Super Sad True Love Story

LEONARDO DABRAMOVINCI TO EUNI-TARD ABROAD:

Oh, hi there. It’s Lenny Abramov. You might remember me from our little time in Rome. Thanks for brushing my teeth! Hee hee. So, anyway, just got back to the US of A. I’ve been practicing my abbreviations. I think you said ROFLAARP in Rome. Does that mean “Rolling On Floor Looking At Addictive Rodent Pornography”? See, I’m not that old! Anyway, been thinking about you. Coming to NYC anytime soon? You’ve got a place to stay here. I’ve got a nice place all set up, 740 square feet, balcony, view of downtown. Can’t compete with da tonino, but I make a pretty mean roasted eggplant. I can even sleep on the couch if you want me to. Call or write anytime. It was really, really, REALLY great to meet you. I’m committing the constellation of your freckles to memory as I write this (hope that doesn’t make you uncomfortable).

Love,

Leonard

3 THE OTTER STRIKES BACK

FROM THE DIARIES OF LENNY ABRAMOV

JUNE 4

New York City

Dearest Diary,

I saw the fat man at the first-class lounge at Fiumicino. There’s a special terminal for flights to the United States and SecurityState Israel, the most dilapidated terminal at the Roman airport, where everyone who is not a passenger is basically carrying a gun or pointing some sort of scanning gizmo at you. There aren’t even seats for the economy-class passengers by the gates, because they can scan you better standing up, get between your folds of flesh and light you up like a six-hundred-watt bulb. Anyway, life’s a lot better in the first-class lounge, and that’s where I went to see if I could find some last-minute High Net Worth Individuals, some potential Life Lovers who might be interested in our Product. I could see myself strolling into boss man Joshie’s office and saying, “Look at this! Even when he’s traveling, your Lenny’s looking for prospects. I’m like a doctor. Always on call!”

First-class lounges aren’t what they used to be. Most Asian HNWIs fly private planes these days, but my apparat picked up on some scan-able faces, an old-time porno star and a slick guy from Mumbai just starting out on his first worldwide Retail empire. They all had some money on them, if not the twenty million northern euros in investable income that I’m looking for, but there was this one guy who registered nothing. I mean he wasn’t there. He didn’t have an apparat, or it wasn’t set on “social” mode, or maybe he had paid some young Russian kid to have the outbound transmission blocked. And he looked like a nothing. The way people don’t really look anymore. Not just imperfect, but awful. A fat man with deeply recessed eyes, a collapsed chin, limp and dusty hair, a T-shirt that all but exposed his large breasts, and a gross tent of air atop where one imagined his genital would be. No one would look at him except me (and then only for a minute), because he was at the margins of society, because he was without rank, because he was ITP or Impossible to Preserve, because he had no business being mixed up with real HNWIs in a first-class lounge. Now, in hindsight, I want to imbue him with some heroism; I want to place a thick book in his hands and perch even thicker bifocals on his nose. I want him to look like Benjamin Franklin. But, then, I promised you the truth, dear diary. And the truth is that from the moment I saw him I was scared.

With his hands clasped at his crotch, the Impossible to Preserve fat man stared out the window, his head moving forward and backward contentedly, as if he were a half-submerged alligator enjoying a sunny day. Ignoring the rest of us, he watched, with an enthusiast’s abandon, the sleek new dolphin-nosed China Southern Airlines planes taxiing past our peeling UnitedContinentalDeltamerican 737s and some equally crappy El Als.

When we finally boarded after a three-hour technical delay, a young man dressed in business casual walked down the aisle videotaping all of us, focusing repeatedly on the fat man, who blushed and tried to turn away. The filmmaker tapped me on the shoulder and bade me, in slow Southern English, to look directly into his boxy, antiquated camera. “Why?” I asked. But that little bit of sedition was apparently all he needed from me, and he moved on.

By the time we were in the air, I tried to erase the videographer and the otter and the fat man from my mind. On my way back from the bathroom, I registered Fatty only as a pastel-colored blob in the corner, its form tickled by high-altitude sunlight. I took out a battered volume of Chekhov’s stories from my carry-on (wish I could read it in Russian like my parents can) and turned to the novella Three Years, the story of the unattractive but decent Laptev, the son of a wealthy Moscow merchant, who is in love with the beautiful and much younger Julia. I was hoping to find some tips on how to further seduce Eunice and to overcome the beauty gap between us. At one point in the novella, Laptev asks for Julia’s hand in marriage, and she initially turns him down, then changes her mind. I found this particular passage most helpful:

[Attractive Julia] was distressed and dispirited, and told herself now that to refuse an honorable, good man who loved her, simply because he was not attractive [emphasis mine], especially when marrying him would make it possible for her to change her mode of life, her cheerless, monotonous, idle life in which youth was passing with no prospect of anything better in the future [emphasis mine]-to refuse him under such circumstances was madness, caprice and folly, and that God might even punish her for it.

From this single passage I developed a three-point conclusion.

Point One: I knew that Eunice didn’t believe in God and deplored her Catholic education, so it would be useless to invoke that deity and his endless punishments to make her fall for me, but, much like Laptev, I truly was that “honorable, good man who loved her.”

Point Two: Eunice’s life in Rome, despite the sensuousness and beauty of the city, also seemed to me “cheerless, monotonous,” and certainly “idle” (I knew she volunteered for a couple of hours a week with some Algerians, which is incredibly sweet but not really work). Now, I do not come from a wealthy family like Chekhov’s Laptev, but my annual spending power of about two hundred thousand yuan would give Eunice some considerations in the Retail department and possibly “change her mode of life.”

Point Three: Nonetheless, it would take more than mere monetary consideration to prompt Eunice to love me. Her “youth was passing with no prospect of anything better in the future,” as Chekhov said of his Julia. How could I take advantage of that fact re: Eunice? How could I trick her into aligning her youth with my decrepitude? In nineteenth-century Russia, it was apparently a much simpler task.

I noticed that some of the first-class people were staring me down for having an open book. “Duder, that thing smells like wet socks,” said the young jock next to me, a senior Credit ape at LandO’LakesGMFord. I quickly sealed the Chekhov in my carry-on, stowing it far in the overhead bin. As the passengers returned to their flickering displays, I took out my apparat and began to thump it loudly with my finger to show how much I loved all things digital, while sneaking nervous glances at the throbbing cavern around me, the wine-dulled business travelers lost to their own electronic lives. By this point the young man in business-casual attire had returned with his video camera and just stood there at the front of the aisle recording the fat man with a trace of dull, angry pleasure hanging off his mouth (his quarry had buried his head in a pillow, either sleeping or pretending to be).

I was looking for clues on Eunice Park. My beloved was a shy girl by comparison with others of her generation, so her digital footprint wasn’t big. I had to go at her laterally, through her sister, Sally, and her father, Sam Park, M.D., the violent podiatrist. Working my lusty, overheated apparat, I pointed an Indian satellite at southern California, her original home. I zoomed in on a series of crimson-tiled haciendas to the south of Los Angeles, rows and rows of three-thousand-square-foot rectangles, their only aerial features the tiny silver squiggles that denoted rooftop central air conditioning. These units all bowed to the semicircle of a turquoise pool guarded by the gray halos of two down-on-their-luck palm trees, the development’s only flora. Inside one of these homes Eunice Park learned to walk and talk, to seduce and sneer; here her arms grew strong and her mane thick; here her household