Our Country Friends(97)
“Dee told me she and Ed are having some really kinky sex,” Karen gossiped. “Like cosplay or something. She wears a gauze mask while they’re doing it.”
“Oh.”
“You and me will get back to it, too. Soon as you’re well.”
He smiled. “No masks,” he said. “I want to see your darling face.” She noticed the redness of his gums, and now his eyes looked too small for their sockets. It was hard to look at him and not try to embrace him these days. Harder still to imagine him as an adult moving through life under his own steam again. The boy she had chastised and mothered (or at least sistered) three decades ago had returned to her as such. Instead of applying eye cream, she now pasted his poor cracked lips with Vaseline. But he wasn’t beaten down entirely; his gaze was still lightly male. Once she had come out of the bathroom naked and had sat down on the bed to slip on her underwear, and she noticed him looking at her body, examining the way it settled and creased. The folds above her hips, everyday, workaday, meant for a biological purpose she had never entertained, provided him with the pretext of trying to draw the next impossible breath. She got up, looking away shyly (for that was her secret, he now realized, that despite all her previous entanglements she was impossibly shy), put her hands at her sides, and drew her lips apart for him.
* * *
—
“Sweetie,” he wheezed on another day. “I have these awful dreams. You wouldn’t believe what happens. One after the other. I need something to take my mind off things. I can’t concentrate on a book.” What he left unsaid was that it was hard to read about people who were still in the bloom of life. “When I can’t go back to sleep, I need something stupid.”
“I got you, babe,” Karen said.
That spring and summer it became impossible to glance out the window without entertaining questions of physics, of multiverses collapsing onto themselves, of time lines breaking off like Antarctic ice shelves. Was all this really happening: masks and tyrants, aerosol sprays and gun-toting clowns? Senderovsky and his family and guests had moated themselves into their biosphere for four safe months, until they were breached by the Actor’s return, but others had developed different ways of coping. One such way was a return to the 1980s.
Karen found compilations of commercials from that era on her computer, and now the phlegmy cough emerging from the bungalow’s inner bedroom was counterpointed by chirpy instrumentals, barking dogs demanding better pet food, and the blandishments of bubble gum and cars “made with pride” right here in the USA. Vinod had long found sleeping on his back or sides impossible, the accursed stickiness, the mucus, coursed through his chest and windpipe, but now he could doze off while sitting upright as the commercials prodded him into semi-oblivion instead of the pure slow annihilation of that elevator on Washington Street.
Raise your hand, you know it, raise your hand, you got it, raise your haaaaaand if you’re Sure.
Raise your hand, you feel dry now, raise your hand, you know why now, raise your haaaaaand, if you’re Sure.
Confident, confident, dry and secure, raise your hand, raise your hand
If you’re Sure.
He had sung these lyrics with Senderovsky during their high-school days (“confident, confident, dry and secure!”), as both of the immigrant boys had been accused by their elementary-school classmates of not smelling the way an American should. (Karen would always laugh at their particular Indo-Soviet predicament.) The commercial still mesmerized. Cowboys, policewomen, naval cadets, future supporters of the current president, all were raising their hands, showing off their deodorized armpits with confidence, all of them were “Sure” their scent was not just ambient but gone, devoid of all odor like a piece of plastic or else, at worst, tinged with a hint of processed sugar like a Quaker Oats chewy granola bar wrapper from the same period. And in the final shot, the Statue of Liberty herself was brandishing her barely clothed armpit for both the newcomer and the native-born to smell, for despite being born a Frenchwoman, she was an American now, dry and secure, confident beyond all reason.
“I think Jim’s the most handsome guy in the world.”
“Her smile just warms me inside.”
“Her teeth, they’re really beautiful.”
“I love a bright, beautiful smile.”
“I like fluoride. I like white teeth and freshness is a plus.”
“Close-Up makes me feel all fresh especially if I’m going to be kissing Jim.”
“Close-Up helps me get close to Lisa.”
Lisa and Jim and their joint beautiful hair and their joint beautiful teeth were kissing now. They were kissing with all the concentration with which his mother chopped yam for winter undhiyu or with which his father tried to sell an Apple Lisa computer to an unsuspecting American. (“Not to rush you, sir, but I’m actually closing in ten minutes.”) As they kiss, Vinod can sense his parents watching this commercial over his shoulder, scandalized, both of them thinking, Are these two even married, baka? And young Vinod thinks: Why does Jim need Close-Up to help him get close to Lisa? If he were Jim, he would be kissing Lisa’s mouth even if her tongue was on fire (much like his has been for the past two weeks).
“It’s not my fault, Mom. Sneakers just smell.”