Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel

by Gary Shteyngart

  “Yeah, I gets drunk!” the sculptor shouted. “And I may even be a little bit tipsy right now. But in the morning I’ll be making art. And what are you going to be doing, Leonard? Pushing green tea and cloned livers to geezer Bipartisans? Typing in a diary? Let me guess. ‘My uncle abused me. I was addicted to heroin for three seconds.’ Forget the fountain of youth, pal of mine. You can live to be a thousand, and it won’t matter. Mediocrities like you deserve immortality. Don’t trust this guy, Eunice. He’s not like us. He’s a real American. A real sharpie. He’s the reason we’re in Venezuela right now. He’s why people are afraid to say ‘boo’ in the States. He’s no better than Rubenstein. Look at those dark, lying Ashkenazi eyes. Kissinger the Second.”

  A crowd had started to gather around us. Watching the famous sculptor “act out” was a great source of entertainment for the Romans, and the words “Venezuela” and “Rubenstein,” spoken with slow, accusatory relish, could arouse even a coma-bound European. I could hear Fabrizia’s voice announcing itself from the living room. As gently as possible, I prodded the Korean toward the kitchen, which led to the servants’ quarters, which enjoyed a separate entrance to the apartment.

  In the half-light of a bare bulb, I saw the Ukrainian nanny petting the sweet, dark head of Fabrizia’s boy, as she maneuvered an inhaler into his mouth. The child registered our intrusion with little surprise, the nanny began to say “Che cosa?,” but we trooped right past her and the small tidy stash of clothes and cheap mementos (a cooking apron depicting Michelangelo’s David astride the Coliseum) that made up her immediate possessions. As Eunice and I clambered down the noisy marble stairs, we heard Fabrizia and others give chase, summoning the wire-mesh enclosure of the elevator to their high floor, eager to catch up with us and hear what had happened, how the sculptor’s considerable drunken anger had been stirred. “Lenny, come back,” Fabrizia was shouting. “Dobbiamo scopare ancora una volta. We have to fuck still. One last time.”

  Fabrizia. The softest woman I had ever touched. But maybe I no longer needed softness. Fabrizia. Her body conquered by small armies of hair, her curves fixed by carbohydrates, nothing but the Old World and its dying nonelectronic corporeality. And in front of me, Eunice Park. A nano-sized woman who had likely never known the tickle of her own pubic hair, who lacked both breast and scent, who existed as easily on an äppärät screen as on the street before me.

  Outside, the southern moon, pregnant and satisfied, roosted atop the outreached palm trees of Piazza Vittorio. The usual immigrant gaggle were sleeping off a long day of manual labor or tucking in their mistresses’ children. The only pedestrians were stylish Italians staggering back from dinner, the only sounds the hum of their bitter conversations and the hissing electric rattle of the old tramcar that surveyed the piazza’s northeastern side.

  Eunice Park and I marched ahead. She marched, I hopped, unable to cover up the joy of having escaped the party with her by my side. I wanted Eunice to thank me for saving her from the sculptor and his stench of death. I wanted her to get to know me and then to repudiate all the terrible things he had said about my person, my supposed greed, my boundless ambition, my lack of talent, my fictive membership in the Bipartisan Party, and my designs on Caracas. I wanted to tell her that I myself was in danger, that the American Restoration Authority otter had singled me out for sedition, and all because I had slept with one middle-aged Italian woman.

  I eyed Eunice’s ruined sweater and the obscenely fresh body that lived and sweated and, I hoped, yearned beneath it. “I know of a good dry cleaner that can fix red-wine stains,” I said. “There’s this Nigerian up the block.” I stressed “Nigerian” to underline my open-mindedness. Lenny Abramov, friend to all.

  “I volunteer at a refugee shelter near the train station,” Eunice said, apropos of something.

  “You do? That’s so fantastic!”

  “You’re such a nerd.” She laughed cruelly at me.

  “What?” I said. “I’m sorry.” I laughed too, just in case it was a joke, but right away I felt hurt.

  “LPT,” she said. “TIMATOV. ROFLAARP. PRGV. Totally PRGV.”

  The youth and their abbreviations. I pretended like I knew what she was talking about. “Right,” I said. “IMF. PLO. ESL.”

  She looked at me like I was insane. “JBF,” she said.

  “Who’s that?” I pictured a tall Protestant man.

  “It means I’m ‘just butt-fucking’ with you. Just kidding, you know.”

