Our Country Friends(64)
“There was a line in your book,” Senderovsky said. “It’s right after the first time your parents kiss in the Parimal Gardens. And the father is angry the next day. He’s in love, but he’s angry because”—Senderovsky closed his eyes to quote—“?‘She had taken away what he thought would sustain him for life. The character of the lonely man, his aloneness bordering on the holy. Wherever they went, whichever rich country would give them a visa, whatever more she would give him of herself, just as she had a moment ago given him the moist creases of her lips, he would never forgive her.’?”
Vinod was amazed at Senderovsky’s recall, how he had even remembered the name of the unremarkable gardens where his parents courted back in Ahmedabad. Had he read the manuscript many times since? Is that why he still kept the Teva box? For inspiration?
“And there were more lines like that,” Senderovsky said. “Plenty more lines on every page. You spoke the truth without being clever about it. You revealed your parents, while I hid mine in my shadow. All I had was cleverness. Cleverness paid well for a while.”
“I want to leave here,” Vinod said. He picked up the completed espresso cup, swirled the copper within, and swallowed the hot contents in one go. “All this is poisoned for me now. I feel more alone on the same estate with you than I would in my studio apartment.”
“You’re not going back to Elmhurst,” Senderovsky said. “And with your permission, I’m sending Hotel Solitaire to my literary agent tomorrow.”
“We’ve spent so many years of friendship together,” Vinod said, “without ever saying a proper ‘fuck you’ to one another. So, let me be the first to say it. Fuck you, Sasha Borisovich Senderovsky. Fuck you and your stupid comic novels and your stupid comic life. I’ll find my own agent.”
As expected, he did not feel better using those words. He was merely borrowing them from someone else, someone native-born and entitled to use them without the trace of an accent.
“No,” Senderovsky said. “You’re not going. You’re staying here with her. It’s safe here. And it’s easier to fall in love. And we can fix this, you and me. If it bothers you to see my face at the dinner table, you can eat in her bungalow or I’ll eat alone in the kitchen.”
Vinod washed his espresso cup in the sink, without saying a word.
But they continued to assemble for dinner, all of the eight residents, as if this was the only requirement of their stay: the daily climb up the cedar steps, the familiar placement along the table (Ed and the Actor had recently swapped places, so that the latter could sit next to Dee), the nodding of the heads in culinary appreciation as Ed made use of the latest local ingredients to appear at the local farm stand, cherries and squash. But, as mentioned, a new quiet reigned, a semaphore of love between Karen and Vinod and Dee and the Actor, but mostly brooding silence as the bungalow residents absorbed what their host had done against their most kindly member.
Only Nat talked and talked, about BTS and sunbathing groundhogs and the Korean-language cartoons she was watching with Karen (and now also Vinod), as if daring the others back into conversation. She was trying to defend her father’s honor, to remind them all that there was nothing more he liked than hearing the voices of his beloved guests, even as his toasting hand remained on his napkin, his eyes skirting over the cherry sauce with which Ed had nimbly coated his pork chops.
“The mal told the ori ‘you walk funny!’ A mal is a horse and an ori is a duck. But mal also means ‘bad language.’ That’s why the horse is always saying bad things. And that’s when he told hama hippo ‘you’re so fat’ and the hama started to cry.
“Well,” Nat said when she realized no one was going to reward her for her language lesson. “It’s not easy being a child in the time of the virus.”
After dinner, when the Actor suggested to Masha and Senderovsky that he and Dee should move into the main house (he claimed to need the signal now that they were going into preproduction) and Senderovsky and Masha and Nat should move into the Petersburg Bungalow, Senderovsky could only grunt assent. “We have to keep him happy now,” Senderovsky whispered to Masha in Russian. “We’re almost there.”
In her office, Masha’s Russian patients rejoiced at the nightly clashes between the protestors and the police throughout the country. They had never really cared for this land, these elderly Soviet immigrants feasting off the full smorgasbord of government support. They had been sickened by its promiscuous diversity, all but destroyed by its first Black president, and now they were going to take it back at last.
Photographs appeared on their social media feeds of the mug shots of Black men sneering into cameras alongside ungrammatical broadsides in English: “This man…went into Windmere gated community to steal a car. He beat the home owner to death with a bat, then went into their home and beat their son to death with a bat. This is equivalent, to a knee on an innocent mans neck…Ask yourself…why are you afraid to share this!!!”
And everywhere they turned, a man named Beel Gates awaited them with his monstrously long vaccine needle. Under the guise of the fake virus spread by his friend Dzhordzh Tsoris, bespectacled Beel would bend them over and “vaccinate” them right in the popka turning them into Marxist zombies who would be content to live in a society without “STRONG MASCULINE MEN.”