Super Sad True Love Story

17 ANTI-INFLAMMATION

Dear Diary,

Noah told me there’s a day during the summer when the sun hits the broad avenues at such an angle that you experience the sensation of the whole city being flooded by a melancholy twentieth-century light, even the most prosaic, unloved buildings appearing bright and nuclear at the edge of your vision, and that when this happens you want to both cry for something lost and run out there and welcome the decline of the day. He made it sound like an urban rapture, his aging face taking on a careful glow, as if he was borrowing some of the light of which he spoke. I thought he was emoting when he said it, but his äppärät was at standby, he wasn’t streaming: This was real enough. We were sitting in some crappy St. George café, oddly moved by the fact that there were still cafés out in the world, much less on Staten Island. “I’d love to see that,” I said. “When does it happen exactly?”

“We missed it,” Noah said. “It was late in June.”

“Next year then,” I said.

And then, like a perfect Media drama queen, Noah told me he expected to be dead by the next year. Something about the Restoration Authority, the Bipartisans, the price of biofuel, the decline of the tides-who can keep up anymore? That kind of ruined the effect of what he was saying about the light hitting the avenues just so. I wanted to tell him that he didn’t have to strain for me, that I liked him exactly as he was: perfectly above average, angry but decent, just smart enough. I thought of Sammy the Elephant in the Bronx Zoo, his calmly depressive countenance, the way he approached extinction with both equanimity and unobtrusive despair. Maybe this was what Noah was jabbering about when he followed the light across the city. The fading light is us, and we are, for a moment so brief it can’t even register on our äppärät screens, beautiful.

Speaking of the light, I had one luminous moment with Eunice this week. I caught her looking at my Wall of Books with some curiosity, specifically at a washed-out old cover of a Milan Kundera paperback-a bowler hat floats over a Prague cityscape-her index fingers raised above the book as if ready to tap at the BUY ME NOW symbol on her äppärät, her other fingers massaging the book’s back, maybe even enjoying its thickness and unusual weight, its relative quiet and meekness. When she saw me approach she slid the book back on its shelf and retreated to the couch, smelling her fingers for book odor, her cheeks in full blush. But I knew she was curious, my reluctant sentence-monger, and I chalked up yet another victory-the second after what I thought was a very successful dinner with her parents.

Life with Euny has been okay. Exciting, sometimes upsetting. We argued daily. She never backed down. A fighter to the very last. This is how a human being is forged after an unhappy early life. This is the independence of growing up, of standing up for yourself, even if against a phantom enemy.

Mostly we fought about social commitments. She’d be fine with her Elderbird friends who just moved back to New York. They seem like decent girls, effervescent but unsure of themselves, lusting after big-ticket items and some measure of identity, confusing one for the other, but basically in no great hurry to grow up. One girl who actually ate food scored only in the low 500s on her Fuckability, so the other girls would give her tips on how to lose weight. They’d reach over and pinch her all the time, coat her in creams until she glowed sadly on my living-room couch, and weigh her as if she were a prized albacore hanging over a Tokyo wharf. Another girl was going for that new Naked Librarian look, very little covering her body except glasses as thick as my storm windows, which I thought was funny because even a fine institution like Elderbird had recently closed its physical library, so what the hell was this girl even referencing? Then they’d get trashed on rosé out on our (our!) balcony, those cute, bloated, drunken faces of theirs, as they told these long, circular stories that were supposed to be funny but instead proved highly disturbing, narratives of a cheap, ephemeral world where everyone let everyone down as a matter of course and women sometimes got pissed on in front of others. I felt both jealous of their youth and scared for their future. In short, I felt paternal and aroused, which is not a good combination.

I had told Eunice, offhandedly and wearing my cutest platypus grin, that the next two weeks would prove busy on the social front. Joshie had been begging to meet her and expected us on Saturday at his house. Grace and Vishnu were having a party in Staten Island on the Monday after that to officially announce Grace’s pregnancy. “I know you’re not, like, the biggest socializer,” I said.

But she had already turned away from me, the angry spires of her shoulder blades staying my comforting hand.

“Your boss,” she said, “wants to meet me?”

“He loves young people. He’s turning into a teenager himself.”

“That bitch Grace wants us over? Why? So she can laugh at me some more?”

“Are you kidding? Grace loves you!”

“Probably wants to be my big sister. No thanks, Len.”

“She does care about you, Eunice. She wants to find you a job in Retail. She said her Princeton roommate might know of an internship at Padma.” The three times we had briefly, tangentially, touched upon the subject of Eunice procuring employment and helping out with the escalating air-conditioning bill ($8,230 unpegged, just for the month of June), she had mentioned working in Retail. All her Elderbird friends wanted the same. No big surprise there. Credit for boys, Retail for girls.

