Shelter in Place

by David Leavitt

  “Anyway, in Venice I needed somewhere to live, obviously, so Pablo arranged for me to rent a room from Ursula, with whom he was having an affair. Or had been having an affair. Maybe by then it was over, it’s hard to remember. I’m not even sure Ursula was divorced yet.

  “So then I get there, to Ursula’s, and the room, it turned out, wasn’t even a room, really, it was this sort of alcove off the kitchen, with a curtain instead of a door, and just enough space for a very narrow bed. Later I learned it was where Ursula’s maid usually slept, that she’d kicked the maid out for the duration and the maid was having to sleep on a settee in her dressing room. She’d pretty much lied about the whole thing, I guess because she needed the money—she always needed money—and also maybe she figured if I was there, Pablo would come to Venice more often.

  “Anyway, in those days, in addition to the one she lived in, Ursula owned three or four other apartments that she rented to visiting academics, and it was in one of these, directly upstairs from hers, that Vincent was living. He taught art history at Bard, and that year he had a fellowship to do research in Venice—his specialty was Carpaccio—and one afternoon when he came down to pay his rent—we all paid Ursula in dollars, under to the table—she introduced him to me and offered him some tea, and we just sort of … fell madly in love, or convinced ourselves that we had. Which wasn’t anything new for Vincent—he’d had a bunch of relationships by then, including one that had lasted for six years—but for me it was just amazing, because nothing like it had happened to me before. My whole experience of love until that point had consisted of crushes on my teachers, Pablo mostly, plus the occasional one-night stand with a classmate, or someone I picked up on the street, that inevitably left me with that Peggy Lee is-that-all-there-is feeling. And now here was Vincent, who could have been one of my teachers, because he was a lot older than me. Well, fourteen years older, which felt like a lot at the time. The age difference scared me but it also thrilled me, because in so many ways he reminded me of Pablo, only, unlike Pablo, he wasn’t straight and seemed to be as enamored of me as I was of him. And so I started spending every night with him, in his apartment, even though I was still paying Ursula for the so-called room.”

  “What did Ursula think?”

  “She thought it was great, as did her maid, who got her alcove back.

  “It’s funny, only recently have I started to realize what a big role Venice played in the whole thing. Earlier, when I said it could have happened anywhere, I was lying, I see now. I mean, sure, it could have, but it wouldn’t have been the same story, or have had the same ending. Because Venice, its foundation—the city’s literal foundation—is an illusion. Illusions sustain it, and of all the illusions, the most potent may be the assumption that the city will actually last, that it won’t sink into itself, or be submerged by a flood. And so when you’re there, in this place that honestly shouldn’t exist, that goes against nature, you can imagine something similar for yourself—that you won’t sink into the mud or get swept away by a tidal wave. Which is why it seems especially … dare I say appropriate … that when Vincent got sick—Vincent, whose name is an anagram of Venice with a t stuck on the end, did you pick up on that?—that it should have been there.”

  “It was AIDS, I assume?”

  “What else would it have been?”

  “And did you know that when you got together—that he had AIDS?”

  “I guess that depends on how you define know. If you’re asking if he told me outright, the answer is no, he didn’t. As for whether he knew … I’ve thought about that a lot over the years. It’s possible he knew but didn’t say anything out of fear that I’d leave him, which I might have, or that he knew but couldn’t bring himself to admit it to himself, much less to me, or that he knew but believed himself to be immune somehow, to have some sort of special dispensation. I mean, you must understand, at this point nothing bad had ever happened to him in his life. Nothing. All the schools he’d ever applied to had accepted him, all the prizes he’d competed for he’d won, all the reviews he’d ever gotten—he’d written two books—had been raves. Plus everyone loved him—his family, his students, his teachers, his friends, of whom he had dozens, hundreds, it seemed, men, women, couples, so many of them there wasn’t a single point, I don’t think, when someone wasn’t visiting, staying at the Gritti, or at a pensione near the station, or with him—with us—in the apartment upstairs from Ursula’s, though usually the only ones he asked to stay were the good-looking men, older than me but younger than him, with whom we’d invariably end up having three-ways. And then his former boyfriends—I don’t know why this amazed me so much, but not once in his life had he ever been broken up with. In every case he was the one who’d done the breaking up. Mind you, he wasn’t happy about this, he took no pleasure in it, he just saw it as something that went with the territory of being who he was. And then it all changed.”

