Shelter in Place

by David Leavitt

  “None of which, the college’s defenders say, ought to be used as an argument against it,” Aaron said. “The way they see it, when it was established, it corrected for an imbalance.”

  “Unjustly,” Rachel added.

  “Then, yes. Now it corrects—justly—for another. Or so its defenders claim.”

  “You’re getting way too far into the weeds for me,” Grady said.

  “He always does,” Rachel said. “The only reason he knows anything about any of this is that last year he edited a book on the history of the electoral college.”

  “A book, I might add, that sold quite decently,” Aaron said.

  “This is all well and good,” Grady said, “but what bearing does any of it have on what Eva said, which is that in her view, keeping Trump out of the White House is more important than preserving the principle of free elections?”

  “That’s what I meant when I asked if she wasn’t a teensy bit fascist,” Sandra said.

  “Eva is not a fascist,” Min said emphatically. “No one who knows her would ever say that about her, would they, Jake?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t,” Jake said, surprised mostly to learn that Min regarded him as someone who knew Eva.

  “I mean, her parents were refugees from Poland,” Min said. “They came to this country to escape fascism, for God’s sake.”

  “Eva never talks about her parents,” Grady said. “Are they still alive?”

  “Alive and kicking, and still living in the apartment on West Eighty-ninth Street where she grew up.”

  “Half a mile from her as the crow flies,” Aaron said.

  “Although these days, the crow doesn’t fly there very often,” Jake said.

  “At the risk of being accused again of sounding like Aaron’s fifth-grade teacher,” Rachel said, “I have to say it makes me uncomfortable talking about Eva like this when we’re guests in her house.”

  “It’s my fault,” Sandra said. “I should never have said what I did. I meant it as a joke, but as Grady can testify, I was born without a sense of humor.”

  “It’s true,” Grady said. “As kids, we took cruel advantage of the lack.”

  “I sometimes wonder if Eva has a sense of humor,” Aaron said.

  “Why are you all being so critical of her?” Rachel said. “I mean, the woman is obviously suffering. Didn’t anyone else hear what she said about Rachel Maddow?”

  “I heard it,” Jake said.

  “Pontificating about the electoral college—it’s just a way of avoiding dealing with your own fears. It’s so male. At least Eva’s open about hers.”

  “Rachel thinks that, given our druthers, we men will always plump for getting deep into the weeds over dealing with our own fears,” Aaron said.

  “Is that a joke?” Sandra said.

  “The joke is part of the evasion,” Rachel said.

  “Maybe what we’re doing is letting Eva have our hysterics for us,” Jake said.

  “Speak for yourself,” Grady said. “For my part, I’m having plenty on my own, only instead of carrying on about them, I’ve gone into denial. Stopped watching the news, stopped reading the paper.”

  “I can’t watch the news either,” Sandra said.

  “Why not?” Aaron asked. “What are you all so afraid of, that you have to hide your eyes? Me, I plan to read every article, watch every program, read every op-ed.”

  “I think I’ll wait until it’s all over to read about it if you don’t mind,” Grady said.

  “But that’s just it,” Sandra said. “How can we presume it’ll ever be over? No one can predict the future. I mean, if you’d told me a year ago he’d be elected, I wouldn’t have believed you.”

  “I wouldn’t have believed you if you’d told me a week ago,” Rachel said.

  “It was so blindsiding,” Min said.

  “But was it really?” Aaron said. “I mean, is blindside really the right word? I’m only asking because people have been using it an awful lot lately, and it seems to me they’re using it wrong.”

  “It’s how they feel,” Rachel said.

  “Fine, but to be blindsided, really blindsided, the thing that hits you has to be a bolt from the blue, right? And for this to have been a bolt from the blue, we would have had to believe, in our heart of hearts, that Hillary’s winning was a fait accompli—which obviously we didn’t, or we wouldn’t have been so nervous.

  “In retrospect, I think the truth is that we all saw it coming but tried to talk ourselves out of it. And so, yes, there was a shock, but it wasn’t a blindsiding shock. It was more like the shock when your dermatologist tells you the mole you’ve been trying to convince yourself is nothing is really a melanoma.”