“You don’t understand, Leonard.”

The phrase I hate the most in the world. I do understand. Not everything, but a lot. And what I don’t understand, I certainly want to learn more about. If Eunice ever asked me to I would take an entire week off from work, claim some family-related emergency (which is essentially what this is), and listen to her talk. I would put a box of tissues and some calming miso broth between us, take out my äppärät, write it all down, pinpoint the hurt, make reasonable suggestions based on my own experiences, become completely versed in all things Park. “I’m broke,” she said.

“What?”

“I have nothing to wear. And my butt is fat.”

“You weight eighty-three pounds. Everyone on Grand Street stares at your ass in wonder. You have three closets’ worth of shoes and dresses.”

“Eighty-six. And I have nothing for the summer, Lenny. Are you even listening to me?”

We fought some more. She went to the living room and started teening, legs crossed, the dead smile on her face, forceful sighs, my entreaties rising in pitch. Eventually we reached a kind of compromise. We would go to the United Nations Retail Corridor and buy new clothes for the both of us. I would contribute 60 percent of the cost of her outfits, and she would cover the rest with her parents’ Credit. Like I said, a compromise.

I’d never been to the UNRC. I’ve always been intimidated by Retail Corridors, and this one was supposed to be the biggest yet. When I went to the Corridor they carved out of Union Square two years ago, everyone looked better and way younger than I did. I love going to these little offbeat boutiques in Staten Island with Grace, even if the clientele is older and grayer, folks who came of age in the grand Brooklyn neighborhoods of Greenpoint and Bushwick, and who have now been forced to retreat to Staten Island.

I started panicking the moment we got to the UN: the crush of humanity pouring out of the seven layers of underground parking; the floor samples emitting info that flooded my äppärät with impulsive data; the Debt Bombers singling me out for my impressive Credit ranking; the giant ARA “America Celebrates It’s [sic] Spenders” banners, which now featured this girl Eunice actually knew from high school who finagled all these Credit lines and managed to buy six spring collections and a house.

The afterglow of the setting sun rushed through the glass roof of the UNRC, the steel trellises hundreds of feet above us gleaming like the ribs of a fearsome animal. I think this is where the Security Council used to meet, although I could be wrong. Since my sabbatical in Rome, it seems that America had learned her lesson on overhead, had shuttered her traditional malls. These thrifty Retail Corridors were supposed to mimic North African bazaars of yore, their only purpose a quick exchange of goods and services, minus the plangent cries of the sellers and the whiffs of tangerine sweat.

Eunice didn’t need a map. She led and I followed past the merchandise crowding the endless floor space in haphazard fashion, one store running into another, rack after rack after rack, each approached, surveyed, considered, dismissed. Here were the famous nippleless Saaami bras that Eunice had shown me on AssLuxury and the fabled Padma corsets that the Polish porn star wore on AssDoctor. We stopped to look at some conservative JuicyPussy summer cocktail dresses. “I’m going to need two,” Eunice said. “One for your boss’s party and one for that bitch Grace.”

“With my boss it’s not really a party,” I said. “We’ll drink two glasses of wine and eat some carrots and blueberries.”

Eunice ignored me and set about her task. She did some äppärät work to get a sense of how things were selling around the world. Then she went over to a circle of black, identical-looking dresses and started clicking through them. Click, click, click, each hanger hitting the preceding one, making the sound of an abacus. She spent less than a full second on each dress, but each second seemed more meaningful than the hours she spent on AssLuxury viewing the same merchandise; each was an encounter with the real. Her face was steely, concentrated, the mouth slightly open. Here was the anxiety of choice, the pain of living without history, the pain of some higher need. I felt humbled by this world, awed by its religiosity, the attempt to extract meaning from an artifact that contained mostly thread. If only beauty could explain the world away. If only a nippleless bra could make it all work.

“They either don’t have a size zero,” Eunice said, upon clicking through the last of the JuicyPussy summer dresses, “or there’s this weird embroidery on the hem. They’re trying to make themselves more classy than TotalSurrender, which has the slit down the crotch. Let’s go to Onionskin.”

“Aren’t those the sheer jeans?” I said. I imagined Eunice with her labia and behind exposed to passersby as she crossed an especially busy Delancey Street, drivers of cars with Jersey plates rolling down their tinted windows in disbelief. I felt protective of her minimalist package, but there was a frisson of eroticism as well, not to mention social positioning. Others would see her little landing strip and think highly of me.

