Shelter in Place

by David Leavitt

  The intercom shrilled. “Amalia, can you see who it is?” Eva called.

  “It’s Mrs. Bleek,” Amalia said from the kitchen.

  “Oh, fine, have them send her up.”

  “Is that Sandra Bleek?” Min asked. “What’s she doing in the city? I thought she was staying at Grady’s place.”

  “She is, but she comes into town once a week or so. I told you we had plans tonight, didn’t I?”

  “You said you and Bruce were going out. Is it with Sandra? Why is she here so early?”

  “I asked her to come early. We’re having an early dinner, then going to a reading. A literary reading. It’s Lydia Davis.”

  Min, who didn’t know who Lydia Davis was, took advantage of the ringing doorbell to look her up on her phone. The photo that appeared on the screen was of a woman more or less her own age, with wide eyes and the uneasy smile of someone who doesn’t like having her picture taken. She was holding a cat.

  Min put the phone down as soon as she heard Sandra’s voice. “Sandra, dear, how lovely to see you,” she said.

  “Oh, hello,” Sandra said, kissing Min on the cheek. “Sorry, I know who you are, but I can’t remember your name. I’m terrible with names.”

  “This is Min Marable,” Eva said. “She’s the one I went to Venice with. She’s just come by to tell me that she wants to put the Venice apartment in Enfilade. She works for Enfilade.”

  “Oh, what a great idea.” Without being invited, Sandra sat at the table and picked out a macaron.

  “That was really lovely of you to bring those the other day,” Eva said. “So few people bother anymore with thoughtful little gifts.”

  “Well, I just happened to be passing Ladurée and I thought, why not? ‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may’ and all that. Min, would you care for one?”

  “If you insist.”

  “How many of those have you had?” Eva said.

  Min, who was just positioning the macaron between her teeth, took it out of her mouth. “Three, I think.”

  “Seven.”

  Smiling, Min put the macaron on a saucer.

  “So, any news about the garden?” Sandra asked.

  Min gave Eva a look of surprise—had she confided in Sandra about the garden and not her?—that Eva met without hesitation. “Yes, as a matter of fact, I just heard from Ursula, and the news is good. She’s ready to sell.”

  “Hooray!”

  “But only on the condition that Eva grant her usufruct to it,” Min said.

  “Well, that’s a twist,” Sandra said. “You know, before you sign anything, you probably ought to check with a lawyer on this. The ramifications of usufruct might be different in Italy.”

  “Have you spent much time in Italy?” Min asked.

  “For a few summers, my husband and I—my ex-husband, I should say—rented a place in Todi. Do you know Todi? It’s this absolutely lovely Umbrian hill town, only it’s crawling with Americans. Not tourists—Americans who live there. Most are artists. Beverly Pepper was the first to stake a claim, so they call it Beverly Hills.”

  “I know Todi,” Min said. “When I was at Town & Country—”

  “Bruce should be here any minute,” Eva said, looking at the ormolu clock on the mantel. “He’s leaving work early so we can have time to eat something before the reading. It’s in Brooklyn. We’ll have to drive, and the traffic might be heavy.”

  “Will Aaron and Rachel be at dinner?” Sandra asked.

  “No, they’re meeting us at the bookstore.”

  Now was the perfect opportunity for Eva to ask Min to join them, but either she chose not to take it or the sound of Bruce’s keys in the door distracted her. As was their habit, the dogs scrambled to greet him. “Hello, my lovelies,” he said. “Now, Caspar, I hope you’ve been leaving that sofa alone”—he stepped into the living room—“and I see you haven’t. All that effort on Amalia’s part! Oh, hello, Sandra,” he added, kissing her on both cheeks. “And Min too.” He hugged her but gave her only one kiss on one cheek. “Gosh, I feel as if I haven’t see you in ages. How are you?”

  “Well, I’m fine. Just so excited about Eva’s news.”

  “What news?”

  Min looked at Eva, who was frowning. “Sorry, wasn’t I supposed …”

  “Not supposed to what?”

  “I was going to tell you later,” Eva said to Bruce. “Ursula’s just written to say she wants to sell us the garden.”

