Shelter in Place

by David Leavitt

  “I wouldn’t put it that way exactly,” Bruce said. “Anyway, let me ask you another question—or maybe it’s the same question put a different way. What’s stopping you from saying yes?”

  “The same thing that’s stopping me from saying no. Fear.”

  “Of what? Eva? Venice?”

  “More Venice.”

  “You lived there once, didn’t you?”

  “Years ago, when I was in my twenties. And so naturally I have certain feelings about the place.”

  “It seems that everyone has feelings about the place except me. Then again, we’ve only been twice. Aside from the canals and there being no cars, it didn’t seem very different from any other European city—expensive restaurants, cheesy gift shops, badly lit museums.”

  “For me it isn’t Venice itself. It was that some things happened to me there. Bad things. Of course, they didn’t have to happen there. They just happened to happen there.”

  “And you haven’t been back since?”

  He shook his head. “I’m sorry if I’m coming across as evasive. I’m not in the habit of saying how I feel about things. I’m told Eva appreciates that about me. And now I have a question for you.”

  “Shoot.”

  “You want me to say it’s a sure thing, my decorating the apartment. Well, is it a sure thing you’re buying it?”

  “The question that underlies all other questions. At this point, I’d say chances are the answer will be yes. Mind you, if you’d asked me earlier in the week, I’d have said chances were the answer would be no. For instance, I trust you’ve heard about the garden?”

  “Min mentioned it.”

  “You don’t do gardens, do you?”

  “No, I’m strictly an interiors guy.”

  “A pity. Anyway, this garden … for a while there, it looked like it might be a deal-breaker. And not just the fact of the garden, or the cost of the garden, but the way Eva told me about it. Or didn’t tell me. Instead she told Min and Min blurted it out.”

  “No surprise there.”

  “Only this time it really brought us to the brink. At least that’s how it felt to me. Like a reckoning. Now I think, I really think, that if I hadn’t pulled us back, she’d have let us go over the cliff. She’d have let us crash.”

  “What do you want me to say to her? I mean, which answer would make your life easier?”

  “One answer would make it easier in one way. The other would make it easier in another way.”

  Almost without realizing it, they had circled back to the house. “It’s the dogs,” Bruce said. “Something I appreciate about the dogs—they have their own priorities. Right now they’re hungry.”

  “And we’re cold,” Jake said.

  “Then let appetite be our guide.”

  21

  “So then he said, ‘The way I see it, the only moral justification for eating meat is if you kill the animal yourself.’ To which Denise replied, ‘Honey, find me the perfect leopard skin and I’ll eat the leopard.’ ”

  Calvin waited for Eva to laugh. He was standing in front of her behemoth six-burner stove, stirring flour into the white sauce for the macaroni and cheese with lobster he was making for dinner. The Connecticut kitchen was a good five times the size of the Park Avenue kitchen, with room for a Tuscan refectory table, an early American hutch, and a sofa, slipcovered in a blue cotton check, on which Eva was at present lounging, looking through the March issue of Enfilade.

  “Of course, I can’t vouch for the truth of that story,” Calvin said. “It was one of the cater waiters who told me. I was in the kitchen at the time.”

  “I didn’t know you knew Clydie and Denise,” Eva said.

  “I didn’t know you did.”

  “Well, I don’t—I mean, I never met Denise, and Clydie I only know because her country place is just a few miles down the road. Min knows her better.”

  “She must be very old. At least as old as Denise was when she uttered that famous line about the leopard skin.”

  “Does the house feel strange to you today?” Eva asked, glancing at the French doors and noting that Beatie had neglected to wipe away the nose marks that the dogs had left on the glass.

  “Only because it’s empty,” Calvin said. “Everyone’s out except Aaron, who’s fallen asleep in front of the fire. Listen, you can hear him snoring.”

  “That snore. I wonder how Rachel stands it.”

  “Dieter was an incredibly loud snorer. When he left me, I told myself not having to listen to him snore anymore was the silver lining, but then I found that I missed his snoring. I couldn’t sleep without his snoring. In the end I had to buy a white noise machine.”