“No, jerk-face,” Eunice said. “I wouldn’t be caught dead in those jeans. They make normal dresses too.”

“Oh,” I said. The fantasy came to an end, and I found myself oddly happy with the conservative girl by my side. We wended our way through a half-kilometer of racks and hit upon the Onionskin outlet. True enough, there were several racks of cocktail dresses, a bit revealing around the bosom, but certainly not see-through. Women, tired and aggrieved, were plowing through the brand’s signature transparent jeans, hanging like rigid, empty skins in the center of the Retail space.

As Eunice started clicking through the dresses, a Retail person came over to talk to her. My äppärät quickly zoomed in past the data outflows spilling out from the customers like polluted surf falling upon once-pristine shores and focused on McKay Watson. She was beautiful, this Retail girl. A tall, straight-necked creature whose eyes, clear and present, spoke of native-born honesty, as if to say, With a background like mine, who needs self-invention? I caressed McKay’s data, even as I took in the Onionskin jeans that clung to her slight if bottom-heavy body-she wore the semi-translucent kind that partly obscured her nether regions and gave them an impressionistic quality, the kind you had to step back to admire. She had graduated from Tufts with a major in international affairs and a minor in Retail science. Her parents were retired professors in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she grew up (baby Images of an oblivious but affectionate McKay hugging a container of orange juice). She didn’t have a boyfriend at present but enjoyed the “reverse cowgirl” position with the last one, an aspiring young Mediastud from Great Neck.

Eunice and McKay were verballing each other. They were discussing clothes in a way I couldn’t fully appreciate. They were discussing the finer points of a particular dress not made of natural fibers. The waists, stretched, unstretched. Composition-7 percent elastane, 2 percent polyester, a size three, 50 percent rayon viscose.

“It’s not treated with sodium hydroxide.”

“I bought the one with the slit to the left and it stretched.”

“Coat the inside of the hem with petroleum jelly.”

Eunice had put one hand on the shiny white arm of the Retail girl, a gesture of intimacy I had seen only extended to one of her Elderbird friends, the plump, matronly girl with the low Fuckability ranking. I heard some funny retro expressions like “JK,” which means one is “just kidding,” and “on the square,” which means one is not. I heard the familiar “JBF” and “TIMATOV!” but also “TPR!” and “CFG!” “TMS!” (temporary motion sickness?), “KOT!,” and the more universal “Cute!” This is just how people talk, I thought to myself. Feel the wonder of the moment. See the woman that you love reaching out to the world around her.

She bought two cocktail dresses for 5,240 yuan-pegged dollars, of which I covered three thousand. I could feel my debt load groaning a little, shedding a few points, immortality slipping a few notches into the improbable, but nothing like the 239,000-yuan-pegged-dollar punch I had recently taken in the balls from Howard Shu.

“Why didn’t you ask that girl if she could get you a job at Onionskin?” I asked Eunice when we had walked away from the Retail space.

“Are you kidding?” Eunice said. “Do you know what kind of grades you have to have to work UNRC? And she had the perfect body too. A nice round butt, but a totally boyish top. That’s so hot right now.”

I hadn’t thought of it that way. “Your grades or looks aren’t any worse than hers,” I said. “Anyway, at least you could have gotten her Teens address. She seems like a good friend to have.”

“Thanks, Dad,” Eunice said.

“I mean-”

“Okay, shhhh… It’s your turn to shop. Breathable fabrics are going to do wonders for my kokiri.”

We hit the glowing, mahogany-paneled insinuation that was the JuicyPussy4Men store. “You have a weak chin,” Eunice told me, “so all these shirts you wear with the huge, high collars just showcase your chin and accentuate how weak it is. We’re going to get you some V-necks and some solid-colored tees. Striped cotton shirts a bit on the roomy side are going to make your flabby breasts less noticeable, and do yourself a favor, okay? Cashmere. You’re worth it, Len.”

She made me close my eyes and feel different fabrics. She dressed me in nontight JuicyPussy jeans and stuck a hand down my crotch to make sure my genitals had room to breathe. “It’s about comfort,” she said. “It’s about feeling and acting like a thirty-nine-year-old. Which is what you are, last time I checked.” I could feel her family inside her-rude, snide, unsupportive, yet getting the job done, acting appropriately, making sure there was room for my genitals, saving face. Beyond the mountains, according to the old Korean proverb Grace had once told me, were more mountains. We’d only just begun.

When I went into a changing room, one of the teenaged sales clerks said to me, “I’ll tell your daughter you’re in there, sir,” and instead of taking offense at being mistaken for Eunice’s presumably adoptive father, I actually felt in awe of my girl, in awe of the fact that every day we were together she ignored the terrible aesthetic differences between us. This shopping was not just for me or for her. It was for us as a couple. It was for our future together.