  “Garden? What garden?”

  “The one in Venice. The one that belongs to the apartment.”

  “I didn’t know that was in the offing.”

  “It only came up as a possibility the other day. We were exchanging texts, Ursula and I, and she said that she might have to sell the garden, because now, in addition to everything else, the government is after her for back taxes.”

  “Such a fabulous opportunity!” Min said. “To have the flat and the garden! It’s the icing on the cake.”

  “Her only condition is that she wants usufruct to it,” Sandra said. “Do you know what usufruct means, Bruce?”

  “I do, as a matter of fact. It means she’ll sell it to us as long as we let her keep it.”

  “Those are your words, not hers,” Eva said.

  “Here’s an interesting example of the use of usufruct,” Min said, looking again at her phone. “ ‘The earth belongs in usufruct to the living.’ Anyone care to guess who said that?”

  No one did.

  “OK, well, when I first read it, I assumed it must be someone French—Montaigne, maybe, or Rousseau—but it’s not. It’s Thomas Jefferson.”

  “And how much is Signora Foot-and-Mouth asking for this garden she intends to keep?”

  “We haven’t gotten to that stage.”

  “If you ask me, it would a lot simpler if she were to give us usufruct to it rather than the other way round.”

  “A garden in Venice,” Sandra said. “It’s like something out of a Merchant Ivory movie.”

  “It’s wildly overgrown,” Eva said. “Hasn’t been cared for properly for years. Still, there are some marvelous roses—really old varieties—as well as a superb magnolia, and a lemon tree, and three or four orange trees. Ornamental orange trees. You can’t actually eat the oranges.”

  “Reading between the lines, I’d say that Ursula wants you to rescue the garden but she’s too proud to say so,” Min said. “What a pity Jake doesn’t do gardens.”

  “Doesn’t he?” Sandra asked.

  “No, he says he only understands interiors,” Eva said. “For the house in Connecticut, he had to find us a landscape architect.”

  “Then he can find you one in Venice,” Min said.

  “So he’s agreed to take on the job?” Sandra said.

  “Not yet,” Bruce said.

  “Really. I wonder what’s holding him back.”

  “Jake’s at a funny moment in his life,” Min said. “Not to put too fine a point on it, he’s in his fifties and he’s still single. He’s approaching his sell-by date and he knows it.”

  “So are you,” Eva said.

  “It’s different for women. Gay men have a shorter shelf life, I guess you could say.”

  “That certainly hasn’t been Grady’s experience,” Sandra said. “Quite the contrary, he’s, what, sixty-two? And he’s having to beat them off with a stick. Boys in their twenties, looking for Daddy.”

  Min glanced at Eva. Had Sandra touched the third rail? She hoped so.

  “All that I mean,” Min said, “is that lately Jake seems to have lost his sense of purpose, his sense of … well, why he’s doing what he’s doing. Which is why what we’ve got to do is persuade him that this project is exactly what he needs in order to reboot. My advice, Eva, is that you put on the thumbscrews. Stop being so patient with him. Remind him, as politely as possible, that there are plenty of other pebbles on the beach.”

  “What is this, interior decoration tough love?”

  “For instance, you could tell him that if
he doesn’t make up his mind by a certain date, you’ll have to ask someone else. Say, Alison Pritchard.”

  “But I don’t want Alison Pritchard. And even if I do, as you say, put on the thumbscrews, who’s to say he won’t tell me I’m absolutely right, I should hire a different decorator, and then where will I be?”

  “Forgive me if I’m sticking my nose into things I don’t understand,” Sandra said, “but would it really be such a mistake to hire Alison Pritchard? From what I gather, she’s done a lot of stuff in Italy.”

  “I don’t ever want to work with anyone but Jake. He understands me. It’s the sort of relationship that takes years to establish. To have to start that all over again, to have to try to build up a relationship like that all over again, from scratch—it doesn’t bear thinking about.”

  “You sound as if you’re describing a marriage.”

  “It is, in a sense. A sort of marriage. And for me—not for everyone, I realize, but for me—one marriage is enough for a lifetime. If Bruce died, I’d never marry again.”