  “I’ve never thought of snoring as white noise. It’s more gray noise. Or smog-colored noise.”

  Calvin considered asking Eva why she didn’t just say “black noise,” then, thinking the better of it, whisked sherry into his white sauce as Eva got up and pressed her own nose against the glass. Where had they all gone? she wondered. What were they doing? As a rule, she imposed no restrictions on her weekend guests other than that they show up for meals. And yet for so many of them to be away at once, and on such a cold afternoon, seemed pointed, as if she were being deliberately left out of something.

  “It gets dark so early these days,” she said. “Funny to think that if this were July, we’d be out by the pool.”

  “Speaking for myself, I can’t stand the sun,” Calvin said. “If it were up to me, from Memorial Day to Labor Day I’d never leave my apartment. My air conditioner’s a Maserati. Of course, since Dieter moved out, it’s been harder. I get lonely. I eat too much.”

  This came as no surprise to Eva. Even when Calvin was younger, and a regular fixture in her kitchen, he had been on the heavy side. Now he was forty, and must have weighed 250 pounds. Although she would never have been so gauche as to say so, his weight gain had been the main reason why, though far more gradually and kindly than was the case with Matt, she had eased him out of the central role he had once played in her life. Obesity repulsed her—and not just morbid obesity. Even from the sight of Bruce’s widening stomach, when he took his shirt off, even from her own naked body, when she caught a glimpse of it in the bathroom mirror, she had to avert her eyes. Which was to say nothing of Min’s recent ballooning.

  Ashamed by the unkindness of her thoughts, she got up, strode over to Calvin, and put her hands on his shoulders. “Dearest Cal, you’re so good to do this,” she said. “And on such short notice.”

  “It was serendipity. Literally five minutes before you called, I had a cancellation—a fiftieth wedding anniversary.”

  “What happened?”

  “The wife had a stroke.”

  “To think that you’ve come so far since I met you, that you’re so in demand!”

  “Well, there are trade-offs. For instance, I don’t get to work for private clients as much as I used to. Now it’s mostly corporate stuff—fundraisers, retirement banquets.”

  “I’m glad it’s you tonight. With Clydie, you have to be so careful. It might have been too much for someone with less experience.”

  “You mean Matt?”

  “You know Matt? How?”

  “How does anyone know anyone? New York is a village.”

  Eva let out a theatrical sigh, returned to the sofa, and pulled her legs up to her chest. “Oh, Cal, I’m such a coward. Of course I should have said something to him, made a clean break, but you see, I just couldn’t, because … Oh, but I’d rather not go into it. Let’s just say there are things I can tolerate and things I can’t, and one of the things I can’t is want of tact.”

  “So it wasn’t his cooking?”

  “Well, there was that too. Once he forgot to put baking powder in a batch of scones. Oh, and another time he made some sorrel soup that was inedible.”

  “Sorrel soup is always inedible. It’s one of those things everyone pretends to like and no one does.”

  With a creak of hinges, the door from the dinin
g room swung open and Aaron stumbled in. “What time is it?” he asked, yawning.

  “That door,” Eva said.

  “Three twenty,” Calvin said.

  “Wow. I fell asleep without realizing it. Oh, I meant to ask—why are all the curtains pinned up?”

  “To keep the dogs from attacking them. Whenever they hear another dog barking, they run to the window and have a go at the curtains. In the end we decided it was easier to pin them up than to have to keep darning the tears.”

  “Is it also for the dogs that you’ve got that bedsheet laid over the rug in the upstairs hall?” Calvin asked.

  “What? I told Beatie to take that up before the weekend. Anyway, yes, you see, Ralph has a tendency—there’s no polite way to say this—to scooch his rear end on that rug, and it’s such a nightmare getting the stains out.”

  “With all the provisions you have to take, the question that naturally comes to mind is why you have dogs in the first place,” Aaron said.

  “Some things matter more than decor,” Eva said.

