Shelter in Place

by David Leavitt

  “Six inches is still a lot of snow,” the freckled man said.

  “Especially for you low-to-the-ground guys, huh?” Frank said, speaking to Sparky.

  “It’s OK, I keep on my toes,” the freckled man said, speaking for Sparky.

  Out on the street, as if by some unspoken agreement, the freckled man and the dachshund headed uptown, Bruce and Jake and the Bedlingtons downtown. “You’ll have to excuse Frank,” Bruce said. “He starts a conversation with one passenger and carries it on with the next. We’ve gotten used to it over the years.”

  “I hope you don’t mind my asking,” Jake said, looking over his shoulder at the freckled man, “but was that the one who gave the inauguration party?”

  “You mean Satan incarnate? Yup. Menacing-looking, isn’t he?”

  Jake laughed.

  “No, but seriously, the way Eva goes on, you’d think he and Kitty were the Honeymoon Killers, when the truth is, they’re much more scared of her than she is of them. Lately it’s gotten so bad that if Kitty’s going out and she hears our door opening, she runs back into her apartment and hides until Eva’s in the elevator. Or so Alec tells me.

  “Maybe it surprises you that I’m on such friendly terms with him, but the way I see it, there’s nothing to be gained from bickering with your neighbors. On top of which I have to make up for Eva’s cold-shouldering. You’d think I’d be used to it by now.”

  They turned left onto a block of brownstones. “Let me take one of the dogs for you,” Jake said, reaching for the leashes.

  “Oh, don’t worry, I’m used to dealing with all three,” Bruce said. “Unless for some reason you want to take one, in which case I’d recommend Izzy. She’s the easiest to manage, which isn’t to say she doesn’t generate a headwind.”

  He handed the leash to Jake, who found that Isabel’s capacity for resistance was indeed mightier than he would have guessed. The walk itself was stop-and-go, what with the dogs braking every few seconds to sniff at a yellow patch in the snow or to lap at some unwholesome spillage on the sidewalk. At more or less every juncture, Ralph and Caspar lifted their legs as high as ballerinas at the bar. They dosed out their urine judiciously, whereas Isabel held hers, appraising each potential spot carefully before moving on to another, squatting, and then changing her mind.

  “Like my wife buying real estate,” Bruce said. “Do you happen to know, Jake, how many apartments we looked at before settling on this one? Thirty-eight. Thirty-eight! I thought the realtor was going to tear her hair out. Lola’s, I mean.”

  “And yet she chose well.”

  “Of course she chose well. She always chooses well. That’s not at issue.”

  “What is, then?”

  Again Jake felt the tug of Isabel’s leash as she inspected yet another property and passed on it.

  “This may come as a surprise to you,” Bruce said, “but I don’t especially like the Connecticut house.”

  “Really? I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t get me wrong, it’s not the decor. I’m fine with the decor. It’s the house itself. Now, Bedford—I liked that house. I liked Bedford. Left to my own devices, I’d have stayed there until they had to carry me out in a pine box, only Eva—no surprise here—every few years she gets restless. Gets a bee in her bonnet. Nothing to be done about it. Oh, well, at least it keeps you in business. No offense intended.”

  “None taken,” Jake said. “And there’s nothing wrong with wanting to stay put.”

  “Try telling her that.”

  “Have you?”

  “You do know my wife’s maiden name, don’t you, Jake?”

  “Kalmann?”

  “Braun.”

  It took Jake a few seconds to get the joke—if it was a joke.

  “And now Venice,” Bruce said. “What’s that about? What on earth do you think that’s about?”

  “The election, apparently.”

  “Oh, that. Some classified information here, Jake. This election, the one she’s got her panties in such a wad about—she didn’t even vote in it. Went to the polling station and turned right around. Said the line was too long. Interesting how she seems to have forgotten that.

  “Now, if you want my opinion—again, this is strictly classified—all this really is is a very expensive hissy fit. By buying this place in Venice, she thinks she’s giving the finger to the Warriners, to Park Avenue, to everyone who voted for him-who-shall-not-be-named. As if they’ll even notice … Well, there’s a bit more to it than that. There’s Venice itself. I think at the root of it, she has this idea of herself in Venice, as one of those American women who went to live in Venice. She’s fixated on it. It’s her polestar.