  “What do you think of that, Bruce?” Sandra said.

  There was no answer.

  “Bruce?” Min called.

  “Where are the dogs?” Sandra said.

  “Oh, I guess he’s taken them for a walk,” Eva said.

  Very briskly she began gathering up the tea things.

  18

  The bookstore where the reading took place was in Fort Greene. “I’m so excited,” Sandra said as she and Bruce and Eva neared the entrance. “Lydia Davis has been such a huge influence on me … Oh, but look how crowded it is! Are we late?”

  “It’s five to seven,” Bruce said.

  “I had no idea she was such a popular writer,” Eva said.

  Inside the bookstore, six or seven rows of folding chairs had been set up in front of a podium. All of these were occupied or had coats or bags draped over them, which made them look like improvised scarecrows. The audience consisted mostly of thin, muscular young men in skinny jeans and thin, muscular young women in floral-print dresses. Those who had not found places stood pressed up against the bookshelves that lined the walls.

  “I thought Aaron and Rachel were supposed to save us seats,” Eva said, scanning the room.

  “Aaron just texted me,” Sandra said. “He says they’re in the back, in the travel section. They can see us, but we can’t see them.”

  “Oh, yes, there they are,” Bruce said. “They’re waving.”

  He led Eva and Sandra through the crowd as if clearing a path through jungle. “I’m so sorry about this,” Rachel said when they arrived. “We got here half an hour early, but it was already packed.”

  “Just to reach the travel guides, you need a travel guide,” Aaron said.

  “No need to apologize,” Eva said, gazing at the crowd. “I must say, it does my heart good to see so many young people. I didn’t think young people read anymore.”

  “Oh, they read,” Aaron said. “The problem is what they read. Shit like this.”

  He held up a copy of Lydia Davis’s Collected Stories.

  “Aaron, will you lower your voice?” Rachel said. “We all know you’re not Lydia Davis’s biggest fan. There’s no need to shout it to the rafters.”

  “You don’t like Lydia Davis?” Sandra said.

  “I respect Lydia Davis,” Aaron said. “I just don’t understand why people think she’s such a big deal. I mean, yes, fine, she was married to Paul Auster, yes, she got a MacArthur and did a not very good translation of Madame Bovary. And yet when it comes to her actual writing, to these so-called stories of hers—is there really any there there? Most of them are, like, two sentences long.”

  “I thought you appreciated concision.”

  “Concision, yes. But a page that’s almost all white space?” Again he held up the Collected Stories. “As far as I’m concerned, all this is is a waste of trees.”

  “Honestly, Aaron, there are times when you can just be so fucking male,” Rachel said. “I mean, not just going off on a tirade against Lydia Davis—Lydia Davis, of all people—but starting it off by saying that she used to be married to Paul Auster. As if that has anything to do with anything, as if all that matters for a woman writer is who she’s married to.”

  “Used to be married to,” Sandra corrected.

  “I agree with you one hundred percent,” said one of the thin, muscular young women in floral-print dresses. “Especially when you consider how much, in recent years, she’s eclipsed him.”

  “Susanna’s right,” said another young woman, this one with flat black hair that fell down her back in the manner of Morticia Addams. “If anything, we should be saying that he used to be married to her.”

  “Believe me, I’m not defending Paul Auster,” Aaron said. “As a matter of fact, I consider Paul Auster the most overrated American writer in the world, even more overrated than … well, Lydia Davis. So far as I’m concerned, everything that’s wrong with contemporary French culture can be summed up in Paul Auster.”

  “Is Paul Auster French?” the black-haired woman asked. “I thought he was from Newark.”

  “He is from Newark,” Rachel said. “What Aaron’s alluding to is the fact that he’s a god in France.”

  “In France he sells more books than Zola and Hugo combined,” Aaron said.

  “So?”

  “I’m just stating a fact. Anyway, Rachel, don’t you think you should introduce your new find to your old friends?”

  “Oh, sorry. Eva, Sandra, Bruce, this is Susanna Varela. She’s the marvelous young author I’ve just signed.”

