Family Dancing

by David Leavitt

  Praise for FAMILY DANCING

  “A genius for empathy . . . [Leavitt’s] stories show great talent, and many a writer would be grateful to have written them.” —The New York Times Book Review

  “He is in full command of a sharp, elegant style, and he already displays in these nine stories a knowledge of others’ lives, their pains and losses, that a writer twice his age might envy.”

  —USA Today

  “A first collection of unusual finesse. Leavitt has justly been praised for his deft handling of sensitive themes.” —Newsweek

  “A fine first appearance, the very sort of book that makes one immediately want more.” —Chicago Tribune

  “A most impressive entrance into contemporary fiction.” —Associated Press

  “Leavitt has succeeded in balancing familiarity and insight. The stories are so recognizable that you’ll want to read more to learn your own secrets.” —Vogue

  “Remarkably gifted.” —The Washington Post

  “Astonishing . . . David Leavitt is an extraordinary talent . . . This young writer shows promise of becoming one of what Virginia Woolf called the great truth-tellers. Every story in his collection is immediately gripping and completely believable.” —The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

  “Luminous, touching and splendid. There isn’t a one of them that isn’t riveting and perceptive.” —The Sun (Baltimore)

  “Regardless of age, few writers so effortlessly achieve the sense of maturity and earned compassion evident in these stories . . . Mr. Leavitt’s stories have the power to move us with the blush o f truth” —The New York Times

  “Brilliantly written.” —San Francisco Chronicle

  “An insightful portrait of people in turmoil.” —Los Angeles Times

  “America has a brand-new, sharp-witted observer in its midst . . . a perceptive, probing chronicler of our time . . . a skilled and artful storyteller who in the course of his writing is able to capture the textures and traumas of middle-class life.” —The Sacramento Bee

  For my mother

  and for Debbie Keates

  . . . Though white is

  the color of worship and of mourning, he

  is not here to worship and he is too wise

  to mourn—a life prisoner but reconciled.

  With trunk tucked up compactly—the elephant’s

  sign of defeat—he resisted, but is the child

  of reason now. His straight trunk seems to say: when

  what we hoped for came to nothing, we revived.

  Marianne Moore, “Elephants”

  Contents

  Territory

  Counting Months

  The Lost Cottage

  Aliens

  Danny in Transit

  Family Dancing

  Radiation

  Out Here

  Dedicated

  A Note on the Author

  Territory

  Neil’s mother, Mrs. Campbell, sits on her lawn chair behind a card table outside the food co-op. Every few minutes, as the sun shifts, she moves the chair and table several inches back so as to remain in the shade. It is a hundred degrees outside, and bright white. Each time someone goes in or out of the co-op a gust of air-conditioning flies out of the automatic doors, raising dust from the cement.

  Neil stands just inside, poised over a water fountain, and watches her. She has on a sun hat, and a sweatshirt over her tennis dress; her legs are bare, and shiny with cocoa butter. In front of her, propped against the table, a sign proclaims: mothers, fight for your children’s rights—support a non-nuclear future. Women dressed exactly like her pass by, notice the sign, listen to her brief spiel, finger pamphlets, sign petitions or don’t sign petitions, never give money. Her weary eyes are masked by dark glasses. In the age of Reagan, she has declared, keeping up the causes of peace and justice is a futile, tiresome, and unrewarding effort; it is therefore an effort fit only for mothers to keep up. The sun bounces off the window glass through which Neil watches her. His own reflection lines up with her profile.

  Later that afternoon, Neil spreads himself out alongside the pool and imagines he is being watched by the shirtless Chicano gardener. But the gardener, concentrating on his pruning, is neither seductive nor seducible. On the lawn, his mother’s large Airedales—Abigail, Lucille, Fern—amble, sniff, urinate. Occasionally, they accost the gardener, who yells at them in Spanish.