  “Of course, to some degree her upbringing’s to blame. It’s from her parents that she inherited her … how do I put it? Fear of persecution, combined with a fight-or-flight impulse, combined with this unbelievable obstinacy, this determination to have her way at all costs. She’s like her mother in that way, though I’d advise you never to say that to her face if you want to keep your balls. Women can’t stand being compared to their mothers.”

  “I’ve never met Eva’s mother.”

  “Very few people have. Min did, back when she and Eva were working at Mademoiselle.”

  “Eva worked at Mademoiselle?”

  “For a year or so, right after we got married. It was how they met.”

  “She never told me that.”

  “She doesn’t talk about it because back when she did, people naturally asked why she quit, and that’s a question she prefers not to answer. Even after all these years, I’m convinced, most of her friends think it was me, that I made her quit, only it isn’t the case at all. Quite the contrary, when she told me, I begged her not to make a rash decision. I wanted her to give it another six months—either that, or get the PhD. She could have gone to Columbia. It was her choice not to.”

  “Why do you think that was?”

  For a moment Bruce was silent. Then he said, “I’m thinking maybe it was because Columbia was too close to where she grew up. Too close for comfort. Or maybe her friends are right, maybe it really was my fault. You see, before she met me, Eva had never felt safe—not really safe—and I wanted to give her that. Her parents—you probably know this—were refugees. From Warsaw, they made their way to Portugal, where they waited out the war, then from Portugal to Brazil, then from Brazil to New York. In Poland, Esther—that’s Eva’s mother—had been working toward her PhD in chemistry. If the war hadn’t happened, she’d have become a professor. Instead she ended up teaching chemistry at a high school on the Upper West Side where she had a reputation for being a holy terror. One look from Esther and the toughest kids, the ones who carried switchblades, pissed their pants. I’ve always been rather sweet on Esther.”

  “What about the father?”

  “Joe? Until he retired, he was an accountant. Small potatoes. Had his office in a storefront on Broadway. Every March he’d pay bums from the park to parade up and down Broadway dressed as the Statue of Liberty, handing out flyers. You can imagine what Eva thought about that.

  “Now, here’s the thing. Until she met me, Eva never knew what it was like to have solid ground under her feet. And that really was her parents’ fault. There’s no getting around it. They were in their early forties when she was born. They never planned to have children—her mother told her that. Eva was just a little girl when one day her mother sat her down and told her that the day she found out she was pregnant, she asked God what she’d done wrong, for why else would he compel an aging couple to bring a child into such a vile world except to punish them?”

  “Jesus.”

  “Not in this case. No Jesus in this case.”

  They turned onto Lexington. Since they’d started the walk, the wind had picked up, blowing north and making the avenues nearly impossible to navigate. On the sidewalk outside a twenty-four-hour Korean grocery store, a woman wearing gloves with the fingers cut off was trying to cover her vegetable display wit
h a plastic tarp. With each fresh gust, the tarp flew into her face. “Mind if we stop here for a sec?” Bruce asked, handing Jake his leashes. “Need to buy some cigarettes. Don’t tell Lola.”

  Jake nodded assent and Bruce went into the store. Abandoning her tarp for the moment, the woman with the fingerless gloves followed. Inside, a girl in a down parka was circling the stainless-steel salad bar. With a pair of tongs she picked up a single pickled mushroom, sniffed it, then put it back in its steel receptacle. Then she did the same with a beet slice. By the time Bruce came out, the girl had almost completely circumnavigated the bar. Her tray was still empty.

