Shelter in Place

by David Leavitt

  It took him about ten minutes. As he had guessed, Kathy had let her computer generate unmemorizable passwords for her accounts and email, which it then filled in automatically. Nor had she erased her browser history. This meant that all he had to do was find the correct website and the entry to the Aladdin’s cave—or, more aptly, the messy boudoir—would open to him, allowing him to sift through its contents, a task he undertook with the delicacy and restraint that chivalry demanded. Efficiently and, as it were, discreetly, he inserted a flash drive into the computer and copied Kathy’s bank statements, her property tax bills, her credit card statements, her homeowner’s insurance policy, her medical bills, and the payment schedule for the home equity loan, as well as those for two other loans she hadn’t told him about, one on a car and one on the sailboat she had spoken of taking out onto the Sound on weekends with Lou. From everything else on her computer—from her photographs, from the emails she had gotten from Lou and her children, from the file called DIARY and the one called EULOGY?—he averted his eyes. He then erased his intrusions from her browser history and put the computer back to sleep—thinking, as he did so, of the Grinch sending Little Cindy-Lou Who back to bed with a drink of water after she discovers him stealing the Christmas tree.

  No one caught him. He switched off the lamp, tiptoed again (but why?) to the door, locked it, rode the elevator to the lobby, and began the familiar walk back to his apartment, though at a faster clip than usual, thanks to the descending temperature and to a fervency of action tinged with righteousness and just a smattering of shame. It was so long past the hour he usually got home that an instinctive shudder of anxiety passed through him, until he remembered that it didn’t matter now, that the only people he was letting down were the dogs, who would be impatient for their dinner and their walk, and they wouldn’t tell on him. They couldn’t even if they wanted to. And Eva was away, six hours further into the night, in the land of Nod. Yet what he had done so far was nothing compared with what he had planned.

  A few blocks west of the office, his phone pinged. The text was from a number he did not know.

  Hi bruce, it’s sandra, i got your number from aaron, hope you don’t mind, anyway was wondering if you were planning to come out to conn. this weekend, grady is away and i will be on my own could use some company, let me know if you’ll be in connecticut, xx

  As it happened, the text arrived just as he was passing his garage, a coincidence that impelled him to knock on the door of the little cage, separated from the world by bulletproof glass, in which the attendant sat at a gunmetal desk, reading the Ming Pao Daily News. As soon as he saw Bruce, he waved and unlocked the door.

  “Mr. Lindquist, you need your car again, sir?”

  “No, not tonight. I just want to tell you, I’ve been thinking about it and I’ve decided I may go up to the country this weekend after all. So could you have the car ready for me on Friday afternoon, say at three o’clock?”

  “Sure thing, Mr. Lindquist,” the attendant said, returning to the office and making a note in an old-fashioned ledger. Bruce followed him in.

  “Warm in here.”

  “Too warm for me. But hey, that’s better than too cold.”

  “What’s your name, by the way?”

  “Willard, Mr. Lindquist. Willard Han.”

  “Willard, good to meet you. Well, to learn your name. Oh, and please call me Bruce.”

  An amused smile passed over Willard Han’s face as Bruce held out his big, clean, pale hand, which Willard shook, taking note, as he did, of the layerings from which it protruded: cashmere coat, wool jacket, cotton-and-silk-blend sleeves fastened with gold cuff links.

  After he left, Willard called his wife and told her of the encounter. “And to think that he drives a Subaru,” he said. “If I had that kind of dough, I’d drive a Beemer.”

  His wife agreed that he would.

  The next morning, Eva called to tell him about the apartment in Venice.

  PART III

  12

  “The way Denise put it, Fifth Avenue is the Grand Canal of the modern world,” Clydie Mortimer said. “So what else but Canaletto?”

  Pablo Bach, his cheeks freshly shaven and his nails newly manicured, studied the Canalettos. There were eight in all, arranged in the spaces between the windows and their views of Central Park.

  “Denise bought the first six in the seventies, when we still had the palazzo in Venice,” Clydie went on. “My son, Jimmy, bought two more last year. Jimmy is a genius when it comes to buying art.”

