Ed was walking with the leather Gladstone creaking behind him. Masha had partly grown up in New Jersey and had seen powerful men carry golf bags in a similar way. “How was the train up?” she shouted, her tone a little too needy, she thought.
“Charming,” Ed said. “I got a seat with river views.” He knew he had to get some preliminaries out of the way: “Thank you so much for hosting me during this time. It’s much appreciated.” He forced himself to take an exaggerated breath of damp air. “Mmm,” he said. “Just what the surgeon general ordered. You both look wonderful. Sasha’s really lost some weight.”
The weight comment, he quickly realized, could be misinterpreted by Masha, who was beautiful but now reminded him of a noblewoman’s portrait he had seen last year at the Tretyakov Gallery. The kaftan certainly didn’t help. The two men walked silently up the cedar steps of the vast covered porch, which was connected to the main house and overlooked the bungalows, the centerpiece of the property and also its jewel, a screened-in world within a world.
“If you don’t mind, I’m going to be a little doctorly,” Masha said, “if that’s even a word.”
“Not at all,” Ed said. Not at all he didn’t mind, or “doctorly” was not at all a word? Masha had to think about it, which maybe was the point.
“I’ve made some rules,” she said. “Since you’ve taken the train up, maybe you could change into fresh clothes before you sit down anywhere. But before that I’d like to wipe down some of the surfaces, which the workers touched in your bungalow. There’s a lot we still don’t know about this virus.”
“Safety first.”
She did not like his tone. Senderovsky stood beside them in a hunched-over position. He had had to serve as diplomat between two feuding parents for many decades. “Also in public areas like the porch and the dining room,” Masha continued, “I’m going to try to space everyone out and also to give everyone a designated seat. I’m sorry if I sound like a killjoy.”
“There’s no right or wrong here,” Ed said. “We all have to be ourselves during this crisis.”
Actually, there was a right and a wrong here. Ed reminded her of her husband’s parents. Talking with them was like dealing with a smiling adversary who kept a handful of poisoned toothpicks in his pocket. Every time you let your guard down, there would be a sharp prick at your haunches.
“Here’s another question I have to ask. And this is really a compliment, because you’re always going somewhere. Can you tell me where you’ve traveled since, let’s say, December of last year?”
“Since December? Hmmm.” Ed looked up at the stucco-clad main house, a neutral gray like the sky. People of a certain class, immigrants in particular, did not like to rock the boat. A second-floor landing and an adjoining window were yellow-lit at an odd angle, like a Mondrian painting—the top quadrant being the daughter’s room, most likely. Ed had forgotten her name.
“Well, I went to Addis for the jazz thing,” he said. “Then I went to AD to visit Jimmy who’s teaching there.” Ed drew a line in the air from （presumably） Addis Ababa to （presumably） Abu Dhabi. “I went back to Seoul for Christmas. No, wait.” The line across the Arabian Sea stopped abruptly, and Ed’s finger circled, dumping fuel. “I saw Suketu in Bombay, just for the weekend, then I continued on to Seoul.” Sasha followed the line in the air with great interest, imagining it were he and not Ed doing the travel, a business-class whiskey in hand. A long time ago, after his childhood relationship with Masha had ended, but before his adult relationship with her would begin, he had worked as a contributing editor to a travel magazine, humping around both hemispheres with nothing but a notepad and some vocabulary. That interval contained some of the best years of his life, the expense accounts, the sweat of tropical cities, the drunken camaraderie of the Eds of the world.
“When did you leave Seoul?” Masha was asking.
“Oh, I see what you’re getting at. I left right after Christmas, before things got bad there. And from there”—Ed’s index finger was ready for a significant jump—“I went to the Big Island.”
“In honor of our bungalow!” Sasha said, brightly. The bungalow reserved for Ed mimicked the one he and Masha had enjoyed during their honeymoon on Hawaii’s Big Island, and it came with a feature no other house did—an outdoor shower, its walls rendered in seashells.