  “Must you use that particular analogy?” Grady asked, touching his neck.

  “I don’t see that it makes all that much difference,” Jake said. “We weren’t in a position to affect what happened, only to be affected by it.”

  “And to suffer over it,” Rachel said.

  “But it’s all so absurd,” Aaron said. “I mean, what’s playing out, it’s like an absurdist comedy. Naturally, you wouldn’t notice that aspect of it, Sandra, since, by your own admission, you have no sense of humor. But the rest of you—”

  “The rest of us clearly aren’t as evolved as you, Aaron,” Rachel said.

  “Or we’re too freaked out to appreciate the comedy,” Grady said.

  “Oh, come on,” Aaron said. “That grab-them-by-the-pussy business? Or that press conference with the Mexican president? That was hilarious. If it were Monty Python, we’d be laughing our asses off.”

  “But it’s not Monty Python.”

  “Pretending it’s Monty Python—it’s just another form of denial,” Rachel said.

  “Whatever,” Aaron said. “All I’m saying is that we all have a choice. We can spend the next four years eating our livers out or we can spend them laughing our asses off.”

  “Not all of us have that choice,” Sandra said.

  “Eva certainly doesn’t,” Jake said.

  “No, I suppose Eva wouldn’t,” Aaron said. “I suppose for Eva there’s only the one way to go.”

  3

  It was his knocking on the door that did it, she told Bruce afterwards. His ringing the bell. His standing before her in the doorway, in his cashmere cardigan and bow tie, all scrubbed and pink like a cartoon pig.

  Immediately the dogs ran to him. When he bent down, they licked his face.

  “That was probably what upset me most,” Eva said. “As if he was trying to take my dogs too.”

  Needless to say, she didn’t invite him in. And why should she have? For eighteen years they’d been next-door neighbors, and in eighteen years neither had ever set foot in the other’s apartment. Instead she listened to what he had to say across the threshold. Though the party was to be held on the night of the inauguration, it wasn’t to be an inauguration party per se. That is to say, he and Kitty would still have been throwing it even if “their guy” hadn’t won. More to the point, though it was true that most of the guests would be people who shared their gladness at the change about to sweep through Washington—and wasn’t change in and of itself a healthy thing?—this wasn’t why he and Kitty had invited them. Nor would everyone at the party be of the same political stripe. Some Democrats would be there. Even a few die-hard Hillary supporters. If she and Bruce chose to drop by, they’d find some fellow travelers.

  “But I’m guessing you won’t,” he added, in an almost wistful tone. And then, when Eva didn’t reply: “In any case, let me assure you, the noise will be kept to a reasonable level. You won’t even notice.”

  “That was the last straw,” Eva told Bruce as they got ready for bed that night. “I mean, it’s bad enough that they’re having the party—but then to come over and rub my face in it—”

  “He might just have been trying to be friendly,” Bruce said.

  “The winner can always afford to be friendly to the loser,” Eva said.

&nb
sp; “You mean that if they’d lost, you’d be friendly to him?”

  “I don’t know. If I’m to be honest, probably not.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because no matter the outcome, the fact remains that he voted for … I don’t even want to say the name.”

  “Well, yes, he’s a Republican. Naturally he voted for the Republican. But that doesn’t mean he was at all those rallies, shouting ‘Lock her up.’ ”

  “How do you know he wasn’t?”

  “Alec Warriner at a rally? I really can’t see it. My hunch is that if you asked him, you’d find that the main reason he voted for Tr—”

  “Don’t say that name. I refuse to have that name uttered in my house.”

  “Sorry. My hunch is that if you asked him, you’d find that he didn’t vote for Tr—for him-who-shall-not-be-named because he likes him, but because he thinks that he-who-shall-not-be-named will get the corporate tax rate below twenty-one percent.”

  “I think you’re wrong,” Eva said. “I think it was because he hates her so much. That’s the thing I can’t wrap my mind around—why people hate her so much. It might be because I went to Smith and she went to Wellesley, but I feel an attack on her is an attack on me.”

