Shelter in Place

by David Leavitt

  “When I inherited, it was simpler. There was just me and Zio Ernesto. But then when he died, his half had to be split among his children, three from two marriages. Since then I’ve lost track of who owns what.”

  “Forgive me if this is a rude question,” Min said, “but your English is so fluent. Where did you learn it?”

  “Where else? In bed!” Again Ursula gave her alarming laugh. “But seriously, I’m basically American. In a different life, I was married for thirty years to an African Americanist—a white one, alas—an authority on the Harlem Renaissance. Before the divorce, Norman and I lived in Urbana. We adopted two black boys from the South Side of Chicago. One’s in California now. He works for Google. The other’s a jazz pianist based in Berlin.” She took a purely notional sip of tea. “Of course, I’ve kept up my American passport. It used to be that if you were American and you spent more than six months of every year abroad, you could get away with not paying taxes in either country. Those halcyon days, alas, are over.”

  “So you can vote in American elections?”

  “Can and do—and what a horror this one was! Afterwards I had to take to my bed. I was sick with disgust. President Caligula, I call him.”

  “Oh, I like that!” Min said. “Eva won’t say his name, you know.”

  “It’s true,” Eva said. “I hate to say it, but since arriving in Venice I’ve felt ashamed to be an American. I’ve never felt ashamed of it before. Just yesterday at Florian, for instance, when the waiter came to take our order—I don’t know what it was, but something impelled me to put on a fake French accent.”

  “A very good fake French accent,” Min said.

  “You see, I had this premonition that if he realized we were American, he’d spit in our coffee,” Eva said. “And yet for all that, I’d rather be here than there. I dread going home.”

  “Then why don’t you stay?” Ursula said. “I’m putting my flat on the market. You could buy it. And if no estate agents are involved, we’ll save on the commission.”

  “Buy an apartment?” Eva said, in the same tone she used when she was contemplating buying a pair of Manolo Blahnik shoes.

  “Why not have a look?” Min said. “It’ll be a lark.”

  Ursula took them on a tour. There were five rooms, all with intricately stuccoed walls and ceilings. Each of the fireplace mantels was carved from a different type of marble. On one side, the view was of the Grand Canal; on the other, of Ursula’s garden, which was aromatic and overgrown and scattered with lacy cast-iron tables and chairs. “There is some history to the house,” she said. “For instance, it’s reputed that Byron wrote Beppo here, though of course that is a claim made by several other Venetian houses. Also a doge was born here. I forget which one.”

  “The garden is lovely,” Min said.

  “Isn’t it?” Ursula said. “I don’t think I could bear to part with it, though of course I must consider the brute realities. My situation is not much different than that of the Curtises. The cost of maintenance is so high, and Italian taxes are extortionate.”

  They concluded the tour with the kitchen, which was ugly in that way that only nineteen-eighties kitchens can be ugly, and the one bathroom, which was at the opposite end of the flat from the bedrooms.

  “But if you sell it, where will you live?” Eva asked.

  “Oh, I’d use some of the money to renovate the attic. A teensy bath, an angolo cottura. That’s all I need. As you can imagine, it will break my heart to leave my lovely flat, though of course if you’re the one who buys it, it will alleviate my agita considerably. I’d know it was in safe hands.”

  With aristocratic delicacy, Ursula withdrew so that Eva and Min could confer.

  “You must have it,” Min said. “Think what you could do with it.”

  It was Min’s role to encourage Eva to take the adventurous steps that she herself would take, if she only had the money.

  “Should I?”

  “An opportunity like this—”

  “It will need a lot of work.”

  “Jake can do it. It will be a dream for him.”

  “I’ll have to talk to Bruce first.”

  “You know perfectly well that if it makes you happy, it will make Bruce happy.”

  “I so long for an escape.”

  “You deserve it. If anyone does, you do.”

  Eva walked to the window. As she looked out, the faintest hint of a smile came over her face.

  Two days after she got back to New York, she invited Jake to dinner.

