Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel (6 page)

With his hands clasped at his crotch, the Impossible to Preserve fat man stared out the window, his head moving forward and backward contentedly, as if he were a half-submerged alligator enjoying a sunny day. Ignoring the rest of us, he watched, with an enthusiast’s abandon, the sleek new dolphin-nosed China Southern Airlines planes taxiing past our peeling UnitedContinentalDeltamerican 737s and some equally crappy El Als.

When we finally boarded after a three-hour technical delay, a young man dressed in business casual walked down the aisle videotaping all of us, focusing repeatedly on the fat man, who blushed and tried to turn away. The filmmaker tapped me on the shoulder and bade me, in slow Southern English, to look
directly
into his boxy, antiquated camera. “Why?” I asked. But that little bit of sedition was apparently all he needed from me, and he moved on.

By the time we were in the air, I tried to erase the videographer and the otter and the fat man from my mind. On my way back from the bathroom, I registered Fatty only as a pastel-colored blob in the corner, its form tickled by high-altitude sunlight. I took out a battered volume of Chekhov’s stories from my carry-on (wish I could read it in Russian like my parents can) and turned to the novella
Three Years
, the story of the unattractive but decent Laptev, the son of a wealthy Moscow merchant, who is in love with the beautiful and much younger Julia. I was hoping to find some tips on how to further seduce Eunice and to overcome the beauty gap between us. At one point in the novella, Laptev asks for Julia’s hand in marriage, and she initially turns him down, then changes her mind. I found this particular passage most helpful:

From this single passage I developed a three-point conclusion.

Point One: I knew that Eunice didn’t believe in God and deplored her Catholic education, so it would be useless to invoke that deity and his endless punishments to make her fall for me,
but
, much like Laptev, I truly was that “honorable, good man who loved her.”

Point Two: Eunice’s life in Rome, despite the sensuousness and beauty of the city, also seemed to me “cheerless, monotonous,” and certainly “
idle
” (I knew she volunteered for a couple of hours a week with some Algerians, which is incredibly sweet but not really work). Now, I do not come from a wealthy family like Chekhov’s Laptev, but my annual spending power of about two hundred thousand yuan would give Eunice some considerations in the Retail department and possibly “change her mode of life.”

Point Three: Nonetheless, it would take more than mere monetary consideration to prompt Eunice to love me. Her “youth was passing with no prospect of anything better in the future,” as Chekhov said of his Julia. How could I take advantage of that fact re: Eunice? How could I trick her into aligning her youth with my
decrepitude? In nineteenth-century Russia, it was apparently a much simpler task.

I noticed that some of the first-class people were staring me down for having an open book. “Duder, that thing smells like wet socks,” said the young jock next to me, a senior Credit ape at LandO’LakesGMFord. I quickly sealed the Chekhov in my carry-on, stowing it far in the overhead bin. As the passengers returned to their flickering displays, I took out my äppärät and began to thump it loudly with my finger to show how much I loved all things digital, while sneaking nervous glances at the throbbing cavern around me, the wine-dulled business travelers lost to their own electronic lives. By this point the young man in business-casual attire had returned with his video camera and just stood there at the front of the aisle recording the fat man with a trace of dull, angry pleasure hanging off his mouth (his quarry had buried his head in a pillow, either sleeping or pretending to be).

I was looking for clues on Eunice Park. My beloved was a shy girl by comparison with others of her generation, so her digital footprint wasn’t big. I had to go at her laterally, through her sister, Sally, and her father, Sam Park, M.D., the violent podiatrist. Working my lusty, overheated äppärät, I pointed an Indian satellite at southern California, her original home. I zoomed in on a series of crimson-tiled haciendas to the south of Los Angeles, rows and rows of three-thousand-square-foot rectangles, their only aerial features the tiny silver squiggles that denoted rooftop central air conditioning. These units all bowed to the semicircle of a turquoise pool guarded by the gray halos of two down-on-their-luck palm trees, the development’s only flora. Inside one of these homes Eunice Park learned to walk and talk, to seduce and sneer; here her arms grew strong and her mane thick; here her household Korean was supplanted by the veneer of California English; here she planned her impossible escape to East Coast Elderbird College, to the piazzas of Rome, to the horny middle-aged festas of Piazza Vittorio, and, I hoped, into my arms.

