Shelter in Place

by David Leavitt

  When Bruce was done speaking, he took a long gulp from the tiny bottle of Evian he’d gotten out of the minibar fridge. He rubbed his eyes. He wiped his nose.

  “Well, what do you think?” he said.

  “What do I think?” she said. “That you’re a good man. Too good for your own good.”

  “Of course, when I came up with the idea, I had no clue that Eva was going to find this apartment. In fact, it was the next day that she told me.”

  “If you’d known, would you have done anything differently?”

  “I’ve thought about that. I don’t think I would have. I think I still would have given Kathy the money. What I wouldn’t have done was let the business with the apartment get so out of hand.”

  “Do you want to stop it?”

  “In some ways, yes. I mean, let’s say you were one of my clients and you were asking me, from an investment standpoint, if I thought buying an apartment in Venice was a good idea. What would I tell you? I’d tell you that from an investment standpoint, you’d do better to buy real estate in Florida or Hawaii or New Mexico—anywhere in the States, really—since buying abroad invariably entangles you in a whole separate tax system, legal system, economic system. I’d tell you that, then I’d tell you to do what you want.”

  “But I’m not one of your clients. Neither is Eva.”

  “My policy is that what people want is none of my business. My business is what they can afford.”

  “Even your wife? Even yourself?”

  “Oh, what I want … That’s a question I’ve only just found an answer for.” He smiled as he said this. “As for Eva, I can only take her at her word. I suppose what rankles me is that there are so many people at so much more risk than she is. And yet the only person she’s out to save is herself.”

  “Whereas you’re out to save Kathy.”

  “At least that’s altruistic. It’s not just self-preservation.”

  “And yet self-preservation has one virtue, which is that it doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is. With altruism, there’s almost always a hidden motive. The benefactor wants to be lionized or, worse, have the person he’s helping at his mercy. Otherwise why would people who give money to universities want buildings named after them?”

  “Neither is the case here. No one knows what I’m doing for Kathy except Kathy. And her kids. And you.”

  “So what happens next? What happens, for instance, when Eva finds out about the check?”

  “She won’t. I’ve made sure of that. I wrote it from an account she doesn’t know about.”

  “And yet she knows something’s up.”

  “Something, but not what.”

  “You could just tell her.”

  “Why should I? What business is it of hers?”

  “Married people’s lives are always each other’s business. Even after they get divorced, that’s true. In addition to which—and please forgive me if I’m stepping out of bounds here—there’s the issue of the money. Of course, I don’t know exactly how much this apartment is likely to cost you, but I can make a rough estimate. I mean, am I right that we’re talking about a pretty substantial outlay of cash here?”

  “Yes.”

  “To which you have to add the money you gave Kathy.”

  “Yes.”

  “Which, if Eva learned about it, she’d probably find … concerning, right? I mean, to the point that it might make her think twice about the expense—”

  “I shudder to imagine what she’d think.”

  “She’s not stupid, Bruce. She knows what you can afford and what you can’t.”

  “Afford—it’s amazing how that word keeps coming up. And yet what does it mean, really? I mean, when I think of my clients, if they were to decide to just stuff all their money into a safe behind a painting, or have some huge cellar full of gold coins into which they could dive headlong like that duck, Uncle what’s-his-name—”

  “—they’d have broken bones.”

  “—they’d only get poorer.”

  “My own ideas of finance, I’ll admit, are crude. Basically they’re derived from nineteenth-century novels. You know, ‘Miss Bleek had five hundred a year.’ Things seem less clear-cut now.”

  “I doubt they were so clear-cut then.”

  “You still haven’t answered my question, you know. You still haven’t told me if you can—this time I won’t say afford—if you can manage it. Not to put too fine a point on it, I have no idea how rich you are. I mean, I know you’re rich. I just don’t know how rich.”

  “Rich enough that I can’t really say how rich I am.”