  “He has such an eye,” Min said. “What do you think, Pablo?”

  Arms clasped behind his back, Pablo leaned into a view of San Giorgio Maggiore.

  “What do I think?” he said. “For those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like. That’s what I think.”

  Jake laughed. He couldn’t help it.

  “That’s rather inscrutable,” Clydie said.

  “He’s quoting someone,” Min said. “Wait, it’s on the tip of my tongue … Oscar Wilde?”

  “Muriel Spark, actually,” Indira Singh said. “Miss Jean Brodie’s opinion of the girl guides.”

  “Very good,” Pablo said, giving Indira the same curatorial once-over he had just given the painting. “Jake and I met her once, you know. She was Dame Muriel by then. She’d invited us to lunch at her place near Arezzo, only when we got there, she’d forgotten we were coming. Leave it to a Catholic to make you feel guilty for her own mistakes.”

  That the conversation had strayed from the Canalettos worried Min, who said, “Well, if you want my opinion, Mrs. Mortimer, they’re absolutely marvelous. In fact, I want to thank you for giving me the opening line for my article.” She cleared her throat. “ ‘Fifth Avenue is the Grand Canal of the Modern World,’ says Clydie Mortimer of the spectacular Manhattan duplex in which she has lived for the past three decades. ‘So what else but Canaletto?’ ”

  “You know you’re not to use my name,” Clydie said.

  “Oh, yes, of course we won’t,” Min said. “That was just off the top of my head.”

  “I do wonder about this one,” Pablo said, bringing his face close to a painting of the Riva degli Schiavoni. “Looks more like School of than Canaletto proper.”

  “You’re just saying that because you know it’s one of the ones Jimmy bought,” Clydie said.

  “How would I know that?”

  “You’ve been here enough times.” She turned to Indira. “So, my dear, Enfilade. I have to be frank, when Min called to tell me you wanted to publish the apartment, I was dubious. I mean, Enfilade … isn’t it a bit, well, dentist’s office?”

  “Do you know, that’s exactly what I thought when they offered me the job,” Indira said.

  “Oh, but that’s how the magazine used to be,” Min said. “Since Indira took over, its whole identity has changed.”

  “I remember in the old days, the people from Enfilade used to practically get down on their knees and beg Denise to let them publish the Palm Beach house,” Clydie said. “Or maybe that was House & Garden. Anyway, she always refused. She was adamant. She wouldn’t let any of her houses be photographed.”

  “Why not?” Indira said. “That is, if you don’t mind my asking.”

  “After the break-in in Venice, she was deathly afraid of burglars. The last thing she wanted was to give clues as to where she lived.”

  “Understandable,” Min said.

  “Which is why, even though I’m agreeing to let you publish the apartment, I don’t want my name used.”

  “I might not want mine used, either,” Pablo said, peering again at the Canalettos.

  Clydie laughed, her laugh turning into a cough that nearly caused her glasses—round, tortoiseshell, oversize—to fall off her small nose. “He’s only saying that because he’s mad at me for putting them back where they were,” she said to Indira. “You see, when he had this new wallpaper put up, he played a trick on me. While the wallpaper was being hung, the Canaletto
s had to be taken down and stored, and Pablo stored them in Jimmy’s room. I was in Palm Beach at the time, and naturally assumed that when I got back, they’d be where they were supposed to be, instead of which he’d moved them to the dining room. Well, I moved them back.”

  “So you did.”

  “It was where Denise wanted them.”

  “With all due respect, Clydie, if your goal was to keep the apartment exactly the same as it was when Denise was alive, why did you hire me?”

  “To do your job. Or do you really think that when you redecorate a place, it belongs to you?”

  “With Pablo, that’s always a question,” Jake said.

  This time it was Indira who laughed, tilting her head so that her earrings jingle-belled.

  After her visitors left, Clydie poured herself some Scotch and called Jimmy. Clydie was eighty-seven, Jimmy sixty-four.

  “What is it, Mother?” Jimmy spoke against a backdrop of traffic noise.

