Dee sat with her back to him. “You shouldn’t be seen here,” she said, loudly. “It’s not good for any of us.”
“Yes, please leave,” Ed said.
“I got this, sweets,” Dee said.
“Then at least let me talk to you,” the Actor said to Senderovsky. “I have some news.”
“Keep your distance,” Masha said to her husband, handing him a mask.
* * *
—
They walked into the Petersburg Bungalow, and Senderovsky closed the door behind them. He carried himself like a game warden caging a dangerous animal. He put on his mask and opened the windows. The Actor looked at his former abode, and every single memory touched him nostalgically, from the second he had set down his duffel bag on the night of his first arrival to the moment he triumphally hoisted the same bag to the main house to claim his rightful place with Dee. This was the dormitory of his humble romantic beginnings with her, his boarding school of love, and he stood in it now an older and properly ruined man.
“I talked to Bob Gilderdash,” the Actor said to Senderovsky. This was the head of a small but prestigious network, a discreet rival to the one that had first commissioned the series based on the landowner’s book. “I sent him your scripts. The funny ones. He’s a huge fan of your work. He visited Moscow in 1979 or whatever, so naturally he was knocked the fuck out. He said putting this show on the air was a national imperative no matter who wins the election. Direct quote.”
Senderovsky digested the news. The old hunger gnawed at him, the chance to be somebody again. And yet he was concerned. Amid the dead coral of the Actor’s eyes there floated a strange new darkness. His gaze was fixed slightly above Senderovsky’s shoulder even though the Actor was well known for his unshakable eye contact. Senderovsky decided, for the first time all summer, not to lie. He decided to be strong and faithful to his friends. “She’s in love with Ed,” he said. “I think she was from the start, though she had trouble admitting it to herself. Why not leave her alone?”
His words, he noticed, had no effect on the Actor, one way or another. Surely, he had seen happy photographs of Dee and Ed on her social channels. Surely, he had enough congruency with the human experience to know those smiles belonged to people who desired each other, who were smiling for each other even more than for their audience. “I can make it work,” the Actor said. “If you help me, I’ll help you.”
“You should talk to Karen,” Senderovsky said. “She said there’s maybe a way to help you. Sit down with her. Go over the options. I never thought I’d say this, but you look just horrible.”
“May I stay the weekend?” the Actor said. “I don’t know where else to go. My team won’t talk to me unless I stay away from her. I took the agency’s plane in the middle of the night.”
“I’ll have to ask Masha,” he said. “You should wear your mask at all times.”
“I don’t have it,” the Actor said. “The virus, I mean.” He slapped his hands together thrice in quick succession, as if at a flamenco show. “Listen,” he said. “I have an idea. The three of us should run away together.”
“Me, you, and Masha?”
“Me, you, and Dee. I can make you important. All this”—he swept his arm around the bungalow—“could be just a funny past, an asterisk on your bio page. You’ll be a player. I’m about to start a production company. We’ll call our own shots.”
Senderovsky shook his head from side to side in the manner of Vinod’s mother, that famous noncommittal Indian “yes-no.”
Once his reluctant host was gone, the Actor sat down hard on the bed and wiped off a slick of sweat. His secret sharer had been with him for five days, possibly risen out of a bathroom aerosol plume in a Palm Desert gas station where he and Elspeth had stopped in the middle of a long knockout fight that ended with both pugilists crying inside the West Coast version of the Lancia, a topless old Alfa Romeo, but only one of them stricken. Or perhaps it wasn’t the fecal plume, but the coughing elderly man who had stumbled out of the bathroom before the Actor took his place astride the toilet, the top of his own mask hanging ineffectively below his nose, holstering it. Or perhaps it was a parting gift from Elspeth herself, who, though asymptomatic, had just enjoyed a low-grade undocumented tryst with a daredevil Los Angeles influencer of variable hygiene. Even now, the secret sharer was probing every sector of the divided Berlin that was the Actor’s body, looking for greater purchase, pulmonary union with this sleepless animal, the constant sour taste of extinction in his mouth.