Shelter in Place

by David Leavitt

  Jake: This isn’t sex, sex is what I’m proposing and you seem more scared of it than I am

  Jake: Which is weird, since I’m the one who hasn’t had it in 16 years

  Simon: you said 14

  Jake: Look, I have to get some sleep, have to be up early in the am, I promise I’m not mad, goodnight

  Simon: ok, goodnight my prince

  Simon: goodnight

  Simon: goodnight

  Jake put down his phone. Next to it was the shopping list he had started.

  Toilet paper

  Preparation H

  Splenda

  Was this what his life had come to?

  PART IV

  14

  If he could have, Bruce would have repaired Kathy’s life invisibly. He would have slipped down the chimney of her life, arranged the gifts under the tree, and clambered back out without her ever knowing he’d been there, so that when she woke in the morning, it would be to find her debts miraculously paid, an infusion of cash in her checking account, and Susie and her daughters out of her house. But this plan was impracticable. As his lawyer, Rita, explained—a little impatiently, as if he should have known better, which he should have—to pay off someone else’s debts without first obtaining their consent was virtually impossible. Nor was there any way, even if he could do it, that Kathy would not guess the identity of her nameless benefactor. This news threw a monkey wrench into the grand plan of rescue that Bruce had envisioned the night he snuck into his own office after hours. It seemed that there would be no chance to spare Kathy the ordeal of thanking, or himself the ordeal of being thanked.

  He had settled on a sum of $200,000. This was more than Kathy needed, based on the documents he had copied from her computer, for his intention was to save her from future as well as present worry. The price of the Venice apartment, by contrast, was in the region of $800,000. To this had to be added the cost of its renovation and furnishing, which, knowing Eva, he estimated would come in at around a million dollars. Such a figure made the $200,000 he planned to give Kathy seem negligible. Indeed, that was what pricked his conscience: that $200,000 would make so much more of a difference to Kathy than nearly ten times that amount would make to Eva. And yet Eva persisted in presenting the apartment as a necessity, something without which she simply could not go on.

  Since her return from Venice, Bruce’s life had seemed to him increasingly bifurcated—or perhaps it had always been that way and he was only now recognizing it. As a teenager, he and his mother had sometimes watched a game show called 3’s a Crowd, the premise of which was the question “Who knows a man better, his wife or his secretary?” Usually the secretary won—or at least that was how Bruce remembered it. Now he wondered, if his own wife and secretary were to compete on 3’s a Crowd (a ludicrous notion, he knew), which would be the victor? Kathy, he suspected. Or was he underestimating Eva?

  A trickier question was which of the two women he knew better. Before he’d started taking Kathy to her chemo sessions, he would have said Eva. But now he was less certain, and not only because lately he had become so much better acquainted with Kathy’s circumstances; also because the more he got to know his secretary, the less he seemed to know his wife.

  It was the transitions that most unmoored him—the jolts he experienced when, after spending the afternoon with Kathy at the outpatient center, he would return home to find Eva and Min and some assortment of their friends gathered in the living room. He could still smell the antiseptic on his fingers as Min—on cue, and with a great screeching of gears—brought the conversation around to Venice, after which it would follow its invariable course: from the thrilling prospect of owning an apartment in Venice to the thrilling prospect of restoring an apartment in Venice to the still unresolved question of whether Jake would agree to undertake the restoration of this apartment in Venice. Eva’s trajectory was just as predictable. What if it were France in 1940? she’d ask. Would they have the guts and the foresight to get out?

  “The part I can’t get past is that I don’t know if I would,” she said. “Especially if I didn’t have a place set up to escape to, and every morning the newspapers were telling me I had nothing to worry about.”

  “OK, but what if you had inside information?” Rachel asked. “What if you had, say, friends high up in the foreign service and they warned you? Would that have been enough to change your mind?”

  “It wouldn’t have been enough to change mine,” Grady said.

  “When you think about it, the human capacity not to hear the truth is staggering,” Jake said.

  “It certainly is in my case,” Grady said.

