Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel (25 page)

Noah and Amy were loudly streaming a few feet apart from each other, straining to be heard over the din of the bar.

“Rubenstein’s making a point to Li,” Noah was saying. “We may not be a great power anymore, we may be into you for sixty-five trillion yuan-pegged, but we’re not afraid to use our troops if our spades act up, so watch out, or we’ll go fucking
nuclear
on your yellow asses if you try to cash in your chips. Keep the credit
rolling, chinos
.”

Amy Greenberg: “Remember Jeremy Block, the guy I broke up with last Passover?” A stream of a naked, masturbating guy who resembled Noah was projected next to Amy’s äppärät, and she scowled at the Image of his generous penis, her pretty post-bulimic face betraying the beginnings of a muzzle. “Remember how I couldn’t count on that jerk-off when there was, like, trouble in the world? Remember how he wouldn’t
explain
anything to me, even though he worked for LandOLakes? Remember how he made me
weigh
myself every morning? Remember how he …” Big pause, and then a bright, smiley face.
“… didn’ respect the muffintop?”

Vishnu had gone to get us more beer, and Eunice and Grace were doing AssLuxury together. Grace said something that made Eunice smile, and then they talked back and forth, Grace’s eyes on Eunice, Eunice’s eyes mostly on her äppärät, but occasionally, shyly, on Grace. I though I heard some words in Korean—“Soon-Dooboo” (however it’s spelled) is a tofu stew that Grace had ordered a lot on 32nd Street. I wanted to join their conversation, but Grace gently pushed me away. Eunice was FACing a little with three of the other Asian girls in the room, and her
FUCKABILITY
, I noticed with pride and a little worry, was 795, although her
PERSONALITY
just 500 (maybe she wasn’t extro enough). But one very young Filipina Mediawhore in a suburban cardigan, big clunky orthopedic-type shoes, and Onionskin jeans streamed quietly by the jukebox rated several points higher on the
FUCKABILITY
. “That girl has the perfect body,” I heard Eunice saying to Grace. “God, I hate twenty-one-year-olds.”

I looked sadly at my own rankings. Most of the men tonight were wearing cool Mr. Rogers–like V-neck sweaters and were appraising me coldly at best. Someone had written about my stubble, “That dude next to the cute Asian spermbank has like pubic hair growing out of his chin,” and I was ranked fortieth out of the forty-three guys in the room. Did Eunice care? I noticed that when I put my arm around her my
MALE HOTNESS
shot up by a hundred points, and I ranked a respectable thirty out of forty-three men. But what did that say about me? That I needed Eunice just to be acknowledged in the greater world? For one thing, I resolved to shave my stubble tomorrow. It only worked for a certain kind of very attractive guy.

Amy Greenberg, pointing to the little flaps of skin hanging between her armpits and breasts: “I’ve got wings! Thirty-four and I’ve got wings like an angel. I can’t believe
any guy
would want to feel me up with all this
bra goo
! Look at me! Look at me!”

Noah Weinberg: “Thirty-three casualties in the Low Net Worth riots as of nine-oh-four p.m. EST. And the Guard is still shooting up
in Central Park. But we’ve lost four hundred National Guardsmen in Ciudad Bolívar
alone
in the last two months. That’s the Rubenstein strategy: The more Americans die, the less anyone cares. Redefine the normative down. Start digging the graves.”

Amy Greenberg: “Let me break down what I’m wearing. The shoes are from Padma, the blouse is a Marla Hammond original, and the nippleless bra is a Saaami Wing Concealer—my mother got it for me on sale at the United Nations Retail Corridor.”

Noah Weinberg: “And I’m not even talking about the LIBOR rate here. I’m talking—” He stopped and looked around. A trio of Staten Island girls were lustily humming a song whose only discernible lyric was “Mmmmmmm …” Noah started to say something, but in the end all he said was “You know what,
patos
? I—I have nothing more to say to any of you.”

Amy Greenberg: “I just want to say, my mom is freaking
amazing
. When I was breaking up with Jeremy Block, she just like made me see through all his bullshit. We looked at his rankings together and we were like, who cares about his big dick and the fact that he can bone all night. He made me give him a rim job for his thirtieth birthday, and then he wouldn’t kiss me afterwards. That really says
a lot
about a guy, when he won’t kiss his girlfriend after she’s licked out his junk. My mom, she’s so cute, she was like ‘You deserve so much better, Aimeleh. Be your
own
pimp, girl!’”

