Super Sad True Love Story

by Gary Shteyngart

  “He reminds me of you,” Eunice said. “A big nerd.” I smiled at that, pleased that she could conceive of our commonalities. The idea occurred to me that we could form a family, although I was unsure of what role I would play. Eunice picked a few hairs from my face, her face warm with attention, then glossed my lips with chap. She pulled down on my short-sleeved shirt so that it aligned better with my light cashmere V-neck sweater. “Go like this with your arms,” she said, shaking her own. “Now pull on the sleeves.”

  Joshie returned to hand Eunice a glass of wine; I got a mug’s worth of purple aroma. “Hope you don’t mind the mug, Lenny,” he said. “My cleaning woman got stopped at the ARA checkpoint on the WB.”

  “The what?” I said.

  “Williamsburg Bridge,” Eunice clarified. Both she and Joshie rolled their eyes and laughed at my slow ways with abbreviations. “You have such a pretty apartment,” Eunice said. “Those posters must be worth a billion. Everything’s so old.”

  “Including the owner,” Joshie said.

  “No,” Eunice said. “You look great.”

  “You look great too.”

  I pulled on the sleeves of my shirt an extra time. “Let me show you around,” Joshie said. “Two-minute house tours my specialty.”

  We went into his cluttered “creative study.” I noticed Eunice had finished most of her Pinot and was already improvising a way to remove the purple from her lips with her finger and a translucent green jelly she squeezed out of a tube. “These are stills from my one-man show,” Joshie said, as he pointed out a framed Image of himself dressed in prison stripes with a giant stuffed albatross hanging from his neck. Standing before me, he looked thirty years younger today than in the Image, which was at least ten years old. He had lost forty years. A half-life gone.

  “The play was called Sins of the Mother,” I said helpfully. “Very funny and very deep.”

  “Was it on Broadway?” Eunice asked.

  Joshie laughed. “Yeah, right,” he said. “Didn’t make it past this sucky supper club in the Village. But I didn’t give a damn about success. Creative thinking, working with your mind, that’s my number-one prescription for longevity. If you stop thinking, if you stop wondering, you die. That simple.” He looked down at his feet, perhaps realizing he sounded more like a salesman than a leader. Eunice made him nervous, I could tell. We had no shortage of attractive women at Post-Human Services, but their self-assuredness made them bleed into one personality. Anyway, Joshie had always said that he had no time for romance until immortality was “a done deal.”

  “Did you draw this yourself?” Eunice asked, pointing to a watercolor of an old, naked woman shattered into three by an unnamed force, her empty breasts flying in all directions, a dark pubic mound holding the thirds together.

  “Very beautiful,” I said. “Very Egon Schiele.”

  “This one’s called Splinter Cell,” Joshie said. “I did about twenty variations of it, and they all look exactly the same.”

  “She kind of resembles you,” Eunice said. “I like the shading around her eyes.”

  “Yes, well …” Joshie said, and made a shy croaking sound. I always felt embarrassed when looking at Joshie’s paintings of his mother, as if I had walked into a bathroom and caught my own mother lifting her tired hindquarters off the toilet seat. “You paint yourself?”

  Eunice coughed. The Great Discomfort Smile came on, the shame bringing her freckles into strong relief. “I took a class,” she barely breathed out. “At Elderbird. A drawing class. It was nothing. I sucked.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I said. “That you took a drawing class.”

  “That’s because you never listen to me, jerk-face,” she whispered.

  “I’d love to see something you’ve drawn,” Joshie said. “I miss painting. It really calmed me down. Maybe we can get together one day and practice a little.”

  “Or you could take some classes at Parsons,” I suggested to Eunice. The idea of the two of them—alive and deathless—creating something together, an Image, a “work of art,” as they used to say, made me feel sorry for myself. If only I had had a proclivity to draw or paint. Why did I have to suffer that ancient Jewish affliction for words?

  “Maybe we can both take some classes at Parsons,” Joshie said to Eunice. “You know, together.”

  “But who has the time?” I ventured.

  We returned to the living room, with Joshie and Eunice landing on one cozy, curvaceous sofa, while I hunched over an opposing leather ottoman. “Cheers,” Joshie said, clinking his mug with Eunice’s long-stemmed glass. They smiled at each other, and then Eunice turned to me. I had to abandon the ottoman and walk over to them to complete the ritual. Then I had to sit back down again. Alone.

