Super Sad True Love Story (15 page)

“What?”

“I think he’s working for the Bipartisans.”

“Are you crazy?” I said. “What about ‘It’s Rubenstein time in America’? What about the zero hour?”

“I’m just telling you, watch what you say around him. Especially when he’s streaming his show.”

My urination stopped of its own accord, and my prostate felt
very sore.
Care for your friends, care for your friends
, the mantra repeated itself.

“I don’t understand,” I muttered. “He’s still our friend, right?”

“People are being forced into all kinds of things now,” Vishnu said. He lowered his voice even further. “Who knows what they got him for. His Credit ranking’s been going to shit ever since he started doing Amy Greenberg. Half of Staten Island is collaborating. Everyone’s looking for backing, for protection. You watch, if the Chinese take over, Noah will be sucking up to them. You should have stayed in Rome, Lenny. Fuck that immortality bullshit. Ain’t going to happen for you anyway. Look at us. We’re not HNWIs.”

“We’re not Low Net Worth either!” I protested.

“That don’t matter. We’re poster children for Harm Reduction. This city has no use for us. They privatized the MTA last month. They’re going to knock down the projects. Even your fancy Jew projects. We’ll be living in Erie, Pennsylvania, by the time this decade’s over.”

He must have noticed the lethal unhappiness disfiguring my expression. He zipped up and patted my back. “That was some good emoting about Eunice in there,” he said. “That’ll get your
PERSONALITY
ranking higher. And who knows about Noah? Maybe I’m wrong. Been wrong before. Been wrong lots, my friend.”

Before my melancholy could get the best of me, Vishnu’s girlfriend, Grace Kim, showed up to drag him homeward, to their pleasant, air-conditioned Staten Island abode, making me pine in a heartbreaking way for Eunice. I stared at Grace with a need bordering on grief. There she was: intelligently, creatively, timidly dressed (no Onionskin jeans to show off
her
slender goods), full of programmed intentions and steady, interesting plans, hardwired for marriage to her lucky beau, ready to bear those beautiful Eurasian kids that seem to be the last children left in the city.

Along with Noah, I was invited to Vishnu and Grace’s house for a nightcap, but I claimed jet lag and bade everyone farewell. They were sweet enough to walk me to the ferry station, although not sweet enough to brave the National Guard checkpoint with me. I
was duly searched and poked by tired, bored soldiers. I denied and implied everything. I said, in answer to some metaphysical question, “I just want to go home.” It wasn’t the right answer, but a black man with a little golden cross amid his paltry chest hairs took pity on me and let me board the vessel.

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

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

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

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.