“You ought to give it up anyway,” Sandra said. “It kills your brain cells … Oh, I’ve been meaning to ask, are any of you going to the Women’s March tomorrow? Lara’s insisted that I go with her.”
“I’m going,” Rachel said. “Whether Aaron joins me remains to be determined.”
“You know I can’t stand crowds.”
“I’ve even got my hat. I crocheted it myself.” From the sideboard, Rachel picked up a cloche-like pink wool cap. When she put it on, Jake saw that it had two horns. Or were they horns?
“Well, what do you think?” she asked, pirouetting. “Oh, and in case you’re too embarrassed to ask, Jake, yes, this is exactly what you think it is.”
“I’m afraid I don’t have any idea—”
“Jake! It’s a pussy.”
“Oh!”
“Will you be wearing one, Sandra?”
“Only if Lara makes me. I look terrible in pink. How about you, Aaron? If you go, will you wear one?”
But Aaron, with unusual stealth, had returned to the kitchen, from which he reemerged a minute or so later. “Right, the fish is almost ready. Now what else?” He counted on his fingers. “I’ve got the rice in the rice cooker, the wok on the back burner. What have I forgotten?”
“To say hello,” Rachel said.
“Oh, sorry. Bruce, Jake. Oh, hi Sandra. You’ve met Sandra, right, Jake?”
“Of course he has.”
“We met at Eva’s,” Jake said, kissing Sandra on the cheek.
“Actually, we met before that,” Sandra said. “Don’t worry, it’s not something I’d expect you to remember. It was years and years ago. You came over to my grandmother’s apartment with your aunt. Your aunt was her decorator.”
“What’s your grandmother’s name?”
“Isabel Allenby. Does that ring a bell?”
“Ding, ding, ding,” Rachel said, at which Sandra laughed—her laugh at once tinselly and gravelly.
“Please, there’s no need to pretend. It was eons ago. I was fourteen, and not very memorable. You came a few times with your aunt to see Nana. I was living with her then. It was right after my mother’s suicide.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Bruce said.
“One thing I do remember—you did all the measuring.”
“In those days measuring was pretty much all I was allowed to do,” Jake said. “Even though I was her nephew, Aunt Rose insisted on treating me the way she would any other trainee. As a dogsbody.”
“What a curious word, dogsbody,” Rachel said. “I need to look up the etymology.”
“It’s old Navy slang,” Bruce said. “Back in the day, the joke was that the pease pudding the sailors were fed was so bad it was only fit for dogs. Thus dog’s breakfast and later dogsbody—one whose menial status obliges him to subsist on pease pudding.”
“Were you in the Navy?” Sandra asked.
“No, but my father was.”
They moved to the dining table, on which Aaron had laid out bowls of rice, sautéed pea shoots, cucumber chunks in chili oil, and some sort of meat with slices of lotus root. The fish, on an immense platter, took center stage. Bits of cilantro, garlic, and hot red pepper clung to its vast and primitive jaw. “They say the head is the best part,” Aaron said, taking up what looked like a saw. “It should go to the guest of honor. I think that’s you, Bruce.”
“Hear, hear,” Rachel said as Aaron decapitated the fish and forked the head onto Bruce’s plate. An eye stared up at him, the same blue as one of Mumbles’s, though he couldn’t remember which.
“What kind of fish is this?” Jake asked.
“Scump,” Rachel said.
“Scup,” Aaron corrected. “Also known as porgy.”
“As in Porgy and Bess?”
“Maybe.”
“Another etymology to look up.”
Eating the fish proved a complicated business, because it had so many tiny, vicious bones. “Something that just came back to me,” Sandra said to Jake, taking up where she’d left off, “is that when you came to our apartment that first time, Nana told me to take you to my room and quote-unquote entertain you while she had tea with your aunt. And I was mortified, just utterly mortified, because I had no idea what it even meant, to entertain someone. A boy, no less. I mean, was I supposed to show you my dolls, or make you a sandwich, or ask you to play Scrabble? And really, it’s absurd, when you think about it, this idea grown-ups have that children can just be sent off together and they’ll start playing, like dogs.”
