Super Sad True Love Story

9 TOTAL SURRENDER

Dear Diary,

Oh my God, oh my God, Oh My God! She’s here. Eunice Park is in New York. Eunice Park is in my apartment! Eunice Park is sitting NEXT TO ME on my couch while I’m writing this. Eunice Park: a tiny fragment of a human being in purple leggings, pouting at something terrible I may have done, anger in her wrinkled forehead, the rest of her absorbed by her äppärät, checking out expensive stuff on AssLuxury. I am close to her. I am surreptitiously smelling the garlic on her breath, diary. I’m smelling a lunch of Malaysian anchovies and I think I’m about to have a heart attack. Oh, what’s wrong with me? Everything, sweet diary. Everything is wrong with me and I am the happiest man alive!

When she teened me she was coming to NYC, I rushed out to the corner bodega and asked for an eggplant. They said they had to order it on their äppärät, so I waited twelve hours by the door, and when it came my hands were shaking so bad I couldn’t do anything with it. I just stuck it in the freezer (by accident) and then went out on the balcony and started to weep. From joy, of course!

On the morning of the first day of my real life, I threw out the frozen eggplant, and put on my cleanest, most conservative cotton shirt, which became a monsoon of nervous sweat before I even left for the door. To dry off a little and gain perspective, I sat down and pondered Point No. 3: Love Eunice, the way my parents always sat down before a long trip to pray for a safe journey in their primitive Russian way. Lenny! I said aloud. You are not going to screw this up. You’ve been given a chance to help the most beautiful woman in the world. You must be good, Lenny. You must not think of yourself at all. Only of this little creature before you. Then you will be helped in turn. If you don’t pull this off, if you hurt this poor girl in any way, you will not be worthy of immortality. But if you harness her warm little body to yours and make her smile, if you show her that adult love can overcome childhood pain, then both of you will be shown the kingdom. Joshie may slam the door on you, may watch your heartbeat stutter to a stop in some public hospital bed, but how could anyone deny Eunice Park? How could any god wish her less than eternal youth?

I wanted to meet Eunice at JFK, but it turns out that you can’t even get close to the airport without a plane ticket anymore. The cabbie left me at the third American Restoration Authority checkpoint on the Van Wyck, where the National Guard had set up a greeting area, a twenty-foot camouflaged tarp beneath which a crowd of poor middle-class folk huddled in anticipation of their relatives. I almost missed her flight because a part of the Williamsburg Bridge had collapsed and we spent an hour trying to turn around on Delancey Street next to a hasty new ARA sign that said “Together We’ll Repare [sic] This Bridge.”

While we were pulling up to the checkpoint, my äppärät came through with another bit of wonderful news. Nettie Fine is alive and well! She teened me, using a new secure address. “Lenny, I’m so sorry if I brought you down when I saw you in Rome. My kids tell me sometimes I can be a real ‘Nervous Nettie.’ I just wanted to let you know things aren’t so bad! There’s good news on my desk all the time. There’s real change back home. The poor people thrown out of their homes are getting organized just like in the Great Depression. These ex-National Guard boys are building cabins in the parks and protesting that they don’t have their Venezuela bonuses. I can just feel a burst of bottom-up energy! Media isn’t covering it, but you go take a look in Central Park and tell me what you see. Maybe the reign of Jeffrey Otter is finally behind us! xxx, Nettie Fine.” I teened her right back, telling her that I would go see the Low Net Worth people in the park and that I was in love with a girl named Eunice Park who (I anticipated Nettie’s first question) wasn’t Jewish but was perfect in every other way.

Filled with good tidings about my American mama, I waited for the UnitedContinentalDeltamerican bus, pacing nervously until the men with the guns began to look at me funny, then retreated into a makeshift Retail space by a dumpster, where I bought some wilting roses and a three-hundred-dollar bottle of champagne. My poor Eunice looked so tired when she huffed off the bus with her many bags that I nearly tackled her in a rejuvenating embrace, but I was careful not to make a scene, waving my roses and champagne at the armed men to prove that I had enough Credit to afford Retail, and then kissed her passionately on one cheek (she smelled of flight and moisturizer), then on the straight, thin, oddly non-Asian nose, then the other cheek, then back to the nose, then once more the first cheek, following the curve of freckles backward and forward, marking her nose like a bridge to be crossed twice. The champagne bottle fell out of my hands, but, whatever futuristic garbage it was made of, it didn’t break.