  “How exciting,” Sandra said, grasping Susanna’s hand. “Is this your first book?”

  “My first in English.”

  “Susanna is Brazilian, but now she writes in English,” Rachel said.

  “And this is my friend Katy,” Susanna said.

  “I’ve been meaning to say, I love your dress,” Eva said to Katy. “Derek Lam, isn’t it?”

  “Yes!” Katy said. “I’m so glad, you’re the first person who’s noticed. I bought it at Beacon’s Closet for $29.95.”

  “Katy’s lucky,” Susanna said. “She’s got a couture body. Ninety percent of what’s out there fits her like a glove.”

  “If only that were true,” Katy said.

  “Whereas zero percent of what’s out there fits me like a glove,” Rachel said.

  “Are you waiting for someone to disagree?” Aaron said.

  Taking Susanna by the arm, Sandra said, “Now tell me about your book. What is it? Is it a novel? What’s it about?”

  “It’s a collection of stories.”

  “Oh, that’s great. What are they like? Can I read some? I’d love to read some.”

  “She’s got two coming out this spring,” Rachel said, “one in Granta and one in A Public Space. Everyone at the office is wildly excited about it. Even the sales reps. Especially the sales reps.”

  “My stories are about my life,” Susanna said to Sandra. “I’m not going to lie and say they’re made up, the way so many writers do. They’re set mostly in Bahia, in the house I grew up in. The mother is my mother. The brothers are my brothers. The boyfriends were my boyfriends.”

  “And yet they’re written in the most perfectly idiomatic English,” Rachel said. “It’s like she’s channeling Salinger.”

  “Please, not Salinger.”

  “Well, who would you rather it be?” Aaron asked.

  “Grace Paley. Joy Williams. Mary Robison.”

  “What I love about Susanna’s work is the way she uses this highly American vernacular to describe a completely non-American world,” Rachel said. “It creates this extraordinary dissonance, this friction.”

  “I know you must get sick of this question, but what made you decide to write in English?” Sandra asked.

  “I never decided to. Five years ago I married an American and moved to New York. We had a child. I was leading an American life, in American English, so it just made sense to write
in English.”

  “You make it sound so easy. Me, for instance, I speak French, but I could never write in French.”

  “Well, but you aren’t married to a Frenchman, are you?” Aaron said. “It’s one thing to speak a language, another to share a bed with it.”

  “And yet you were married to a Spaniard,” Eva said to Sandra. “Couldn’t you write in Spanish?”

  “Rico’s Colombian, actually—and he came to the States when he was five. He only speaks Spanish with his mother.”

  “What about you, Katy?” Bruce said. “Are you a writer, too?”

  “Me?” Katy said. “God, no. I work for Speedo.”

  “As a model?”

  “That’s flattering, but no, I’m in the marketing department.”

  “Her job is just how Katy earns her living,” Susanna said. “Her real work is painting and collage.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “Yes, it is. She’s a phenomenal artist, she just doesn’t like to talk about it.”

  Aaron was about to say more when the lights dimmed. A bookstore employee, a youth with disorderly red hair and the sort of beard that might just have been forgetting to shave, welcomed the audience and introduced the introducer, whose name Bruce didn’t catch. From a seat in the front row, a frail woman with white hair took to the podium. She was carrying an enormous handbag through which she rummaged for a full minute before finally extracting a pair of reading glasses and a sheet of densely filled notebook paper from which she began to read aloud in a voice so thin and mumbling it was nearly impossible to make out what she was saying.

  “Speak up!” Aaron shouted in his announcer’s voice.

  Rachel elbowed him. The woman looked flustered. “What?” she said. “What’s the matter?”

  “We can’t hear you!”

  A murmur moved through the crowd to the effect that the mic needed adjusting, at which point the youth with the red hair returned and fiddled with the sound equipment.

  “Try it now,” he said to the woman.

  “Hello?” she said into the mic.

  “You have to lower it, it’s too high,” Aaron yelled.

  “What?”

  “Allow me,” the youth said, adjusting the mic so that it was at the level of her mouth.