Shelter in Place

by David Leavitt

“Look, I just found her,” Aaron said, holding up his phone. “Dr. Melody Joy Greenblatt, professor of art history at Michigan State. Specializes in conceptual art. Oh, and here’s a coincidence. She’ll be in Venice this summer—something to do with the Biennale. Mundo piccolo.”

  “Mondo piccolo. Clearly you never studied Italian.”

  “Or Spanish,” Calvin said.

  The door opened again and Sandra peered in. “I hope I’m not interrupting,” she said.

  “That door,” Eva said. “For weeks I’ve been asking Beatie to put some WD-40 on the hinges.”

  “Beatie has a lot on her plate right now,” Bruce said. “Her son just got out of prison.”

  “She hasn’t cleaned the windows, either. Or taken up the sheet over that rug.”

  “Where’s your social justice agenda now?” Aaron said. “Oh, and while we’re on the subject, Sandra, which do you prefer, beef ribs or pork ribs?”

  “What?”

  “And please bear in mind that your entire future as a writer depends on the answer.”

  “Really? Well, I haven’t really thought about it. The fact is, I don’t eat that much red meat.”

  Aaron let out another torrential laugh, at which Sandra blushed. “Oh, so this is another joke at my expense? It seems to be the theme of the day.”

  “What can I say? You’re an easy target.”

  “And Bruce wearing that hat. Is that a different joke or part of the same one?”

  “Why is everyone so worked up about my wearing this hat?”

  “Tell me, Sandra, are you by any chance a youngest child?” Jake asked.

  “In my case that’s a complicated question,” Sandra said. “By my mother, yes. But then, after she died, my father married again and had three more kids. I was ten at the time. I always felt like the hinge between the two families.”

  “That could be a title,” Aaron said. “The Hinge.”

  “Where are Rachel and Min?” Eva asked.

  “They’ve gone up to their rooms to rest. We came in through the back porch, and now I’m heading back to Grady’s to change for dinner. In fact, that’s why I popped in—to tell you I just got a text from him. He and Cody are on their way home from the airport—he’s been off on one of his South Pacific cruises—so I asked them to join us for dinner. I hope that’s OK.”

  “Who’s Cody?”

  “Grady’s new boyfriend. They met on the cruise.”

  “Well, I’m not sure,” Eva said. “I mean, Calvin’s only making enough food for the nine of us.”

  “Don’t worry, I always plan for such contingencies,” Calvin said.

  “In that case, fine,” Eva said, not bothering to hide her annoyance, which Sandra either failed to pick up on or chose to ignore.

  After she left, Eva got up and paced. “Of all the nerve,” she said. “I mean, whose house does she think this is? You don’t invite people to other people’s dinner parties. You just don’t.”

  “But darling, it’s only Grady,” Bruce said.

  “That’s beside the point.”

  “How? He’s our neighbor and our old friend, on top of which Sandra’s his cousin and houseguest.”

  “At this point I’d hardly call her his houseguest, considering she’s been living there for months and months.”

  “That’s my point. If it wasn’t for Grady, we’d never have met her. Plus he’ll have just gotten off a long flight.”

  “Then he’ll be too tired to come to dinner.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe he’ll be starving. And it’s not as if he hasn’t been to dinner here a hundred times before. It’s the neighborly thing to do.”

  “I know that. Of course I know that, and of course I would have said yes if she’d asked me. But she didn’t ask me. She told me. And then there’s this new boyfriend, about whom we know nothing. Zero. Do you know him, Calvin?”

  “Afraid not.”

  “I thought you knew everybody.”

  “He must be from a different part of the village.”

  Min was the next to come in. “What’s all the shouting?” she said. “I could hear it all the way from the third floor.”

  “Oh, that door hinge!” Eva said. “It’s driving me nuts. And with Clydie coming …”

  “Relax, I’ll put some WD-40 on it myself,” Bruce said.

  “I thought you were resting,” Eva said to Min.

  “I was,” Min said, “only I heard shouting and wanted to make sure everything was all right.”

