Super Sad True Love Story Read Online Free PDF

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