“Too hot?” Ed was worried.
“No, perfectly hot. And these snow peas, they just go so well with the veal and the sauce.”
“Textures,” Senderovsky said, resuming his unasked-for role as Dee’s teacher. “The softness against the crunch.”
“This is flipping amazing,” Karen said. “When you put your mind to something, Ed.”
“Oh, these sardines,” Masha said, filleting a glossy section for Nat. “They couldn’t be more perfectly grilled. It’s like I can inhale their essence.” It was unusual for her to be so lyrical, Senderovsky thought. Was she the one to have extricated Vinod’s novel? She sometimes took walks down the front lawn between patient calls and Nat’s classes and speech-therapy appointments.
“I made them just for you,” Ed said to Masha, turning to Dee with a wink to signal that it wasn’t true, that everything was for her.
“You should write a cookbook,” Vinod said.
“The world needs another Mediterranean cookbook like I need another ulcer,” Ed said.
Only the Actor remained silent, and while normally they would try to suss out his opinion, the guests remained too enthralled by the food to notice its absence. He felt their lack of interest morbidly.
“Where did you learn to cook like this?” Dee asked.
“I lived in Italy for a while,” Ed said. “When I was younger.”
“Remember when you and that countess started a bilingual magazine about the rivers of the world?” Karen said. “What was it called?”
“Wasn’t it just called Rivers slash Fiumi?” Senderovsky said, his mouth making the chavk sound with impunity now, his quarantined mother too far away in Forest Hills to hear.
“Let’s not go there right now,” Ed said, and Karen raised her hands in surrender. Ed reached for a bottle of Riesling （the newspaper would soon declare it the most underrated grape of this particular summer） and poured himself a glass to the brim, realizing he should have first asked Dee if she needed a refill. To bring up Rivers/Fiumi right now, after his victory with the tonnato and the sardines? He would never forgive Karen for that. So he had wasted his youth on silly indolent things fueled by ancestral money. So what? Were the eight hundred readers of Rivers ruined forever by his attempt at twentysomething romanticism, inspired by a combination of his love of Huck Finn’s journey down the Mississippi and the only family trip on which his father had been too drunkenly passed out to humiliate him, a luxury steamer belching its way down the wide contours of the Nile? By contrast, Karen’s invention was actively destroying people’s lives, the Actor’s included.
Quiet returned to the table. This communal meal would be different from the first. Every diner except for Senderovsky had learned something new about another, and the secrets were as piquant as the habanero-laced tonnato they were now shoveling down without regard for the country plumbing. Karen stared at Senderovsky, knowing that he had tried to entomb Vinod’s novel inside a groundhog’s hole. Nat stared at Karen knowing that she would teach her Korean and then one day she would be ready to meet Jin and J-Hope and Rap Monster in Seoul. Dee and Ed glanced at each other, companions after their long walk, she aware of his desire, he trying to gauge his chances. The Actor glanced sideward at Masha, knowing the consistency, the texture, to quote her husband, of her touch. And Masha stared at her plate knowing the heat of the Actor’s sideways stare, which she feared contained both pity and derision.
“Okay,” Ed said, “who wants lamb steaks?” They all raised their hand except for Vinod and Nat, both moralists when it came to lambs. “They’re coming in bloody unless you say otherwise.”
Soon the rosy little strips of meat attached to the bone were heaped onto plates, and the flimsy recyclable knives proved useless. The six lamb eaters brought their defenseless quarry up to their mouths with their hands and tore at the flesh like lunatics. The meat, succulent but tough, required a dedicated carnivore’s persistence, and each eater concluded their mastication with a lick of first the index finger, then the thumb. Senderovsky was particularly taken with this dish, an emblem of his bungalow colony at its finest. “Before I’m buried I want my body drizzled in olive oil and salt,” he said.
“Daddy’s not going to die for a long time,” Masha told Nat. “He was just being silly.”
“I might die before him!” Nat sang out.
“Now why would you say that?”