Super Sad True Love Story

could cause her harm, and toward the Model Boat Pond. “I’m okay, I’m okay,” she said, squeezing out of my embrace.

“Some of those folks looked a little street,” I said.

“And you were going to put your nerd moves on them?” Eunice said, laughing brightly.

Some vestigial teenage memory ran up and down my gut, making me cramp. I was perhaps the least popular child in secondary school. I never learned how to fight or carry myself like a man. “Stop calling me that, please,” I whispered, rubbing my stomach.

“Ha! I love it when my nerd feigns defiance.”

I growled a bit, taking note of her use of the possessive. My nerd. Would she really take ownership of me?

We walked slowly and meditatively, neither of us speaking, both of us a little unhappy and a little content. Early-summer evening was settling over the city. The sky was the color of ghosts. The atmosphere, warm but breezy, reeking of pollinated sweetness and baked bread. Crowding around the boat pond were young Euro couples, playful as children, amorous as teenagers, pressing devalued dollars into the hands of T-shirt and trinket vendors, excited by the twilight country around them. Asian kids, learning to be loud and impetuous, chased one another’s radio-controlled sloops across the still, gray waters of the pond.

Up above, three military helicopters, evenly spaced, rumbled across the put-upon sky. The fourth, barely tagging along, seemed to hold a giant spear in its maw; the spear glowed yellow at its tip. Only the tourists looked up. I thought of Nettie Fine. I had to believe in her optimism. She had never been wrong before, whereas my parents had been wrong about everything. Things were going to get better. Someday. For me to fall in love with Eunice Park just as the world fell apart would be a tragedy beyond the Greeks.

We were walking hand in hand now along the vast grassy Sheep Meadow, which felt comfortable and familial, like a worn rumpus-room carpet or a badly made bed. Beyond it, on three sides, lay the constellation of once-tall buildings, the old ones mansard-topped and stoic, the new ones covered with blinking information. We passed a white-and-Asian couple enjoying an early-summer picnic of prosciutto and melon, which made me squeeze Eunice’s hand. She turned around and brushed my graying hair with her moisturized hands. I prepared myself for a comment on my age and looks. I prepared myself to become Chekhov’s ugly merchant Laptev again. I knew this hurt so well, it actually had left a strange foretaste in my mouth, that of almonds and salt.

“My sweet emperor penguin,” she said instead. “You’re so beauticious. You’re so smart. And giving. So unlike anyone I’ve met. So you. I bet you can make me so happy, if I just let myself be happy.” She kissed me quickly on the lips, as if we had already exchanged a hundred thousand kisses before, then ran into a passing field of green and did three graceful somersaults-one after the other after the other. I stood there. Delirious. Taking in the world in tiny increments. Her simple body parting the air. The parabola of her spine in motion. The open mouth breathing hard after the light exhaustion. Facing me. Freckles and heat. I steeled my chest against what it expected of me. I would not cry.

Gray clouds bearing some kind of industrial remnant moved into the foreground; a yellow substance etched itself into the horizon, became the horizon, became the night. As the sky darkened, we found ourselves enclosed on three sides by the excess of our civilization, yet the ground beneath our feet was soft and green, and behind us lay a hill bearing trees as small as ponies. We walked in silence, as I sniffed the sharp, fruity facial creams that Eunice wore to fight off age, mixed in with just a hint of something alive and corporeal. Multiple universes tempted me with their existence. Like the immutability of God or the survival of the soul, I knew they would prove a mirage, but still I grasped for belief. Because I believed in her.

It was time to leave. We headed south, and when the trees ran out the park handed us over to the city. We surrendered to a skyscraper with a green mansard roof and two stark chimneys. New York exploded all around us, people hawking, buying, demanding, streaming. The city’s density caught me unprepared, and I reeled from its imposition, its alcoholic fumes, its hubris, its loud, dying wealth. Eunice looked at some shop windows on Fifth Avenue, her apparat crawling with new information. “Euny,” I said, trying out a shorter version of her name. “How are you feeling right now? Are you jet-lagged?”

She was looking at an alligator skin stretched into a meaningfully large object and failed to answer me.

“Do you want to go to our house?”

Our house?

She was busy scanning the dead amphibian with her apparat as if it contained an answer. Her lower face was now covered with a smile that was a smile in name only. But when she turned away from the store window, when she appraised me, there was nothing on her face. She was looking into the smooth white emptiness of my neck.

“Don’t rub your eyes,” she said into that emptiness, sucking the words through her lips, shredding each syllable. “You’re killing the cells around your eyes when you rub so hard. That’s why there’s so much dark skin. It makes you look older.” I was hoping she would add “nerd-face,” so that I would know it was all right, but she didn’t. I didn’t understand. What had happened to the somersaults? What had happened to “my sweet emperor penguin”? To that wonderful, utterly unexpected word: “beauticious”?

We walked back to the subway without a syllable between us, her stare covering the ground ahead of her like a beam of negative light. The silence continued. I breathed so hard I thought I would faint. I didn’t know how to bring us back to where we were before. I didn’t know how to restore us to Central Park, to Cedar Hill, to the Sheep Meadow, to the kiss.

Back in my apartment, with the hollow “Freedom” Tower glowing extra bright behind the thick curtains, and the sound of an empty M22 bus lowering itself for an elderly insomniac, Eunice and I had our first fight. She threatened to move back with her parents.

I was on my knees. I was crying. “Please,” I said. “You can’t go back to Fort Lee. Just stay here with me a little longer.”

“You’re pathetic,” Eunice said. She was sitting on my couch, hands in her lap. “You’re so weak.”

“All I said was ‘I’d like to meet your parents someday.’ You’re more than welcome to meet mine next week. In fact, I want you to meet them.”

“Do you know what that means for me? To meet my parents? You don’t know me at all.”

“I’m trying to know you. I’ve dated Korean girls before. I understand the families are conservative. I know they’re not crazy about whiteys like me.”

“You don’t understand anything about my family,” Eunice said. “How could you even think…”

I lay in my bed, listening to Eunice teening furiously on her apparat in the living room, probably to her friends in southern California or to her family in Fort Lee. Finally, three hours later, the birds picking up a morning tune outside, she came into the bedroom. I pretended I was asleep. She took off most of her clothes and got in bed next to me, then pressed her warm back and behind into my chest and genitals, so that I ended up spooning her warm body. She was crying. I was still pretending to be asleep. I kissed her in a way that was consistent with my being supposedly asleep. I didn’t want her to hurt me anymore that night. She was wearing those panties that snap right off when you press a button on the crotch. Total Surrender, I think they’re called. I held on tighter to Eunice, and she pressed deeper into me. I wanted to tell her that it was okay. That I would bring her joy whenever I could. I didn’t need to meet her parents right away.

But it wasn’t true. This was another thing I had learned about Korean women. The parents were the key to Eunice Park.

10 SOMETHING NICE IS GROWING INSIDE ME

FROM THE GLOBALTEENS ACCOUNT OF EUNICE PARK