Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel (46 page)

Love,

Mommy

SALLYSTAR:
I got the student visa. I don’t know what to say, Eunice, just that I love you. I know you’ll always have my back, and not just because you’re my older sister. You don’t want to hear this, but I pray for you every day. I pray that you’re happy and at peace with yourself. Remember how happy we were as kids when we’d get H-Mart ddok and mandoo after church? Remember how you’d stuff your face and cry later because you thought you gained weight?

EUNI-TARD:
You don’t have to thank me, Sally. I’m just glad you’re safe. I can’t believe you had to hide in the basement for a whole week. I can’t believe what happened to the Kim’s daughter, what’s her name?

SALLYSTAR:
I don’t think I want to talk about that right now.

EUNI-TARD:
I just feel guilty that I wasn’t there with you.

SALLYSTAR:
It’s the kind of thing that makes you focus. And now I know why I’m alive. For you and for Mommy and for Daddy. I’m going to be quiet, I’m not going to act out Politically, and I’m going to make sure that nothing like what happened to Sarah Kim is going to happen to any of us. You really are a “roll” model for me, Eunice, just like Mommy says.

EUNI-TARD:
Are you going back to Barnard?

SALLYSTAR:
They’re closing Barnard for the year, but that’s fine. I have to take more Mandarin and Norwegian classes all year long anyway.

EUNI-TARD:
You’ll do great, Sally. You can do anything you set your mind to.

SALLYSTAR:
What about you?

EUNI-TARD:
Huh?

SALLYSTAR:
What do you think you want to do next with your life?

EUNI-TARD:
I don’t know. Joshie can get me a great Retail job, but I might do art-finance college in London.

SALLYSTAR:
So things are pretty serious with him? Have you told Lenny yet?

EUNI-TARD:
No.

SALLYSTAR:
You shouldn’t lie to him anymore, Eunice. I never told you this but I think Lenny’s a very nice man, the one time I met him anyway. He really tried with Mom and Dad.

EUNI-TARD:
I know. You don’t have to tell me. But he’s not perfect. He only cares about me when I’m pissed at him. Anyway, I’m sure he’ll find another Korean girl, like the hundred he’s already dated. A real nomo cha-keh girl, not like me. Oh, and I saw some Images of his exes broke-ass faces. Lenny’s one of those white guys who can’t tell a good-looking Asian girl from an ugly one. We all look the same to them.

SALLYSTAR:
It’s none of my business, but I think you should be really kind to Lenny, even if you break up with him. You want to be fair to him.

EUNI-TARD:
I know, Sally. I’ll be honest. I don’t know if I CAN break up with him. I still love him. He’s just so clueless. My poor Leonardo Dabramovinci. He’s sitting next to me now and trimming his toenails, smiling at me for no good reason. I don’t know why, but I think that’s really sad when he smiles like that. And I get kind of angry too, that he can still have that kind of effect on me.

GOLDMANN-FOREVER
TO
EUNI-TARD:

Eunice, we have to talk. I know you love me, but sometimes you really don’t treat me well. One day you tell me I’m “the bestest boyfriend ever” and the next day you’re not sure, you want us to take some time off from each other, you want to relax things a little. And that makes me feel like I’m some kind of needy asshole, pushing you to tell Lenny about us, pushing you to move in with me, pushing you to take this relationship as seriously as I take it. You seem to get me confused with Joshie Goldmann the high-profile guy who’s trying to change the world and whom everyone worships. I’m a different man with you. I’m just a human being who’s in love and nothing more.

I don’t like it when you make me feel guilty about all the old people who are going to be thrown out of Lenny’s buildings. That’s not my department, Eunice. I can help you with your parents and your sister, but I can’t exactly keep over a hundred unneeded people in New York. The IMF calls the tune now. I think I’ve done about all I can for them over the last months, sending down food and water.

Look, I know I’m asking you to take enormous steps, and I know Lenny represents a kind of “emotional” safety net, and that’s why you’re sticking up for him. But don’t forget that I’m ultimately the one that can assure your safety. And I know that Lenny pursued you in this ridiculous overbearing way and I don’t want to repeat that mistake. Though I may not act it sometimes, let’s not forget that I’m seventy. And one thing I can tell you from my experience, Eunice, is that you’ll only get one youth. And you better spend it with someone who can maximize it for you, who can make you feel good and cared for and loved and, in the long run, someone who won’t die a long time before you, like Lenny will. (Statistically, given that he’s a Russian male and you’re an Asian female, he’ll be gone about twenty years before you.)

Am I scared of how fast things are going with us? You better believe it! I look at us in the mirror sometimes and I can’t believe who I am. Every week we come closer together, and then every week you do something to make me feel like I’m not deserving of you. You push me away. Why? Is it
just in your nature to be cruel to men? Then maybe you can change that part of your nature before it’s too late.

I think about you all the time, Eunice. Sometimes you’re the only thing in this world that still makes sense to me. Now YOU have to start thinking of ME. I’m up here on the good old Upper West Side, thumping my chest and making sad ape sounds and dreaming of the day when you will treat me the way I deserve to be treated. We’ve got many years ahead of us, my sweet bumblebee. Let’s not waste a moment of precious time. Sogni d’oro, as you like to say. Golden dreams to you.

