Our Country Friends(25)
“I should turn in as well,” the Actor said after the door of Dee’s bungalow was shut, the little house lit in amber. He got up and hugged himself as if pressing his heart back into place, one chamber at a time.
“But there’s still a cheese course,” Senderovsky said.
“We got a lot of work tomorrow,” the Actor said to Senderovsky in a voice that he hoped conveyed his rank and authority but which, given his new affliction, failed to convince anyone.
8
“‘You smoke,’?” Karen sang, passing an imaginary microphone to Vinod.
“?‘I smoke,’?” Vinod sang back, passing the microphone back.
“?‘I drink,’?” Karen sang.
“?‘Me too,’?” Vinod sang.
“?‘Well good,’?” Karen sang, “?‘Cuz we gon’ get high tonight.’?”
Senderovsky and Ed sat on one of the porch’s nautical-looking moisture-resistant couches (they had been designed with a beach house in mind), watching their friends dance to the music in the candlelight. “The first time we heard this song,” house historian Senderovsky said to Ed, “was the night you and I met. It was 2001, a famous year, in that Fort Greene brownstone Suj and I used to live in. Remember my ex-girlfriend Suj? I wonder what happened to her.” Ed shrugged. “Some guy was running around with a suit of armor, and one of the deputy mayors or commissioner of something or other was snorting cocaine in the third-floor bathroom with you! That’s how we met, right? When I walked in on you and the vice mayor.”
“Wasn’t that the party where you met up with Masha again?” Ed said. He had finished a bottle of wine and the four Gibsons Dee had failed to drink.
“A lot happened during that party,” Senderovsky said. “It was seminal.”
Karen and Vinod fell in tandem onto the couch opposite, the one with the perfect view of the sheep farm beyond and its many rustic structures, a bungalow colony for quadrupeds. They were slicked in sweat and laughing, hands reaching toward each other, hungry for touch. Vinod was lost in the cluck-cluck-cluck of her dorky middle-aged laughter, the glint of her cheekbones. Karen felt the years falling away. When she reached for her glass on a side table she could have been reaching for a carafe of cheap Beaujolais at their favorite restaurant back in the day, a brasserie named Florent, the chrome-edged fortress of their origin story. Now she was scared of time’s compression, scared of the innocence Vinod invoked. They kept telling her that now, and only now, her life finally attained “limitless possibilities.” But all of these possibilities seemed quite limited and asterisked besides, born of unexercised stock options but not the understanding of others. The trajectory was clear: every passing year would mean being more alone, until even the bathroom mirror of her loft on White Street would figure out a way to reject her, would show her the face of another.
“You two are adorable!” Senderovsky cried. “Vinod, do you remember that party in Fort Greene, when we first met Ed? And when I met up with Masha again after twenty years?”
Vinod’s smile faded. He found himself crossing his legs. “Yes,” he said without affect. “Quite the party.” He did not want to time travel at the moment, particularly not to that particular soiree. He thought once more of his Teva box and the novel within.
“Noona,” Ed said to Karen through half-closed eyes. “Can you make me a cheese plate? Pretty please. I can’t walk.”
Karen sighed and went over to the table, where many sharp local cheddars and custardy époisses and oozy, bacony Greenswards congregated around a field of grapes. She examined her distant relative, his opened shirt revealing a triangle of chest hair, his pocket square, his brogues. Maybe he thought he was suave, but he reminded her of a midlevel salaryman stumbling into Seoul’s Apgujeongrodeo station just before the last train departed, headed toward his unforgiving mortgage and his unforgiving wife.
“Noona,” Ed said once the cheese was placed in front of him. “You must have tried the app yourself, right? Does it ever work for you? Did you and Leon try it before you split up?”
“That’s a bit personal, bhai,” Vinod said.
“What personal, we’re all best friends, right?”
“I’m glad you still have the capacity to fall for someone after all these years,” Karen said, “but Dee is not the right woman for you.”
“Oh, fuck you, noona,” Ed said. The sentence made him laugh. He liked referring to her as his “older sister.” Senderovsky was glad he hadn’t brought out the expensive eighteen-year-old bottle, which Ed would have quaffed in a minute and forgotten the next day. “I’m supposed to hold out for a nice stable Korean Masha, right? Well, that’s not all that’s cut out to be either. No offense, Sasha.”
“Eddie.” Senderovsky extended his hand, even though that was against Masha’s distancing rules. “Let’s get you out of that pocket square and into some pajamas, what do you say?”
Ed snorted and looked around. “Faces look ugly when you’re alone,” he said.
“Up you go, Jim Morrison.” As they hobbled off the porch Karen took something out of her pocket which Vinod’s bad eyesight strained to identify. Could it be?