“Do you think it’s strange for Bruce, sleeping alone?” Rachel said. “I mean, has he ever actually spent a night in this bed without Eva?”
“I have, actually,” Bruce said, coming out of the house in dry clothes. “As a matter of fact, I was up here the weekend after the inauguration, just before Eva and Min came back from Venice. Sandra was, too. She’d texted me to say Grady was out of town and she was alone, so I drove up on the spur of the moment.”
“We kept each other company,” Sandra said.
“Oh, I see,” Rachel said.
“I wonder what Matt’s planning for dinner,” Jake said.
“He’s not. Aaron’s doing the cooking. He’s insisted.”
“Oh, God, not another whole fish,” Bruce said.
“What’s wrong with his whole fish?”
“Nothing, it’s just that this time I’d prefer not to have the head.”
“Whoever I decide is the guest of honor will get the head,” said Aaron, who had stepped outside with Matt to join the others. “Maybe it’ll be you, Matt.”
“I wouldn’t mind. They say the best meat on a fish is the cheeks.”
“Why are you wearing that hat, Aaron?” Bruce asked.
“Oh, I don’t know. I suppose on the off chance that some paparazzo shows up, snaps my picture, and tweets it. And you know what? Even if it goes viral, even if I get death threats, I won’t care, because hey, as of last week I’m officially unemployable. I can do whatever I want.”
“You’re not unemployable,” Rachel said. “It was one job interview.”
“I am persona non grata.”
“But I thought you were glad to be out of the industry,” Sandra said.
“It’s one thing to refuse an invitation,” Aaron said, “another to be told you’ll never get one.”
“Aaron, please, it was one interview,” Rachel said. “There’ll be others.”
“And in every one of them, Katya’s name will come up.”
Tears welled in Rachel’s eyes. “Oh, that woman,” she said. “I could kill her, I really could. I mean, OK, you may have lost your temper—and yet to claim you got physical—he’d never do that to a woman. Ask Sandra. Ask any woman who’s ever worked with him.”
“It’s true he’s never grabbed me by the arm so hard it bruised,” Sandra said.
“Let’s face it, she says I grabbed her, so I grabbed her.” With surprising pique, Aaron yanked off the pussy hat and threw it on the ground. “Fate has simply decreed that from here on my life will take a different path than I’d anticipated. That, rather than serve literature by publishing books, I shall serve as a different sort of midwife, working closely with writers like Sandra, in the faint hope that when she wins the National Book Award, in the audience a few mutterings may sound to the effect that if her novel is as good as it is, a certain Aaron Weisenstein deserves some credit for the minuscule role he played in its creation. Not that I want you to include my name in the acknowledgments, Sandra. Quite the opposite, I want you to promise me not to include my name in the acknowledgments. Or, better yet, not to have any acknowledgments at all. I mean, what’s the point? No one needs to know what an invaluable contribution your cat made—”
“I don’t have a cat.”
“Or that if it hadn’t been for the encouragement of Mrs. Colleen Oscopy, your fourth-grade teacher, you could never have reached the pinnacle you occupy today.”
“Stop it, just stop it,” Rachel said. “Six months from now, when Aaron’s working again—”
“Or when he’s been offered the job of his dreams and turned it down—”
“—when Aaron’s working again, we won’t even remember we had this conversation.”
Leaving the pussy hat on the ground, Aaron and Matt went back inside. From the kitchen door the dogs bounded out again, ran past the group gathered on the patio, and began barking at the fountain’s spray.
Bruce laughed. “Come on, let’s rile them up,” he said, taking Sandra’s hand and leading her in a gallop toward where the dogs were gathered.
Rachel stole closer to Jake. “What do you think that means?” she asked. “His coming up that weekend to keep her company—and now this? Look at them.”
Jake looked. No sooner had Sandra reached the fountain than Bruce put his arms around her waist. He was so much taller than her that when they kissed, he had to bend his back and she had to stretch her neck.
For a few seconds Jake and Rachel were struck dumb, not just by the unexpectedness of the moment but by its beauty. For as Bruce and Sandra kissed, it was clear that the couple—and there was no doubt in Jake’s mind that this was what they were—were either too lost in each other to realize they could be seen, or realized they could be seen and were indifferent to their audience: unspectacular, neither ashamed nor proud, neither trying to be discreet nor showing off. The kiss was simply what it was—a kiss—made lovelier by the setting sun, and the capering dogs, and the fountain casting its jets into the sky. And the onlookers regarded it as such, and did not judge.
After a minute or so it ended. Holding hands, laughing a little, the pair wandered off into the gloaming. The dogs followed them for a few feet, then turned back toward the house.
It was their dinnertime.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
David Leavitt’s novels and story collections include Family Dancing (finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award), The Lost Language of Cranes, While England Sleeps, Arkansas, The Indian Clerk (finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Prize and the IMPAC/Dublin Literary Award), and The Two Hotel Francforts. He is also the author of two nonfiction books, Florence, A Delicate Case and The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer. He is co-director of the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Florida, where he is a professor of English and edits the journal Subtropics. www.davidleavittwriter.com
BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING
Bloomsbury Publishing Inc.
1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA
BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING, and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
First published in the United States 2020
Copyright © David Leavitt, 2020
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.
ISBN: HB: 978-1-62040-487-4; eBook: 978-1-62040-489-8
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA IS AVAILABLE
To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.
Bloomsbury books may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at [email protected].
Shelter in Place Page 30