I left JuicyPussy with the equivalent of ten thousand yuan’s worth of goods. My debt load was blinking frantically with the words RECALCULATION IN PROGRESS, which scared off the swarms of Debt Bombers looking to give me more money. When I walked by a Credit Pole on 42nd Street, I registered a ranking of 1510 (down ten points). I may have been poorer, but you couldn’t confuse me for the overaged faux-hipster that had entered the UNRC three hours ago. I was what passed for a man now.

There was more. I looked healthier. The breathable fibers took about four years off my biological age. At work, Intakes asked if I was undergoing dechronification treatments myself. I took a physical, and my statistics started flapping on The Boards, my ACTH and cortisol levels plummeting, my designation now “a carefree and inspiring older gent.” Even Howard Shu came down to my desk and asked me to lunch. By this point, Joshie was sending Shu down to Washington on his private jet every week. Rumor had it Shu was bound for the White House or even higher up than that. “Rubenstein,” people hiccupped, covering their mouths. We were negotiating with the Bipartisans themselves! Over what, though, I still couldn’t tell.

But I was no longer scared of Shu. At our lunch meeting, I stared him down as I played with the cuffs of my striped cotton shirt, which indeed gave cover to my incipient man-breasts. We sat in a busy canteen drinking Swiss water we had alkalinized ourselves at the table and eating a few pellets of something fishy.

“I’m sorry we got off on the wrong foot when you came back from Rome,” Shu allowed, his full-bore eyes floating through the data fog of his äppärät.

“No big,” I said.

“I’m going to tell you something for your ears only.”

“Whatevs,” I said. “Verbal me, friend.”

Shu wiped his mouth as if I had just spat in it, but then resumed his collegial air. “There’s a good chance there’s going to be a disturbance. A realignment. Bigger than with the last riots. Not sure when. It’s what we’re picking up from Wapachung Intelligence. Just playing out some war games.”

“Safety first,” I said, looking bored. “What’s going on, Shu-ster?”

Shu descended into another äppärät reverie. I did the same, pretending it was something serious and work-related, but really I was just GlobalTracing Eunice’s location. She was, as always, at 575 Grand Street, Apt. E-607, my home, deep into her own äppärät, but subconsciously saturated by the presence of my books and mid-twentieth-century-design furniture. It pleased me, in a parochial way, the fact that I could always count on her being there. My little housewife! She tracked me moment by moment as well, getting suspicious if I veered off course from the daily set of my life, an impromptu meeting at a bar with Noah or Vishnu or a walk in the unbloodied part of Central Park with Grace. The fact that she was suspicious of me, the fact that she cared-that pleased me too.

“Let’s not talk about what might happen,” Shu said. “I just wanted you to know that Post-Human Services values you.” He swallowed too much water and coughed into his hand. He had had the same educational and work background as I had, but I noticed the callused tips of his fingers, as if he volunteered at a knitting factory during the weekends. “And we want you to be safe.”

“I’m touched,” I said, and I meant it. A high-school memory resurfaced, the day I found out that a wispy freshman girl whom I fancied, complete with an attractive limp and a penchant for poetry, liked me as well.

Howard nodded. “We’ve updated your äppärät. If you see any National Guard troops, point your äppärät at them. If you see a red dot, that means they’re Wapachung Contingency personnel. You know”-he tried to smile-“the good guys.”

“I don’t get it,” I said. “What happened to the real National Guard?”

But Shu never answered me. “That girl you have on your äppärät,” he said, pointing to an Image of Eunice I had floating all over my screen.

“Eunice Park. My gf.”

“Joshie says to make sure you’re with her in any emergency.”

“Duh,” I said. But it was nice that Joshie remembered I was in love.

Shu picked up his glass of alkalinized water and made a jokey toast with it. Then he leaned back and drank it down in such forceful gulps that our veined marble table shook, and the business people who shared the premises looked at this small brown almond of a man in their midst and tried to snicker at his display of strength. But they too were afraid of him.

After my Shu lunch, I walked from the Essex Street F stop to my far-flung riverside co-op with a renewed sense of grandeur. Since Eunice had picked out my new duds, I had started obsessively FACing every girl in sight: pretty, average, thin, skeletal, white, brown, black. It must have been my confidence, because my PERSONALITY was hitting the 700s and my MALE HOTNESS skirted into the 600s-so that, in an enclosed space like the M14 bus, with its small herd of trendoids grazing amidst the dying old people, I could sometimes emerge in the middle range of attractiveness, say the fifth-cutest man out of nine or ten. I would like to describe this utterly new feeling to you, diary, but I fear it will come out in purely evangelical terms. It felt like being born again. It felt like Eunice had resurrected me on a bed of cotton and wool.

