Senderovsky turned away from her and hid his face in his pillow. The father in him, the Boris, would not countenance tears. On second thought, they wouldn’t come anyway, as if his ducts had been cauterized. He had never known what to do with the affections of others. When his mother would squeeze him as a child, her way of showing love, he would squeal “Mama, stop!” in delight, but his voice had long lost that register.
“Dorogoi,” Masha said （“My dear”）， “do it for yourself, if not for me and Nat. Save yourself from this endless heartache. It’s okay to give up on a dream. The majority of dreams don’t come true. Our whole country is learning as much.”
* * *
—
“You have to fix it,” Vinod was saying to Karen. They were lying, also naked, in the bedroom of her double-roomed family bungalow, a catbird screaming into their open window. They had turned off the air-conditioning and were now luxuriating in their common musk, a near century in the making.
“It hurts when you say that,” Karen said. “Like everything I’ve done is monstrous. I gave the market what it wanted. Was it best practices all the way? Of course not. It never is. There were investors.”
“Couldn’t you have done something nice?” Vinod asked. “Something less coercive than Tr?? Emotions?”
“They didn’t want anything nice. We tried an algo for pet owners. People were already in love with their dogs. Like in love, in love.”
“You have to fix it,” Vinod repeated. “I know it hurts you to see him the way he is. And if you don’t care about him, think about Dee and Ed. He’ll never leave her alone. He’s possessed.”
“I’ll never have another good idea in my life,” Karen said.
“Why?”
“Because I never had a good idea to begin with.”
“So why did you put everything you had into something you never believed in?”
“I don’t know, Vin,” she said loudly, turning away from him. “Not all of us are content with just being shat upon by society day in and day out.”
He touched her shoulder and neck, noticed how she had folded her arms over her chest. His paucity of partners made him unsure of how fights were to be conducted between lovers. Like Senderovsky, he was ever the diplomat, but his meekness, or else his reserve （“our little bhenchod Brahmin,” his father used to call him, even though they were of a merchant caste, even though he himself had so craved holiness）， could seem affected and not helpful. If I don’t fight with her, he thought, I may miss a chance to make her less depressed.
“It occurs to me,” he began, “that all three of us—you, me, and Sasha—are products of our fathers’ business failures.”
“Honey, I have a shrink,” she said. “Probably the best one in the city. You’re practically all of my happiness right now, along with Nat. You don’t have to do double duty here. Stick to your core competency, which is being Vinod.”
“And I think you’re trying to avenge your father’s mistakes.”
Karen moved back so that she was flush with him. “Put your arms around me,” she said. He did. She had a small new pouch of a belly, which he loved atavistically, a sign that she was eating well, along with arms strengthened by swimming and hair as long as in her youth.
“He was such a loser,” Karen said. “Such a handsome loser. They even had money back in Seoul, not a lot, but some, and he wasted it like he was Ed or something. He kept opening up stores where there was no need, where there was already a long-established competitor. Bayside, Douglaston, freaking Great Neck? What did he think, his smile was going to win him someone else’s customers?” She sprang up, dark skin in the pale light. “Those handsome dads are the worst. They couldn’t roll with it. You take the insults, you take the slurs. You make the money and you shut up. But not him. One strike against him and he’d curl up like a fucking pangolin. You know I’m more Korean than he is in some ways. He was the fucking dreamer, and then Evelyn took after him with her MFA. He didn’t get it. What is business? It’s daily hand-to-hand combat. Like, what does Sasha call it?”
“Stalingrad. But, honey, it can’t be that all the time. We don’t live in a war zone.”
“We don’t?”
“At some point the struggle ends. It can’t be worth it.”
“I can do anything in the world right now,” she said. “We can travel to the moon. We can buy ourselves a senator in the South. We can live a thousand leagues under the sea. Anything is possible.” She looked at him. “Now that I have you.”