“And yet as adults we’re often put in that same situation,” Rachel said. “At book parties, for instance, when someone introduces you to someone else and then leaves you to fend for yourselves.”
“It’s why, early on, I made it a house rule never to do anything like that with my own daughter,” Sandra said. “From the get-go, Lara decided who she played with.”
“How old is she now?” Jake asked.
“Twenty-six. Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, That Sandra looks so young, how can she have a daughter who’s twenty-six? Was she a child bride? The truth, though, is that I’m older than I look. I was twenty-five when Lara was born. Do the math.”
“Do the math, do the math,” Aaron said. “Have you noticed how these days, everywhere you turn, someone is telling you to do the math? I can’t bear the way these awful phrases creep into the language. Another one that drives me crazy is ‘reach out.’ When did everyone start ‘reaching out’? These are the sort of stupid locutions you need to avoid in your writing, Sandra. Or if you do use them, put them in quote marks.”
“Literally?”
“Not necessarily. You can do it with voice. The idea is to make sure the reader catches on that you know the expression is stupid and you’re using it ironically.”
“Let me write that down,” Sandra said, fishing a little notebook and a pen from her purse. The notebook, Bruce observed, was gilt-edged, the pen Montblanc.
“I feel privileged to have the chance to listen in on this conversation,” he said, moving the fish head around on his plate. “I mean, how often is it you get to hear writers talking shop?”
“In Sandra’s case, it won’t be talking shop until she has a shop to talk about,” Aaron said.
“What made you decide to take up writing?” Jake asked Sandra.
“Well, there’s a fake answer and a real answer to that,” Sandra said. “The fake answer is that after my husband and I split up, I had this intense urge to try to redeem my atrocious marriage by turning it into a novel. The real answer is that one day I was shopping—at Hermès, I’ll admit it—when I saw this gorgeous notebook—not this one, another one—and I thought, I have to have that notebook. I just have to. And so I bought it and brought it home—I still had the apartment then—and when I opened it, suddenly I just wanted to fill it with beautiful handwriting, in beautiful ink.”
“Wait a sec, that’s not your story,” Aaron said. “You got it from Jean Rhys.”
“Who’s Jean Rhys?”
“I mean, she answered the question of why she became a writer the same way. She said it was because of a notebook she bought. You must have read about it or picked it up somewhere.”
“No, honestly. I swear, I’ve never even heard of Jean Rhys.”
“You haven’t read Wide Sargasso Sea?” Rachel said. “Oh, but you must. It’s one of the great works of the twentieth century, told from the point of view of the madwoman in Jane Eyre.”
“I haven’t read Jane Eyre either.”
“A pity Eva isn’t here,” Bruce said. “This is just the sort of conversation she’d love.”
“Let’s hope that Venice inspires Eva to write her own book,” Rachel said.
“What book?” Sandra asked.
“A biography of Isabella Stewart Gardner. I’ve been trying to talk her into doing one for years.”
“If she writes it, will you publish it?” Jake asked.
Rachel withdrew her spoon from her mouth. “W
ell, of course, if it were up to me, I’d publish it in a second, but unfortunately it’s not so easy these days. It used to be that if you loved a book, you could just acquire it, but now everything has to get past the marketing people and the sales reps, and biographies are a hard sell.”
“That sort of crap answer is the reason I’m glad to be out of publishing,” Aaron said. “I mean, listen to you. Out of one side of your mouth, you play cheerleader—‘Oh, Eva, you’ve got to write this book, you’ve got to write this book’—and then out of the other, it’s the usual namby-pamby publishing horseshit—‘If it were up to me I’d love to, only the sales reps say this doesn’t sell, that doesn’t sell, no one reads biographies anymore, no one reads story collections anymore, no one ever read poetry in the first place,’ all anyone wants to read are books about what a bitch Hillary Clinton is and quote-unquote graphic novels with no fucking words.”
“No wonder you’re glad to be out of it,” Jake said.