  “It’s that Pablo,” Clydie said. “I invited him over, along with the Enfilade people, and he had the nerve to slap my wrist—in front of them—because I’d moved the Canalettos back. I mean, who does he think he is?”

  “If that’s how you feel, just don’t use him anymore.”

  “And then he made this crack about not wanting his name in the article. ‘Fine,’ I should have said, ‘what do I care? Your name’s not the one people will be guessing at.’ ”

  “Mother, I’ve got to go. I’m just—”

  “But what really upset me was the insult to you, Jimmy. The condescension. Implying those Canalettos of yours weren’t authentic.”

  “Who cares what he thinks? Look, we’re just pulling up at the hotel. I have to check in.”

  “I don’t know how you do it, Jimmy. You’re so gifted when it comes to buying art. I want you to find me a Marie Laurencin next. Where are you, by the way? What’s all that noise?”

  “Bangkok.”

  “Is it hot? What time is it?”

  “I’d rather not know.”

  “Be careful of the shellfish,” Clydie said, when in fact the shellfish was the least of the things she feared her son might not be careful about in Bangkok.

  After they left Clydie’s apartment, Pablo, Jake, Min, and Indira went out for dinner. Indira chose the restaurant, a South Indian place on Madison where the maître d’ fussed over her. This annoyed Pablo, who had planned to take them to a French place on Lexington where the maître d’ fussed over him.

  Of course, Indira’s presumptuousness would have been less irksome if she hadn’t been so pretty, with her sleek, obedient hair, her lucent skin, the small diamond embedded in her left nostril, and the big one gleaming on her ring finger.

  “Is Singh your married name or your maiden name?” he asked her once they were seated.

  “Both, actually.”

  “Ah, so you’re Mrs. Singh Singh.”

  “Oh, please,” Min said. “As if she hasn’t heard that line twenty million times.”

  “I don’t mind,” Indira said. “What else is love but a prison?”

  This riposte got more laughs than the joke that had occasioned it. It was Indira’s self-possession that most transfixed and alarmed Pablo, for it was the self-possession that comes of youth and beauty, the kind he himself had once known and therefore knew he would never know again.

  A turbaned waiter brought menus. By the standard of Indian restaurants, this one was surprisingly posh, with soft light, beige chenille upholstery on the booths, no canned sitar music or attar of room freshener. Most of the other diners were Indian, the men in tailored suits, the women in saris. The menus were tall and glossy.

  “Shall I order for everyone?” Indira asked—which was just plain bad manners, Pablo thought, ignoring the possibility that some of the members of the group might, for example, have trouble digesting spicy food. And yet to request something not spicy would be to admit that after years of being able to eat anything he liked, Pablo was now turning into one of those people who has trouble digesting spicy food. Better just to dip a piece of naan into the raita—better not to eat anything—than to allow this irksomely beautiful woman to gain any more leverage over him.

  For a few minutes Indira consulted with the waiter, who then collected the menus and glided away. She rested her chin on her hand, something that even twenty years ago no properly raised young woman would have done.

  “So, Clydie Mortimer,” she said. “I’ll say this—she’s not what I expected.”

  “Oh, really?” Pablo said. “What did you expect?”

  “Someone frailer, perhaps. Less gumptious.”

  “That suit was vintage Schiaparelli,” Min said.

  “Vintage Balenciaga, actually,” Indira said.

  “Oh, yes, I meant Balenciaga,” Min said. “I said Schiaparelli but I meant Balenciaga.”

  “One thing I didn’t get, Pablo. Why did you say you might not want your name in the article?”

  “Pablo was teasing Clydie,” Min said. “He can’t bear it when his clients move things around.”

  “Those last two Canalettos are fakes,” Pablo said. “Jimmy Mortimer is a fool.”

  “What’s the story with Jimmy?” Indira asked. “Who’s his father?”

  “No one knows. Clydie already had him when she met Denise.”

  “She was a model then, right?”

  “In London, in the fifties. She posed for Helmut Newton.”

  “Maybe he was the father,” Min said.

  “That was where she met Denise, in London. Everyone seems to meet there.”

  “And they were lovers from then on?”

