Shelter in Place

by David Leavitt

  They had arrived at Bruce’s building. After a brief tussle over who would pay the fare, he bade Jake goodnight and headed up to his apartment, where he found the dogs in a state of discernible anxiety due to his lateness. When the dogs were anxious, they lost control of their bowels. It was eleven in the evening in New York, five in the morning in Venice. Six hours and four thousand miles, much of it ocean, separated him from his wife, making her as close to nonexistent as she could be without being dead.

  As he took the dogs out for their walk, he listened at the Warriners’ door for party noises but heard none. The dogs were quick about their business. When he got home, after he brushed his teeth, he got into bed on the left side.

  11

  “Have you heard of the drama of the gifted child?” Kathy asked.

  “What child is that?” Bruce said.

  “Not any child in particular,” Kathy said. “It’s a book—The Drama of the Gifted Child—and according to Michael, it describes exactly what Lou and I did to him.”

  Bruce put the Outback into park. It was the Wednesday before Eva and Min’s return from Venice, and the traffic on Lexington was at a standstill. All around him, taxi drivers and Uber drivers were pressing their horns, as if noise could blast apart gridlock.

  “Something must be going on at the UN,” he said. “Or there’s another protest in front of Trump Tower.”

  “Or an accident,” Kathy said, tearing at a Kleenex she held balled in her fist. “It could be an accident. Do you want me to check Waze?”

  “Knowing why there’s traffic won’t make it move. Anyway, we’ve got time. We’ve got forty minutes. So what’s this gifted child thing?”

  A snowfall of shredded Kleenex was collecting on Kathy’s lap. “Well, from what Michael says, it’s what happens when there’s a gifted child in a family, but also a troubled one, so the parents lavish all their attention on the troubled one in the belief that the gifted one can take care of himself. And so the gifted one feels neglected—punished. He feels punished for being gifted.”

  “Is Michael gifted?”

  “I suppose. I mean, he was in the gifted program at school. He’s never really been into academics, though. He wants to be an interior designer. He wants to go to Parsons.

  “I’m not sure I believe we neglected him as much as he says. It’s true we never worried about him the way we did about Susie, because he’s always been responsible, always landed on his feet. Susie never lands on her feet. The thing about Susie … But I don’t need to explain Susie to you. Her history’s like mine in so many ways—had kids too early, just like me, never went to college, just like me. Can’t hold down a job. That’s where we part ways. She’s more like her father in that way. It’s no coincidence that Lou sells cars. He could never make it in a salaried position, he can only get something done if there’s a gold ring to grab. Not that Susie could ever sell cars. Mind you, a few years ago Lou tried her out at it. God, that was a disaster.

  “Anyway, the reason I’m bringing all this up is that last night we had a little incident and I’d like your opinion on it. We were watching SVU—me, Michael, Susie, and the girls, Chloe and Bethany—when the doorbell rings, and it’s Ricky, Chloe’s dad. He and Susie lived together for a couple years, until Susie decided she’d had enough of his drinking and took out a restraining order against him—despite which she still sees him from time to time. Now, I ask you, what’s the point of taking out a restraining order on someone if you’re the one who’s going to break it?

  “Anyway, he rings the doorbell, and she goes to answer. They talk for a few minutes, and then she comes into the living room and asks me, in this sheepish voice, if he can come in for a little while. At first I don’t say anything—you see, I was trying to decide which would be worse, the fight Ricky and Susie would have if I let him come in or the fight Susie and I would have if I didn’t—and then, before I can even open my mouth, Michael jumps in with ‘Absolutely no way is that asswipe’—excuse me, but that’s the word he used—‘coming inside this house.’ And of course, all this time Ricky’s standing at the door, which means he can hear everything, which shouldn’t matter, I know, but to me it does—I’m hardwired that way, don’t air your dirty laundry in public—so I tell Michael to keep his voice down, and he stands up and puts his hands on his hips and says, ‘What are you trying to do? Do you want to kill yourself? I’m trying to help you out here. God, it’s the drama of the gifted child all over again.’ ”

  “And how did you answer?”

