Equal Affections

by David Leavitt

  After finishing four or five of Joey’s awful songs—but were they awful, Danny asked himself sometimes now, or had he simply allowed April’s accounting of these events to influence his own memory?—April said, “And now I’d like to sing a song in sympathy with the people of Cambodia and Vietnam, which Joey and I wrote together. It’s called ‘No More Vietnams.’ And if you please, I’d like everyone to join in on the chorus.”

  She picked up her guitar; the lights faded to a crescent, surrounding her in darkness. Conway’s Garage disappeared; this was April’s moment; no accompaniment but her own would be necessary.

  She sang. It was the sort: of song that protest singers dream of writing—so vivid in its compassion, so powerful in its fury, that hearing it, Danny wondered how people could not be moved to change their lives. The song called for change. “Change!” April sang.

  “Will we never learn?

  I am too young to watch young flesh being burned.

  Well, as long as I’ve a voice to sing, I’ll cry out to the world,

  I want no more Vietnams!

  (Come on, everybody!)

  I want no more Vietnams!”

  It seemed to Danny that night that hearing April sing, no human being could possibly keep from seeing the light of left-wing ideology. Not even Roger Krauss. Not even Roger Krauss’s father. Sitting there in the front row, he fantasized somehow sneaking April’s song over the public-address system at the National Rifle Association. How, after hearing it, could those men not be compelled to lay down their guns and join in?

  April finished with a triumphant bow. The audience was on its feet in seconds. And then, when the applause was at its peak, Danny noticed Joey standing in the background, on the little stage. He was smiling tightly, as if he were trying to keep from hiccuping. Danny could tell from his expression that April was simply being kind when she said Joey had cowritten that song with her, and this realization pleased him fiercely, because it meant that April was the special one, April the one who would go far. Not Joey. And yet Danny suspected April did not recognize what was special in herself. “I owe it all to Joey,” she was now saying to the campus newspaper reporter who was interviewing her. “Joey Conway, my partner. Come on, Joey, come down.”

  Nervously he climbed down from the stage. Danny didn’t know Joey very well, but he knew that he had visions of glory for himself and April, and in those visions it was always he who was asked for the interviews and April who waited patiently to climb down from the stage. Things did not look good for him right now, standing there, his face tight, as if he were confronting right then, for the first time, the terrible disparity that often falls between one person’s desire and another’s talent.

  Still, she loved him. A few nights later, having climbed out of bed for a glass of milk, Danny heard her confiding to Louise across the kitchen table. “To be honest,” she said, “I’m addicted to his cock.”

  “April!” Louise answered, and clamped her hand over her mouth. Tiny peals of laughter spilled through her fingers, like bubbles escaping a pot that was boiling over.

  ___________

  After that, “No More Vietnams” became such a popular anthem that April and Joey were persuaded to copyright and, finally, record it. Unfortunately, on that early, 45 rpm record—now a collector’s item, since April is still listed as April Cooper—she is accompanied by Joey, whose voice simply cannot stand up to hers. He realized this soon enough, and agreed simply to play while April sang, and, shortly after that, to abandon Conway’s Garage. And then of course it was only a matter of weeks before the shouts of “Ap-ril” from big audiences transformed “Joey Conway and April Cooper” into “April Cooper with Joey Conway.” Soon enough, in a fashionable gesture toward matriarchy (and because it sounded better, she later admitted), April Cooper took on Louise’s maiden name; she became April Gold, SHOWER OF GOLD, reviewers headlined. Then underneath: NEW SINGER SHINES IN UNEVEN DUO. In his notebook of April’s career Danny had an old, yellowed clipping from the University of Oregon paper—saved no doubt with vengeful zeal—in which April and Joey are called “the peace movement’s Sonny and Cher; once again, a phenomenally talented woman singer has doomed herself to be paired with a partner who is both smugly unappealing and musically inept.”

  Of course they broke up; one day April arrived home from the apartment she’d been sharing with Joey in a station wagon filled to the brim with clothes and books and announced that she was never going to sing again. It was an old station wagon, the same one they’d used to move her into her freshman dorm. She wouldn’t leave the house for days after that; she sat for hours around the kitchen table, watching game shows and cracking peanuts out of their shells—a habit picked up from Nat. She gained weight. She could not sing without him, she declared one night at dinner, then headed off to the bathroom to vomit.