  “OK, fine,” Rachel said, “but what about today? Isn’t that what we’re really talking about? If we should be leaving the country, like, now?”

  “I’m glad you brought that up,” Aaron said, “because the fact is, when you look at the two situations closely, you’ll see that there are a lot more differences than similarities. First, our press isn’t being censored.”

  “Not yet,” Grady said.

  “Second, we’re not on a war footing with our neighbors. That is to say, there’s no defense line, impregnable or otherwise, along the Canadian border, so far as I’m aware.”

  “To say nothing of the Mexican border.”

  “Which means we don’t have to worry about looking out the window and seeing tanks rolling down Park Avenue.”

  “Really, Aaron, you shouldn’t joke about those things,” Min said, looking at Eva.

  “Oh, but there’s an even bigger difference,” Grady said, “which is that if this were 1940, and we were Europeans, and we decided we had to get out of Europe, at least we’d know where to try to get to. Here. New York. Today it’s much harder to figure out where you’ll be safe. Me, for instance—if things reached a point where I felt I had to clear out, I’d choose Uruguay.”

  “Uruguay?” Rachel said. “Why Uruguay?”

  “Where to begin?” Grady said. “A progressive government, marriage equality, legalized pot. Plus it’s beautiful. And cheap.”

  “And tiny,” Aaron said. “And surrounded by huge countries not exactly famous for their political stability.”

  “Have you been to Montevideo?”

  “I have,” Min said. “When I was at Bon Appetit—”

  “As a matter of fact, if you look at the Social Progress Index, Uruguay’s not even in the first tier,” Aaron said. “It’s in the second tier.”

  “What’s in the first tier?” Rachel asked.

  “Let’s see.” He typed on his phone. “OK, in order of progressivity—is that a word?”

  “No.”

  “Finland, Canada, Denmark, Australia, Switzerland, Sweden.”

  “And where’s Italy?” Min said.

  “Also second tier. Higher than Uruguay but lower than the U.S. The U.S. is nineteenth. Italy is twenty-fourth, Uruguay twenty-eighth.”

  “Well, I rest my case.”

  “What case?” Aaron said.

  “That Italy’s a better place to buy an apartment than Uruguay.”

  “But that’s not a case. That’s just … I mean, if Grady hadn’t happened to bring up Uruguay—”

  “My memory of Montevideo is that it’s charming but a great bore,” Min said. “A sort of mini Buenos Aires but without the shopping.”

  “Some lovely Paris-style buildings,” Grady said.

  “This conversation is absurd,” Eva said. “I am not going to Uruguay.” Then she got up and left the table.

  Distantly a door slammed.

  “Excuse me,” Min said, getting up and following her.

  “Oh, shit,” Grady said. “I’m sorry about this. If I’d known I’d be opening up such a can of worms—”

  “It’s all right,” Bruce said. “The can of worms was already open.”

  Min resumed her seat and refilled her glass. “She’ll be OK in a bit,” she said. “Honestly, why are you so determined to tease her? You know all the reasons it has to be Venice. Her bo
ok, to start with.”

  “The one Rachel plans to publish,” Aaron said.

  Rachel gave her husband a look.

  “Speaking of publishing, how’s the job search going?” Grady asked.

  “I’m not looking for a job,” Aaron said.

  “He’s happier doing freelance,” Rachel said.

  “Why are you changing the subject?” Min said. “None of this has anything to do with Eva, or the way you’ve been teasing her.”

  “I can but bow my head in shame,” Aaron said.

  “And I mine, in tribute to your loyalty,” Grady said, “which is of an order rarely encountered these days.”

  “Well, that’s just how it is between us,” Min said, her face flushing. “I mean, Eva was the first friend I made when I moved to New York. We used to spend nearly all our time together.”

