Our Country Friends(23)

But then he looked at his own eyes. At the other end of the table Karen watched his expression change. His eyes in the enhanced photo were not his. They were not his photogenic eyes. They were not his bedroom eyes. They did not belong to Getty Images. They did not belong to his unimagined self. Maybe it was Senderovsky’s earlier remark, but he thought of the movies of the 1980s, he thought of an extraterrestrial’s elucidating touch, the flood of light and comprehension. This smiling man in front of him was who he needed to be, the final version, the finished version, and this woman, holding the phone in front of him, with her defiant strawberry cowlick and her unplucked brows, was who allowed him to ascend to that stage. He focused on his eyes the way he would focus on his lines. The Method was a site plan, but nobody knew how or why a role came together the way it did.

    Karen now recalled that her pitch deck for Tr?? Emotions had started with a photo of the Actor and the Norse royal he was dating at the time. Although he had never been a brand ambassador, he had always epitomized the broad strokes of the algorithm.

“Well?” someone was saying.

“Nice, very nice,” the Actor said, and laughed. Others laughed with him. Dee laughed. But Karen knew that tone.

“Ruh-roh,” she said quietly, her distance from others allowing the words to pass unheard, though Ed read her lips anyway.

Dee walked back to her seat once more. “It’s a fun app,” she said to Karen. “Whether it works or not, it makes you think about what people want from each other.”

“That’s right,” the Actor said, still in his fugue. He looked over to Dee at the other end of the table, her body a blot of green and orange heat amid the blackness of his night vision. “If you don’t mind,” he said to her, “could you send me that photo?”





7


Alcohol is the gift of any narration, and any writer thrills to the thwop of a corkscrew being pulled. Now the protagonists will reveal themselves. Now there will be unchecked laughter and love. Now the principals will flirt and be cruelly rebuffed, and the loveless will sigh into their cups and try to remember what it was like to be wanted.

An hour later, every adult but the Actor and Masha properly drunk, Senderovsky found another bottle of primitivo between his legs as he struggled to get it open. “That can’t possibly be safe!” drunk Vinod was shouting.

“My thighs don’t have the virus!” Senderovsky shouted back.

“Doctor?” Vinod asked Masha. “Your professional opinion?”

“That would be a difficult route of transmission. Though we don’t know yet what’s possible.” She noticed the stove sputtering in the corner, ready for a strong hand, which would have to be her own.

“I saw this on the platform of your train station,” Ed was saying, holding up his phone for others to lean in and look, one at a time. It was a photograph of a sticker in red, white, and blue featuring some kind of extraterrestrial iconography, a deconstructed swastika entrapping the segments of a hissing snake and the words PATRIOTIC DEFENSE LEAGUE. SLEGS BLANKES.

Senderovsky and Masha both thought of the many tattoos gracing the ankles of their handyman. “I’ve seen stuff like that around here and it’s frightening,” Masha said. “Down by the main road, someone has a flag of an eagle sitting on top of a globe. And the globe has an anchor running through it.”

    “I have three uncles in that organization,” Dee said.

“The Patriotic Defense League?” Masha asked. “How scary!”

“No, the US Marines.”

“Oh,” Masha said.

“You go, girl,” drunk Ed said to Dee. “You tell ’em! Down with the ruling elites!”

“Just so you know,” Karen said, “Ed is the scion of a chaebol family.”

“Chaebol light,” Ed said. “And I’m the black sheep of the family. They got me on a tight leash these days.”

“When using a foreign word it might be cool to explain what it is, or some of us might look stupid,” Dee said.

“That’s right,” the Actor said. He looked at Dee in a blaze of heterosexuality.

The definition of “chaebol” was patiently explained to Dee by the two Koreans. “But my family doesn’t own Samsung or anything,” Ed cautioned. He was drunk now; his hand off his ear. A part of him did want Dee to understand that he had means at his disposal. Enough for a decent life, enough for Chania.

Masha was still thinking of the fascist sticker on the platform of the train station, and her unlit Sabbath candles (it was Friday), and her Asian daughter. “What does slegs blankes mean?” she asked.

“?‘Whites only.’?” Ed said. “It’s Afrikaans.”

“Great,” Masha said. “Just great.”

“More wine, Proffy!” Dee demanded.

“I’m going to cut you off,” Senderovsky said, though he gave her a full pour, while looking at the Actor corner-eyed. He had noticed the way the Actor was staring at Dee and wanted to see where this was going.

Dee bolted down the thick fruity vintage. Ed was quietly selling her his vision of what constituted a memorable journey to Crete, but she seemed to have something else on her mind. She turned to Senderovsky. “You know, instead of building all these cottages or whatever you call them and inviting your friends up, you could just get to know some of the locals instead. I mean they’re people, too, right? Ex-Marines and all.”