Senderovsky thought of Nat. Masha checked for signs of bullying after every school day the way they checked for ticks in the countryside, but all they could elicit out of Nat was that she was safe on her Quiet Mat spinning out her own fantasy world, sometimes talking to herself in a half whisper through the entirety of a lesson, which to Masha’s chagrin her teachers did not discourage or “redirect” because they wanted to “honor that part of her profile.” The only time she had cried was when she tried to get the whole class to dress up like members of BTS, and the kids thought she was being authoritarian, even though all she had wanted to do was to share the one thing she loved.
They drank quietly, listening to the radio, trying to decide if they both still liked Brian Eno. Senderovsky thought it might be time to steer the topic to the real matter at hand. “I don’t think you should leave,” he said to Ed, who had already packed his Gladstone. “Dee doesn’t love him. She’s just toying with him.”
“I heard the great showman finally okayed your script,” Ed said. “Good for you.”
“He’s no longer doing his assisted showering with Masha either,” Senderovsky said. “Now that he’s got what he wanted.”
“He asked me the other day if I could teach him how to grill a lamb shoulder,” Ed said. “I bet he was cheating off the Asian kid in high school, too.”
Ed lit a cigarette and Senderovsky quickly supplied an ashtray stolen from a middling Bogotá hotel during his traveling years. “Karen says they’re close to the antidote,” he said, noticing that Ed had the rare ability to smoke and weep at once （a skill learned at his mother’s knee）。 “Then you can have another shot at Dee. Speaking of shot.” He poured Ed another glass of the outrageously expensive liquor he had finally brought out for this occasion and gave himself a little taste. （It was against his nature to drink something so dear.） After the liquor hit all the sensitive parts of his esophagus like a pinball igniting the pleasure centers of its machine, he began to cough loudly.
“Where am I supposed to go anyway?” Ed said. “London? Seoul? My brother’s Hungarian vineyard? What would I even do there? So many parts of me are closed off for repairs right now. I might as well see her in person than in some angry memory.”
“I personally envy you that you can feel something for someone,” Senderovsky said. “When I stopped falling in love, my art died. I don’t even remember what love is like.”
“It’s like having a stuffed nose all the time.”
“Hmm.”
“It’s like pouring a jeroboam of champagne down your throat and then forgetting how to swallow.”
“Okay.”
“It’s like lighting a Romeo y Julieta with your own thumb.”
“I got you.”
The lights had gone off in Karen’s bungalow, and both men knew what that meant. “I hope Vinod remembers how to work his thing,” Senderovsky finally said.
“They say it’s like riding a unicycle.”
“Imagine wanting someone all your life, and then you go to bed with them and you discover that it’s just like doing it with anyone else. Or that it’s worse. Maybe you don’t like something trivial about them. I once broke up with a woman because saliva pooled in the corner of her mouth. What an idiot I was.”
“It’s the little things I’ll miss about that show,” Ed said. （Often the two were happy talking past each other.） “The way at the end of the season, they’d all get together to clean the house. Imagine that happening anywhere but Japan.”
“When Vinod and I were roommates living in that fifth-floor walk-up on Washington Street, we always fought over who would take down the garbage. After a while, we just kept it in the fridge so that it wouldn’t attract water bugs. That’s how Karen would introduce us to her beaux sometimes. The guys who kept garbage in their fridge.”
Ed yawned.
“Here’s the thing,” Senderovsky said, “you know I never ask you for anything. Would it be possible to borrow a small sum of money for a month or two, just to pay off the pool company and restock the alcohol? There’s a huge tranche of money coming from the network now that things are rolling.”
“I don’t understand why you didn’t ask me earlier,” Ed said. “You’ve basically been feeding and boozing five extra people for the last two months.”
“I come from one of those proto-Arabic cultures where the guest is sacred. Also, you never offered.”