Shelter in Place Page 4

  He helped her scoop up the dogs and they went inside. The apartment was capacious without being grand. From the front door a corridor led into the living room, which in turn segued into a dining room that did double duty as a library. Off the living room, another door cordoned off the two principal bedrooms, each of which had its own bath and one of which Jake had done up as a study. All these rooms looked out onto Park Avenue. On the opposite side, a swinging door opened onto the bright blue-and-white kitchen, the laundry room, and the tiny maid’s room and bath, which had views of the interior courtyard. Since Amalia came only during the day, Jake had remade the maid’s quarters into a candy box of a guest room, its walls covered in the same pink-striped cotton as the Roman blind and the bedspread. So far as he was aware, no one had ever slept in this room.

  Eva helped him off with his coat, hung it on the rack (midcentury Danish), and escorted him into the living room. Here, in the wingback chair (early twentieth century, purchased at an estate sale in Ossining), Min Marable sat drinking a martini. Min was from Quincy, Florida. She was something in magazines—food magazines, travel magazines, shelter magazines. Usually she was just out of a job or just starting a job. Often she began her sentences, “When I was at Self …” or “When I was at Good Housekeeping …” or “When I was at Marie Claire …” Although she was younger than Eva, she looked older, with her hard agate-like eyes, her red-lacquered hair, the tortoiseshell reading glasses that hung from a silver chain around her neck.

  “Jake,” she said, hoisting herself out of her chair and giving him a boozy hug.

  “Bruce not home yet?” Jake asked.

  “He should be any minute,” Eva said. “He had to stay late at the office for a phone call from Australia.”

  “Is it yesterday in Australia?” Min said. “Or is it tomorrow? I can’t remember. When I was at Travel & Leisure—”

  “Sit down, Jake,” Eva said, opening a bottle of Perrier, since she knew he didn’t drink.

  He sat across from Min, on the loveseat (his own design, covered in a blue coral-patterned silk). One thing you learn quickly in the decorating trade is how little attention people pay to where they live. Ask a client how many windows she has in her living room and she will say, “Four? No—six?” Then ask her husband. “Six?” he will say. “No—four?”

  Eva’s living room had four windows, all curtained generously in a hand-blocked lily-and-auricula chintz. On the third window from the left, a tieback had come loose. Except for Amalia, no one but Jake would have noticed the tieback, just as no one but Jake would have noticed the scratch on the Hepplewhite credenza, or the niche that was just a hair too shallow for the bookcase it held, or the corner where the stripes on the wallpaper didn’t quite line up. (They never do in old buildings, since the walls are never plumb.)

  This is not to say that he was not pleased with Eva’s apartment. In fact, he considered it some of the best work he’d ever done. The shade of blue on the entryway walls, for instance—it had taken him days to get it right. He’d ground the pigments himself. And that linen on the window-seat cushions, the color of coffee ice cream—he’d found a single bolt of it, by chance, in a thrift shop on Wooster Street.

  And who would have guessed how perfectly, if improbably, it would match the olive-green damask on the fauteuils?

  He would have.

  With a pair of silver tongs, Eva dropped a slice of lime into the tumbler of Perrier, then handed it to him. She herself was drinking white wine. Min got up and mixed herself another martini.

  “Well, aren’t you going to tell him?” she said.

  “Now, Min, don’t be naughty,” Eva said. “I told you, I want to wait for Bruce.”

  “Tell me what?” Jake said.

  “Nothing that can’t wait, so hush up.”

  “When we were in Venice, we bought an apartment! Oh!” Min clapped her hand over her mouth.

  “Min!”

  “I’m sorry, it just slipped out. Oh, but Jake, it’s gorgeous. Terrazzo floors, high ceilings, a view over the Grand Canal. And it needs a total overhaul. I mean, total. A decorator’s dream.”

  Right then keys clicked in the door. Into the apartment Bruce carried the smell of Manhattan winter, the ingredients of which include (but are not limited to) fir needles, the duct-taped Naugahyde upholstery of taxis, roasted chestnuts, cigarettes, and the steam that rises from subway grates.