But getting Eunice to meet Joshie was not easy. On the night before we were to go over to his place, she couldn’t sleep. “I don’t know, Len,” she whispered. “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.”

She was wearing a long satin twentieth-century sleeping gown, a gift from her mother that left everything to the imagination, instead of her usual TotalSurrenders.

“I feel like you’re making me do this,” she said.

“I feel like I’m being pushed.”

“I feel like things are moving too fast.”

“Maybe I should move back to Fort Lee.”

“Maybe you need to be with a real adult.”

“We both knew I was going to hurt you.”

I gently pawed her back in the dark. I did my patented cornered-rat-tapping-his-foot-in-distress noise against the mattress and made an ambiguous animal sound.

“Stop that,” she said. “The zoo is closed.”

I whispered what was required of me. Various pop-psych gems. Encouragements. I assumed the debt and the blame. It wasn’t her fault. Maybe it was my fault. Maybe I was just an extension of her father. The night was dedicated to her sighs and my whispers. We finally fell asleep just as the sun rose over the Vladeck housing projects, an exhausted American flag slapping itself in the summer wind. We awoke at 5 p.m., having nearly missed the car Joshie had sent to help us ascend to the Upper West Side. We dressed in silence, and when I tried to take her hand in the sparkling new Hyundai Town Car, possibly on its maiden voyage, she flinched and looked away. “You look beautiful,” I said. “That dress.”

She said nothing. “Please,” I said. “It’s important for Joshie to meet you. It’s important for me. Just be yourself.”

“What’s that? Dumb. Boring.”

We cut through Central Park. Armed choppers were making their weekend rounds above us, but the traffic below was light and easy, the humid breeze rocking the tops of the immortal trees. I thought of how we had kissed in the Sheep Meadow on the day she moved in with me, how I had held her tiny person to me for a hundred slow beats, and how, for that entire time, I had thought death beside the point.

Joshie’s building was on a street between Amsterdam and Columbus-a twelve-story Upper West Side co-op, unremarkable save for the two National Guardsmen who stood on either side of the entrance, shunting passersby off the sidewalk with their rifles. An ARA sign at the mouth of the street urged us to deny its existence and imply consent. Joshie had told me these men were keeping tabs on him, but even I understood they served as protection. A red dot appeared on my äppärät, along with the words “Wapachung Contingency.” The good guys.

The tiny lobby was filled by an affably heavy Dominican man in a faded gray uniform and the difficult breath coming out of him. “Hello, Mr. Lenny,” he said to me. I used to see him all the time when Joshie and I were more regular friends, when our work was not yet all-consuming and we would think nothing of sharing a bagel in the park or catching some exhausting Iranian flick at Lincoln Center.

“This is where the Jewish intelligentsia used to live, a long, long time ago,” I told Eunice in the elevator. “I think that’s why Joshie likes it here. It’s a kind of nostalgia trip.”

“Who were they?” she said.

“What?”

“Jewish intelligentsia.”

“Oh, just Jews who thought a lot about the world and then wrote books about it. Lionel Trilling and those guys.”

“They started your boss’s immortality business?” Eunice asked.

I could have almost kissed her cold, rouged lips. “In a sense,” I said. “They came from poor, hardy families and they were realistic about dying.”

“See, this is why I didn’t want to come,” Eunice said. “Because I don’t know any of this stuff.”

The old-fashioned elevator doors opened symphonically. By Joshie’s door, a muscular young man in T-shirt and jeans was dragging out a heavy garbage bag with his back to me, the dull interior light of the Upper West Side glistening off his shaved head. A cousin, if I remembered correctly. Jerry or Larry from New Jersey. I stuck out my hand as he began to turn around. “Lenny Abramov,” I said. “I think we met at your dad’s Chanukah party in Mamaroneck.”

“Rhesus Monkey?” the man said. The familiar black pelt of his mustache twitched in greeting. This was no cousin from Matawan. I was looking at dechronification in action. I was looking at Joshie Goldmann himself, his body reverse-engineered into a thick young mass of tendons and forward motion. “Jesus Christ,” I said. “Someone’s been hitting the Indians. No wonder I haven’t seen you at the office all week.”

But the rejuvenated Joshie was no longer noticing me. He was breathing both heavily and evenly. His mouth opened slowly. “Hi-ya,” the mouth said.

“Hi,” Eunice said. “Lenny,” she started to say.

