Our Country Friends(21)

“Freshman year,” Vinod said.

“I have almost no white friends,” Senderovsky said. And, he wanted to proudly add, my daughter is probably gender fluid.

“Thank you, Non Sequitur Man,” Ed said.

Masha had started bringing out the pasta nel sacco in her blue disposable gloves. The pasta was gummy, Senderovsky thought, certainly not al dente, and the white truffles, though tasty, made a bit of a mush. The landowner himself barely knew how to boil water.

“You should have seen these two when I met them,” Karen was saying apropos of Senderovsky and Vinod. “The things they wore. I would lecture them all the time. ‘When you guys dress the way you want to dress and you go to parties, people just think you’re weird. When you dress like I tell you to dress, people think you’re charming. Yeah, I know, it’s a freaking shallow town!’?”

    “How did they dress?” Dee asked, between mouthfuls of pasta she thought delicious. “Give us some highlights.”

“Yeah, how did they dress?” Nat sang out.

“Well, your daddy here wore puka shells!”

Everyone laughed, including Nat, who did not know what puka shells were. Masha checked this off as appropriate social behavior—the need to fit in.

“I can picture it all too well,” the Actor said.

“And Vinny here was super into Teva active sandals.”

“Oh,” Masha said. “I actually saw a box of those up in the attic. Maybe they’re yours.”

Senderovsky and Vinod glanced at each other. “I thought that box was in storage,” Senderovsky said. He nearly looked down at his own feet to hide his expression, thought that would be too damning, and instead turned to a tree between the bungalows in which a mysterious bird wearing yellow shoulder pads slumbered.

“What storage?” Masha asked.

“I rented a storage space down in the city.”

Senderovsky was not a good liar, but his wife still wanted to believe him. Vinod, despite being brought up by his parents to be an apprehensive immigrant, was not suspicious by nature.

“Why would you do that?” Masha asked. “We have so much room up here.”

“We should look through all that old stuff,” Karen said. “I just found some pictures of us in my old Crown Heights place that are hi-lar-ious.”

“Karen is our archivist,” Vinod said. “Which is crazy when you think about it, given her schedule.”

“What do you do?” the Actor asked Karen. He was being friendly. Participating. No one could call him disinterested. He swept back some of his hair just in case.

“She works in tech!” Nat shouted. “Her company has a licensing deal with BTS. Instead of ‘Fake Love’ they sing ‘Real Love.’ I just looked it up.”

“Is that right?” the Actor said, perking up.

“She came up with the number one app of last year,” Vinod said, as boastfully as if he was talking of his parent or his child. “Have you tried Tr?? Emotions?”

    “That’s huge!” The Actor looked at Karen across the table with a kind of faux-bewildered “What are we two doing in this place?” smile. “My girlfriend wanted me to do that with her. I had to shoot her down.”

“Too scared?” Karen asked.

“How much more in love can we be?” the Actor said.

“Aww,” Masha said, misinterpreting his tone.

“I’m not even sure how it works,” the Actor said.

“It doesn’t always work,” Karen said. “We’re being sued by a lot of unhappy campers. Even though the download is free.” She had failed to mention the spouses who lost their partners to the app and were now part of another class action suit.

“You take a photo looking into someone else’s eyes?” the Actor asked.

“And blam!” Ed said. “You’re both in love.”

“Sometimes,” Karen said.

“How does someone even come up with that?” the Actor wondered, throwing up his hands.

“Karen was just tooling around on her computer,” Senderovsky said.

“Please never say ‘tooling around,’?” Karen said.

“She was just tooling around and she came up with it.”

The Actor was still amazed by his dining companion. “But what’s the impetus for even envisioning something like that?” he asked. “Were you cast as Puck in a high-school version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream?”

“Let’s just say that somebody didn’t get any love as a child,” Ed said. He paused dramatically. “And that boy was me.”

Dee laughed. Ed noted the outsize form of her incisors. He had dated a girl with teeth like that in Italy, almost a foot taller than he was. She would bundle him up in her arms and carry an inert Ed around the streets of Bologna as part of a performance art piece she called La Pietà Mobile. This was almost thirty years ago. A generation ago, thought Ed. Most of the weirdness and wildness of the world had been snuffed out, even before the virus. Maybe some of it could come back now.

    “You should try it,” Dee said to the Actor.

“Me? With who? Or is it ‘with whom’?” He looked to Senderovsky, who shrugged. Grammar was not his specialty. He only knew English by sight, like a pilot flying without the aid of instruments.