  “Duh,” I said. “I knew that. Seriously. What makes me a nerd in your estimation?”

  “‘In your estimation,’” she mimicked. “Who says things like that? And who wears those shoes? You look like a bookkeeper.”

  “I’m sensing a bit of anger here,” I said. What had happened to that sweet, hurt Korean girl of three minutes ago? For some reason I puffed out my chest and stood up on my toes, even though I had a good half a foot on her.

  She touched the cuff of my shirt, and then looked at it more carefully. “This isn’t buttoned right,” she said. And before I could say anything, she rebuttoned my cuff and pulled on the shirtsleeve to make it less bunched up around the shoulder and upper arm. “There,” she said. “You look a little better now.”

  I didn’t know what to say or do. When dealing with people my own age, I know precisely who I am. Not physically attractive, but at least well educated, decently paid, working at the frontiers of science and technology (even though I have the same finesse with my äppärät as my aged immigrant parents). On Planet Eunice Park, these attributes clearly did not matter. I was some kind of ancient dork. “Thanks,” I said. “Don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  She smiled at me, and I noticed that she had the kind of dimples that not merely puncture the face but easily fill it with warmth and personality (and, in the case of Eunice, take away some of her anger). “I’m hungry,” she said.

  I must have looked like the befuddled Rubenstein at his press conference after our troops got routed at Ciudad Bolívar. “What?” I said. “Hungry? Isn’t it a little too late?”

  “Um, no, Gramps,” Eunice Park said.

  I took that in stride. “I know of this place on Via del Governo Vecchio. It’s called da Tonino. Excellent cacio e pepe.”

  “So it says in my Time Out guide,” the impudent girl said to me. She lifted up her äppärät-like pendant, and in shockingly perfect Italian ordered a taxi to pick us up. I hadn’t felt so frightened since high school. Even death, my slender, indefatigable nemesis, seemed lackluster when compared with the all-powerful Eunice Park.

  In the taxi, I sat apart from her, engaging in very idle chatter indeed (“So I hear the dollar’s going to be devaluated again …”). The city of Rome appeared around us, casually splendid, eternally assured of itself, happy to take our money and pose for a picture, but in the end needing nothing and no one. Eventually I realized that the driver had decided to cheat me, but I didn’t protest his extended route, especially as we swung around the purple-lit carapace of the Coliseum, and I told myself, Remember this, Lenny; develop a sense of nostalgia for something, or you’ll never figure out what’s important.

  But by the end of the night I remembered very little. Let’s just say that I drank. Drank out of fear (she was so cruel). Drank out of happiness (she was so beautiful). Drank until my whole mouth and teeth had turned a dark ruby red and the pungency of my breath and perspiration betrayed my passing years. And she drank too. One mezzo litro of the local swill became a full litro, and then two litri, and then a bottle of something possibly Sardinian but, in any case, thicker than bull’s blood.

  Enormous plates of food were needed to mop up this overindulgence. We thoughtfully chewed on the pig jowls of the bucatini all’amatriciana, slurped up a plate of spaghetti with spicy eggplant, and picked apart a rabbit practically drowning in olive oil. I knew I would miss all this when I got back to New York, even the horrible fluorescent lighting that brought out my age—the wrinkles around my eyes, the single lo
ng highway and the three county roads that ran across my forehead, testaments to many sleepless nights spent worrying about unredeemed pleasures and my carefully hoarded income, but mostly about death. This particular restaurant was favored by theater actors, and as I stabbed with my fork at the thick hollows of pasta and the glistening aubergines, I tried to remember forever their loud, attention-seeking voices and the vibrant Italian hand gestures that in my mind are synonymous with the living animal, and hence with life itself.

  I focused on the living animal in front of me and tried to make her love me. I spoke extravagantly and, I hope, sincerely. Here’s what I remember.

  I told her I didn’t want to leave Rome now that I had met her.

  She again told me I was a nerd, but a nerd who made her laugh.

  I told her I wanted to do more than make her laugh.

  She told me I should be thankful for what I had.

  I told her she should move to New York with me.

  She told me she was probably a lesbian.

  I told her my work was my life, but I still had room for love.

  She told me love was out of the question.

  I told her my parents were Russian immigrants who lived in New York.

  She told me hers were Korean immigrants who lived in Fort Lee, New Jersey.

  I told her my father was a retired janitor who liked to go fishing.