  4

  That same week, the first week of February 2017, Jake turned fifty-two. At the party that the staff at his office gave him—Connie Bolen, the bookkeeper, the five assistants, Tim, Jen, Henry, Soledad, and Imogen, and the intern, Fallow—Pablo Bach, his business partner, raised a glass of champagne to him and said, “Here’s to the start of your fifty-third year.”

  “But he’s fifty-two,” said Fallow, who was twenty-one.

  “Exactly,” Pablo said. “Your fifty-second birthday is the first day of your fifty-third year. The belief that it’s the first day of your fifty-second year is but another example of the American unwillingness to accept the inexorability of death. The Italians, death lovers that they are, put it correctly: ‘Ho compiuto cinquantadue anni.’ Literally, ‘I have completed fifty-two years.’ ”

  “He’s pointed this out on every one of my birthdays since the millennium,” Jake said. The millennium, he went on to explain, had been very upsetting for Pablo, because it was celebrated a year early. In vain had Pablo tried to persuade his friends to boycott the improperly timed festivities, in vain had he tried to make them understand that January 1, 2000, was the first day of the last year of the old millennium, not the first day of the first year of the new millennium, but no one would listen to him. “I suppose everyone was too preoccupied with Y2K,” Jake said.

  “What’s Y2K?” Fallow said.

  “She is too young to remember,” Pablo said.

  “They’re too young to remember,” Connie corrected—meaning not the group collectively but Fallow, who eschewed the binary.

  “Of course, afterwards he told us he’d told us so,” Jake said, to forestall Pablo giving a lecture on the degradation of the language that would ensue if they were to be tolerated as a singular pronoun.

  “It’s simply that I cannot bear this habit of playing fast and loose with truth,” Pablo said. “It’s like peeing before you weigh yourself. How many of you do this? Be honest.”

  The assistants, all of whom were ruthlessly thin, looked at one another, as if trying to ascertain whether one of them was being singled out as fat, and which one.

  “It’s ridiculous. As I was just telling a friend”—he meant Min Marable—“the number on the scale isn’t going to make that skirt any less tight.”

  “I get what you mean,” Fallow said. “Like, the other day I was getting ready to go out, right? And I was thinking which coat should I wear, right? And, like, I checked my phone to see what the temperature was. I mean, instead of just opening the window and sticking my head out, I looked on my phone. Duh.”

  “Truth is experiential,” Pablo said. “In decorating, too, this is the case. ‘Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful,’ William Morris said. Words to live by, since they put the onus on you, on your discernment, your taste. The notion that taste is relative is specious. Bad taste owes to mental laziness or derangement, whereas good taste is truth balanced with reason.”

  Pablo proceeded to tell a story that the assistants had heard many times before, about how when he was starting out, in the seventies, purple vinyl wallpaper was all the rage. “All my clients were asking for it. They were begging me for it. ‘OK,’ I said, ‘in that case, if that’s what you want, call up David Hicks.’ And a lot of them did call up David Hicks, only to come to me a few months later, crying, ‘Pablo, please, please save us from this hideous purple vinyl wallpaper.’ Which I did. You can’t af
ford to hold grudges in this business.”

  “Isn’t it time for Jake to cut the cake?” Connie asked, handing him the knife that she kept in her desk for such purposes. And Jake did cut the cake, and as he cut it he reflected on how much the story Pablo had just told had become part of his legend, of which his townhouse in the East Sixties was the embodiment—the townhouse in the morning room of which two throw pillows, one embroidered with REASON and the other with TRUTH, reposed on a pair of wingback chairs. Reason and truth. Yet Pablo himself was Argentine; he himself, in his childhood, had watched helplessly as his parents—his father first and then his mother—were arrested, disappeared. Unreason. Untruth. Did his childhood explain Pablo? Did anyone’s childhood explain anyone? Or was this one of those questions to which the only answer is another question, and another, and another?