  “What happened?”

  “Maybe a month after we met, he had to go to Munich for a conference, and when he got back he came down with this terrible cough, and started running a fever, which he attributed to the fact that his flight back to Venice was full of children with runny noses. In other words, just a cold, which would pass. Only it didn’t pass. Every morning he’d wake up saying he felt a million times better and head off to work, only to come back at lunch exhausted. Soon it got so bad he started having to cancel on his friends who’d come to Venice to visit him. I think the truth was that he was afraid of what he’d see in their eyes when they looked at him.”

  “Was that when you realized what was going on?”

  “I’m not sure realize is the right word. I mean, yes, the possibility crossed my mind. How couldn’t it? That was just how it was in those days—if a gay man got sick, the first thing you thought was AIDS, though you never said so. Later things changed a bit, people started to feel they could speak openly about it without suffering terrible repercussions, but in those days—bear in mind this was still fairly early, ’87 or ’88—in those days if you were in my position, if you were twenty-two and worried your older lover might have AIDS and was trying to keep it from you … well, what were you supposed to do? Where were you supposed to go? Especially in Italy? There wasn’t any ACT UP then. I don’t think Rock Hudson had died yet. The test, I’m pretty sure, you could get, but the results took weeks to come through, and if you tested positive, the word on the street was that the government might make your doctor give them your name and then they’d round you up and put you in a camp, which was what was happening in Cuba, or tattoo a scarlet A on your behind, which was what William F. Buckley proposed. All of which provided a really great excuse not to have the test, which at this point was basically the devil you knew versus the devil you didn’t know, and given that choice—and how often I’ve been given it—I’ve always gone with the devil I don’t know, only in this case I really saw him as a devil, one of the ones from Signorelli’s painting of Hell, because the fact of the matter was that since we’d met, Vincent and I had had a lot of sex, most of which wasn’t of the variety that the authorities of the period would have deemed safe, or, as they later put it, safer, which was really just dotting the i on the fact that no one really knew what was safe and what wasn’t. Are these details too gory for you?”

  “No. Go on.”

  “So things went on like that through November, and then Vincent got really sick—tired all the time, a hacking cough that wouldn’t quit, fevers that spiked to 103 or 104. I kept trying to get him to see a doctor, but he wouldn’t. He just refused. And then Pablo showed up. I forget what his reason was, some project or other—really it was just an excuse to check on me and to see Ursula, whom he still must have been having an affair with, and who must have clued him in on what was going on, because no sooner had he arrived than he went straight upstairs, took one look at Vincent, and called a doctor. She was the one who said he had to go into hospital, that if he didn’t go into the hospital subito, she couldn’t guarantee he�
��d last the night. And so Ursula called an ambulance, and of course, this being Venice, it was a boat ambulance, on which we rode along the Grand Canal, past the back gardens of the palaces, and the docks decorated with flags and red carpets. It was dusk, and the sky had a spectral quality that made the ambulance seem like one of those funeral gondolas for which Venice is famous, and the canal itself one of the rivers in Hell—the Lethe or the Styx. And then we got to the hospital itself and there was this phalanx of doctors and nurses waiting for us, and here’s the thing: They were all wearing gloves and gowns and masks and paper caps. Now, let me make one thing perfectly clear—this was still fairly early in the game, there were still a lot of unknowns about how the virus was spread. Why, for all I know, Vincent might have been the first AIDS patient they’d ever had at that hospital. And yet it’s one thing to act out of an excess of caution, and another to make a patient feel like a leper, which was, I’m sorry to say, what they did, with the result that as soon as Vincent saw them—and, really, they might have been Galactic Stormtroopers, the way they were dressed—he just went off the deep end. He said he wanted to go home, that there was no way he was staying, that we couldn’t make him say.

