And now her husband was found out as his best friend’s jealous betrayer. “Why did Daddy want to hide Vinod’s manuscript in Steve’s winter palace when everyone says it’s so good?” “Not everyone, honey. I haven’t read it, for one.” “But Karen-emo says—” “That’s enough. Daddy’s not perfect, but he’s not that bad.” （Great, now she was defending him.）
So now she and her husband were both abandoned and scorned, the insulted and the injured, sentenced to a five-hundred-square-foot cabin on their own property, alone amid the field-mouse droppings and the coyote howls and the nearby guns going off off-season, the subdued pop-pop-pop! of their retorts getting closer every day, until someone would finally reclaim their bravery and aim straight for the two salt-and-pepper heads gathered over the samovar. Yes, the revolution was coming for them, too. How many revolutions would they have to live through during the never-ending historicity of their goddamned lives?
But the world of the colonists was about to change irrevocably. And, this time, it would have nothing to do with the Russians.
6
It happened three weeks later. Dee woke up in Masha and Senderovsky’s bed, listening to the prodigious rustle of trees that were close enough to touch from the main house’s second floor. Directly below her, the Actor was adjusting the futuristic knobs of the espresso maker to his satisfaction. The main house was a treat, especially with its strong signal for her laptop, but there were things Dee missed about their love affair when each still had their own bungalow. He had been giddy and manic then, coming up with strange new ways for them to express their love. He had suggested that they exchange their dirty underwear and keep it on their desks while they worked. The handyman, finally paid in full by Senderovsky and excited to see his foreign employers reduced to living in a cabin, happily hoisted the desks from Dee’s and the Actor’s respective bungalows and set up snug new offices in the house’s now-empty bedrooms. （“What a beautiful couple you two make!” he had said.） She told the Actor his underwear-exchange idea was disgusting—“But you’re just so Dee-licious!” he had shouted—but then they fought through his proposition with great charm, and eventually a silky, musky thing found its way onto her desk, draping one of the Underwoods from her old bungalow.
What was it like to be involved with the Actor? It was all-consuming, like watching him from the front row of a movie theater, the volume of his musical voice blaring, his face up close, constantly puzzling through new things with unbridled enthusiasm, lighting up with pleasures he had surely experienced before but which he now repurposed as new and exclusively theirs. （“This is the first time I’ve ever really encountered an apricot.”）
“I love you,” he would say first thing in the morning.
“I respect that,” she would answer. Fine, he would think. Respect was but a signpost on the road to love. All he needed to be was more lovable.
* * *
—
Now that she had plenty of signal around her, each morning Dee indulged in the privilege Senderovsky used to enjoy, the ability to tune in to social media before even brushing one’s teeth. She found herself surprised by how much she liked the vitriol directed against her by the Actor’s fans, some of whom posted side-by-side photographs of Dee and her predecessor, Elspeth of Glasgow, to highlight the deficiencies of the former. The photo they used of Dee was usually the least attractive they could find, her eyes squinting at the flashbulb of some literary festival red carpet, her face betraying unfamiliarity with even this minor form of fame.
What did it matter? They were now crowned as the first couple in the age of the virus. Her book was enjoying a very modest uptick in sales, and her publicist had called to congratulate her on her new relationship. On this particular morning there had been great response to the photo of her and the Actor holding a baby squash together on his feed, her head curled into his shoulder with an impish smile, both of them with their bushels of long, tangled virus hair, under which he had written “We’re learning to make babies!” as if they had grown the squash themselves and not picked it up at a farm stand. Also, this implied they might soon become a family, which was just the kind of outrageous statement the Actor could get away with.
She was lying atop a stack of pillows, their cases only recently denuded of the starchy scent of their former owners. They had forgotten to have sex that morning, an omission she could live with （it would be imprudent to get too used to any routine）， and the bough of a scraggly elm kept elbowing the window as Dee scrolled through her many mentions, until she thought to herself: Damn, we ought to get the tree guy to trim these trees. Just the other day, after they did have sex right upon waking, and as his body lay next to hers looking a tiny bit deflated and suburbanized on the faux-rustic Craftsman-style bed, he had lifted up his head full of dense black curls, looked around, and said, “You know, I’m not in love with this house. There’s nothing special about it.”