  “Thanks for waiting,” Bruce said, taking Isabel’s leash this time and leaving Jake to contend with Caspar and Ralph, who lunged forward so fast he nearly tripped. The trouble wasn’t just that there were two of them; it was that they moved with such intentionality, as if they had somewhere they had to get to and didn’t want to be late. Yet there was nowhere they had to get to, so far as Jake was aware, unless it was the nearest lamppost, which they circled, in the process hog-tying him with their leashes. “Allow me,” Bruce said, and held them steady while Jake stepped out of the snarl. Again the dogs lifted their legs. Nothing came out. “Instinct,” Bruce said. “Even though their bladders are empty, they’ll keep doing it until we get home. I suppose most of us are like that on some level. Men, I mean. Some women, too. Min, for instance.”

  From the avenue they turned onto a street on which a white-brick high-rise, an eyesore from the early sixties, broke the stately procession of brownstones. Here the wind eased a little. Rather than blowing into their faces, the snow stuck, settling on the stoops, the roofs of the parked cars, the dogs’ tartan jackets. Ice was forming on the pavement, making Jake worry for a delivery boy racing by on a bicycle, his basket filled with insulated bags of takeout Chinese food. “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night,” Bruce said, removing his gloves so that he could fish the bag from the deli out of his pocket. It contained a pack of Marlboros and a roll of Mentos.

  “Want one?” he asked, holding out the pack.

  “No, thanks.”

  “Don’t smoke?”

  Jake shook his head.

  “Myself, I don’t really smoke,” Bruce said, lighting a cigarette and taking a deep drag. “Only when I take a lunch break or go out with the dogs. Can’t smoke at the office. Or at home, God knows.”

  At last Isabel peed. As if to show her up, Caspar shat, bringing all four of his legs together with a grace as balletic as his previous leg-lifting. Having stubbed out his cigarette, Bruce fished a plastic bag from another of his pockets, scooped up the steaming pile, and dropped it into a trash bin. “I read somewhere that in Venice the maids used to empty the chamber pots out the window into the canals,” he said. “Is that true, do you think?”

  “I think I read it in a book. I never saw it happen.”

  “Oh, well, if it makes the job easier, I suppose …” They resumed walking. “So Jake, this Venice thing—what do you make of it? Is it a bridge too far? Oh, I didn’t even realize I was making a joke.”

  “I wish I could tell you. The thing is, I’m not what you’d call an expert on Venice. Although I’m pretty sure an apartment in Venice won’t lose its value.”

  “Still, it’s not like Connecticut, is it? I mean, with Connecticut you can just pile the dogs into the car and two hours later you’re there. But Venice … You can’t just up and go to Venice for the weekend. There are the flight reservations. There’s the time difference. And then, when would we go? Would Eva go alone? For how long? And what about these guys? Would she take them? Leave them? I did a little checking. One you can take in the cabin with you, if it’s small enough. But only on some airlines. And only one dog—the other two would have to go in the hold regardless.”

  “Have you mentioned any of this to Eva?”

  “I tried, and she nearly bit my head off. According to her, there are no problems at all. When we’re in Venice, one of her boyfriends can dog-sit, here or in the country, and then when we’re not in Venice, Signora Foot-and-Mouth or whatever her name is can keep an eye on things. She can even rent the place out for us. I said to Eva, ‘You’re actually saying you’re prepared to let total strangers sleep in your bed?’ It’s always the same with her. Once she’s off to the races, there’s no stopping her.”

  “How far along are you in the process? I mean, too far along to back out?”

  “It’s funny you should ask, because this morning I asked our lawyer that very question. The short answer is no, it’s not too late to back out. At this stage we can even get back our deposit. And there are plenty of reasons to, not the least of which is that buying real estate in Italy is crazy. Just crazy. For example, when you buy a place, the price on the contract isn’t the price you actually pay. It’s much less—a fraction of the real price. What happens at the closing is that after the buyer and seller sign the contract, the buyer gives the seller a check for the official price, and then the lawyers or notaries or whatever they’re called step out for a quote-unquote espresso, so that the buyer and seller can exchange the rest of the money under the table. It’s to save on taxes. And there’s no way around it, because no one will sell anything any other way. The corruption is too entrenched.”

  They had circled back to Bruce’s building. “I’m not sure what to say,” Jake said, “except that if you’ve got doubts about this thing, you should tell Eva.”

