Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart Read Free Book Online

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 äppärät 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