Shelter in Place

by David Leavitt

  “When did you move in with your mother?”

  “A year ago.”

  “A year and three months,” Kathy corrected.

  It amazed Bruce that she had never told him any of this. After Susie left, he asked her why. “What would have been the point?” she said. “You might as well know, I’m not the same person at home I am at the office. Home is supposed to be where you relax after work. For me work is where I relax after home.

  “Of course, it could be worse. Both home and work could be terrible. They are for most people. If it was just Michael, it would be easy. Michael’s low-maintenance.”

  “He lives with you, too?”

  “He’s never moved out. He’s only twenty-five.”

  “Couldn’t you find Susie an apartment?”

  “No one will rent to her.”

  “Can’t Lou help?”

  “You can take that up with him.”

  After the session ended, Bruce walked Kathy to her hotel. “Tonight I think I’ll take a bath,” she said as they stood together in the lobby, waiting for the elevator. “My room has this lovely, big tub, all clean and white. I’ll fill it up with bubbles and have a good soak and then wrap a towel around my head, the way women do in movies. It’s something I never get to do at home. At home there’s just the one tub, and it gets scummy.”

  This remark took Bruce aback. At first he couldn’t figure out why. Indeed, it was only when he was walking to the garage that he figured it out. When Kathy and Lou had taken out the home equity loan, she’d told him it was so they could build an addition onto their house: a master suite with a whirlpool tub. She’d asked him if he thought they could afford it, and he’d said that, yes, in his professional opinion, they could. Now she’d let the truth slip: Whatever she’d spent the money on, it wasn’t a master suite with a whirlpool tub.

  9

  The sun was setting. From the garage where he had left it, Bruce fetched the Outback and drove it to his own garage. From there he took a taxi home. It was the Monday before the inauguration, three days before Eva and Min were scheduled to leave for Venice. He wished it wasn’t a Monday. He wished it was a Tuesday, since on Tuesday nights Eva always had friends over and he was absolved of the need to talk. On Tuesday nights he could just sit back and let the bright chatter wash over him, whereas on Mondays, by long tradition, he and Eva stayed home and had one of the three pastas that constituted her culinary repertoire: penne with shrimp and asparagus, linguine with pesto, new potatoes, and green beans, or fusilli with ham, peas, cream, and the tomato sauce that Amalia made in batches and froze. On Monday nights they ate at the kitchen table. They went to bed early. For most of his married life, Monday nights had been Bruce’s favorite; if it were up to him, he’d once told Jake, each week would include extra Mondays, three or four at least. Now he dreaded Mondays, because these were the nights when he and Eva had to talk, and therefore the nights when he was most likely to have to lie to her.

  No sooner had he let himself into the apartment than Ralph, Caspar, and Isabel laid siege to him, their welcome so ecstatic a stranger might have thought he’d just come back from a war. “It’s me,” he called to Eva, hanging up his coat and shaking the dogs off his legs.

  “In here,” she answered from the kitchen.

  He pushed through the swinging door. When he saw the package of fusilli on the counter, the water bubbling in one pot and the tomato sauce in another, his mouth watered. A feeling of homecoming suffused him. “I’m afraid I’m running a little late,” Eva said, reaching to open the refrigerator and at the same time giving him a kiss that was cursory but not without tenderness. To his own surprise, he held her fast for a moment, breathing in her familiar scent of perfume (Jardins de Bagatelle) and shampoo (Molton Brown) and the creams and serums (La Prairie) that she rubbed every day onto her face, her neck and arms, around her eyes. As was her habit on Mondays, she wore her hair in a loose ponytail. She had on Gap jeans, an avocado-green cashmere turtleneck, the same apron that Matt Pierce wore when he cooked for her.

  For a few seconds she withstood his embrace, then slipped out of it, opened the refrigerator, and took out the bowl of grated Parmesan. Bruce sat at the table, which was already laid, and on which a bottle of red wine breathed.

  “How was your day?” she asked.

