“The Suzuki?” Ed said. “I never even learned the Hyundai Sonata.”
The immigrants laughed. “Oh, Ed,” Karen said.
Dee summoned a smile. She was missing more references than usual. White ignorant folk like me, she thought, we’re the immigrants today. She looked at the Actor, who also shrugged.
“So,” Masha said to the Actor, “I understand you’re half Irish but also a quarter Turkish?”
“This missing quarter must be Gujarati,” Vinod said. “How else does one become so handsome?”
“You know a lot about me,” the Actor said to Masha.
“It’s just that we have some salted Turkish air-cured beef in the pantry,” Masha said. “Basturma. We eat it in Russia, too, because of the sizable Armenian population.” She had spent half an hour trying to pick out what to wear for the Actor’s arrival, an amount of time she had not spent with clothes since her twenties, finally settling on a white sail of a dress that she thought negated her as best as it could.
The Actor admired her eyes. How many decades had she spent with Senderovsky? He tried to imagine what that would cost in beauty. “I think I remember something like that from my grandma. And a kind of flatbread.”
“Lahmacun.”
He snapped his fingers. “Bingo.” Everyone laughed.
“I thought we were an international table,” Ed said, “but our latest guest contains multitudes. Suck it, Walt Whitman.”
“Suck it, suck it, suck it!” Nat yelled, her affect too aggressively boyish to Masha’s ears. The girl had wanted to be Nate at first, but Masha convinced her that Nat, a shortening of her given name, was cooler. Already Ada Horowitz in her class had declared themselves nonbinary, but their father was the second-richest private equity manager in the city. And Ada was a class sweetheart, perfectly social in every way, unburdened by Nat’s vocabulary and anxiety, anxiety that Masha’s professional experience taught her would one day segue into depression. Masha knew how difficult childhood had been for her husband. Sometimes she would look at her daughter, lost in a BTS monologue or an unbidden discussion of Leicester sheep, and, with her own anxieties and Soviet residue at full pitch, simply think: Will anybody love my child as much as I do?
“I guess I’m the only real cracker here,” Dee was saying. The Actor noticed her for the first time. She reminded him of a personal assistant he had had way back when, a lanky Texan who always spoke out of turn and didn’t last long in the industry. Senderovsky gave a long-winded explanation of why Dee was important, mentioning a prestigious award she had just been given, the Young Literary Lion. （I have a lion and a puma at my table, Senderovsky thought.）
“I’ll have to check it out,” the Actor said. “I’m always looking for interesting things to adapt. At least once I’m done with Sasha’s book. By which point I might be doing ads for the AARP.”
Laughter proved trickier now, but it was still granted, with Senderovsky himself cackling at length, a fist curled under the table for his own personal consumption. The Actor was fond of humor at the expense of others. Senderovsky found this a shortcoming. He had only seen a few films starring his master. （He was not an avid filmgoer; slow novelistic television was his favorite medium.） The Actor could emulate flawed creatures, his gifts were inestimable, he could cry at will at a version of himself that only partly existed, but he could never quite understand his own flaws. He was, in a sense, profoundly without Jesus. Like a small damaged atomic reactor he could generate his own array of “feelings,” which he released into the air as background gamma. Everyone at the table except Senderovsky, everyone on the planet, in fact, wanted a dose.
Senderovsky checked back into the conversation. “There have been studies done about the friendships that form at the elementary and high-school level between four groups in particular,” Vinod was saying in his best former adjunct professor voice. “Koreans, Gujaratis, West Africans, and Soviet Jews. Adolescents from these groups tend to form an unusual bond, although we don’t know precisely why.”
“A cool Nigerian girl would have been nice for our gang,” Karen said. “Or guy.”
“They came a little after our generation,” Vinod said.
“So the three of you met in high school?” the Actor asked.
“Freshman year,” Vinod said.
“I have almost no white friends,” Senderovsky said. And, he wanted to proudly add, my daughter is probably gender fluid.