  “I didn’t. But I told Susie that Ricky couldn’t come in. I told her that if she wanted to talk to him, she’d have to go outside, which she did. So there they were, out in the driveway, smoking, when … But I should have seen it coming. Two minutes, literally two minutes, was all it took before they were going at it full throttle, loud enough that the neighbors called the police.

  “Well, I should have seen what would happen next. The minute Ricky hears the sirens, he bolts. That’s typical of him—leaving Susie to take the heat. I thought they were going to arrest her for disturbing the peace. It’s happened before. And so I’m thinking, if she gets taken in, I’ll have to go down to the city jail, again, wait for her to be arraigned, again, bail her out, again. I’m thinking, if I’m lucky, I’ll be home by four in the morning. And that’s when I just … lost it. I mean, I got furious, really furious, which is something I don’t do often. Usually I’m a pretty calm person. Only now I’m literally shaking with rage, and Michael’s glaring at me, and the girls are crying and … well, that’s when I go into the bedroom and call Lou. I call Lou, and when he picks up I say, ‘The cops are here, and Susie’s about to be arrested, and if you want it dealt with, you’d better come over and deal with it, because I’m not doing it.’ And Lou—he must have heard it in my voice that I meant business, because he goes, ‘OK, OK, I’ll be there in five minutes.’ But despite saying that, he’s a good half hour, and by then it’s all over, they’ve let Susie off with a warning, and she’s ripping the kitchen apart looking for cigarettes. And Lou walks in and he just … lights into her, tells her she’s an unfit mother, and how can she do this sort of thing in front of her children, to say nothing of her poor mama, who has cancer, to which Susie answers that he’s in no position to criticize, considering he’s walked out on her poor mama who has cancer and she’s the one who stayed to take care of her. It’s always the same argument with them. The first time Susie got sent to juvie, it was because she gave him a black eye. He called the cops, and when they showed up she told them she’d done it to protect me, that he was hitting me and she was trying to stop him, but they arrested her anyway.”

  “Was he hitting you?”

  “How do I answer that? Over the years, hitting happened. I did some of it, he did some of it, Susie did some of it. I know I should say it was domestic abuse—it would certainly help me in the divorce case—but honestly, that’s not how I see it. I don’t see Lou as the bad guy. Or Susie, for that matter. Lou, on the other hand, does see Susie as … if not the bad guy, then a lost cause. When she and the girls got thrown out of their last place, he didn’t want to take them in. His opinion was that she’d made her bed and she should lie in it. And I said, ‘But she’s got no money, they’ll have to go to a shelter,’ and he said, ‘Well, let them go to a shelter, if that’s what it takes to get her to start acting like a grown-up.’ And I said, ‘But there are the girls to think of. They’re just children, we can’t just sit back and let them go to a shelter.’ And now suddenly I see something. That maybe when I said Lou would never have left if I hadn’t gotten sick, I was kidding myself. Maybe the truth is, he would have left anyway.”

  The light changed. This time Bruce made it through. “Hoorah!” he said.

  Half a block later the traffic slowed again.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “If worse comes to worst, I’ll call you a helicopter.”

  “I’m not worried,” Kathy said. “Oh, but I never got to the part about the gifted
child.”

  “Oh, yes. What happened?”

  “It was around ten. Lou had left, and Susie was putting the girls to bed, when Michael comes up to me and starts complaining about how everyone always forgets him. How he gets left out of everything. And I say, ‘Michael, you should consider yourself lucky,’ and he says, ‘But I don’t, because I have to live here,’ and I say, lamely, ‘You’re a good boy, Michael,’ and he says, ‘Exactly, it’s the drama of the gifted child. She gets all the attention, and even says she’s here to take care of you when everyone knows she’s really only here because she’s got nowhere else to go, and in the meantime I’m the one who buys the groceries, cleans the house, changes the sheets,’ and on and on like that until I couldn’t even really hear him anymore … And I said—I know it’s selfish, but I said it—‘Why am I always the one to get blamed? Why am I always wrong? I’m so tired of always being wrong.’ ” Tears sprang into Kathy’s eyes. “Mind you, I’m not shirking responsibility. No one understands the mistakes I’ve made better than I do. And yet I’ve got to have done some things right, haven’t I? I’ve got to have.”