Grace took me aside. “Hey,” she said. “I think Eunice has some real problems.”

“Duh,” I said. “Her father’s a dickhead.”

“I know this kind of girl,” Grace was saying. “It’s the worst kind of combination of abuse and privilege, and growing up in this, like, greenhorn southern-Californian Asian upper-middle-class ghetto, where everyone is
so
shallow and money-craven. I mean even shallower than Noah’s girlfriends. At least Amy
Green
berg knows exactly what she’s doing.”

“But I love her,” I said, quietly. “And I think she shops just because our society is
telling
Asian people to shop. You know, like it says on the Credit Poles. I actually heard one guy yelling to Eunice, ‘Hey, ant, buy something or go back to China!’”

“Ant?”

“Yeah, like the ant that saves too much and the grasshopper that spends too much? Like on the ARA signs? Chinese and Latino? So fucking racist.”

“Leonard, it’s time to stop dating all these Asian and white-trash girls with serious problems,” Grace said. “You’re not doing them any favors, you know.”

“You’re really hurting me, Grace,” I whispered. “How can you judge her so quickly? How can you judge
us
?”

And right away Grace softened. The Christianity and goodwill kicked in. She teared up. “I’m sorry,” she said. “God, it’s the times we live in. I’m becoming so harsh. Maybe I can hang out with her? Maybe I can be like a big sister?” I considered turning indignant, but then I considered who Grace was, the oldest of a brood of five well-adjusted kids, the inheritor of a set of doctor parents from Seoul whose immigrant anxieties and sense of Wisconsin alienation were high, but who nonetheless dispensed love and encouragement in the manner of the kindest, most progressive native-born. How could she even begin to understand Eunice? How could she comprehend what it was like between the two of us?

I hugged Grace for a few beats and kissed one warm cheek. When I looked back, I noticed that Eunice was staring at us, her lower face covered with that amphibian smile, the grin without qualities, the grin that cut me in the softness around my heart.

“Well, that’s about it for the republic,” Hartford was saying on his Antillean stream, his young friend toweling a spent geyser of semen off his back. “Yibbity-yibbity, that’s all, folks.”

We crossed back to Manhattan in silence. The National Guard checkpoints were practically abandoned, most of the troops likely ordered up to Central Park to quell the insurrection. Back in my apartment, I was on my knees and crying again. She was threatening to move back to Fort Lee again.

“Your friends are awful,” she was saying. “They’re
so
full of themselves.”

“What did they do to you? You barely said a word to them all night!”

“I was the youngest person there. They were all ten years older than me. What did I have to say to them? They all work in Media. They’re all funny and successful.”

“First of all, they’re not. And, second of all, you’re still young, Eunice! You’ll work in Media someday. Or Retail. And I thought you liked Grace. You were getting along so well. I saw you looking at AssLuxury together and talking about Soon-Dooboo.”

“I hated
her
the most,” Eunice Park hissed. “She’s
exactly
who her parents want her to be and she’s so fucking
proud
of it. Oh, and forget about meeting my family. You’ll never meet them, Lenny. How can I trust you with them? You’ve blown it.”

I lay in my bed alone; Eunice again in the living room with her äppärät, with her teening and shopping, as the night turned black around us, as I realized, with a quiet gnawing pain, that when you took away my 239,000 yuan-pegged dollars, when you took away the complicated love of my parents and the mercurial comforts of my friends, when you took away my smelly books, I had nothing but the woman in the next room.

My mind was full of sickening Jewish worry, the pogrom within and the pogrom without. I declined to think of Fabrizia, Nettie, or the otter. I stayed in the moment. I tried to find out what was happening in Central Park to the Low Net Worth protesters. Some of the rich young Media people on Central Park West and Fifth Avenue were streaming from balconies and rooftops, and a few had broken through the National Guard cordons and were emoting from deep within the park itself. I looked past their angry and excited faces screeching about their parents and lovers and weight gain, trying to catch sight of the helicopters floating behind them, firing into the green heart of the city. I thought of Cedar Hill—the new ground zero of my life with Eunice Park—and considered the fact that it was now covered in blood. Then I felt guilty for thinking about my own life with such Media obsessiveness, so readily forgetting the ranks of the new dead. Grace was right. The times we live in.