“Lenny,” Joshie echoed, absently. “Sorry. I’m-”

“Eunice.”

“Joshie. Come in. Please.” He examined her as she passed through the door, preyed on the lightly tanned shoulders beneath the black cocktail-dress straps, then looked at me with numb understanding. Youth. A seemingly untrammeled flow of energy. Beauty without nanotechnology. If only he knew how unhappy she was.

We passed into the living room, which I knew to be as humble as the rest of the apartment. Art Deco couches in blue velvet. Posters from his youth-science-fiction films with big-haired women and deep-jawed men-framed conservatively in oak, as if to say they had withstood the test of time and emerged, if not masterpieces, then at least potent artifacts. The names alone. Soylent Green. Logan’s Run. Here were Joshie’s beginnings. A dystopian upper-class childhood in several elite American suburbs. Total immersion in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. The twelve-year-old’s first cognition of mortality, for the true subject of science fiction is death, not life. It will all end. The totality of it. The self-love. Not wanting to die. Wanting to live, but not sure why. Looking up at the nighttime sky, at the black eternity of outer space, amazed. Hating the parents. Wanting their love. Already an anxious sense of time passing, the staggered bathroom howls of grief for a deceased Pomeranian, young Joshie’s stalwart and only best friend, felled by doggie cancer on a Chevy Chase lawn.

Eunice stood there, in the middle of the living room, blushing intensely, the blood coming in waves. I did something I hadn’t quite expected of myself. I breached decorum, came over and kissed her on the ear. For some reason I wanted Joshie to understand just how much I loved her and how that love was not just predicated on her youth, probably the only thing he appreciated about her. The two people who formed my universe looked away from me, embarrassed. “I’m so glad,” Joshie muttered. “I’m so glad to finally meet you. Jeez. Lenny talks so much about you.”

“Lenny just talks a lot,” Eunice successfully joked.

I put my hand around her shoulders and felt her breathe. Joshie straightened up and I could see the muscle tone, the deep-veined reality of what he was becoming, the little machines burrowing inside him, clearing up what had gone wrong, rewiring, rededicating, resetting the odometer on every cell, making him shine with a child’s precocious glow. Among the three of us in the room, I was the one who was proactively dying.

“Okay, let’s get some of that yummy good wine,” Joshie said. He laughed with uncharacteristic fakeness, then ran off into the well-stocked galley kitchen.

“I’ve never seen him like this,” I said to Eunice.

“He reminds me of you,” Eunice said. “A big nerd.” I smiled at that, pleased that she could conceive of our commonalities. The idea occurred to me that we could form a family, although I was unsure of what role I would play. Eunice picked a few hairs from my face, her face warm with attention, then glossed my lips with chap. She pulled down on my short-sleeved shirt so that it aligned better with my light cashmere V-neck sweater. “Go like this with your arms,” she said, shaking her own. “Now pull on the sleeves.”

Joshie returned to hand Eunice a glass of wine; I got a mug’s worth of purple aroma. “Hope you don’t mind the mug, Lenny,” he said. “My cleaning woman got stopped at the ARA checkpoint on the WB.”

“The what?” I said.

“Williamsburg Bridge,” Eunice clarified. Both she and Joshie rolled their eyes and laughed at my slow ways with abbreviations. “You have such a pretty apartment,” Eunice said. “Those posters must be worth a billion. Everything’s so old.”

“Including the owner,” Joshie said.

“No,” Eunice said. “You look great.”

“You look great too.”

I pulled on the sleeves of my shirt an extra time. “Let me show you around,” Joshie said. “Two-minute house tours my specialty.”

We went into his cluttered “creative study.” I noticed Eunice had finished most of her Pinot and was already improvising a way to remove the purple from her lips with her finger and a translucent green jelly she squeezed out of a tube. “These are stills from my one-man show,” Joshie said, as he pointed out a framed Image of himself dressed in prison stripes with a giant stuffed albatross hanging from his neck. Standing before me, he looked thirty years younger today than in the Image, which was at least ten years old. He had lost forty years. A half-life gone.

“The play was called Sins of the Mother,” I said helpfully. “Very funny and very deep.”

“Was it on Broadway?” Eunice asked.

Joshie laughed. “Yeah, right,” he said. “Didn’t make it past this sucky supper club in the Village. But I didn’t give a damn about success. Creative thinking, working with your mind, that’s my number-one prescription for longevity. If you stop thinking, if you stop wondering, you die. That simple.” He looked down at his feet, perhaps realizing he sounded more like a salesman than a leader. Eunice made him nervous, I could tell. We had no shortage of attractive women at Post-Human Services, but their self-assuredness made them bleed into one personality. Anyway, Joshie had always said that he had no time for romance until immortality was “a done deal.”

