They skirted around the kitchen, past the covered porch, but Vinod did not run inside to greet her, even as he heard her nasally voice （something about the virtues of Napa cabbage versus the kind Russians liked）， was touched by its workaday lack of melody or magic. He wanted to savor his aloneness just a bit longer. He was staying at his usual place, the Lullaby Cottage, its walls decorated by the lullabies Senderovsky’s friends recounted from their childhoods, as rendered in bright cursive by a notable （and notably cruel） British artist who had since fallen from favor. Senderovsky had written the introduction of a catalog for an exhibition the artist had made out of cork and dismembered ants, and the artist had painted the Lullaby Cottage in return.
Vinod looked to his own Gujarati contribution written directly above the headboard in saffron Devanagari script.
He wanders around and then I go searching for him.
Somebody saw him go into the flower-bushes.
Now let us trim the bushes and bring him back home.
Sleep, my baby, sleep.
My baby loves to swing in his crib.
“I think you can catch a snooze before dinner,” Senderovsky said, snapping open a luggage rack and hoisting the luggage over its woven ribs, beads of sweat on his forehead, winded by the small task. “You’ve missed our hotel’s turndown service, I’m afraid.”
“If only you were capable of turning me down.”
“Sorry?”
Vinod smiled with the yellowed stubs of his former smoker’s teeth. “I just wanted to thank you for this stay. I’ll thank Masha later.”
“I’m just sad we didn’t have you over last summer.”
“I’m not keeping score. And I’m honored to be among the anointed at a time like this.”
“Everyone’s over the moon that you’re here.”
“Everyone? I had a bit of a run-in with our brilliant friend.”
Senderovsky noticed Vinod looking away as he spoke. His love for Karen brought to the landowner’s mind an old Soviet saying, apropos of the Great Patriotic War against the Fritzes, as the advancing Germans were called: No one is forgotten, nothing is forgotten.
“So she got angry at one of us on the phone,” Senderovsky said. “What else is new? I think I spent all of the nineties being yelled at by her. At least once she got her nights and weekends plan.”
“It was my fault. I should have just accepted her help.”
“I think being rich is hard for her,” Senderovsky said. “If I had that kind of money, I’d probably just get gout and die the next day.”
“I was expecting you to say, ‘She’s worried about you.’？”
“Should she be?”
Vinod looked at him with his politely extinguished eyes. “No.”
Senderovsky was satisfied by the finality of the reply. “Good,” he said.
“Okay, bhai, let me wash up and we’ll go say hi to the ladies.”
Senderovsky bowed to him like a majordomo after his master’s return from the capital.
“One tiny thing,” Vinod said. “I feel scared to even ask.”
“I am your faithful slave, as they said in the old days.”
“It’s embarrassing.”
“There’s no such thing as ‘embarrassing’ around here. Skinny-dipping begins on May twentieth, speaking of. That’s when we open up the pool. No excuses.”
Unlike Senderovsky, and despite being swaddled in hair so thick it would give a mare pause, Vinod had never been shy about his body.
“Remember the novel I gave you a million years ago?” he said. “The one that you saved me from sending in to an agent? For which I’m eternally grateful.”
Senderovsky was looking out the bungalow’s single glazed window. Despite its soundproofing he imagined he could hear the resident woodpecker starting up a rare nighttime shift, perhaps confused by all the lights blazing around the property. “I think I remember something,” he said.
“Well, that makes one of us,” Vinod said. “I can’t even think of the title now. I’m sure it was heavy-handed as hell. But I kind of wanted to take a look at it. Not to show it to anyone, but just to remember my state of mind when I wrote it. Now that we’re all here.”
“That sounds kind of valedictory,” Senderovsky said. “You do know you’re going to outlive us all.”
“So, is there any chance you saved the copy I gave you?”
There was more than a chance. Roughly fifty yards from where the friends were speaking, in the extreme northwest corner of the main house’s attic between two other shoeboxes containing yellowed international love letters women had posted Senderovsky during the wild period after the publication of his first book, sat a Teva active sandals shoebox. It contained the two hundred eighty-seven closely typed pages of Vinod’s manuscript, complete with a rigid blue floppy disk, one of the last of its kind.