Our Country Friends(103)

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    Lying in bed next to her. The bed was soaked with their sweat and Karen was sponging a pearly burst of semen off her thigh with one of the threadbare towels Senderovsky’s mother bought for him off a Ukrainian idling in a van. “Goddamn,” Karen said. “You really should get an air conditioner.”

He knew the reply to that. “Soon as they’re on sale in September.”

“I never know which one of you is cheaper: you or Sasha. Speaking of, I think he’s waiting outside for us to finish. Like a dog.”

Vinod cupped her breast, examined it in the gray city light of the 1990s. Yellow pollution, harbor skies, and, in his hand, those thin bright blue veins descending to the purple terminus of her softening nipple with its severe dimple-like indentation. “Wait,” he breathed. “Just a little more time together.”

“We don’t want a pissy Russian on our hands. And it’s not every day Florent sets up dinner on the pier for us.”

“What? What’s happening?” She was snapping on the neon T-shirt she got at the Stereolab concert, drawing her legs into one of his boxers and then a velvety miniskirt. Vinod got up. Out the window, the railway trestles of what would one day become a tourist park were rotting away like a distinctly American version of the Roman ruins, and the stench of blood and tallow from the meat-packers teased his nostrils. An Anglepoise lamp sat like a mantis on the desk he shared with Senderovsky, next to stacks of papers that were the respective manuscripts of their first (and in Vinod’s case, last) books. The rectangular bulk of a Macintosh Colour Classic Pro originally intended for the Australasia market hummed industrially, its floppy-disk drive warbling dementedly to itself. Vinod remembered his father and Senderovsky’s mother arguing over its price deep into the night—“Gujarati or Jew, who will win?” Vinod had whispered to his friend as they nervously drank beers in the back room, each hoping their parent would end on a gracious note, would give up the last fifty dollars that had formed a bloody wedge between them. Finally, at three in the morning, Mr. Mehta had reared up like a python and shouted at the Russian woman, “It’s because of your son that Vinod is staying in the city! Such universities he was accepted to. And he throws it all away for a city college.”

    And Senderovsky’s mother merely said, “Tphoo. Stop already being hysterical. It’s not my son. He’s in love with the Oriental girl.”

Karen opened the front door—the only door—to reveal a pup-like, puka-shelled Senderovsky in wait for them. “How long does it take to orgasm?” he complained. “The whole building could hear you.”

“Don’t forget to take the garbage down from the fridge,” Karen said.

Sasha sighed and opened up the fridge, where a Hefty bag full of Chinese takeout was crammed onto the single shelf, the outlines of cardboard boxes and metal handles perfectly visible from within its petroleum sheath.

They stepped into the asphalt heat and set off for the pier, passing the rows of Hasidic station wagons, their occupants being pleasured by transgender goddesses. “This is what real work is like,” Vinod remembered Senderovsky once declaring from a window table at Florent, “blowing someone who thinks you shouldn’t exist.”

Vinod noticed that he and Karen now walked out in front, sweaty hand in sweaty hand, with Senderovsky following them, as if he was their child or their charge. Every few steps, Vinod would look back to see his friend, kicking his feet out in front of him in that strange way of walking he had, as if his feet were merely a projection, as if he wanted to kick them off like a pair of shoes. Vinod felt guilty about the loveless Senderovsky in this new formation, about the fact that in this version Karen wanted him and not some white boys in mesh shirts flirting with her after hours at the Cooler on Fourteenth. The fact that he and Senderovsky were both single for so long had been their tightest bond. He wondered how their friendship would survive in this universe.

    They crossed the gritty unregulated highway with its overlarge American cars to get to the pier, which, downwind of a garbage plant, smelled like the city’s glorious ass. Transgender kids, though they were called something else back then, congregated in shy self-conscious packs around the pier, and there were stray female college students reading Geek Love. “Look,” Karen said. He saw now what awaited them at the pier’s edge—a linen-covered table, before which stood three beautiful Florent waiters, dressed in pleated pants and skinny ties for the occasion. “Oh, my,” Vinod said. “How did you make this happen?”

“You made it happen,” Senderovsky said, glumly. “It was always you.” A golden trail of cigarette butts and last night’s condoms, some ringed with lipstick, marked the path to the table and the waiters. As soon as they were seated, the sun fell out of the sky to be replaced by instant night, the air around them sultry and dense with effluvia beyond identification, memories of beloved Bombay. The checkerboard of the partly lit twin towers glittered in the early dark like entry-level magic on a Texas Instruments computer.

The waiters were usually sassy and verbose, much like Florent Morellet himself, that debonair cross-dressing lunatic with his Bastille Day parades. One waiter—Miguel, was it?—always flirted with Vinod, gave him unasked-for but nervously appreciated back rubs, called him Short Circuit 2 affectionately (different times). But tonight the waiters were subdued and meek, like Eastern European proletariat. They lifted the silver lids off the assembled dishes in unison to reveal their usual fare: “Alex’s mussels Proven?ale” with fries, “Evelyne’s goat cheese salad,” rillettes. Carafes of slightly chilled Beaujolais magically appeared. The kids at the mouth of the pier, playing “Groove Is in the Heart” off a cassette deck, eyed them like movie stars, blinding them with the flashes of their cameras. Karen and Senderovsky started eating maniacally, the fries quickly lost in the pools of aioli, the mussels being snapped back with oily fingers and sucked out with glee. When they would treat themselves to these meals, they would always think: Goat cheese! Aioli! Shellfish! Rillettes! How fucking sophisticated are we? How far have we come from Queens? But now all Vinod could think of was the smell of her sex on his fingers.