  After two years’ absence, Neil reasons, he should feel nostalgia, regret, gladness upon returning home. He closes his eyes and tries to muster the proper background music for the cinematic scene of return. His rhapsody, however, is interrupted by the noises of his mother’s trio—the scratchy cello, whining violin, stumbling piano—as she and Lillian Havalard and Charlotte Feder plunge through Mozart. The tune is cheery, in a Germanic sort of way, and utterly inappropriate to what Neil is trying to feel. Yet it is the music of his adolescence; they have played it for years, bent over the notes, their heads bobbing in silent time to the metronome.

  It is getting darker. Every few minutes, he must move his towel so as to remain within the narrowing patch of sunlight. In four hours, Wayne, his lover of ten months and the only person he has ever imagined he could spend his life with, will be in this house, where no lover of his has ever set foot. The thought fills him with a sense of grand terror and curiosity. He stretches, tries to feel seductive, desirable. The gardener’s shears whack at the ferns; the music above him rushes to a loud, premature conclusion. The women laugh and applaud themselves as they give up for the day. He hears Charlotte Feder’s full nasal twang, the voice of a fat woman in a pink pants suit—odd, since she is a scrawny, arthritic old bird, rarely clad in anything other than tennis shorts and a blouse. Lillian is the fat woman in the pink pants suit; her voice is thin and warped by too much crying. Drink in hand, she calls out from the porch, “Hot enough!” and waves. He lifts himself up and nods to her.

  The women sit on the porch and chatter; their voices blend with the clink of ice in glasses. They belong to a small circle of ladies all of whom, with the exception of Neil’s mother, are widows and divorcées. Lillian’s husband left her twenty-two years ago, and sends her a check every month to live on; Charlotte has been divorced twice as long as she was married, and has a daughter serving a long sentence for terrorist acts committed when she was nineteen. Only Neil’s mother has a husband, a distant sort of husband, away often on business. He is away on business now. All of them feel betrayed—by husbands, by children, by history.

  Neil closes his eyes, tries to hear the words only as sounds. Soon, a new noise accosts him: his mother arguing with the gardener in Spanish. He leans on his elbows and watches them; the syllables are loud, heated, and compressed, and seem on the verge of explosion. But the argument ends happily; they shake hands. The gardener collects his check and walks out the gate without so much as looking at Neil.

  He does not know the gardener’s name; as his mother has reminded him, he does not know most of what has gone on since he moved away. Her life has gone on, unaffected by his absence. He flinches at his own egoism, the egoism of sons.

  “Neil! Did you call the airport to make sure the plane’s coming in on time?”

  “Yes,” he shouts to her. “It is.”

  “Good. Well, I’ll have dinner ready when you get back.”

  “Mom—”

  “What?” The word comes out in a weary wail that is more of an answer than a question.

  “What’s wrong?” he says, forgetting his original question.

  “Nothing’s wrong,” she declares in a tone that indicates that everything is wrong. “The dogs have to be fed, dinner has to be made, and I’ve got people here. Nothing’s wrong.”

  “I hope things will be as comfortable as po
ssible when Wayne gets here.”

  “Is that a request or a threat?”

  “Mom—”

  Behind her sunglasses, her eyes are inscrutable. “I’m tired,” she says. “It’s been a long day. I . . . I’m anxious to meet Wayne. I’m sure he’ll be wonderful, and we’ll all have a wonderful, wonderful time. I’m sorry. I’m just tired.”

  She heads up the stairs. He suddenly feels an urge to cover himself; his body embarrasses him, as it has in her presence since the day she saw him shirtless and said with delight, “Neil! You’re growing hair under your arms !”

  Before he can get up, the dogs gather round him and begin to sniff and lick at him. He wriggles to get away from them, but Abigail, the largest and stupidest, straddles his stomach and nuzzles his mouth. He splutters and, laughing, throws her off. “Get away from me, you goddamn dogs,” he shouts, and swats at them. They are new dogs, not the dog of his childhood, not dogs he trusts.