  “But how can that be? Everyone has a net worth.”

  “Once you pass a certain point, your net worth ceases to correspond to anything real. It’s less a matter of what you have than what you can get hold of.”

  “In that case, I want you to consider something. I want you to consider the possibility that buying the apartment might actually be a good idea. Not as an investment, and not for Eva, but for you.” Sandra was silent for a moment, letting the remark sink in. “I didn’t think about saying that before I said it. If I had, I’d never have had the courage to get it out, because of course I know it’s way too soon to be talking about these things. I know there’s a gun I’m jumping, but sometimes you have to. You have to. Even if there’s every chance the thing—affair, relationship, whatever you want to call it—will peter out. And if it does, so much the better, because it will make life that much easier for all of us. But what if it doesn’t? I guess what it comes down to is that if Eva buys the apartment, she’ll start spending a lot of time in Venice, and there’ll be that much more time that you and I will have here. By ourselves. It’s a chance to try it out, to give ourselves a trial run, and if we can have that chance and we don’t take it … well, I’ll regret that. Maybe you won’t, but I will. Because there have been other times—I’m full of clichés today—when the iron was hot and I didn’t strike. And I regret them.”

  “Is the iron hot now?”

  “For me, yes. Is it for you?”

  “Isn’t the answer obvious?”

  “Last Saturday, when we were at Grady’s, you talked about the rush. I like the rush, too. I like a little danger. And yet, given the choice, I’d rather have time with you, alone, in a bed big enough that we can both sleep in it without doing permanent injury to our spines, than a few minutes in a narrow bed waiting for Grady to get home, or in a hotel room where God knows who else has been in the bed. And we won’t get that, Bruce, we won’t get what we want—at least what I want—unless Eva gets what she wants, which is the apartment. And if she doesn’t get it … I don’t know Eva that well, I won’t pretend I do, but I know this about her—that her longings are as fragile as they are ardent. When the iron cools, so does she. I mean that if this chance falls through, she might not look for another. And we’ll have lost ours.”

  For a few seconds Bruce was silent. Then he said, “This is all so new to me. Not just you, or this, but this whole way of thinking.”

  “Then let me say one more thing. You’ve told me about your money situation. Well, let me tell you about mine. When my grandmother died, she left me five million dollars, more or less. That’s my money. It’s not community property. Rico can’t touch it.”

  “Good. It means you don’t have to worry.”

  “Oh, but that’s not why I’m telling you. The reason I’m telling you is … well, I have wealth, and you’re—what is it you are? A wealth management consultant?”

  “Wealth management adviser.”

  “Whatever. Here’s what I’m proposing—that I give you my wealth and you manage it.”

  “That wouldn’t be ethical. If you want an adviser, I can recommend someone else.”

  “Believe me, I understand why you might think it’s a conflict of interest. And it would be if you’d suggested it, but you didn’t. I’m the one who’s suggesting it. And the reason I’m suggesting it is that if you have access to my
money, and at some point find yourself short of cash, you could use it—”

  “Sandra—”

  “Of course, we’d have a signed agreement. It would be understood that any money of mine that you used, you’d have to get my permission first, and that you’d reimburse me. With interest if you like.” She put her hands on his neck. “I’m not trying to buy you. I just want to do for you what you’re doing for Kathy. Make things easier. Give you a backup plan, in case the economy goes south, or haywire, or Trump changes the tax code, or the plumbing in the new apartment turns out to be a thousand years old.”

  “But why?”

  “So that we can have our chance.”

  “I don’t know what to say. I don’t even know what to think. All my life, I was sure my course was mapped out for me.”

  “It was. But now you’ve crossed a boundary.”

  “But how did it happen? That’s what I can’t fathom.”

  “You did it yourself,” Sandra said. “You did it the day you decided to help Kathy.”

  26

  “Time present and time past,” Aaron said.

