Our Country Friends(38)
“Dee,” he said out loud, as close to a moan as he could. “Oh, Dee.”
The woman stopped. She wouldn’t look up to face him. “Don’t stop,” he said. “Keep going.”
Masha recoiled, loosened her grip, but then there were the same words on endless loop: Das ist für mich, Das ist für mich, Das ist für fucking mich!
There was a lot of it and it mixed with the deer-skin-smelling suds circling the drain, until it was hard to distinguish what was his and what came from an expensive foreign bottle. She turned off the water, and he faced her now in complete silence, a tall Mediterranean body, the closed double brackets of his chest, the pre-sex of his belly, the stubbly well-shorn fuzz of a pornographer’s dream, and the menagerie of bobbing animals below. His eyes were red as if he had cried, and in every movie he had ever made there would be a scene where his lucky tears flowed and slalomed down the woodwork of his face like the catharsis of a nation, like an ancient rite. All this had been hers. Was that the right way to look at it? In the possessive? “There’s egg salad if you want for lunch,” she said.
He snorted, but then reached up to touch her cheek. “Your husband ought to fix the plumbing system,” he said. “But until he does, I want you to keep those buckets ready.” He smiled “boyishly,” he thought.
“We’ll see,” Masha said. She handed him a towel.
“You don’t want to towel me off? Finish what you started?” There was a joke in there somewhere. Plus the insinuation: she had started it.
“I have a patient,” she said, the sudden realization of her responsibilities to a person in (perpetual) distress entombing the birth of her own quick pleasure. She walked out, passed all the familiar sights, the big and little tokens of culture that cluttered her small home, holding her still-wet hands out in front of her like a proof of concept. The concept being that she was alive and strong and wanted, if not loved.
5
“‘My name is Luka!’?” Senderovsky happily sang along to the satellite radio as he bounced up the driveway at an obnoxious speed, scrutinizing a lawn now completely free of blanched tree branches. “?‘I live on the second floor!’?” An undeniably male and colonial feeling seized him. He had stood up to the Actor and, with the aid of Tree Guy, he had stood up to the detritus of a windstorm and thus to nature herself! The rest of the day would pass with grace.
An instant fog had settled over the property, and he could see a stack of freshly laundered towels in the upstairs bathroom window that put him into a deep, familial calm. Once again, everything was in its place. “You have a lovely family and a lovely home,” as his Los Angeles agent had said. He coughed into his hand for a good minute as he parked the car, his lungs seizing from the effort. It was the acid reflux, for sure. He should limit his alcohol intake and avoid chocolate and acidic foods.
Speaking of such foods, he had just driven to Rudolph’s Market in the village due north at Ed’s request to pick up a trunkful of items including a mysterious and expensive bottle of “Tunisian pimento & citrus confit.” As he got out of his car, he saw the Actor walking out of the house with a towel wrapped around his waist, his hair a dark halo, his ankles tough but slim, like Karen’s.
“Hello,” Senderovsky shouted to the near-naked man. “Yoo-hoo!” A thought occurred to him. “Did the water cut out in the bungalows?”
“Just another day in paradise,” the Actor said, pouting.
“Please go inside,” Senderovsky said. “I’ll have my handyman look at the pipes. You must be freezing.”
“I’m perfectly fine,” the Actor said. “I like the cold.”
He turned around and left the landowner to what he imagined was a dark state of perplexity. On the way out of the house he had seen the overexposed photograph of the young Senderovsky and his wife-to-be, a charismatic-looking child with resplendent Eastern cheeks, atop a haystack. He remembered Senderovsky’s howl at one of his authorial suggestions—“But that’s ridiculous!”—and counterbalanced it with the feel of his wife’s surprisingly deft hand upon him.
“Karen says it’s better to take a shower at night!” Senderovsky shouted after him. “I should have announced it earlier.”
“Fix it!” the Actor shouted back. Now he was playing a dictator atop a balcony, someone who did not need to use more than two words at a time. But back in the Petersburg Bungalow, he deflated. He sank into a hard modernist chair beside a hard modernist desk and slumped over like a schoolboy caught. First, there were the possible consequences. He scrolled through what had happened just minutes before. Had he crossed a line? Many of his Y-chromosome-bearing colleagues were now in the clink, metaphorically speaking, after decades of touching women and instructing women to touch them. The excuses about her generation and her professional standing seemed weak. If anything, she had the resources and wherewithal to eviscerate him. The best he could come up with now was that she was “European,” and perhaps this was not the first time she had cheated on her sad-sack husband. Still, he should not have said Dee’s name out loud as a final insult. That was as over the top as one of Senderovsky’s scripts.
Which brought him to Dee, of course. She was responsible for this! No, it wasn’t Dee. It was Karen and her algorithm. She was no better than the social media platform guy, the little orange snot at the congressional hearings. They were all scoundrels, out to destroy him, out to destroy the country. And now, thanks to Karen, his heart was not his own. And neither were his eyes.