Equal Affections

by David Leavitt

  Danny and April and Nat stayed by the car; they waited till she was through.

  Then she walked back to them, her shoes in her hand, sand in her hair. “That was the Goldbergs’ house, wasn’t it, Nat?” she said, pointing to a small, white, stuccoed cottage into which a little girl in flippers was just disappearing.

  “Yes,” Nat said. “I believe it was.”

  ___________

  Xavier, the sailor, died at sea in the Second World War. Tommy Burns went to war too, but he came back a decorated hero. His white teeth flashed across the Boston Common as he received his medal. (Louise, newly married to Nat, stood in the crowd, a scarf pulled over her hair to protect it against the rain, and clapped like crazy. He probably wouldn’t have remembered her anyway. She was working in the shipyards then, welding battleships, while Nat got his degree.)

  A long time later Tommy Burns became Tom Brent. He was Sheriff Bo Tucker on The Wild Country. Wednesday nights from eight to nine the television was reserved for Louise, until the series was canceled. Then for a while she’d see him every few weeks doing a guest spot on a cop show or sitcom. Then he disappeared for years from their television.

  One afternoon in the late seventies Louise was riding the Exercycle, watching Password, when she started to scream. “What?” Nat cried, running in from the garden. “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s him, Nat! It’s Tommy Burns! Look!”

  Well, he had come back—older now, but still handsome as ever. His hair was streaked gray. He was wearing a dark suit. He stood against a beige background, a tiny, white-shingled house cupped delicately in his hands.

  Tommy Burns was the Allstate insurance man.

  Chapter 6

  No one could pinpoint exactly when April started singing. Danny thought he remembered, from when he was four or five, hearing her in her bedroom, strumming her little guitar in accompaniment to renditions of “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” “Five Hundred Miles,” “Puff the Magic Dragon.” Later she performed these songs for their parents’ friends after dinner parties, at the piano. “A regular Eydie Gorme!” Aunt Eleanor would say, tapping her cane against the floor. She pronounced “Gormé” without the Frenchified accent, so that it sounded like a word people might use on Mars.

  They had moved a few years before to a neighborhood just off the university campus, officially called Redwood Park but affectionately known as the faculty ghetto. Every fourth Tuesday Louise hosted a tea for the department wives, and every third Wednesday Nat hosted a study break for the computer science graduate students. April and Danny usually hid in April’s room during these festivities, emerging only when a sharp rap at the door demanded their appearances. Danny could hardly say which group he dreaded more. The department wives wore crisp little suits; they touched him with powdery hands and asked him how school was going. They knew too much about politeness. The graduate students didn’t know enough about politeness. They didn’t wash. They were vacant-eyed young men who pocketed their pens without capping them, so that their shirts were always bleeding blue at the heart. Danny did his duty, shook their slick hands, then ran back to April’s room. It was a different world there. April’s room had avocado-color carpeting; it had thick curtains patterned with immense, fullblown flowers and dangling with little white powder puffs. She burned incense on the desk. She had a drawer, and in it was a book called Sexual Love by Tamako Nagawachi, M.D., which she let Danny read all he wanted. (Danny particularly liked the chapter that described wet dreams and suggested extra-soft pajamas as a deterrent to them.) He liked to sniff the smell of April’s room—a strong, female smell, which she made no effort to hide or cover. She did not believe in shaving under her arms, and she also didn’t believe in deodorant, much to the chagrin of her mother, who insisted that excess underarm hair increased body odor in women—a scientific fact, she said. (April laughed at that.) She had long blond hair everywhere—on her head, under her arms, wisps of it on her legs. She made all her own dresses, mostly out of purple velvet embroidered with hearts and moons, and sometimes she wore bells around her ankles. In her room, on those occasional Tuesdays and Wednesdays when she and Danny joined together in resistance to social niceties, she liked to lie on her bed, a mirror propped in the crick of her elbow, and work the long blond hairs under her arms into tiny braids. Other afternoons, when she was feeling more industrious, she gave Danny guitar lessons. She showed him how to pick, and how to make A and D. He sat on her lap, her fingers pressing his smaller fingers down onto the frets, and while he strummed, they sang together: “Puff the Magic Dragon,” “The Muffin Man,” “Barbara Allen,” “The Impossible Dream.”

