I eyed Eunice’s ruined sweater and the obscenely fresh body that lived and sweated and, I hoped, yearned beneath it. “I know of a good dry cleaner that can fix red-wine stains,” I said. “There’s this Nigerian up the block.” I stressed “Nigerian” to underline my open-mindedness. Lenny Abramov, friend to all.
“I volunteer at a refugee shelter near the train station,” Eunice said, apropos of something.
“You do? That’s so fantastic!”
“You’re such a nerd.” She laughed cruelly at me.
“What?” I said. “I’m sorry.” I laughed too, just in case it was a joke, but right away I felt hurt.
“LPT,” she said. “TIMATOV. ROFLAARP. PRGV. Totally PRGV.”
The youth and their abbreviations. I pretended like I knew what she was talking about. “Right,” I said. “IMF. PLO. ESL.”
She looked at me like I was insane. “JBF,” she said.
“Who’s that?” I pictured a tall Protestant man.
“It means I’m ‘just butt-fucking’ with you. Just kidding, you know.”
“Duh,” I said. “I knew that. Seriously. What makes me a nerd in your estimation?”
“‘In your estimation,’” she mimicked. “Who says things like that? And who wears those shoes? You look like a bookkeeper.”
“I’m sensing a bit of anger here,” I said. What had happened to that sweet, hurt Korean girl of three minutes ago? For some reason I puffed out my chest and stood up on my toes, even though I had a good half a foot on her.
She touched the cuff of my shirt, and then looked at it more carefully. “This isn’t buttoned right,” she said. And before I could say anything, she rebuttoned my cuff and pulled on the shirtsleeve to make it less bunched up around the shoulder and upper arm. “There,” she said. “You look a little better now.”
I didn’t know what to say or do. When dealing with people my own age, I know precisely who I am. Not physically attractive, but at least well educated, decently paid, working at the frontiers of science and technology (even though I have the same finesse with my äppärät as my aged immigrant parents). On Planet Eunice Park, these attributes clearly did not matter. I was some kind of ancient dork. “Thanks,” I said. “Don’t know what I’d do without you.”
She smiled at me, and I noticed that she had the kind of dimples that not merely puncture the face but easily fill it with warmth and personality (and, in the case of Eunice, take away some of her anger). “I’m hungry,” she said.
I must have looked like the befuddled Rubenstein at his press conference after our troops got routed at Ciudad Bolívar. “What?” I said. “Hungry? Isn’t it a little too late?”
“Um, no, Gramps,” Eunice Park said.
I took that in stride. “I know of this place on Via del Governo Vecchio. It’s called da Tonino. Excellent cacio e pepe.”
“So it says in my Time Out guide,” the impudent girl said to me. She lifted up her äppärät-like pendant, and in shockingly perfect Italian ordered a taxi to pick us up. I hadn’t felt so frightened since high school. Even death, my slender, indefatigable nemesis, seemed lackluster when compared with the all-powerful Eunice Park.
In the taxi, I sat apart from her, engaging in very idle chatter indeed (“So I hear the dollar’s going to be devaluated again…”). The city of Rome appeared around us, casually splendid, eternally assured of itself, happy to take our money and pose for a picture, but in the end needing nothing and no one. Eventually I realized that the driver had decided to cheat me, but I didn’t protest his extended route, especially as we swung around the purple-lit carapace of the Coliseum, and I told myself, Remember this, Lenny; develop a sense of nostalgia for something, or you’ll never figure out what’s important.
But by the end of the night I remembered very little. Let’s just say that I drank. Drank out of fear (she was so cruel). Drank out of happiness (she was so beautiful). Drank until my whole mouth and teeth had turned a dark ruby red and the pungency of my breath and perspiration betrayed my passing years. And she drank too. One mezzo litro of the local swill became a full litro, and then two litri, and then a bottle of something possibly Sardinian but, in any case, thicker than bull’s blood.
Enormous plates of food were needed to mop up this overindulgence. We thoughtfully chewed on the pig jowls of the bucatini all’amatriciana, slurped up a plate of spaghetti with spicy eggplant, and picked apart a rabbit practically drowning in olive oil. I knew I would miss all this when I got back to New York, even the horrible fluorescent lighting that brought out my age-the wrinkles around my eyes, the single long highway and the three county roads that ran across my forehead, testaments to many sleepless nights spent worrying about unredeemed pleasures and my carefully hoarded income, but mostly about death. This particular restaurant was favored by theater actors, and as I stabbed with my fork at the thick hollows of pasta and the glistening aubergines, I tried to remember forever their loud, attention-seeking voices and the vibrant Italian hand gestures that in my mind are synonymous with the living animal, and hence with life itself.
I focused on the living animal in front of me and tried to make her love me. I spoke extravagantly and, I hope, sincerely. Here’s what I remember.
I told her I didn’t want to leave Rome now that I had met her.
She again told me I was a nerd, but a nerd who made her laugh.
I told her I wanted to do more than make her laugh.
She told me I should be thankful for what I had.
I told her she should move to New York with me.
She told me she was probably a lesbian.
I told her my work was my life, but I still had room for love.
She told me love was out of the question.
I told her my parents were Russian immigrants who lived in New York.
She told me hers were Korean immigrants who lived in Fort Lee, New Jersey.
I told her my father was a retired janitor who liked to go fishing.
She told me her father was a podiatrist who liked to punch his wife and two daughters in the face.
“Oh,” I said. Eunice Park shrugged and excused herself. On my plate, the rabbit’s little dead heart hung from within his rib cage. I put my head in my hands and wondered if I should just throw some euros down on the table and walk out and leave.
But soon enough I was walking down ivy-draped Via Giulia, my arm around Eunice Park’s fragrant, boyish frame. She was seemingly in good spirits, both loving and goading: promising me a kiss, then chastising my poor Italian. She was shyness and giggles, freckles in the moonlight and drunken, immature cries of “Shut up, Lenny!” and “You’re such an idiot!” I noticed she had released her hair from the bun’s captivity and that it was dark and endless and as thick as twine. She was twenty-four years old.
My apartment could accommodate no more than a cheap twin-sized mattress and a fully opened suitcase, brimming with books (“My text-major friends at Elderbird used to call those things ‘doorstops,’” she told me). We kissed, lazily, like it was nothing, then roughly, like we meant it. There were some problems. Eunice Park wouldn’t take off her bra (“I have absolutely no chest”), and I was too drunk and scared to develop an erection. But I didn’t want intercourse anyway. I talked her out of her pants, cupped the twin, tiny globes of her ass with my palms, and pushed my lips right inside her soft, vital pussy. “Oh, Lenny,” she said, a little sadly, for she must have sensed just how much her youth and freshness meant to me, a man who lived in death’s anteroom and could barely stand the light and heat of his brief sojourn on earth. I licked and licked, breathing in the slight odor of something authentic and human, and eventually must have fallen asleep with my face between her legs. The next morning, she was kind enough to help me repack my suitcase, which refused to close without her help. “That’s not how you do it,” she said, when she saw me brushing my teeth. She made me stick out my tongue and roughly scraped its purple surface with the toothbrush. “There,” she said. “Better.”