Our Country Friends(108)
And this is what they drank to: The future together. The survival, in perpetuity, of the House on the Hill, with room for all of them, and one day, Karen said, “maybe even for Nat’s best friends or boyfriends or girlfriends.”
The rain came suddenly out of the heavy skies. But the city dwellers, masked and unmasked, would not stand for this intrusion. All across the roofless Filipino neo-sukkah, umbrellas went up into the sky, defiantly, and the eating and drinking and laughter continued even as the world flooded around them.
When it ended, and the night began to shiver in earnest, and Nat’s bedtime approached (a temper tantrum was just in the offing), the restaurant started blasting Sly’s “Everyday People” as ambulance lights wailed uptown past the ferns and plastic bunting to the hospitals just ten blocks north, and a bout of reggae competed with the restaurant’s speakers from the window of a parked old car across the street. (“How nineties!” Karen said.)
And although it was forbidden, they got up to dance with each other by the bike lane with its electrified deliverymen speeding at twenty miles an hour. “I am no better and neither are you / we are the same whatever we do,” sang the welcoming Black voices on the stereo, and the dancers now believed that all of these statements were true, and that they would go on and meld even further with their countrymen and countrywomen (Ed had finally applied for citizenship at Dee’s request), and they would be forgiven and accepted and sent out faces uncovered into the wider world, from Bogotá to Berlin to Bombay, where other people, equally happy, would dance with them, too.
Only Masha remained at the table, her hands over the notarized forms, protecting them from the rain’s return, watching her daughter, who was unused to the sounds of late-sixties soul, dance spasmodically, trying to keep up with the grown-ups who were modeling happiness and impromptu pleasure with their own awkward gestures and composed smiles, facsimiles of what they had once been before all the knowing happened. There was too much honey in her margarita, so instead of finishing it she raised it to him and spoke his name aloud, which made just a slight disturbance in the September air around her, but which made the fact of his life true, as if the sound of his name contained everything about him. Counting six people, three of them her family, she motioned the waiter over, put on her mask, and asked for exactly half of the bill. A small apartment with low white ceilings awaited them, but it was entirely theirs, bought through their labors, paid off slowly in the American way. At long last, it was time to go home.
To E.W.
acknowledgments
I am happy to be reunited with my editor, David Ebershoff, who has guided me through many love stories super sad and true and has excised his share of big and little failures in my prose.
Random has been my House for five books now and I would like to thank the many people inside that tall, friendly tower who have read and promoted by work, starting with Andy Ward and Robin Desser, who both helped steer this boat when it was still taking on water. And huge thanks to Gina Centrello, Avideh Bashirrad, Maria Braeckel, Denise Cronin, Barbara Fillon, Ruth Liebmann, Leigh Marchant, Carrie Neill, Darryl Oliver, Paolo Pepe, and Melissa Sanford.
Denise Shannon has been my agent for over two decades and is always the first to read my work with a kind but critical eye. I thank her and the other helpful readers of this book: Doug Choi, Dr. Jonathan Gross, Paul La Farge, Krys Lee, Suketu Mehta, Sarah Stern, Ming Loong Teo, and Alex Turner-Polish. James Baluyut guided me through the making of Ed’s vitello tonnato, which I highly recommend.