  “I’m afraid Min’s let the cat out of the bag,” Eva said as he kissed her cheek.

  “Cat?” Bruce asked. “What cat? Where?” He was talking to the Bedlingtons, who did not react. They are realists, those dogs. They will not be bamboozled into thinking there is a cat where there is no cat.

  “I mean about the apartment,” Eva said.

  “You’re not planning to redo it again, are you?” Bruce said.

  “Oh, hush. You know perfectly well what I’m talking about. The apartment in Venice.”

  “Ah, Venice.” Bruce winked. “Well, Jake, you know the rule around here. Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets.”

  “It was a coup de foudre,” Min said.

  “It was not a coup de foudre,” Eva said. “I’m buying that apartment for a perfectly sound reason. It’s so that, if we have to leave the country in a hurry, we’ll have somewhere to go.”

  “And little man, Lola wants you,” Bruce sang to himself as he hung up his coat. “You see, Jake, my wife is convinced that with Tr—”

  “Don’t say that name.”

  “Sorry—that with him-who-shall-not-be-named in the White House, we’re on the road to a dictatorship.”

  “Martial law. Press censorship.”

  “Prison camps.”

  “You think I’m overreacting,” Eva said. “Well, so did the Jews who stayed in France—think the ones who left were overreacting. They thought that because they were French citizens, they’d be safe. But they weren’t safe.”

  “Mine is not to reason why,” Bruce said, then went to wash his hands. Jake followed Eva into the dining room. There is only so much a decorator can do to make a room beautiful. At a certain point the responsibility must shift to the client, and in this regard Eva was the best client he had ever had. An old hand-embroidered Portuguese cloth covered the table. The tole sconces, a design of his own, were dimmed to their lowest wattage. Silver candlesticks threw a skipping light onto the curtains, which were trimmed in the same moss fringe as the coffee-colored cushion on the window seat, on which the Bedlingtons now lay in a heap—such decorative dogs, with their fleece-like coats, the pliant musculature that allowed them, when they curled up, to chew the ends of their tails.

  From a Coalport tureen Eva ladled out sorrel soup. It tasted like dirt.

  She said, “You must promise to do it, Jake. You know I don’t trust anyone else.”

  This was true. Eva trusted him because he could read her. It was a mysterious gift; the only gift, Pablo liked to say.

  Of course, it had to go both ways. The client had to be willing to let go of what she thought of as her taste. Some refused. Such a client might object to a certain shade of red, saying, “It’s just not me.” Or she might nix the perfect console for her dining room because she didn’t like the way it looked in a picture. Or buy some hideous sideboard at auction for three times what it was worth and then complain that the cut-silk velvet for the bedroom was “a bit bordello.”

  Such clients didn’t understand. The point wasn’t to create a room that reflected their personalities. It was to create a room where they belonged. What was it Diana Vreeland had said? “Give them what they don’t know they want.”

  Eva was the better sort of client. That is to say, when Jake worked for her, she simply described the mood she was after and left the rest to him.

  And he, in turn, gave her rooms where every object was in harmony with every other object—but where she herself was the object without which the whole could not cohere.

  She appreciated this. She liked a room that only her own presence could complete.


  He asked her to tell him more about the Venice apartment, and for some minutes she and Min held forth, speaking over and under each other. The layout was described, as were the floors, the fireplaces, the stuccoed and frescoed ceilings. Min handed her phone to Jake so that he could look at the photos she had taken, from which he could discern little more than light and shadow and the murk of large furniture.

  “Count on Eva’s eye,” Min said, retrieving the phone. “She has a genius for spotting diamonds in the raw.”

  “Don’t be absurd,” Eva said. “I’m not a genius.”

  “Oh, but you are.”

  “No, I’m not. To say that—it’s like saying that the collector who buys a Picasso is on a par with Picasso.”

  “He is if he finds the Picasso in a junk shop.”

  “No, he isn’t. The ability to recognize beauty is not the same as the ability to create beauty. It is not a category of genius.”