  When she graduated from high school, April decided to attend the same university she’d grown up in. This was not because she liked the place, only because it was free; she could not justify her parents’ shelling out money to finance an education that was going to be basically worthless, she said—a supposition on her part to which Nat responded with bitter invective, and Louise with a slight shrug of the shoulders, a chastising “Oh, now, April.” Danny remembered moving April to her freshman dorm; it was about two minutes from their house. Still, April insisted on packing everything she owned, all her clothes, her records, her books and stuffed animals, lugging them out to the car, driving them down and unloading them in the little cinder-block room she was to share with one Vilma H. Pampas of Los Angeles. Her freshman year, when Danny was nine, she joined a hunger strike on the lawn of the president’s house, which was across the street. Nat became incensed. Louise, worried about malnutrition, filled the kitchen with bottles of orange juice and vitamin C, thus turning it into a refueling station for starving students. Twice a day April brought groups of protesters by the house, and Louise fed them vitamins and orange juice, as well as an occasional, surreptitious apple slice. Danny hid in the laundry room off the kitchen, watching the pallid students down their pills. Why was it that they had to fast while he could eat? he asked April, who explained that she and her friends were protesting the firing of a popular professor who was being denied justice. Danny couldn’t figure out the connection between these two conditions: Was he, in eating, aiding in the denial of justice? Must he fast as well? Worried, he wolfed down an entire package of Oreos while reading the backs of the empty orange juice containers. Fasting for a day was impossible for him to imagine.

  It didn’t stop there. All through Danny’s childhood, it seemed, April was demanding that their family, for political reasons, not eat certain foods. Grapes, for instance. Louise would wheel her grocery cart down the supermarket aisle, and the little globes, piled in decadent bunches, would seem to Danny so sweet, so good in their beady greenness that he’d break down and beg his mother for some, ashamed at his own lack of resolve. Still, Louise was firm. “Do you know how much the men and women who pick these grapes are paid?” she’d say. “April told me, it’s something like forty-two cents an hour. We’re talking about children, Danny, children your age, sweating in the fields. They sleep in dirty shacks, without blankets, without toilets. How would you feel if you had to sleep in a dirty shack, with no room of your own, just so some other little boy could eat grapes?” But then, passing the fruit section and the mountains of grapes a second time, she’d let him pick a few on the sly and eat them right there in the store.

  In Danny’s elementary school civics class, he debated Roger Krauss on the grape-boycotting issue. Roger Krauss’s father was the president of the local chapter of the National Rifle Association. “Would you like to sleep in a dirty shack?” Danny argued, but because Roger Krauss was more popular, the decision, by vote, went to him. It enraged Danny, already, the way that politics worked.

  Afterwards, at lunch period, Roger Krauss and his friends would torment Danny—dangling the little bunches of grapes over their faces, eating them as seductively as women in Maxfield Parrish posters.

  Shortly after all this happened Salvador Allende was assassinated in Chile.

  Danny remembered April crying hysterically at th
e kitchen table. “It was the fucking CIA!” she shouted.

  “Come on, April,” Nat said. “The CIA! Really! You kids, with your conspiracy theories. What does the CIA have to do with Chile?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” Louise said. She was doing dishes, her hands deep in sudsy water. “Mark my words, Nat,” she said. “I would not be a bit surprised.”

  “Ha!” Nat said. “Ha-ha!” He considered the possibility so absurd that when the weekend news marked Louise’s words, he had to retreat to his toolshop in the garage for the rest of the afternoon. Louise walked around the house looking shell-shocked. To her own surprise, she was surprised. “Surprise,” she later wrote, in a speech to be delivered to the Mothers Against the Draft, “was perhaps the single most important factor in awakening a backwards, middle-aged housewife like me to the problems in the world I lived in.”

  Sometimes, when Danny was in his late teens—all this years after April had dropped out of college, changed her name, and begun touring the country with her songs—Louise would have the Mothers Against the Draft over to the house for coffee and cake, the way she used to have the faculty wives. Nat, back early from his computers, slunk into the kitchen, alarmed by the collection of station wagons crammed into the driveway, and there he’d find Danny drinking Tab and suffering through an internal debate as to whether or not he too should register for the draft when the time came. Louise, oddly enough, felt that he should in order to protect his status as a conscientious objector; Nat, who took the whole thing far less seriously, disagreed.

  “Are those women here?” he’d ask Danny.

  “Yup.”

  “How long?”

  “An hour or so.”

  Then Nat would open the refrigerator, take a spoonful of jam from a jar on one of the shelves, and sit down at the kitchen table to eat it. Eventually, when it became clear the meeting was going to last a long time, he’d put the spoon in the sink and retreat, via the back porch, to his bedroom, where Danny would often find him a few hours later, half asleep, watching Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom with one open eye.

  ___________

  April made her debut as a singer in the fall of her junior year, at an on-campus coffeehouse called Harriet Tubman’s. At that time she was billing herself as lead female vocalist for Conway’s Garage, the group led by her boyfriend, joey Conway. Joey rode a motorcycle and had a thick, soft brown beard Danny longed to touch. He and April lived together in a big room in an off-campus house dedicated to nonviolent change, but sometimes, when Nat and Louise were away, they’d come over and sleep in their giant hotel-sized bed, and Danny would listen to them moaning through the thin wall that divided him from them. In the morning once, after April had rushed off to a meeting, he crept into his parents’ room and stared at April’s diaphragm and the big, half-squeezed-out tube of Ortho-Gynol jelly sitting on Louise’s night table. He had never seen a diaphragm before, and he fingered the slippery rubber rim curiously, trying to figure out how thé thing worked. Then the bathroom door opened, and Joey walked out, naked from the shower. Danny couldn’t keep from looking at his penis, which was hanging down out of what seemed to him an astounding quantity of pubic hair.