  “See what I mean about how sound travels in these houses?” Calvin said.

  “Everything’s fine,” Bruce said from the pantry. “Eva’s just a little upset because Sandra invited Grady and his boyfriend to dinner without asking her.”

  “What? How dare she!”

  “It’s not that I mind their coming. It’s that she took me off guard. I don’t like being taken off guard.”

  “Of course you don’t,” Min said, sitting next to Eva on the sofa and putting an arm around her. “Now, darling, I’m going to speak frankly. Of course, we all like Sandra—that goes without saying—but if we’re to be honest, shouldn’t we also admit that she can sometimes be a teeny bit presumptuous? A teeny bit, well, grand?”

  “She can’t help that. It’s how she was raised.”

  “Trust me, I know how she was raised, and her grandmother definitely did not raise her to invite strangers to other people’s dinner parties, much less to call up her acquaintances out of the blue and invite herself to stay the night.”

  “That was my fault,” Bruce said. “I’m the one who took the call.”

  “And how did you feel about that, Eva? Be honest.”

  “Well, I certainly would have appreciated a little more warning. Which isn’t to say I’m inhospitable.”

  “I can’t imagine anyone accusing you, of all people, of being inhospitable.”

  “Is it possible we don’t have any WD-40?” Bruce asked.

  “If you don’t mind, I think I’ll have a rest before dinner,” Jake said.

  “Oh, Jake, before you go, have you seen this?” Eva said, holding up the copy of Enfilade. “It’s the new issue. The room on the cover, it’s by Alison Pritchard. Didn’t she use to work for you and Pablo?”

  “She did, yes. And no, I haven’t seen it.”

  Eva handed him the magazine, the cover of which showed an expensively austere dining room furnished with a chunky table in anigre, Saarinen chairs with shiny pink leather cushions, and an Alvar Aalto ceiling lamp. On the Josef Frank sideboard, roses were arranged in an Edmund de Waal vase. One side of the room was glass, with a view of green-blue water, while the other was papered in a pale orange silk and hung with two Color Field paintings—Barnett Newman, Jake was pretty sure.

  FEMINI-MINIMALISM, the headline read. ALISON PRITCHARD REBOOTS THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY.

  “Well, what do you think?” Eva asked.

  “I like it,” Jake said. “It’s fresh.”

  “There’s that famous discretion again,” Min said.

  Turning the heat off under his sauce, Calvin came over to have a look. “Oh, I know that house,” he said. “It’s in the Salento. Some friends of mine rented it last summer.”

  “But I thought you never left your apartment in the summer.”

  “In this case I made an exception, because they’ve got fantastic air-conditioning. Funny, I don’t remember those paintings being there.”

  “Maybe they were borrowed for the shoot,” Aaron said.

  “They absolutely were not borrowed for the shoot,” Min said. “We never do that. The owners must have put them up after Cal left.”

  “What surprises me is that it’s so unlike the sort of thing you and Pablo do,” Eva said.

  “It’s true that Alison’s aesthetic is more minimalist,” Jake said.

  “Is that why she left?” Min said. “Or was she fired?”

  “Open to interpretation. The official line was that she and Pablo had quote-unquote creative differ
ences.”

  “But we don’t want the official line. We want the truth.”

  “Sometimes the official line is the truth.”

  “I notice Jake still hasn’t told us what he thinks of the room,” Bruce said, still from the pantry.

  “You’re right,” Jake said. “I was hoping to take advantage of the fact that the conversation was moving in other directions to avoid answering that question.”

  “A skill well worth cultivating,” Calvin said.

  “Although this time we’re not letting you get away with it,” Min said. “Well, come on.”

  Jake gave the cover a second look. “How best to put it?” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with it, but there’s nothing right with it.”

  “Another great line!” Aaron said. “May I steal it?”

  “It’s already stolen. I stole it from Pablo, who no doubt stole it from someone else.”

  “Min, you’re the editor,” Eva said. “In your professional opinion, how much of a difference does the cover of a magazine like Enfilade make to a decorator’s career?”