  “Cheers,” I said, nearly demolishing Joshie’s mug. “To the people I love the most.”

  “To being fresh and young,” Joshie said.

  They started talking. Joshie asked her about her life, and she replied in her usual inconsequential manner—“Yeah,” “I guess so,” “Sort of,” “Maybe,” “I tried,” “I’m not good,” “I suck.” But she was pleased to be engaged, as attentive as I had ever seen her, one open palm buffering a clump of hair spilling down her shoulder. She didn’t know how to conduct a conversation with a man properly, without anger or flirtation, but she was trying, filtering, giving away as little as possible, but wanting to please. She would look at me worriedly, her eyes crinkling with the pain of having to think and respond, but the worry receded as Joshie kept pouring wine—we were all above the two-glasses-of-resveratrol maximum—and fed her a plate of blueberries and carrots. He volunteered to boil some pot in a kettle of green tea, something I hadn’t seen him do in years, but Eunice politely told him that she didn’t smoke marijuana, that, perversely enough, it made her sad.

  “I wouldn’t mind some,” I said, but the offer had clearly floated off the table.

  “Why do you call Lenny ‘Rhesus Monkey’?” Eunice asked.

  “He looks like one,” Joshie said.

  Eunice gave her äppärät a spin, and when the animal in question appeared, she actually threw her head back and laughed the way I had only seen her laugh with her best Elderbird friends, with honesty as well as mirth. “Totally,” she said. “Those long arms and that, like, bunched-up middle. It’s so hard to shop for him. I always have to teach him how to …” She couldn’t describe it, but made some stretching motions with her arms.

  “Dress,” I concluded for her.

  “He’s a quick learner,” Joshie said, looking at her, one arm reaching absently for a second bottle of wine sitting obediently by his legs. I presented my mug for a refill. We continued to drink heavily. I pushed myself down into the moist leather ottoman, marveling at how little Joshie cared about his surroundings. He hadn’t bought a new piece of furniture in the years I’d known him. All those years, alone, no children, no American overabundance, devoting himself to only one idea, the personification of which sat half a foot away from him, one leg tucked under her, a sign that her distress was abating. One thing Joshie could always communicate was the fact that he wasn’t going to hurt you. Even when he did.

  They were talking youthfully: AssDoctor, girl-threshing, Phuong “Heidi” Ho, the new Vietnamese porn star. They used words like “ass hookah” and teenaged abbreviations like TGV and ICE that brought to mind high-speed European trains. The wrinkle-free, wine-blushing Joshie, his body run through with new muscles and obedient nerve endings, leaned forward like a missile in mid-arc, his mind likely flooding with youthful instincts, the need to connect at any cost. I wondered, heretically, if he would ever miss being older, if his body would ever long for a history.

  “I really want to draw, but I’m no good,” Eunice was saying.

  “I bet you’re good,” Joshie said. “You have such a sense of—style. And economy. I get that just by looking at you!”

  “This one teacher in college said I was good, but she was just this dyke.”

 
“OMFG, why don’t you doodle something right now?”

  “No freaking way.”

  “Totally. Do it. I’ll get some paper.” He pumped his fists into the sofa, propelled himself into the air, and was running for his study.

  “Wait,” Eunice shouted after him. “Holy crap.” She turned to me. “I’m too scared to draw, Len.” But she was smiling. They were playing. We were drunk. She ran after Joshie, and I heard a sharp youthful yell—I could barely tell which of them was responsible. I went over to the abandoned sofa and sat in Joshie’s space, savoring the warmth my master had left behind. It was getting dark. Out the window I traced water towers and the unadorned backs of once-tall buildings leading up to the glass-and-cement scrim of development that lined both banks of the Hudson River, like two sets of dirty mirrors. My äppärät patiently provided information on various real-estate valuations and compared them with HSBC-London’s and Shanghai’s. I pressed the wine bottle to my lips and let the resveratrol flood my system, hoping, praying for a few more years added to the countdown clock of my life. Joshie came back into the living room. “She wouldn’t let me watch,” he said.

  “She’s actually drawing?” I said. “By hand? Not on an äppärät?”

  “Hell’s yeah, home-slice! Don’t you know your own gf?”

  “She’s so modest around me,” I said. “FYI, no one really says ‘home-slice’ anymore, Grizzly.”