  All that being said, Jake owed a great debt to Pablo, for it was from Pablo, more than anyone else, more even than his aunt Rose, who had brought him into the business, that he had learned to be a decorator. This education had entailed studying not just the technicalities of wallpaper repeats and goblet pleats, not just how to distinguish real Louis Quinze from fake Louis Quinze, or French Jean-Michel Frank from Argentine Jean-Michel Frank, but the all-important art of what Pablo termed “looking the part.” “What you want is to be the sort of man whose photograph could appear next to the dictionary definition of dapper,” he told Jake, when Jake was in his twenties and far from dapper. It wasn’t difficult, just a matter of keeping your cheeks freshly shaven, and your fingernails manicured, and getting your hair cut once a week by a decent barber. To look the part, Pablo said, was to wear a tailored suit. It was to wear a Charvet tie and just a dab of Acqua di Parma on the neck. Nothing showy, nothing that advertised its own expensiveness. “Modesty,” Pablo told Jake at twenty-two, “is the hallmark of lasting worth.”

  And what was the purpose of all these cultivations? Nothing less than to project absolute competence and absolute discretion, so that when you presented your client with the antique escritoire on which you had just spent fifty thousand of her dollars, she would look past her instinctive dismay, her suspicion that it was ugly, and assure herself that, because you had chosen it, it must be beautiful.

  “Decorating is a trade, not an art,” Pablo concluded. “Never forget that, Jake. Taste has a value, it’s the commodity in which we traffic—which is why your home is your most valuable asset. Show them how you live and they’ll want to live the same way.”

  It was here, alas, that Jake faltered. In his own apartment, there was much that was neither useful nor beautiful. The trouble was not that he had tried and failed. It was that he had never tried, never so much as painted the drab white walls, or replaced the vertical blinds with curtains, or removed the cheap mirroring affixed to the sliding closet doors. Nor would he have moved even if he could have afforded to, which he could not, since the value of the apartment, when he’d bought it fifteen years before, had resided in its view of the East River, which a new high-rise now blocked. Beautiful things passed through Jake’s apartment, rested there for a while, then moved on to other apartments, other rooms. Most of these things had had many owners, and would outlast the ones for whom Jake had bought them. The impermanence of ownership was an obstacle he found he could never quite get over.

  For his part, meanwhile, every few years Pablo redecorated his townhouse and had it published in its latest iteration, usually in The World of Interiors. Enthroned like William and Mary in the morning room, Reason and Truth cast their beneficent gaze over the new scheme, for in Pablo’s mind the townhouse was an idea that with each revision he sought to further refine, to bring closer to some ideal version of itself. “It often strikes me that a house is at its best when it is empty of life,” he said to Jake at twenty-two. “At heart every aesthete is an ascetic, putting more and more of himself into his work until he has no self left. First he is the custodian, the steward. Then he, too, must leave.”

  Privately Jake thought this was bullshit. The way he saw it, there could be no decorating without a client, no home without someone to live in it. This was why, in his drawings, he always included a sketch of the client herself, usually arranging flowers or gazing out the window with a teacup in her hand. The trouble was, what he could do for others he could not do for himself. There was no room he could draw himself into, and so the rooms he occupied eluded him, resisting every effort he made to make them his, make them home.

  5

  The evening of Eva’s post-Venice dinner, Jake walked the twenty-some-odd blocks that separated their buildings. He did this not in spite of the weather but because of it. Ever since he had moved back east—how long ago had it been, three decades now?—he had taken pleasure in the astringency of northern winters, the exfoliating winds that, he fancied, quickened his Eastern European blood, so that, as he made his way up Park Avenue, his cheeks numb, he might have been his great-grandfather, whom he had never met, leading a herd of cattle over some vast plain in Kaunas province, where he had never been.

