Our Country Friends(37)
“I’m here,” Masha announced herself, her eyes already having skimmed the trunk and twin ears of his genitalia, but not yet having the time to process the shaved and styled fuzz of pubic hair above. “Did the water cut out?”
“Yes, it fucking did! I can’t live like this. This conditioner contains”—some ingredient she had never heard of—“it needs to be washed out immediately! There could be retinal damage.”
“Here,” Masha said, “I’m going to take your hand now, okay?” She glanced around to make sure there was no one watching them (from the vantage of her bungalow, Karen was recording everything with her phone), and then grabbed his hand, the wet soapy warmth of it pulsing with life. He squeezed it like a panicked child. She led him inside, the conditioner still spilling off of him in great torrents and coating the rustic wide-beamed floors in opalescent industrial-grade suds. “I can’t live like this!” the Actor moaned. After only eighteen hours at the Senderovsky estate his outlook was already fully Russified. She led him into the bare-bones downstairs bathroom and, even though he was being led, he announced, sadly and dramatically, “I can’t see,” as if this was now his permanent condition.
She switched on the shower, but only a quick burst of water came out with a country snarl. The sinuous W of his buttocks filled her mind, knocking out Nat and Lara Zacharovna and the failed state that was her husband. There was an incongruous tuft of hair right atop them where the primordial tail would have found a home, almost a mirror image of the shaved outcropping above his twin ears and trunk, and she needed to stop looking below his waist. “I keep buckets of water around in case something like this happens,” she told him.
“In case something like this happens?” he yelped blindly. “This has happened before?”
She gently pushed him into the shower, her hand between the sharp blue shoulder blades, and told him to bend down. “I’m sorry I’m short,” she added.
He bent over for her slightly. She grabbed a bucket of water, hoisted it up, self-conscious about the size of her forearms, and began to pour the contents into the impossible thickness of his hair, massaging it with both hands, trying to get out the lather, which had already started to cement. He put a strong wet hand around her waist to steady himself, feeling no need to apologize for the severity of his touch. With his body forming a Russian г in front of her (thinking in alphabets calmed her), she could now see the contrast of the two hardened clumps of his breasts in free fall and compare them with the soft run of posterior, the slightly feminine hips, which lacked the usual indented lines of reasonably priced men’s underwear. (Did he wear any at all, or were they as silky as a Mormon’s garments?) The air filled with the strange musk of what must have been the special conditioner, bringing to mind the deer-hide rug her uncle Artyom “the adventurer” had brought home from far Yakutia or thereabouts. And all this was happening in a fly’s slow-motion time, her eyes recording everything with as much fidelity as Karen’s phone. “It might take a while before I get this out of your hair,” she said, feeling sweat start to coat her armpits despite the bathroom’s groaning fan above her.
“Not just the hair,” he said through his teeth.
“What?”
“Not just the hair.” His mind was feasting upon itself, the images carouseling about. He saw Dee, he saw his own eyes watching Dee in the enhanced photograph, but he smelled this woman, a twin pinch of morning dairy and sweat. Yes, he smelled this woman, the wife of the man who had just insulted his writing, his process, his substantial education, his love of the Greek classics. He stood before her hunched over, naked but powerful. Was he wrong in thinking that her hands caressed his scalp with more than a practiced mother’s touch? That they were hungry for him? He prided himself on knowing several persons of imperfect physique, but he had never thought he would stand naked before one of them. Through the slits of his pained red eyes he saw her pendulous bosom, the rosy fluster of her thick arms, and the folds of her neck, and although he knew that in the current sociopolitical climate many things were not allowed, perhaps this was still his due.
“Not just the hair,” he repeated, breathing heavily now. “Wash all of me. Get it all out.” He thought of adding “if you’d like,” or “if you can,” which would soften things and maybe even indemnify him, but he held back, proudly, his penis starting to rise on its own accord.
She saw all this. Heard the excited tremor of his voice and felt her own lack of control at the edges of her fingernails, inside the warm pouch of her underwear. She wanted to speak now, to speak one sentence after the next, to monologue in the manner of Nat or Lara Zacharovna, or to call her late sister and tell her everything that happened in endless run-on English sentences, not caring if her accent returned or not. But no, this wasn’t for anyone, not even for her dead sister. She thought of the final scene of her favorite movie, which happened to be set in East Germany, a former Stasi member buying a book about his life and being asked by the salesclerk if it was a gift. “Das ist für mich,” the aging former Stasi man had said, without affect, but with clear emotion. This is for me.
“Where do you need me to wash?” she whispered, the cartilage of his ear bending between her fingers, her cracked lips just 2.54 centimeters away. He reached up and took her other arm, at first unsure of where to place it. Again, he was aware of the tenor of the times, but somehow her age and profession calmed him. She was a medical doctor, she came from an era of different understandings. He put the hand against his chest, where he helped her make arcs around the hardness of it, and then reached down to massage the bellyfuls below. And now if she increased her arcs she would soon gather all of him. He wanted her to take her time, he wanted to be in control and also to be teased. At first, when the water had cut out in his bungalow, he imagined playing a recently blinded man in some extremely limited series on a new streaming network, using his panic, his loss of control, as propellant into a new dark (he had missed his own pun) place. But, as he had said to Senderovsky, all roles led to himself. And now she was caressing it, ostensibly to get the suds out, but with a practiced muscular motion. There was a word he wanted to say, a proper name, but it might not end well for him. Then again: a medical professional from an era of different understandings. He was sick of holding himself in check all the damn time.