  Joshie shrugged. “Youth is youth,” he said. “Talk young, live young. How are your pH levels anyway?”

  She came out, blushing but happy, clutching a sketchpad to her chest. “I can’t,” she said. “It’s stupid. I’m going to tear it up!”

  We raised the appropriate protests, outdoing each other with our thundering baritones, Joshie rapping his mug on the coffee table like some coarse fraternity brother. Shyly, but with a hint of flirtation probably borrowed from an old television series about women in Manhattan, Eunice Park handed Joshie her sketchpad.

  She had drawn a monkey. A rhesus monkey, if I wasn’t mistaken. A bulbous gray-haired chest, long heart-shaped ears, perfectly dark little paws holding on tenuously to a tree branch, a whirl of gray hair on top, below an expression of playful intelligence and contentment. “How meticulous,” I said. “How detailed. Look at those leaves. You’re wonderful, Eunice. I’m so impressed.”

  “She’s got you down, Len,” Joshie said.

  “Me?” I looked at the monkey’s face once more. The red, cracked lips and rampant stubble. The overstated nose, shiny at the tip and bridge, the early wrinkles dashing up to the naked temples; the bushy eyebrows that could count as separate organisms. If you looked at it from a different angle, if you moved the sketchpad into half-shadow, the contentment I had previously discerned on the monkey’s slightly fat face could pass for want. It was a picture of me. As a rhesus monkey. In love.

  “Wow,” Joshie said. “That is so Media.”

  Eunice said it was awful, that twelve-year-olds could do a better job, but I could tell she wasn’t entirely convinced. We each hugged him farewell. He kissed her cheeks for a while, then slapped me quickly on the shoulders. He offered us a digestif and some Upstate-sourced strawberries for the road. He offered to go down in the elevator with us and deal with the armed men outside. He stood in the doorway, clutching on to the doorpost, watching the last of us. During that final moment, the moment of letting go, I saw his face in profile, and noticed the confluence of purpled veins that made him look momentarily old again, that produced a frightening X-ray of what burbled up beneath that handsome new skin tissue and gleaming young eyes. That stupid male shoulder-slap wasn’t enough. I wanted to reach out and comfort him. If Joshie somehow failed at his life’s work, which of us would be more heartbroken, the father or the son?

  “See, that wasn’t so bad,” I said in the Town Car as Eunice put her sweet, alcohol-reeking head on my shoulder. “We had fun, right? He’s a nice man.”

  I heard her breathing temperately against my neck. “I love you, Lenny,” she said. “I love you so much. I wish I could describe it better. But I love you with all I’ve got. Let’s get married.” We kissed each other on the lips, mouth, and ears as we passed through seven ARA checkpoints and the length of the FDR Drive. A military helicopter seemed to follow us home, its single yellow beam stroking the whitecaps of the East River. We talked about going to City Hall. A civil ceremony. Maybe next week. Why not make it official? Why ever be apart? “You’re the one I want, kokiri,” she said. “You’re the only one.”

  OLD MAN SPUNKERS

  FROM THE GLOBALTEENS ACCOUNT OF EUNICE PARK

  JULY 20

  GOLDMANN-FOREVER: Hi, Eunice. It’s Joshie Goldmann. Whasss’uuuup?

  EUNI-TARD: Joshie?

  GOLDMANN-FOREVER: You know, Lenny’s boss.

  EUNI-TARD: Oh. Hi, Mr. Goldmann. How’d you get my info?

  GOLDMANN-FOREVER: Just teened around for it. And what’s with the Mr. Goldmann? That’s my dad’s name. Call me Joshie. Or Grizzly Bear. That’s what Lenny calls me.

  EUNI-TARD: Ha ha.

  GOLDMANN-FOREVER: So I’m writing to remind you of our little date.

  EUNI-TARD: We had a date?

  GOLDMANN-FOREVER: We were going to take an art class together. Duh!

  EUNI-TARD: We were? I’m sorry. I’ve been so busy this week. I should be applying for Retail jobs and stuff.

  GOLDMANN-FOREVER: A lot of our clients are in Retail. What kind of job are you looking for? The guy from Ass something just came in. That’s confidential, actually.

  EUNI-TARD: Oh, I couldn’t impose.

  GOLDMANN-FOREVER: Stop! Who’s imposing? Ha! I’m sure we can hook you up with some mad-ass job.

  EUNI-TARD: Okay. Thank you.