  It was five in the afternoon, the first Saturday of spring, and they were sitting—Aaron, Rachel, Jake, Sandra, and Matt Pierce—on Eva’s back porch, watching Bruce trying to get the fountain on the patio to start. Eva herself was gone, as was Min. That afternoon they had left for Venice, where in a few days Bruce would meet them for the closing.

  Aaron had on the pussy hat. “Time present and time past,” he repeated, pulling the flaps down toward his ears. “Why did Eliot go out of fashion, do you think? Was it because he was an anti-Semite?”

  “His fall from fashion preceded his fall from grace,” Matt said. “Not the usual sequence.”

  “T. S. Eliot—he was the one who wrote Cats, right?” Sandra said.

  “Don’t overplay the ignorance card,” Aaron said. “It’s only charming up to a point.”

  “And in Eliot’s case I’m not sure it’s even accurate to say that he’s fallen from grace,” Matt said.

  “Forgive me if this is a gauche question, but what are you doing here?” Aaron said. “I thought you’d been banished.”

  “I had, but then Bruce called and asked me to come up for the weekend. It’s because Eva’s away, I suppose.”

  “Do you know, this is the first time I’ve been here without Eva,” Rachel said. “It makes me feel self-conscious. As if I’m breaking some rule.”

  “I wonder if she knows we’re here,” Jake said.

  “Why should it matter?” Sandra said. “Why should she mind if Bruce has you up for the weekend?”

  “She wouldn’t mind Bruce having us up,” Matt said, “she’d mind his not telling her. Except for me—she’d mind his having me up.”

  “I’ll be the first to admit it, I miss her,” Jake said. “There’s an emptiness without her. For better or worse, she’s the sun around which we orbit.”

  “In that regard, I don’t see that her absence makes any difference,” Sandra said, “since you’re orbiting around her regardless.”

  “And you?”

  “Me? I don’t count. I’m the outsider.”

  “Funny, it doesn’t feel like that,” Rachel said. “It feels like you’ve been part of this house as long as we have.”

  “Look at Bruce,” Aaron said, standing and walking to the windows. “Look at that concentration. It isn’t patience. It’s nothing like patience. And yet until he gets that fountain working, he won’t quit. He’ll stay there all night if he has to.”

  “Instead of disquisiting on his determination, have you thought about offering to help him?” Rachel said.

  “I don’t think he wants any help,” Sandra said. “I think he wants to do it himself.”

  “Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future … That perhaps in the second line—do you think it’s a failure of nerve, Sandra?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Perhaps perhaps is always a failure of nerve,” Matt said.

  “Is that a joke?” Sandra said.

  “You know, I don’t actually think it was the anti-Semitism that cost Eliot his place in the stratosphere,” Rachel said. “I think it was Harold Bloom, in the eighties, when he got the Yale English department to change the title of the prerequisite course for the major from ‘Major English Poets, Chaucer to Eliot’ to ‘Major English Poets, Chaucer to Stevens.’ ”

  “Rachel will take any opportunity to remind us that she went to Yale,” Aaron said.

  “You know perfectly well that’s not why I brought it up,” Rachel said. “I brought it up to make a point, which is that the turn against Eliot happened a good two decades before critics started calling him on the anti-Semitic stuff.”

  “For years I’ve been ashamed to admit how much I love Eliot,” Aaron said. “It was only after I lost my job that I decided to come out of the closet. Because really, you shouldn’t be ashamed of the things you love, the things that made you who you are, and that was what The Waste Land was for me. When I was in high school I must have read it a thousand times. Ten thousand times.”

  “I never said it wasn’t a great poem.”

  “Oh, but you believe it isn’t. It’s all right. Yale indoctrinated you, as it probably would have me—if I’d gotten in.”

  “Must you keep bringing that up? More than a quarter of a century on and he’s still bitter that he didn’t get into Yale.”

  “Not half as bitter as I am that you did.”