  “I suppose I understand that,” Aaron said. “I mean, it’s not as if Mumbles hasn’t wreaked havoc in his time. Especially before we had him neutered. The last straw was when he sprayed the bed. We had to throw out the mattress.”

  “Cal was just saying that no one likes sorrel soup,” Eva said, in the tone of one eager to change the subject. “That people only pretend to like sorrel soup. What’s your view on sorrel soup, Aaron?”

  “Having never tasted it, I can’t offer one, though I will note that among people who identify themselves as liberals, it’s common to pretend to like things they don’t because they think they’re supposed to.”

  “The first time I took Dieter to Memphis, we went to this ribs place,” Calvin said. “He wasn’t sure whether to have the beef ribs or the pork ribs, so he asked the waitress which she recommended. ‘Let me put it this way,’ she said. ‘The beef ribs are good for you, but the pork ribs are good.’ ”

  Aaron let out a laugh like a car backfiring. “Oh, that’s great! Can I steal that line? It sums it up so perfectly.”

  “What?”

  “Well, the fundamental difference—between plaisir and jouissance, the fraudulently beneficent and the authentically disturbing, Barbara Kingsolver and—I don’t know—Beckett, or Proust.”

  “What’s wrong with Barbara Kingsolver?” Eva asked.

  “She is the embodiment of liberal piety at its most middlebrow and tendentious. Her novels are the beef ribs of fiction.”

  “Just to be clear, I don’t actually have anything against beef ribs,” Calvin said. “As a matter of fact, I love beef ribs.”

  “OK, then, they’re the sorrel soup of fiction.”

  “I don’t think that’s fair,” Eva said.

  “To Barbara Kingsolver or to sorrel soup?”

  “To either.”

  “Now, come on, Eva, tell us the truth. Have you actually ever read Barbara Kingsolver?”

  “Have you?”

  “I’ve dipped in. To paraphrase Wilde, you don’t have to drink the whole cask to know the vintage.”

  “Then you’re in no more of a position to dismiss her than I am.”

  “OK, fine, choose someone else. There are plenty who fit the bill. The point is, having some warm and fuzzy impulse to make the world a better place isn’t enough. It doesn’t make you an artist. What’s been lost is any appreciation of virtuosity, of flair. You don’t find it so much in the visual arts or the performing arts, because there you actually have to learn how to do something in order to do it. Whereas with writing, there’s this notion that anyone can do it, that if you can write a tweet, you can write a novel.”

  “So you’re saying that all novels that aspire to do good are by definition bad?”

  “I suppose I am saying that, yes. To my mind, the two ambitions are antithetical.”

  Eva laughed. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this. I mean, here we are, in a moment of national crisis, global crisis, with democracy about to fly off its hinges, and you’re badmouthing a writer for having a conscience? No, don’t interrupt me. I’m going to have my say. I’m sick of this line you literary people take that writers who care about social justice are by definition boring do-gooders, and the only ones who count are the ones who write whole books without ever using the letter e, or where the main character’s grandmother is a zombie, or someone’s going up an escalator for a thousand pages. You mentioned Proust. Well, what about Zola? Today everyone pooh-poohs Zola, but he published J’Accuse, for God’s sake. In the middle of the Dreyfus Affair, he put his life on the line, went on trial, had to go into exile.”

  “Excuse me, but Zola was no Proust. And Kingsolver is no Zola.”

  “Let’s not forget she endowed that prize.”

  “Yes, for quote-unquote socially engaged fiction.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Can you name me a single book that’s won it? And in the meantime she’s living on a farm raising Icelandic sheep.”

  “You certainly know a lot about her, considering how much you claim to despise her.”

  “And you know nothing about her, and yet you’re defending her.”

  “I wonder why Icelandic sheep,” Calvin said.

  “What’s this about sheep?” Bruce asked, walking through the French doors with Jake and the dogs, who immediately started barking.

  “Sheep,” Bruce repeated.

  Their barking intensified.

  “Wow, they know the word sheep?” Calvin asked.