  Once, during those six months or so that April was living at home, she took out a personal ad in the Bay Guardian, which read: “Zaftig leftist woman, 23, seeks inspired and enlightened man with movement experience for friendship.” Everyone in the family was surprised—it seemed a rather uncharacteristic gesture for April—but then again, no one dared object to something that might lead to her starting up her life again. For a while there were no respondents, and then one morning April made a show of inviting Danny to lunch at a huge, steam-filled Chinatown dim sum house. “I want to take you to lunch,” she said. “Anywhere you like.”

  Danny liked the dim sum houses, where women in white uniforms rolled carts down the aisles between the tables, shouting out the names of various steamed and fried dumplings, thick rice soups, sweet buns. “You know why there are no windows in dim sum restaurants?” he asked as he caught the warm smell of steam from an approaching cart. “Because you pay by the plate. If there were windows, people would throw the plates out the windows to save money.”

  “Danny,” April said, “this is the tenth time you’ve told me that story. Remember the interest scale.” He looked away, bit into something ambrosial wrapped in rice noodle dough. A perfect afternoon, other than that remark, an afternoon of thanks and love and goodness, offered by his sister to him in repayment for . . . services rendered? And yet, as was usual with April, things were not as they seemed, which in no way meant her intentions were less than honorable, her love for him less “than genuine, only that there was a small other matter, something she needed help with, and she had hoped he wouldn’t mind. And presently a pale-skinned man in a pressed white shirt and tortoiseshell glasses ambled down the aisle and asked if she was April and, when she said she was, shook her hand and sat down. The man looked at Danny next, somewhat confusedly, until April said, “Uh, Jim, this is my brother, Danny. Danny, this is Jim . . . I’m sorry, what did you say your last name was?”

  “Tully. Jim Tully.”

  “Yes, sorry.”

  “Hi,” Danny said. He looked at April.

  “Danny, remember that personal ad I took out? Well, Jim is the first person to answer.” She laughed and looked at her date. “Jim, you don’t mind my little brother tagging along, do you?”

  “Oh no,” Jim said. “That’s just fine. I have a brother myself, just about his age. How old are you, Danny?”

  “Fourteen.”

  “Well, my little brother—his name is Bill—he’s sixteen. He plays basketball.”

  “That’s great,” Danny said.

  “Jim’s a lawyer,” April said. “He works for the Post Office.”

  “In a consulting capacity.”

  A woman came by with a metal tea cart, shouting out names of delicacies in hoarse Cantonese, and Danny made a show of his expertise, gathering from the cart, among other things, a plate of small, noodle-wrapped bundles topped with hard-boiled quail eggs.

  “This is the weirdest food I’ve ever seen,” Jim said.

  “What?” Danny said. “You’ve never eaten quail eggs?” Had he shaken his head in disgust? If he hadn’t, he decided later, he should have.

  “Thank God
Danny came with me,” April said later to Louise. They had just gotten back and were sitting in the warm kitchen, taking off their shoes. “This little guy positively saved my life.”

  She grabbed his head and started kissing him.

  “April—”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t resist it, you’re too cute. ...”

  “April!”

  “Your voice just cracked! Did you hear that?”

  “April, let me go.”

  “So you didn’t like this guy?” Louise said from the sink, where she was doing dishes.

  “Oh, he was nice enough. Just boring. I couldn’t have stood having to be alone with him. As usual, my beloved brother came through for me. Ah, well.” She lumbered off toward her room, singing in a clear soprano, “I will never sing again. ...”

  But of course, soon enough, she did.

  Alone, she was more popular than ever.

  As for Joey, to Danny’s surprise, he reacted to April’s return to the stage with neither violence nor jealousy. He resigned himself to his failure; he returned to school. When Danny went riding his bicycle, he would see Joey on the campus sometimes, looking more quiet and bookish than usual. They never spoke; usually Danny rode away as fast as he could.

