Our Country Friends(75)
She had never stopped going for walks with Ed, not during her three weeks of romancing with the Actor and not after. Remarkably, her affair with the thespian rarely came up as a subject of conversation between them and instead they talked about all the stupid things young (not that Ed was especially young) urban people of the moment talked about, the vagaries of social media, the flavorful mee krops and tom kha gais they had last slurped down in February, their path through the brambles of high society, along with gossip about other people being brought down, forced to recalibrate, rephrase, and recant.
After the dinner with the Actor and Vinod’s hurtful words about her being on the side of her people, Ed began to talk about the members of his own family and their manifold awfulness. If you searched for them online in Korean, you would discover their role in the destruction of labor unions and the many monopolies they wielded since the times of the Japanese occupation. You would learn about scalding cups of tea thrown at subordinates and even the flogging of an elderly chauffeur, a decorated military man, after he had fragranced a company limousine with the wrong type of air freshener. Because rich people were excused from the suffering of the world, they had to invent their own more elaborate and personalized forms of suffering and then to inflict baroque versions of that stunted interiority onto others. And that was just the public stuff. There were arranged marriages to violent schizophrenics, corrupt divorce proceedings, stolen children, suicidal mothers, shamed children shunted off to Rhode Island and London art schools. No one, but no one, was happy, just shuffling through cosmetic surgery clinics and watch boutiques in a Valium haze.
“And yet,” Ed said, “how can I claim to be entirely different from my relatives? How can I claim to be divorced from all those years of feudalism? I’m supposed to throw off the yoke of history all by myself? That’s a nonsense American idea, that one can just”—a very loud snap of his fingers—“change. My skin is too thick to be shed. I can choose not to abuse a chauffeur, but I can’t alter the manner of my gait as I tipsily saunter to the waiting car. My oppressiveness is priced in.”
“I’d rather be considered bad,” Dee said, “than to actually be false. Everything I write is a time stamp in history. Everything, no matter how horrible and self-indicting, is, I swear to God, honest. Can I be blamed that the portrait which emerges does not fit the requirements of the moment?”
This was, she had to admit, the button-down letter-writing men’s prescription for art as well—that it had to be reflective, not revolutionary. The artist, according to them and in line with their experiences at New Haven, stood in the vicinity of history processing its raw nature through her own blemished experiences and typing the resulting observations into the Notes application of her phone. That was the job description. But what if this particular job had suddenly become irrelevant? And what if irrelevancy, not cultural tone deafness, was the real specter that haunted the bungalow colony, haunted her and Senderovsky and the Actor as well? The hour for chronicling the situation had passed; it was time to seize the telegraph station and detain the provisional government. Maybe that was what drew Dee to Ed in the first place: he had placed himself outside the game. He did not publicly render an opinion on anything, and no power could hold him accountable for his action or his speech. If society collapsed, he would put on an ascot and waltz over to the nearest still-functional one. (He had Canadian citizenship.) He did not even own a social media account.
A pickup truck passed and Ed waved to its sole occupant who dutifully waved back within the sunlit dome of his vehicle. Since the Actor had left the colony, there were no incidents with homicidal trucks (cause and effect?), but Ed now took it upon himself to wave to every car rumbling down Senderovsky’s road. He had even acquired something of a reputation among the locals as the Waver of V—— Road. To not wave back at him had become a local faux pas, no matter the color of the flag swinging off one’s porch. Dee thought she understood some of the reasoning for his fake cheer. Senderovsky once accounted for his own self-abusive Russian Jewish humor as a demographic imperative, the need to make fun of himself before the dominant group (Christian Slavs) could get a chance to do so, to self-slap before being punched down. There was something of that in Ed’s happy wave, too, along with an overblown “model minority” smile that disappeared with the sound of the car’s passing swoosh or became genuine when he turned and looked into Dee’s face. This made her happy. There was a lot going on with Ed, but only she got to see the whole of it. The daily Ed walks gave her purpose and pleasure. They saved her from her fruitless encounters with social media, which meant they also saved her from herself.
* * *
—
There was a restaurant known for its hand sanitizer in a charming and progressive nearby town, once the center of the nineteenth-century riverside whale-processing industry. The restaurant was Southeast Asian in nature, a cuisine Ed claimed he could not successfully replicate for lack of the right ingredients, and it proffered food and collected payment without any human contact at all, except for a sterilized nod at the counter once the credit card information had clicked into place. After picking up their tray, the diner adjourned to a table within a vast tented former parking lot where each table was separated from the next by at least three meters.
Ed and Dee drove down to the whale-processing town in a fit of excitement. They were sick of rural anthropology and desperate for new spice. It was almost dinnertime at the colony, and on this day the colonists would be deprived of their chef. (The fact that both he and Dee would be absent raised one of Senderovsky’s considerable eyebrows as well as his wife’s smaller woolly caterpillar.)