Our Country Friends(39)

His eyes. His eyes in the photograph. His eyes beholding her. Her being beheld by his eyes. That was the moment of climax in the shower, Masha no more than a handmaid (was that another joke?), all of it unspooling from himself, the want and desire and need. He had needs. He had a past. If he were smart about pursuing Dee, he would set aside a few months and write a memoir. Maybe now was the time to do it. Then he could present it to Dee and say, “It’s all in here. There’s no need to exalt me. No need to guess about who I am. I’m just like everyone else.” Except he wasn’t. He did not ask for his level of self-entitlement; it was bundled upon him like a curse along with his talent and the twin dolmas of his eyebrows. Of course he had suffered! You didn’t just fall into his level of range without suffering. But the particulars of how he had suffered, the “throughline” of his pain, yes, that’s what needed to be explored in the memoir. “Here is who I am, Dee.” A writer could say that even more accurately than an actor. “I wrote this for you, Dee.” He knew exactly whose name would go on the dedication page.

    He took out his tablet. It would be funny if he used the same style as hers for his own memoir. “I wrote this like you, Dee.” An homage. The Grand Book of Self-Compromise and Surrender by Dee Cameron. Now that was a good title. He clicked past the copyright page, gray light slanting through the window poetically, which brought his hand to his hair and a reminder that given his contretemps with the conditioner he had to run a brush through it sooner rather than later. His phone buzzed—sometimes the reception would get through for a second or two in the bungalows, the invisible probing hand of a cellular tower in the hills above—but he wouldn’t pick it up, and later he would tell his Glaswegian Elspeth that the reception was, to use a word from her language, “wonky.”

What if Dee’s book was devastatingly good? Could he get through it then? Would he despise her talent or learn to accept it? I have to stop being competitive, he told himself. He could handle the woman he wanted to be with forever having a minor kind of fame, instead of a failed kind like Elspeth’s. (She was a retired model-activist.) There was a knock on the door. What if it was Dee? He hopped on one leg while sliding on a convenient dirty pair of underwear and a T-shirt. “Just a minute!” Jeans were slid into and a bushel of hair eased to the side. He opened the door.

    It was the Indian guy holding what looked like a rough-hewn blanket under his arm (it was actually a handcrafted area rug Senderovsky picked up in Paraty, Brazil, during a raucous literary festival), and clothed for the weather in a very pragmatic spring jacket handed down from a rich cousin. “Excuse me, Mr. ——,” the peaceful intruder said, invoking the Actor’s beautiful last name. “Would you mind if I get a book out of your bungalow?”

The Actor nodded, resigned to being friendly. “I’m sorry, I’m awful with names, you are—”

“Vinod. I’m looking for a copy of Uncle Vanya. It’s right over there.” The man with the soft extinguished eyes knew exactly where Vanya sulked amid the colorful mass of bookshelves. Why wasn’t he given this bungalow? Perhaps the Actor could ask for a trade.

“I believe I saw you in a very avant-garde version of The Cherry Orchard in Berlin once,” Vinod said.

“Yes,” the Actor said. “When I was much younger. I played the actual orchard, if I remember correctly. Or the personification of it.”

“A very tough role, but you carried it off with aplomb.”

The Actor smiled and waved away the compliment. “I’m just a vessel. Chekhov was the genius?” He hadn’t meant it as a question.

“It must be exciting to collaborate with Sasha,” Vinod continued.

“?‘Exciting’ is not the first word that comes to mind.”

“He’s a great writer. I’ve been lucky to see him grow over the years. I even tried my own hand at writing a novel once, and he was kind enough to read it and give advice. He’s a teacher at heart.” The Actor was touched by the earnestness of Vinod’s friendship. He rarely saw the same affection among men in his own circles. “You would make a terrific Uncle Vanya, by the way,” Vinod said.

The compliments felt soothing to the Actor because they seemed to come from a place of real noncompetitiveness. Unlike Senderovsky, his friend had compliments to spare, and no need to constantly prove himself. He watched Vinod glide over to a bookshelf by the map of the Leningrad metro and pluck out the mentioned volume.

“Actually,” the Actor said, “I always wanted to play the self-entitled professor who comes to visit Vanya and his family. The one who owns the estate. Can’t remember the name offhand.”

    “Serebrakoff.”

“Yes! My stay with Senderovsky might really ground me in that character.” He felt very erudite to be having this conversation.

Vinod said nothing, merely shook his head and smiled. The Actor admired the five hundred eyelashes which staffed Vinod’s tired eyes almost as lushly as did his own. “Are you reading anything interesting these days?” Vinod asked, his arm circling the rows of books imprisoning them.

“I just downloaded Dee’s book of essays.”

“I read it last year,” Vinod said.

“Oh. What did you think?”

“I think she’s trying.”