  From his pocket Bruce took out the pack of Mentos, opened it, and popped one in his mouth before handing it to Jake, who this time accepted. “I don’t know how much you think about money, Jake,” he said. “Me, I think about it all the time. It’s my business. My clients have money, serious money, so much they can lose a few million and not even feel it. Now, I’m not saying we don’t have money—of course we do—and yet we’re not in a position where we can spend literally as much as we want, or where we’re immune to recession, inflation. Eva likes to give the impression that she’s sort of oblivious to money, but it’s not true. Appearances to the contrary, she understands what we can afford and what we can’t.”

  “And can you afford this apartment?”

  “Oh, we can afford it. Of course we can afford it. The question is, should we? … I’m sorry if I’m not making myself clear. I suppose it’s because I don’t really understand myself exactly what I’m thinking. I don’t know if Eva told you, but my secretary, Kathy, has lymphoma. And then, right after she got the diagnosis, her husband left her. And so … I don’t know. I think about Kathy, and I think about Venice, and something freezes in me.”

  “I’m sorry to hear about Kathy.”

  “Oh, thanks. I’ll say this for her—she has guts. Gutsiest woman I’ve ever known. Even so, it seems unfair, doesn’t it? As if she’s being tested.”

  “Other people’s lives …” Jake said but could not think how to complete the sentence.

  “Well, I appreciate your listening,” Bruce said. “Care to come up for a drink?”

  “No, I’d better get home. School night. Thank Eva for me. Tell her I’ll call her tomorrow.”

  “Will do,” Bruce said, and held out his gloved hand. Though the hand was big, the handshake was mild—the practiced mildness of a man who might break fingers if he wasn’t careful.

  He dragged the dogs through the door to the lobby. Jake turned south onto Park Avenue. Not a taxi in sight, which was fine by him. He felt like walking. He felt like fighting the wind.

  7

  In the living room, Bruce found Eva and Min sitting with the young man who had cooked dinner, to whom he nodded. It made him cross that he couldn’t remember this young man’s name, given that in recent months he had become such a fixture in their lives, both here and in Connecticut. The trouble was, Eva had so many young men, all so alike in their youth and good looks, that he couldn’t keep them straight. (Keep them straight! He wished he could share that joke with someone.)

  “Where’s Jake?” Min asked as he
extricated the dogs from their jackets.

  “Gone home. Sends his regards.”

  “But I thought he’d be coming back up,” Min said.

  “Well, he isn’t. Has to be up early in the morning.”

  “Oh, what a shame.”

  “Did anyone do anything?” Eva asked.

  “Everyone did number one. Only Caspar did number two.”

  “Must be the cold,” Matt Pierce said.

  In case the Mentos had not been sufficient to get the smoky taste out of his mouth, Bruce excused himself to brush his teeth. Min wished that Matt would go away. She wanted to ask Eva some questions about the Venice apartment in the hope of ascertaining whether Bruce could do anything at this point to scuttle the deal. Unfortunately, so long as Matt was there, she could not bring any of these matters up. Matt was a tall youth of thirty-seven, Texan by birth, with a cowboy hat and an accent that he put on and took off as it suited him. At present he was ABD at Columbia (English, dissertation on Marianne Moore) and eking out a living doing odd jobs such as cooking dinners for Eva, writing reader reports for publishers, and now and then putting on his cowboy hat and his Texas accent and saying filthy things via webcam to men who paid him for the privilege.

  For Min, the disparity between Matt’s looks—he was six foot three and bore a distinct resemblance to the young Glenn Ford—and his fastidious manner, which expressed itself most obviously in his cooking, was troublesome. As a rule incongruities disconcerted her. She preferred people and things to be what they seemed.

  After Bruce and Jake had gone to take the dogs for their walk, Matt, as was his habit, had come out of the kitchen, taken off his apron, and poured himself a glass of cognac. He’d then sat down next to Eva on the loveseat and crossed his long legs so that the hem of his jeans rode up, revealing the upward thrust of a cowboy boot. Such conduct—to cater a dinner and then have a cognac with its hostess—was in keeping with his ambiguous role in the duchy, something partway between servant and cicisbeo.