Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel (49 page)

I blanked for a second, catching snatches of what Joshie was saying. “I met him through the skater scene.…” “I come from a different budgeting culture.…” “When you think about it, the capitalist system is more entrenched in America than anywhere else in the world.…”

And then his arm was around me and we were walking away from the girls. I cannot recall our exact surroundings when he gave me his speech. We were lost in negative space, his closeness the only thing I could still cling to. He spoke of the seventy years in which he had not known love. How unfair that had been. How much love he had to give; how I had, in some ways, been a recipient of that love. But now he needed something different: intimacy, closeness, youth. When Eunice first walked into his apartment, he
knew
. He picked up my äppärät and produced a study on how May-December relationships lifted the lifespan ceilings for both partners. He spoke of practical things, my parents in Westbury. He could move them to a safer, peripheral region, like Astoria, Queens. He spoke of how we needed to spend some time apart, but how eventually the three of us could reconcile. “We could be like a family someday,” he said, but when he mentioned family, I could think only of my father, my
real
father, the Long Island janitor with the impenetrable accent and true-to-life smells. My mind turned away from what Joshie was saying, and I pondered my father’s humiliation. The humiliation of growing up a Jew in the Soviet Union, of cleaning piss-stained bathrooms in the States, of worshiping a country that would collapse as simply and inelegantly as the one he had abandoned.

I lost track of where I was, until Joshie brought me back to Eunice
and Sally, who were holding hands and staring up into the blue portal of the skylight, as if awaiting deliverance. “Maybe you and Lenny should be alone right now,” he said to Eunice. But she wouldn’t let go of her sister and she would not look into my eyes. They stood together, silent, with their little chests thrust out ahead of them, their eyes quiet and blank, the seemingly endless continuation of their lives stretched out before them into the three dimensions of the Triplex.

Words broke out of me. Stupid words. The worst final words I could have chosen, but words nonetheless. “Silly goose,” I said to Eunice. “You shouldn’t have worn such a warm suit. It’s still autumn. Aren’t you hot? Aren’t you hot, Eunice?”

There was high-pitched yelling from the direction of the vestibule, not far from where we were, and Howard Shu was sprinting ahead like a gorgeous greyhound, shouting things at many people.

The Chinese delegation had arrived. Two giant banners floated into the air, held aloft by an invisible force, as the opening bars of Alphaville’s “Forever Young” (“Let’s dance in style, let’s dance for a while”) blared in the background.

A series of loud pops exploded in the air, reminding me of tracer fire during the Rupture. Firecrackers were being launched from the center of the souk-like space and through the enormous skylight above us. As the first batch went off, I saw Sally cringe and raise her arm protectively. Then there was a push to get to the front to see the Chinese. I let the bodies wash over me, the young octogenarians, wearing ironic John Deere T-shirts and trucker’s caps that barely contained their masses of silky new hair. Separated from the people I loved, pushed out of the glass house, I found myself in the winter-cold air, by a phalanx of limousines bearing the insignia of the People’s Capitalist Party, by a row of Triplexes cantilevered over the
FDR Drive and the East River. There had once been housing projects here and a street called Avenue D. Media people ran past me as if there was a fire somewhere, as if tall buildings were burning. I was looking south. I should have been thinking about Eunice, mourning Eunice, but it wasn’t happening at the moment.

I wanted to go home. I wanted to go home to the 740 square feet that used to be mine. I wanted to go home to what used to be New York City. I wanted to feel the presence of the mighty Hudson and the angry, besieged East River and the great bay that stretched out from the pediment of Wall Street and made us a part of the world beyond.

I went back to our rooms in the nurses’ dormitory. I sat down on the hard bed and clutched the bedspread, then pressed my pillow into the equivalent softness of my stomach. The central air conditioning was still on, for some reason. The room was freezing. Cold sweat trickled down my chin, and my books felt cold to the touch. The wetness confused me, and I touched my eyes to make sure I wasn’t crying. I thought of the firecrackers going off. I heard their harsh, unnecessary noise. I saw Sally’s arm raised against the phantom punch about to be landed. The look on her face was pleading, but still loving, still believing that it could be different, that at the last moment something would give way, that the fist would fall by his side, and they would be a family.

In the bathroom, Eunice’s allergy medications and tampons and expensive lotions were already gone—Joshie must have sent someone down to take them—but a bottle of Cetaphil Gentle Skin Cleanser remained in the corner of the tub. I turned on the shower, climbed in, and poured the Cetaphil over myself. I rubbed it into my shoulders, my chest, my arms, and my face. And I stood there in the water’s painful heat, my skin at last as gentle and clean as the bottle promised.