  “Oh, huge. It puts them on the map. Or keeps them on the map. I hope you’re listening to this, Jake.”

  “I’m hearing it.”

  “That’s not the same thing.”

  “You know, the more I think about it, the more I realize I never felt comfortable in that house,” Calvin said. “There was something sort of inhuman about it. Or anti-human. As if the rooms didn’t want people in them.”

  “In other words, the sort of place where you’d eat sorrel soup,” Aaron said.

  “It’s true that it’s not what you’d call a homey home,” Min said. “Or maybe that’s just me. Home is such a relative concept.”

  “Speaking for myself, home is where you sleep best,” Calvin said. “Me, I never sleep better than when I’m in my own bed.”

  “Really?” Aaron said. “That’s funny, because I never sleep worse than when I’m in my own bed, maybe because when I’m in my own bed, I’m always worrying about whether it’s time to change the sheets, or change the cat’s litter, or why aren’t the kids home yet, and that keeps me awake. Whereas here at Eva’s—I mean, the cat could be dead, the kids could be out all night, and I’d never know, so I sleep like a rock.”

  “And the sheets are always clean,” Min said.

  “And yet it’s not home,” Calvin said. “I mean, it’s not your home.”

  “I had hoped that after all these years you’d have come to think of this as your home away from home,” Eva said.

  “Oh, but we do,” Min said. “Of course we do.”

  “What does home even mean?” Jake said.

  The others looked at him. “I’d have thought you, of all of us, would be the best equipped to answer that question,” Eva said.

  “But that’s assuming that the people who are best at doing something are also the best at talking about it,” Aaron said.

  “Decorating I understand,” Jake said. “Curtains, fabrics, colors I understand. What I don’t understand is what people mean when they talk about home. I’m not sure I’ve ever understood that.”

  “Well, isn’t it obvious?” Min said, picking up the magazine and holding it before him, as if it embodied some idea she herself could not put into words. “Home is where you feel … at home.”

  “House and home,” Aaron said, taking the magazine from her. “A pet peeve of mine is the way people treat these words as synonyms.”

  “Aren’t they?” Bruce said.

  “No, they are not. A house is a physical thing. Home is a concept.”

  “Not always. On your way into the village, you may have noticed a billboard advertising Gene, Ray, Jim, and Pete’s Homes. And on it there’s a picture of an old lady, and above her head is a speech bubble that says, ‘Gene, Ray, Jim, and Pete got me a great deal on my home.’ ”

  “What is it, a real estate agency?”

  “No, they sell mobile homes. Trailers.”

  “Beatie lives in a trailer,” Eva said.

  “Which she almost certainly bought from Gene, Ray, Jim, and Pete. And which she almost certainly calls her home.”

  “Let’s not forget the old folks’ home,” Calvin said. “As in ‘It was a sad day when we had to put Grandma in the home.’ ”

  “I think these days people are more likely to say ‘retirement community.’ ”

  “Not where I grew up.”

  “Where did you grow up?” Jake asked.

  “In Byhalia, Mississippi, just across the state line from Memphis. We did have a house, at least. My sister lives in it now. It’s the tradition in our family that when one generation gets too old for the house, they move into a trailer on the property and the house is passed on to the next generation.”

  “I’m glad you said trailer,” Eva said.

  “When you think about it, does any other language have a word that’s quite the same as our home?” Min said. “The closest I can think of is French—chez moi, chez toi.”

  “As in ‘Chez moi is where the heart is’?” Aaron said.

  “Click your heels three times and say ‘There’s no place like chez moi,’ ” Calvin said.

  “Une chambre n’est past une maison,” Min sang. “Et une maison n’est pas un chez soi. Quand il n’y a personne …”

  “Why does this entire conversation seem to me so dire?” Aaron said.

  “Because none of us has answered Jake’s question,” Eva said. “None of us has said what we mean when we say we feel at home somewhere.”

  “It’s all right. I didn’t really expect an answer.”

  “Well, how about where you grew up?” Min said. “For instance, it’s been years since I lived in Quincy, and still, every time I go back, this feeling comes over me. A feeling of homecoming.”