Confronted with this kind of crazy love, Eunice didn’t withdraw, nor did she return my ardor. She smiled at me with those full, purple lips of hers and those tired young eyes, abashed, and made a motion with her arms to indicate that the bags were heavy. They were, diary. They were the heaviest bags I’ve ever carried. The spiky heels of ladies’ shoes kept stabbing my abdomen, and a metal tin of unknown provenance, round and hard, bruised my hip.

The cab ride passed in near silence, both of us a little ashamed of the situation, each probably feeling guilty of something (my relative power; her youth), and mindful of the fact that we had spent less than a day together in total and that our commonalities had yet to be determined. “Isn’t this ARA shit totally crazy?” I whispered to her, as yet another checkpoint slowed us to a crawl.

“I don’t really know much about politics,” she said.

She was disappointed by my apartment, by how far it was from the F line and how ugly the buildings were. “Looks like I’ll get some exercise walking to the train,” she said. “Ha ha.” This was what her generation liked to add to the end of sentences, like a nervous tic. “Ha ha.”

“I’m really glad you’re here, Eunice,” I said, trying to keep everything I said both clear and honest. “I really missed you. I mean, it’s kind of weird…”

“I missed you too, nerd-face,” she said.

That single sentence hung in the air between us, the insult wedded to the intimacy. She had clearly surprised herself, and she didn’t know what to do, whether to add a “ha!” or a “ha ha” or just to shrug it off. I decided to take the initiative and sat down next to her on my chrome-and-leather couch, the kind that once graced luxury cruise ships in the 1920s and ’30s and made me wish I was someone else. She looked at my Wall of Books with a neutral expression, although by now my volumes mostly stank of Pine-Sol Wild Flower Blast and not their natural printed essence. “I’m sorry you broke up with that guy in Italy,” I said. “You said on GlobalTeens he was really your type.”

“I don’t want to talk about him right now,” Eunice said.

Good, I didn’t either. I just wanted to hold her. She was wearing an oatmeal sweatshirt, beneath which I could espy the twin straps of a bra she did not need. Her rough-hewn miniskirt made out of some kind of sandpaper fiber sat atop a pair of bright-violet pantyhose, which also seemed unnecessary given the warm June weather. Was she trying to protect herself from my roving hands? Or was she just very cold at her center? “You must be tired from the long flight,” I said, putting my hand on her violet knee.

“You’re sweating like crazy,” she said, laughing.

I wiped at my forehead, coming away with the sheen of my age. “Sorry,” I said.

“Do I really excite you that much, nerd-face?” she asked.

I didn’t say anything. I smiled.

“It’s nice of you to let me stay here.”

“Indefinitely!” I cried.

“We’ll see,” she said. As I squeezed her knee and made a slight movement upward, she caught my hairy wrist. “Let’s take it easy,” she said. “I just had my heart broken, remember?” She thought it over and added, “Ha ha.”

“Hey, I know what we can do,” I said. “It’s, like, my favorite thing when the summer comes.”

I took her to Cedar Hill in Central Park. She seemed disturbed by the ragged project-dwellers walking and wheeling their way down my stretch of Grand Street, the old Dominicans leering at her and shouting “Chinita!” and “You better spend some money, China honey!” in what I hoped was a not-too-threatening way. I made sure to avoid the block where our resident shitter did his business.

“Why do you live here?” Eunice Park asked, perhaps not understanding that real estate in the rest of Manhattan was still grossly unaffordable, despite the last dollar devaluation (or perhaps because of it; I can never figure out how currency works). So, to compensate for my poor neighborhood, I paid the extra ten dollars each at the F train stop and got us into the business-class carriage. As Vish had drunkenly told me the other night, our city’s dying transit is now run on a for-profit basis by a bunch of ARA-friendly corporations under the slogan “Together We’ll Go Somewhere.” In business class, we had the run of the cozy, already slightly browned sofas and the bulky äppäräti chained to a coffee table and dusted with fingerprints and spilled drinks. Heavily armed National Guardsmen kept our carriage free of the ubiquitous singing beggars, break-dancers, and destitute families begging for a Healthcare voucher, the ragtag gaggle of Low Net Worth Individuals who had turned the regular cars into a soundstage for their talents and woes. In business, we were allowed a thousand discrete moments of underground peace. Eunice scanned The New York Lifestyle Times, which made me happy, because even though the Times is no longer the fabled paper of yore, it’s still more text-heavy than other sites, the half-screen-length essays on certain products sometimes offering subtle analysis of the greater world, a piece on a new kohl applicator giving way to a paragraph-long snapshot of the brain economy in the Indian state of Kerala. There was no denying that the woman I had fallen for was thoughtful and bright. I kept my eyes on Eunice Park, at her sun-browned little arms floating above the projected data, ready to pounce when an item she coveted was unfurled on the screen, the green “buy me now” icon hovering beneath her busy index fingers. I watched her so intently, the overlit subway stops flashing meaninglessly outside the windows, that we missed our own stop and had to double back.