WELCOME BACK, PA’DNER

NOTES ON THE NEW “PEOPLE’S LITERATURE PUBLISHING HOUSE” (
) EDITION OF THE LENNY ABRAMOV DIARIES

L
ARRY
A
BRAHAM
Donnini, Tuscan Free State

When I was young, I loved my parents so much it could have qualified as child abuse. My eyes watered each time my mother coughed from the “American chemicals in the atmosphere” or my father clutched at his beleaguered liver. If they died, I died. And their deaths always seemed both imminent and a matter of fact. Whenever I tried to picture my parents’ souls I thought of these perfectly white Russian snowbanks I saw in history books on the Second World War, all those arrows being drawn into Russia’s heart along with the names of German panzer divisions. I was a dark blemish upon these snowbanks. Before I was even born, I had dragged my parents away from Moscow, a city where engineer Papa didn’t have to overturn wastebaskets for a living. I had dragged them away just so the fetus inside my mother, that
future-Lenny
, could have a better life. And one day God would punish me for what I had done to them. He would punish me by killing them.

My father drove a typical ninety miles per hour in his boat-like Chevrolet Malibu Classic, swerving from one lane to another as his mood dictated, and eyeing the concrete median with unconcealed glee. He actually flipped over that median on one occasion and thundered into a tree, breaking the bones of his left hand, which kept him from his custodial duties for a month (“Let the Chinamen
choke on their garbage!”). One winter day, my father was many hours late in picking up my mother from her secretarial duties, and I was certain he had done the tree maneuver once more. There they were: their faces wide and frozen, their thick Jewish lips an unnatural purple, shards of glass upon their foreheads, dead in some cruel Long Island ditch. Where would they go when they died? I tried to picture this Heavenly place of childhood rumor. It looked, according to the adolescent sages amongst us, like the fairyland castle out of the frustrating wizards-and-swords-and-naked-maidens computer game we all played; it looked, oddly enough, like a copy of the cheap garden-apartment complex where my family lived, only with turrets.

An hour passed. And then another. Weeping and hiccups on my part, my mind journeying to my parents’ funeral. Synagogues have no bells, yet bells were tolling, deep and sonorous and thoroughly Russian. A gaggle of faceless, dark-suited Americans had to be conscripted to carry the two caskets down a winding path covered on both sides with that textbook Moscow snow. That was all that was left of my parents, cruel snow on both sides of the funeral path, snow too cold and deep for my spoiled American feet, which knew mostly the warm shag carpet stapled halfheartedly to our living-room floor by a retarded American man named Al.

A key began to turn in the lock. I sprang, gazelle-like, to the door, chanting “Mama! Papa!” But it wasn’t them. It was Nettie Fine. A woman too stable, too sweet, too noble to be an Abramov, no matter how hard she tried to pick up our fine Russian phrases—“
Priglashaiu vas za-stol
” (“I invite you to the table”)—no matter the rich, silky texture of her homemade borscht, a recipe inherited from her Gomel-born great-great-great-grandmother (how the hell do these native-born Jews keep track of their endless genealogy?).

No, she would not do. The fact was that when she kissed my cheek it didn’t hurt afterward, nor did it smell of onions. So
to the devil
with her good intentions, as my parents might say. She was an alien, a trespasser, a woman I couldn’t love back. When I saw her at
the door, I threw the first and last punch of my life. It connected with her surprisingly narrow mid-torso, where the last of her three boys had just gestated in fine, cushy comfort. Why did I punch her? Because
she
was alive while my
parents
were dead. Because now she was all I had left.

She did not flinch from my ridiculous assault. She sat down and put me on her lap, held my tiny nine-year-old hands, and let my cry upon the tanned infinity of her scented neck. “I’m sorry, Missus Nettie,” I wailed in a Russian accent, for although I was born in the States my parents were my only confidants, and their language was my sacred, frightened one. “I think they die in car!”

“Who died in the car?” Nettie asked. She explained to me that my father had called and asked her to watch me for an hour because my mother was held up at her office. But knowing they were safe would not stop my tears.

“We all die,” Nettie told me, after she had fed me a powdered-cocoa-and-fruit concoction she called “the chocolate banana,” whose ingredients and manner of preparation I still don’t understand. “But someday you’ll have children too, Lenny. And when you do you’ll stop worrying about your parents’ dying so much.”

“Why, Missus Nettie?”

“Because your children will become your life.” For a moment at least, that made sense. I could feel the presence of another, someone even younger than myself, a kind of prototypical Eunice person, and the fear of parental death was transferred upon her shoulders.

According to the records of the Ospedale San Giovanni in Rome, Nettie Fine died of complications from “pneumonia” only two days after I had seen her at the embassy, after we had talked loudly in the hallway about the future of our country. She was perfectly hale when I saw her, and the records of her treatment were scant enough to appear satirical. I do not know who sent me those GlobalTeens messages from a “secure” address, including the one asking me which ferry Noah had boarded, seconds before it was destroyed. Fabrizia DeSalva died in a supposed
motorino
accident one week before the Rupture. I never had children.