  “Who knows? Maybe hate is blind. Like love.”

  “Don’t try to be philosophical. You just end up sounding glib. And anyway, it’s not true. Hate isn’t blind. It sees—and in this case what it sees is that she’s a woman.”

  “Well, but so is Marine Le Pen. So are Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, the one who used to have the judge show—you know, what’s her name. Jeanine Pirro.”

  “Oh, God, her. Don’t mention her.”

  They got into bed. As Bruce switched out the light, it occurred to him that for all the years of their marriage, he had always slept on the left side and Eva on the right. Exactly how this arrangement had come into being, he couldn’t remember. All he knew was that it was now second nature to him, so much so that even when Eva was out of town and he had the bed to himself, he slept on the left. Even when he was traveling on business and staying at a hotel, he slept on the left. The idea of the bedside lamp, the bedside table, being on his right was more than his imagination could cope with.

  There was a rustling in the dark—the dogs coming in, jumping up onto the bed, and settling themselves between his and Eva’s legs.

  He closed his eyes. He could hear Eva turning over. He could hear her pulling open her bedside drawer, taking out the bottle of Ambien, opening it, and shaking a pill onto her palm. On election night she’d also taken an Ambien—which hadn’t stopped her from being wakened at two thirty by a noise that she quickly identified as cheering. For maybe fifteen seconds, a delicious sensation of relief flooded her—Hillary had won!—until she realized where the cheering was coming from.

  In the morning, as was his habit, Bruce rose at six. He showered, dressed, fed and walked the dogs, and was just leaving for work when their maid, Amalia, arrived. He hardly ever saw Eva in the morning, since it was her habit to sleep until eight or eight thirty.

  As they had most weekday mornings over the past eighteen years, Bruce and Amalia nodded at each other as they passed.

  Nine hours later, when he got home, Eva was waiting for him. Her face was flushed and she was rotating the rings on her fingers, one after the other.

  “So I’ve made a decision,” she said. “I can’t be here for this inauguration party. The mere idea of it, of those idiots rallying together next door—next door!—to gloat over their victory, to rub it in my face, the way they did on election night …”

  “Well, but Eva, I hardly think you’re the reason they’re having the party.”

  “Yes, I am. I know I am. I know it because if we’d won, I’d have done the same thing … Anyway, I refuse to give them the satisfaction of being here to endure it. It’s too much. I have to get away.”

  “Well, why not go to the country?”

  She shook her head. “It’s not far enough, the country. It’s the country—this country—I need to get away from. I’ve been thinking about it all day. Where in the world is there a place where I won’t even hear an echo of that cheering? And then I hit on it. Venice.”

  “Venice?”

  She nodded exuberantly. “I’ve always loved Venice, ever since the first time I went there, when I was in college.”

  “But it’s January.”

  “Exactly. That’s the best part. It’ll be practically empty, the way it was my semester abroad. The wind, and the acqua alta, and the utter silence at night … Well, what do you think? I’ve been checking flights. We could leave on Thursday and be there before the horror show starts.”

  “But that’s next week. I can’t get away on such short notice.”

  “Can’t you? Then I’ll ask Min. She’ll be game. She always is.”

  Min was. They left on the night of the nineteenth, arriving at their hotel by water taxi at two in the afternoon—six hours ahead of New York, Washington, the inaugural circus.

  And from the moment they stepped off the boat, Eva breathed more easily. She felt that she was once again in the civilized world.

  They stayed at a four-star hotel in Dorsoduro. For five days they didn’t look at a newspaper. They didn’t turn on the television. Each morning they would visit a museum or a religious building—the Accademia, the Frari, the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, with its frescoes of Saint George slaying the dragon, and later delivering the dragon, not quite dead, to the Mamluks. “It’s like he’s got the poor thing on a leash,” Eva said, either failing or choosing not to notice the sword that the saint was brandishing to deliver the final blow. “I think the dragon looks sweet. Like a dog.”

  The frescoes in the scuola had real dogs in them, too. “Which is your favorite?” she asked Min, who plumped for the scruffy white terrier gazing up at Saint Augustine as he received from Saint Jerome the news of his imminent demise.

