Gary Shteyngart - Little Failure

Why do so many men (and women) fall in love with you so quickly?

You are my greatest teacher — you’ve taught me so much of what I admire and respect about myself .

About myself, sure. I am deeply into learning, admiring, and respecting myself. But what about her ? Lost in the shocking scenario of finally being a Boyfriend, constantly worried that amorous North Carolinians named Jason will keep kissing her on the neck in my absence, constantly trying to devise ways in which she can love me more, can I really see the sad, lovely girl in front of me, all five feet and three inches of her? She is the child of a shattered family, a fun-house image of what my own family might look like if the razvod had gone through. The sullen Armenian father, a genius at some branch of computer science, alone in his Research Triangle countryside ramble, goading his children to do worse. The southern mother in her little modern ranch, dividing her time between eating, sleeping, drinking down glasses of white wine, and playing bridge. The cold, angry older half sister, radiating negativity out of Dallas/Fort Worth. The younger brother, who calls her Nate for some reason, lighting his farts and drag racing down the sunbaked Carolina tar.

In the mail from North Carolina, a postcard with a photo of Yoko and John Lennon’s “Bedpeace,” and in her pretty scrawl, “We’ll be having some of that soon!”

From other letters:

I look like an Armenian marshmallow .

I am just NOW starting to really trust you with everything, Gary. Parts of me which are constantly on guard are finally relaxing with you .

I am going to send you a copy of the [new] David Byrne tape .

A co-worker said to me, You mixed aren’t ya? I mean you’re not all white?

I cried on the whole way home from work … It turns out my grandfather had a heart attack. I love that old man. He really is a good person .

Gary, we’re in our prime — let’s enjoy it — Oberlin stress is bad!

I can’t believe how much your mom criticizes you. She doesn’t ever say good things, at least none that I’ve ever heard. How does that affect you? *

I wish I could fly over to the Shteyni house and rescue you .

Could you have Nina [my mother] pray for my grandfather?

Can you imagine our wedding? Jews, Armenians and Southerners .

Dude, there is no jokin’ around about the Mississippi River!

I love you, Gary .

I feel that I must type that last one over again, because when I first read those words, they were not read only once.

“I love you, Gary.”

The plane touches down in Raleigh-Durham. Early summer, just a few weeks after Oberlin has closed for summer fumigation and ideological reset, but we cannot wait to see each other a day longer. I’m covered in a plaid thrift-store shirt, très Keep Cottage, where we first kissed, which I wear all the time because it makes me feel loose and boyfriend-like. There’s a string around my neck with a single marble-like blue bead that I don’t dare take off, even in the shower, since it is a gift from her. For the next half decade, whenever I am anxious, I will spin the bead between my thumb and index finger. Even when she is gone. Especially when she is gone.

I’ve had three Bloody Marys on the plane because that’s what LaGuardia-Raleigh jet-setters like me are keen to do. And also because by this point in my life I can’t survive a few hours without a drink. Outside I can already sense a different world, her world. Looking out the plane window, I see nothing but North Carolina green. Forest upon forest, blessed by the mellow local sun, cut apart by small rivulets of sprawl that the migrating Yankees are said to be bringing with them as they take over the college towns of Durham and Chapel Hill and beyond.

There she is past baggage claim, my pale half-Armenian marshmallow now made slightly red by the aforementioned sun, just as I’ve been reddened by the aforementioned vodka. (I am now twenty-one, and my bingeing is legal.) She is wearing the vintage green-and-gold, vaguely Asian-styled silk shirt that I bought for her twentieth. I hug her. Boy, do I hug her.

“Easy. Easy there, Shteyni-dawg.” Shteyni-dawg is my nickname, used not just by J.Z. but our friend Michael, Breasty Roommate Irv, and Kind Rapping Roommate Zap.

And I think:

Oh, my God, I am not alone .

So many miles from my parents, and there is my girlfriend in my arms, and scattered across the Eastern Seaboard, with a brief jaunt into the Pennsylvania hinterlands for Zap, are my friends.

Easy there, Shteyni-dawg .

She has an Oldsmobile 88, a big red southern monster, and as she drives I lean over and kiss her neck. She is wearing the lavender perfume we bought from a street vendor near Fourth Avenue. I am covered in Drakkar Noir or Safari for Men or a cologne of equally debilitating pungency. Something, after all, has to announce the fact that I am still a Russian immigrant.

Or am I?

When I walked into the Sheep Meadow in Central Park after my first day of Stuyvesant, I thought a part of me broke. A connection to the past. A straight shot from Uncle Aaron’s labor camps and the bombs of the Messerschmitts to the wield of my father’s hand and the lash of my mother’s tongue to the boy who writes “Gary Shteyngart” and “SSSQ” on his Hebrew school assignments. Maybe the connection didn’t break. Maybe it just bent. And now in J.Z.’s car it is bending further. The past, which stretches indefinitely behind me, and the future, which stretches for another fifty years at best, are evenly matched. Nothing in the genetic program I’ve been given has prepared me for someone like her, for the unconditional warmth of her interethnic nose, for “Dude, there is no jokin’ around about the Mississippi River!” Nor for the deep existential melancholy that weighs us both down like the hot and wet southern summer around us.

Her mother’s home, unlike my mother’s, is unkempt, the heavy furniture sunk into carpets, every square inch haunted by a furry beast of a corgi named Tally-Dog, which, when confronted by my Drakkar Noir stink, knows only one mode: bark. To my greatest horror, three minutes into the visit, I pull an albino roach out of the sink by one of its antennae, thinking it is one of my own hairs gone prematurely gray.

But her mother is sweet and interested in me, staring out from her large golden glasses with good cheer and an early evening buzz. She is a big woman prone to the colors purple and lavender, often layered together. And from the moment I cross her threshold, it is clear that I am welcome here, and welcome to her daughter’s love.

On the previous summer’s visit to Little Neck, J.Z. accidentally breaks my mother’s desk lamp, for which we are promptly billed eighty dollars by my no-nonsense mater. (We split the eighty, not a trifling amount for two financial aid students.) That, and the sight of my father walking down the stairs in his tight soccer shorts, his shining testicles spilling out of both sides, provide J.Z. with a quick but potent overview of Shteyngart family life in medias res.

Down here, testicles are kept away from public sight. In fact, there is a southern rule that a man must keep one foot on the floor when inhabiting a room with a woman of tender age. It is the most wonderful rule in Christendom, this tense little caveat, because when the house is cleared of her mother, J.Z. and I run for the bedroom and collapse into each other, disappearing our ugly Oberlin clothes in just a few simple motions, as David Byrne starts singing: