Little Failure

by Gary Shteyngart

  I watch her body being driven to a Long Island cemetery in a van, not a real hearse, and wish I had the money to upgrade her final voyage. The body of the one woman who didn’t consider me a Little Failure or a Snotty or a weakling is covered with dirt, handfuls of which we have all thrown on top of her with our hands, as is Jewish custom.

  And the final thing I don’t have. St. Petersburg: Architecture of the Tsars. After my panic attack is over, I put the book down and walk right out of the Strand Book Annex. Walk right out toward a fresh lunchtime vodka and tonic at the Blarney Stone. No Chesme Church for me. No helicopter either.

  But four dry years after I’ve kissed J.Z. a final goodbye, there will be someone new in my life.

  Someone, as they say, special.

  Her name is Pamela Sanders.* We hook up at a social agency conference about the resettlement of Hmong refugees or something of the sort. She is a serious-minded Program Development Specialist who works at the nonprofit I just got laid off from. I am writing grant proposals for a Lower East Side settlement house, my new employ. My title is Senior Grant Writer, but I am sometimes referred to as Señor Grant Writer, and people tell me I am not a team player.

  After four lonely years without J.Z., I am primed to like anybody who will touch me, but there’s more to Pamela than that helpful distinction. Let me start with how she looks. She has two bodies. An aristocratic upper half that my Petersburg ancestry would probably have termed “cultured”—diminutive shoulders that fit into the hollows of my palms, a well-proportioned Anglo face (here the straight stalk of a nose, there a minimalist attempt at ears), the whole pleasant affair crowned by twenty inches of rich, flaxen hair. But by candlelight a second body reveals itself, as loamy and real as our country’s interior: strong, strong legs that conquer the hills of Brooklyn where she lives (Cobble and Boerum Hills, to be exact) with ease; hips wide enough to give birth to the tribe of Joseph; a backside in which one could lose oneself, a scalloped, ridged, white-pink ode to the uncomplicated side of lust. And when she propels this second half out of a pair of tight jeans, I am torn between the biological and the refined—do I grab the ass or kiss the nubbin of a nose, do I go for the part of her golden crown or plunge between the obvious promise of her thighs? After knowing her a few weeks, after falling thoroughly in love, I am, I think to myself, caught in a love triangle between me and these two Pamelas. And then the love triangle gets really complicated. She tells me she has another boyfriend.

  He is, let’s say, Kevin, a thirty-year-old poet who lives with his parents in New Jersey, drops dubious verses about the Greek gods, and weekly crashes at my sweetheart’s house in Brooklyn. They have been together for the better part of a decade, the phone bill is in his name, and the answering machine informs the caller that she has reached “the home of Kevin.” In photographs he looks like a Greek god himself, a dark, hipster one, assigned by Zeus to some minor precinct, say, Trendios the god of Williamsburg. If the outgoing phone message is any indication, he speaks with a fake aristocratic accent. He also enjoys working with wood. Despite this inclination, he has not had sex with my baby doll for some time.

  That is my job. By this point, I am living in a tenement apartment off Delancey Street on the Lower East Side, measuring maybe ten feet by twenty feet (fewer tiny roaches than in my Brooklyn digs, more giant flying water bugs), next to another studio that is home to a couple so loud one could graph their hourly orgasms in a series of parabolas and bell curves. Pamela gets competitive with the neighbors. She hollers during lovemaking as if my tenement building is on fire (frequently it is), urging me to do the same. “Let’s show them where the real fun is!” she’ll say. When it’s over, she calls her other boyfriend, makes sure his parents know that, yes, she is still coming over to New Jersey for a weekend of family fun, her tone quiet, familial, obedient.

  Once I call her Brooklyn apartment when Kevin is in situ, and he tells Pamela he doesn’t want “that man,” meaning me, ever calling there, meaning her home, again. This puts a crimp in our communication.

  I love Pamela. She is what I’ve been waiting for all my life. A chance to lower myself into complete abasement, a chance to beg for someone’s love over and over again, knowing I will never get it. After our first date, when I find out she has a boyfriend, I sign off gallantly in an email, “I am at your disposal.”

  Except what I’ve written is: “I am your disposal.”

  In return for this admission she gives me a present, Michel Leiris’s Manhood: A Journey from Childhood into the Fierce Order of Virility.

  She’s in her late twenties, but already there are crow’s-feet radiating from the edges of her pale gray eyes. But it’s not just her face. Her personality is old. She is a self-described urban hermit and unreformed shoplifter. When I fall ill, she tells me she loves thinking of me as a feverish little nineteenth-century child, with her playing the role of horny older caregiver. When she notices I use Lever 2000 Pure Rain soap (forty-nine cents at the local bodega) she tells me it’s bad for my skin and gets me some fancy soap made from olive oil. She plays computer chess until two in the morning. She schedules a week off from work that she promises me will be “FuckFest ’99.” “I have this tingle in my middle region,” she informs me. She calls me Dope, Mr. Shygart, Coy Little Mother, Poochie (as in “Have fun tonight, Poochie”), Pussy-cake, Big Furry Bitch.

  “You shouldn’t let me get away with this crap,” she tells me, after hurting me some more.

  On the other hand, she gets upset when I tell her I love her. She tells me I’m quite “dear” to her but that she can’t reciprocate all this “love” because of Kevin. “Oh, the complexities of modern life!” I write to her. “So many goofy, earnest middle-class boys to choose from.”

  But here’s the problem. Pamela and I both want to be writers, we both want to be card-carrying members of the East Coast Intelligentsia, but we also both think we’re fakes. I’m a Russian immigrant (before the burst of Russian immigrant lit of the early 2000s), and she’s working class. To wit, she’s from a destroyed family in Washington State, the father a Boeing worker always worried about his next paycheck and the next union strike. Kevin’s family is her new family, tender, native-born, educated Jewish suburbanites. When she spends the weekend at their house, Kevin sleeps on the floor next to her, pretending they’re still together in every way. Neither of them wants to give up the ruse to her adoptive parents.

  And here’s what really hurts: I can’t give her the same kind of family. Not with the greenhorn Shteyngarts in their Little Neck enclosure. Not with my mother’s cold cabbage borscht with the surreally large dollop of sour cream, not with their Republican politics, not with their superannuated Ford Taurus leaking quietly in front of the single-car working-class garage.

  And when I see my parents through her eyes I do love them more. Because I know behind those accents, behind the fearful, angry, conservative views, there is culture of the kind Pamela can only imagine, the culture of a superpower that was tossed on history’s ash heap, yes, but the culture of Pushkin and Eisenstein and Shostakovich and Eskimo ice cream and diapers that had to be washed and hung out to dry, and black-market Grundig radios desperately trying to catch Voice of America and the BBC. But maybe I’m being overly sentimental.

  “Don’t let that bastard Tolstoy ruin your life,” Pamela tells me.

  Much like Pammy, I lead a double life. With her, I am a Big Furry Bitch. With my friends, I am confident and full of life, proud that I have a girlfriend (most of my friends don’t know about Kevin), proud to have rejoined the world of the reproductive. I retreat into food and cocktails to the point where Pamela complains that all I ever talk about is the overpriced crap I put into my mouth. My nonprofit salary goes entirely toward gin fizzes at Barramundi on Ludlow, hookah pipes at Kush on Orchard, oysters at Pisces on Avenue A, yam and roast duck at Le Tableau on Fifth Street. Postgorging, my friends and I head back to my studio to hear MC Solaar drop French-Senegalese beats on my new TEAC stereo, singing along
to “Prose Combat” and “Nouveau Western.” A typical email to Pam at the time: “We had tapas at Xunta that were nonpareil, dry sausage, blood sausage, olives stuffed with anchovies, sheep’s milk cheese, patatas bravas, and the ubiquitous garlic shrimp.” Oh, that nonpareil dry sausage. Oh, those ubiquitous garlic shrimp.

  So here I am boasting of my gastronomy to Pam, and my lovemaking with Pam to my friends. And there I am in bed in my Lower East Side studio, my futon gently rolling down the sloped floor until I crash headlong into my bookshelf, crying furry Poochie tears because Pam is with Kevin in New Jersey or, worse yet, in her Boerum Hill apartment, having her famous lamb and oven-roasted potatoes like the married couple they should have been.

  “If you won’t speak to me, it is better not to live!” is what I would shout to my mother when she gave me the silent treatment as a child. Now I am, according to Pam, Mr. Shygart, a coy little mother who is approaching thirty, with a half-girlfriend, with a job as Señor Grant Writer that pays $50,000 a year. But despite these modest successes, my mother’s silence is where I want to be. The truth is I miss her almost as much as I miss Pam. Alone and crying and plotting angry revenge, this is what it feels like to be home. This is comfortable and familiar. The only thing that is missing is the Lightman from my childhood closet.

  Desperate, I write to her: “I would love it if Kevin and I could be friends and we could all spend time together.”

  Even more desperate: “Perhaps we can even form a kind of unconventional family, Marin County style.”

  My perception of Marin County, California, appears to be flawed at the time.

  Finally, I take it to the next level. I am not to be anywhere near her apartment when Kevin deigns to visit from New Jersey, but one such night I find myself at the nearby Brooklyn Inn, a dusty but attractive joint on Hoyt Street with huge arched windows and a long dark-wood bar. Kevin and Pammy both love the place because it often attracts a certain groomed literary crowd, the people they one day wish to be. At the bar, I guzzle down a vodka tonic, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another and another. How many does that make? My math not so good.

  The walk from the Brooklyn Inn to Pamela’s takes about five minutes under sober conditions. The main danger for me now is Atlantic Avenue, which has many lanes to cross, by which I mean more than two for certain. A small Japanese car pulling out into traffic bumps me somewhere around the hip, but I shrug it off, waving at the driver not to worry. Eventually, I turn onto leafy, gorgeous State Street, Pam’s street, and crawl on all fours up to her buzzer. At the top step, I collapse and take a little breather, gather my anger together. The last time I hit somebody was back at the dacha in upstate New York, the kid I would torture while citing the torture scene from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. What I am about to hit now is not exactly Kevin. It is not even Orwell’s poor Vinston. It is a door. Pamela’s front door.

  The problem with chronicling the lowest moment of my life is that I can’t recall much of it.

  Here’s what I do remember.

  I am hitting the door. The tough Brooklyn door, probably wrought in the time of Walt Whitman, does not budge. Instead my hand turns red, then purple. I feel nothing. Maybe my hip is starting to ache some from being hit by the car on Atlantic.

  Then I am inside, because someone (Pam?) has opened the door, and I am racing upstairs to confront my nemesis. The thing about Kevin is that he truly is very handsome. He has a real jaw, a serious nose, and tight clever eyes underneath a well-stocked brow. Immediately, I can tell that I am outclassed.

  What happens in the next few seconds, minutes, or hours seems to be this: I scream and cry, something like “I can’t take it anymore, I can’t take it anymore! It is better not to live!” and Pammy screams and cries with me. Kevin, as far as I can remember, remains fairly immobile and unmoved. He says a few things here and there, perhaps along the lines of I’m sorry it has to be like this. But what’s truly amazing about this scene is that Pamela and I are essentially putting on a performance for Kevin. The two outsiders, one drunk out of his mind, the other depressed and eternally abandoned, are dancing and singing and weeping for Kevin, our God. I cannot fully choreograph Pamela’s dance, but I can surely remember the lyrics to my own. They are in Hebrew, of course, and I learned them in 1979 in a school in Queens.

  Yamin, smol, smol, yamin, left, right, right, left, troo-loo-loo-loo.

  Pamela guides me downstairs, my hand already throbbing to the point where my eyes are clouded in a different brand of tears. She goes no farther than the door I had hit with twenty-seven years of frustration, a door that she slams shut behind her. Angry, accusatory emails will stream in from her end by morning’s light. It would appear that by meeting Kevin I have broken the rules of the game.

  And outside it is warm either in the fading way of fall or the rapturous, tenuous way of spring. And I am standing there holding my hand as a bearded, academic-looking man walks a set of Welsh corgis down State Street, a mirror of some earlier time and place—summer break, North Carolina—that should have pleased the early Nabokov so.

  Three years later, Pamela Sanders is in a creative writing M.F.A. program at the University of Florida. One night, she sees her latest ex-boyfriend—a Ph.D. student in English, who, rumor has it, has done something terrible to her—sitting on the patio of the Market Street Pub & Brewery. When he gets up, Pamela follows him through the bar and into the restroom. She is carrying a carpenter’s hammer, its head wrapped in plastic. In the restroom, as he is taking a leak, Pamela hits the back of his head repeatedly with the claw end of the hammer. “I’m going to kill you!” Pamela is screaming, according to the arrest form. “You ruined my life!” He wrestles the hammer from her in the bathroom, and she runs out of the Market Street Pub, leaving her victim to stagger back into the bar. He suffers multiple lacerations and contusions to the head.

  Pamela flees the state of Florida; she is charged with attempted murder. Eventually, she returns to Florida and turns herself in. The charges are reduced to aggravated battery with a deadly weapon and she is sentenced to a year in the county pen.

  The first time I hear of the crime it is 2004, and I am at a writers’ conference in Prague, following the publication of my first novel. My beer-hoisting interlocutor tells me the tale with a smile, which may indicate that he knows of our past relationship. I can only imagine how quickly and gleefully a story like this must have spread through a college town. How quickly the term “Pamma Hamma Slamma” would be coined. Even before the attack, she was a mystery to many of her fellow writers and teachers, but several of the women in the creative writing program rallied behind her, one apparently going as far as to take her into her home, in Gainesville, after she was released on fourteen years’ probation. Some time later, she returned to New York City.

  “That guy whose head she bashed in,” my drinking companion in Prague tells me, “he kind of looked like you! He had a beard!”

  I am later told that Pam’s fiction was really coming into its own before the attack, something that does not surprise me, because she was always an exceptionally strong writer, if maybe a little too scared of the truth she was leaving behind on the page. But that kind of work requires a bravery different from the kind needed to bash a human being over the head with the claw end of a carpenter’s tool in a stinking subtropical bathroom, again and again and again.

  * * *

  * Not her name. Not her name at all.

  The author posing for his first novel. What he will gain in readership, he will soon lose in hair.

  A BOOK FULL OF DYSFUNCTION and hammer-armed assassins needs an adult in the room. Someone has to enter from stage left, way left, and tell our deluded hero, You can’t live like this anymore. Someone with two ounces of wisdom and at least as many of kindness needs to change our hero’s life. How romantic it would be if said person was a willowy American blonde or a sharp-tongued Brooklyn girl. Nothing doing here. We all know who it’s going to be.

  But, oh
, thank God there is someone. No, let me be emphatic: Thank God there is him.

  When I graduate from Oberlin, John is at the center of my life and the center of my abuse. I hate him so much for being from a prosperous American family, for being older than me, for being generous to Maya, whom he’s installed in the first decent apartment of her life and who, thanks to his kind offices, no longer has to whip businessmen inside a Manhattan dungeon. And I hate the little muscle under his left eye, the one that twitches when we watch something sad at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, the one that allows the sheen of liquid to coat the bottom lid, the one that shows that he is human and aware of the pain of others. That, more than anything else, is unforgivable to me and to my origins. So I respond by sabotaging his documentary, by offering him nothing but clownish songs and stupid accents whenever he flips on the camera. I want to punish John for trying to see beyond my goatee and spiteful tongue. I want to make him pay for his curiosity and his love.

  But despite this hatred, I want his life, too. I pass by the Frank Stella shop on Columbus where John gets some of the shirts he wears effortlessly to places like Le Bernadin or a production of Mamet’s Oleana. To me, Frank Stella, this old-fashioned middle-class shop, looks like nothing less than a well-lit jewel box. Just the simplicity of it, the lack of pretension, the lack of Stuyvesant striving to be the best. If only my eye could twitch and cry. If only the silent coldness inside me could dissipate. If only my apartment had green silk curtains, a 1920s burgundy mohair couch, and a letter from Bette Davis thanking me for sending flowers when we stayed at the same hotel in Biarritz. If only I could drink a few glasses less each day.