Gary Shteyngart - Super Sad True Love Story

I was nervous in a way I hadn’t been since childhood. My last time in a place of worship, I had been chastised by the angry, aged audience at Temple Beit Kahane for singing the Mourner’s Kaddish for my parents when they were quite obviously not dead, and in fact were standing blankly next to me, mouthing the Hebrew words none of us could begin to understand. “Wish fulfillment,” my social worker had told me as I sobbed in her cramped Upper East Side office a decade later. “The guilt of wishing them dead.”

My silvery jacket glided past the rows of exhausted Koreans. I had to keep myself from sweating further, because the reaction of salt and the poly-whatever-it-was of my jacket may well have hastened all of us into Jesus’s waiting arms. And then I saw them. Sitting in a good row, heads bent forward either from a sense of shame or to get a head start on worship. The family Park. The tormentor, the enabler, the sister.

Mrs. Park looked twenty years older than the age Eunice had given me for her mother-just a little over fifty. I almost addressed her with another term I had picked up from Grace, “halmoni,” but was pretty sure she was not the grandmother, that, in fact, Eunice’s grandmother was already in the ground somewhere on the outskirts of Seoul. “Mommy, this is my roommate, Lenny,” Eunice said, her voice like nothing I had heard before, a shouted whisper on its way to becoming a plea.

Mrs. Park had tweezed her brows to within an inch of their life, à la Eunice, and her round lips had a trace of rouge, but that was the extent of her beautification project. A great spidery web of defeat spread across her face-as if there lived below her neck a parasitic creature that gradually but purposefully removed all the elements that in human beings combine to form satisfaction and contentment. She was pretty, the features economical, the eyes evenly spaced, the nose strong and straight, but seeing her reminded me of approaching a reassembled piece of Greek or Roman pottery. You had to draw out the beauty and elegance of the design, but your eyes kept returning to the seams and the cracks filled with some dark cohesive substance, the missing handles and random pockmarks. It was an act of the imagination to see Mrs. Park as the person she had been before she met Dr. Park.

I bowed from the waist in greeting, not low enough to caricature the custom, but enough to show her that I knew the tradition existed. I shook hands with Dr. Park, feeling immediately ashamed and inferior before him. His hands were strong, as was the rest of him. He was a singularly handsome man, the one who had obviously bequeathed to Eunice her beauty. He was dressed down-at least by comparison with the other parishioners-in an Arnold Palmer polo shirt, a jacket slung over one arm. He had a thick entrepreneurial neck, and skin that still bore the leather of the California sun. I had never seen a chin so firm and set, so unmistakably manly, and a lower body that contained such an endless amount of propulsion. He had partly dark lenses in his glasses, another incongruity or maybe even a hint of blasphemy, which he lowered just slightly to take me in. Despite his race, his eyes were almost as light as Jesus’s, and they regarded me with indifference. I sat down next to Sally Park, Eunice’s sister, who shyly shook my hand.

Sally was pretty, but she had taken more of her mother’s than her father’s looks; in a sense, she opened a window onto how lovely the mother must have been. The flatter face and bulkier shoulders made her stand apart from her sister’s easy glamour, at least as far as my own judgmental gaze was concerned, but the fact that she resembled her mother gave her an instant kindness. The shadows under her eyes spoke of studies undertaken, endless worry, and hard work. The imaginary parasitic creature that constrained her mother’s and her sister’s happiness had not burrowed beneath her neck. Eunice had told me Sally was the most tender and loving member of her family, and I could only believe this was true.

And yet Sally bothered me. Throughout the service, she and Eunice engaged in a dance of glances, like two divorced spouses who hadn’t seen each other in years and were now sizing each other up. On the few occasions when Eunice had talked to me about Sally, she had lowered her voice to a defeated, mumbling register, as opposed to the high and smirky one she used to lay siege to her parents. When she talked of her sister, Eunice appeared scattered and unsure. Sometimes Sally came across as rebellious, sometimes as religious, sometimes as political and involved, sometimes as detached, sometimes as budding with sexuality, and always as overweight, which was to Eunice the deepest of shames, the most self-evident loss of face imaginable. Upon first inspection, Sally might have been all of these things (except fat) and something else too. The dance of glances between the sisters-Sally’s thrusts and Eunice’s parries-revealed it all. She was hurt and alone. She was in love with her sister, but unable to breach the walls that made of Eunice a stern, pretty castle amidst a landscape laid to waste.

We sat there silently. The family was embarrassed to say anything; without alcohol, Koreans can be a timid people. I felt proud of myself. I had known Eunice for a little over a month, and already I was sitting next to her kin. I was pacifying her as surely as she had domesticated me. How my life had changed in such a short amount of time! With just a few morning kisses on my eyelids, unbidden, welcome kisses, Euny could transform me for the rest of the day into the opposite of Chekhov’s ugly Laptev. I would greet the food deliveryman in my boxer shorts, forgetting my usual timidity at showing my hairy legs, reveling in the idea that on the couch behind me this little girl was shopping, teening, watching a hated former classmate of hers scheme her way into new lines of credit on “American Spender,” fully ensconced within her digital reality but also within the walls of my apartment. I would hand the deliveryman his ten yuan-pegged with my chest thrust forward, with a Joshie-grade smile on my face, the smile of one of life’s easy champions. I am a man, and this is my money, and here is my future wife, and this is my charmed life .

The service began. A cellist, two oboists, several violinists, a pianist, and a small, adorable choir, the majority of them young women dressed in rather form-fitting gowns, mounted the stage and began to play a medley of songs that varied between the sacred and the bizarre. We got a Mahler violin concerto, then the stirring Korean pop anthem Alphaville’s “Forever Young” sung by some exhausted-looking teenagers in bad haircuts and tight jeans, which they followed with a power-rock tribute to Ephesians that left the older half of the congregation visibly confused. We ended with “Softly and Tenderly Jesus Is Calling.” It was this last song that roused all the parishioners who began to sing loudly and with gusto as a kind of PowerPoint presentation appeared on a large screen in both Korean and English against a backdrop of orchids floating down streams and a very visible copyright sign, which seemed to soothe our law-abiding natures. Everyone sang in tune, even the older folks mouthing the English words with more competence than my father and mother trying to wail Sh’ma Yisroel (Listen Up, Israel) at their synagogue.

I was caught unawares by the line “Why should we tarry when Jesus is pleading? / Pleading for you and for me?” The English language was dying around us, Christianity was as unsatisfying and delusional an idea as it had ever been, but the effectiveness of the sentence-its clever mix of kitsch, guilt, and heartbreaking imagery, Jesus pleading for the attention and love of these put-upon Asian people-made me shudder. The awful things was: They were beautiful words. For the first time in my life, I felt sorry for Jesus. Sorry that the miracles ascribed to him hadn’t actually made a difference. Sorry that we were all alone in a universe where even our fathers would let us get nailed to a tree if they were so inclined, or cut our throats if so commanded-see under Isaac, another unfortunate Jewish shmuck.