Our Country Friends(49)
He had come here to dissolve—his words, not ours—but it was the city that was dissolving behind him. If she wasn’t here, if she didn’t make him happy every day with her predictable banter and nosiness, with her unexpected love for Senderovsky’s little girl, he told himself he would leave for Elmhurst at once.
But he stayed. They all did. Even as the indolence of the country life made them slower, softer, wobblier on their feet. The only exception, yet again, was Senderovsky, whose anxiety gurgled in the same acidic bath as his reflux. He couldn’t sleep and not just because his cough kept him awake. (Masha wore earplugs now.) He considered summoning a police car to investigate the black pickup truck, but he worried the arrival of the state troopers would scare Masha and the colonists. He kept his fear to himself, along with the memory of the oversize elm branch that might have killed him that night and the kindly force that rolled him to safety. For how much longer would he stay lucky? When he tried to breathe after coughing, he could hear the grind of his lungs and esophagus like the gears of a rusted superannuated clock. Each morning he smelled his own armpits, because the virus was said to affect one’s sense of smell. The familiar barnyard odors were there, but when he looked into the mirror he could not locate the gaze of his eyes, only their hollows. Who was sitting behind the wheel of the truck ready to assault his colony? Who had taken Vinod’s novel? Who had figured out the truth?
2
The Japanese reality show was the steady taiko drumbeat of their isolated lives. The pace was nineteenth century, at best, and sometimes Vinod or the Actor would put down the Russian play or novel they were reading and wonder if they were still watching the show instead. The setup was traditional to the genre, three Japanese women and three men in their twenties were given a fancy house in Tokyo or in Hawaii or elsewhere in Japan. But unlike the Western equivalents, the Japanese roommates rarely betrayed one another or erupted in profanity or succumbed to onscreen lust. They probed their friendships and dalliances and extended romances so shyly, with such a lack of surety, that Ed and Senderovsky and Masha and especially Vinod thought they were watching a parallel universe in which they were reborn as young and good-looking middle-class Japanese just starting out as retail workers and chefs and online personalities.
There were to date about a half-thousand episodes, and Ed knew them all by heart. How could this man without entanglements be so taken by a show where an entire thirty minutes could be spent discussing a slight rebuff over a bowl of soba noodles? How could Ed run to the bathroom in tears every time a spunky, na?ve half-Indonesian wrestler got rejected by her crush, a laconic self-involved basketball player?
Senderovsky also found the show heartbreaking. The failures of the onscreen young people brought to mind his own. They reminded him of his loveless early years, before he had sold his first book. Just as then, his finances were in free fall. The bill for removing the dead trees exceeded four thousand dollars, and he had had to take out an additional credit card from a usurious last-ditch lender. And now it was imperative for his marriage to fix the water situation in the bungalows and the main house. Yes, Senderovsky had heard that his wife and the Actor were involved in some kind of intricate cleansing ritual. He would sometimes press his ear to the door of the first-floor bathroom where he knew Masha kept emergency daytime water buckets, though he never heard anything. Also, there were rumors of Karen having taken a video of something untoward. When Senderovsky thought of his wife sexually, he returned to the wild Fort Greene party during which they had reunited in 2001, the smooth tanned skin, the way the light shone off the twin pivots of her bare shoulders, her youthful flirting and exaggerated med-school-student toughness. Had she any of that vitality left? And if so why would the Actor deserve those long-stored-away final dregs of life?
The handyman had come to look things over but could not pinpoint the problem even after folding himself painfully under several washbasins. “Well,” he said, “looks like it’s time to call in the general.” By which he meant the general contractor who had built the cottages. Normally, Senderovsky would laugh at this joke, file it under “country wisdom,” but today he grew impatient and cross. “What do we pay you for?” he bellowed.
The handyman stood at his full rural height, his features pink and childlike, his true age impossible to pinpoint, but all of him huffing with displeasure, fogging the cheap lenses of his glasses. (What if he was the driver of the black pickup? Perhaps his antagonist stood right before him, ready to crack him open as the elm branch should have done on the night of the storm.) “Thing is,” the handyman said, “you haven’t paid me in two weeks. And I don’t work for free. Missus got”—he mentioned the scientific as well as Christian name of a disease and some of its ghastly features. “We got bills, too. Only for us it’s a matter of life and death.”
Senderovsky watched his truck, gray not black in color, race down the fairway of his lawn and disappear with an angry rightward swerve. The general contractor was summoned, a skinny college-educated man who spoke in vexing, incomplete sentences and charged in increments of ten thousand dollars. He drove a black pickup, which he kept in country-authentic condition, spring mud still coating its flaps. Had this been Senderovsky’s tormentor, owner of the gloved hand tapping the wheel at the end of his driveway? No, it wasn’t possible. Senderovsky had always paid his bills to the contractor on time. Plumbers and electricians and tree guys came and went, but one never stiffed one’s contractor in the country.