“Yay!” her daughter cried as she and Karen adjourned to the living room.
“Wow, I’m sorry,” Ed said to Masha and Senderovsky. “I’m just not used to being around children. Although she’s almost too smart to be a child.”
“But she is,” Masha said. “A child.”
“I do that, too,” Dee said. “I forget how to talk to them. I have nieces, but they’re nowhere in Nat’s range of intelligence.”
Yes, thought Masha, talk some more about how my daughter is different from others.
“Sasha always taught us that having a child is expensive, but great for material,” Dee continued.
Ed laughed. “Oh, that is prime Senderovsky.”
“Is that what you told your class?” Masha said. “Is that why you agreed to adopt?”
“Well,” Senderovsky began.
“He also said to marry ‘a professional,’？” Dee said. “That was the only way to survive as an artist.”
“I’m glad he followed his own advice,” Masha said.
“Sasha’s a survivor,” Dee said.
They all chewed silently while passing around the Riesling bottles, their green contents gleaming and sloshing in the candlelight, until Karen came back onto the porch, looking, Vinod noticed, radiant and dimpled. “Done with Swan Lake?” Masha asked. “I’ll go put her to bed.”
“She’s already in her pj’s,” Karen said. “She was really tired and just needed to be tucked in.”
“She’ll need a glass of water next to her bed and her little towel.”
“The one with Llama Llama Red Pajama on it?” Karen asked. “I put it under her pillow along with a photo of Jin.”
The most tender part of her relationship with her daughter, the bedtime rituals during which Nat regressed to someone even younger than her age, was so easily appropriated by another. She was less mother, Masha thought, than caretaker, lesson planner, and unwanted therapist-at-large. One day her daughter would share with Karen the prairie dog kiss, if she hadn’t already, and then Masha might as well move to the attic.
The Actor meanwhile was slowly moving his chair toward hers. “So,” he said to Masha, one eyebrow raised, “you went to New Haven, too?”
“How did you know?” She looked at her husband, who was sucking on a lamb bone with his shoulders hunched and his eyes dimmed. “Have you been talking about me?”
“Not at all,” Senderovsky said.
He must have looked me up, Masha thought. He went through the trouble. “Well, I graduated many moons before you,” Masha said. Her shyness throttled Senderovsky. He had expected his wife to have a crush on the Actor, but this took him back to the Russian bungalow colony, back when eleven-year-old Masha was in love with a tall dumb ox named Oleg who had been mostly in love with himself and something called a LeBaron.
The Actor sat back in his chair and surveyed the audience and the discomfort he was sowing among its members. He was wearing a shrunken tan gabardine shirt of faux-military appearance that would have looked affected on anyone but him—a statement of intent in its own right and a riposte to Ed’s studied rakishness. He could wear anything, do anything, do anyone.
“So, Vinod,” he said, speaking as if to an old friend, “have you ever been in love?”
There was a rustling among the three original friends who, proud graduates of city colleges all, had already been put on edge by flagrant mention of New Haven. But the Actor liked to ask uncomfortable questions. He felt he deserved that privilege after baring himself in front of his audiences.
“Who hasn’t been in love?” Karen said, preemptively.
“I’m asking Vinod,” the Actor said.
Masha felt it now—his cruelty—and she chastised herself for not being turned off by it. So he was the type to survey a group and attack its most vulnerable. “What was your major again?” she loudly asked the Actor. “Theater?”
“I’ve been in love with Karen most of my life,” Vinod said. As he said it, he was looking into his plate and its three perfectly gnawed sardine skeletons, at the economy all that careful gnawing represented. Senderovsky wanted to run across the table and hug him.
“And you’ve been aware of that love, I assume,” the Actor said to Karen. “I ask all this from a place of caring.”
“We have a friendship that’s stronger than any physical love,” Karen said.
“That sounds pro forma,” the Actor said.