Our Country Friends(18)
Senderovsky may have uttered some still-more-passionate sentences here and he may have felt tears building along his lower eyelids as he did so, but no one heard his words or felt stirred by the hot liquid sluicing gently from his orbs.
A tiny red car was crunching up the gravel. It stopped at the toppled branches, as if examining them, critically, and then continued along. Senderovsky thought it looked like the little vehicles that had been given out to invalids of the Great Patriotic War. Ed correctly surmised it was a Lancia.
“It’s him,” Masha said.
“Who?” Nat asked.
But no one answered.
6
The Actor stepped out of the car. He was immediately aware of an audience readying their lorgnettes. He was in no mood. The scenic drive had been endless, and most of it had been spent arguing with his girlfriend on the phone. She had been unusually Glaswegian, so it was hard to tell exactly what she was saying, but the fight appeared to be about the timing of the Actor’s visit to the countryside, and now it had lodged itself firmly in a space usually reserved for nasal headaches. Senderovsky was rushing toward him in what looked like Hasidic dress, his lips wine purple, the remaining tufts of his untrimmed hair leaning oddly to the side like a stegosaurus at rest. “You’re here!” he said to the last of his guests. “I was so worried you wouldn’t come. Because of your many messages.” The Actor tilted his head and looked far away as if to say: Messages? There were messages? “I was just delivering a toast, but now I’ll start all over again. But first, we go to your bungalow, no?”
“You tell me.” Senderovsky’s smile melted in the heat of his guest’s indifference.
“Is that all your luggage?” the landowner asked. The Actor had slung a duffel bag inscribed with the name of a California winery and resort Ed despised.
“Only here for a few days.”
“Of course, of course.” They went up the path past the silent porch with its many eyes. Masha could hear Senderovsky’s obedient blather and it made her sad. “The idea behind this whole property, the mad idea, I should say, was to create the bungalows on an even plane with the main house. The bungalows are between five hundred and eight hundred square feet each, the largest one meant to accommodate a small family, and the main house has bedroom quarters of about the same space meant for three people, myself, my wife, and my daughter. You’ll get to meet them in a second, my wife is a huge fan. In addition, there’s a kitchen, dining room, and living room with a grand piano that all residents can share. (I believe I’ve heard you play onstage.) While we’re here there are no social ranks. Everything’s a bit communitarian. Add to the number of people staying at any one time one other entity, which is our little society as a whole. When I was a child my happiest memories were of a bungalow colony on the other side of the river catering to Russian immigrants, cheap but tidy lodgings, wonderful people, such warmth! And here we are.”
They were standing at the entrance of a bungalow, adorned by the same gray stucco as the main house. A motion sensor that always ignored Senderovsky snapped to attention immediately as the Actor neared, a halogen light spotlighting him and only him. “Although I must confess,” Senderovsky continued, “that while all bungalows were created equal, this one may be my favorite. And my wife’s, too. You’ll see why in a minute.”
He opened the door and turned on a light. The Actor could not see why. Maybe it had not been a minute. The walls were covered by rough-edged, handyman-made bookshelves, which were filled with volumes, some of them old and foreign. There were framed, fussy drawings and photographs of a city he did not recognize (Copenhagen, could it be?), a massive drawbridge accepting a carnivalesque cruise ship, an array of homunculi in baseball caps waving from its deck, an orange castle framed by two frozen canals and groaning under a blanket of snow no one had asked for, a map of a subway system written in an unfamiliar alphabet, the intersection of its green, red, blue, and purple branches forming the occasional parallelogram or backward 4.
“This is the Petersburg Bungalow,” Senderovsky announced. “The city where my wife and I were born!”
“Huh,” the Actor said. “Is one of these books Crime and Punishment?”
“That one!” Senderovsky said, stabbing a Cyrillic spine with his forefinger. “And a translation is right here, next to your bed. You are, of course, welcome to read anything you like. Make a little picnic if you wish and sit in the meadow, reading. I can think of nothing better.”
The Actor smiled with his eyes. He was about to tell Senderovsky some unhappy news, and suddenly felt a syringe’s worth of compassion for the man whose book he had been adapting for the last half-dozen years. Senderovsky—or “Return to Sender,” as he and Elspeth had nicknamed him after they had rejected so many of his drafts—sounded different than he did back in the city or in Los Angeles. The Actor did not realize that the bilingual nature of time spent with his wife and daughter inspired in him a different soundtrack.
Meanwhile, Senderovsky enjoyed the Actor’s smile and the way his presence inhabited the five hundred square feet of the Petersburg Bungalow. Back in elementary school, a dreadful place for the likes of short, awkward Senderovsky, students collected glossy informational cards with pictures of animals on them. The most desired card featured a puma resting its head atop its paws, white-furred mouth and yellow eyes conveying the height of animal thought and repose. If you flipped the card over, the puma could be seen licking its lips after a successful kill, its tongue reaching up as far as its nose, next to a series of statistics that demonstrated how fast the puma was, how sentient, how beautiful and feared. Time spent with the Actor, with those thoughtful eyes and white mouth, always brought that glossy puma card to mind.