  GOLDMANN-FOREVER: So I got us into a summer drawing class at Parsons-Ewha.

  EUNI-TARD: That’s very nice of you, but the summer session’s already started.

  GOLDMANN-FOREVER: They’re making an exception. It’s just the two of us. Although maybe you shouldn’t tell that to Lenny. Ha ha.

  EUNI-TARD: Thank you so much but I really can’t afford it.

  GOLDMANN-FOREVER: WTF? I got it covered.

  EUNI-TARD: That’s very kind of you, Mr. Goldman. But I think I need to concentrate on getting a job this week.

  GOLDMANN-FOREVER: What did you call me?

  EUNI-TARD: Sorry!!!! I meant Joshie.

  GOLDMANN-FOREVER: Duh! Anyway, that rhesus monkey painting was so good I don’t want your talent to go to waste, Eunice. You’re super-gifted. This may sound weird, but you kind of remind me of me when I was younger. Except you’re sweeter. I was a very angry young man until I realized I didn’t have to die. Some of us are so special, Eunice, we don’t have to succumb to the Fallacy of Merely Existing. Maybe you’re special too, huh? Anyway, I can help you get a job, so you don’t have to worry about that part. And I’ll take a class with you. It’ll be so great!!!! You can make more animal drawings of Lenny and then give them to him for his birthday in the fall.

  EUNI-TARD: I’ve been wondering what to get him actually.

  GOLDMANN-FOREVER: Poifect! OK, gotta jet, but get back to me soon about the classes. They’re flying in some teacher from Paris just for us.

  EUNI-TARD TO GRILLBITCH:

  Dear Precious Pony,

  HOLY FUCKING SHIT!!! Okay, you’ve got to help me, jizz-monkey. Okay, are you sitting down? So we go over to Lenny’s boss’s place and it’s this like adorable old-school apartment, like something out of Paris. So smartly decorated and not too typical Mediastud either, like he’s put a lot of thought into it. They even had the street closed off for him. And his boss is SOOOO adorable. He runs this huge company that makes people look a lot younger. And he’s in his seventies but he looks like he could be Lenny’s younger, handsomer brother. Remember those porns we used to watch when we were in kindergarten? With the old man who molests teens on the beach. What was it called? Old Man Spunkers or something? That’s sort of what he looks like, with the shaved he
ad, but cuter and younger.

  Anyway, Lenny’s boss says he has these micro-robots inside him that repair his dead cells, but that sounds like bullshit. I bet he’s just had a lot of plastic surgery and he also takes care of himself and works out three times a day (UNLIKE LENNY!). So when we hung out I drunk more wine than I’ve had since Rome, and I got a little tipsy, and this guy, Mr. Goldman, he kept looking at me with this kind of sweet, lustful face, like he wants to whore me out, but gently, like I’m his daughter and his sex toy at the same time. He’s so goofy and dorky (he had a one-man show on a live stage and he drew all these funny paintings of an old woman with massive pubic hair—SICK!), I just wanted to jump on his lap or something. It kind of made me a little wet, how disarming he was and how smart and easygoing and just plain old FUN, the way Lenny never really is anymore. I was starting to sweat a little, and I get SO self-conscious. It’s like my freaking thighs are so fat they’re rubbing against each other and making this wet kissing sound. MWAH! MWAH! TIMATOV!!!! I need to lose weight NOW, no excuses. I am so through with proteins and carbs, although Mr. Goldman was talking a lot about peak proteins. Anyway, this week I’m just going to eat those lo-cal red-bean icicle pops from the Korean mart and drink five cups of water for dinner.

  And then I go home with Lenny and I make out with him and we do Magic Pussy time and all that, but all the time I’m thinking about Joshie Goldman. GAH! What is wrong with me. It’s like Lenny’s not old enough? I have a real “ha ra buh gee” complex! Ha ha! I should ask Sally if I can intern at the geriatric ward of this hospital where she volunteers. And I guess I felt so guilty that I kept telling Lenny I want to get married to him! Anyway, the next day I get a message from Joshie (that’s what he wants me to call him) saying that WE SHOULD TAKE THIS ART CLASS TOGETHER at Parsons, where it’s just me and him and some French art teacher. And that I should keep that secret from Lenny that it’s just the two of us. Does that sound like a come-on do you think? What do I do? He’s my boyfriend’s boss, Pony!