Cedar Hill. This is where I start my walks in Central Park. Many years ago, after a violent breakup with an earlier girlfriend (a sad Russian I had dated out of some kind of perverse ethnic solidarity), I used to go to a young, recently accredited social worker just one block over on Madison. For under a hundred dollars every week, someone cared for me in these parts, even if, in the end, Janice Feingold, M.S.W., could not cure me of my fear of nonexistence. Her favorite question: “Why do you think you would be happier if you could live forever?”

After my sessions, I would decompress slowly with a book or an actual printed newspaper amidst the brilliant greenery of Cedar Hill. I would try to assimilate Ms. Feingold’s therapeutic view of me as someone worthy of the colors and graces of life, and this particular stretch of Central Park nicely brought home the point of all her good work. Depending on your viewing angle, the Hill can appear a collegiate New England lawn or a dense coniferous forest, gray rocks spread out glacially, cedars cautiously intermingling with pines. The Hill descends eastward to a tiny green valley, unfurling a cast of strollers, long-haired dachshunds wearing polka-dot bandanas, dexterous Anglo-Saxon children in full swing, dark-skinned caregivers, tourists on ethnic blankets enjoying the weather.

What a day it was! The middle of June, the trees coming into their own, the boughs filling abundantly. Everywhere youth for the taking. How to contain the natural reflex to stand up on one’s hind legs and sniff poignantly for the warmth of the sun? How to keep one’s mouth from finding Eunice’s and burrowing inside?

I pointed out a park sign that said “Passive Activities Encouraged.” “Funny, huh?” I said to Eunice.

“You’re funny,” she said. She looked at me directly for the first time since she’d landed. There was her customary sneer curling the left side of her lower lip, but, per the sign’s directions, it was entirely passive. She put her hands forward, and the sun stroked them before they met the shadow of my own. We held hands briefly and then she looked away from me. Small doses, I thought. This is enough for right now. But then my mouth started talking. “Boy,” it said, “I could really learn to love-”

“I don’t want to hurt you, Lenny,” she interrupted me.

Easy. Easy does it. “I know you don’t,” I said. “You’re probably still in love with that guy in Italy.”

She sighed. “Everything I touch turns to shit,” she said, shaking her head, her whole face suddenly older and unforgiving. “I’m a walking disaster. What’s that?”

It hurt my eyes to part company with her face. But I looked as directed. Someone had built a little wooden shack at the crest of the hill, adding to its rustic appeal. We languidly went up to investigate, I relishing the opportunity to observe her behind, which sat humbly, almost unnecessarily, atop two sturdy legs. I wondered how she would survive in the world without an ass. Everyone needs a cushion. Maybe I could be that for her.

The cabin wasn’t wooden actually, just some corrugated metal that had lost so much texture and paint it appeared primordial. A sunflower had been painted on it along with the words “my name aziz jamie tompkins I worked bus driver kicked out of home two days ago this is my space dont shoot.” A black man sat on a brick outside the shanty, gray sideburns like my own, an affected cap that on second examination proved to belong to the former Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and the rest of him unremarkable-white T-shirt, golden chain with an oversized yuan symbol-except for the expression on his face. Stunned. He sat there looking to the side, his mouth open, gently breathing in the beautiful air like an exhausted fish, utterly removed from the small crowd of New York natives who had formed respectfully a few yards away to watch his poverty, and the äppäräti-toting tourists just another few yards behind them, jostling for a sightline. From time to time, one could hear the fall of a metal pan inside his shanty, or the opening bars of an obsolete computer trying to boot up, or a woman’s low, displeased voice, but the man ignored it all, his eyes blank, one hand poised in midair as if practicing some quiet martial art, the other one scratching miserably at a patch of dead skin spreading along his calf.

“Is he poor?” Eunice asked.

“I guess so,” I said. “Middle-class.”

“He’s a bus driver,” a woman said.

“Was,” said another.

“They cleared him out for the central banker dude’s visit,” said a third.