  Chastened, Min ate a spoonful of dirt. The exchange was typical of them. Because Min relied on Eva to take her along on trips she could not afford on her own, she dosed their conversations with flattery. Yet the flattery had to be leavened with just a little provocation. To be Eva’s minion, you also had to be her adversary—but just a little.

  Jake never did learn what “Min” was short for.

  “How did you find the place?” he asked.

  “Well, that’s the best part of the story,” Min said. “A countess invited us to tea.”

  “She’s not a countess,” Eva said.

  “A fascinating woman—she’s lived most of her life in the States, but then she inherited this palazzo, and now she’s impoverished herself trying to keep it up. That’s why she’s selling her flat.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Ursula Brandolino-Foote.”

  “Ursula Brandolin-Foote,” Eva corrected. “There’s no o at the end.”

  Jake picked up his water glass and drank. He didn’t want his surprise at hearing the name to register.

  Somewhat abruptly, Eva got up and started clearing the soup plates. It should be noted that all this time, in the kitchen, her friend James had been lurking. Or maybe it wasn’t James, maybe it was Andrew or Sean or Tom. They were interchangeable, these gay editorial assistants and assistant stage managers and aspiring graphic designers whom Eva befriended, cultivated, and often, because they never had any money, hired to cater her dinner parties.

  And now, through the same swinging door, Michael or Peter or Sam emerged, only it wasn’t Michael or Peter or Sam, it was Matt Pierce, he of the botched scones, wearing a green apron over his street clothes and bearing the main course on a silver tray—poached salmon fillets, boiled potatoes flecked with parsley, steamed green beans.

  A boring dinner. A grown-up dinner. For a few seconds Bruce gazed at the platter, as if hoping that something more appetizing might materialize: a twirl of buttered noodles or a quenelle of creamed spinach. Nothing did.

  They ate. Every now and then, Bruce cast his glance over Min’s head and out the window, at the snow billowing in the wind, which looked as if it were falling upward. According to his business card, Bruce was a “wealth management adviser.” Exactly what this meant, Jake had never quite grasped. In New York there is a whole category of careers the logistics of which only their practitioners understand, and that ordinary people understand only as the source of steady and voluminous incomes. By and large these careers involve money—its manipulation, mutation, transfiguration.

  What was obvious was that Bruce revered his wife, and was also a little spooked by her—as if he could never quite decide whether the passions that intermittently seized her (such as the Venice apartment) were the whims of a neurotic, or evidence that she was a Great Visionary Woman, someone like Isabella Stewart Gardner.

  Isabella Stewart Gardner, by the way, had been the subject of her honors thesis at Smith, which her marriage to Bruce interrupted. They’d had to get married in a hurry, Bruce had told Jake, so that by the time his parents had cottoned on to the fact that his bride was Jewish, the wedding would be a fait accompli.

  It was Eva’s professors at Smith whom the marriage had upset most—because they had predicted a brilliant future for her, were hoping she would pursue a PhD at Yale or Princeton or the University of Chicago.

  Most of this—most of what Jake knew about Eva—he had learned from Bruce himself, on those occasions when they found themselves alone together in the kitchen of the country house early in the morning, before anyone else was up, or out in the garden, where after lunch Bruce liked to squat on his haunches, pulling weeds, or trying to figure out what was clogging up the ornamental fountain on the patio.

  About Jake, Eva knew almost nothing. This was not because he kept anything from her. It was because she never asked. He was a bachelor decorator. His position was not one that required a pedigree. It required only contacts, manners, and a decent portfolio.

  Once, when he was visiting Eva and Bruce at their country place—Eva often included him in her little weekend parties, both because she liked his company and because she knew she could count on him to use the correct fork, and to fill in the protracted silences that occasionally seized the dinner table with stimulating (but not too stimulating) anecdotes, and to compose his face into the proper rictus of enthusiasm when one of the other guests said something that was supposed to be witty—once, at one of these weekend parties, Bruce happened to mention a launderer in London, in Belgravia, who was famous all over the world for removing spots from silk ties. So famous was this launderer, Bruce said, that movie stars, kings, presidents, and sheikhs had their ties sent to him. George Soros and François Hollande had their ties sent to him, as did Daniel Craig. And Placido Domingo. And Bruce himself.

