Our Country Friends(101)

“But what do I do?”

“Maybe it’s best that you don’t find out,” Vinod said.

The Actor looked up at him. Looked back to make sure the cameras were not filming. He got up, forgetting to wipe the nonexistent dust off his knee. “You should go,” Karen said to him. “Leave here for good. Summer’s almost over. Resort’s closing down.” And now the Actor wanted to slug her back, to deliver a backhand if not a left hook. Because it had all started with her, hadn’t it? One tiny snap of a phone’s camera lens. Instead he walked off the porch, the camera and microphone once again borne aloft and pointed in his direction.

On the cedar steps, he ran into Dee and Ed, still in their Russian garb, their arms linked. “Joel,” Dee said to him. “Do you want to come down to the city?”

He looked at her, mystified, as if she had never spoken his given name aloud before. “Yeah,” he said. “Sure. That would be great. My car broke down.”

    “You can catch a ride with us,” Ed said. “We have space for you and maybe one piece of luggage.”

“Okay,” he said. He looked at the two lovers, examining them afresh, wondering, without malice, if they would survive as a couple in the difficult years to come, in the city, in their masks. “If you’ll have me,” he said.



* * *



—

“Could you leave, too?” Vinod said to Karen. “I want to speak to Masha.”

Masha sat on the white rocking chair, adult sized but bought specifically to entertain Nat, its wild motions meant to make up for her lack of horsing-around siblings or friends. “How are you feeling?” Masha asked. “Was that too strenuous?”

“It was fine,” Vinod said. “But it won’t end well.”

“I’m sorry I can’t hear you,” Masha said, adjusting her face shield and mask. She had taken off her gray wig, but still wore her kaftan, and her posture was bent as if she could not slough off her role as the old nurse.

“It won’t end well for me,” he said, louder now. Down on the front lawn, Senderovsky had taken on the role of traffic warden and was maneuvering a line of Subarus off the grass and onto the gravel driveway. The black pickup was long gone. “You have to stand up to them when the time comes,” he said.

“What do you mean?” she said.

“Sasha and Karen.”

“I can’t stand up to them,” she said. “When have I ever been able to stand up to them? And you have your MOLST.”

“Karen will find a way. And Sasha will back her.” He took a deep breath. “There was a man, they amputated both legs, his right arm, the finger of his left—”

“That won’t happen to you. The odds of that—”

“He died anyway. Two months on the ventilator.”

“Karen wants to fly in the best specialists.”

“They’ll have me in the hospital in no time.”

“There are days when you show signs of improvement.”

    “It’s not going anywhere. It’s lingering.” He took a deep breath, his intake meager. “My oxygen levels can plummet any second. My heart rhythms can go nuts.”

“All good reasons to get the best care.”

“Mashen’ka. Listen to me. You were in a dream of mine. You helped me up the stairs.”

“You’re getting overexcited. You need to go home and rest. This whole thing was ridiculous. I can’t believe I was forced to act.”

“You were good.”

“I was not.”

“Fine. But you’re not an actor. You’re Mashen’ka. You have to help me. You have to promise. Say it. ‘I’ll fight them.’?”

“Vinod.” His helplessness made her feel eleven again. Landing at the madhouse of an airport, her country’s proud bant in her hair, the sleek luggage carts, the advertisements for products that could not have possibly existed, the lack of caps with socialist insignia above the mustaches of the immigration officers. She was so small again. As small as him. Vinod, the once adjunct professor and short-order cook. When you circled too close to the country’s outcasts, they killed you. Just by association. This is what her old Soviet patients, the Laras, understood intrinsically: this country was a killing field. By associating with the killers, they hoped they would be spared. “I’ll do my best,” she said, wondering how she could keep that sentiment from just being words, “official phrases,” as they called them in Russian. Also, it was what the housemates said to each other on the Japanese reality show. I’ll do my best. As a worker, as a boyfriend, as an influencer. And then they failed anyway.

She and Karen walked him down the cedar steps and toward the bungalow, and he felt their warmth echoed in the warmth of the night. He thought of Uncle Vanya’s words, “This wonderful feeling of mine will be wasted and lost as a ray of sunlight is lost that falls into a dark chasm,” and thought: No, not for me. For me, it is not yet lost.





9


The spotlight fell on Dee, the moderator, in her spaghetti-strap dress and high-cut bangs. Her smile was just a shrug with teeth but he would take it anyway. “I am pleased to welcome you to the Other Voices/Other Shores reading series,” Dee said. “Tonight we have two of our nation’s leading immigrant voices, Sasha Senderovsky, author of Terrace House: The Dacha of Doom, and the newcomer Vinod Mehta, with his debut, Love Is Letting Go of Fear. We’ll start with a reading by Mr. Mehta.”