“The Chinese Central Banker.” This was the first person, an older woman in an odorous T-shirt who clearly belonged to the marginal classes (what was she doing in this part of Manhattan anyway?). Several of her cohorts looked at Eunice, not in a friendly way. I wondered if I should declare to the gathering crowd that my new friend was not Chinese, but Eunice was absorbed by something on her äppärät, or pretending to be. “Don’t be scared, sweetie,” I whispered to her.

“He was living by the Van Wyck,” said the marginalized know-it-all. “They don’t want the Chinese banker seeing no poor people on the way from the airport. Make us look bad.”

“Harm Reduction,” a young black man said.

“What the hell’s he doing in the park?”

“Restoration ’thority not going to like this. Uh-uh.”

“Hey, Aziz,” the black man yelled. There was no response. “Hey, brother. Better scoot out of here before the National Guard comes.” The man in the MTA cap continued to sit there, scratching and meditating. “You don’t want to end up in Troy,” the younger man added. “They’ll get your lady too. You know what they’ll do.”

This Aziz guy must have been part of the new “bottom-up” Great Depression movement Nettie Fine was talking about. Only a few hours together, and Eunice and I were already witnesses to history! I took out my äppärät and started to take Images of the man, but the young black man yelled, “What the fuck you doing, son?”

“A friend of mine asked me to take an Image,” I said. “She works for the State Department.”

“State Department? Are you fucking kidding me? You better put that thing away, Mr. 1520-Credit-ranking got-me-a-bitch-twenty-year-younger Bipartisan motherfucker!”

“I’m not a Bipartisan,” I said, although I did as I was told. Now I was completely confused. And a little scared. Who were these people all around me? Americans, I guess. But what did that even mean anymore?

The conversation behind me was turning to the sensitive subject of China-Worldwide. “Damn China banker,” someone was shouting. “When he comes, I’m going to cut up all my credit cards and throw them at him like confetti. I’m gonna shoot his lo mein ass.”

The Chinese tourists on the outer perimeter were starting to disband, and I thought it would be wise to move Eunice along too. I looped myself around her shoulders and gently walked her down the hill, away from anyone who could cause her harm, and toward the Model Boat Pond. “I’m okay, I’m okay,” she said, squeezing out of my embrace.

“Some of those folks looked a little street,” I said.

“And you were going to put your nerd moves on them?” Eunice said, laughing brightly.

Some vestigial teenage memory ran up and down my gut, making me cramp. I was perhaps the least popular child in secondary school. I never learned how to fight or carry myself like a man. “Stop calling me that, please,” I whispered, rubbing my stomach.

“Ha! I love it when my nerd feigns defiance.”

I growled a bit, taking note of her use of the possessive. My nerd. Would she really take ownership of me?

We walked slowly and meditatively, neither of us speaking, both of us a little unhappy and a little content. Early-summer evening was settling over the city. The sky was the color of ghosts. The atmosphere, warm but breezy, reeking of pollinated sweetness and baked bread. Crowding around the boat pond were young Euro couples, playful as children, amorous as teenagers, pressing devalued dollars into the hands of T-shirt and trinket vendors, excited by the twilight country around them. Asian kids, learning to be loud and impetuous, chased one another’s radio-controlled sloops across the still, gray waters of the pond.

Up above, three military helicopters, evenly spaced, rumbled across the put-upon sky. The fourth, barely tagging along, seemed to hold a giant spear in its maw; the spear glowed yellow at its tip. Only the tourists looked up. I thought of Nettie Fine. I had to believe in her optimism. She had never been wrong before, whereas my parents had been wrong about everything. Things were going to get better. Someday. For me to fall in love with Eunice Park just as the world fell apart would be a tragedy beyond the Greeks.

We were walking hand in hand now along the vast grassy Sheep Meadow, which felt comfortable and familial, like a worn rumpus-room carpet or a badly made bed. Beyond it, on three sides, lay the constellation of once-tall buildings, the old ones mansard-topped and stoic, the new ones covered with blinking information. We passed a white-and-Asian couple enjoying an early-summer picnic of prosciutto and melon, which made me squeeze Eunice’s hand. She turned around and brushed my graying hair with her moisturized hands. I prepared myself for a comment on my age and looks. I prepared myself to become Chekhov’s ugly merchant Laptev again. I knew this hurt so well, it actually had left a strange foretaste in my mouth, that of almonds and salt.