  “Oh, you know, the usual,” he said—which was not, strictly speaking, a lie, since on Mondays going with Kathy to the outpatient center had become the usual. “And yours?”

  “I had a bit of a scene with Amalia today.”

  “Oh? What happened?”

  “Well, this morning when I went into the kitchen, she was watching Good Morning America. Of course the second she saw me, she switched it off. I only caught a glimpse, but it was enough. That face. One thought pollutes the day … Who said that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Anyway, I was so bent out of shape, I decided to have a talk with her there and then, so I sat her down at the table. ‘Amalia,’ I said, ‘this is my house, and in my house, when that man appears on the television, we change the channel.’ ”

  “What did she say to that?”

  “Nothing. She just nodded in that way she has, that way that means ‘I’m hearing you, but I’m not listening to you.’ So then I said, ‘Amalia, how can you bear to look at him when he wants to build a wall along the border and send all your relatives back to Honduras?’ And she got very snippy and said, ‘All my relatives are legal.’ ”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  “That all her relatives are legal?”

  “No, that she got snippy.”

  “Why should she have gotten snippy?”

  “Well, it isn’t really your business, is it?”

  “She needs to know what she’s up against.”

  “I’m sure she knows exactly what she’s up against.”

  The water for the pasta had come to a boil. Eva threw in some sea salt, and the water surged and spat from the pot, hitting the stove’s control panel so hard it switched on the convection oven. She screamed and jumped back.

  “Jesus!” Bruce said, leaping up and knocking over his chair.

  “I’m fine,” Eva said, putting her thumb in her mouth. “Get out of the way. Damn. I forgot to turn the heat off before I added the salt. Why did I forget? I never forget.”

  With a pair of potholders she moved the water to another burner, brought it back to a boil, and shook in the fusilli.

  “It’s just a little burn,” she said, looking at her thumb.

  “I’ll get the Neosporin.”

  “It’s all right, I don’t need Neosporin.”

  Bruce sat down again. He poured himself a glass of wine.

  “It’s him,” she said. “He’s that water. That hissing, spitting water.” She tested one of the fusilli for doneness. “Min says I was the same when Bush Two was elected, but I don’t think that’s true. I mean, I never hated Bush personally. The thing about—there I go, I almost said his name. I’m afraid to say his name. It’s like a curse. The thing about that man is that what I feel for him is pure hatred, absolute blind hatred … Honestly, Bruce, I think the world’s gone mad. How do you live in a world that’s gone mad without going mad yourself? By the way, we couldn’t get rooms at the Gritti. Instead we’ll be staying at this new hotel—a friend of Min’s is writing it up for Travel & Leisure, after which it’ll be huge, but for now hardly anyone knows about it. She says it’s a twenty-first-century take on the old-fashioned Venetian pensione—you know, like the one Katharine Hepburn stays at in Summertime. Speaking of which, do you know what Sandra told me? The reason Katharine Hepburn had the shakes all those years was because when she was filming Summertime, she fell into a canal and caught some disease.”

  “Not a great advertisement for Venice, is it?”

  “I doubt it’s true. It’s probably just a legend.”

  Eva drained the pasta, tossed it with the sauce, and heaped it into bowls. They ate with spoons. “Don’t eat so
fast,” Eva said, which was what she always said on Monday nights.

  “Sorry,” Bruce said. And to himself: Chew each bite ten times.

  “I hope you’ll be all right while I’m away. Will you go to Connecticut this weekend?”

  “Probably not.”

  “I figured you wouldn’t, so I phoned Rachel Weisenstein and she’s invited you to dinner on Friday.”

  He put down his spoon. “And what if I don’t want to go to dinner at the Weisensteins’ on Friday?”

  “All right, no need to bite my head off.”

  “I’m not biting your head off. I’m just saying, you’ll only be out of town for ten days. I don’t need babysitters.”

  “Fine. I’ll call her and tell her you can’t come. I’ll make something up.”