“I am. I’m sick of the horseshit. And it’s not just publishers, it’s writers. Ninety percent of what gets published is worthless. With any luck, that’ll be the silver lining of this fucking election, that when writers start to feel oppressed again they’ll start to write books worth reading instead of all that idiotic upper-middle-class self-absorbed liberal navel-gazing crap we got when Obama was president. I mean, Sheila Heti, for Christ’s sake. What a stupid fucking book. She’s giving some dude a blowjob and she throws up. Who cares?”
“I love Sheila Heti,” Sandra said.
“So do I,” Rachel said. “You just don’t get it because you’re a man.”
“Fine, then Jeffrey Eugenides. He’s a jerk-off. As is Jonathan Fucking Franzen, and Jonathan Fucking Lethem, and Jonathan Asshole Safran Foer. All these fucking Jonathans, they’re total jerk-offs.”
“This is why I love working with Aaron,” Sandra said. “He’s so in your face. I find it bracing.”
“For God’s sake, don’t say ‘in your face,’ ” Aaron said. “It’s worse than ‘do the math.’ ”
“Sorry. How about this? What I love about Aaron is that he’s so no-bullshit.”
“Better.”
“Eva would eat this up,” Rachel said.
“No, she wouldn’t, any more than she’d eat up this fish,” Aaron said. “Am I right, Bruce?”
“I suspect you’re right about the fish,” Bruce said.
“It’s true that with Eva you feel you have to hold yourself—I don’t know—to a higher standard,” Rachel said, taking off her pussy hat. “For example, that you ought not to swear so much. I’m not sure that’s a bad thing.”
“Fuck, yeah,” Aaron said.
“What do you think, Jake?”
“Oh, don’t ask me,” Jake said. “I’m just a decorator.”
Everyone looked at him. Had he really said that? He’d thought he was only thinking it.
“But that’s fascinating,” Sandra said. “Tell us more.”
“He means his orientation, his language, is visual,” Rachel said.
“Let him speak for himself,” Aaron said. “What do you mean, Jake?”
“I’m not sure what I mean.”
“There’s something to be said for not thinking,” Aaron said. “It’s often struck me that the best artists are a little stupid. Jean Rhys, for instance.”
“Jean Rhys was not stupid,” Rachel said.
“Oh, but she was. She couldn’t punctuate, and she had no vocabulary. If it hadn’t been for Ford Madox Ford, she’d never have had a career.”
“That’s just plain sexist and you know it.”
“But I mean it as a compliment. It’s why she’s a great writer.”
“And would you say the same thing about any male writer?”
“Most male writers are too smart for their own good. It makes them assholes.”
“That’s not an answer to Rachel’s question,” Sandra said. “Rachel wants you to tell us if there are any male writers you think are good because they’re stupid, not if there are any male writers you think are bad because they’re smart.”
“Is that what Rachel wants? Usually I find it impossible to grasp what Rachel wants.”
“You mustn’t take Aaron seriously when he’s off on one of his tirades,” Rachel said.
“Oh, but I love it,” Sandra said. “I mean, what he says gives me hope that I may actually stand a chance as a writer, because God knows I’m stupid.”
“You are not stupid,” Rachel said, slapping her hand.
“Oh, but I am. I don’t even have a college degree. I dropped out of three different colleges.”
“So what? Amy Hempel doesn’t have a college degree, either.”
“And there’s nothing intellectual about my process. When I write, it doesn’t even feel like it’s me doing the writing. It’s more like—I don’t know—channeling. Most of the time, when I look over what I’ve written, I don’t even understand it.”
“Unfortunately, neither do I,” Aaron said.
“What’s it like for you, Jake?” Rachel said. “When you’re doing a room, do you plan everything in advance? Is every detail a conscious choice? Is there a point when the room itself starts to tell you what to do?”
“Do you think of the house as a narrative?” Sandra said.
“Do you ever find it’s more what you leave out than what you put in?”
“Or that you have to kill your darlings?”
“It’s a mix of those things,” Jake said.
“Have some more fish. There’s plenty,” Aaron said, handing around the platter.
“Thank you,” Bruce said, and thought, I hate this conversation. I hate bony fish. I never asked to be given the head.