  “The obvious choice,” Eva said, “though for my part I prefer the long-snouted greyhoundish one watching him baptize the Selenites.”

  In the afternoons they shopped or sat in cafés, Eva reading Jan Morris and Min pretending to send texts but really playing Candy Crush. Each day passed more quickly than the last, and then on the sixth, Ursula Brandolin-Foote invited them to tea at her palazzo near Campo della Maddalena. Aaron Weisenstein, who had published some of her translations from the Serbo-Croatian, had told her that Eva and Min were in Venice, and she’d tracked them down. Ursula was a stately woman in her early seventies, with thick hair dyed several shades of gray and a fondness for multihued caftans that lent emphasis to her high breasts and long legs. Although she owned roughly half of Ca’ Brandolin, she told Eva and Min, she occupied only a portion of the piano nobile and rented the rest short-term to visiting academics. Her own flat she also occasionally rented, to studios making period movies and television series. “It has that sepia look,” she said as, with a sweep of a billowing sleeve, she indicated the vast sofa covered in faded Fortuny velvet, the heavy silk curtains, the bookshelves with their stock of ragged paperbacks, the bombe chest, and the basket by the fireplace from which old copies of La Cucina Italiana spilled. Rugs were scattered over the terrazzo floor, which had been poured to create a trompe l’oeil of rugs scattered over a terrazzo floor. On the ceiling, blue-and-pink stucco work framed a trompe l’oeil sky to which time and smoke had lent the yellowish tint of the sky outside at dusk. “All this was in situ when I inherited the place,” Ursula went on. “A mixed blessing, since I only got the property. No money. I’m poor as a church mouse.”

  She laughed, her laugh unexpectedly high-pitched, almost a caw.

  “How long ago was that?” Eva asked.

  “Oh, now, let me see, it must have been 1986 or 1987 when Zia Carlotta went to her comforts—she was ninety-three, you know, young for Venice—the doges all lived to be a hundred and ten—so I guess … 1989? Ah, and here is Elisabetta with our tea. When I moved in, Elisabetta was also
in situ, weren’t you, Elisabetta?”

  “Si, Signora.”

  “She understands English but she won’t speak it. How old are you, Elisabetta?”

  “In Ottobre ho compiuto novantacinque anni,” Elisabetta said.

  “See what I mean about the Venetians being longevitous? Sul tavolo. Sit, ladies, sit.”

  They sat, Eva and Min on the sofa, Ursula on a beige vinyl-covered recliner that somehow did not look out of place. Along with the tea, Elisabetta had brought a plate of sandwiches spread with a fish paste that gave off a dubious odor.

  “And is this your first time in Venice?” Ursula asked, taking up a purple vape pen.

  “Oh, no,” Eva and Min said at the same time.

  “I’ve been at least—”

  “It’s my fourth—”

  “You go first.”

  “No, you.”

  Ursula vaped.

  “It’s my fourth visit to Venice,” Eva said, with restrained impatience.

  “Eva’s an authority on Venice,” Min said, touching Eva’s knee.

  “No, I’m not,” Eva said.

  “Yes, you are,” Min said. “She’s writing a biography of Isabella Stewart Gardner.”

  “No, I’m not,” Eva said.

  “Oh, what a good idea!” Ursula said. “I’ve always wondered why someone hasn’t done one.”

  “Someone has,” Eva said.

  “Only it’s not very good,” Min said.

  “We’re going tomorrow to Palazzo Barbaro.”

  “Our beloved Ca’ Barbaro!” Ursula said. “Such a grievous day it was when the Curtises had to sell the piano nobile. And yet it’s always the same story here—the inheritors of the old houses paupered by their upkeep.”

  “I heard the family bickered,” Eva said.

  “In Venice bickering is a tradition. Our laws, you see, are based on the Napoleonic Code, which means that when the owner of an historic property dies, it has to be divided equally among his heirs. Well, in the case of Ca’ Barbaro, there were three children, and they simply couldn’t figure out a way of divvying the place up. Which is a pity, because if they had, they wouldn’t have had to sell.