Our Country Friends(61)
A shot rang out in the distance. Karen wondered briefly if it was hunting season as Vinod pulled the bateau T-shirt off, grasping like a schoolboy at the clasp of her bra.
Senderovsky and Ed heard the shot three meadows over. The stove had gone cold for the season and only a solitary candle still cast the two friends in funereal shadows. Senderovsky listened to the retort echo against the far hills to the east where the whiteness of the partial moon slumbered amid a sky of black and blue, forming the flag of a small Baltic country. Hunting season was not until the fall. What did it mean that they were shooting guns already? And here they were, showcased within the cedar jewel box of the porch above the meadows, two talkative targets bathed in candlelight.
“It was because she was half Indonesian,” Ed was saying. Finally, he had found the proper use for his pocket square, blowing his nose with abandon, the sound of it dull and elephantine. He was shocked by his own tears, though it felt surprisingly fine to cry in front of the emotional Russian. “The fans posted racist stuff all the time. They called her a monkey.”
His favorite housemate on the Japanese reality show, a twenty-two-year-old budding female wrestler, had killed herself after being taunted online. The show had stopped filming because of the virus, and now there was a chance it would never return. “She was the nicest of all of them,” Ed said, wiping his eyes. “When she fell in love with the basketball player, she was so shy and so honest about it. And when he turned her down, it’s not like the hope went out of her. She just wanted someone to love her. And because she was a wrestler, and a hāfu, and because she was both girlie and a tomboy, because she didn’t tick all the boxes they need her to tick in a conformist society, they bullied her to death.”
Senderovsky thought of Nat. Masha checked for signs of bullying after every school day the way they checked for ticks in the countryside, but all they could elicit out of Nat was that she was safe on her Quiet Mat spinning out her own fantasy world, sometimes talking to herself in a half whisper through the entirety of a lesson, which to Masha’s chagrin her teachers did not discourage or “redirect” because they wanted to “honor that part of her profile.” The only time she had cried was when she tried to get the whole class to dress up like members of BTS, and the kids thought she was being authoritarian, even though all she had wanted to do was to share the one thing she loved.
They drank quietly, listening to the radio, trying to decide if they both still liked Brian Eno. Senderovsky thought it might be time to steer the topic to the real matter at hand. “I don’t think you should leave,” he said to Ed, who had already packed his Gladstone. “Dee doesn’t love him. She’s just toying with him.”
“I heard the great showman finally okayed your script,” Ed said. “Good for you.”
“He’s no longer doing his assisted showering with Masha either,” Senderovsky said. “Now that he’s got what he wanted.”
“He asked me the other day if I could teach him how to grill a lamb shoulder,” Ed said. “I bet he was cheating off the Asian kid in high school, too.”
Ed lit a cigarette and Senderovsky quickly supplied an ashtray stolen from a middling Bogotá hotel during his traveling years. “Karen says they’re close to the antidote,” he said, noticing that Ed had the rare ability to smoke and weep at once (a skill learned at his mother’s knee). “Then you can have another shot at Dee. Speaking of shot.” He poured Ed another glass of the outrageously expensive liquor he had finally brought out for this occasion and gave himself a little taste. (It was against his nature to drink something so dear.) After the liquor hit all the sensitive parts of his esophagus like a pinball igniting the pleasure centers of its machine, he began to cough loudly.
“Where am I supposed to go anyway?” Ed said. “London? Seoul? My brother’s Hungarian vineyard? What would I even do there? So many parts of me are closed off for repairs right now. I might as well see her in person than in some angry memory.”
“I personally envy you that you can feel something for someone,” Senderovsky said. “When I stopped falling in love, my art died. I don’t even remember what love is like.”
“It’s like having a stuffed nose all the time.”
“Hmm.”
“It’s like pouring a jeroboam of champagne down your throat and then forgetting how to swallow.”
“Okay.”
“It’s like lighting a Romeo y Julieta with your own thumb.”
“I got you.”
The lights had gone off in Karen’s bungalow, and both men knew what that meant. “I hope Vinod remembers how to work his thing,” Senderovsky finally said.
“They say it’s like riding a unicycle.”
“Imagine wanting someone all your life, and then you go to bed with them and you discover that it’s just like doing it with anyone else. Or that it’s worse. Maybe you don’t like something trivial about them. I once broke up with a woman because saliva pooled in the corner of her mouth. What an idiot I was.”
“It’s the little things I’ll miss about that show,” Ed said. (Often the two were happy talking past each other.) “The way at the end of the season, they’d all get together to clean the house. Imagine that happening anywhere but Japan.”