Gary Shteyngart - Little Failure

And sometimes she laughs, and sometimes she looks straight ahead with uncertainty, and sometimes she cocks her head back and takes a long, thick dredge of Milwaukee. Soon every detail of her background will be of interest to me, soon every mannerism will be studied with the kind of microeconomic detail that would have impressed my roommate. But right now I am onstage. I am on the stage before my dead grandma Galya singing to her of Lenin and His Magical Goose . I don’t have the arrogance to say to the woman in front of me: You will love me . But I do have the arrogance to say, Why don’t you at least think about loving me?

It will take her about a year to think about it, the two of us becoming close friends first. But along with my charm I am also learning the art of desperate persuasion. To quote Louise Lasser: “You’re fake and manipulative!” And finally I will leave her no choice.

Her name is Jennifer, and her last name begins with a Z and ends in the common Armenian patronymic suffix — ian . For most of her life she goes by her initials, J.Z . Of the American names I deeply covet, ecumenical Jennifer is up there with Waspy Jane and Suze, and I’ve also adored the variations of Jenny and even the terse but lovable Jen. But there is something strong and unusual in a woman, even a woman at Oberlin, going by no more than her initials. After it is over between us and I move back to New York, I can hardly look at the subway map because of the prevalence of the J and Z trains as they swing merrily from Manhattan through Brooklyn and Queens, through all the boroughs I know and love.

J.Z. is from the northern suburbs of Raleigh, North Carolina. She speaks with traces of a southern accent, her parents are not academics, and she does not have easy access to money. All these many facts combine to ensure that she is different from your typical Obie.

Her friend Michael is different, too — multilingual and cosmopolitan in a way that belies an upbringing in Plattsburgh, New York, well versed in the martini shake and the use of bitters and colloquial Yiddish. Let me now expand my warm menagerie of friends circa sophomore year, 1992 to 1993. I have two new roommates. Irv (not really his name, though it kind of ought to be) has beautiful C-cup breasts and a Japanese girlfriend from the Conservatory of Music. He is stoned even more than I am and spends a good part of the day sucking with great delicacy upon his own thumb. He will approach a trio of hippie chicks in our dorm with the suave entrée “So I hear you guys are having a bit of a gang bang tomorrow night.” My other roommate is Mike Zap, who introduces me to the music and thought of the then-inflammatory rapper Ice Cube. We will begin many evenings with the rousing cheer: “Po-lice eat the dick straight up!” per Cube’s album Death Certificate . Mike is Pittsburghian by nature, covers sports for the Oberlin Review (the most thankless journalistic task in our deeply uncoordinated college), and, with his kindness and relative normalness, provides a useful compass for the rest of us freaks. When visiting his home in Pittsburgh’s Jewish Squirrel Hill I feel shades of my Hebrew school friend Jonathan, the smooth running of decent parents and functional household, here bound together by two of the most genial animals I have yet come across, a black dachshund named Rudy and a caramel one named Schultz.

The five of us — me and J.Z. and Michael and my roommates, Irv and Zap — together we are what I’ve always wanted out of life, a community among whom I do not have to feel second-rate. As in love as I am with J.Z., I am also in love with the fact that she and I share our best friends. Two weeks into sophomore year, the enormous three-foot sky-blue bong in our dorm room attracts hordes of first-year students who have heard of its legendary smoky output. The best thing about Big Blue is that it is so big it requires more than one person to operate, and, sure enough, either breasty Irv or Zap with his scruffy new beard and adorable high laugh will do the honors with the bowl and hold the “carb,” as I lean back and fill myself with laughter and lunacy. “ Po -lice eat the dick straight up!” Disgusting, polluted Ohioan winds knock at the bay windows of Noah Hall, but up here we are all in this together. And then, filled with smoke and friendship, I get to shut my eyes and dream entirely of her.

I pursue her the only way I know how. Fakely and manipulatively. I insult her. Something about her upper chest being covered with freckles, freckles that I dream only of kissing. A tough southern girl, she writes me a letter short on ceremony: “… Enough bullshit! You also have some insecurities that you need to address.”

What? Me? Insecure?

She closes with the directive “Write what you feel uncensored” next to a big heart and her initials, J and Z .

Sensing an opening, I pounce. I write what I feel. I write and I write and I write and I write and I write, a flood of lovelorn missives that will have no equal in my life, because my next relationship, a full eight years later, will already take place in the age of email. Even after we break up post-Oberlin, fourteen-page letters come sailing from New York to North Carolina and fourteen-page letters come sailing back. Hell, we write to each other while we’re at Oberlin, both of us guarded and scared of each other, neither of us used to opening our mouths and letting the emotions change the timbre of our voices. Emotions are weaknesses where we come from. And when summer puts an end to Oberlin and we are mostly apart, we write throughout our working days, me at an immigrant resettlement agency—$8.25 an hour — and her, for half that sum, behind the counter at an American automotive store called Pep Boys.

The most beautiful collection of letters and numbers I have ever seen, on a simple white envelope, about half a year into our relationship:

RESEARCH TRIANGLE AREA

RALEIGH DURHAM CHAPEL HILL

HAPPY HOLIDAYS!! 12/29/92 PM RAL NC #1

RAL NC #1. Someone from America, the real America, has written to me. In front of my parents’ house, the sparse traffic of Little Neck behind me, I open the Christmas letter, and I go deaf to the actual world. Her thin red lips are speaking to me, the noise of my parents—“Igor! Snotty! It is vacuuming time!”—so much Russian nonsense behind the drawn-out, southern cadences of her voice. I absorb the letter, the love and the angst both (for she is, like me, not altogether a happy person), while locked in the upstairs bathroom, the water running. And then with the vacuuming still undone, with my mother’s pristine floors still covered with minuscule traces of dust that upset her careful world to no end, I begin to write back.

J.Z. —

The whole idea of living w/you, working out w/you, writing poetry w/you, cooking grits and okra w/you, is just too astounding for words .

I’m making great strides in discovering what I’m all about, I’m finally being happy about being Gary, and all this has happened because I finally have a friend who I can share everything with .

I’ve had an uneasy feeling about the Bible all my life .

Doesn’t our society suck?

I HATE MY HAIR!

I look like a hunchbacked Jewish goat with a row of teeth like the Sarajevan skyline after the war .

I respect your pessimism .

Is that [North Carolina] Jason guy still bothering you? I don’t take this kissing-on-the-neck stuff lightly you know .