Shelter in Place

by David Leavitt

  “Now, I want you to be totally honest,” he said. “What did you think of the sorrel soup? Was it oversalted?”

  “I thought it was perfect,” Eva said.

  Matt shook his head. “No, it was oversalted. And the salmon was dry.”

  Min said, “When I was at Gourmet, we did a piece on how to keep salmon from getting dry. The trick is—”

  “I’m sure Matt knows the trick for keeping salmon from getting dry,” Eva said.

  “I’ll be the first to admit it—I was off my game tonight,” Matt said. “It’s been a rough week. That’s not an excuse, it’s just a fact.”

  “Poor Matt.” Eva crossed her legs in a manner that Min recognized as signaling both curiosity and a warning as to the limits of her curiosity. “Do you want to tell us about it?”

  Matt cleared his throat in a prefatory way. “OK, well, a few nights ago, completely out of the blue, Dean—I’ve told you about Dean, right? He’s the guy I’ve been seeing—well, living with—since September. Anyway, the other night, completely out of the blue, he asks me how I feel about three-ways. Much as he loves me, he says, every now and then he still finds himself wanting to have sex with other guys and he wants to know if I do, too. So I say, ‘Well, I can’t deny that occasionally I think about it,’ which isn’t at all—let me emphasize this—isn’t at all the same as saying I want to do it, but he doesn’t pick up on the distinction. Instead he starts in on this boring lecture about how, for the modern gay couple, three-ways are the ideal solution to the quote-unquote problem of monogamy, because they allow partners to have sex with other people without being disloyal to each other.”

  “Oh, my,” Min said. “And what did you say to that?”

  “Nothing. What I mean is, what I wanted to say was that, unlike him, I don’t want to have sex with other people, but I didn’t … Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have anything against three-ways per se. I’ve had plenty of them in my time, some quite fun. It’s just, with Dean … maybe it’s a sign that I’m getting older, but I kind of want to keep him for myself. Plus, you know how it can be with three—someone always ends up feeling left out. And it could be him just as easily as it could be me.”

  Min, who very much doubted that Eva knew how it could be with three, looked at her friend. In the course of Matt’s monologue, her neck had stiffened, her lips were pressed tightly together. Oh, God, Min thought, has no one warned him? Eva hated talking about sex.

  There was only one thing to do, she decided, and that was to take matters into her own hands. “Well, darling,” she said, “if you want my advice, you should proceed with extreme caution. Now, I actually know something about this—not from firsthand experience, mind you—well, not much—but because when I was at Cosmo, we ran this big article on the subject—you know, ménages à trois. We did a reader survey, and interviews with therapists, and profiles of couples who’d tried it, and the conclusion we came to, basically, was that three into two won’t go … Isn’t that the name of a movie?”

  “But what if I say no and Dean says forget it? What if it’s a deal-breaker for him—I mean, for the relationship?”

  Matt was looking at Eva as he asked this—Eva, now bolt upright, her legs twisted one around the other like pipe cleaners.

  It was at that moment, thankfully, that Bruce returned with the dogs, bringing the smoky winter air and their canine fluster into the apartment and, in so doing, relieving the high tension of the scene. Seeing her husband, Eva relaxed her posture and smiled. The brief conversation reported above ensued. Then Bruce headed in the direction of the bathroom—Min couldn’t tell, from his gait, whether he planned to come back—and Matt, pouring himself a second cognac, resumed his narrative, moving back in time to his first electronic encounter with Dean, and the early days of their courtship, when he had been so immensely moved by the blond hair on Dean’s chest, the way it “pearled with sweat” after he’d worked out. Although Dean was younger than Matt, he made more money—he was an entertainment lawyer, a job that necessitated frequent trips to the West Coast, as well as frequent late nights at the office—and owned a condo in Williamsburg. “Probably it was a mistake to move in with him so soon after we met, but what choice did I have?” Matt said. “I was living in an illegal sublet in Bushwick, and the friend I was subletting from was about to come back from a year in Sweden. I had nowhere else to go.”

