“My mom’s new lawyers keep me on a tight leash. But I’ll scrounge something up. Will ten thousand help?”
Senderovsky nodded. His sense of pride was aching.
The lights came on in Karen’s bungalow again. “What was that, fifteen minutes?” Ed said. “Not bad for someone Vinny’s age.” He had stopped crying and seemed suddenly in a good mood. Senderovsky wondered if it was because he had asked him for money.
Now they heard shouting, not just Karen’s piercing soprano, but Vinod’s deep, unused bass. For most of his life he had spoken so quietly, so worried of being scorned for his accent, that teachers had often asked him to repeat himself. “Sounds like love,” Senderovsky said, but he was worried about any potential discord between his best friends. Just when I got the money to open the pool, he thought.
Karen’s door clanged open and a series of automatic lights flicked on to showcase a breathless Vinod running toward the covered porch dressed only in his pajama bottoms, his skin sallow in the artificial light. An object that registered as colored cardboard flapped in one hand and he ran with an anger that made his steps too long, like a drunk man who thinks he can overtake the horizon. Karen emerged behind him, pulling a T-shirt over the gloss of her naked belly. “Vin,” she shouted. “Come back!”
“Something tells me we’ll be untangling this mess for weeks to come,” Ed said.
Vinod did not respond to Karen’s shouted directions. That in itself was frightening. As he flung open the door to the porch, nearly removing the flimsy portal from its hinges, both Ed and Senderovsky saw the lit fury of his eyes.
“Whoa,” Ed said.
And now Senderovsky could positively identify the object in Vinod’s hand and he felt himself rise to defend himself, even as he heard Karen drawing nearer to the porch, shouting words that were not part of their common language.
Vinod was upon Senderovsky, a small man towering over an even-smaller one, one fist curled at his side as if he were his own father entering their Jackson Heights kitchen–cum–boxing ring.
“Did you lie to me?” he shouted to Senderovsky.
“Okay, okay,” Ed said, thrusting one meaningless hand between the two antagonists. “Calm down. This is not like you.”
“Was it good?” Vinod shouted. “Was it? And then you lied to me? Because, you’re—you’re—a fucking—” He was not sure he could break the rules of their relationship, the three-decades-old established order of things: Karen at the top, Senderovsky by her side, Vinod orbiting whosever gravitational pull was stronger at any given time.
“A fucking fraud!” he finally shouted.
As Senderovsky looked into his friend’s eye from the corner of his own, he thought: My God, he’s an adult now.
And: This is the end of our family.
“I’m sorry,” Senderovsky said, just as Karen flip-flopped onto the poorly lit stage of the porch, just as Vinod, using the hand that was not holding the remains of the Teva box, slapped Senderovsky with precisely felt fury across the left cheek.
The drunk and unsteady landowner received this familiar childhood insult just as it was intended. His neck and jaw cracked audibly, his ankles connected with the coffee table upon which the expensive bottle of liquor was perched, and his weight toppled both off their axes, glass and wood and flesh mingling for a second, then each succumbing to gravity in his own unhappy way, the shouts of the two bystanders drowning out the noise of the shattering.
5
Two days after Vinod had slapped Senderovsky on the porch, a news item began to trickle out of the Midwest and to assume ever-larger importance. Every adult was horrified to a greater or lesser degree, and among themselves they took positions ranging from “This is a new low for our country” to “What did you expect?” Some were frightened by the marches and the sprinkling of broken glass in the city （“They’re not riots, they’re uprisings,” Senderovsky publicly corrected his wife）， while others wished they were running through the streets themselves, illuminated by the fire of burning trash cans, the way the city used to be in its heyday.
In any case, everything they saw and heard when they downloaded the day’s news to their tablets reinforced that they were residents of a semicircle of houses surrounding a so-called House on the Hill, flanking a covered porch and a pool that was being brought to life by a trio of chlorine-bearing technicians in uniform. They were as far away from the uprisings as they could be. They were watching a double disaster through glasses pressed to binoculars pressed in turn to a telescope.