An instant fog had settled over the property, and he could see a stack of freshly laundered towels in the upstairs bathroom window that put him into a deep, familial calm. Once again, everything was in its place. “You have a lovely family and a lovely home,” as his Los Angeles agent had said. He coughed into his hand for a good minute as he parked the car, his lungs seizing from the effort. It was the acid reflux, for sure. He should limit his alcohol intake and avoid chocolate and acidic foods.
Speaking of such foods, he had just driven to Rudolph’s Market in the village due north at Ed’s request to pick up a trunkful of items including a mysterious and expensive bottle of “Tunisian pimento & citrus confit.” As he got out of his car, he saw the Actor walking out of the house with a towel wrapped around his waist, his hair a dark halo, his ankles tough but slim, like Karen’s.
“Hello,” Senderovsky shouted to the near-naked man. “Yoo-hoo!” A thought occurred to him. “Did the water cut out in the bungalows?”
“Just another day in paradise,” the Actor said, pouting.
“Please go inside,” Senderovsky said. “I’ll have my handyman look at the pipes. You must be freezing.”
“I’m perfectly fine,” the Actor said. “I like the cold.”
He turned around and left the landowner to what he imagined was a dark state of perplexity. On the way out of the house he had seen the overexposed photograph of the young Senderovsky and his wife-to-be, a charismatic-looking child with resplendent Eastern cheeks, atop a haystack. He remembered Senderovsky’s howl at one of his authorial suggestions—“But that’s ridiculous!”—and counterbalanced it with the feel of his wife’s surprisingly deft hand upon him.
“Karen says it’s better to take a shower at night!” Senderovsky shouted after him. “I should have announced it earlier.”
“Fix it!” the Actor shouted back. Now he was playing a dictator atop a balcony, someone who did not need to use more than two words at a time. But back in the Petersburg Bungalow, he deflated. He sank into a hard modernist chair beside a hard modernist desk and slumped over like a schoolboy caught. First, there were the possible consequences. He scrolled through what had happened just minutes before. Had he crossed a line? Many of his Y-chromosome-bearing colleagues were now in the clink, metaphorically speaking, after decades of touching women and instructing women to touch them. The excuses about her generation and her professional standing seemed weak. If anything, she had the resources and wherewithal to eviscerate him. The best he could come up with now was that she was “European,” and perhaps this was not the first time she had cheated on her sad-sack husband. Still, he should not have said Dee’s name out loud as a final insult. That was as over the top as one of Senderovsky’s scripts.
Which brought him to Dee, of course. She was responsible for this! No, it wasn’t Dee. It was Karen and her algorithm. She was no better than the social media platform guy, the little orange snot at the congressional hearings. They were all scoundrels, out to destroy him, out to destroy the country. And now, thanks to Karen, his heart was not his own. And neither were his eyes.
His eyes. His eyes in the photograph. His eyes beholding her. Her being beheld by his eyes. That was the moment of climax in the shower, Masha no more than a handmaid （was that another joke?）， all of it unspooling from himself, the want and desire and need. He had needs. He had a past. If he were smart about pursuing Dee, he would set aside a few months and write a memoir. Maybe now was the time to do it. Then he could present it to Dee and say, “It’s all in here. There’s no need to exalt me. No need to guess about who I am. I’m just like everyone else.” Except he wasn’t. He did not ask for his level of self-entitlement; it was bundled upon him like a curse along with his talent and the twin dolmas of his eyebrows. Of course he had suffered! You didn’t just fall into his level of range without suffering. But the particulars of how he had suffered, the “throughline” of his pain, yes, that’s what needed to be explored in the memoir. “Here is who I am, Dee.” A writer could say that even more accurately than an actor. “I wrote this for you, Dee.” He knew exactly whose name would go on the dedication page.
He took out his tablet. It would be funny if he used the same style as hers for his own memoir. “I wrote this like you, Dee.” An homage. The Grand Book of Self-Compromise and Surrender by Dee Cameron. Now that was a good title. He clicked past the copyright page, gray light slanting through the window poetically, which brought his hand to his hair and a reminder that given his contretemps with the conditioner he had to run a brush through it sooner rather than later. His phone buzzed—sometimes the reception would get through for a second or two in the bungalows, the invisible probing hand of a cellular tower in the hills above—but he wouldn’t pick it up, and later he would tell his Glaswegian Elspeth that the reception was, to use a word from her language, “wonky.”