Our Country Friends(72)
“I’m with the side of the people,” Dee said. “Isn’t that obvious?”
“On the side of your people,” Vinod said. “Which is to say, on your own side.”
Mypeople. The Actor saw what he hadn’t before as he scrolled through her social media mentions. The hopelessness of her position. And of his own. She was trapped. He was trapped. What if he looked into her eyes and failed to see his unimagined self, the man he needed to be? This reality cut through him, eviscerated his Tr?? Emotions, filled him with anxiety on a Nat scale.
What if loving her made it impossible to love himself?
She was seated next to the Actor on the western edge of the table so that, in normal circumstances, to look at the beauty of the setting sun was also to witness the beauty of them. But the sun was out of contention tonight, clouds shaped like countries swept in in its stead, the wind cleaving them of their Alsaces and East Timors. And the two lovers looked cleaved of each other as well.
Ed watched her. He could reach over and hold her hand. He could internalize the sordidness of her struggle, her helplessness, and he could walk her through to the other side. It had recently emerged that the housemates on the Japanese reality show had been coached all along. Just actors in a play. Playthings. And so was she, after all, with her tidy middle-class bank account and her grasping middle-class soul, although she had had the temerity to think she could write and talk her way into being someone original. Their gaze met for a second. She would not unwrinkle her lower face for him, the lower face that lived within the catalog of past slights and which counterbalanced the wit and sparkle of her eyes, but he would still take her as she was. If given the signal, he would sweep her into the folds of a long and complicated dilemma, into a mistake they could make together.
9
Masha and Senderovsky lay in bed in the Petersburg Bungalow, listening to the sheets of rain steel-drumming the expensive new roof. Country rain. Dacha rain. It still meant something to Masha. Instinctively, as if this was 1983, she reached her hand over and took Senderovsky’s. She used to hold hands with him in the Russian bungalow colony across the river all the time, thinking it was platonic for her, knowing it was not for him, but still doing it. Even back then he was a source of entertainment for her, a “one-man clown posse,” always ready with the stupid joke about babushkas and cabbage-soup farts. And still she married him. And still she loved him.
“The first tranche from the network is going to be deposited this week,” Senderovsky said. “Though I do owe Ed ten thousand and another twenty to the general and the workmen. Which won’t leave much.”
“It must be scary for you,” she said. “Running out of money.” They were speaking, therapeutically, in English.
“They’ve commissioned the next two episodes already, so we’re in good shape.” What he left unsaid was the fact that if the Actor broke up with Dee, if he began to once again cast a critical eye over the scripts or if he were to drop out completely to distance himself from Senderovsky and his Dacha of Doom, the money would stop at the first tranche. She felt him squeeze her hand and knew he was worried. There were more squeezes to follow, until he finally fell asleep, coughing all the while.
She lay awake for another hour, until someone began to turn the knob of the bungalow’s front door. Masha jerked up. She had made all the residents lock their doors at night after hearing the state trooper describe the defenselessness of their property. She thought of waking her coughing husband but instead ran to the door herself, peeking past the blinds.
It was Nat, beneath a colorful Wanna One umbrella (they were a rival boy band to BTS; Nat couldn’t stand to get the umbrella with her real heroes wet), still wearing her polka-dot frock. Masha ushered her in. “What happened?” she whispered.
“I wanted to sleep next to you and Daddy,” Nat whispered back. The back of her neck felt sticky to Masha’s touch. Karen had probably failed to bathe her. Masha found herself worried that Karen might wake up in the middle of the night and discover the child was missing. Why was she so concerned with Karen’s feelings all of a sudden? “I wrote Karen-emo a note,” Nat whispered, reading her mother’s mind.
She briskly climbed into bed and found a groove between her parents into which she curled, her arms around her knees. Masha buried her nose into Nat’s dirty hair and began to breathe in all she could. Senderovsky blindly draped an arm around Nat, but without the moonlight streaming through one open window his wife and daughter could not see his dreamland smile. Eventually, Masha did see that his big hand had found her little one, and she begged herself to forget the fact that when the kids pared off at the Kindness Academy before proceeding to lunch or recess (there was a lot of recess), there would often be no one to hold Nat’s hand but the teacher.
“You should get a health app to monitor Daddy’s cough,” Nat whispered. She had learned a lot about apps from Karen.
“Shhh,” Masha whispered back. “Count backward from ten in any language you like and then you’ll be asleep.”
“Desyat’,” Nat began. “Devyat’, vosem, sem, shest’, pyat’, chetyre, tri, dva, odin.”
“Tak derzhat’,” Senderovsky whispered in his sleep, his father’s rarely tendered praise bright and sweet against his palate.