“My bet would be,” Senderovsky said, “that even if you take away the algorithm, he would still be in love with you.”
“Bullshit, Proffy,” Dee said. “He barely looked at me before we took that photo.”
“He falls in love with artists and thinkers.”
“He hasn’t even read my book.”
The door to the main house creaked open, and Masha emerged carrying a heavy pail of water, wearing a sundress still a few weeks out of season. She was headed for the Petersburg Bungalow. She saw Dee and her husband, wondered how she should compose herself, if she could compose herself, and decided that no composition was necessary in the end. She smiled, waved with her free hand, and continued on her way to the Actor’s cabin, the water sloshing loudly in her pail, her gait veering to the left （her right leg had gone numb during the night）， and her dress sticking to her posterior, until, with a trembling hand, she straightened it. They watched her leave the pail at the Actor’s door, knock twice, then quickly turn around and head back, her eyes minding the fur of her slippers.
The Actor opened the door wearing nothing but a demonstrative pair of European underwear, looked down at the pail, and called out, “Masha!” When she wouldn’t respond, he shouted as if to an errant dog, “What’s wrong with you? Come back!” Then he glanced at the porch, saw Senderovsky, and especially saw Dee, and managed to both open his mouth and shut his door at the same time.
Masha’s brazenness affected Dee more than it did Senderovsky. She thought of what the pail of water, its very sloshing, represented. She thought of its uses and of Masha’s pale dumpling hand. She considered herself uncritically, saw her many advantages, and decided to also grow bold. “I’ll read your script and talk to him,” she said. “Maybe you can lay the groundwork. Make it look like it was your idea. Hello? Are you listening?”
Senderovsky watched his wife in the sundress return to her patients and her child’s lesson plans and thought of the raft of mystery that floats between two partners, even contented ones, as they turn in for the night. He wished he could fall in love with someone as his wife evidently had done. He had chased after beauty for such a long part of his life, until he had caught up with it and found it, like everything else, worthy of no more than a chapter or two of heightened prose.
Now all that mattered was the property and its salvation. The dewy land and the rustle of dying trees and the companionship of friends disembarking at the station and the sound of grilled meat being turned over, once, twice—all of it must remain his until the day he coughed his last.
3
“If you are interested in my wife, I could look the other way.” Senderovsky was holding the pail of water in front of him, surprised by just how heavy it was and yet how easily his wife had carried it.
“You can put that down,” the Actor said. “And I’m not interested in Masha.” He had just been taking a turn at himself beneath the sheets only to be interrupted by the arrival of the wrong Senderovsky.
“I am telling you this as a gentleman,” Senderovsky said. “I am not bound by old constraints.”
“What a weasel of a man you are.” The Actor wiped his hand on his European underwear.
“Look at it my way,” Senderovsky said. “I did not grow up with the advantages you had. Advantages physical, financial, emotional. And yet here I stand before you. Offering a bucket of water my wife brought to you. I assume you have your own sponge. All I want is for us to move forward and for you to be happy.”
The Actor sneered. He wondered if he could continue his daily soapings with Masha now that her husband knew and the excitement of the transgression would be gone. In the end, Senderovsky ruined everything.
“You think you’re better than me, don’t you?” the Actor said.
“Not at all,” Senderovsky said. “It’s not a competition.”
The Actor slung on a T-shirt that barely covered his navel. He did not want to talk about Masha, but he did want to talk.
“Maybe you’re right about advantages,” he said. “Some of us are light on our feet. We can pivot. We’re not afraid of learning new things instead of living in the past. I did not just study ‘acting.’ I am not just an ‘actor.’ I studied dancing, music, literature, history, theology, physics both practical and theoretical.”
He gestured to the bungalow redolent of books and mouse droppings. “And in the end, I am better than you. I’m a better driver than you, a better sous-chef, a better flight mechanic, a better commercial fisherman, a better private investigator, a better and certainly more courageous astronaut, and, if I took the time to really learn the craft, a better writer. I also know how to communicate with people, how to elicit their frankest emotions. And I know how to make them come. So that’s the difference between us.”