“Be gracious, sladkaya,” Masha said. “Remember what Miss Franco said when it comes to making friends. Inside trade, outside trade.”
“Keep listening,” Karen seconded. “Keep exchanging information.”
Dee and Ed had cornered Senderovsky and were asking him questions with the single-mindedness of new couples. Ed: “Did he suffer?” Dee: “Was he under the whole time?” “Will he be cremated?” But Senderovsky would just sigh, shrug, and peel the meat off his ribs. He had no answers. He told them they would be sent a link to a virtual memorial on Tuesday, midday, at a time convenient for a brother in San Francisco and another in London.
They sat there between the ferns and the busy bike lane, passing around plates of food, surrounded by faces that looked like their own. Masha had just noticed that since this morning her husband had stopped coughing. “I’m getting a really hygge feeling right now,” Ed said.
“Please stop using that word,” Dee said, her tone stern. “There’s nothing hygge about what happened to us today.” Us, Senderovsky thought. Even down in the city, they were still members of his bungalow colony. The summer of 2020, that year of imperfect vision, would hold them together forever. He reminded himself to call his agent concerning Hotel Solitaire. Vinod had not wanted his help in finding a publisher, but he would ignore his instructions once more.
Nat looked up the Danish term hygge on Karen’s phone. “I know what ‘coziness’ means, but what’s ‘con-viv-i-a-lity’？”
They drank an alcoholic fresh melon drink sweetened further with pandan syrup and a margarita with calamansi honey. Karen’s assistant dropped by, and she and Dee （whom she resembled down to the miniature hips and prominent coccyx） had gone to the same graduate writing program, although she had never enjoyed Senderovsky’s drunken tutelage. The assistant had Karen, Masha, and her husband sign a stack of papers further fusing her boss with the Levin-Senderovskys. “I’m a notary public,” she said, brightly, when Masha wondered whether a lawyer shouldn’t be present.
And this is what they drank to: The future together. The survival, in perpetuity, of the House on the Hill, with room for all of them, and one day, Karen said, “maybe even for Nat’s best friends or boyfriends or girlfriends.”
The rain came suddenly out of the heavy skies. But the city dwellers, masked and unmasked, would not stand for this intrusion. All across the roofless Filipino neo-sukkah, umbrellas went up into the sky, defiantly, and the eating and drinking and laughter continued even as the world flooded around them.
When it ended, and the night began to shiver in earnest, and Nat’s bedtime approached （a temper tantrum was just in the offing）， the restaurant started blasting Sly’s “Everyday People” as ambulance lights wailed uptown past the ferns and plastic bunting to the hospitals just ten blocks north, and a bout of reggae competed with the restaurant’s speakers from the window of a parked old car across the street. （“How nineties!” Karen said.）
And although it was forbidden, they got up to dance with each other by the bike lane with its electrified deliverymen speeding at twenty miles an hour. “I am no better and neither are you / we are the same whatever we do,” sang the welcoming Black voices on the stereo, and the dancers now believed that all of these statements were true, and that they would go on and meld even further with their countrymen and countrywomen （Ed had finally applied for citizenship at Dee’s request）， and they would be forgiven and accepted and sent out faces uncovered into the wider world, from Bogotá to Berlin to Bombay, where other people, equally happy, would dance with them, too.
Only Masha remained at the table, her hands over the notarized forms, protecting them from the rain’s return, watching her daughter, who was unused to the sounds of late-sixties soul, dance spasmodically, trying to keep up with the grown-ups who were modeling happiness and impromptu pleasure with their own awkward gestures and composed smiles, facsimiles of what they had once been before all the knowing happened. There was too much honey in her margarita, so instead of finishing it she raised it to him and spoke his name aloud, which made just a slight disturbance in the September air around her, but which made the fact of his life true, as if the sound of his name contained everything about him. Counting six people, three of them her family, she motioned the waiter over, put on her mask, and asked for exactly half of the bill. A small apartment with low white ceilings awaited them, but it was entirely theirs, bought through their labors, paid off slowly in the American way. At long last, it was time to go home.