  “Of course,” Bruce said, laying his hand on her knee.

  “I suppose what it comes down to is that every second of every day of your life, the stakes are just so high, aren’t they? Always so high …”

  Again the traffic eased. The car seemed suddenly very warm to Bruce, so warm that he could feel the sweat on his neck soaking into his collar. Yet he had to keep the temperature high. Kathy got cold so easily.

  “Kathy, there’s something I want to ask you about,” he said. “It’s really none of my business, and if you’d rather I shut up, just tell me and I will.”

  “What is it?”

  “Well, last Monday when I dropped you off at the hotel, you said something about how much you were looking forward to taking a bath—”

  She laughed. “So I did say it! The minute I got in the elevator, I was sure I had. I just wondered if you’d picked up on it.”

  “Were you hoping I hadn’t?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe I was hoping you had.” She cleared her throat. “So, as you’ve no doubt figured out, we never put in that master suite.”

  “But you took out the loan?”

  “Oh, yes, the loan’s real. We just ended up spending the money on other things. I didn’t want to tell you, in case you disapproved.”

  “Why would I disapprove? How you spend your money is none of my business.”

  “I know, I know, that’s what you always tell your clients. But I’m not one of your clients. And even if I was, is it really true? I mean, do you really not judge? Or do you just keep your judgments to yourself?”

  “I’ve trained myself not to think along those lines. Ideally I’d rather not know the particulars.”

  “But you must want to know them in this case, or you wouldn’t have asked.”

  “Well, you’re not one of my clients. And as I said, if you think it’s none of my business—”

  “I don’t mind telling you. Why not, when you consider how much I’ve already told you? OK, when we first got the idea to take out the loan, our plan really was to add on a master suite. You see, all the kids had left except Michael, and once they were gone, the strangest thing happened. For the first time in our lives, we had more space than we needed—and for the first time in our lives, it didn’t seem like enough. Which is maybe how it always is. Wants are stronger than needs. Anyway, I’d gotten in the habit of watching those programs on television where people refurbish their homes, and on these programs everyone was always going on about master suites, how great it was to have a master suite, and I thought, Wow, it really would be great to have a master suite, with a big whirlpool tub and a separate shower. And Lou thought it was a good idea, too—for different reasons. I mean, for him it wasn’t so much about comfort as about having the sort of house that he thought befitted a man of his status. The same with his car. Of course, he’s got things ass-backwards—he thinks a house and car confer status, when really they’re just symbols. One of his brothers is a builder, he has a huge house, six thousand square feet. Lou’s always been jealous of it. So one night he invites this brother, Ronny, over for dinner, and we get to talking about the possibility of putting on an addition, and the next thing I know we’re out in the yard and Ronny’s showing us where it could go, and how it could be laid out, and from then on things just moved very fast. Ronny did some drawings and gave us an estimate and put us in touch with this mortgage broker he knew, who was avid to sell us the loan, only I was nervous about taking on more debt. That’s when I asked your advice about it, and when you said you thought it was fine, that we could afford it, we took it out. And then the trouble started.”

  “Susie?”