  When, an hour or so later, Matt finally accepted his check, said goodnight, and went off to catch the subway, Eva poured herself a glass of wine. “What I don’t understand is why he insists on going into the gory details,” she said. “It’s one of the things I’ve always appreciated most about Jake—he doesn’t go into the gory details.”

  “I’ve been meaning to ask, how are things coming along with the apartment? Do you have a closing date yet?”

  “Early April, it looks like. Bruce’s lawyer is handling all that.”

  “You must be so excited.”

  “It still seems a long way off. There are so many hurdles to jump before we actually get there.”

  “Oh, but when you do get there, think how marvelous it will be. For one thing, you can write your book. I predict that as soon as you’re settled in, you’ll get down to work and finish it. Just imagine, a desk set up in front of that window with the view of the canal—”

  “No, the desk should be in front of the window overlooking the garden. The canal could be smelly.”

  “Then that’s where it’ll be. Jake will see to it.”

  “Speaking of Jake, how did he seem to you tonight?”

  “Fine. Why do you ask?”

  “I don’t know. Something struck me as off.”

  “What, you mean his not agreeing right away to decorate the apartment? I wouldn’t worry about that. He probably just wants to sleep on it.”

  “It hadn’t occurred to me to worry about it until you said that. Why did you say that? Do you think he doesn’t want to do it?”

  “Oh, no, not at all, I just … Well, when you said something struck you as off—”

  “Oh, but it wasn’t that. It was his general demeanor. But seriously, Min, do you think he might say no? I don’t think I could manage this without him.”

  “You’re just tired, that’s all. In twenty-four hours, when he’s said yes and all this is behind us, you won’t even remember we had this conversation.”

  “I suppose you’re right. Really it was Matt who put me off. Why he had to … What’s the word people use these days? You know, when you tell too much.”

  “TMI? Overshare?”

  “That’s it. Overshare. I thought I knew him better than that. Or that he knew me better.”

  Around half past ten, Min took a taxi home. She lived on West Seventy-seventh Street, in a studio apartment on which she had signed the lease in 1984, the year she and Eva worked together at Mademoiselle, and then bought at the insider price when the building went co-op. In the intervening decades, the neighborhood had improved—even Amsterdam Avenue had become chic—and yet Min’s flat still had the provisional feel of a nest from which the fledgling should have long since flown. She herself knew better than anyone that she should not be living here any longer, that by now she should have found a husband, or at least a one-bedroom. Instead, every evening, she climbed the four flights of stairs to this cramped, oblong room with its view of fire escapes, stopping at least twice to catch her breath, something she hadn’t had to do when she was younger and thinner. Clothes she had accumulated over the years, mostly during her stints at fashion magazines, hung on wheeled department store racks that took up the bulk of the space. Few of them fit her anymore. At her last checkup, her doctor had told her she needed to start exercising what he called “portion control.” But every time she tried, she found herself thinking of the people who died in plane crashes, how so many of them had been on diets, or had given up coffee or booze, or were trying to limit their sugar intake, and then she would throw caution to the wind and have a dessert. Even when she was
at lunch or dinner with Eva, she would have a dessert. Nor did Eva, on these occasions, conceal her disapproval, which vexed Min, for the humiliations with which she dealt on a daily basis—the skirts that wouldn’t zip, the bras from which back fat bulged, the Miraclesuit Extra Firm Tummy-Control Shape Away Torsettes that she ordered from Amazon in order to be spared from having to buy them at a shop—Eva had never known.

  Wearily she took off her shoes. Aside from the clothes racks, she had very little furniture: an armchair she had inherited from her grandmother, a desk, a desk chair, and a bed pushed up against the wall—full-size, “too big for one and too small for two,” as she used to joke. Except for the occasional lover—fewer every year, now that she was on the wrong side of fifty—she rarely had visitors.

