“Neither will you,” Karen said.
Senderovsky reached over to comfort his wife. The unhappy voices echoed off his magnificent porch, the conversation never ending, like that of his parents, who could battle into the morning off a thimble of vodka and a few cups of tea. He was still thinking of his friend’s death and his own. They were all supposed to be getting used to this, to the new science of it all, but this wanton destruction still did not make sense to him. He was a decent man, a convivial host, and a self-ordained ordoliberal. Four months ago, under the cover of spring, he had welcomed five guests of exceptional quality to his colony.
How did it get to this? How?
6
“Getting married is memorable time.” A Russian-accented voice. “Extra memorable with Senderovsky Superior Wedding Album System.” Vinod walked toward the voice in the dim haze of the airless warehouse, his Teva sandals slapping at the gray, dusty floors. “But first let me tell you about good screw! It is special reinforced stainless-steel screw which postbinding allows the pages of your wedding album to lie flat. Hello? Meesees Fernandes? Hello?”
Mr. Senderovsky looked at the receiver in incomprehension, its twentieth-century dial tone issuing from it in one long flat line. Vinod realized that something was terribly wrong. He hadn’t done his job properly. He brought his hand up to his mouth to check for the tube. “Fucking sheet,” Mr. Senderovsky said, brushing back the last strand of hair over the olive pit of his head. “Sasha tell me this was good lead. Mother of college classmate remarrying oilman. Fernandes is not Spanish, but Filipino.”
“I didn’t do my job,” Vinod said, voice shaking. “I didn’t fix the label maker.”
“Aw, fuck,” Mr. Senderovsky said. “Aw, sheet. But what are you going to do? Slow summer anyway. No one get married. Too hot. Difficult economic climate because Clinton. Things fall apart, but what about center? Center does not hold. Kaput. Whole wedding album industry—” He made a fluttering motion with his hands to indicate its state. “But people like us, we are used to misfortune, nu, Vinod? What did we say when Indian engineers came to Leningrad: Hindi, Russi, bhai, bhai. Brother, brother. And so even in America we are all now bhais. Bhais in misfortune!”
“Mr. Senderovsky, can I make some cold calls? I’ve been working on my accent like you said.”
“No, no, you are strong. You lift boxes.”
“Let me try one call.”
“No, no, your accent is too sick.”
“Too thick?”
“Yes, what I say?”
“I thought you said—” They heard the doorbell and looked at each other.
“I did not make appointment,” Mr. Senderovsky said, tugging at the pager chained to his Dockers. “Maybe idiot Sasha, marijuana user, forgot his key. Wait, did you make appointment?”
“How could I make it? You won’t let me near the phone.”
“So it is surprise customer!” Mr. Senderovsky scurried off toward the distant front door. “Hot sheet! Village Voice ad maybe worked.”
Vinod looked at the old cream-colored public-school-teacher’s desk from which his employer conducted his desperate business, and alongside it the little TV tray with a phone and folding chair where Sasha sat by his side for most of the summer like a minimum-wage lapdog, absorbing his father’s politics and unhappiness. These small, cramped immigrant spaces were Vinod’s favorites, whether his uncle’s curried explosion of a “diner,” where the native born and the just-washed-ashore could have spicy eggs for three dollars at a cramped counter bar; or his father’s ever-failing computer store, where both of his brothers worked on their way up to Wall Street sales desks but where there was no space for Vinod, the Brahmin bhenchod; to this, the most outrageous of gambits, a wedding album business featuring Mr. Senderovsky’s patented “special screw” technology, barely chugging away on the cusp of the Internet.
“Vinod,” the Russian accent returned, “your girlfriend is here.”
Girlfriend? Mr. Senderovsky was fond of jokes about Vinod’s virginity. An entire summer at the office—sophomore year of college, was it?—had been spent arguing about whether oral sex constituted his entrance into manhood. Could he mean—？
Karen walked in wearing the same close-fitting bateau shirt she had worn at their first dacha dinner, only matched now with cutoffs that brought out the muscle of her thighs, the gloss of her knees.
She came up to Vinod. He could feel her closeness and the marimba of feelings that would chime within whenever she did so. He reached over to touch her semi-nude shoulder, like a bird softly tagging a nest mate with her wing. But something else happened now.