sculptor’s self-serving remarks. I wanted to reach over and touch her empty chest, feel the tough little nipples that I imagined proclaimed her love. I noticed that her sharp nose and little arms were lightly coated with moisture and that she was matching me in the drinking department, plucking off wineglasses from passing trays, her tightly wound mouth turning purple. She wore fancy jeans, a gray cashmere sweater, and a string of pearls which lent her at least ten years of age. The only youthful part of her was a sleek white pendant—a pebble almost—which looked like some kind of miniaturized new äppärät. In certain wealthy precincts of trans-Atlantic society, the differences between young and old were steadily eroding, and in other precincts the young were mostly going naked, but what was Eunice Park’s story? Was she trying to be older or richer or whiter? Why do attractive people have to be anything but themselves?

  When I next looked up, the sculptor had placed his heavy paw on her negligible shoulder and was squeezing hard. “Chinese women are so delicate,”
he said.

  “I’m not that delicate.”

  “Yes, you are!”

  “I’m not Chinese.”

  “Anyway, Bobby D. and Dick Gere were fighting at a party. Dick came to me and said, ‘Why does Bobby hate me so much?’ Wait. What was I saying? Do you need another drink? Oh! You made the right choice coming to Rome, kitten. New York is finished these days. America is history. And with those fuckers in charge now, I’m never going back. Fucking Rubenstein. Fucking Bipartisan Party. It’s 1984, baby. Not that you would get the reference. Maybe our bookish friend Lenny here could enlighten us. You’re so lucky to be here with me, Euny. Do you want to kiss me?”

  “No,” Eunice Park said. “No, thank you.”

  No, thank you. A nice Korean girl, graduate of Elderbird College, Mass. How I longed to kiss those full lips myself and cradle the slightness of the rest of her.

  “Why not?” the sculptor shouted. And then, because he had long lost the ability to gauge short-term consequences, he shook her by the shoulder, a drunken shake, but one that her tiny body looked ill-equipped to handle. Eunice looked up, and in her eyes I saw the familiar anger of an adult suddenly dragged back into childhood. She pressed one hand to her stomach, as if she had been punched, and looked down. Red wine had spilled on her expensive sweater. She turned to me, and I saw embarrassment, not for the sculptor, but for herself.

  “Let’s take it easy,” I said, putting my hand on the sculptor’s taut, moist neck. “Let’s maybe sit down on the couch and have some water.” Eunice was rubbing her shoulder and backing away from us. She looked as if she was expertly holding back the tears.