“Well,” Nat said when she realized no one was going to reward her for her language lesson. “It’s not easy being a child in the time of the virus.”
After dinner, when the Actor suggested to Masha and Senderovsky that he and Dee should move into the main house （he claimed to need the signal now that they were going into preproduction） and Senderovsky and Masha and Nat should move into the Petersburg Bungalow, Senderovsky could only grunt assent. “We have to keep him happy now,” Senderovsky whispered to Masha in Russian. “We’re almost there.”
In her office, Masha’s Russian patients rejoiced at the nightly clashes between the protestors and the police throughout the country. They had never really cared for this land, these elderly Soviet immigrants feasting off the full smorgasbord of government support. They had been sickened by its promiscuous diversity, all but destroyed by its first Black president, and now they were going to take it back at last.
Photographs appeared on their social media feeds of the mug shots of Black men sneering into cameras alongside ungrammatical broadsides in English: “This man…went into Windmere gated community to steal a car. He beat the home owner to death with a bat, then went into their home and beat their son to death with a bat. This is equivalent, to a knee on an innocent mans neck…Ask yourself…why are you afraid to share this!!!”
And everywhere they turned, a man named Beel Gates awaited them with his monstrously long vaccine needle. Under the guise of the fake virus spread by his friend Dzhordzh Tsoris, bespectacled Beel would bend them over and “vaccinate” them right in the popka turning them into Marxist zombies who would be content to live in a society without “STRONG MASCULINE MEN.”
They reserved a special hatred for Chicago’s mayor, a short gay Black woman married to a six-foot-tall white woman, these two socialist “freaks” who ran “the worst black-on-black murder city in America.” What would her patients think of her own family? Masha wondered. What would they think of Nat? Why was she helping them, healing them, listening to their twisted monologues, when she and her sister had never known such ugliness, when there had been no one in their own family to counsel or save?
On the day the Actor told her she should no longer wash him, confirming that Dee was now returning his affections, she heard a ringing in her ears. It was like church bells ringing in old Russia announcing the start of a snowstorm. On the previous days, she had shown some initiative in the shower, had opened her blouse and put one of his wet, soapy hands upon her breast, where he squeezed for a while, perhaps issuing a Morse code of distress to his publicist, and then she had placed another of his hands beneath her skirt, whereupon he recoiled and said, most stupidly, “But you’re not wearing any underwear.”
After that shower, as she was washing her own hands, he said, “I want to stop being in love. Can you recommend addiction therapy?” She said she had colleagues who could possibly help, although they were still doing studies on the effects of Tr?? Emotions, figuring out which category of maladies the effects of the algorithm best fit. He had come up to her then, as she was at the sink, talking in her calm therapeutic voice, and pressed his naked bulk against her skirt, rubbing against her buttocks in great circular motions, as if he still had more to give. “Thank you, Mashen’ka,” he said. She had taught him the diminutive of her name. “You’re the only one who gives a damn about me.” And when she went back to the main house, to her office and its monitor full of squeaking angry Russians, she sat down and felt the wetness of him on her skirt and thought she would cry out joyfully right in front of her Lyubas and Laras if only to show them what it was like to still feel something other than hate.
And then it was all over. Her husband was involved, obviously, had spurred Dee to reciprocate the Actor’s interest so that his pilot script would advance, knowing what it would do to his wife and, come to think of it, to one of his best friends, Ed. Was he any kinder, in the end, than the Laras on her screen, any better disposed to empathizing with the grief of others?
The Actor had rejected her on a Friday; this she remembered, because during her secret Marrano ritual that night in the spacious upstairs bathroom she had brought her palm down on both candles during her lehadlik ner shel Shabbat—her Actor-washing palm, to be sure—and was angry at the flames for extinguishing themselves so quickly, for neither cleansing her nor refusing to let her feel hurt anywhere but within the four chambers of her most problematic muscle. So we used each other, the Russian voice in her kept saying in a nontherapeutic, pragmatic, Lara-like way. We used each other, and then it had to end. Two people had needs, the needs were met. What else had she fantasized? That they would run away together? That she would mean everything to him? That they would have a bedside hotel breakfast in Los Angeles when this was all over? Every relationship was transactional, and no one ever gave more than they had to.