“My sweet emperor penguin,” she said instead. “You’re so beauticious. You’re so smart. And giving. So unlike anyone I’ve met. So you. I bet you can make me so happy, if I just let myself be happy.” She kissed me quickly on the lips, as if we had already exchanged a hundred thousand kisses before, then ran into a passing field of green and did three graceful somersaults-one after the other after the other. I stood there. Delirious. Taking in the world in tiny increments. Her simple body parting the air. The parabola of her spine in motion. The open mouth breathing hard after the light exhaustion. Facing me. Freckles and heat. I steeled my chest against what it expected of me. I would not cry.

Gray clouds bearing some kind of industrial remnant moved into the foreground; a yellow substance etched itself into the horizon, became the horizon, became the night. As the sky darkened, we found ourselves enclosed on three sides by the excess of our civilization, yet the ground beneath our feet was soft and green, and behind us lay a hill bearing trees as small as ponies. We walked in silence, as I sniffed the sharp, fruity facial creams that Eunice wore to fight off age, mixed in with just a hint of something alive and corporeal. Multiple universes tempted me with their existence. Like the immutability of God or the survival of the soul, I knew they would prove a mirage, but still I grasped for belief. Because I believed in her.

It was time to leave. We headed south, and when the trees ran out the park handed us over to the city. We surrendered to a skyscraper with a green mansard roof and two stark chimneys. New York exploded all around us, people hawking, buying, demanding, streaming. The city’s density caught me unprepared, and I reeled from its imposition, its alcoholic fumes, its hubris, its loud, dying wealth. Eunice looked at some shop windows on Fifth Avenue, her äppärät crawling with new information. “Euny,” I said, trying out a shorter version of her name. “How are you feeling right now? Are you jet-lagged?”

She was looking at an alligator skin stretched into a meaningfully large object and failed to answer me.

“Do you want to go to our house?”

Our house?

She was busy scanning the dead amphibian with her äppärät as if it contained an answer. Her lower face was now covered with a smile that was a smile in name only. But when she turned away from the store window, when she appraised me, there was nothing on her face. She was looking into the smooth white emptiness of my neck.

“Don’t rub your eyes,” she said into that emptiness, sucking the words through her lips, shredding each syllable. “You’re killing the cells around your eyes when you rub so hard. That’s why there’s so much dark skin. It makes you look older.” I was hoping she would add “nerd-face,” so that I would know it was all right, but she didn’t. I didn’t understand. What had happened to the somersaults? What had happened to “my sweet emperor penguin”? To that wonderful, utterly unexpected word: “beauticious”?

We walked back to the subway without a syllable between us, her stare covering the ground ahead of her like a beam of negative light. The silence continued. I breathed so hard I thought I would faint. I didn’t know how to bring us back to where we were before. I didn’t know how to restore us to Central Park, to Cedar Hill, to the Sheep Meadow, to the kiss.

Back in my apartment, with the hollow “Freedom” Tower glowing extra bright behind the thick curtains, and the sound of an empty M22 bus lowering itself for an elderly insomniac, Eunice and I had our first fight. She threatened to move back with her parents.

I was on my knees. I was crying. “Please,” I said. “You can’t go back to Fort Lee. Just stay here with me a little longer.”

“You’re pathetic,” Eunice said. She was sitting on my couch, hands in her lap. “You’re so weak.”

“All I said was ‘I’d like to meet your parents someday.’ You’re more than welcome to meet mine next week. In fact, I want you to meet them.”

“Do you know what that means for me? To meet my parents? You don’t know me at all.”

“I’m trying to know you. I’ve dated Korean girls before. I understand the families are conservative. I know they’re not crazy about whiteys like me.”

“You don’t understand anything about my family,” Eunice said. “How could you even think…”

I lay in my bed, listening to Eunice teening furiously on her äppärät in the living room, probably to her friends in southern California or to her family in Fort Lee. Finally, three hours later, the birds picking up a morning tune outside, she came into the bedroom. I pretended I was asleep. She took off most of her clothes and got in bed next to me, then pressed her warm back and behind into my chest and genitals, so that I ended up spooning her warm body. She was crying. I was still pretending to be asleep. I kissed her in a way that was consistent with my being supposedly asleep. I didn’t want her to hurt me anymore that night. She was wearing those panties that snap right off when you press a button on the crotch. Total Surrender, I think they’re called. I held on tighter to Eunice, and she pressed deeper into me. I wanted to tell her that it was okay. That I would bring her joy whenever I could. I didn’t need to meet her parents right away.

But it wasn’t true. This was another thing I had learned about Korean women. The parents were the key to Eunice Park.