Our Country Friends(93)

“You always do, babe. You could use a little mouthwash when we get upstairs.”

“What if I had gone to New Haven? What if I had left you guys? Gotten my PhD? Published? Did a lot of national radio like Sasha? Developed a persona, funny or serious or somewhere in between.”

“Shh,” she said. “Don’t talk about these things. You’ll just tire your poor lungs out.”

“I’m so excited, I can’t breathe.”

“I want you pretty badly, too,” she said. But her eyes were sad and her dimples unfathomable.

“Suj said I could never catch up with you.”

“Suj? Is that your slutty cousin from Connecticut?”

“Just another voice in my head.”

    “What do I always say?”

“I think too much. Born at the wrong time. I’ll never catch up, will I?”

“You’re about to put your hands on my breasts and we’ll fuck so slow you’ll forget how to talk.”

“Oh my God,” he said. Although did Karen ever really say things like that? Even to her tall H-1B visa Irishmen? The stuff about the mouthwash was spot-on, though. He fumbled with the outer door of the tenement, then made his way into the fake-marble lobby. The new elevator was waiting for him. He walked inside the stifling enclosure, horny and dazed. He turned around. She wasn’t there. The elevator’s lightbulb flickered and the temperature around him turned beige, dour, colonial. “Hold the door!” someone was shouting; it wasn’t her. He knew who it was. What if he didn’t hold the door? No, that would be impolite. He always had to hold the door; otherwise he wouldn’t be Vinod Mehta. The large man in the Mets T-shirt slid in with his fawn-like brown eyes and his sensual mouth. It was pointless to retreat, but Vinod did so anyway. His assailant’s sickly sweetness filled the elevator. It sighed and moved off its mooring. Once again, he had forgotten to check for the tube.



* * *



—

He was crawling up the stairs again, and with each step conquered, another would present itself. The noise from the party downstairs had stopped. There were no partygoers running down the stairs either. All he knew were the stairs in front of him and the task they entailed. There was a presence next to his own, and he could feel the thump of its palms against the stairs.

It was Masha. The Masha of 2001. The angular and bright-eyed pre-Senderovsky girl, a bob of auburn hair against a dark, near-Sephardic cast. She looked like the costar of a movie the Actor desperately wanted to be in, a movie the lesser blogs would term “difficult but illuminating.”

“Vinod,” she said, “I’m speaking in Russian.”

It was true. While Vinod had never learned either of his best friends’ languages, there was a Slavic mumble, unhappy at its core, issuing from beautiful young Masha’s mouth. “I understand you!” Vinod said. “I’ve always understood you.”

    “Shh, not so loud,” she continued, the sibilants spilling out of her.

“Everyone’s telling me to shh,” Vinod said. “But no one’s helping me.”

“How can we help you?”

“You’re the doctor. What’s your opinion?”

“I’m in my second year at med school.”

“But you must have some opinion.”

“Come with me to New Haven. Get your doctorate. Don’t hang around with these clowns.” The last word sounded like in English: klow-ny.

“But she loves me now. I made it.”

“Wait until you get to the top of the stairs.”

“What’s at the top of the stairs?”

“Uka-uka.”

“That’s not a real word. You sound like Sasha’s dad.”

“Ouch.” Pronounced: aff-chhh.

“Go down to the kitchen, Masha. He’s waiting for you there. He’s going to play it so cool, but the moment he sees you he’ll have it all planned out. He always does. A man with a plan. A canal. Senderovsky. He’ll leave her like the past three years never happened. He’ll forget all the crying he did in her arms when his book was rejected nine times over.”

“I’ve always felt bad about doing that to Suj,” young Masha said. “My original sin.”

“Wasn’t your fault.”

A deep sigh. Now her gray eyes looked faded, like the thrice-bought jeans they were reselling in her homeland at the time.

“A joke on top of a joke on top of a joke,” she said.

“Your life?” he guessed.

“That’s what I signed up for. At least there was money for a while. He was very seductive, at first. With me, with his audience. It didn’t even seem like he was trying. You’d think, Wow, this guy knows what he’s doing.”

“When are the stairs going to run out, Masha? I just want to go upstairs. I just want to fall on a bed and plop down on the cold sheets.”

    “I know, honey,” Masha said. She stopped crawling now. Her eyes filled with tears. “I wish you could,” she said.

He stopped crawling and put an arm around her. “O, Mashen’ka,” he said. “Kak mne zhal’ tebya.”

“Don’t,” she said, “Don’t feel sorry for me.” She pointed upward. Beneath her T-shirt, he spotted an untamed tuft of armpit hair. She was on her own wavelength back then, as free as any immigrant of their vintage could be. He followed her still-upturned finger with its implications of a biblical Renaissance painting, da Vinci’s St. John the Baptist with his abundant smile.