  This was true. Bruce had been there, too, in those early years of their marriage, when he and Eva were living in a rental on East Seventy-eighth Street, and he was a junior broker at a big Wall Street firm, and she and Min were at Mademoiselle. There was no Amalia then, just an old Russian woman who came once a week and carried the dog (they had only one at this point) under her arm like a purse while she vacuumed. Little in their life was planned. Eva might cook a spontaneous dinner for him and Min and whomever Min was dating at the time, or they might venture down to Chinatown for soup dumplings, or to a trendy West Village club where Min had only to give her name and they would be let past the crowd on the wrong side of the velvet rope. If one of her boyfriends was tagging along, she might talk about her childhood in Quincy, about the tobacco field that had once been the site of a great house that had been swept away by a hurricane, and how she and her sister, as children, had spent hours combing the field for relics—fragments of floral-patterned china, glass dolls’ eyes, rusted cast-iron pans … None of this lasted long, only until Bruce got the first of his several promotions, and he and Eva moved to the first of their several bigger apartments, and Eva quit her job and began the gradual process by which she had folded elegantly into herself, becoming the origami rose around which Min now buzzed and hovered. Their other friends, he supposed, took it for granted that Min’s devotion to Eva was mostly a function of the Lindquists’ wealth—of the trips to Europe on which Eva took her, and the dinners at nice restaurants to which Bruce treated her, and the weekends in the country, none of which she could have afforded on her own. And yet Bruce knew that there was more to it than that. Few votaries are not masochists, nor can most idols resist the impulse to test the constancy of their flock. Whatever it was that Eva and Min satisfied in each other, money was only its most outward aspect.

  In the meantime, the actual purchase of the apartment was proving to be a great nuisance. Early on, Rita had warned Bruce to expect complications, just as Kathy’s doctor had warned her to expect side effects. What she hadn’t warned him of was how bizarre, how unlike anything he had previously dealt with, these complications would be.

  “I’ve just been talking to Maria Luisa,” she told him one afternoon in February—Maria Luisa was her Italian counterpart—“and I’m afraid there’s a problem with the kitchen.”

  “What kind of a problem?”

  “Not to put too fine a point on it, it isn’t legal. Or at least as far as we can tell it isn’t legal, because there aren’t any permits on file.”

  “You mean Signora Foot-and-Mouth just put the kitchen in?”

  “So it seems. When Maria Luisa told me, she didn’t sound especially worried. Quite the contrary. From what I gather, this sort of thing happens all the time in Italy.”

  To his own surprise, the news about the kitchen put some wind in Bruce’s sails. Indeed, so avid was he to share it with Eva that after work he practically ran home. His breath was still choppy as he took off his coat and strode into the living room, the dogs at his heels.

  “Are you all right?” Eva asked.

  She was sitting on the sofa with Min, drinking tea.

  “I’m fine,” he said, still huffing. “I’ve just been talking to Rita … Hold on.” He poured out—and drank—a tumbler of water. “OK, so this afternoon Rita called me, and it seems there’s an issue …”

  “Do you mean the business with the kitchen?” Min said. “We already know about that.”

  “Ursula sent me an email,” Eva said.

  “Oh, I see,” Bruce said. “And what did she say?”

  “Well, obviously, that she’s absolutely furious with the contractor.”

  “What contractor?”

  “The one who put in the kitchen. Didn’t Rita tell you?”

  “The contractor lied to her,” Min said. “When she hired him, he told her he’d take care of all the permits, that she didn’t have to worry about any of it. She only found out yesterday.”

  “Hold on a second, how could she only find out yesterday? It’s her kitchen. If the permits weren’t pulled, she couldn’t not have known—”

  “Poor thing, her head is in the clouds,” Min said. “Anyway, it shouldn’t matter, should it, since we’ll be putting in a new kitchen?”

  At this Eva laughed. “Whose head is in the clouds now? You know perfectly well that before we can put the new kitchen in, we have to get the old one sorted out. Penalties will have to be assessed, fines paid.”

  Where had Eva learned this? Rita had said nothing about fines.

  “The only question is who should pay them. Ursula’s feeling, obviously, is that it should be the contractor, since he’s the one who was responsible.”

  “Oh, yes, of course it should be the contractor,” Min said.

