“Yeah, you didn’t just come out looking so glamorous,” Karen said. “Remember how much time I spent shopping with you geeks at Screaming Mimi’s?”
“I remember spending a lot of money,” Senderovsky said.
“And we had to buy you mussels and fries at Florent after,” Vinod said, “as a ‘finder’s fee.’？” He picked a photo, held it up for the wind to caress. His mood soured immediately.
“Is this the party Suj threw for Sasha when his first book came out?” he asked. “The one where Masha reappeared.”
“And where you guys met Ed the first time,” Karen said. “Remember you all thought he was such a pretentious asshole at first?”
“That was also the party when the deputy mayor or something was in our bathroom tooting coke,” Senderovsky said. He always had to mention this （erroneous） detail as if it best captured the last truly wild moment of his past, the transition from party animal to married, respectable bourgeois.
The photograph in question showed Senderovsky standing next to a blasted, pockmarked Russian journalist at least two meters in height who was presenting him （for reasons now unremembered） with a plastic suit of armor, while the ever-hamming author—his book had just hours before received a thunderous review in the newspaper—held his arm around a thin, dolorous Indian woman in a tight T-shirt and baggy jeans, smiling with her mouth but not her eyes.
Vinod brought the photo closer. The three friends had always dated people from each other’s homelands. Senderovsky spent three years with Suj, a kindly rich Sindhi girl, in the Fort Greene mansion she and Sasha had painstakingly gentrified and which her parents had bought her as an “investment.” Vinod dated the difficult Korean academic. Even Karen’s Leon Wi?niewski was Eastern European in family origin, if not quite Russian. And that very night Senderovsky would reconnect with the girl he’d been in love with since he was a child and, after much self-remorse and misdirection, leave the woman who threw him, as he would always acknowledge, “the best party of my life.”
Vinod didn’t know why the photos of this party hurt him so much, or why he was so bothered on Suj’s behalf. He had not been the one ultimately rejected. The following photo was of the three friends lost amid the loud party that even the mansion’s four stories could not contain. （Policemen were ultimately summoned and the inebriated non–deputy mayor had jumped out of a window.） Senderovsky was in the middle, trying to look cool, but his pinched red eyes telegraphing that this entire event, this new turn at stardom, was already way beyond his capacities; Vinod to his left, holding aloft the front page of the newspaper’s book section, which featured Senderovsky posed in the most serious hand-on-chin Russian-novelist way possible （he looked like he was about to rescind serfdom with his next sentence）; and to his left Karen, dimpled and glassy-eyed and possibly with a narcotic coating the bottom of one nostril, leaning into the fêted new author so sweetly, as if she had just met him for the first time and straightaway fallen in love, their bodies conjoined in one half of the photo, while in the other his and Vinod’s torsos were farther apart, Senderovsky’s arm swung around Vinod’s neck as if he was draping it over an outsize armchair in a boutique hotel.
Vinod put the photo down. His friends were chattering away, reminiscing about Suj’s best friend who had attended a liberal arts college in Ohio with her and whose nickname, perspicacious they had to admit, had been Gender, the subject she now taught at, of all places, New Haven.
Senderovsky was spinning a playlist called “Sahel Sounds” on the handsome red radio, but the Malian beats were not making Vinod feel any better. He wanted to ask himself why he was suddenly so down. He looked back and forth between his friends. Karen had been wearing a mask since her time with the Actor in their bungalow （she had also scrubbed every surface in their living room, even though this form of viral spread was no longer considered likely）， and the blue gauze hid the pretty seagull of her lips.
Senderovsky, by contrast, was unmasked. And now Vinod felt a budding anger at his friend’s naked face as the landowner recelebrated the greatest night of his existence, courtesy of a gullible desi girl, this just two years before he was to tell Vinod that his own novel was too “mired in history,” too formal and distant and desperately unfunny.
“Formal and distant” was also how he had described Suj’s behavior to them as he was seeking his friends’ permission to untangle himself from the woman he had lived with and sponged off for several years and had at one point planned to marry. He had abandoned her just so that he could airlift Masha from the mountain airstrip of the distant past. Even then, Vinod remembered, he was urging med school Masha to pursue lucrative radiology instead of psychiatry.