Our Country Friends(65)
They reserved a special hatred for Chicago’s mayor, a short gay Black woman married to a six-foot-tall white woman, these two socialist “freaks” who ran “the worst black-on-black murder city in America.” What would her patients think of her own family? Masha wondered. What would they think of Nat? Why was she helping them, healing them, listening to their twisted monologues, when she and her sister had never known such ugliness, when there had been no one in their own family to counsel or save?
On the day the Actor told her she should no longer wash him, confirming that Dee was now returning his affections, she heard a ringing in her ears. It was like church bells ringing in old Russia announcing the start of a snowstorm. On the previous days, she had shown some initiative in the shower, had opened her blouse and put one of his wet, soapy hands upon her breast, where he squeezed for a while, perhaps issuing a Morse code of distress to his publicist, and then she had placed another of his hands beneath her skirt, whereupon he recoiled and said, most stupidly, “But you’re not wearing any underwear.”
After that shower, as she was washing her own hands, he said, “I want to stop being in love. Can you recommend addiction therapy?” She said she had colleagues who could possibly help, although they were still doing studies on the effects of Tr?? Emotions, figuring out which category of maladies the effects of the algorithm best fit. He had come up to her then, as she was at the sink, talking in her calm therapeutic voice, and pressed his naked bulk against her skirt, rubbing against her buttocks in great circular motions, as if he still had more to give. “Thank you, Mashen’ka,” he said. She had taught him the diminutive of her name. “You’re the only one who gives a damn about me.” And when she went back to the main house, to her office and its monitor full of squeaking angry Russians, she sat down and felt the wetness of him on her skirt and thought she would cry out joyfully right in front of her Lyubas and Laras if only to show them what it was like to still feel something other than hate.
And then it was all over. Her husband was involved, obviously, had spurred Dee to reciprocate the Actor’s interest so that his pilot script would advance, knowing what it would do to his wife and, come to think of it, to one of his best friends, Ed. Was he any kinder, in the end, than the Laras on her screen, any better disposed to empathizing with the grief of others?
The Actor had rejected her on a Friday; this she remembered, because during her secret Marrano ritual that night in the spacious upstairs bathroom she had brought her palm down on both candles during her lehadlik ner shel Shabbat—her Actor-washing palm, to be sure—and was angry at the flames for extinguishing themselves so quickly, for neither cleansing her nor refusing to let her feel hurt anywhere but within the four chambers of her most problematic muscle. So we used each other, the Russian voice in her kept saying in a nontherapeutic, pragmatic, Lara-like way. We used each other, and then it had to end. Two people had needs, the needs were met. What else had she fantasized? That they would run away together? That she would mean everything to him? That they would have a bedside hotel breakfast in Los Angeles when this was all over? Every relationship was transactional, and no one ever gave more than they had to.
And now her husband was found out as his best friend’s jealous betrayer. “Why did Daddy want to hide Vinod’s manuscript in Steve’s winter palace when everyone says it’s so good?” “Not everyone, honey. I haven’t read it, for one.” “But Karen-emo says—” “That’s enough. Daddy’s not perfect, but he’s not that bad.” (Great, now she was defending him.)
So now she and her husband were both abandoned and scorned, the insulted and the injured, sentenced to a five-hundred-square-foot cabin on their own property, alone amid the field-mouse droppings and the coyote howls and the nearby guns going off off-season, the subdued pop-pop-pop! of their retorts getting closer every day, until someone would finally reclaim their bravery and aim straight for the two salt-and-pepper heads gathered over the samovar. Yes, the revolution was coming for them, too. How many revolutions would they have to live through during the never-ending historicity of their goddamned lives?
But the world of the colonists was about to change irrevocably. And, this time, it would have nothing to do with the Russians.
6
It happened three weeks later. Dee woke up in Masha and Senderovsky’s bed, listening to the prodigious rustle of trees that were close enough to touch from the main house’s second floor. Directly below her, the Actor was adjusting the futuristic knobs of the espresso maker to his satisfaction. The main house was a treat, especially with its strong signal for her laptop, but there were things Dee missed about their love affair when each still had their own bungalow. He had been giddy and manic then, coming up with strange new ways for them to express their love. He had suggested that they exchange their dirty underwear and keep it on their desks while they worked. The handyman, finally paid in full by Senderovsky and excited to see his foreign employers reduced to living in a cabin, happily hoisted the desks from Dee’s and the Actor’s respective bungalows and set up snug new offices in the house’s now-empty bedrooms. (“What a beautiful couple you two make!” he had said.) She told the Actor his underwear-exchange idea was disgusting—“But you’re just so Dee-licious!” he had shouted—but then they fought through his proposition with great charm, and eventually a silky, musky thing found its way onto her desk, draping one of the Underwoods from her old bungalow.