When the evening was over, Rachel helped her guests on with their coats. “Well, I think I can congratulate myself on achieving my goal,” she said. “We got through the whole dinner without once talking about the inauguration.”
“Until just now, when you reminded us of it,” Aaron said.
“Needless to say, it was at the back of my mind the whole time,” Sandra said to Bruce and Jake in the elevator. “How could it not be?”
“Of course, Rachel meant well,” Jake said. “And she did get you away from that party, Bruce.”
“It was Eva who wanted to get away from the party,” Bruce said. “Four thousand miles away.”
“Venice must be magic,” Sandra said.
“Didn’t you once live there, Jake?”
“For a while. Ages ago.”
They were now on the sidewalk, hands in their pockets, huddled together against the cold. “There’s no point in asking me to share a ride, because where I’m going isn’t on anyone’s way,” Sandra said.
“Where are you going?”
“Bushwick. I’m spending the night with my daughter. Just tonight. She won’t have me more than that.”
“She lives in Bushwick?” Bruce said.
“Haven’t you heard?” Sandra said. “Nowadays Bushwick is the place to be. Before that it was Williamsburg and Fort Greene, but they got too expensive.”
“I’m such an old fogey,” Bruce said. “Even after all these years, I don’t know where any of those neighborhoods are. For me, Brooklyn might as well be Albania.”
“You need to get out and see more of the city,” Sandra said. “Maybe Eva’s trip to Venice will give you the chance.”
“I wouldn’t know where to start.”
“If you like, I can take you on a tour of Bushwick. Of course, we’d have to take the subway.”
“Or I could drive,” Bruce said.
“Oh, my, a car trip to Brooklyn. Let’s do it. I’ll call you.”
“Have you got my number?”
“I’ve got Eva’s number,” Sandra said—a bit ambiguously, it seemed to Bruce—as a gleaming SUV, a Lincoln, pulled up to the curb. “Well, here’s my ride. Goodnight.”
“What was that?” Bruce said after the Lincoln drove off. “Does she have a driver?”
“It’s an Uber.”
“Oh, yes, of course. I really am an old fogey. I still take cabs. Shall we share one?”
“Sure,” Jake said as Bruce lifted his wrist and a taxi pulled up. This seemed to Jake significant—that magnetism for taxis that certain men possess, and that he did not.
In the cab, Bruce said, “She’s a strange one, that Sandra. Did you really meet when you were fourteen?”
“When she was fourteen. Probably. To be honest, most of that part of my life is a blur.”
“Which part do you mean?”
“Oh, let’s see, from when I arrived in New York—1987—through … well, about an hour ago.”
“You’re a dark horse, Jake. For instance, you’ve never said anything before about this aunt of yours. At least to me.”
“Because you’ve never asked,” Jake almost answered, but restrained himself.
“She was a decorator. She used to visit my parents a lot when I was growing up, and sometimes I’d go to stay with her in the summer. She had a big apartment on Central Park West. I lived with her while I was getting my degree at Parsons.”
“Where did you grow up again?”
The again was face-saving. Bruce had never before asked Jake where he grew up.
“California.”
“Ah.”
“One thing that’s true—I did do all the measuring for her. She was terrible with measurements, she always took them down wrong.”
“So probably you did meet Sandra.”
“Probably.”
They were crossing the park. Tall lamps illuminated the Ninety-seventh Street Transverse. Beyond them, in shadowed woods, Bruce knew, things were happening that were beyond his capacity to imagine.
“I’m sorry that Aaron got laid off,” he said.
“Oh, but he didn’t,” Jake said. “He was fired. He called his boss a cu—the C-word.”
“God! Really?”
“Don’t quote me on that. I got it from Min, and she’s not exactly what you’d call a paragon of reliability.”
“Rachel is so good-natured, so patient. You wonder sometimes how nice women like her end up with men like Aaron. Men who aren’t nice. Do you think he’s sleeping with Sandra?”
“I’m the wrong person to ask. The fact is, I don’t understand human relationships. I only understand rooms, and even with rooms, every day I’m less and less sure.”
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