“I have maybe three hundred dollars in the bank,” Vinod said. “My father says he might will me his Buick.”
“Honey,” Karen said to Dee, “that’s actually a lot of money for somebody in their early thirties.” Her voice was lacking in malice. She feels sorry for her, Ed thought.
“Says Karen of White Street!” Dee said. The name Karen had recently become a pejorative for a certain class of white women.
“I’m not that kind of Karen,” Karen said. “I’m the kind that nearly gets mowed down on the street because of how I look. And how do you know where I live? I bought my place with an LLC.”
Dee smiled at her. She realized she had no allies among the women. How predictable. “You take no responsibility for what happened to us, do you?” she said.
“You fucked up,” Karen said, Masha’s hands again on her daughter’s ears. “I have, too. Many times. This is a country full of successful fuckups. No one remembers anything. Just clear the deck and start again.”
“Maybe you can hide behind your millions,” Dee said.
“And you can hide behind your two hundred thirty-eight thousand.”
Ed felt terrible for Dee. She was not an inherently bad or particularly racist person, he thought, but she had miscalculated terribly. “I’m proud that you’ve earned every single cent of that,” he said to her. “In a way that I couldn’t.” Dee avoided eye contact with Ed, worried that if she saw his solicitude she might, against all of her being, start to cry.
After a few seconds of silence had elapsed, Vinod said to Dee, “I read your book.”
She blinked in surprise. “You have?”
“Yes,” Vinod said. “I guess I was too shy to talk about it with you, since I’m not a published author myself.” Dee, Ed, and the Actor looked at Senderovsky, accusatorily. “It’s very well written.”
“Thank you.”
“I think it’s about this country’s negotiation with white supremacy. You’re trying to understand many contradictions, contradictions that came with your birthright.”
“It wasn’t much of a birthright,” Dee said.
“But, ultimately.” Vinod stopped for a second. The thunder tried to interject, but no one heard it. “Ultimately,” he said, “it’s hard to know which side you’re on.”
“I’m with the side of the people,” Dee said. “Isn’t that obvious?”
“On the side of your people,” Vinod said. “Which is to say, on your own side.”
Mypeople. The Actor saw what he hadn’t before as he scrolled through her social media mentions. The hopelessness of her position. And of his own. She was trapped. He was trapped. What if he looked into her eyes and failed to see his unimagined self, the man he needed to be? This reality cut through him, eviscerated his Tr?? Emotions, filled him with anxiety on a Nat scale.
What if loving her made it impossible to love himself?
She was seated next to the Actor on the western edge of the table so that, in normal circumstances, to look at the beauty of the setting sun was also to witness the beauty of them. But the sun was out of contention tonight, clouds shaped like countries swept in in its stead, the wind cleaving them of their Alsaces and East Timors. And the two lovers looked cleaved of each other as well.
Ed watched her. He could reach over and hold her hand. He could internalize the sordidness of her struggle, her helplessness, and he could walk her through to the other side. It had recently emerged that the housemates on the Japanese reality show had been coached all along. Just actors in a play. Playthings. And so was she, after all, with her tidy middle-class bank account and her grasping middle-class soul, although she had had the temerity to think she could write and talk her way into being someone original. Their gaze met for a second. She would not unwrinkle her lower face for him, the lower face that lived within the catalog of past slights and which counterbalanced the wit and sparkle of her eyes, but he would still take her as she was. If given the signal, he would sweep her into the folds of a long and complicated dilemma, into a mistake they could make together.
9
Masha and Senderovsky lay in bed in the Petersburg Bungalow, listening to the sheets of rain steel-drumming the expensive new roof. Country rain. Dacha rain. It still meant something to Masha. Instinctively, as if this was 1983, she reached her hand over and took Senderovsky’s. She used to hold hands with him in the Russian bungalow colony across the river all the time, thinking it was platonic for her, knowing it was not for him, but still doing it. Even back then he was a source of entertainment for her, a “one-man clown posse,” always ready with the stupid joke about babushkas and cabbage-soup farts. And still she married him. And still she loved him.