  Tonight the wind was especially cutting. No sooner did the snow touch the ground than it would be cast back up, as if the city were a snow globe being shaken. His head bent, his gloved hands in his pockets, he trudged up Park Avenue until he got to Eva’s building, where he found the doorman, his heavy coat dusted with snow, blowing his whistle for taxis. Eva must have alerted him that Jake was coming, for instead of calling up to announce his arrival, the doorman simply nodded and ushered him into the lobby, where his glasses fogged from the steam heat. Even in 2017, in buildings like Eva’s, an old-fashioned formality obtained. The elevator was manual, its oak-paneled interior decorated with heraldic devices and a frieze depicting a sylvan scene of birds and hounds and women in long robes. Next to the control panel was a pull-down oak seat, the size and shape of a toilet seat, on which Frank, the elevator man, sat down for a rest during those rare moments when his services weren’t needed. A few months before, the building’s shareholders had voted to replace the old elevator with an automatic model. Since then Eva had confided to Jake her worry over what it would be like for Frank, a man who had all his life had a métier (turning the handle to start the elevator, slowing it down as it approached its destination, stopping it at exactly the point where the inner doors aligned with the outer), to see his job reduced to the pushing of a button that the passenger could just as easily push himself. “What must it feel like to be rendered, in effect, a symbol?” Eva asked, to which Jake replied that he supposed being rendered a symbol was better than being out of a job. “Oh, but he won’t be out of a job, because of the union,” she answered with a harsh little laugh. “The union’s so strong that if just one elevator man got laid off, there’d be massive strikes. They’ve got us over a barrel. Which isn’t to say I’m not glad that he won’t be fired.” As she hoped Jake knew, Eva went on, she was immensely fond of Frank, and cared about his welfare, just as she cared about the welfare of Amalia, who kept house for her in New York, and Beatie, who kept house for her in Connecticut, and Kathy, Bruce’s secretary, whose husband had left her a week after she was diagnosed with lymphoma, “though between you and me,” Eva said to Jake, “I sometimes worry that Kathy’s taking advantage of Bruce’s generous nature. All these women lead such harsh lives,” she went on, “especially Amalia, who five days a week, from eight to four, works her fingers to the bone here, only to have to go home and do the whole thing all over again in her own apartment, because her husband’s in a wheelchair, on top of which she has her mother to care for, and two adult daughters for whom she has to be on regular call to do babysitting duty. And yet she never complains.” When Jake asked where Amalia lived, Eva gestured vaguely toward the kitchen window and said, “Oh, I don’t know, somewhere out in Queens,” as if Somewhere Out in Queens were a third-world country that only missionaries and aid workers ever traveled to, when in fact, as the crow flew, Amalia’s neighborhood was at most five miles away.

  Eva’s worry over Frank was
somewhat different. In his case, what troubled her was less the perceived tediousness of his life than the effect his being robbed of his purpose, as it were, might have on his self-esteem. Only later did it occur to Jake that this concern might be a screen for Eva’s own sense of purposelessness and the panic it induced in her, or that this panic might in turn have influenced her impulsive decision to buy the apartment in Venice.

  Eva aside, Jake was fond of Frank. Like most of the doormen and elevator men who worked in the building, he was Irish, with a florid complexion and a beer belly that strained the buttons of his burgundy uniform jacket. “Cold night, isn’t it, Mr. Lovett?” he said as Jake wiped the mist from his glasses with his handkerchief, in response to which Jake said that it seemed to him that the winters were getting colder each year, and Frank said he thought the previous winter had actually been colder than this one, but his wife insisted on the opposite. This was all the conversation they had time for, for Eva only lived on the third floor. Jake could easily have taken the stairs, but the door to the stairs was rigged so that it could only be opened from the inside in the event of a fire. The ride was ceremonial, a vestige of some protocol-laden past that left him feeling somewhat purposeless himself, there in the third-floor vestibule, checking his appearance in a mirror as, on the other side of the heavy oak door, paws scrabbled for purchase, nails skidded on waxed parquet. “Get down!” Eva called, opening the door just wide enough to let the three Bedlingtons wriggle past her ankles into the corridor, the length of which they ran twice before stopping to pee on one of her neighbors’ doormats.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “That’s the Warriners’ doormat. I want them to pee on it.”

  Then she leaned her cheek toward his lips, her lips toward his cheek, which they barely brushed, for she shrank from physical intimacies. That evening she wore her hair coiled over her ears, like Princess Leia’s. Her cardigan was cashmere, that color that Nancy Lancaster called “No Color.”