  As she undressed, worry about Eva nagged at her. Their friendship, the most enduring in either of their lives, was a source of both gratification and anxiety for Min. To some extent the anxiety owed to a feeling of beholdenness. At Mademoiselle Eva had been a star. When she quit, she claimed it was for Min’s sake, so that Min, who had to earn a living, would get the promotion that otherwise would have gone to her. This wasn’t hubris, nor was it merely an excuse for giving up a job Eva neither wanted nor needed. The fact was, she really did have a better eye than Min, and was a better writer. Asked by the editor to whip up a description, say, of a day dress, Eva could produce a perfect piece of copy in fifteen minutes flat, without crossing out a single word, whereas Min would be up half the night, breaking her pencil and resharpening it and breaking it again. At first she had envied Eva her gift, her seeming ability just to wave her magic wand and make the words do her bidding, like the bunnies in Snow White. But then, over time, her envy had verged into gratitude, for whatever else you might say about Min’s somewhat erratic career, the fact remained that if Eva hadn’t left Mademoiselle, she might never have had it.

  Whether Eva felt the same way, she wasn’t sure. Close as they were, Min had little idea how Eva spent her weekdays, while she herself was at work. If asked, Eva would say that she wrote, yet if this was true, there was little evidence of it: a couple of articles in Glamour (commissioned, as it happened, by Min), a poem she had burned after The New Yorker rejected it, two crosswords for the Times, a Monday and a Wednesday, published under her maiden name in 2002. Her main project—always in the offing—was the Book, the subject and form of which had changed frequently over the years. First it was to be an expansion of her Smith thesis into a monograph, then a biography of Isabella Stewart Gardner, then a joint biography of Isabella Stewart Gardner and John Singer Sargent, then a biography of John Singer Sargent, then a novel about Isabella Stewart Gardner and John Singer Sargent, then a novel about an Isabella Stewart Gardner–like figure with a different name, of which she wrote nine hundred pages before she decided she was telling it from the wrong point of view and chucked it in the bin. Soon Min learned that it was best not to ask Eva how the Book was going, and, later, to ask only when she wanted to annoy Eva on purpose, for she knew it was a touchy subject. On these occasions, the thought sometimes crossed Min’s mind that Eva might actually regret her decision to leave Mademoiselle all those years ago and that this regret might explain her often rebarbative bursts of impatience. For her part, Min tried not to lose patience with Eva, for she recognized Eva’s irritability as the obverse of her vulnerability. If Min had a duty in life, she had come to believe, it was to protect Eva, to shield her, to reassure her.

  A few months back, as part of her profile on a dating site, Min had listed instinct as her most salient characteristic. This was neither vanity nor self-delusion: Instinct really was her strong suit. Most of the time, the accuracy of her instincts accounted for her successes and her inability to follow through on them for her failures. It was instinct that had led her to suggest that Jake accompany Bruce on his walk. She had sensed trouble, and hoped that sending them off together might reveal its source. So far it had not.

  From her refrigerator she took out a stick of butter, unwrapped it, rolled it in sugar, took a bite, put it on the butterfly-patterned covered butter dish she had inherited from her grandmother, and returned it to the refrigerator. She then changed into her pajamas, brushed her teeth, rubbed one kind of moisturizer onto her face and another onto her hands, got into bed, tried to find a comfortable position, gave up, got up again, reopened the refrigerator, retrieved the stick of sugar-dusted butter, took another bite of it, put it back, closed the refrigerator, brushed her teeth again, and got back into bed. For half an hour she did jigsaw puzzles on her phone—puppies and kittens, unicorns and princesses, unicorns and fairies. Then she called Jake.

  He picked up after five rings. He sounded groggy.

  “I’m not waking you, am I?” she said.

  “What time is it?”

  “Eleven—oh, damn, twelve thirty. I did wake you, didn’t I? Sorry. You know how I am about time.”

  “What is it, Min?”

  “I just wanted to make sure you’re all right. When you didn’t come back after your walk, Eva and I were … concerned.”

  “I have to be up early tomorrow. Didn’t Bruce tell you?”

  “Oh, yes, of course he did. It’s just that we wondered if maybe that was an excuse. If maybe the truth was that you didn’t want to come up.”

  “Why wouldn’t I want to come up?”

  “I don’t know. I had an instinct.”

  “Then your instinct was wrong. I intended—intended—to make it an early night. There was no ulterior motive.”