  “If the strength of our feelings was in proportion to the events that provoke them, the world would not be the place it is,” Jake said.

  “Look, now the dogs are getting in on the act,” Sandra said. “They’re trying to distract him, to get him to play with them. Good luck. They never will.”

  “I’ve never known dogs to eat so fast as these do,” Matt said. “This afternoon I gave Isabel a piece of cheese and she wolfed it down. I doubt she even tasted it.”

  “Sometimes having a thing matters most,” Sandra said.

  “And then she wanted another piece, and another.”

  “That’s why it’s better not to want things,” Jake said.

  “But if we never wanted things, we’d never go anywhere,” Rachel said.

  “Exactly,” Jake said.

  “Humankind cannot stand very much reality,” Aaron said.

  At last the fountain started. At its first tentative spurt, the observers on the porch applauded. The dogs barked. Bruce bowed.

  “Congratulations,” Jake said, coming outside with Sandra.

  “Fall seven times and stand up eight,” Bruce said, wiping water from his face.

  He went inside to dry off and the dogs followed him, leaving Jake and Sandra to gaze at the fountain in the dusk light. “Spring always gets a jump on me,” Jake said. “Look, the daffodils are done. The crocuses are nearly done. The tulips will be done before I’m back.”

  “So you’ve decided to go?”

  “Yes, I’m going. It’s funny, from the beginning Min treated it as a fait accompli, as if it was really just a matter of admitting that I had no choice. Well, she was right.”

  “When do you leave?”

  “After Eva gets back. I want a week or so alone there, to look the place over. Then she’ll fly over and join me.”

  “Will Bruce come with her?”

  “I doubt it. Min might. You know that Enfilade is shutting down, right?”

  “Really? Why?”

  “The same reason as with so many other magazines. Not enough readers, not enough ads.”

  “Poor Indira. To have left one magazine for another and then to have it shuttered—”

  “Don’t worry about Indira, she’s already got herself another job. It’s a new magazine called mood board, all lowercase. A quarterly, very chic, bound like a book. Jimmy Mortimer, Clydie’s son, is putting up the money.”

  “In other words, Clydie is.”

  “So now the question is whether Indira will tak
e Min with her. And if she doesn’t, what Min will do next.”

  “She’ll have to find another job.”

  “Or maybe she’s finally ready to wind up her magazine career and try something else.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, Eva’s going to need someone to keep her company in Venice, right? I mean, when Bruce isn’t there. And that’ll be a full-time job, for which Min is eminently qualified.”

  A breeze came up. “So lovely, these first warm days,” Sandra said, staring gravely at the fountain. “All we have to do now is wait for the blizzard.”

  “What blizzard?”

  “The one that always shows up just as spring is taking hold, killing everything that’s just come into bloom.”

  “But you don’t know there’ll be a blizzard.”

  “It’s what I fear, which for me is as good as knowing.”

  “Were we always like this, do you think? Governed by fear?”

  “Once bitten, forever shy. I suppose the way I see it is that if I accept the blizzard as inevitable, at least I won’t be blindsided by it.”

  “And then if it doesn’t come, its not coming will seem like a kindness.”

  “Well, we have to find good news somewhere, don’t we? Even if it’s just in the worst-case scenario not happening.”

  “And what are you two talking about?” Rachel asked, emerging so suddenly it was as if a piece of shadow had broken off from the dusk.

  “The seasons,” Jake said.

  “I remember reading an interview with Teresa Stratas,” Sandra said. “She was talking about sitting with Lotte Lenya when she was dying. And she asked her which was her favorite season, and Lenya said, ‘I love them all.’ ”

  “I wish I could be so generous, but I have very strong feelings about the seasons,” Rachel said. “My favorite, unquestionably, is spring, followed by fall, followed by winter, followed by summer.”

  “I’d put winter second,” Jake said.

  “I’d put it first,” Sandra said. “It’s so nice to be in bed with someone else on a cold night.”