Our Country Friends(82)

“You should talk to Karen,” Senderovsky said. “She said there’s maybe a way to help you. Sit down with her. Go over the options. I never thought I’d say this, but you look just horrible.”

“May I stay the weekend?” the Actor said. “I don’t know where else to go. My team won’t talk to me unless I stay away from her. I took the agency’s plane in the middle of the night.”

“I’ll have to ask Masha,” he said. “You should wear your mask at all times.”

“I don’t have it,” the Actor said. “The virus, I mean.” He slapped his hands together thrice in quick succession, as if at a flamenco show. “Listen,” he said. “I have an idea. The three of us should run away together.”

“Me, you, and Masha?”

    “Me, you, and Dee. I can make you important. All this”—he swept his arm around the bungalow—“could be just a funny past, an asterisk on your bio page. You’ll be a player. I’m about to start a production company. We’ll call our own shots.”

Senderovsky shook his head from side to side in the manner of Vinod’s mother, that famous noncommittal Indian “yes-no.”

Once his reluctant host was gone, the Actor sat down hard on the bed and wiped off a slick of sweat. His secret sharer had been with him for five days, possibly risen out of a bathroom aerosol plume in a Palm Desert gas station where he and Elspeth had stopped in the middle of a long knockout fight that ended with both pugilists crying inside the West Coast version of the Lancia, a topless old Alfa Romeo, but only one of them stricken. Or perhaps it wasn’t the fecal plume, but the coughing elderly man who had stumbled out of the bathroom before the Actor took his place astride the toilet, the top of his own mask hanging ineffectively below his nose, holstering it. Or perhaps it was a parting gift from Elspeth herself, who, though asymptomatic, had just enjoyed a low-grade undocumented tryst with a daredevil Los Angeles influencer of variable hygiene. Even now, the secret sharer was probing every sector of the divided Berlin that was the Actor’s body, looking for greater purchase, pulmonary union with this sleepless animal, the constant sour taste of extinction in his mouth.

The Actor stood up, felt Dee’s presence nearby, told himself this was the time for fortitude and not desperation. He coughed once, twice, felt a now-familiar liquid rumble in his stomach and the heave of the snap-pea-and-blood-orange salad he had eaten on the plane rising high into his esophagus, and nearly made it to the bathroom before he threw up.



* * *



—

Negotiations were afoot throughout the main house and the bungalows. Emergency councils were being held on the porch and in “breakout rooms.” Voices that had been placid for weeks were suddenly being raised. Colonists wept. Or held back their tears. Only Nat was happy about his return, the fulfillment of her prophecy, the proximity to greatness. She had asked her mother to let him stay. She and Karen would sew a stylish new mask for him and then isolate him for weeks. She thought he was a wounded bird.



* * *



—

    “I don’t love him and I don’t want him,” Dee said to Ed. “Stop talking about him like he’s some kind of rival. Like I don’t get to choose.”

“There must be some ember here or there,” Ed said. They were in her cabin, surrounded by typewriters, the presence of which inadvertently heightened their vocabulary.

“What ember?”

“Ember of desire. On your part. For him.”

“Don’t go all English as a second language on me now.”

“Fuck you,” Ed said, surprised he could still be hurt by her remark. “I’m just thinking about your career.”

“How can you say that? I’m supposed to choose between two men for my career? Between a man I want and one I don’t.” Ed realized his blunder and was ashamed. She stormed out and he followed her into the warm lunar night.

“I love that you’re a striver!” he shouted after her. “I love that about you!”

She ran down the driveway and into the beams of a truck idling at its terminus. She thought she saw what looked like a barely legal country boy in the driver’s seat, seat belt off, his speckled chin still a work in progress, his eyes fixed fearfully onto the woman emerging from the mist, running toward him as if she were ready to throw herself on his hood in some overblown Mediterranean gesture. The driver quickly killed his dome light falling into villainous shadow, reversed his truck, swerved out of the driveway, and stepped on the gas with a youthful lack of compromise. She ran after it without concern or care. She could stand up to anyone. A lovesick thespian, her coward boyfriend, a fellow hick with a pump-action rifle.



* * *



—

“He’s just toying with you,” Masha was saying to her husband in the main house. They were in the bedroom, both of them naked, as they had recently stopped wearing clothes after Nat was tucked away with her photo of Jin and Llama Llama towel, their simple bedroom re-eroticized.

    “But what if? What if!” the landowner shouted.

“Shhhh!” Masha said. From down the hallway they heard a loud Nat moan. (She was being dream-chased by a murderous hornet, and her father’s voice sounded like the nearness of its buzz.)