  And soon enough there was another boyfriend, this time named Karl Mathias, and another manager, a professional with offices in a skyscraper in San Francisco. The manager was named Tina Tompkins, and under her tutelage April got gigs at big music festivals, sharing stages with Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. She traveled to Indochina on tour. The family could hardly keep up with her successes. Still, her attempts to get a contract with a major recording company persistently failed. No More Vietnams, her first album, was finally released by a near-bankrupt independent studio that operated out of someone’s garage. Louise and Nat had to lend money to the producers to pay the final bills. For months that year Louise had to park her car on the street because their own garage was filled with boxes and boxes of the album; Danny would walk up and down the streets of the neighborhood, selling it door to door to neighbors, ex-teachers, April’s friends from high school. It was a shoddy-looking thing, with a badly angled blackand-white photograph of April on the cover, but even Aunt Eleanor said the songs were wonderful.

  Danny was, by this time, becoming more and more involved in April’s career, skipping school (to his parents’ chagrin) so that he might attend her concerts. Often he’d help out backstage, and late at night, at parties, smoke marijuana with April and her ever-increasing retinue of musicians, technicians, boyfriends, and of course women friends who worshiped her, who wanted more than anything to be like her. Another album—Freedom—was released, and this time it easily earned its keep; with great ceremony, April presented Nat and Louise with a check reimbursing her old debt from No More Vietnams. She was at her peak.

  And yet, somehow, she was also too late. Danny thought, in retrospect, that they all suspected this, at those late-night parties after the concerts. It was by now 1977; the war was finally over—Danny remembered Louise crying over the baby lifts—and with its ungraceful conclusion, the spirit, the energy seemed somehow to have been sucked out of the protest movement. Had she begun two or three years earlier, perhaps, April could have been a mainstream star on a par with Joan Baez, say, or Joni Mitchell. But she was born late for that; her committed audience, even in 1977, was beginning to abandon her, retreating to business schools and law schools and medical schools. Finally she was left with a following that was loyal but terribly small—the fierce, diminishing nucleus of revolution, the truly committed few who had long before pledged themselves to the hard work of keeping up the light through the dark period many were already predicting ahead. The vision of these people was essentially fatalistic; revolution for them was hard work against terrible odds; there was nothing fun about it. Real revolution, they believed, occurred underground, in corners, during the dark night of oppression.

  So, with the end of the war and the days of Berkeley glory, these hardy souls returned to the woodwork within which they had always functioned best, and were in truth probably relieved to do so. They specialized not in promoting mass revolution, but in small-scale advocacy of social change. This was April’s audience, and as a rule it was not a very glamorous bunch: sallow-faced men with black-framed glasses and long, thin ponytails the color of wine falling down their backs; and their women—hale, wiry-haired, with scarves tied around their heads like Bulgarian peasants. They had babies with names like Justin or Molly, not Rainbow or God, and they carried them in slings worn over their breasts, and breast-fed them till they were six. They were not particularly interested in music as art, only as propaganda, only as an instrument of social change. The wild parties that had always followed April’s concerts gave way to quiet potluck dinners in bleached, under-decorated houses, after which bald Buddhist poets would give readings from their work. April sometimes brought Danny, who was now in high school; they’d sit at the table together, listening politely and moving the soybean casserole around on their plates, both of them secretly dying for a cheeseburger, both of them secretly bored out of their heads.

  It was around this time that April first sang with Margy McLaughlin. Margy, who was also managed by Tina Tompkins, was a committed lesbian who performed only with other women and whose songs were explicit and defiant. She was a beautiful, hollow-cheeked woman, with neatly crew-cut chestnut-colored hair, and she dressed in loose-fitting pale linen pants and shirts that gave her the look of a spiritually advanced being—an alien or a monk. Even before they met, they fascinated each other; they sought each other out, asking mutual friends, “Does she have a lover?” or “Is she gay?” nurturing crushes on album cover photographs so acute that by the time they did meet they had, in their own minds, courted, married, separated, and reunited a hundred times. (Or so April said when she told the story during the long bus trips between concerts.) They knew each other’s songs by heart. When April was visiting her parents’ house, she’d play Margy’s album Woman-Loving-Woman over and over again on the old record player Nat had built from a kit.

  They were lovers, April liked to say later, from the moment they met, the moment their hands first touched in greeting and they looked at each other and smiled.