  “No, don’t do that. I’ll do my duty.”

  He returned his attention to his food.

  “You’ve never liked them, have you?”

  “Who?”

  “Aaron and Rachel.”

  “He’s a loudmouth. I was hoping for a break.”

  “From what?”

  “Just a break.”

  Now it was Eva who put down her spoon. “You’re looking forward to my being gone, aren’t you?”

  “Well, and what if I am? You are.”

  “It’s being somewhere else I’m looking forward to, not being away from you.”

  Despite his chewing each bite ten times, his bowl was empty. “Who’s for seconds?” he asked, as he asked every Monday night.

  “I wouldn’t care for any more, thank you,” Eva said.

  She pushed away her bowl, which was still three-quarters full.

  “Actually, now that I think about it, I wouldn’t either,” he said. “I need to watch my waistline.”

  He got up and began rinsing his dishes in the sink. “One thing’s for sure,” he said. “You’ll get great pasta in Venice.”

  There was no answer.

  “Eva?”

  But she had left the room.

  At nine he took the dogs for their walk. An earlier rain had left the potholes full of water that darkened their paws.

  As he turned onto Madison, he ran into Alec Warriner, surreptitiously kicking a turd from where Sparky had deposited it into the sidewalk grate.

  “Caught in the act,” Alec said. “I forgot to bring a bag.”

  “A likely story,” Bruce said. “Anyway, don’t worry, I’ll let you off with a warning. This time.”

  For the first time in their lives, the men walked together. Whereas in the elevator Bruce’s dogs had ganged up on Sparky, out here, on neutral ground, they ignored him. Paying no heed to another dog, pretending it wasn’t there—this was the canine way of indicating acceptance. Often Bruce wished people would behave more like dogs.

  “He’s reading the newspaper,” Alec said when Sparky, for the fourth time in five minutes, stopped to sniff the pavement.

  “I wonder if they learn more from theirs than we do from ours,” Bruce said.

  “It’s hard to imagine they learn less,” Alec said. He looked Bruce in the eye. “You don’t have kids, do you?”

  Bruce shook his head.

  “Me, I’ve got two daughters. Well, had. Oh, sorry, that sounds like one of them died. What I mean is that our elder daughter just disowned us. That’s the word she used—disowned—when she wrote to tell her mother and me that she plans never to speak to us again, and that she no longer regards us as her parents, and that if we make any further attempts to contact her, she’ll have our phone numbers and emails blocked.”

  “What brought that on?”

  “The election. It was because we voted for Trump. Tell your wife if you like. I’m sure it’ll make her feel better.”

  This embarrassed Bruce. “You know, if I thought it would make any difference, I’d apologize for Eva,” he said. “Short of that, I’d tell you to take her behavior with a grain of salt, only I know a grain of salt wouldn’t be nearly enough. You’d have to swallow a tablespoon of salt, maybe more, certainly more than anyone should be expected to stomach. Anyway, I’m sorry about your daughter—that she’s so angry.”

  “She’s angry? What about me? Of course, the great pity of it is that this is the daughter who lives near us. Well, nearer. Nearness has been relative for Kitty and me since our youngest moved to Phnom Penh.”

  “In Cambodia?”

  “Affirmative. That’s Rebecca. We haven’t seen her in three years. Judy’s in Boston. She’s a lawyer, with three kids she now says we’re not to make any attempt to contact or she’ll get a restraining order. You can imagine what that’s done to Kitty.”

  “And all this because of the election?”

  “According to her, yes. In retrospect, I see that my mistake was telling her how I voted in the first place. I should have lied, I should have said that at the last minute I had a change of heart and voted for Hillary, only I couldn’t—and not just because I knew she’d never believe me. The truth is, my conscience just won’t allow me to say I voted for that woman, not even to preserve my relationship with my daughter.”

  “Do you really think Hillary’s that bad?”

  “Your wife thinks we’re evil. Well, we think she’s evil. Hillary, I mean.”

