Super Sad True Love Story (2 page)

Now, Sandi knows
everything
—he works in fashion—so I decided to take his vividly expressed, highly caffeinated advice and headed for Via Veneto, where our nation’s creamy palazzo of an embassy luxuriates behind a recently built moat. Not for much longer, I should say. According to Sandi, the strapped State Department just sold the whole thing to StatoilHydro, the Norwegian state oil company, and by the time I got to Via Veneto the enormous compound’s trees and shrubbery were already being coaxed into tall, agnostic shapes to please their new owners. Armored moving vans ringed the perimeter, and the sound of massive document-shredding could be divined from within.

The consular line for the visa section was nearly empty. Only a few of the saddest, most destitute Albanians still wanted to emigrate to the States, and that lonely number was further discouraged by a poster showing a plucky little otter in a sombrero trying to jump onto a crammed dinghy under the tagline “The Boat Is Full, Amigo.”

Inside an improvised security cage, an older man behind Plexiglas shouted at me incomprehensibly while I waved my passport at him. A competent Filipina, indispensable in these parts, finally materialized and waved me down a cluttered hallway to a mock-up of a faded public-high-school classroom decked out in the Welcome Back, Pa’dner, motif. The Mexican otter from the “Boat Is Full” campaign was here Americanized (sombrero replaced by red-white-and-blue
bandana worn around his hirsute little neck), then perched upon a goofy-looking horse, the two of them galloping toward a fiercely rising and presumably Asian sun.

A half-dozen of my fellow citizens were seated behind their chewed-up desks, mumbling lowly into their äppäräti. There was an earplug lying slug-dead on an empty chair, and a sign reading
INSERT EARPLUG IN EAR, PLACE YOUR ÄPPÄRÄT ON DESK, AND DISABLE ALL SECURITY SETTINGS
. I did as I was told. An electronic version of John Cougar Mellencamp’s “Pink Houses” (“Ain’t that America, somethin’ to see, baby!”) twanged in my ear, and then a pixelated version of the plucky otter shuffled onto my äppärät screen, carrying on his back the letters ARA, which dissolved into the shimmering legend: American Restoration Authority.

The otter stood up on his hind legs, and made a show of dusting himself off. “Hi there, pa’dner!” he said, his electronic voice dripping with adorable carnivalesque. “My name is Jeffrey Otter and I
bet
we’re going to be friends!”

Feelings of loss and aloneness overwhelmed me. “Hi,” I said. “Hi, Jeffrey.”

“Hi there, yourself!” the otter said. “Now I’m going to ask you some friendly questions for statistical purposes only. If you don’t want to answer a question, just say, ‘I don’t want to answer this question.’ Remember,
I’m
here to help
you
! Okay, then. Let’s start simple. What’s your name and Social Security Number?”

I looked around. People were urgently whispering things to their otters. “Leonard or Lenny Abramov,” I murmured, followed by my Social Security.

“Hi, Leonard or Lenny Abramov, 205-32-8714. On behalf of the American Restoration Authority, I would love to welcome you back to the
new
United States of America. Look out, world! There’s no stoppin’ us now!” A bar from the McFadden and Whitehead disco hit “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now” played loudly in my ear. “Now tell me, Lenny. What made you leave our country? Work or pleasure?”

“Work,” I said.

“And what do you
do
, Leonard or Lenny Abramov?”

“Um, Indefinite Life Extension.”

“You said ‘effeminate life invention.’ Is that right?”

“
Indefinite
Life
Extension
,” I said.

“What’s your Credit ranking, Leonard or Lenny, out of a total score of sixteen hundred?”

“Fifteen hundred twenty.”

“That’s pretty neat. You must really know how to pinch those pennies. You have money in the bank, you work in ‘effeminate life invention.’ Now I just
have
to ask, are you a member of the Bipartisan Party? And if so, would you like to receive our new weekly äppärät stream, ‘Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now!’? It’s got all sorts of great tips on readjusting to life in these United States and getting the most bang for your buck.”

“I’m not a Bipartisan, but, yes, I would like to get your stream,” I said, trying to be conciliatory.

“Okey-dokey! You’re on our list. Say, Leonard or Lenny, did you meet any nice
foreign
people during your stay abroad?”

“Yes,” I said.

“What kind of people?”

“Some Italians.”

“You said ‘Somalians.’”

“Some Italians,” I said.

“You said ‘Somalians,’” the otter insisted. “You know Americans get lonely abroad. Happens all the time! That’s why I never leave the brook where I was born. What’s the point? Tell me, for statistical purposes, did you have any intimate physical relationships with any
non
-Americans during your stay?”

I stared hard at the otter, my hands shaking beneath the desk. Did everyone get this question? I didn’t want to end up in an Upstate “secure screening facility” simply because I had crawled on top of Fabrizia and tried to submerge my feelings of loneliness and inferiority inside her. “Yes,” I said. “Just one girl. A couple of times we did it.”

“And what was this
non-
American’s full name? Last name first, please.”

I could hear one fellow sitting several desks in front of me, his square Anglo face hidden partially by a thick mane, breathing Italian names into his äppärät.

“I’m still waiting for that name, Leonard or Lenny,” said the otter.

“DeSalva, Fabrizia,” I whispered.

“You said ‘DeSalva—’” But just then the otter froze in mid-name, and my äppärät began to produce its “heavy thinking” noises, a wheel desperately spinning inside its hard plastic shell, its ancient circuitry completely overtaxed by the otter and his antics. The words
ERROR CODE IT/FC-GS/FLAG
appeared on the screen. I got up and went back to the security cage out front. “Excuse me,” I said, leaning into the mouth hole. “My äppärät froze. The otter stopped speaking to me. Could you send over that nice Filipina woman?”

The old creature manning this post crackled at me incomprehensibly, the lapels of his shirt trembling with stars and stripes. I made out the words “wait” and “service representative.”

An hour passed in bureaucratic metronome. Movers carried out a man-sized golden statue of our nation’s E Pluribus Unum eagle and a dining table missing three legs. Eventually an older white woman in enormous orthopedic shoes clacked her way down the hall. She had a magnificent tripartite nose, more Roman than any proboscis ever grown along the banks of the Tiber, and the kind of pinkish oversized glasses I associate with kindness and progressive mental health. Thin lips quivered from daily contact with life, and her earlobes bore silver loops a size too large.

In appearance and mien she reminded me of Nettie Fine, a woman whom I hadn’t seen since high-school graduation. She was the first person to greet my parents at the airport after they had winged their way from Moscow to the United States four decades ago in search of dollars and God. She was their young American mama, their latkes-bearing synagogue volunteer, arranger of English lessons, bequeather of spare furniture. In fact, Nettie’s husband had worked in D.C. at the State Department. In further fact, before I left for Rome my mother had told me he was stationed in a certain European capital.…

“Mrs. Fine?” I said. “Are you Nettie Fine, ma’am?”

Ma’am? I had been raised to worship her, but I was scared of Nettie Fine. She had seen my family at its most exposed, at its poorest and weakest (my folks literally immigrated to the States with one pair of underwear between them). But this temperate bird of a woman had shown me nothing but unconditional love, the kind of love that rushed me in waves and left me feeling weak and depleted, battling an undertow whose source I couldn’t place. Her arms were soon around me as she yelled at me for not coming to visit her sooner, and why was I so old-looking all of a sudden (“But I’m almost forty, Mrs. Fine,” “Oh, where does the time go, Leonard?”), along with other examples of happy Jewish hysteria.

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.