I then looked up Dr. and Mrs. Park’s new home, a square Dutch Colonial with one gaping chimney, deposited at an awkward forty-five-degree
angle into a bowl of Mid-Atlantic snow. The California house they left was worth 2.4 million dollars, unpegged to the yuan, and the second, much smaller New Jersey one at 1.41 million. I sensed the diminution of her father’s income and I wanted to learn more.

My retro äppärät churned slowly with data, which told me that the father’s business was failing. A chart appeared, giving the income for the last eighteen months; the yuan amounts were in steady decline since they had mistakenly left California for New Jersey—July’s income after expenses was eight thousand yuan, about half of my own, and I did not have a family of four to support.

The mother did not have any data, she belonged solely to the home, but Sally, as the youngest of the Parks, was awash in it. From her profile I learned that she was a heavier girl than Eunice, the weight plunged into her round cheeks and the slow curvature of her arms and breasts. Still, her LDL cholesterol was way beneath the norm, while the HDL surged ahead to form an unheard-of ratio. Even with her weight, she could live to be 120 if she maintained her present diet and did her morning stretches. After checking her health, I examined her purchases and felt Eunice’s as well. The Park sisters favored extra-small shirts in strict business patterns, austere gray sweaters distinguished only by their provenance and price, pearly earrings, one-hundred-dollar children’s socks (their feet were that small), panties shaped like gift bows, bars of Swiss chocolate at random delis, footwear, footwear, footwear. I watched their AlliedWasteCVSCitigroup account rise and fall like the chest of a living, breathing animal. I noticed the links to something called AssLuxury and several L.A. and New York boutiques on one side, and to their parents’ AlliedWaste account on the other, and I saw that their precious immigrant nest egg was declining steadily and ominously. I beheld the numerical totality of the Park family and I wanted to save them from themselves, from the idiotic consumer culture that was bleeding them softly. I wanted to give them counsel and to prove to them that—as the son of immigrants myself—I could be trusted.

Next, I did the social sites. The photos flashed before me. Mostly
they were of Sally and her friends. Asian kids getting furtively drunk off Mexican beer, attractive boys and girls in decent cotton sweatshirts flashing V-signs at the äppärät lens in front of doily-covered pianos and gilt-edged pastoral paintings of Jesus in blissed-out freefall. Boys roughhousing on their parents’ wide bed, denim jeans upon denim jeans upon denim jeans. Girls huddled together, all eyes on a busy äppärät, serious attempts at laughter and spontaneity and light feminine “clowning around.” Sister Sally, hurt kindness radiating from her face, her arms draped over an equally heavy girl in a Catholic-school uniform who has snuck her hand behind Sally to make a pair of childhood horns, and there, at the end of a chorus line of ten desperately grinning recent college grads, was my Eunice, her eyes coolly surveying an asphalted patch of California backyard and a flimsy dog-proof gate, her cheeks rising with difficulty to produce the requisite glossy three-quarters of a smile.

I closed my eyes and let the image slide into my mind’s burgeoning Eunice archive. But then I looked again. It wasn’t Eunice’s brilliantly fake smile that had struck me. There was something else. She had turned away from the äppärät lens, while one hand was forever stuck in midair trying to quickly apply a pair of sunglasses. I magnified the image by 800 percent and focused on the eye farthest from the camera. Beneath it and to one side, I saw what looked like the leathery black trace of burst capillaries. I zoomed in and out, trying to decipher the blemish on a face that would tolerate no blemishes, and eventually distinguished the imprint of two fingers, no, three fingers—index, middle, thumb—striking her across the face.

Okay, stop. Enough detective work. Enough obsessiveness. Enough trying to position yourself as the savior of a beaten girl. Let’s see if I can write three pages without mentioning Eunice Park even once. Let’s see if I can write about something other than my heart.

Because, when the plane’s wheels finally licked the tarmac in New York, I almost failed to notice the tanks and armored personnel carriers squatting amidst the islands of sunburned grass between the runways. I nearly failed to heed the soldiers in their muddy boots running alongside our airplane as we shuddered to a premature
stop, the pilot’s anxious voice over the PA system drowned out by a jagged electronic hiss.

