Super Sad True Love Story

place. Her arms were soon around me as she yelled at me for not coming to visit her sooner, and why was I so old- looking all of a sudden (“But I’m almost forty, Mrs. Fine,” “Oh, where does the time go, Leonard?”), along with other examples of happy Jewish hysteria.

It turned out that she was working as a contractor for the State Department, helping out with the Welcome Back, Pa’dner program.

“But don’t get me wrong,” she said, “I’m just doing customer service. Answering questions, not asking them. That’s all American Restoration Authority.” And then, leaning toward me, in a lowered voice, her artichoke breath gently strumming my face: “Oh, what has happened to us, Lenny? I get reports on my desk, they make me cry. The Chinese and Europeans are going to decouple from us. I’m not sure what that means, but how good can it be? And we’re going to deport all our immigrants with weak Credit. And our poor boys are being massacred in Venezuela. This time I’m afraid we’re not going to pull out of it!”

“No, it’ll be okay, Mrs. Fine,” I said. “There’s still only one America.”

“And that shifty Rubenstein. Can you believe he’s one of us?”

“One of us?”

Barely sonic whisper: “A Jew.”

“My parents actually love Rubenstein,” I said, in reference to our imperious but star-crossed Defense Secretary. “All they do is sit at home and watch FoxLiberty-Prime and FoxLiberty-Ultra.”

Mrs. Fine made a distasteful face. She had helped drag my parents into the American continuum, had taught them to gargle and wash out sweat stains, but their inbred Soviet Jewish conservatism had ultimately repulsed her.

She had known me since I was born, back when the Abramov mishpocheh lived in Queens in a cramped garden apartment that now elicits nothing but nostalgia, but which must have been a mean and sorrowful place all the same. My father had a janitorial job out at a Long Island government laboratory, a job that kept us in Spam for the first ten years of my life. My mother celebrated my birth by being promoted from clerk/typist to secretary at the credit union where she bravely labored minus English-language skills, and all of a sudden we were really on our way to becoming lower-middle-class. In those days, my parents used to drive me around in their rusted Chevrolet Malibu Classic to neighborhoods poorer than our own, so that we could both laugh at the funny ragtag brown people scurrying about in their sandals and pick up important lessons about what failure could mean in America. It was after my parents told Mrs. Fine about our little slumming forays into Corona and the safer parts of Bed-Stuy that the rupture between her and my family truly began. I remember my parents looking up “cruel” in the English-Russian dictionary, shocked that our American mama could possibly think that of us.

“Tell me everything!” Nettie Fine said. “What have you been doing in Rome?”

“I work in the creative economy,” I said proudly. “Indefinite Life Extension. We’re going to help people live forever. I’m looking for European HNWIs-that’s High Net Worth Individuals-and they’re going to be our clients. We call them ‘Life Lovers.’”

“Oh my!” Mrs. Fine said. She clearly didn’t know what the hell I was talking about, but this woman with her three courteous UPenn-graduated boys could only smile and encourage, smile and encourage. “That certainly sounds like-something!”

“It really is,” I said. “But I think I’m in a bit of trouble here.” I explained to her the problem I had just experienced with Welcome Back, Pa’dner. “Maybe the otter thinks I hang out with Somalians. What I said was ‘Some Italians.’”

“Show me your apparat,” she commanded. She raised her eyeglasses to reveal the soft early-sixties wrinkles that had made her face exactly how it was meant to look since the day she was born-a comfort to all. “ERROR CODE IT/FC-GS/FLAG,” she sighed. “Oh boy, buster. You’ve been flagged.”

“But why?” I shouted. “What did I do?”

“Shhh,” she said. “Let me reset your apparat. Let’s try Welcome Back, Pa’dner again.”

Several attempts were made, but the same frozen otter appeared along with the error message. “When did this happen?” she asked. “What was that thing asking you?”

I hesitated, feeling even more naked in front of my family’s native-born savior. “He asked me the name of the Italian woman I had relations with,” I said.