FOREVER YOUNG

NOVEMBER 10

Dear Diary,

Today I’ve made a major decision:
I am going to die
.

Nothing of my personality will remain. The light switch will be turned off. My life, my entirety, will be lost forever. I will be nullified. And what will be left? Floating through the ether, tickling the empty belly of space, alighting over farms outside Cape Town, and crashing into an aurora above Hammerfest, Norway, the northernmost city of this shattered planet—my data, the soupy base of my existence uptexted to a GlobalTeens account. Words, words, words.

You, dear diary.

This will be my last entry.

A month ago, mid-October, a gust of autumnal wind kicked its way down Grand Street. A co-op woman, old, tired, Jewish, fake drops of jade spread across the little sacks of her bosom, looked up at the pending wind and said one word: “Blustery.” Just one word, a word meaning no more than “a period of time characterized by strong winds,” but it caught me unaware, it reminded me of how language was once used, its precision and simplicity, its capacity for recall. Not cold, not chilly, blustery. A hundred other blustery days appeared before me, my young mother in a faux-fur coat standing before our Chevrolet Malibu Classic, her hands protectively over my
ears because my defective ski hat couldn’t be pulled down to cover them, while my father cursed and fumbled with his car keys. The streams of her worried breath against my face, the excitement of feeling both cold and protected, exposed to the elements and loved at the same time.

“It
is
blustery, ma’am,” I said to the old co-op woman. “I can feel it in my bones.” And she smiled at me with whatever facial muscles she still had in reserve. We were communicating with words.

I returned from Westbury to find Eunice in one piece, but the Vladeck Houses turned into shells, their orange carapaces burned black. I stood in front of the houses with a posse of still-employed Media guys in expensive sneakers, as we evaluated the jagged lines of windows past, made poetry out of a lone Samsung air conditioner dangling back and forth on its cord in the shallow river breeze. Where were the project dwellers? The Latinos who had once made us so happy to say we were living in “downtown’s last diverse neighborhood,” where had they gone?

A Staatling truck full of five-jiao men pulled up. The men clambered out and were immediately presented with tool belts, which they eagerly, almost happily, tied around their shrunken waists. A rural log truck pulled up behind the first. But these weren’t logs stacked five to a row, these were Credit Poles, blunt and round, lacking even the adornments of their predecessors. They were up within a day, a new slogan billowing from their masts, the outline of the new Parthenon-shaped IMF headquarters in Singapore, and the words:

“Life Is Richer, Life Is Brighter! Thank You, International Monetary Fund!”

I met Grace for a picnic lunch in the park. She was sitting on a comfortable rock outcropping in the Sheep Meadow, a glacier-era chaise longue. Less than half a year ago, the blood of a hundred had
washed over the neighboring pillows of grass. In a white cotton dress loosely draping her shoulders, in a perfect curve of hair draping the concentration of her face, deeply pregnant yet elegant in repose, she seemed, from afar, a vision of something incomprehensibly right in the world. I walked toward Grace slowly, gathering my thoughts. Now I would have to figure out how to adjust our friendship to include someone else, someone even smaller and more innocent than her mother.

I could see the child already. Whatever her nature would impress upon him (I was told it would be a boy), he was sure to have at least some of Vishnu’s furriness, his bumbling nature, his kindness and naïveté. It was strange for me to consider a child the product of
two
people. My parents, for all their temperamental differences, were so alike that at times I consider them a uni-parent, made heavy with child by a Yiddish Holy Ghost. What if Eunice and I had a child together? Would it make her happier? She seemed, in recent days, distant from me. Sometimes even when she was viewing her favorite anorexic models on AssLuxury, it would appear Eunice’s gaze was boring right through them into some new dimension devoid of hip and bone.

Grace and I drank watermelon juice and ate freshly sliced kimbap from 32nd Street, the pickled daikon radish crunching smartly between our teeth, rice and seaweed coating our mouths with sea and starch. Normalcy, that’s what we were going for. After some jokey preliminaries, she put on her serious face. “Lenny,” she said, “there’s something a little sad I have to tell you.”

“Oh, no,” I said.

“Vishnu and I got permanent residency in Stability. We’re moving to Vancouver in three weeks.”

I felt the rice expanding in my throat and coughed into my hand. I beheld the terms I was given.
Grace
. The woman who had loved me the most. Had listened to me for the past fifteen years, me with all that melancholy and dysthymia.
Vancouver
. A northern city, far away.

Grace’s arms were around me, and I breathed in her conditioner
and her impending motherhood. She was abandoning me. Did she
still
love me? Even Chekhov’s ugly Laptev had an admirer, a woman named Polina, “very thin and plain, with a long nose.” After Laptev marries the young and beautiful Julia, Polina tells him:

I wanted Grace to hiss similar words at me, to confront me once again for loving someone so young and inexperienced, and to make me consider being with her instead of Eunice. But, of course, she didn’t.