  “So you found that stuff, hey, kid?” Joey said as he pulled on his underwear. He smiled. “How old are you?”

  “Almost twelve,” Danny said.

  “You know what it’s for?” He came close, put his hand on Danny’s thin back. “Yeah, you’ll know,” he said. “You’ll know all about that soon enough.”

  He turned from Danny and pulled a red T-shirt over his head. “Your sister,” he said. “Your sister—has one fucking fantastic voice.”

  “I like to hear her sing too,” Danny admitted.

  “Yeah, well, she is good at a lot of things,” Joey said, picking up the diaphragm. He smiled. “I’ll bet you already can’t wait to get laid,” he said, “can you?”

  Danny turned around, and Joey laughed.

  After that Danny didn’t like Joey, though he longed to see him naked again. This was an essential contradiction he was bound to come up against again and again throughout his life.

  ___________

  It was Joey, not April, who concocted the interest scale. He complained that Danny talked too much, and it was true: Danny was given to repeating the plots of movies he’d seen, or books he’d read for school, or National Geographic specials about termite colonies.

  April sat him down one day to discuss it. “All adults,” she said, “before they say anything, think about the interest scale. They think to themselves, ‘This thing I’m about to say, where does it rank on the interest scale? Is it a one? Is it a ten?’ The rule is, Don’t say anything under eight.”

  Danny took the interest scale seriously. He thought it was an essential fact of adulthood that one should have to measure oneself against some common rule. And yet he had questions: Were shy or silent people shy or silent because they had nothing worthwhile to say? Danny could think of plenty of adults (Joey Conway among them) who, in his opinion, neglected to consult the interest scale, as well as others who were quiet, but who he suspected would have had plenty to say if they’d wanted to.

  He asked his sister about this. She said, “These questions rate about a three-point-four.” It was a mean period in her life in which it seemed Danny couldn’t win, couldn’t say anything without her or Joey laughing and shaking their fingers at him like old-fashioned schoolteachers. “Now, Danny, remember the interest scale!” But the interest scale worked. In a matter of weeks Danny moved from excessive talkativeness into a state of almost painful shyness, in which he barely said anything at all. April didn’t seem to notice. She still liked to have him around, sitting on the big beanbag chair in her room, like a kind of mascot. Her friends offered him pot and alcohol, both of which he steadfastly refused.

  As for Joey, he remained in the picture, sleeping with April every night on the big mattress she had spread on the floor of her room, plucking his guitar while she practiced his songs. Sometimes he came by the house for dinner with Nat and Louise. While Louise cooked, he and Danny played long games of Spit, the cards slapping and flying in a frenzy of motion, all the while Danny imagining situations in which Joey once again took off his clothes.

  ___________

  The first songs Joey and April performed were written by Joey. They were by and large bad—angry anthems decrying the wrongs being perpetrated by the university’s administration. At the coffeehouse debut, Danny sat in the front row with April’s housemates, Paula and Phyllis, nice girls with vaguely leftist sympathies, while on the stage Joey did something called “Talking Blues.” This meant that someone in the audience would shout out a topic, and Joey would sing about it. Usually the topics were political. “Governor Reagan!” someone shouted, and Joey strummed his guitar and sang:

  “Gonna sing you a song ‘bout Gov’nor Ron,

  He’s got ice cream in his head,

  He’s got a wife named Nancy who dresses fancy,

  And he wears his cowboy hat to bed!”

  The game thrilled Danny. Song, it seemed, could be born from anything, any topic, any word. All one had to do was speak it, and Joey, like an old-fashioned magic lantern, would grant the wish. “Turkey!” Danny shouted. “Pizza! Bowling!” By this time Joey was getting annoyed. “Whipped cream!” Danny said, and a mischievous look came over Joey’s face.

  “I wonder what erotic dreams

  This young boy has about whipped cream!”

  As intended, this shut Danny up for the rest of the evening. He cowered between Phyllis and Paula and tried to avoid looking at Joey, who was now singing some dreadful love song he’d written called “When You Lay Me, Baby.” He hated Joey now, but he was determined to sit through his set, if only for April’s sake.

  And finally—remarkably, thrillingly late, it seemed (and yet his parents had given him permission, for the first time, to stay out as long as he wanted)—it was April’s turn. She strode onto the stage with what wou
ld later be called by reviewers “her characteristic performing confidence.” Danny was entranced. Here was his sister, with whom he had grown up sharing a bathroom, and she was on a stage, a famous singer. She had long blond hair brushed over her shoulders and was wearing a peasant skirt and an Indian blouse with dozens of little mirrors sewn into it. “Thanks,” she said to the audience, taking the guitar in hand. “I’m real happy to be here tonight with Conway’s Garage.”