  “The trouble is, this was all years and years ago. She didn’t save any of the paperwork. She doesn’t even know if the contractor’s still in business. Or alive. And even if he is, he might refuse to pay, in which case she’ll have to sue him.” Eva finished off her tea. “Anyway, it’s nothing to worry about. Just a hiccup. I’m sure Rita can sort it out.”

  A hiccup! “I’m afraid it’s not quite as simple as that,” Bruce said.

  “What? Why not?” Min said.

  “Well, this is Italy. In Italy these things can take time a long time. The closing may have to be postponed.”

  Bruce didn’t look at Eva as he said this, but rather at Min, whose expression assured him he had hit his intended target.

  “Postponed! For how long?”

  “For however long it takes them to work things out—Signora Foot-and-Mouth and her contractor.”

  “But Eva just told you, she doesn’t even know if the contractor’s still alive.”

  “That’s her problem.”

  “God, Bruce, do you have to be so callous?” Eva said.

  “What’s callous? I mean, if it isn’t her problem, whose problem is it? Certainly not ours.”

  “It is ours, if it jeopardizes the closing,” Min said.

  “We can’t control that.”

  “Oh, but we can,” Eva said. “We just have to pay it ourselves—the penalty or bribe or whatever.”

  “Bribe?”

  “Call it what you like, the point is, if there’s to be a timely resolution, someone’s got to be paid something, and … well, Ursula can’t. The fact of the matter is, she’s broke. Otherwise she wouldn’t be selling the apartment in the first place. That’s the real reason she’s putting the blame on the contractor. To save face.” Eva wiped at her eyes with a tissue. “I didn’t want to say any of that, but you left me no choice.”

  “Why did you use the word bribe just now?”

  “It’s how things work in Italy. You know it as well as I do. Rita told us.”

  This was true. When buying property in Italy, Rita had warned them, a certain amount of bribery was par for the course.

  “Not that you’ll be liable,” she’d added, “since you won’t be paying any money directly to Ursula. It’ll all go through Maria Luisa.”

  That evening, as he was taking the dogs for their walk, Bruce once again ran into Alec and Sparky.
“We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” Alec said.

  Again they walked together. This time Alec led—north, then west, in the direction of the park, not the route Bruce usually took.

  “Well, I hear you’re buying an apartment in Venice,” Alec said.

  “So I’m told,” Bruce said.

  “And that I’m the reason you’re buying it. Or rather my noisy proximity.”

  “Don’t worry,” Bruce said. “If it hadn’t been you, she would have found another excuse.”

  “Too bad. I rather liked the idea that I could be responsible for someone doing something so impulsive and wild. So what’s really behind it, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “The election. She says she’s afraid.”

  “Afraid of what? I mean, does she honestly believe that any of this is going to affect her life, that on a day-to-day basis it’ll make even an iota of difference to her life?”

  “You’ll have to ask her.”

  “Afraid,” Alec repeated mockingly. “If you want my opinion, that’s the reason you liberals are doomed. You’re always afraid. Fear is your default program, only instead of just dealing with the things you’re afraid of, just getting rid of them, you try to domesticate them, like those lunatics on TV who keep hyenas or whatever as pets, and then, when the hyenas tear their faces off, insist it’s their own fault. I mean, there you are with your face torn off and your big worry is that the hyena might not give you a second chance. It’s your biggest fail, don’t you see? You turn your fear into guilt, you tell yourselves the only reason the hyena tore your face off is that you disenfranchised it or something, and that to make amends you have to be quote-unquote inclusive, you have to bring the hyena into the process, only it doesn’t work, it never works, all it leads to is making the hyena want to rip your face off all over again. Whereas the way we see it, there’s only one way to deal with hyenas, and that’s to keep them out, to lock them up or send them away until they get the message that if they don’t toe the line, that’s it. They’re toast. It’s why Trump won, I’m convinced—because the people who voted for him are sick of all that. After all these years they’ve reached the point where they’re more angry than scared, and they see him as the only guy in the room who has the balls to deal with this shit.”