Nat leaned out of her window to better hear the Actor’s apologies. She wished to run down and throw herself into his arms.
“Who was in the black truck?” Senderovsky shouted. “Is that who’s been watching us?”
“He’s a good person,” the Actor shouted back. “He helped me. He means no harm.”
“How can we trust anything you say?” Ed shouted.
They all stood there, frozen, at an impasse. The Actor wanted to draw nearer. These were his friends, after all. They had spent most of quarantine together. “I came to make amends,” he shouted. “To each of you.” He did a head count. “Where’s Vinod?”
The silence continued, the stillness, followed by the crunch of sneakers against gravel. Karen was running just as her trainer back west had taught her, crisp, elegant propulsions, her hands at her side, until she made a hook of the right one, which she would connect, full square, with the Actor’s jaw.
He had been at the receiving end of mock punches behind the camera, and at first joyfully perceived it as such, a prank, an acting-out between pals, between equals, really, given Karen’s lofty successes in the world. But suddenly his head was positioned at an unruly angle to his neck and to the rest of him, and his feet performed a quick tap dance up and down the driveway until they stopped, the known universe tilted, and his head joined his feet on the ground.
As he was recalibrating his consciousness, he heard the little girl running toward him, crying, and just feet away, her mother grabbing her, spinning her around, her shout deafening and rising above the confused susurrations of the small but rapt audience: “Natasha! NO!”
And he thought: I am still loved.
* * *
—
Several days after the Actor’s second （and final） reappearance and his resequestration inside the Petersburg Bungalow, Karen was feeding Vinod gossip and dinner. Ed claimed he could not make a proper dal or anything Gujarati or southern Indian, but he did spice up a consistently brilliant vegetable biryani to Vinod’s standards （he made it with both yogurt and milk in the Lucknow manner）， and now his taste buds craved it for every meal, since he had, luckily, never fully lost his sense of taste or smell. What wouldn’t he give for parathas and pickles, though. To Karen, his appetite signified he was “turning a corner,” though he coughed with regularity and exhibited a smudged blue pallor like the electoral thumbprint used to prevent double voting in a poor country. He also had loose motions after every other meal and presented to her loving gaze a set of tired, drowned-looking eyes. Once, after he tried to wipe the toilet seat down after he had made a mess of it, he had fallen and banged his spine hard against the bathroom wall and had sat there stunned for most of the day. Since then, Masha and Karen kept him in bed, budding appetite notwithstanding, and Karen accompanied him on his bathroom runs.
“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.”