“Let’s backtrack,” Nettie said, ever the troubleshooter. “When the otter asked you to subscribe to the ‘Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now!’ thing, did you do it?”

“I did.”

“Good. And what’s your Credit ranking?” I told her. “Fine. I wouldn’t worry. If you get stopped at JFK, just give them my contact info and tell them to get in touch with me right away.” She plugged her coordinates into my apparat. When she hugged me she could feel my knees knocking together in fear. “Aw, sweetie,” she said, a warm tribal tear spilling from her face onto mine. “Don’t worry. You’ll be okay. A man like you. Creative economy. I just hope your parents’ Credit ranking is strong. They came all the way to America, and for what? For what?”

But I did worry. How could I not? Flagged by some fucking otter! Jesus Christ. I instructed myself to relax, to enjoy the last twenty hours of my year-long European idyll, and possibly to get very drunk off some sour red Montepulciano.

My last Roman evening started out per the usual, diary. Another halfhearted orgy at Fabrizia’s, the woman I have had relations with. I’m only mildly tired of these orgies. Like all New Yorkers, I’m a real-estate whore, and I adore these late-nineteenth-century Turinese-built apartments on the huge, palm-studded Piazza Vittorio, with sunny views of the green-tinged Alban Hills in the distance. On my last night at Fabrizia’s, the expected bunch of forty-year-olds showed up, the rich children of Cinecitta film directors who are now occasional screenwriters for the failing Rai (once Italy’s main television concern), but mostly indulgers of their parents’ fading fortunes. That’s what I admire about youngish Italians, the slow diminution of ambition, the recognition that the best is far behind them. (An Italian Whitney Houston might have sung, “I believe the parents are our future.”) We Americans can learn a lot from their graceful decline.

I’ve always been shy around Fabrizia. I know she only likes me because I’m “diverting” and “funny” (read: Semitic), and because her bed hasn’t been warmed by a local man in some time. But now that I had sold her out to the American Restoration Authority otter, I worried that there might be repercussions for her down the line. Italy’s government is the last one left in Western Europe that still smooches our ass.

In any case, Fabrizia was all over me at the party. First she and some fat British filmmaker took turns kissing me on the eyelids. Then, as she was having one of those very angry Italian apparat chats on the couch, she spread her legs to flash me her neon panties, her thick Mediterranean pubic hairs clearly visible. She took time out of her sexy screaming and furious typing to say to me in English: “You’ve become a lot more decadent since I’ve met you, Lenny.”

“I’m trying,” I stuttered.

“Try harder,” she said. She snapped her legs shut, which nearly killed me, and then went back to her apparat assault. I wanted to feel those elegant forty-year-old breasts one more time. I made a few slow gyrating motions toward her and batted my eyelashes (that is to say, blinked a lot), trying, with a dose of East Coast irony, to resemble some hot Cinecitta leading lady of the 1960s. Fabrizia blinked back and stuck one hand down her panties. A few minutes later, we opened the door to her bedroom to discover her three-year-old boy hiding beneath a pillow, a cloud of smoke from the main rooms draping him twice-fold. “Fuck,” Fabrizia said, watching the small, asthmatic child crawling toward her on the bed.

“Mama,” the child whispered. “Aiuto me.”

“Katia!” she screamed. “Puttana! She supposed to watch him. Stay here, Lenny.” She went off looking for her Ukrainian nanny, her little boy stumbling through the Hollywood-grade smoke behind her.

I went into the corridor, which seemed like the arrivals lounge at Fiumicino Airport, with couples meeting, coming together, disappearing into rooms, coming out of rooms, fixing their blouses, tightening their belts, coming apart. I took out my dated apparat, with its retro walnut finish and its dusty screen blinking with slow data, trying to get a read on whether there were any High Net Worth Individuals in the room-last chance to find some new clients for my boss, Joshie, after having found a grand total of one client during the whole year-but no one’s face was famous enough to register on my display. A sort-of well-known Mediastud, a Bolognese visual artist, sullen and shy in person, watched his girlfriend flirting ridiculously with a less accomplished man. “I