Our plane had been surrounded by what passed for the United States Army. Soon we heard the knocking against the plane’s door, the stewardesses scrambling to open it to the urgent military cries outside. “What the fuck?” I asked the young jock next to me, the one who had complained about the smell of my book, but he only pressed one finger to his lips and looked away from me, as if I too radiated the stench of a short-story collection.

They were inside the first-class cabin. About nine guys wearing grimy camouflage fatigues, in their thirties mostly (too old to serve in Venezuela, I’d guess), sweat stains underneath their arms, water bottles haphazardly stapled to their bulletproof vests, M-16s cradled against their torsos, no smiles, no words. They scanned us with their large brown ghetto äppäräti for three interminable minutes, during which the American contingent remained petulantly silent while the Italians aboard began to speak in angry, assertive tones. And then it began.

They grabbed him by both arms and tried to drag him to his feet, his vast bulk passively protesting. The American passengers instantly turned away, but the Italians were already hollering: “
Que barbarico!
” and “
A cosa serve?
”

The fat ugly man’s fear washed over the cabin in putrefying waves. We felt it before we even heard the sound of his voice, which, like the rest of him, did not conform to the standards of our time: was weak, helpless, despicable. “What did I do?” he was stammering. “Look at my wallet. I’m Bipartisan. Look in my wallet. I have a first-class ticket. I told the beaver everything he wanted.”

I snuck a glance at the fat man’s tormentors, standing evenly around him, fingers on their triggers. Their uniforms were adorned with hasty insignia, a sword superimposed over Lady Liberty’s crown, which I believe denotes the New York Army National Guard. And yet I sensed these exurban white guys were from nowhere
near
New York. They were slow and unwieldy, tired-looking, as if someone had poked them in their pupils and then circled their eyes. “Your äppärät,” one of them said to the fat man.

“I left it at home,” the man whispered loudly, and we all knew he had lied. As the soldiers finally pulled him to his feet, the cabin filled with the sound of a grown-up’s out-of-practice whimpering. I looked back to see his baggy, ill-fitting pants, too big for his oddly tiny legs. And that’s all I saw or heard of the criminal passenger on UnitedContinentalDeltamerican Flight 023 to New York, because somehow the soldiers had made his crying stop, and all we could hear was the slap of his loafers among the steady thump of their man-boots.

It wasn’t over yet. While the Italians had begun their angry crowing about the state of our troubled nation, murmuring the name of “
il macellaio
” or “the butcher” Rubenstein, whose blood-smeared, cleaver-wielding visage could be seen in poster form on every Roman street corner, a second group of soldiers had returned to our cabin. “U.S. citizens, raise your hands,” we were told.

My Ohio-shaped bald spot felt cold against the headrest of the seat. What had I done? Should I have kept my mouth shut when the otter had asked for Fabrizia’s name? Should I have said, “I don’t want to answer this question,” as he had told me was my right? Had I been
too
compliant? Was there time to reach into my äppärät for Nettie Fine’s info, so that I could present it to the Guardsmen? Would they drag me off the plane too? My parents were born in what used to be the Soviet Union, and my grandmother had survived the last years of Stalin, although barely, but I lack the genetic instinct to deal with unbridled authority. Before a greater force, I crumble. And so, as my hand began the long journey from my lap into the fear-saturated cabin air, I wanted my parents near me. I wanted my mother’s hand on the back of my neck, the cool touch that always calmed me down as a child. I wanted to hear my parents’ Russian spoken aloud, because I always thought of it as the language of cunning acquiescence. I wanted us to face this together, because what if they shot me as a traitor and my parents would have to hear the news from a neighbor, from a police report, from a potato-faced anchor on their favorite FoxLiberty-Ultra? “I love you,” I whispered in the direction of Long Island, where my parents live. Deploying the satellite powers of my mind, I zoomed in on the undulating green roof of their humble Cape Cod house, the tiny
yuan valuation floating over the equally minuscule green blot of their working-class backyard.