“Did you draw this yourself?” Eunice asked, pointing to a watercolor of an old, naked woman shattered into three by an unnamed force, her empty breasts flying in all directions, a dark pubic mound holding the thirds together.

“Very beautiful,” I said. “Very Egon Schiele.”

“This one’s called Splinter Cell,” Joshie said. “I did about twenty variations of it, and they all look exactly the same.”

“She kind of resembles you,” Eunice said. “I like the shading around her eyes.”

“Yes, well…” Joshie said, and made a shy croaking sound. I always felt embarrassed when looking at Joshie’s paintings of his mother, as if I had walked into a bathroom and caught my own mother lifting her tired hindquarters off the toilet seat. “You paint yourself?”

Eunice coughed. The Great Discomfort Smile came on, the shame bringing her freckles into strong relief. “I took a class,” she barely breathed out. “At Elderbird. A drawing class. It was nothing. I sucked.”

“I didn’t know that,” I said. “That you took a drawing class.”

“That’s because you never listen to me, jerk-face,” she whispered.

“I’d love to see something you’ve drawn,” Joshie said. “I miss painting. It really calmed me down. Maybe we can get together one day and practice a little.”

“Or you could take some classes at Parsons,” I suggested to Eunice. The idea of the two of them-alive and deathless-creating something together, an Image, a “work of art,” as they used to say, made me feel sorry for myself. If only I had had a proclivity to draw or paint. Why did I have to suffer that ancient Jewish affliction for words?

“Maybe we can both take some classes at Parsons,” Joshie said to Eunice. “You know, together.”

“But who has the time?” I ventured.

We returned to the living room, with Joshie and Eunice landing on one cozy, curvaceous sofa, while I hunched over an opposing leather ottoman. “Cheers,” Joshie said, clinking his mug with Eunice’s long-stemmed glass. They smiled at each other, and then Eunice turned to me. I had to abandon the ottoman and walk over to them to complete the ritual. Then I had to sit back down again. Alone.

“Cheers,” I said, nearly demolishing Joshie’s mug. “To the people I love the most.”

“To being fresh and young,” Joshie said.

They started talking. Joshie asked her about her life, and she replied in her usual inconsequential manner-“Yeah,” “I guess so,” “Sort of,” “Maybe,” “I tried,” “I’m not good,” “I suck.” But she was pleased to be engaged, as attentive as I had ever seen her, one open palm buffering a clump of hair spilling down her shoulder. She didn’t know how to conduct a conversation with a man properly, without anger or flirtation, but she was trying, filtering, giving away as little as possible, but wanting to please. She would look at me worriedly, her eyes crinkling with the pain of having to think and respond, but the worry receded as Joshie kept pouring wine-we were all above the two-glasses-of-resveratrol maximum-and fed her a plate of blueberries and carrots. He volunteered to boil some pot in a kettle of green tea, something I hadn’t seen him do in years, but Eunice politely told him that she didn’t smoke marijuana, that, perversely enough, it made her sad.

“I wouldn’t mind some,” I said, but the offer had clearly floated off the table.

“Why do you call Lenny ‘Rhesus Monkey’?” Eunice asked.

“He looks like one,” Joshie said.

Eunice gave her äppärät a spin, and when the animal in question appeared, she actually threw her head back and laughed the way I had only seen her laugh with her best Elderbird friends, with honesty as well as mirth. “Totally,” she said. “Those long arms and that, like, bunched-up middle. It’s so hard to shop for him. I always have to teach him how to…” She couldn’t describe it, but made some stretching motions with her arms.

“Dress,” I concluded for her.

“He’s a quick learner,” Joshie said, looking at her, one arm reaching absently for a second bottle of wine sitting obediently by his legs. I presented my mug for a refill. We continued to drink heavily. I pushed myself down into the moist leather ottoman, marveling at how little Joshie cared about his surroundings. He hadn’t bought a new piece of furniture in the years I’d known him. All those years, alone, no children, no American overabundance, devoting himself to only one idea, the personification of which sat half a foot away from him, one leg tucked under her, a sign that her distress was abating. One thing Joshie could always communicate was the fact that he wasn’t going to hurt you. Even when he did.

They were talking youthfully: AssDoctor, girl-threshing, Phuong “Heidi” Ho, the new Vietnamese porn star. They used words like “ass hookah” and teenaged abbreviations like TGV and ICE that brought to mind high-speed European trains. The wrinkle-free, wine-blushing Joshie, his body run through with new muscles and obedient nerve endings, leaned forward like a missile in mid-arc, his mind likely flooding with youthful instincts, the need to connect at any cost. I wondered, heretically, if he would ever miss being older, if his body would ever long for a history.

