Our Country Friends(32)
He waved after it defiantly.
2
“I’ve been rereading Odysseus this morning,” the Actor said.
Oh no, Senderovsky thought.
“I was thinking about my own commonalities with Odysseus. And with Misha.” Misha was the name of the character the Actor was supposed to play in the adaptation of one of Senderovsky’s early novels. He was the son of a wealthy Russian oligarch who tried to escape to the West in a long, roundabout journey that took him through a former Soviet republic riven by civil war. “Me, Misha, and Odysseus share a lot in common,” the Actor was saying. “We have a worldliness, a cunning, we’re tricksters. But we’re constantly battling our hubris. And by hubris I mean self-entitlement, which is the same thing.”
Is it, though? Senderovsky asked himself.
“Yes, I’m self-entitled,” the Actor was saying, “but that’s what drew me to this role to begin with. It’s the most natural elucidation of who I am as a person circa right now. It’s the rare role that lets me plunge feetfirst into myself.”
“I see,” Senderovsky said.
“Do you, though? Because—”
The em dash above may make the reader think there was a break in the Actor’s speech, but it was only a break in Senderovsky’s consciousness. His eyes were watching the Actor pace, puma-like, as he was known to do in his most excitable moments, up and down the short length of the bungalow, constantly removing the hair that cropped his eyes like an ancient veil. Ed had recommended a Japanese reality show to Senderovsky, and he was now reminded of the way the young women on that show also continually brushed their hair away from their pretty faces as a way of punctuating their dialogue. Senderovsky was also reminded of the classroom. Not the one he led in his decade as a professor, which could never have been tarnished with an epithet like “didactic.” (One of his students had drunk so much Armagnac during a seminar he had to be transported to the university hospital.) He was thinking of his early years in the country, sitting in a classroom without English, trying to follow the ramblings of some unprepared, anxious educator, while his mind returned home to Leningrad, to the metro, to the whoosh of its rubber-clad tires, to the chess moves of a junior novel he was already plotting in his overstuffed mind. Did Nat have any memories of the Harbin orphanage, despite arriving in this country just shy of four? He planned to ask her at a much-later date, frightened of what she might reveal to him.
“I’m returning to Ithaca,” the Actor was saying, “I’m readying my bow and arrow to slay Penelope’s suitors, but those suitors are me. Or, rather, they are the parts of me that need to be slain.”
Senderovsky thought he was catching on. “You want to slay your self-entitlement,” he said.
“No!” the Actor shouted. “Have you been listening? Self-entitlement is my fuel. It’s the bag of wind that what’s-his-face gives to Odysseus. It lets me be the trickster that fools the Cyclops. Do you know what this script lacks, what all of your scripts lack? One word. Subtext.”
“I taught a graduate seminar on subtext,” Senderovsky said.
“That’s your defense for a shitty script? Academia?”
The Actor launched into another soliloquy, this one more impassioned than the last, sometimes holding up a hand in front of his face and talking into its palm, as if for want of a skull. Senderovsky had seen him agitated, but never like this. He’s really in love with her, Senderovsky thought. How could he use this to his own advantage? According to Karen he might be “confused, disorganized, searching for direction.” What if he got Dee involved in doing a very minimal rewrite of the script? Could that be a sense of direction? Would that help get the script over to the network?
“Instead of starting on the image of Misha ripping into a crawfish with his bare hands while rapping about his wealth on top of an inflatable duck, we start with a dream sequence in which he envisions himself spinning a globe, over and over, Russia, Europe, the Atlantic, America, Russia, Europe, the Atlantic, America, Russia”—Yes, thought Senderovsky, I get it—“as a pair of eyes hovers in the distance, like the cover of The Great Gatsby. And only by episode eleven does the audience realize what it has known subconsciously all along. That those are Misha’s dead mother’s eyes.”
“But that’s ridiculous!” The outburst had left Senderovsky’s mouth of its own accord. There was no way to invite it back in.
“What did you say?”
“I’m sorry,” Senderovsky said. “I simply meant that this is still a comedy. That’s what the network bought. Dreams of dead mothers are inherently not funny. Why can’t we share a little laughter with the audience? Especially given the times in which we live. Wouldn’t it be selfish of us to hold it back?”
“I can’t work with you,” the Actor said. He went to the bathroom and turned on the tap full blast. This gave Senderovsky time to weigh his options and gather his thoughts. Once they were gathered, he straightened his posture and puffed out his chest. When the Actor returned, he would be ready to say the following:
“If you don’t like my scripts, you’re free to leave anytime.”
Senderovsky never imagined himself capable of uttering those words—most of his income now depended on the Actor and the script—but there they were. Why did he say them? Because he knew the Actor wouldn’t leave the House on the Hill, his Tr?? Emotions in tow? Senderovsky got up and walked to the door.