Our Country Friends(15)
Also, she had tried Tr?? Emotions on a first date with someone whose company she thought she liked, a bearded journalist covering the luxury-watch market, and it had not worked out for either of them. So, most likely, her teacher’s friend was another Palo Alto fraud.
“Turn left,” her car reminded her, its personality that of a fidgety beagle. It was not an expensive car, but it was hers, no payments, and it symbolized the ability to own a car in the city, to cough up the occasional parking fee. She turned the wheel with her right hand from midnight to seven o’clock. In the glare of her high beams, the tall grass of the front lawn fluttered up and down in the wind like her neighborhood’s Jews at prayer. The gravel up the driveway was deeply uneven, and gigantic tree limbs were scattered about, outtakes in a documentary about bleached coral reefs. Was all this—the uncut grass, the dead tree branches—supposed to evoke the devil-may-care attitude of wealthy urban aristocrats who studiously rejected appearances? She had to get this right, to figure out who these people were in case she had to attack them.
The sight of the main house and the bungalows flanking it was more bewildering than intimidating. She had seen a photo of it in the newspaper’s real estate section, Senderovsky having been given a chance to call his property his “folly,” but the main house looked small and ordinary, and the only thing interesting about these structures—each not that much bigger than their impoverished counterparts down the road—was their unusual number. She could spy several people on the half-lit porch (candles?), which alone provided poetry. Her car beams rummaged through disheveled grass, insects dancing in the light, everything a little mythic and primordially Southern. Dee thought of a kiss in her high school’s back lot, rough chapped hands at her bra, the dangerous mouth of an eighteen-year-old alcoholic, a torn windblown banner cheering on the team whose standing-room-only games she had ignored, SHOOOO, DOGGIES!
Senderovsky ran down the cedar stairs to greet her. He was wearing some kind of dress. So that’s who he was going to be at this juncture. He had lost a great deal of weight and hair since she had seen him last at a literary party so rich and stuffy that they had both been tapped to provide diversity. She opened her car door and dug a sandal into the gravel. “Hey, Proffy,” Dee sang, hugging herself to show how she would have hugged him if this was happening only a few weeks ago.
“Dee Cameron! Hot dog!” Senderovsky sang back, hugging himself, too. “You made it. Yay! And I’m a proffy no more. Just another civilian. They broke my sword, Dreyfus-style.”
Dee had two very fine degrees, but she missed out on some of the cultural references of which the older generations were fond. That did not bother her. Even in class, Senderovsky would babble on, nervously, drunkenly—at times, she had to add a third adverb, charmingly—while the students pawed their phones beneath the giant conference table. “I brought an Armagnac,” she said.
“Ooh la la!”
“I remember how you quaffed that shit down in class.”
He grabbed her bags and put them down right away. His next hernia was just around the corner.
“Sorry, I overpacked,” she said. “Girls’ stuff. Let me help.”
“No, no, no.” Senderovsky grunted away. “Now what was that girls’ school called? Miss Porter’s. Well, call me Mister Porter.” Again, Dee knew not what he was talking about, European or mid-Atlantic stuff most likely, but again she laughed as they circled the great yellow porch, the people within still indistinct, but two sets of male eyes clearly following her.
* * *
—
“That is a surprisingly good-looking woman,” Ed said.
“I can’t see well in the dark,” Vinod said.
* * *
—
She had been placed in what the newspaper article had described as “the Writer’s Cottage.” The ordinariness of Senderovsky’s projection of the “writing life” broke her heart. There were, she counted, seven antique typewriters and possibly one more in the bathroom. She could picture her former teacher piling the last Underwood on the blond-wood shelf next to the poster of a young Joan Didion—he was, to his credit, the first instructor who had given her a copy of Didion’s White Album—and thinking, There. Everything’s in its place now.
“This is the smallest cottage, but it’s also the coziest,” Senderovsky was saying.
“It’s like a garret in the woods,” Dee said, remembering a word he had repeated often in class.
“Exactly!” Senderovsky cried. That minor detonation inspired both of them to step apart. Senderovsky thought he could smell perfume, but maybe it was a floral shampoo. It had been almost two decades since he had pursued anyone, and during the official wooing of Masha he had never really cataloged his future wife’s smells. She smelled, from the start, like home (a tragic beginning, he now realized).
“I’ll let you freshen up, and then we’ll go meet the gang,” Senderovsky said.
“I’ll walk up with you,” Dee said. “Just gonna pee.”
Senderovsky sat on the tiny bed—in his recounting, none of his guests had ever made love on it, those monkish writers—and listened to the sound of a muffled but hearty stream coming from the bathroom. He was excited by the day’s many chapters, but already growing tired before the main event of dinner and the uncertainty of the Actor’s arrival, and, hence, of everything else in his life. Student peeing, he thought to himself, not lasciviously, but filing it away for some possible future reference.