  She told me her father was a podiatrist who liked to punch his wife and two daughters in the face.

  “Oh,” I said. Eunice Park shrugged and excused herself. On my plate, the rabbit’s little dead heart hung from within his rib cage. I put my head in my hands and wondered if I should just throw some euros down on the table and walk out and leave.

  But soon enough I was walking down ivy-draped Via Giulia, my arm around Eunice Park’s fragrant, boyish frame. She was seemingly in good spirits, both loving and goading: promising me a kiss, then chastising my poor Italian. She was shyness and giggles, freckles in the moonlight and drunken, immature cries of “Shut up, Lenny!” and “You’re such an idiot!” I noticed she had released her hair from the bun’s captivity and that it was dark and endless and as thick as twine. She was twenty-four years old.

  My apartment could accommodate no more than a cheap twin-sized mattress and a fully opened suitcase, brimming with books (“My text-major friends at Elderbird used to call those things ‘doorstops,’” she told me). We kissed, lazily, like it was nothing, then roughly, like we meant it. There were some problems. Eunice Park wouldn’t take off her bra (“I have absolutely no chest”), and I was too drunk and scared to develop an erection. But I didn’t want intercourse anyway. I talked her out of her pants, cupped the twin, tiny globes of her ass with my palms, and pushed my lips right inside her soft, vital pussy. “Oh, Lenny,” she said, a little sadly, for she must have sensed just how much her youth and freshness meant to me, a man who lived in death’s anteroom and could barely stand the light and heat of his brief sojourn on earth. I licked and licked, breathing in the slight odor of something authentic and human, and eventually must have fallen asleep with my face between her legs. The next morning, she was kind enough to help me repack my suitcase, which refused to close without her help. “That’s not how you do it,” she said, when she saw me brushing my teeth. She made me stick out my tongue and roughly scraped its purple surface with the toothbrush. “There,” she said. “Better.”

  During the taxi ride to the airport, I felt the triple pangs of being happy and lonely and needy all at once. She had made me wash my lips and chin thoroughly to obliterate all traces of her, but Eunice Park’s alkaline tang still remained on the tip of my nose. I made great sniffing motions in the air, trying to capture her essence, thinking already of how I would bait her to New York, make her my wife, make her my life, my life eternal. I touched my expertly brushed teeth and petted the flurry of gray hairs sticking out from beneath my shirt collar, which she had thoroughly examined in the morning’s weak early light. “Cute,” she had said. And then, with a child’s sense of wonder: “You’re old, Len.”

  Oh, dear diary. My youth has passed, but the wisdom of age hardly beckons. Why is it so hard to be a grown-up man in this world?

  SOMETIMES LIFE IS SUCK

  FROM THE GLOBALTEENS ACCOUNT OF EUNICE PARK

  JUNE 1

  Format: Long-Form Standard English Text

  GLOBALTEENS SUPER HINT: Switch to Images today! Less words = more fun!!!

  EUNI-TARD ABROAD TO GRILLBITCH:

  Hi, Precious Pony!

  What’s up, twat? Missing your ’tard? Wanna dump a little sugar on me? JBF. I am so sick of making out with girls. BTW, I saw the pictures on the Elderbird alum board with your tongue in Bryana’s, um, ear. I hope you’re not trying to get Gopher jealous? He’s had way too many threesomes. Respect yourself, hoo-kah! So—guess what? I met the cutest guy in Rome. He is exactly my type, tall, kind of German-looking, very preppie, but not an asshole. Giovanna set me up with him he’s in Rome working for LandO’LakesGMFordCredit! So I go to meet him in the Piazza Navona (remember Image Class? Navona the one with all the tritons) and he’s sitting there having a cappuccino and streaming Chronicles of Narnia! Remember we streamed that at Catholic? So adorable. He kind of looked a little like Gopher but much thinner (ha ha ha). His name is Ben, which is pretty gay, but he was SO NICE and so smart. He took me to look at some Caravaggios and then he kind of like touched my butt a little and then we went to one of Giovanna’s parties and made out. There were all these Italian girls in Onionskin jeans staring at us, like I was stealing one of their white guys or something. I fucking hate that. If they mention my “almond eyes” one more time, I swear. Anyway, I NEED YOUR ADVICE because he called yesterday and asked if I wanted to go up to Lucca with him next week and I was playing hard to get and said no. But I’m going to call him and say yes tomorrow! WHAT SHOULD I DO? HELP!!!