  “Of course, I’d just as soon throw them out, but Lola insists,” he said.

  “Bruce is sloppy with his soup,” Eva said, which was true.

  Sometimes Jake suspected that Eva put him in the same category as the tie launderer: the master of a craft whose reputation earned him loyalty and high fees. And yet who would ever think to ask the tie launderer who he was or where he came from?

  The plates were cleared, the dessert brought: caramelized bananas and vanilla ice cream, which Eva abjured.

  “Oh, why not?” Min said, helping herself to some.

  “You know why not,” Eva said, looking pointedly at Min’s belly.

  They resumed their conversation about the apartment in Venice, how perfectly unspoiled it was, yet how everything was spotless, because of the maid. This maid, in Min’s words, was “old school.”

  “Well, Jake, what do you say?” she said. “Don’t keep us in suspense. Will you do it?”

  “But I’ve never worked in Venice,” Jake said.

  “Well, but you’ve spent time there,” Min said. “In fact, you lived there for a while, didn’t you?”

  “Years ago—and not for very long. There’s a reason why most people, when they buy an apartment in Italy, hire an Italian decorator.”

  “As if Eva would ever hire anyone but you.”

  Bruce punched Jake lightly on the arm. “Why are you fighting it?” he asked. “You know my wife. You know she won’t take no for an answer.”

  “Oh, Bruce,” Eva said.

  But it was true. She would not take no for an answer.

  “I have to think about it,” Jake said.

  6

  At Eva’s dinner parties, coffee was served in the living room. This was an act of homage on her part to the manners of the past as depicted by her favorite novelists, Ivy Compton-Burnett and Edith Wharton.

  She was just handing around the cups when Bruce stood up and said, “I think I’ll take the dogs for a walk.”

  “This early?” she said, tilting her cup slightly, so that a drop of coffee fell from it onto her cardigan.

  “Caspar! Ralph! Izzy!” Bruce called to the dogs, who leaped up from the window seat where they were sleeping and scrambled after him.


  “Jake, why don’t you go with Bruce?” Min said. “Keep him company?” Her eyes, he could see, were on Eva’s sweater—the stain that she herself appeared, so far, not to have noticed.

  In the front hall, Jake found Bruce getting the dogs into their coats, matching tartan affairs that had to be affixed to their torsos by means of a bewildering array of Velcro straps and buckles—not an easy job, for no sooner had the dogs realized that a walk was in the offing than they began leaping and writhing and letting out high-pitched whines. So elastic are Bedlingtons, moreover, that just getting their necks through the neck holes is a struggle. And how do you explain to a dog who recognizes the signs that he is about to be taken on a walk that, if the walk is actually going to happen, he must stand still long enough to be fitted into the straitjacket on which, paradoxically, his freedom depends? Come to think of it, how do you explain that to anyone? How do you explain that to yourself?

  “Let me help you,” Jake said, and held each dog steady as Bruce, in turn, lifted legs, did up fastenings, attached leashes.

  “Thanks,” Bruce said. “Usually I ask Frank, but at this hour Frank has his hands full with people coming back from the theater.”

  They headed out into the foyer. Already waiting for the elevator was a freckled man in his late sixties. He had pale blue eyes, and hair the same “No Color” as Eva’s sweater, and was accompanied by an elderly long-haired dachshund, at the sight of whom the Bedlingtons started barking and straining against their leashes until they choked. In response, the dachshund got behind his master’s legs and snarled.

  “Sparky,” the freckled man said warningly.

  “Don’t worry, Sparky,” Bruce said to the dachshund. “They’re all talk.”

  The elevator arrived. “But my guess is that it will be more likely six inches,” Frank said.

  “You think?” Bruce said.

  Frank nodded emphatically. “These weathermen! Have you noticed how, the minute there’s a hurricane, they race off to wherever it’s supposed to make landfall? And then, if it’s supposed to be a Category 5 and it ends up being a Category 1, they look all disappointed, even as they’re saying how relieved they are.”