  “I’m glad to hear that. You can’t know, Jake, how important this apartment is to Eva. It means the world to her that you’ve agreed to do it.”

  “But I haven’t.”

  “Well, no, not officially.”

  “No, not just not officially.”

  “But why not? What’s holding you back?”

  “It’s a big project. It will involve a lot of travel. I need to think about it.”

  An idea flashed in Min’s mind. “Would it be any incentive if I were to tell you that if you do the apartment, I can guarantee you the cover of the magazine?”

  “The cover of Food & Wine?”

  “I’ve left Food & Wine. I’m at Enfilade now.”

  “Oh, I hadn’t heard.”

  “I only just started … Look, I wasn’t going to say anything about this yet, but I might as well. Yesterday I pitched the idea to my editor—she’s marvelous, by the way, young and fresh, full of new ideas—and the way she sees it, it’s a natural fit. I mean, look at our demographic. Middle-aged women. Well, what do we have here? A middle-aged woman—we won’t say middle-aged, of course, Eva would hate that—goes to Venice and on the spur of the moment buys this gorgeous apartment. Voilà! A new life in the old world. Renovation as romance.”

  “But I thought she was buying it because of the election.”

  “Oh, that’s part of it. It’s just not the part we’ll talk about.”

  “Have you run this by Eva?”

  “Not yet—I wanted to tell you first. Of course, I know how she’ll respond. First she’ll demur—that’s the correct use of demur, by the way, to protest, so often people use it as if it’s the verb form of demure, but hey, one learns a few things in the editing trade. But as I was saying … What was I saying?”

  “That she’ll demur.”

  “Oh, she’ll pretend to demur. She’ll make me twist her arm—at first. I know Eva. I can read her like a book.”

  “Then it should be easy.”

  “The only thing is, before I broach the subject with her, I want to make sure you’re on board, because that’s the first thing she’ll ask about.”

  “But I just told you. I need to think about it.”

  “Why?”

  “I do have other clients besides Eva.”

  “Yes, and you also have a staff. On top of which … Look, Jake, I’m going to be brutally frank here. The cover of Enfilade—it would be a big thing for you. Especially now, since—now, I know
you may not want to hear this, but you need to—over the last few years, you’ve, well, fallen off the decorating map a bit. Don’t pretend you haven’t.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Well, this would put you back on. I mean, how long has it been since you were even in Enfilade?”

  “You tell me. You work there.”

  “If it makes any difference, Alison Pritchard’s on the cover of the March issue. A beach house in Italy.”

  “Good for her.”

  “Doesn’t that bother you even a little, that she’s getting the cover?”

  “Why should it? She’s the proverbial squeaky wheel.”

  “The part that gets my goat is that in the interview we did, she never once mentions you or Pablo. Come on, that must rankle. I mean, where would she be without you?”

  “Exactly where she is now. Only she’d have gotten there faster.”

  “Oh, Jake, why can’t you just admit that it bothers you? It’s me you’re talking to, remember? Min. Min who knows all. Now, I realize I haven’t brought this up before, but your being dropped from the last Kips Bay show house—”

  “And Alison being added to it.”

  “Exactly. Well, it sends a message. That you need to start thinking about the future, about growing the firm.”

  “Why? So that you can have a place to stay in Venice?”

  “No! For your own sake. And also, let’s be honest, to show up Alison. I mean, it’s human nature—the viper nurtured at your bosom. And now the viper’s eclipsing you. Don’t you care that she’s eclipsing you?”

  “You talk as if it’s a given that all anyone ever thinks about is being eclipsed, or eclipsing. Well, I don’t. Maybe once, but not anymore.”

  “If you were doing better, you wouldn’t say that.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Instinct. Besides which, Jake, it’s Venice!”

  “Venice doesn’t need me.”

  “Maybe not. But Eva does. Now, I’m going to let you in on another little secret. For years she’s been dying to have one of her places published. Of course, I’ve tried, I’ve pitched every apartment, every house, only no one’s ever bitten, because, well, let’s face it, apartments on Park Avenue, houses in Litchfield County, they’re a dime a dozen in the shelter magazine sector. A Venetian palazzo, on the other hand—”