Masha didn’t care if her husband heard her, which he did. She spread her legs, the bed flooded with her own scent, which, if only her husband remembered, was magnificent. She alone had a concrete fantasy of the Actor, him on top in the most obvious of ways （what she lacked in imagination, she made up in ardor）， on this very bed, her hands pressing into his chest because she couldn’t accept all of him at once. So much had been written about the softness of his hair and the color of his eyes that in order to claim a new part of him she focused on the enamel of his sclera. White is the color of infinity, Malevich had proclaimed. Afterward, she spent a good hour staring into darkness, until she could make out the entirety of the room, the chestnut trim of the windowsill, the cheap paper shades, the prosaic rectangle of the light switch. When was the last time she felt both this good and this scared? The airport hall reeking of terrible cinnamon buns, her nervous husband at her side, scanning the departure board for Beijing, anticipating the transfer to Harbin, the rush of a crowded new country, the first live glimpse of her daughter.
In his bungalow, Ed dreamed of Chania. Unfortunately, the scale of his drunkenness had erased all short-term memory, and Dee wasn’t there to enliven his travelogue. The dream came to him in the form of an endless quest. He kept trying to get back to his hotel but was lost in the rotisserie of Greek summer streets. He had to deliver a beautifully hand-wrapped gift to his mother, waiting for him in the hotel lobby, but he did not know what was inside. All he needed to do was hand it to her, and then his mother’s maid would hand him a packet of balled-up underwear in return. The gift was but a detail; the underwear was the point. As it were, Ed walked the dusty streets wearing nothing from the waist down.
* * *
—
By the time he heard his wife snoring, morning was almost upon them. Senderovsky softly creaked his way up to the attic and soon emerged with a Teva sandals box, trailing cobwebs behind him. As he walked out the front door leading to the front yard with its dead white tree branches, the sleepless Actor entered through the rear with his phone, looking to mate it with the main house’s signal, the password written in Masha’s elegant post-Cyrillic handwriting on the refrigerator’s chalkboard. He downloaded the Tr?? Emotions photograph along with everything else he could about Dee, including her Grand Book of Self-Compromise and Surrender. It had been reviewed no fewer than four hundred times by media outlets from Cleveland to Catalunya. Every time he saw the same stock photo of her, he pinched it bigger with his index finger and thumb. Her eyebrows were never plucked and her sober stare was more powerful than her tipsy one. Lately, there had been a minor scandal. She was associating with some miscreants from the questionable right: “Some of these people are very erudite and cannot be easily dismissed. They channel the mindset of poor folk who happen to be white and who we would like to believe have no minds at all.” Her contradictions throttled him. He loaded up the most attractive photo of her, a simple one taken by phone at a reading, at a podium, spaghetti-strap dress and high-cut bangs, halogen light. Breathless, he ran back to his cottage, to the useless books and the map of the Leningrad metro and the firm new bed crying out for his body’s delight.
* * *
—
Senderovsky stood amid the felled white branches, death all around him, Vinod’s novel snug in its box as it had been for two decades. The garbage cans sat at the end of the driveway, covered in dew, waiting for pickup. If he carried out his plan, Vinod’s words would be lost forever. Senderovsky ruminated over that fact. How he hated his dressing gown right now, and all that it represented, the sniveling, the posing. All of it was the very opposite of Vinod’s novel, a portrait of his parents when they were university students in India, when they were still in love. That rare impossible thing: a young man’s novel about a subject not himself.
Senderovsky stood before the gray March heavens as if waiting to be judged, a balding man in need of a haircut. No, he couldn’t do it. But returning the manuscript to the attic was out of the question now that his wife knew about the box and suspected its contents. He looked around. The property was shared by many groundhogs, but its most irascible tenant had been dubbed “Steve” by his daughter. Steve had an overweight furry body mottled with orange highlights, and like a prosperous American with several condominiums, he had dug more than one cavernous hole for himself. He summered by the one near the pool, at times actually flopping himself out on the pool deck in a happy rodent stupor. During the leaner months, he lived by the Christmas trees flanking the west perimeter of the property from whose delicious sweet roots he would make winter meals. It was this hole Senderovsky approached now with the Teva sandals box under his arm.