But one thing I knew: I would never follow Nettie’s advice. I would never visit those poor people in Tompkins Square Park. Who knew what would happen to them? If the National Guard shot people in Central Park, why wouldn’t they shoot them downtown? “Safety first,” as they say around Post-Human Services. Our lives are worth more than the lives of others.

An armada of helicopters flew north. The whole building shook with their ferocity, china jiggling in the neighbor’s kitchen cabinet, little children crying. That seemed to scare Eunice, and soon she was in bed next to me, trying to find a comforting fit with my larger body, pressing so deeply into me that it hurt. I felt scared, not because of the military operation outside (in the end, they would never hurt people with my assets), but because I knew that I could never leave her. No matter how she treated me. No matter how bad she made me feel. Because in her anger and anxiety there was familiarity and relief. Because I understood those greenhorn southern-Californian immigrant families better than I could Grace’s right-hearted Midwestern kin, the craving for money and respect, the mixture of entitlement and self-loathing, the hunger to be attractive, noticed, and admired. Because after Vishnu told me that Grace was pregnant (“ha-
huh
,” he laughed awkwardly while bearing the news) I realized that the last door had closed for me. Because, unlike the slick and sly Amy Greenberg, Eunice had no idea what the hell she was doing. And neither did I.

Sorry, diary, I’m such an emotional wreck today. Bad night’s sleep. Even my best ear plugs can’t help against the sound of rotor blades outside and Eunice mumbling loud Korean deprecations in her sleep, continuing her never-ending conversation with her
appa
, her father, the miscreant who is responsible for most of her pain, but without whose angry lashings I probably would never have fallen in love with her, or she with me.

But I realize that I’m also leaving some things out, diary. Let me describe some of the beautiful moments, at least before the LNWI riots started and the checkpoints went up by the F train.

We go to midtown Korean restaurants and feast on rice cakes swaddled in chili paste, squid drowning in garlic, frightening fish bellies bursting with salty roe, and the ever-present little plates of cabbages and preserved turnips and seaweed and chunks of delectable dried beef. We eat in the Asian fashion, eyes on our food, hearty slurps of tofu stew and little belches indicating our involvement with the meal, my hand reaching for a glass of alcoholic
soju
, hers for a dainty cup of barley tea. A peaceful family. No need for words. We love each other and feed each other. She calls me
kokiri
and kisses my nose. I call her
malishka
, or “little one” in Russian, a dangerous word only because it once spilled out of my parents’ mouths, back when I was under three feet tall and their love for me was simple and true.

And the warmth of a Korean restaurant, the endless procession of plates, as if the meal cannot end until the whole world is eaten, the shouting and laughter after the meal is done, the unchecked inebriation of the older men, the giggly chatter of the younger women, and everywhere the ties of the family. It’s no wonder for me that Jews and Koreans jump so easily into romantic relations. We were stewed in different pots, to be sure, but both pots are burbling with familial warmth and the easiness, nosiness, and neuroticism that such proximity creates.

While we were lunching at one of the louder places on 32nd Street, Eunice saw a man eating by himself and sipping a Coca-Cola. “It’s so sad,” Eunice said, “to see a Korean man without a wife or girlfriend to tell him not to drink that junk.” She lifted up her cup of barley tea as if to show him a healthier alternative.

“I don’t think he’s Korean,” I said to Eunice. “My äppärät says he’s from Shanghai.”

“Oh,” she said, losing interest as soon as her bloodlines to the solitary Asian Coca-Cola drinker were cut.

When we were walking home, our stomachs filled with garlic and chili, the summer heat without and the pepper heat within covering our bodies with a lovely sheen, I started to ponder what Eunice had said. It was sad, according to her, that the Asian man did not have a wife or girlfriend to tell him not to drink the Coca-Cola. A grown
man had to be
told
how to behave. He needed the presence of a girlfriend or wife to curb his basest instincts. What monstrous disregard for individuality! As if all of us didn’t lust, on occasion, for a drop of artificially sweetened liquid to fall upon our tongues.