Our Country Friends(17)

    She remembered now that Masha had lost her younger sister. To cancer, was it? She looked across the porch meaningfully but without modulation, a look Masha misinterpreted as anger instead of sorrow. What does she have to be angry about, Masha thought.

“How’s it going with that fire?” Masha shouted to Ed.

“No luck yet. The kindling’s gotten wet.” Ed glanced at Dee, who was sucking on an oblong Greek olive.

“A bad dancer is bothered by his balls,” Senderovsky shouted to Ed.

“Let’s go help him,” Vinod said to Senderovsky.

“You, sit!” Karen said, but Vinod rebelled.

All the men fussed over the woodstove now, Ed and Sasha ignoring the distancing rules, but none of them really knew how to light it, not even the landowner himself.

Finally, Masha sighed and got up. “Please move over,” she said, taking the poker from her husband. When the fire had been lit (a draft had to be opened to ensure success), Senderovsky realized Masha had given Vinod his exact place at the table so he could be closer to the warmth of the fire, his sallow face lit by a biblical glow.

“Masha’s awesome,” Ed said to Dee after he had retaken his place behind his Gibson.

“You probably laid the groundwork,” Dee said.

There was a term Ed and Senderovsky came up with a long time ago in the city, after a drunken May Day spent on a Fifth Avenue rooftop: sundress weather. The air was still brutally cold, but, to Ed, tall, slender Dee was the essence of sundress weather. He wondered how many inches she had on him, even in flats.

    “This is not jamón serrano,” Senderovsky was saying after his second glass of wine at the other end of the table, “this is jamón Monta?o.”

“What makes it different, Proffy?” Dee asked. She was hardly one for diminutives, but Russians seemed to appreciate them.

“For one thing, it’s a thicker cut,” Ed explained. He had failed to notice his right hand cupping his right ear as he spoke to her, but the rest of his friends did.

“Do you travel a lot?” Dee asked him, speaking louder, because his ear cupping seemed to indicate he had trouble hearing her.

“Oh, here and there.”

“Once this is over, I’m going to hit the road myself.”

Ed pictured something very specific: a cheap, rumpled room in Chania, on Crete, the sole window filled by a large many-domed mosque jutting out of the harbor, its optical white peeled clean by the sea, placed like a squid egg alongside a colorful devil-may-care row of Christian tavernas. And at the desk (because the single room of their minimal lodgings would still have a desk), this woman, Dee, was putting on a silver necklace he had bought her back in Athens, at the airport’s satellite terminal, it must be confessed, because even though he tried to talk her out of it—“If you don’t find anything better on the island, which, I swear, you will, we’ll get it on the way back”—her mind was made up, and now the silver of the pendant glowed against the sunburn of her skin. “I’m going to put some aloe on you,” the phantom Ed said to make-believe Dee. He had thought of every eventuality.

Ear-cupped Ed was about to launch into a dense and heartfelt soliloquy on the subject of journeys, when Senderovsky noisily pulled back his rustic chair and stood before the diners with his dressing gown and his glass of red.

“Oh, no,” Karen said. “He’s going to speak.”

“Daddy used to be a teacher before I was born!” Nat said.

“That’s right, and I was his student,” Dee said.

    “I think a really dumb person could learn a lot from Daddy!” Nat said.

Everyone laughed, Senderovsky wondering if the remark colored his daughter as too strange or too clever. “Even though we’re technically outside, we use our inside voice,” Masha instructed Nat. “And we think before we speak”—in Russian—“so that we don’t hurt people’s feelings.”

Sasha surveyed his guests. Ed was studiously not looking at Dee. Dee was looking at Senderovsky as if her grade depended on it. Masha was breathing along with the girl on her lap, hoping, as ever, to meld her mind with her daughter’s. Karen was sticking out her tongue at Senderovsky, which made Nat laugh, which made Karen laugh more.

Karen only ever dressed like she had just gotten out of a time machine, today a Salvation Army bateau shirt and thin-wale corduroys. (She had taken off her Bundeswehr army jacket because of the stove’s warmth, or maybe Vinod’s.) She looked better when she left the city, calmer. They all did.

“My dear ones,” he said. “Welcome to the House of People’s Friendship, as we used to call it back in the Union of Soviets. This is a scary time.” Masha pointed to Nat and pressed a finger to her lips. He had forgotten his daughter’s generalized anxiety disorder, though she was now mostly busy playing marbles with her olive pits and not really listening to him. “A scary time, but also a fun time,” Senderovsky amended. “We have abandoned our city for each other’s company, and we may feel guilty for leaving people behind who may get very sick.” Again, Masha pointed to their daughter and her behavioral profile. “But not too guilty and not too sick, because we’re all good people and we’re here to keep each other safe. Now, I’ve known each of you…”