“Fuck you for even asking permission,” she said.
“Put on your mask,” he said.
“You really do hate my chin.”
“Will not dignify with reply.”
She put on her mask with shaking hands as he, just as shakily, positioned a hanging bathroom mirror against his stupid modernist desk so that she could see herself, then knocked the fucking Hawaiian pineapple statues off with one horny hand. There was a loud sound, his and hers, as he entered her from behind, all of her naked, sprawled against the desk, except for the familiar, by now totemic blue of the surgical mask around her face.
Oh, no, he thought. Could my asking her to put on a mask be interpreted as an attempt to muzzle her? Or an appropriation of Islamic face covering? What does it mean for me as a—
And just then, he came.
2
The head of the network had called Senderovsky personally to tell him they were officially passing on his show. He expected as much after the Actor begged off. “It’s not just that,” the network head said. “It’s the subject matter. Oligarchs, hookers, payoffs. A former Soviet republic won’t seem that different from 2020 America to the viewer.”
“Doesn’t that make it pertinent?” Senderovsky asked.
“No, it makes it depressing.”
After the call, which had taken place a week before Dee and Ed consummated their relationship, he paced the cool dark empty living room of the main house, grieving his loss. Yes, it was over now. Even his agent in Los Angeles had stopped calling him with her stale Russianisms and mentions of his lovely home and lovely family. The bank would take the bungalow colony. Well, fine! He would move to the city, to their tiny apartment, and do what? Write a novel? The very thought repulsed him. He could see the words and sentences accreting on the screen as mourning doves cooed their reviews on his windowsill. He could imagine himself cribbing the best lines from his past, regurgitating his youth, now that the future was but the slow dull tick of a metronome atop the Steinway. He had come so close to having his own television show, to being someone. Now he would have to angle for a teaching job, as some kind of adjunct at first, maybe hoping a full-time position opened up. He would become, essentially, Vinod. Except that Vinod had actually written something brilliant.
And so Senderovsky sulked amid his living room, bumping his hip against the Steinway, tripping over Nat’s junk on the floor. （When had she come into possession of an archery set?） He had always said the right things on social media. He cried when they killed that man in Minneapolis. He was an ordoliberal. He believed in the role of the state in the social market economy and the redistribution of things. Reparations, if that’s what it took. But now he would go further. He would renounce all his privileges. He would not write another novel so that others could be heard. If he were summoned to give a talk or reappear in Hollywood, he would fly in economy class. But if he followed through on his vow of poverty, who would pay for the basic necessities? Who would pay for Nat’s Kindness Academy?
And here was the strangest part: as his career prospects dwindled, Senderovsky looked at the members of his minuscule family with fresh morning eyes. Karen, his most successful friend, wanted Nat for a daughter; the Actor had desired his wife as a “handmaiden.” What kind of fool would he be if he didn’t appreciate what he had? Now that they had moved back into the main house, Nat back into her tiny room （though she did have occasional sleepovers at Karen and Vinod’s） and he and his wife into theirs, a familial charm had fallen over him, best exemplified by the contradictory smells of bacon in the mornings and Sabbath candles on Friday night. He rolled on top of Masha one night after she had lehadlik’d her ner shel Shabbat in the dining room and had lost his nose in the musk of her hair and she held his skinny, childhood-evoking shoulders with two candle-warm hands, tightly, as if he might fly away, then lightly, because she knew he wouldn’t, and they thought of nothing but the glow of certain objects and the strangeness of marriage and the comforts of a home regained. For the duration of their slow coupling, he had even forgotten to cough.
Masha now found herself in the mood for her husband and for the life they hadn’t shared in so long. She had decided to take a leave of absence from her work with the elderly Russians. This happened during a visit to her parents in a Jewish suburb of Boston. She had driven there with Nat, a red cooler full of cold borscht and baguettes for sustenance （she would not trust the hygiene of the road stops）， which had reminded her of every childhood road trip undertaken since she and her bant had landed in America, thirty-seven years ago to the month.