work.
“They either don’t have a size zero,” Eunice said, upon clicking through the last of the JuicyPussy summer dresses, “or there’s this weird embroidery on the hem. They’re trying to make themselves more classy than TotalSurrender, which has the slit down the crotch. Let’s go to Onionskin.”
“Aren’t those the sheer jeans?” I said. I imagined Eunice with her labia and behind exposed to passersby as she crossed an especially busy Delancey Street, drivers of cars with Jersey plates rolling down their tinted windows in disbelief. I felt protective of her minimalist package, but there was a frisson of eroticism as well, not to mention social positioning. Others would see her little landing strip and think highly of me.
“No, jerk-face,” Eunice said. “I wouldn’t be caught dead in those jeans. They make normal dresses too.”
“Oh,” I said. The fantasy came to an end, and I found myself oddly happy with the conservative girl by my side. We wended our way through a half-kilometer of racks and hit upon the Onionskin outlet. True enough, there were several racks of cocktail dresses, a bit revealing around the bosom, but certainly not see-through. Women, tired and aggrieved, were plowing through the brand’s signature transparent jeans, hanging like rigid, empty skins in the center of the Retail space.
As Eunice started clicking through the dresses, a Retail person came over to talk to her. My apparat quickly zoomed in past the data outflows spilling out from the customers like polluted surf falling upon once-pristine shores and focused on McKay Watson. She was beautiful, this Retail girl. A tall, straight-necked creature whose eyes, clear and present, spoke of native-born honesty, as if to say,
Eunice and McKay were verballing each other. They were discussing clothes in a way I couldn’t fully appreciate. They were discussing the finer points of a particular dress
“It’s not treated with sodium hydroxide.”
“I bought the one with the slit to the left and it stretched.”
“Coat the inside of the hem with petroleum jelly.”
Eunice had put one hand on the shiny white arm of the Retail girl, a gesture of intimacy I had seen only extended to one of her Elderbird friends, the plump, matronly girl with the low Fuckability ranking. I heard some funny retro expressions like “JK,” which means one is “just kidding,” and “on the square,” which means one is not. I heard the familiar “JBF” and “TIMATOV!” but also “TPR!” and “CFG!” “TMS!” (temporary motion sickness?), “KOT!,” and the more universal “Cute!” This is just how people talk, I thought to myself. Feel the wonder of the moment. See the woman that you love reaching out to the world around her.
She bought two cocktail dresses for 5,240 yuan-pegged dollars, of which I covered three thousand. I could feel my debt load groaning a little, shedding a few points, immortality slipping a few notches into the improbable, but nothing like the 239,000-yuan-pegged-dollar punch I had recently taken in the balls from Howard Shu.
“Why didn’t you ask that girl if she could get you a job at Onionskin?” I asked Eunice when we had walked away from the Retail space.
“Are you kidding?” Eunice said. “Do you know what kind of
I hadn’t thought of it that way. “Your grades or looks aren’t any worse than hers,” I said. “Anyway, at least you could have gotten her Teens address. She seems like a good friend to have.”
“Thanks, Dad,” Eunice said.
“I mean-”
“Okay, shhhh… It’s your turn to shop. Breathable fabrics are going to do wonders for my
We hit the glowing, mahogany-paneled insinuation that was the JuicyPussy4Men store. “You have a weak chin,” Eunice told me, “so all these shirts you wear with the huge, high collars just showcase your chin and accentuate how weak it is. We’re going to get you some V-necks and some solid-colored tees. Striped cotton shirts a bit on the roomy side are going to make your flabby breasts less noticeable, and do yourself a favor, okay? Cashmere. You’re worth it, Len.”
She made me close my eyes and feel different fabrics. She dressed me in nontight JuicyPussy jeans and stuck a hand down my crotch to make sure my genitals had room to breathe. “It’s about comfort,” she said. “It’s about feeling and acting like a thirty-nine-year-old. Which is what you are, last time I checked.” I could feel her family inside her-rude, snide, unsupportive, yet getting the job done, acting appropriately, making sure there was room for my genitals, saving face. Beyond the mountains, according to the old Korean proverb Grace had once told me, were more mountains. We’d only just begun.
When I went into a changing room, one of the teenaged sales clerks said to me, “I’ll tell your daughter you’re in there, sir,” and instead of taking offense at being mistaken for Eunice’s presumably adoptive father, I actually felt in awe of my girl, in awe of the fact that every day we were together she ignored the terrible aesthetic differences between us. This shopping was not just for me or for her. It was for us as a couple. It was for our future together.
I left JuicyPussy with the equivalent of ten thousand yuan’s worth of goods. My debt load was blinking frantically with the words RECALCULATION IN PROGRESS, which scared off the swarms of Debt Bombers looking to give me more money. When I walked by a Credit Pole on 42nd Street, I registered a ranking of 1510 (down ten points). I may have been poorer, but you couldn’t confuse me for the overaged faux-hipster that had entered the UNRC three hours ago. I was what passed for a man now.
There was more. I looked healthier. The breathable fibers took about four years off my biological age. At work, Intakes asked if I was undergoing dechronification treatments myself. I took a physical, and my statistics started flapping on The Boards, my ACTH and cortisol levels plummeting, my designation now “a carefree and inspiring older gent.” Even Howard Shu came down to my desk and asked me to lunch. By this point, Joshie was sending Shu down to Washington on his private jet every week. Rumor had it Shu was bound for the White House or even higher up than that. “Rubenstein,” people hiccupped, covering their mouths. We were negotiating with the Bipartisans themselves! Over what, though, I still couldn’t tell.
But I was no longer scared of Shu. At our lunch meeting, I stared him down as I played with the cuffs of my striped cotton shirt, which indeed gave cover to my incipient man-breasts. We sat in a busy canteen drinking Swiss water we had alkalinized ourselves at the table and eating a few pellets of something fishy.
“I’m sorry we got off on the wrong foot when you came back from Rome,” Shu allowed, his full-bore eyes floating through the data fog of his apparat.
“No big,” I said.
“I’m going to tell you something for your ears only.”
“Whatevs,” I said. “Verbal me, friend.”
Shu wiped his mouth as if I had just spat in it, but then resumed his collegial air. “There’s a good chance there’s going to be a disturbance. A realignment. Bigger than with the last riots. Not sure when. It’s what we’re picking up from Wapachung Intelligence. Just playing out some war games.”
“Safety first,” I said, looking bored. “What’s going on, Shu-ster?”
Shu descended into another apparat reverie. I did the same, pretending it was something serious and work- related, but really I was just GlobalTracing Eunice’s location. She was, as always, at 575 Grand Street, Apt. E-607, my home, deep into her own apparat, but subconsciously saturated by the presence of my books and mid- twentieth-century-design furniture. It pleased me, in a parochial way, the fact that I could always count on her being there. My little housewife! She tracked me moment by moment as well, getting suspicious if I veered off course from the daily set of my life, an impromptu meeting at a bar with Noah or Vishnu or a walk in the unbloodied part of Central Park with Grace. The fact that she was suspicious of me, the fact that she cared-that pleased me