  “It’s one of their sixty words. They’ve learned it from the drive up here, which takes us right past a sheep farm.”

  “What other words do they know?”

  “Oh, let’s see. I’d better spell them out instead of saying them, otherwise we’ll have a riot. Well. D-I-N-N—”

  “Why are you wearing that silly hat?” Eva said.

  “E-R. This? I found it in the field while we were walking the dogs and I just … put it on. What do you think? Does it suit me?”

  “It’s you,” Aaron said.

  “You might have told me you were taking the dogs out.”

  “I did. T-R-E-A—”

  “No, you didn’t. Again.”

  “T-S-I-E.”

  “Sound carries strangely in old houses,” Calvin said. “Someone says something from the next room and you don’t hear it. And yet you can hear perfectly what someone else is saying on the third floor.”

  “Well, now that you’re back, maybe you can tell me what’s happened to the girls.”

  “Oh, they’re outside, in that copse of maples,” Jake said.

  “What are they doing there?”

  “Double, double, toil and trouble,” Bruce said, cackling and putting his hands on his wife’s shoulders. Then, when she didn’t laugh: “No, in all seriousness, they’re just standing in a huddle, gossiping.”

  “But they could have done that in the house. Why did they go outside?”

  “Min said something about wanting to breathe the clean and frosty air,” Jake said.

  “She must be a fresh-air enthusiast,” Bruce said. “Remember, darling, when you had to fill out that roommate form at Smith? Wasn’t that one of the categories?”

  “A pity you and I weren’t asked to fill out that form before we got married,” Eva said.

  “My wife is referring to one of our few points of conjugal disharmony,” Bruce said. “Whereas I’ll put up with noise for the sake of a breeze, Eva will put up with stuffiness for the sake of silence.”

  “Is it so strange that horns honking and trucks rattling keep me awake?”

  “And yet it was the same in our last apartment, where the bedroom faced the back. It’s the same here.”

  “Only people who haven’t lived in the country think it’s quiet. There are all sorts of noises in the country. Animals, birds. Insects.”

  “You should get a white noise machine,” Calvin said.

  “I’ve always
meant to ask, who was your roommate at Smith?” Jake said.

  “What, you mean Eva’s never told you about Melody Joy Greenblatt?” Bruce said. “And yes, that really was her name.”

  “That wasn’t her fault.”

  “I agree. It’s the parents I blame. When you call your child Melody Joy, you’re asking for trouble.”

  “Especially if your last name is Greenblatt,” Aaron said.

  “I never understood what you had against her,” Eva said. “She was very smart.”

  “Smart, yes. Game, no. The thing you have to understand”—Bruce turned to Jake and Aaron—“is that in those days, the Smith campus was like Fort Knox. Sneaking onto it at night was like crossing the Berlin Wall. Many was the time I took my life into my hands to get into Eva’s dorm room. And then when I got there, Melody Joy wouldn’t play ball. She wouldn’t leave.”

  “It was her room, too.”

  “Still, she could have gone downstairs for an hour or so. She never would, not even when I bribed her with chocolate.”

  “You took the wrong approach. You should have sweet-talked her. She had a crush on you.”

  “Are you kidding? It was you she had the crush on.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “As you have doubtless noticed, my wife is congenitally oblivious to the concupiscence of others. Especially when she’s the object of it.”

  “I’d hardly call Melody Joy concupiscent. She was too cerebral to be concupiscent.”

  “Any idea what became of her?”

  “I wish I knew. Every issue, I check the class notes in the alumnae magazine, but she’s never there. She doesn’t go to the reunions either.”

  “Maybe she changed her name,” Bruce said. “Didn’t she use to talk about changing her name?”

  “She joked about it. It was after we read that Flannery O’Connor story where the girl with the wooden leg changes her name from Joy to Hulga.”

  “She was going to change her name to Hulga?” Calvin said.

  “Of course not. It was a joke.”

  “Still, I’ll bet it happened in those years,” Bruce said. “I’ll bet more than a few girls changed their name to Hulga.”