—
“Why didn’t you show the manuscript to others?” Senderovsky said. He and Vinod were standing by the espresso machine, watching it perform its morning ablutions before preparing the first cup. Days had passed since Vinod had hit his friend. “You knew people in publishing. Why did you count on my opinion alone?”
“You told me not to send it out,” Vinod said. “You told me it would destroy my career before it even got started. You said to work on something else. A funny novel about growing up in Queens.”
“Why did you trust me?”
“Because you’re family.”
“Who the hell trusts family? Would you trust your brothers to do right by you?”
“I’m going to borrow money from Karen,” Vinod said, “and buy you another bottle of whiskey and fix the coffee table.” The offer of money hurt Senderovsky even more. It implied that everything Vinod had lost because of his jealousy was beyond measure. I broke your liquor, you broke my life.
“There was a line in your book,” Senderovsky said. “It’s right after the first time your parents kiss in the Parimal Gardens. And the father is angry the next day. He’s in love, but he’s angry because”—Senderovsky closed his eyes to quote—“？‘She had taken away what he thought would sustain him for life. The character of the lonely man, his aloneness bordering on the holy. Wherever they went, whichever rich country would give them a visa, whatever more she would give him of herself, just as she had a moment ago given him the moist creases of her lips, he would never forgive her.’？”
Vinod was amazed at Senderovsky’s recall, how he had even remembered the name of the unremarkable gardens where his parents courted back in Ahmedabad. Had he read the manuscript many times since? Is that why he still kept the Teva box? For inspiration?
“And there were more lines like that,” Senderovsky said. “Plenty more lines on every page. You spoke the truth without being clever about it. You revealed your parents, while I hid mine in my shadow. All I had was cleverness. Cleverness paid well for a while.”
“I want to leave here,” Vinod said. He picked up the completed espresso cup, swirled the copper within, and swallowed the hot contents in one go. “All this is poisoned for me now. I feel more alone on the same estate with you than I would in my studio apartment.”
“You’re not going back to Elmhurst,” Senderovsky said. “And with your permission, I’m sending Hotel Solitaire to my literary agent tomorrow.”
“We’ve spent so many years of friendship together,” Vinod said, “without ever saying a proper ‘fuck you’ to one another. So, let me be the first to say it. Fuck you, Sasha Borisovich Senderovsky. Fuck you and your stupid comic novels and your stupid comic life. I’ll find my own agent.”
As expected, he did not feel better using those words. He was merely borrowing them from someone else, someone native-born and entitled to use them without the trace of an accent.
“No,” Senderovsky said. “You’re not going. You’re staying here with her. It’s safe here. And it’s easier to fall in love. And we can fix this, you and me. If it bothers you to see my face at the dinner table, you can eat in her bungalow or I’ll eat alone in the kitchen.”
Vinod washed his espresso cup in the sink, without saying a word.
But they continued to assemble for dinner, all of the eight residents, as if this was the only requirement of their stay: the daily climb up the cedar steps, the familiar placement along the table （Ed and the Actor had recently swapped places, so that the latter could sit next to Dee）， the nodding of the heads in culinary appreciation as Ed made use of the latest local ingredients to appear at the local farm stand, cherries and squash. But, as mentioned, a new quiet reigned, a semaphore of love between Karen and Vinod and Dee and the Actor, but mostly brooding silence as the bungalow residents absorbed what their host had done against their most kindly member.
Only Nat talked and talked, about BTS and sunbathing groundhogs and the Korean-language cartoons she was watching with Karen （and now also Vinod）， as if daring the others back into conversation. She was trying to defend her father’s honor, to remind them all that there was nothing more he liked than hearing the voices of his beloved guests, even as his toasting hand remained on his napkin, his eyes skirting over the cherry sauce with which Ed had nimbly coated his pork chops.
“The mal told the ori ‘you walk funny!’ A mal is a horse and an ori is a duck. But mal also means ‘bad language.’ That’s why the horse is always saying bad things. And that’s when he told hama hippo ‘you’re so fat’ and the hama started to cry.