  “Who else? The day after we got the money—literally the day after—she shows up on our doorstep with the girls. Despite his threats, Lou let them stay. He didn’t make them go to a shelter—which didn’t stop him from fighting with her all the time, the same fight they’ve been having for a thousand years. So things went on like that for a couple weeks, when all of a sudden Susie’s other ex—Bethany’s father, Jason—slaps her with a custody suit. And this completely blows my mind, because up until then he’s been the classic deadbeat dad, always late with child support, which meant that I was always loaning Susie money that she’d promise to pay back and never did, which infuriated Lou. And now here he is, Jason, suing for full custody. He’s quit drinking and gotten a job, plus I think his mother’s giving him money. And Susie … well, as you imagine, she goes totally ballistic. Says she’ll die before she gives up Bethany, and that she’s got to hire a lawyer, to which Lou replies that he’d rather pay for a lawyer for Jason than for her, since as far as he’s concerned there’s no way Jason could do a worse job with Bethany than she has. At which point the fight starts up again, the two of them screaming at each other, until finally Susie says she’s leaving, only you have to remember, she has nowhere to go, literally nowhere. She’s packing her bags, and the girls are wailing and weeping, and the whole time Lou’s sitting on the sofa playing some idiotic game on his phone, pretending not to notice. And that’s when all of a sudden Susie just grabs the girls and pulls them down with her onto the floor. They’re just sitting there on the floor, and now all three of them are wailing and weeping, and hugging each other, all in a heap, like a bunch of puppies, and from the heap this voice, Susie’s, says, ‘Daddy, Daddy, please help me,’ and right then I can see where this is going, because they’re both con artists at heart and the secret about con artists is that they’re always each other’s easiest mark.

  “You can probably guess what happened next.”

  “Lou hired her a lawyer?”

  Kathy nodded. “Only the lawyer wanted a retainer, so that’s a chunk of the loan gone. And then another chunk to pay the rent Susie owes, plus interest, and another to Ronny, who’s already done a design and pulled the permits for the master suite, which now we can’t afford to build. You know how it is, how money never goes as far as you think it will. Or maybe you don’t know that.”

  “I do, actually.”

  “Well, that’s everything. Where I am now—it’s not where I ever expected to be. And yet in another sense it seems the inevitable place to end up, doesn’t it?”

  Fighting the constraints of his seatbelt, Bruce turned to Kathy. “Listen to me,” he said. “This isn’t the end of the story. Maybe it’s the end of a part of the story, but not the whole of it. There’s the future to think of.”

  “Believe me, I never stop thinking about the future.”

  “And look, we’re here.” They were pulling up in front of the outpatient center. “And on time, despite the traffic. That’s a good sign, isn’t it?”

  As usual, he let her out, then went to park the Outback. By the time he got to the suite she was already in the recliner and hooked up to the IV. Her eyes were closed. Fine veins stood out on the fluttering lids.

  As quietl
y as he could, he sat down, opened his computer, and typed into the search bar “Syosset home values.”

  To his surprise, there was much less traffic on the drive back uptown.

  “Going to the country this weekend, Mr. Lindquist?” the attendant at his garage asked when he dropped off the car.

  “Probably not,” Bruce said. “I’ll let you know if I do.”

  “By Friday morning if you can. So we can plan for the weekend. Goodnight, Mr. Lindquist.”

  “Goodnight.”

  Had the weather been worse, he would have taken a taxi back to the apartment. Instead he walked. Too many hours in the car and in the armchair at the chemo suite had constricted his muscles.

  Halfway home, an idea seized him and turned him around and he headed to his office, for he was determined to act on the idea before any twinges of guilt he was having grew strong enough to stop him.

  It was nearly eight when he unlocked the door. Everyone had gone home. The lights were out. On tiptoe, he made his way through the dark to Kathy’s office, shut the door softly, sat down at her desk, switched on the lamp, and woke the computer from its twilight sleep.

  He knew her password, just as she knew his—a precaution they had taken years ago, in case one or the other should be incapacitated. Even so, the sight of her desktop startled him—the wallpaper itself (a photo of her and Lou and their kids, taken at least twenty years before), over which a haphazard array of pdfs, spreadsheets, Word docs, and photos was scattered. Had Kathy known that he would be looking at her desktop, he had no doubt, she would have organized all these items into neatly labeled folders. Some she would have deleted. She would no more have wished him to see her desktop in this condition than she would have wished him to see her when she woke in the morning, before she put on her makeup and her wig, and this apprehension precipitated in him pangs of remorse at the same time that it solidified his conviction that he was doing the right thing, that he must plunge ahead.