Our Country Friends(66)
What was it like to be involved with the Actor? It was all-consuming, like watching him from the front row of a movie theater, the volume of his musical voice blaring, his face up close, constantly puzzling through new things with unbridled enthusiasm, lighting up with pleasures he had surely experienced before but which he now repurposed as new and exclusively theirs. (“This is the first time I’ve ever really encountered an apricot.”)
“I love you,” he would say first thing in the morning.
“I respect that,” she would answer. Fine, he would think. Respect was but a signpost on the road to love. All he needed to be was more lovable.
* * *
—
Now that she had plenty of signal around her, each morning Dee indulged in the privilege Senderovsky used to enjoy, the ability to tune in to social media before even brushing one’s teeth. She found herself surprised by how much she liked the vitriol directed against her by the Actor’s fans, some of whom posted side-by-side photographs of Dee and her predecessor, Elspeth of Glasgow, to highlight the deficiencies of the former. The photo they used of Dee was usually the least attractive they could find, her eyes squinting at the flashbulb of some literary festival red carpet, her face betraying unfamiliarity with even this minor form of fame.
What did it matter? They were now crowned as the first couple in the age of the virus. Her book was enjoying a very modest uptick in sales, and her publicist had called to congratulate her on her new relationship. On this particular morning there had been great response to the photo of her and the Actor holding a baby squash together on his feed, her head curled into his shoulder with an impish smile, both of them with their bushels of long, tangled virus hair, under which he had written “We’re learning to make babies!” as if they had grown the squash themselves and not picked it up at a farm stand. Also, this implied they might soon become a family, which was just the kind of outrageous statement the Actor could get away with.
She was lying atop a stack of pillows, their cases only recently denuded of the starchy scent of their former owners. They had forgotten to have sex that morning, an omission she could live with (it would be imprudent to get too used to any routine), and the bough of a scraggly elm kept elbowing the window as Dee scrolled through her many mentions, until she thought to herself: Damn, we ought to get the tree guy to trim these trees. Just the other day, after they did have sex right upon waking, and as his body lay next to hers looking a tiny bit deflated and suburbanized on the faux-rustic Craftsman-style bed, he had lifted up his head full of dense black curls, looked around, and said, “You know, I’m not in love with this house. There’s nothing special about it.”
“The chestnut trim of the windowsills is supposed to be extinct or something,” Dee said.
“I wish it was open plan,” the Actor said. “Then it would better fit in with the nature around it, like the porch does.”
“Maybe we can ask permission to remodel,” she had said.
And he just laughed and said: “Permission granted.”
Dee and the Actor did not know it, but this furniture—and indeed the house itself—had been picked by Masha and Senderovsky because it was happy and light, the opposite of their parents’ dark armoires and heavy Eastern European curtains.
But lying on the bed now, alone, eyes still blinking in the austere early morning sunlight, Dee’s long, wide mouth (“Just horsey enough for my tastes”—The Actor), began to open and slacken, her breathing became irregular, panicked (“I love to hear you pant, baby”), and her hands curled with great, almost tensile strength around the innocent shell of her laptop (“I can tell you used to work out before all this”).
What the hell was happening?
A different line of attack was presenting itself across the blue-and-white landscape of her favorite social media channel, and it wasn’t the sexist blather about her appearance versus Elspeth’s. No, these comments, multiplying in real time, were about an essay Dee had written about the seminal American racist film Gone with the Wind, which was having a moment after a new streaming network decided to remove it from its offerings after the recent uprisings.
The essay had been written just as the initial burst of enthusiasm for The Grand Book of Self-Compromise and Surrender had begun to die down among the country’s small but ever-bored readership and as another book about growing up poor and white began to overtake it on the lists.
Dee had decided to skew provocative at that point, while still functioning within the safety of the left. The essay—not her finest, she would be the first to admit—centered on a childhood obsession with Gone with the Wind, which had started with a trip to Atlanta with her mother and her abusive boyfriend of the moment—he had recently learned that the key to his broken Datsun could better serve as a weapon—a trip which proved to be a great financial and psychological expense for her family (they had stayed at a crumbly motel on the outskirts of the Georgian capital and had run out of gas money on the way back), but which also became a life-changing trip, as it inspired young Dee to buy the novel upon which the movie was based, which then led her to keep her first journal, written on the backs of a ream of Agway customer service forms that had fallen off a truck (perhaps this had happened, perhaps not, but this was how she chose to tell the story), which culminated, two decades later, in a graduate classroom with the drunken Senderovsky and then all the rest of it.