  P.S. I met this old, gross guy at a party yesterday and we got really drunk and I sort of let him go down on me. There was another even older guy, this sculptor, trying to get in my pants, so I figured, you know, the lesser evil. Ugh, I’m turning into you!!!!! He was nice, kind of dorky, although he thinks he’s so Media cause he works in biotech or something. And he had the grossest feet, bunions and this gigantic heel spur that sticks out like he’s got a thumb glued to his foot. I know, I’m thinking like my dad. Anyway, he brushes his teeth all wrong, so I had to SHOW A GROWN MAN HOW TO USE A TOOTHBRUSH!!!!! What is wrong with my life, precious pony?

  GRILLBITCH TO EUNI-TARD ABROAD:

  Hey, Precious Panda!

  OK, let me just say this: Ass Hoo-kah, you are majorly sick? How old was this guy? Why did you touch his feet? Are you a secret toe muncher? I am sending you a cleaning bill because I am completely VOMITING as I write this. OK, forget the wheelchair geezer. This Ben guy sounds really Media, and he works in Credit, so he must be FILTHY FUCKING RICH. Wish Gopher could get a job with LandO’LakesGMFord. Now for Grillbitch’s patent advice: Go with him to Lucca, where is that exactly?, treat him like shit during the first day, let him fuck you HARD the first night, then leave him completely confused the rest of the time. He’ll fall for you pronto, especially after you let him plunder your MAGIC PUSSY!!! And on the way back to Rome be all nice, so that he’s left with a good impression but still not sure of himself.

  So here’s what’s up here. This Filipino guy had a party in Redondo. Pat Alvarez, do you remember him from Catholic? And Wendy Snatch showed up in Onionskin jeans and a nippleless Saaami bra and then she starts grinding on Gopher’s lap. He was like trying to push her off but she said maybe you want me and your girlfriend to thresh each other and all the time she is practically POKING his eye out with her nipple, which is one of those big fat pink DISGUSTING white girls nips. So Gopher’s looking at me with this expression, like, yeah, you can thresh each other if you want too or not that’s totally cool just don’t make a scene. And anyway all these Flip girls who just graduated from UC Irvine are threshing the shit out of ea
ch other in the living room trying to impress some white guy (not Gopher) so I teened her like I DON’T THINK SO, WENDY SNATCH. Only I didn’t say it in CAPS, it was more like no thank you and that’s my BOYFRIEND’S crotch you’re humping. And she actually came up to me PHYSICALLY and VERBALLED me like “Oh, I thought you were a lez cause you went to Elderbird, I didn’t know you were a feminazi too” and I was like “Yeah, but even if I was the biggest lez in America I wouldn’t thresh you with a fucking combine” and then guess where she ended up by the end of the party? In the bathtub getting ass-reamed and face-pissed by Pat Alvarez and three of his friends who taped everything and then put it on GlobalTeens the next day. GUESS how high her ratings went up? Personality 764 and Fuckability 800+. What is WRONG with people?

  JUNE 2

  CHUNG.WON.PARK TO EUNI-TARD ABROAD:

  Eunhee,

  Yesterday your LSAT come. Sally try to hide anvelope from me. You score 158. Very low. Even for rutgers law you do not get in. I dissapoint that you have same score as last time. It mean you not student enough for that. I now sometimes life is suck, but you are twenty-four. Big girl. I cannot push you any long. You must study and when you study you must not do anything! Dating nice boy extra. But all the time you must to be careful with him because you are woman. Do not give away mystery. Are there any korea boy in rome? Please forgive I have terrible english.

  I Love you,

  Mommy

  P.S. Daddy says I shouldn’t say I Love you, because I spoil you and korea parent don’t say Love you to children, but I do Love you from deep in my heart so I say it!

  EUNI-TARD ABROAD TO CHUNG.WON.PARK:

  Mom, please put ten thousand yuan-pegged dollars into my AlliedWasteCVSCitigroupCredit account. I’ll take the LSAT again when I get back. Ethel Kim got 154 on her LSAT and she took three test-prep classes, so whatever. I’m doing fine. It’s hard to work here because you need a permesso soggiorno, which is a kind of green card, and they hate Americans. Otherwise I would have to work as an au pair or something. I’m already volunteering three hours a week at the refugee shelter. Did you tell that to Daddy? No, there are no Korean boys in Rome. Rome is in Italy. Look at a map.