  “I’m not sure lovers is quite the word. For Denise, Clydie was more like a decorative statue, or a piece of topiary.”

  “Denise liked having Clydie lying on the chaise by the pool,” Jake said. “And that, for fifty years, was basically all Clydie did.”

  “Lying by the pool was her career. Except when she was in Manhattan, when her career was sitting in nightclubs.

  “They moved around depending on the season. Besides the apartment, there were the two houses, the one in Palm Beach and the one in Connecticut. Oh, and the palace in Venice, until Denise sold it. Of course, she was a bit batty in her last years. A sort of a Miss Havisham.”

  “She let the house in Palm Beach go to rack and ruin,” Min said. “An Addison Mizner house! It had to be torn down. Tragic.”

  “Luckily, an architect bought the Connecticut house and restored it,” Jake said.

  “Really?” Indira asked. “Has it been published?”

  “Last year, in Architectural Digest,” Min said. “But the carriage house hasn’t.”

  “Clydie kept the carriage house,” Pablo said. “She goes up there most weekends. I keep telling her she needs to have the roof repaired, but she won’t do anything about it. Every time I visit, I’m worried the ceiling’s going to collapse.”

  “I suppose it must have been a love match,” Indira said.

  “I’d say it was more a match of expectations,” Pablo said. “In my experience, it’s mutual expectations that make for the most successful marriages.”

  “What, not love?” Min said.

  “Plenty of people who love each other end up divorced,” Jake said.

  “Speaking of marriage, I’ve been meaning to ask if you two are married,” Indira said.

  She was looking at Pablo and Jake. For a moment neither spoke.

  “What’s the matter? Have I put my foot in it?” Indira said.

  “No, of course not,” Min said, reaching across the table to pat Indira’s hand. “Believe me, after all these years, they’re used to people thinking they’re a couple, aren’t you, boys?”

  “Oh, absolutely,” Pablo said.

  “I mean, it’s an occupational hazard, isn’t it? If you’re a man, and you’re a decorator, people are likely to make certain assumptions about you that, frankly, in most cases, will turn out to be true. Only in Pablo’s case they’re not. Not
that you do much to dispel the misapprehension, do you, Pablo?”

  “Don’t I?”

  “The truth is, he wants women to think he’s gay. It’s his MO. It means when they’re with him, they let down their guard. Then when he makes his move, they’re too startled to object.”

  “And then later, when they take him on buying trips to Paris, the husbands don’t care,” Jake said.

  “Thank you for revealing all my trade secrets,” Pablo said, “and in the process ruining my chances of seducing the lovely Mrs. Singh Singh.”

  Indira smiled her cool smile. She is attracted to him, Jake thought. Inexplicably, despite his age and girth, she is attracted to him. And here I am, two decades younger (“Congratulations on beginning your fifty-third year!”), and I cannot win so much as a wink from this handsome waiter as he lays his silver tray, with its artful arrangement of idlis and sambar, pooris and coconut chutney, on the table.

  “Jake’s gay,” Min added. “Though single, in case you know anyone we can fix him up with.”

  Jake said to Indira, “I’m afraid that in her avidity to explain what Pablo and I aren’t, Min has omitted to say what we are, which is partners—business partners.”

  “For twenty-six years,” Pablo said.

  “Jake’s aunt founded the firm,” Min said. “She took on Pablo first, then Jake, and now they co-own it.”

  “Who was your aunt?” Indira asked.

  “Rose Lovett. A major force in the industry in the sixties and seventies. Sometimes called the female David Hicks.”

  “She’d turn over in her grave if she heard you say that,” Jake said.

  “David Hicks?” Indira said. “Should I know that name?”

  Pablo gave her a look of bemused astonishment. “Excuse me if this is a rude question,” he said, “but you are the editor of Enfilade, aren’t you?”

  “It’s not a rude question,” Indira said, “and yes, as of last November, I am. The thing is—I’ll be the first to admit it—I’m a total ignoramus when it comes to decorating. My first job after college was at Glamour, then from Glamour I moved to InStyle, then from InStyle to Sweetheart.”