Our Country Friends(10)
Three cars had gathered at the intersection of two major state roads. Senderovsky had forgotten the rules on which vehicle should take precedence during such an event, assumed it was his own, and stepped on the gas. Similarly, half a mile later, he drove past a yield sign, but refused to yield. On the approach to the bridge, slowing down because of a likely police car waiting ahead (his side mirror was still dangling), he slammed on the brakes and heard a great reshuffle in his trunk ending with the unmistakable symphony of shattered glass. Devil take it. Once again, he had forgotten to remove the cartons of alcohol. He pulled over to the side of the road to the Kiss & Ride parking lot. Senderovsky, who had never lived by a far-flung train station, could never figure out why the lot was so named—an incitement to prostitution? He opened his trunk, which immediately reeked of spilled alcohol. He sighed. Could it be the eighteen-year-old bottle he had bought to impress Ed and the Actor (who, he had forgotten, didn’t really drink)? He rummaged through the cartons until he sliced his finger, mildly, on a run of broken glass. He sucked on his finger for a while. Finally, he dared to look down. The expensive bottle was safe, but two bottles of country rye had crashed into each other and bled out into the carton. Senderovsky brought the carton up to his lips, tipped it over slightly, and drank, his tongue screening out little bits of glass. Now he was in his natural state, moderately drunk in his dressing gown, his wife and child a world away. If state law or federal law or intergalactic law would allow it, he would have spent the next hour at the Kiss & Ride drinking himself into tragicomedy before hurtling his car toward his friend. He dumped the remains of the bottles into a waiting trash bin, then stood by the side of the road, watching cars swoosh mindlessly onto the bridge, their drivers bathed in the electronics of their cockpits, looking small, indistinct, unprepared for this moment in history.
The city across the river had recently become fashionable, but was still studied by urban planning graduates as a cautionary tale. Highways meant for far-larger metropolises had been built to separate its neighborhoods by race, and like a not-especially-clever clinical mouse Senderovsky often entrapped himself in cloverleafs and roundabouts. The bus station, catering to an obscure statewide bus company, somehow ended up in the trendy, formerly Black part of town, by the thriving new café and bookstore and a score of restaurants with dim interiors and urbane prices.
Senderovsky found Vinod standing alone by the shabby building, two plastic suitcases at his feet, looking like a slightly updated version of his father the moment he had emigrated from India, too late in his life to succeed in the New World as the owner of a computer store. Masha had insisted on upgrading his fundless friend from a bus to a train ticket, believing it was safer healthwise, but Vinod had refused her aid with the same obstinate politeness he had refused Karen’s.
Senderovsky braked within inches of his friend’s suitcases and leaped out of his car. The men stared at each other. For a second, both were fifteen, back at their freshman orientation at the high school for bright beaten foreign youngsters. Vinod had a full head of graying hair haloing down to his shoulders, peppery whiskers commencing to a salty beard, and somewhere amid all those outgrowths were once-frantic eyes that had recently, politely, extinguished themselves.
“Bhai,” Vinod said, the word leaving his mouth like a short, pretty explosion.
“Bhai,” Senderovsky replied. The word meant “brother” in Hindi. During their college years and beyond, the two had lived together for a decade in an up-and-coming neighborhood just like the one where they now stood (until the neighborhood finally came, and they were asked to leave), and through all those years Vinod referred to Senderovsky either as a bhai or a bhenchod, which was a man who enjoyed relations with his sister. (Although bhenchod was also used in an almost ambient way to label anyone or anything unfortunate, in the same way Russians use blyad, or “whore,” to describe the unforgiving world around them—“When will this whorish snowstorm end already?”)
Senderovsky spread out his arms. “Can’t hug,” he said. “And, just to warn you, Masha’s gone all epidemiological.”
“She is a doctor,” Vinod said.
“Psychiatrist.” Senderovsky could air his grievances to Vinod with just one word, in a way he couldn’t to his more prosperous and competitive friends.
“I’ll get in the back seat,” Vinod said as Senderovsky arranged his shiny luggage amid the cartons of alcohol.
“Are you sure? You don’t have to. I’m very healthy. Though I have lost some weight.”
“This way I can pretend I’m in a cab and you’re my driver.”
They quickly made a joke out of it, jousting in the accents of their parents, or, in Vinod’s case, an accent he had never really outgrown. “Zis taim of day, I vood take Belt Parkvey,” Senderovsky spoke in his gruffest Leningrad.
“Sir, do you vish to rob me?” Vinod protested. Senderovsky had failed to notice that, unlike most of his passengers, Vinod did not brace himself against the seat in front of him as he sped off, had not offered a prayer to any god, nor made use of his grab handle as Senderovsky swerved onto the bridge barely pausing to have his toll collected. He did register a very loud yawn, the kind he had never heard before his friend was diagnosed with cancer a decade ago. Before his illness, he could stay up all night, reinforced by a carton of Marlboros and a friendliness that rivaled Senderovsky’s, but sprang from the same lonely fount.