Our Country Friends(14)
Vinod waved to Ed. The two men were curious friends, the way two dogs set off leash can sometimes run parallel to each other for infinite distances without sharing a glance.
“Where the hell were you?” Senderovsky said to Ed. “We didn’t make the vitello or Masha’s favorite sardines or the sausages or lamb steaks.”
“Oh, crap,” Ed said. He rubbed his eyes. “Is it too late? What will our Magnificent Amberson eat when he gets here?”
“He might not make it tonight,” Vinod said.
“Leaving Senderovsky as the most famous person at the table,” Ed said. “How convenient.”
“Masha’s been saving a pasta nel sacco for a special occasion,” Senderovsky said. “And Karen is way more famous than I am these days.”
“Ah, white truffles.” Ed smiled at a glossy memory from Le Marche. “Well, I guess I’ll go make Gibsons.”
“You’ll have to wear a mask in the kitchen,” Senderovsky shouted after him.
“Do you remember when he ran me over with a golf cart?” Vinod said after Ed had forgotten to close the porch door behind him, a somersaulting moth making straight for the candlelight.
“I hope you’ve never forgiven him.”
“You know my forgiving ways,” Vinod said. “Look.” He was pointing to what he thought was a convocation of fireflies on the front lawn, flaring their airplane warning lights low above the grass as if signaling to an advanced intelligence above. But Vinod had terrible vision, and firefly season was still months away. Beyond the vast front lawn and the imagined fireflies lay the curve of the road, its winter-cracked tarmac raked by a pair of approaching high beams.
5
Dee Cameron drove like a daughter of the Carolinas, the highways and byways a natural extension of her sandal-clad feet. She sped past Northeast suburbs as if they were forests of shortleaf pine; she could sense the police presence up the road and wore a white-toothed backup smile just in case.
At the mouth of the road leading to Senderovsky’s bungalow colony, she had spotted some true bungalows clustered about in peeling primary colors, the propane tanks unceremoniously placed by the front doors, the rows of mailboxes filled with garbage circulars and marked APARTMENT 1 and so on, as if they belonged to city folk and not the rural poor. Flags with obscure patterns of stripes and debatable numbers of stars abounded, some seemingly denying statehood to Alaska or Hawaii, or even Arizona. POSITIVELY NO ENTRY! a sign would scream in handwritten anger. TURN AROUND NOW! And Dee would be reminded of the fierce protection of meager property she had grown up with in a bungalow just like the one she was passing, amid the white poverty that had rightly served as the baseboard of the career she had recently built, the great rolling abusive monotony of it. Senderovsky’s own immigrant memoir had had some of that flavor (albeit with jet travel and more hysterical men), which is why she had signed up for his class in the first place back when she was a graduate student down in the city, back when Senderovsky still taught.
“In three hundred feet, turn left. You will have arrived at your final destination,” her car announced a bit grandiloquently. But had she? Other than the Actor, who she guessed would prove to be a goof, she didn’t know who was coming, or what to expect. No, wait, the woman who had designed the Tr?? Emotions app was supposed to show up, a high-school friend of Senderovsky’s, apparently.
She might have to put on an aggressive front, demonstrate her strength. Her essays were the equivalent of a new prisoner coming up to the toughest inmate in the can and slugging them right in the face. She wrote with a disdain for weak-bellied sentiment, mixed in with tough-love observations about the social class that had recently welcomed her into their messy brownstones. Sometimes her prose devolved into regional drawl and what one review called “Y’all-ism.” As a corollary, she owned a beautiful pair of 1970s cowgirl boots of a deep red color with rainbow stitching flaring out in sunburst patterns (not that any of her kin had ever worn anything of the sort). Because she was tall and her face angular, her eyes a repository for a deep alien blue, she knew the boots and something simple like a peasant blouse would bring out a host of Pavlovian reactions in a wide cross section of educated East Coast men. All she had to do was open her mouth and confuse the situation. She had always been politically nebulous and often mentioned the fact that when Joan Didion was her age—Didion was Dee’s stylistic godmother minus the regionalism—she had been a Nixon supporter in the early sixties. “My animus toward you runs on its own special fuel,” she warned the reader at the start of her collection of essays, “so y’all best mind your preconceptions. This pigeon will not be holed.”
And yet she was lonely. The virus was just starting to make a dead zone of her section of Brooklyn, leaving nothing but ambulance wails and possibly suicidal trips to the bodega. Her predicament was starting to feel personal. She had friends, but they seemed more interested in reaching out to one another than to her at this difficult time. Perhaps they had never thought of her as trustworthy.
At best, this sojourn would turn out to be an extension of Senderovsky’s drunken car wreck of a writing workshop. When she studied under him, or rather next to him, he had been at the height of his powers and popularity. But he had never been intimidating, not to her, at least. Anytime a serious question was asked of a student’s work, he would wear an expression that seemed to ask: What am I doing here? At this fine institution? Me, Senderovsky?