  He stands, and the dogs circle him, looking up at his face expectantly. He feels renewed terror at the thought that Wayne will be here so soon: Will they sleep in the same room? Will they make love? He has never had sex in his parents’ house. How can he be expected to be a lover here, in this place of his childhood, of his earliest shame, in this household of mothers and dogs?

  “Dinnertime! Abbylucyferny, Abbylucyferny, dinnertime!” His mother’s litany disperses the dogs, and they run for the door.

  “Do you realize,” he shouts to her, “that no matter how much those dogs love you they’d probably kill you for the leg of lamb in the freezer?”

  Neil was twelve the first time he recognized in himself something like sexuality. He was lying outside, on the grass, when Rasputin—the dog, long dead, of his childhood—began licking his face. He felt a tingle he did not recognize, pulled off his shirt to give the dog access to more of him. Rasputin’s tongue tickled coolly. A wet nose started to sniff down his body, toward his bathing suit. What he felt frightened him, but he couldn’t bring himself to push the dog away. Then his mother called out, “Dinner,” and Rasputin was gone, more interested in food than in him.

  It was the day after Rasputin was put to sleep, years later, that Neil finally stood in the kitchen, his back turned to his parents, and said, with unexpected ease, “I’m a homosexual.” The words seemed insufficient, reductive. For years, he had believed his sexuality to be detachable from the essential him, but now he realized that it was part of him. He had the sudden, despairing sensation that though the words had been easy to say, the fact of their having been aired was incurably damning. Only then, for the first time, did he admit that they were true, and he shook and wept in regret for what he would not be for his mother, for having failed her. His father hung back, silent; he was absent for that moment as he was mostly absent—a strong absence. Neil always thought of him sitting on the edge of the bed in his underwear, captivated by something on television. He said, “It’s O.K., Neil.” But his mother was resolute; her lower lip didn’t quaver. She had enormous reserves of strength to which she only gained access at moments like this one. She hugged him from behind, wrapped him in the childhood smells of perfume and brownies, and whispered, “It’s O.K., honey.” For once, her words seemed as inadequate as his. Neil felt himself shrunk to an embarrassed adolescent, hating her sympathy, not wanting her to touch him. It was the way he would feel from then on whenever he was in her presence—even now, at twenty-three, bringing home his lover to meet her.

  All through his childhood, she had packed only the most nutritious lunches, had served on the PTA, had volunteered at the children’s library and at his school, had organized a successful campaign to ban a racist history textbook. The day after he told her, she located and got in touch with an organization called the Coalition of Parents of Lesbians and Gays. Within a year, she was president of it. On weekends, she and the other mothers drove their station wagons to San Francisco, set up their card tables in front of the Bulldog Baths, the Liberty Baths, passed out literature to men in leather and denim who were loath to admit they even had mothers. These men, who would habitually do violence to each other, were strangely cowed by the suburban ladies with their informational booklets, and bent their heads. Neil was a sophomore in college then, and lived in San Francisco. She brought him pamphlets detailing the dangers of bath-houses and back rooms, enemas and poppers, wordless sex in alleyways. His excursion into that world had been brief and lamentable, and was over. He winced at the thought that she knew all his sexual secrets, and vowed to move to the East Coast to escape her. It was not very different from the days when she had campaigned for a better playground, or tutored the Hispanic children in the audiovisual room. Those days, as well, he had run away from her concern. Even today, perched in front of the co-op, collecting signatures for nuclear disarmament, she was quintessentially a mother. And if the lot of mothers was to expect nothing in return, was the lot of sons to return nothing?

  Driving across the Dumbarton Bridge on his way to the airport, Neil thinks, I have returned nothing; I have simply returned. He wonders if she would have given birth to him had she known what he would grow up to be.

  Then he berates himself: Why should he assume himself to be the cause of her sorrow? She has told him that her life is full of secrets. She has changed since he left home—grown thinner, more rigid, harder to hug. She has given up baking, taken up tennis; her skin has browned and tightened. She is no longer the woman who hugged him and kissed him, who said, “As long as you’re happy, that’s all that’s important to us.”

