“Not just the hair,” he repeated, breathing heavily now. “Wash all of me. Get it all out.” He thought of adding “if you’d like,” or “if you can,” which would soften things and maybe even indemnify him, but he held back, proudly, his penis starting to rise on its own accord.
She saw all this. Heard the excited tremor of his voice and felt her own lack of control at the edges of her fingernails, inside the warm pouch of her underwear. She wanted to speak now, to speak one sentence after the next, to monologue in the manner of Nat or Lara Zacharovna, or to call her late sister and tell her everything that happened in endless run-on English sentences, not caring if her accent returned or not. But no, this wasn’t for anyone, not even for her dead sister. She thought of the final scene of her favorite movie, which happened to be set in East Germany, a former Stasi member buying a book about his life and being asked by the salesclerk if it was a gift. “Das ist für mich,” the aging former Stasi man had said, without affect, but with clear emotion. This is for me.
“Where do you need me to wash?” she whispered, the cartilage of his ear bending between her fingers, her cracked lips just 2.54 centimeters away. He reached up and took her other arm, at first unsure of where to place it. Again, he was aware of the tenor of the times, but somehow her age and profession calmed him. She was a medical doctor, she came from an era of different understandings. He put the hand against his chest, where he helped her make arcs around the hardness of it, and then reached down to massage the bellyfuls below. And now if she increased her arcs she would soon gather all of him. He wanted her to take her time, he wanted to be in control and also to be teased. At first, when the water had cut out in his bungalow, he imagined playing a recently blinded man in some extremely limited series on a new streaming network, using his panic, his loss of control, as propellant into a new dark （he had missed his own pun） place. But, as he had said to Senderovsky, all roles led to himself. And now she was caressing it, ostensibly to get the suds out, but with a practiced muscular motion. There was a word he wanted to say, a proper name, but it might not end well for him. Then again: a medical professional from an era of different understandings. He was sick of holding himself in check all the damn time.
“Dee,” he said out loud, as close to a moan as he could. “Oh, Dee.”
The woman stopped. She wouldn’t look up to face him. “Don’t stop,” he said. “Keep going.”
Masha recoiled, loosened her grip, but then there were the same words on endless loop: Das ist für mich, Das ist für mich, Das ist für fucking mich!
There was a lot of it and it mixed with the deer-skin-smelling suds circling the drain, until it was hard to distinguish what was his and what came from an expensive foreign bottle. She turned off the water, and he faced her now in complete silence, a tall Mediterranean body, the closed double brackets of his chest, the pre-sex of his belly, the stubbly well-shorn fuzz of a pornographer’s dream, and the menagerie of bobbing animals below. His eyes were red as if he had cried, and in every movie he had ever made there would be a scene where his lucky tears flowed and slalomed down the woodwork of his face like the catharsis of a nation, like an ancient rite. All this had been hers. Was that the right way to look at it? In the possessive? “There’s egg salad if you want for lunch,” she said.
He snorted, but then reached up to touch her cheek. “Your husband ought to fix the plumbing system,” he said. “But until he does, I want you to keep those buckets ready.” He smiled “boyishly,” he thought.
“We’ll see,” Masha said. She handed him a towel.
“You don’t want to towel me off? Finish what you started?” There was a joke in there somewhere. Plus the insinuation: she had started it.
“I have a patient,” she said, the sudden realization of her responsibilities to a person in （perpetual） distress entombing the birth of her own quick pleasure. She walked out, passed all the familiar sights, the big and little tokens of culture that cluttered her small home, holding her still-wet hands out in front of her like a proof of concept. The concept being that she was alive and strong and wanted, if not loved.
5
“‘My name is Luka!’？” Senderovsky happily sang along to the satellite radio as he bounced up the driveway at an obnoxious speed, scrutinizing a lawn now completely free of blanched tree branches. “？‘I live on the second floor!’？” An undeniably male and colonial feeling seized him. He had stood up to the Actor and, with the aid of Tree Guy, he had stood up to the detritus of a windstorm and thus to nature herself! The rest of the day would pass with grace.