“I really want to draw, but I’m no good,” Eunice was saying.

“I bet you’re good,” Joshie said. “You have such a sense of-style. And economy. I get that just by looking at you!”

“This one teacher in college said I was good, but she was just this dyke.”

“OMFG, why don’t you doodle something right now?”

“No freaking way.”

“Totally. Do it. I’ll get some paper.” He pumped his fists into the sofa, propelled himself into the air, and was running for his study.

“Wait,” Eunice shouted after him. “Holy crap.” She turned to me. “I’m too scared to draw, Len.” But she was smiling. They were playing. We were drunk. She ran after Joshie, and I heard a sharp youthful yell-I could barely tell which of them was responsible. I went over to the abandoned sofa and sat in Joshie’s space, savoring the warmth my master had left behind. It was getting dark. Out the window I traced water towers and the unadorned backs of once-tall buildings leading up to the glass-and-cement scrim of development that lined both banks of the Hudson River, like two sets of dirty mirrors. My äppärät patiently provided information on various real-estate valuations and compared them with HSBC-London’s and Shanghai’s. I pressed the wine bottle to my lips and let the resveratrol flood my system, hoping, praying for a few more years added to the countdown clock of my life. Joshie came back into the living room. “She wouldn’t let me watch,” he said.

“She’s actually drawing?” I said. “By hand? Not on an äppärät?”

“Hell’s yeah, home-slice! Don’t you know your own gf?”

“She’s so modest around me,” I said. “FYI, no one really says ‘home-slice’ anymore, Grizzly.”

Joshie shrugged. “Youth is youth,” he said. “Talk young, live young. How are your pH levels anyway?”

She came out, blushing but happy, clutching a sketchpad to her chest. “I can’t,” she said. “It’s stupid. I’m going to tear it up!”

We raised the appropriate protests, outdoing each other with our thundering baritones, Joshie rapping his mug on the coffee table like some coarse fraternity brother. Shyly, but with a hint of flirtation probably borrowed from an old television series about women in Manhattan, Eunice Park handed Joshie her sketchpad.

She had drawn a monkey. A rhesus monkey, if I wasn’t mistaken. A bulbous gray-haired chest, long heart-shaped ears, perfectly dark little paws holding on tenuously to a tree branch, a whirl of gray hair on top, below an expression of playful intelligence and contentment. “How meticulous,” I said. “How detailed. Look at those leaves. You’re wonderful, Eunice. I’m so impressed.”

“She’s got you down, Len,” Joshie said.

“Me?” I looked at the monkey’s face once more. The red, cracked lips and rampant stubble. The overstated nose, shiny at the tip and bridge, the early wrinkles dashing up to the naked temples; the bushy eyebrows that could count as separate organisms. If you looked at it from a different angle, if you moved the sketchpad into half-shadow, the contentment I had previously discerned on the monkey’s slightly fat face could pass for want. It was a picture of me. As a rhesus monkey. In love.

“Wow,” Joshie said. “That is so Media.”

Eunice said it was awful, that twelve-year-olds could do a better job, but I could tell she wasn’t entirely convinced. We each hugged him farewell. He kissed her cheeks for a while, then slapped me quickly on the shoulders. He offered us a digestif and some Upstate-sourced strawberries for the road. He offered to go down in the elevator with us and deal with the armed men outside. He stood in the doorway, clutching on to the doorpost, watching the last of us. During that final moment, the moment of letting go, I saw his face in profile, and noticed the confluence of purpled veins that made him look momentarily old again, that produced a frightening X-ray of what burbled up beneath that handsome new skin tissue and gleaming young eyes. That stupid male shoulder-slap wasn’t enough. I wanted to reach out and comfort him. If Joshie somehow failed at his life’s work, which of us would be more heartbroken, the father or the son?

“See, that wasn’t so bad,” I said in the Town Car as Eunice put her sweet, alcohol-reeking head on my shoulder. “We had fun, right? He’s a nice man.”

I heard her breathing temperately against my neck. “I love you, Lenny,” she said. “I love you so much. I wish I could describe it better. But I love you with all I’ve got. Let’s get married.” We kissed each other on the lips, mouth, and ears as we passed through seven ARA checkpoints and the length of the FDR Drive. A military helicopter seemed to follow us home, its single yellow beam stroking the whitecaps of the East River. We talked about going to City Hall. A civil ceremony. Maybe next week. Why not make it official? Why ever be apart? “You’re the one I want, kokiri,” she said. “You’re the only one.”