Gary Shteyngart - Super Sad True Love Story

“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.