“Tr?? love?” Ed asked, his hand firmly around the soft lobe of his ear.
“I’m going to need a little more time to process it,” Dee said.
“It’s not instantaneous,” Karen said.
“Uh-oh. I’m calling the Better Business Bureau,” the Actor said.
“Maybe she was in love with you already,” Senderovsky said. Masha looked at him and shook her head, sadly. This is my livelihood, he wanted to tell her. Dee went around the table, keeping her distance but thrusting the phone into her companions’ vision. A polite consensus was forming. They were very cute together. They looked like a couple. They looked like they could be in love. This is what relative youth looked like. （The Actor was ten years older than Dee, but still younger than Senderovsky and his compatriots.） Aww.
“Here goes,” Dee said as she held the phone out in front of the Actor.
“Should I be getting the prenup ready?” the Actor said. Masha groaned inwardly.
“Look at the eyes,” Karen said. The Actor took that to mean Dee’s eyes and he spent a few seconds examining them. Her eyes were flirty, mischievous, perhaps trying to conceal a kind of spite. She was trying to hold back, the Actor thought, trying to maintain a distance from his charms, which was in itself a compliment. He was ready to say something polite.
But then he looked at his own eyes. At the other end of the table Karen watched his expression change. His eyes in the enhanced photo were not his. They were not his photogenic eyes. They were not his bedroom eyes. They did not belong to Getty Images. They did not belong to his unimagined self. Maybe it was Senderovsky’s earlier remark, but he thought of the movies of the 1980s, he thought of an extraterrestrial’s elucidating touch, the flood of light and comprehension. This smiling man in front of him was who he needed to be, the final version, the finished version, and this woman, holding the phone in front of him, with her defiant strawberry cowlick and her unplucked brows, was who allowed him to ascend to that stage. He focused on his eyes the way he would focus on his lines. The Method was a site plan, but nobody knew how or why a role came together the way it did.
Karen now recalled that her pitch deck for Tr?? Emotions had started with a photo of the Actor and the Norse royal he was dating at the time. Although he had never been a brand ambassador, he had always epitomized the broad strokes of the algorithm.
“Well?” someone was saying.
“Nice, very nice,” the Actor said, and laughed. Others laughed with him. Dee laughed. But Karen knew that tone.
“Ruh-roh,” she said quietly, her distance from others allowing the words to pass unheard, though Ed read her lips anyway.
Dee walked back to her seat once more. “It’s a fun app,” she said to Karen. “Whether it works or not, it makes you think about what people want from each other.”
“That’s right,” the Actor said, still in his fugue. He looked over to Dee at the other end of the table, her body a blot of green and orange heat amid the blackness of his night vision. “If you don’t mind,” he said to her, “could you send me that photo?”
7
Alcohol is the gift of any narration, and any writer thrills to the thwop of a corkscrew being pulled. Now the protagonists will reveal themselves. Now there will be unchecked laughter and love. Now the principals will flirt and be cruelly rebuffed, and the loveless will sigh into their cups and try to remember what it was like to be wanted.
An hour later, every adult but the Actor and Masha properly drunk, Senderovsky found another bottle of primitivo between his legs as he struggled to get it open. “That can’t possibly be safe!” drunk Vinod was shouting.
“My thighs don’t have the virus!” Senderovsky shouted back.
“Doctor?” Vinod asked Masha. “Your professional opinion?”
“That would be a difficult route of transmission. Though we don’t know yet what’s possible.” She noticed the stove sputtering in the corner, ready for a strong hand, which would have to be her own.
“I saw this on the platform of your train station,” Ed was saying, holding up his phone for others to lean in and look, one at a time. It was a photograph of a sticker in red, white, and blue featuring some kind of extraterrestrial iconography, a deconstructed swastika entrapping the segments of a hissing snake and the words PATRIOTIC DEFENSE LEAGUE. SLEGS BLANKES.
Senderovsky and Masha both thought of the many tattoos gracing the ankles of their handyman. “I’ve seen stuff like that around here and it’s frightening,” Masha said. “Down by the main road, someone has a flag of an eagle sitting on top of a globe. And the globe has an anchor running through it.”