  “It was a terrible scene. I remember some nuns hurrying by, fiddling with their beads, and Pablo running back and forth between Vincent and the doctors, and Ursula demanding to see the hospital director, who was some sort of cousin of hers, though in the end that didn’t prove necessary, because suddenly Vincent stopped yelling and sort of went limp, and they took him off to the isolation unit and put him on oxygen and an IV drip. And for the next few days, that was how it was. Just to go in and see him, you had to put on gloves and a mask and a gown, the same as the staff. And so when the doctor broke the news to him—that he had pneumonia—that pneumonia—he couldn’t see my face or the doctor’s face, though I could see his. At first I looked away, but then I looked at him square on, because frankly I wanted to see what it looked like, what someone who had just gotten the news looked like, maybe so that I’d know what to expect when it happened to me.”

  “What did you see?”

  “Do you know those early Renaissance portraits of the Annunciation to Saint Anne? Not the Annunciation of the Virgin, but Saint Anne, her mother, when the angel comes down to tell her that the child she’s carrying will be the mother of the son of God. The look on Anne’s face in those paintings … that was what I saw. Wonder and horror together—which they never should be. Which I hope I’ll never see together again.

  “Now, when I remember all this, I don’t feel guilty anymore. Or afraid. Just sad, because for years, my excuse—the excuse I gave myself—was that I was young, too young to be expected to cope with what was happening. And I was young. I mean, at that point in my life, the only death I’d known was my mother’s, and when my mother was dying, I was still a child, and people treated me as a child. No one expected anything of me. Not even my mother expected anything of me. Instead everyone worried about me—in some ways more than they did about her. And so when I got the news about Vincent, on the one hand I just accepted that, having made whatever avowals I’d made, it was now my duty to take care of him until he died. And yet on the other hand, I was desperate to escape, and that was also because—I’m sorry to keep repeating this—I was twenty-two. And if, as I say that, you’re thinking that by putting all this emphasis on my youth, I’m trying to let myself off the hook a little, that I’m pleading extenuating circumstances, you’re right. I am.”

  “What happened next?”

  “Well, the crisis passed. He got better—well enough to move back into the apartment. Everyone was telling him he should go home, go back to the States, but he wouldn’t. He had a year in Venice, and by God he was going to stay in Venice. Only suddenly he required all this nursing—not just pills, but injections and inhalations, some of which he had to take every six hours, round the clock. And I just … screwed up royally on that front, not only because I had no experience of it, but because Vincent was so desperately needy. Our roles had reversed. Now he was the child, and I was the adult, and I was supposed to be there all the time, and never leave him alone. He couldn’t bear to be alone—and I couldn’t bear to be with him. I was always looking for excuses to get away, if just for an hour or two—and then when I got back, almost inevitably he’d say something bitter and recriminatory. We’d fight. I hit him once. In the face. I’m ashamed to admit it, but it’s true. Another time I left the apartment without telling him, left for an entire day, which I spent wandering the city, eventually ending up at the train station, where I picked up a Belgian backpacker and went with him to his hotel.

  “That was the day he jumped off the bridge. That’s the part that Clydie got wrong, by the way. He didn’t die from jumping off the bridge. Of course, it makes a better story to say that he did—you assume it was one of the really big bridges, the ones that cross the Grand Canal—when in fact it was just this tiny little bridge near Ursula’s place—I don’t think it even has a name—very low, and crossing a very narrow, very shallow canal, with maybe three feet of water and then a bed of silt and mud. Luckily, some gondoliers were having their lunch nearby. They were the ones who hauled him out and held him until the carabinieri came and arrested him. They were waiting for me at Ursula’s when I got back. I remember she went with me to the questura, where they questioned me for two hours, maybe three. They were very kind. They didn’t hold me in the least responsible. They only held him responsible, because in Catholic countries, attempting suicide really is looked on as a crime.