  The flats spread out around him; the bridge floats on purple and green silt, and spongy bay fill, not water at all. Only ten miles north, a whole city has been built on gunk dredged up from the bay.

  He arrives at the airport ten minutes early, to discover that the plane has landed twenty minutes early. His first view of Wayne is from behind, by the baggage belt. Wayne looks as he always looks—slightly windblown—and is wearing the ratty leather jacket he was wearing the night they met. Neil sneaks up on him and puts his hands on his shoulders; when Wayne turns around, he looks relieved to see him.

  They hug like brothers; only in the safety of Neil’s mother’s car do they dare to kiss. They recognize each other’s smells, and grow comfortable again. “I never imagined I’d actually see you out here,” Neil says, “but you’re exactly the same here as there.”

  “It’s only been a week.”

  They kiss again. Neil wants to go to a motel, but Wayne insists on being pragmatic. “We’ll be there soon. Don’t worry.”

  “We could go to one of the bathhouses in the city and take a room for a couple of aeons,” Neil says. “Christ, I’m hard up. I don’t even know if we’re going to be in the same bedroom.”

  “Well, if we’re not,” Wayne says, “we’ll sneak around. It’ll be romantic.”

  They cling to each other for a few more minutes, until they realize that people are looking in the car window. Reluctantly, they pull apart. Neil reminds himself that he loves this man, that there is a reason for him to bring this man home.

  He takes the scenic route on the way back. The car careers over foothills, through forests, along white four-lane highways high in the mountains. Wayne tells Neil that he sat next to a woman on the plane who was once Marilyn Monroe’s psychiatrist’s nurse. He slips his foot out of his shoe and nudges Neil’s ankle, pulling Neil’s sock down with his toe.

  “I have to drive,” Neil says. “I’m very glad you’re here.”

  There is a comfort in the privacy of the car. They have a common fear of walking hand in hand, of publicly showing physical affection, even in the permissive West Seventies of New York—a fear that they have admitted only to one another. They slip through a pass between two hills, and are suddenly in residential Northern California, the land of expensive ranch-style houses.

  As they pull into Neil’s mother’s driveway, the dogs run barking toward the car. When Wayne opens the door, they jump and lap at him, and he tries to close
it again. “Don’t worry. Abbylucyferny! Get in the house, damn it!”

  His mother descends from the porch. She has changed into a blue flower-print dress, which Neil doesn’t recognize. He gets out of the car and halfheartedly chastises the dogs. Crickets chirp in the trees. His mother looks radiant, even beautiful, illuminated by the headlights, surrounded by the now quiet dogs, like Circe with her slaves. When she walks over to Wayne, offering her hand, and says, “Wayne, I’m Barbara,” Neil forgets that she is his mother.

  “Good to meet you, Barbara,” Wayne says, and reaches out his hand. Craftier than she, he whirls her around to kiss her cheek.

  Barbara! He is calling his mother Barbara! Then he remembers that Wayne is five years older than he is. They chat by the open car door, and Neil shrinks back—the embarrassed adolescent, uncomfortable, unwanted.

  So the dreaded moment passes and he might as well not have been there. At dinner, Wayne keeps the conversation smooth, like a captivated courtier seeking Neil’s mother’s hand. A faggot son’s sodomist—such words spit into Neil’s head. She has prepared tiny meatballs with fresh coriander, fettucine with pesto. Wayne talks about the street people in New York; El Salvador is a tragedy; if only Sadat had lived; Phyllis Schlafly—what can you do?

  “It’s a losing battle,” she tells him. “Every day I’m out there with my card table, me and the other mothers, but I tell you, Wayne, it’s a losing battle. Sometimes I think us old ladies are the only ones with enough patience to fight.”

  Occasionally, Neil says something, but his comments seem stupid and clumsy. Wayne continues to call her Barbara. No one under forty has ever called her Barbara as long as Neil can remember. They drink wine; he does not.