Masha had caught up to her screaming daughter and now held her in her arms. She spoke authoritatively. “You don’t want to go to sleep, do you, Nat?” The therapeutic voice. “This must be very frustrating for you.”
“It is!” Nat burbled through her tears. “It’s very frustrating.”
“What can make you feel better?”
“BTS!”
“No screens right before bedtime. How about a prairie dog kiss?”
Karen watched the scene wistfully. She could feel the child’s dry lips on her own forehead. “That’s how they know they’re the right ones,” she said out loud. Vinod wanted to reach across the table and take Karen’s hand. He had cried when he found out she was getting divorced, though he didn’t know for whom.
“What does that mean?” Dee slurred. “Whatsa prairie dog kiss?” But Karen would not explain it to her. She kept it to herself.
After Nat and Masha had said their goodbyes, Dee got up and said, “Well, I better be a good girl and call it a night.”
“No nightcap?” Ed asked.
“What’s your email address so I can send you the photo?” Dee asked the Actor. He wrote it down on a paper napkin, steadying one hand with the other.
They watched her descend the cedar steps, listened to the clap of her sandals. （Wasn’t it too cold for sandals, the Actor thought.） There was no reception in the bungalows, so she went into the living room to send the Actor the Tr?? Emotions photo. It was a featureless room except for a Steinway and the heritage chestnut trim of its windowsills, the identities of its inhabitants broadcast outward toward the bungalows. There was one silver-framed photo of Senderovsky and Masha as twelve-year-old kids in the Russian colony across the river. They looked like they were sitting on a haystack, and their skinny innocence dwarfed Dee’s at that age. Senderovsky had enough crooked teeth to fill half a smile. His eyes were on Masha, much as the Actor’s had been on Dee. And Masha herself was a slim beauty with a pinch of something not quite European about her, which could have been explained by a heavy Russian tome on a bookshelf by the piano outlining the effects of the Mongol conquest of the Kievan Rus’。 Dee walked outside, past the porch （once more, two sets of male eyes upon her, though different eyes than before）， and toward her bungalow, which sat on its wooden haunches, bathed in a frosty glow.
“I should turn in as well,” the Actor said after the door of Dee’s bungalow was shut, the little house lit in amber. He got up and hugged himself as if pressing his heart back into place, one chamber at a time.
“But there’s still a cheese course,” Senderovsky said.
“We got a lot of work tomorrow,” the Actor said to Senderovsky in a voice that he hoped conveyed his rank and authority but which, given his new affliction, failed to convince anyone.
8
“‘You smoke,’？” Karen sang, passing an imaginary microphone to Vinod.
“？‘I smoke,’？” Vinod sang back, passing the microphone back.
“？‘I drink,’？” Karen sang.
“？‘Me too,’？” Vinod sang.
“？‘Well good,’？” Karen sang, “？‘Cuz we gon’ get high tonight.’？”
Senderovsky and Ed sat on one of the porch’s nautical-looking moisture-resistant couches （they had been designed with a beach house in mind）， watching their friends dance to the music in the candlelight. “The first time we heard this song,” house historian Senderovsky said to Ed, “was the night you and I met. It was 2001, a famous year, in that Fort Greene brownstone Suj and I used to live in. Remember my ex-girlfriend Suj? I wonder what happened to her.” Ed shrugged. “Some guy was running around with a suit of armor, and one of the deputy mayors or commissioner of something or other was snorting cocaine in the third-floor bathroom with you! That’s how we met, right? When I walked in on you and the vice mayor.”
“Wasn’t that the party where you met up with Masha again?” Ed said. He had finished a bottle of wine and the four Gibsons Dee had failed to drink.
“A lot happened during that party,” Senderovsky said. “It was seminal.”
Karen and Vinod fell in tandem onto the couch opposite, the one with the perfect view of the sheep farm beyond and its many rustic structures, a bungalow colony for quadrupeds. They were slicked in sweat and laughing, hands reaching toward each other, hungry for touch. Vinod was lost in the cluck-cluck-cluck of her dorky middle-aged laughter, the glint of her cheekbones. Karen felt the years falling away. When she reached for her glass on a side table she could have been reaching for a carafe of cheap Beaujolais at their favorite restaurant back in the day, a brasserie named Florent, the chrome-edged fortress of their origin story. Now she was scared of time’s compression, scared of the innocence Vinod invoked. They kept telling her that now, and only now, her life finally attained “limitless possibilities.” But all of these possibilities seemed quite limited and asterisked besides, born of unexercised stock options but not the understanding of others. The trajectory was clear: every passing year would mean being more alone, until even the bathroom mirror of her loft on White Street would figure out a way to reject her, would show her the face of another.