Super Sad True Love Story (2 page)

“Yes,” I said.

“What kind of people?”

“Some Italians.”

“You said ‘Somalians.’”

“Some Italians,” I said.

“You said ‘Somalians,’” the otter insisted. “You know Americans get lonely abroad. Happens all the time! That’s why I never leave the brook where I was born. What’s the point? Tell me, for statistical purposes, did you have any intimate physical relationships with any
non
-Americans during your stay?”

I stared hard at the otter, my hands shaking beneath the desk. Did everyone get this question? I didn’t want to end up in an Upstate “secure screening facility” simply because I had crawled on top of Fabrizia and tried to submerge my feelings of loneliness and inferiority inside her. “Yes,” I said. “Just one girl. A couple of times we did it.”

“And what was this
non-
American’s full name? Last name first, please.”

I could hear one fellow sitting several desks in front of me, his square Anglo face hidden partially by a thick mane, breathing Italian names into his äppärät.

“I’m still waiting for that name, Leonard or Lenny,” said the otter.

“DeSalva, Fabrizia,” I whispered.

“You said ‘DeSalva—’” But just then the otter froze in mid-name, and my äppärät began to produce its “heavy thinking” noises, a wheel desperately spinning inside its hard plastic shell, its ancient circuitry completely overtaxed by the otter and his antics. The words
ERROR CODE IT/FC-GS/FLAG
appeared on the screen. I got up and went back to the security cage out front. “Excuse me,” I said, leaning into the mouth hole. “My äppärät froze. The otter stopped speaking to me. Could you send over that nice Filipina woman?”

The old creature manning this post crackled at me incomprehensibly, the lapels of his shirt trembling with stars and stripes. I made out the words “wait” and “service representative.”

An hour passed in bureaucratic metronome. Movers carried out a man-sized golden statue of our nation’s E Pluribus Unum eagle and a dining table missing three legs. Eventually an older white woman in enormous orthopedic shoes clacked her way down the hall. She had a magnificent tripartite nose, more Roman than any proboscis ever grown along the banks of the Tiber, and the kind of pinkish oversized glasses I associate with kindness and progressive mental health. Thin lips quivered from daily contact with life, and her earlobes bore silver loops a size too large.

In appearance and mien she reminded me of Nettie Fine, a woman whom I hadn’t seen since high-school graduation. She was the first person to greet my parents at the airport after they had winged their way from Moscow to the United States four decades ago in search of dollars and God. She was their young American mama, their latkes-bearing synagogue volunteer, arranger of English lessons, bequeather of spare furniture. In fact, Nettie’s husband had worked in D.C. at the State Department. In further fact, before I left for Rome my mother had told me he was stationed in a certain European capital.…

“Mrs. Fine?” I said. “Are you Nettie Fine, ma’am?”

Ma’am? I had been raised to worship her, but I was scared of Nettie Fine. She had seen my family at its most exposed, at its poorest and weakest (my folks literally immigrated to the States with one pair of underwear between them). But this temperate bird of a woman had shown me nothing but unconditional love, the kind of love that rushed me in waves and left me feeling weak and depleted, battling an undertow whose source I couldn’t 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 äppärät,” 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 äppärät. 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 äppärät. 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 Cinecittà 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 äppärät 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 äppärät 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 Cinecittà 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 äppärät, 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 work a little, play a little,” someone was saying in accented English, followed by cute, hollow female laughter. A recently arrived American girl, a yoga teacher to the stars, was being reduced to tears by a much older local woman, who kept stabbing her in the heart with one long, painted fingernail and accusing her, personally, of the U.S. invasion of Venezuela. A domestic came carrying a large plate of marinated anchovies. The bald man known as “Cancer Boy” followed dejectedly on the heels of the Afghani princess to whom he had given his heart. A slightly famous Rai actor started telling me about how he had impregnated a girl of good standing in Chile and then fled back to Rome before Chilean law could hold him accountable. When a fellow Neapolitan showed up, he said to me: “Excuse us, Lenny, we have to speak in dialect.”

I continued to wait for my Fabrizia while nibbling on an anchovy, feeling like the horniest thirty-nine-year-old man in Rome—a very serious distinction. Perhaps my occasional lover had fallen into another’s arms during our brief separation. I did not have a girl waiting for me in New York, I wasn’t sure I even had a
job
waiting for me in New York after my failures in Europe, so I really wanted to screw Fabrizia. She was the softest woman I had ever touched, the muscles stirring somewhere deep beneath her skin like phantom gears, and her breath, like her son’s, was shallow and hard, so that when she “made the love” (her words), it sounded like she was in danger of expiring.

I caught sight of a Roman fixture, an old American sculptor of small stature and dying teeth who wore his hair in a Beatlesque mop and liked to mention his friendship with the iconic Tribeca actor “Bobby D.” Several times I have pushed his drunken rotundity into a taxi, telling the cabbies his prestigious address on the Gianicolo Hill, and handing them twenty of my own precious euros.