  “Anyway, as soon as the interview was over, I went back to Vincent’s apartment, packed my things, and—this is the part I’m most ashamed of—went off to find the Belgian backpacker. And I did find him, and spent the night with him, and then the next morning I took the train to Milan, where I called my father, who was frantic, because Pablo had called him and Ursula had called him and no one could find me. It was my father who bought me the ticket to New York. I flew back the next day.

  “The rest of the story I only know by hearsay. It seems that by this point word had gotten out to all of Vincent’s friends, who took collective action, staying with him in shifts and making sure he ate healthy foods and took his meds until he was well enough to go back to the States. As I said, some of them were really rich, and they must really have loved him, because they tried everything there was to try, taking him to Mexico to get a drug the FDA was dragging its heels on, and to France to get a drug the FDA had refused to approve, and finally to Switzerland for this insane treatment where they pumped all the blood out of your body, fed it through a machine that supposedly cleansed it, and then pumped it back in, but it didn’t do any good. None of it did any good. The day after his thirty-seventh birthday, he died.

  “So that was that. Only here’s the thing. At the time, I thought of him as being so much older than me—whereas now I realize how young he was. I mean, thirty-six—do you realize that in six years that will be as many years as I’ve been alive since he died? Do you realize how young that is?”

  “Was there a funeral?”

  “There was. I didn’t go. Or to the memorial. No one wrote to me, none of his friends tried to contact me. Maybe they didn’t realize the role I’d played, or maybe I exaggerated my own importance. I don’t know. All I know is since then, there have been no more love stories for Jake. Don’t think I haven’t tried. I have. I’ve just never been able to make it work, even with one fellow who, if things had been different, if I hadn’t felt so much guilt and terror, maybe I could have.”

  “Did it get easier after you got tested?”

  “Oh, but I never did get tested. To this day, I’ve never been tested. All this time it’s been the devil I don’t know, and you know what? I’ve gotten to know him anyway, because basically for the last thirty years we’ve been in a holding pattern together. And yet, is that really the worst thing in the world, to live in a holding pattern? I mean, sure, it’s frustrating, but you get used to it aft
er a while. The waiting, it becomes the thing you’re waiting for … and then one night, entirely out of the blue, an old woman remembers your name.

  “I’m sorry. I’ve talked too much.”

  “No, you haven’t,” Bruce said, and almost added: “Look, I’m the one person here who can understand this. Because I’m doing the wrong thing myself, even though I know it’s wrong. Because I’m in the throes of an elation that I have the audacity to think will last, even though I know it won’t. Because I came to care so much about a woman to whom I owe nothing that I gave her two hundred thousand dollars, and now that I’ve given it to her, we can barely say a word to each other. Because I’ve become a secret-keeper. Because I’ve become a liar.”

  In the distance, a window opened. “Bruce?” Eva called. “Bruce, are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” Bruce answered. “We’re fine.” Then, to Jake: “It’s cold. We should go back in. Oh, and if it puts your mind at ease, you don’t have to tell Eva. I’ll tell Eva.”

  “Tell her what?”

  “That you’ve made up your mind about the apartment. That your answer is no.”

  “But it’s not no. It’s yes. If she’ll have me.”

  “Oh, she’ll have you. That much I can guarantee. She’ll have you.”

  25

  Again Bruce was sitting on a bed with a silent woman, methodically outlining a plan of rescue. That the bed was in a hotel on West Forty-third Street, and the silent woman not Kathy, but Sandra, made surprisingly little difference to the import of his monologue.

  Sandra listened patiently. She did not fidget or crack her knuckles or tear apart a Kleenex. Her grandmother had raised her to respect her elders and to keep her back straight in company.