  “It’s one thing if you felt you belonged where you grew up when you were growing up there,” Calvin said. “But what if you didn’t? What if, as a kid, all you did was count the days until you could get the hell out?”

  “Or you ended up where you did totally by chance?” Aaron said.

  “You can still come to feel you belong there,” Min said. “It may take time, but you can come to feel that way.”

  “I give up,” Bruce said, coming out of the pantry. “Clearly we don’t have any WD-40.”

  “Well,” Rachel said, stepping through the squeaky door, “and what are we … Oh my God, Bruce. Why are you wearing that?”

  “I found it outside, in the snow. Whose is it?”

  “It’s hers,” Aaron said.

  “Give it back,” Rachel said. “It looks ridiculous on you.”

  “I bow to your higher sense of fashion,” Bruce said, then took off the hat and returned it to Rachel, who stuffed it into her purse.

  “Thanks. Well, so what are we talking about?”

  “House and home,” Aaron said. “And being eaten out of them.”

  “Don’t listen to him, he’s just trying to be clever,” Min said. “We’re talking about what home means.”

  “What would you do,” Eva said, “if someone you knew—someone you trusted—told you they were planning to leave, to move to another country, because of the election?”

  For a moment no one spoke.

  “I mean, if it actually happened,” Eva said, “if Grady, for instance, really were to sell his house and move to Uruguay, would you think he was overreacting? Or would you think that maybe you should leave, too?”

  “Well, I’m not sure,” Min said.

  “If it were Grady, I suppose the first thing I’d think was that he’d found an Uruguayan boyfriend,” Aaron said.

  “Aaron, please,” Rachel said, and turned to look Eva in the eye. “OK, here’s my answer. If that happened, if it happened today, right now, I wouldn’t do anything. I’d take a wait-and-see approach. I’m sorry if that’s not what you want to hear, Eva, but I have to be honest. Even with the election, I don’t feel my personal freedom has been compromised. I just don’t.”r />
  “Don’t you mean you don’t feel your personal safety has been compromised?” Jake said.

  “That’s what I said.”

  “No, you didn’t. You said you didn’t feel your personal freedom had been compromised.”

  “I don’t see a problem with that equivalency,” Min said. “The way I see it, to feel free, you have to feel safe.”

  “But how can you?” Jake said. “I mean, freedom and safety—how can you ever have both?”

  “How can you not?”

  “Well, because to be safe, really safe, you have to have money, and money, by necessity, ties you into certain … well, economic structures. And then you have to rely on those structures if your money is to have any value beyond the paper it’s printed on. And those structures can collapse. Or turn against you.”

  “He’s right,” Aaron said. “Look at Madoff. Look at the stock market crash. When the market crashed and all those banks started failing, the first thing that went through my mind was that I should close our IRA and get the cash and hide it, like those old women in Italy you’re always hearing about who, when they die, their children find they’ve got forty million euros stuffed into the mattress.”

  “It was that sort of thinking that brought on the crash,” Bruce said. “It’s an ouroboros.”

  “There are different kinds of freedom,” Min said. “We’re not just talking about money.”

  “No matter how you define freedom, to be truly free is not to be dependent,” Jake said. “And that means giving up the pretense that you’re safe.”

  “But it’s not true,” Eva said, raking her hair with her fingers. “The night of the inauguration, when we were in Venice, Min and I went out for dinner. We had those marvelous spiny crabs, and rice with shrimp and arugula, and then afterwards we took a walk. One of the strangest things about Venice is how silent it is at night. At night it’s not like any other city. You feel as if you’re the only person there. And so we walked, and all we could hear was the water splashing, and our heels clicking, and the cats howling, and everything that terrified me at home seemed so far away, as if it could never touch me—the inauguration, the Warriners’ party, it was as if all of it was happening on another planet, or wasn’t happening at all, because how can such things happen when the world contains such an extraordinary silence—and yes, maybe it was because I have money, because I could afford to escape, but I did feel safe, and I did feel free.”