Our Country Friends(87)
When the lights were out and Karen had stilled the many devices around her, Vinod walked over to the couch in the living room where she had self-quarantined and draped his arms around her sleeping form. She snored mightily within his embrace, more than he remembered from their youthful sleepovers, but he found her sputtering mouth and kissed her. She slapped him away in her dream and, with a teenager’s harrumph, turned to face the coarse hump of the couch. She rubbed her stricken eye against its fabric and moaned miserably. He bent down and took in the smell of her hair and her still-fluoride breath. His once-battered lungs filled with her and he went back to their bed slightly satiated, but lonely still.
What if there was more to Senderovsky’s literary debutante party than he actually remembered? What if he was too old for his memory to cooperate with him, to understand what all those glossy photographs really meant? Surely, they weren’t as simple as the camera-ready smiles posterity insisted were real. What if, over and over, he had been made a fool?
There was a piece of paper resting on her side of the bed, the excerpt of a lesson Karen had been teaching Nat, spelling out in Hangul and English the most important of Korean phrases: “My head hurts, eyes hurt, mouth hurts, legs hurt, there is too little, there is too much, I don’t like it.”
5
Vinod sat in the middle of his meadow on his Brazilian area rug reading A Hero of Our Time. This particular edition of the nineteenth-century Russian novel began with a mishmash of an introduction by Senderovsky, mostly about how he wished for a literary future without handsome heroes. Flocks of birds had taken up residence in the elms above the gentle reader and they would chatter away for hours, but then suddenly stop as if someone had said something embarrassing.
Over the past week, Karen had developed—if that’s the word—pink eye, and now as a precaution, she lived on the couch away from the other colonists, including her boyfriend. It drove Vinod mad. If she was to isolate from him, then at least she should take the inner chamber of the bungalow, and he could serve her faithfully with food and drink and sleep on the couch himself. And, besides, as far as the virus went, didn’t pink eye affect mostly children? And besides, she hadn’t lost her sense of taste or smell like most affected people; she could still appreciate the plates of Ed’s cooking Masha dropped off at the front door. And besides, she should stop scratching her eye; he would keep replenishing her cold compresses if she only let him. And besides, her assistant had already summoned for the steroid drops with the aid of Masha’s scrip.
Today the pink eye had worsened, and Karen had entered a state of terror matched only by a sudden glue-like feeling of fatigue, as if she couldn’t separate her fingers from one another or separate her lower and upper rows of teeth, much less reach up to poke out her eye. (And that’s what she urgently needed to do, to scoop out her very vision like what’s-his-face, that motherfucking Greek king.) To hell with Vinod’s “And besides.” She had exposed herself to the Actor, who, dumb thoughtless idiot that he was, had brought his secret sharer into the colony. Why had she listened to Vinod and helped the Actor? Why had Senderovsky allowed him to return in the first place? Why hadn’t Masha put an end to all this? Maybe she still hoarded feelings for him in the old-fashioned sequined purse she called her heart.
And, of course, the elemental part of all this: If it hadn’t been for Karen’s product, none of this would be happening. If only Vin would listen to her, if only he would go and live in the main house or take over the Big Island Bungalow now that Ed was cohabitating with Dee. If only she could give Nat another Korean lesson. The language needed constant reinforcement, and watching endless videos of Bomi the Spelling Octopus, who often made funny but instructive mistakes, wasn’t going to do the trick. If her own mother had been stricter with her about that one damned thing, learning the mother tongue, she’d be a different, prouder person now. Maybe it would have all worked out.
Vinod heard a commotion above the meadow, one made by people, not birds. They all knew one another’s voices by this point, and he could hear Dee and Ed quarreling in public, along with the panicked interjection of Senderovsky’s anxious mezzo-soprano. What was happening? It was nowhere close to dinnertime. It must have been Karen then. She must have taken a turn for the worse. He should have stayed near her in the polluted front room of the bungalow, even if she shooed him away.
As he got up, his book fell out of his grasp. He reached over to pick it up, its garish onion-domed cover suspended in the grass, but came up with nothing. He reached for his area rug, but it was now too far away to reach. How could that be? It was right there. He lifted his arm after it, but came up with no more than a waving motion, as if the rug was driving off to carpet college and he, worried parent, was bidding it farewell.
The day felt impossibly long now as if it belonged inside an extraterrestrial calendar. He must have been living inside a single day for weeks on end, as would a Venusian. He decided to breathe in the humid but wind-stroked summer air around him, but that very act, contract chest, pause, expand chest, now seemed to have too many steps to follow in short order.
Migraine colors flickered at the bottom of his vision. He knew what he had to do—trudge up from the meadow to their bungalow, but it now seemed like a half impossibility, as if he had to emigrate up the treacherous slope without the necessary papers. He took a few steps, then leaned into the ground before him with an outstretched palm for bracing. His calves felt hot, someone must have been stroking them with a warm hand, but when he turned around, his neck a painful vice, to look behind him, there was no one for companionship (even the sun was decked out in frilly clouds). Why must he climb this hill to the cluster of pastel bungalows, each showing him its backside? Why shouldn’t he arrange a siesta upon the newly mowed velvet slope? What was the purpose of all this striving? Karen, he had to get to Karen. He continued to climb, keeping his hand out in front of him as a form of security in case he crumbled. By the time he reached the cedar steps of the covered porch, the first outpost of civilization, it took him a few seconds to figure out where he was exactly.