  “So you’re saying you voted more against Hillary than for Trump?”

  “I know that’s what you’d like me to be saying, but it’s not. The fact is, I was pro-Trump early on. At first I kept quiet about it. I mean, even with my Republican friends, when the question came up, I’d say I hadn’t made up my mind yet, or that I wanted to see how the debates played out, or that all I cared about was keeping her out of office and getting the corporate income tax below twenty-one percent. Now I’m convinced that a lot of us were doing that—lying to each other. It affected the polls, I’m convinced.

  “The fact is, on election night we were the ones who were expecting the worst. Kitty and I invited some friends over, mostly so that we could get drunk and commiserate. Believe me, no one could have been more surprised than we were when the results started coming in. That was why we went a little wild. We couldn’t believe it. It seemed like a miracle.”

  “One man’s miracle is another’s nightmare, I guess.”

  “Mind you, I get why you dislike him. I really do. The thing is, though, I also get him. I mean, sure, he’s crass, but at least he’s our crass, you know what I’m saying? New York crass. Now, Rand Paul—there’s a guy I don’t get. There’s a guy who seems to be from another planet. Guys like Donald, I’ve known them my whole life. At Wharton, I was just a few years behind him. I’ll admit it, I’ve been to Mar-a-Lago a few times. Crazy tacky, sure, but at the same time, there’s something sort of fun about it, like going to Disney World and sleeping in Cinderella’s castle. Now, I’m not saying we’re friends, or even that I like him especially, I’m just saying that I understand him, how his brain works, what he’s after, which is more than I can say for … But I’d rather not say her name. It gives me the heebie-jeebies to say her name.”

  “Don’t you worry that he’s a loose cannon?”

  “And she’s not? I mean, just for example, right now the Pelosi crowd’s in a tizzy about his having the nuclear codes, right? Well, the way I see it, the really scary thing would be her having the nuclear codes, because she’s such a hawk. As for him, tell me honestly, do you really think he’d ever do anything to put all his precious real estate at risk?”

  “Have you told your daughter this?”

  “Judy? She’d hang up before I got three words out. Now that I think about it, it was probably because of her that I kept my mouth shut all that time about voting for Trump. But now that she’s not speaking to me, my attitude is, why hold back? Why not come out of the closet? Why not throw a party?”

  “Still, you must miss her sometimes.”

  “My wife misses her. As for me … I have to be honest, there are times when I wish we’d never had kids in the first place. A whole category of difficulties removed.�
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  “And yet there’s a loneliness. Especially as you get older. This feeling of something not being there that should.”

  “As opposed to something being there that shouldn’t?”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “You tell me. Aren’t you finance guys supposed to see every loss as a potential gain?”

  Bruce did not reply. Alec was right. The idea that losses could be turned into gains was so fundamental to his way of understanding the world that he had never questioned it.

  They turned left. “My secretary has cancer,” he said, not quite believing he was saying it.

  “I’m sorry to hear that. What kind?”

  “Lymphoma … She’s a good person. She’s worked for me for twenty years. I’m trying to help her, only I have to keep it from my wife.”

  “You mean you want to give her money?”

  It was only when Alec said it that Bruce realized that this was exactly what he meant.

  “If I did, and Eva found out, she’d be angry. She’d say I was getting too involved.”

  “Translation—she’d think you were sleeping with her. Are you sleeping with her?”

  “No, of course not. And you’re wrong—Eva would never think that.”

  “Why not? It’s the obvious thing to think. Sparky, no!” The dog was lunging at a shadow, obliging Alec to reel him in. “Well, if you want my opinion, the solution is obvious. You should sleep with your secretary. I mean, as long as you’re going through all the trouble of keeping the thing a secret, you might as well get something out of it, right? Oh, God, was that an offensive thing to say? I guess it was. Sorry, I’ve got a bit of a problem with that. I’m like Sparky, my wife says. I leap before I look.”