  April first brought Margy home for dinner on a March night during Danny’s senior year at high school. She was the kind of dinner guest Louise adored—she insisted on setting the table and drying the dishes—and she asked Nat a lot of questions about his work. She had grown up on a farm in Iowa, but when she was sixteen, she had somehow made her way to Paris, and it was there, she said, that she did her real growing up. Danny kept staring at her, through the dinner, trying to determine if anything in her appearance gave away what had made her a lesbian. He had once heard Roger Krauss say that girls became dykes when they were too fat or ugly for boys to go for them, and yet Margy McLaughlin was neither fat nor ugly; rather, she had the slender body of a beauty queen. What impressed him most was how comfortable she seemed with her lesbianism—comfortable enough to have declared it to the world in a whole album of songs. Such an action must have taken inestimable bravery, he thought, much as he had thought fasting must take inestimable bravery when he was younger. By the end of dinner he adored her; he thought she was lovely and spare and smooth, as if she had been carved from a piece of soap. He believed he was in love with her, wanted to make love to her.

  But when he looked at April and noticed that she was staring at Margy with eyes so much more urgent in their questioning than his own, he realized what he felt was not desire; it was nothing close to desire.

  After that, April started to write songs with Margy, to perform with her, finally to record with her. Nothing was ever said to the direct effect that they were lovers, but Danny knew his parents suspected; they had started to have long discussions late at night from which he was barred. And finally the expected news arrived: April was giving up her apartment; she had decided to move into Margy’s house in Berkeley. Danny volunteere
d to help. It was a small, stuccoed house with geraniums in the front yard. Inside the rounded entry was a succession of rooms with golden floors and cool white walls and vague pieces of furniture upholstered in pastel cottons—sofas that seemed to double as beds, beds piled with huge pillows. Danny had wondered nervously if April was going to have her own room, but life here seemed to defy such easy division; no room was discrete from any other.

  Afterwards Margy burned incense, and they ate a meal of chicken cooked in a peanut sauce that went down smooth and sweet, like caramel, then burst with sourness, then burned. April explained how joyous she was to have finally discovered her own lesbianism, how glad that she would now be recording music only with women. “Yes,” Danny said, forgetting, for the moment, that his own maleness might exclude him. “Yes.” He often forgot, in April’s company, that he was a man at all.

  Louise grilled him when he got home. “What’s the place like?” she asked. “Does April have her own room?”

  “Sort of,” Danny said.

  “Sort of! What do you mean, ‘sort of’?”

  “Well—there are a lot of rooms. But the whole place is very open. I wish our house was like that.”

  Louise shook her head, closed her eyes. She lit a cigarette. “Well, it’s her life,” she said finally, and Danny went to bed.

  Later, when everything was out in the open, and April had signed her first contract with Lesbia Records, the people she’d once worked with started to say she’d sold out. Women’s music was suddenly a lively enterprise after all; Margy McLaughlin’s concerts attracted crowds, which, if not quite as huge as the ones that had thronged to April’s early concerts, nevertheless seemed rife with energy, with desire, with commitment and passion. Perhaps that was why April’s old friends and cronies and ex-boyfriends chose to accuse her of opportunism, of trumping up a change of sexual identity in order to gain allegiance with a more profitable cause. Jokes started to circulate about her; men called her the “bushdiver.” Out of work (for she was performing only with women now), furious with the world, April’s male ex-accompanists gathered in the coffeehouses, now dark and dead, where they had once known glory, and mocked her. Oh, certainly her music had had feminist overtones, even in the earliest days, but these songs the men had treated lightly, as a whim of hers to be indulged. No, it was when she sang “Allende” that they cheered; when she sang “Out of Work”; when she sang “Why Get Married?” And now she was singing “Discovery,” she was pairing up with Margy McLaughlin for duets of “Lover Woman of Mine.” And worse, she had taken those early love songs, the ones that had made her boyfriends melt, and regenderized them, so that now the protagonists were clearly, blatantly pairs of women lovers. Even “Out of Work,” which was about a woman whose husband has lost his job, became lesbian. “She’s a damn good business—businessperson,” the men would scoff, and laugh, and drink more beer.