Equal Affections

by David Leavitt

  And the men were not the only ones who looked on April’s transformation with suspicion. Other lesbian singers who for years had been struggling to establish reputations watched distrustfully as she went onstage with her new Dutch-boy haircut and eclipsed them all. They too suspected opportunism; they too suspected that this was a straight woman in drag, out to steal the glory they’d been faithfully nurturing for years. And perhaps they were right. Perhaps April had shrewdly recognized in the women’s music movement a potential arena for her impassioned voice, her angry and seductive songwriting. For April needed to write songs that bristled with commitment, with passion; the pulpy stuff women sang on mainstream stations bored her. She got on the stage now and soared where those other women had done nothing but crudely flap their wings; she was twice the musician, twice the singer, twice the songwriter that any of them, with the possible exception of Margy McLaughlin, had ever been, and they knew it.

  Around this time Danny met Joey Conway again. It was the summer after his freshman year in college, and he was traveling around the state with April, helping out backstage at her concerts. Joey was sitting in a health food restaurant in Santa Cruz where Danny happened to be eating some dinner with a couple of the women from April’s band, and he came over and said hello. He was dressed in a tight white T-shirt, and even though he’d shaved off his beard, he still looked thrillingly virile.

  They went to the bar to talk. Joey was living in Santa Cruz now, he explained, with his wife, Diane. Both of them were graduate students in the History of Consciousness. “That’s great,” Danny said. “What a subject.”

  “Yes,” he said. “It’s very exciting.” He paused, cleared his throat. “So how is April?”

  “She’s great. You know, I guess, that she’s going to be performing tonight.”

  “Yeah, I’d really love to go. But damn it, I have this study group tonight; it’s one of those things that’s been planned for months. You think she’ll understand?”

  “Sure.”

  “I guess she’s still living with Margy McLaughlin. At least that’s what I’ve heard through the grapevine.”

  “It’s true,” Danny said.

  Joey took another swig from his beer mug. “You know,” he said, “I’ve got to hand it to April. She knew when to jump off a sinking ship. I mean, protest music’s going nowhere. But this women’s music. I guess it’s real popular.”

  “Well,” Danny said, “April’s life changed, and her music changed too.” (He was terribly self-righteous in those days.)

  “Okay,” Joey said. “I can buy that. But listen, Danny—I want you to ask her one thing for me. I want you to ask her, did she really have to rewrite ‘Between Me and My Man’ and make it ‘Between Me and My Woman’? I mean, okay, rewriting a song like ‘Out of Work’ and making it lesbian, that’s one thing. But she wrote ‘Between Me and My Man’ for me.” He looked down into his beer.

  “I can ask her,” Danny said.

  “I’d appreciate that,” he said. “And listen. Tell her to write me, okay?”

  “Of course.”

  Later he brought Joey’s message to April in the dressing room where she and Margy were getting ready to go onstage. “Joey,” Margy said. “How I long to meet him.”

  “How does he look?” April asked.

  “Good,” Danny said. He wondered if it was possible that she could still be attracted to him, or if she ever had been attracted to him at all, or if homosexuality was a one-way street, a choice you made and couldn’t go back on.

  “He asked if you’d write to him,” he said.

  “Sure,” April said. “I’ll write to him.”

  ___________

  Four years of his life Danny more or less gave April. Sometimes, of course, he was in school; then, from the little apartment he rented on Durant Avenue, he was her social secretary, answering her letters, negotiating her complicated phone calls, passing some people on and putting other people off. She was at Margy’s house, in Berkeley, working, or she and Margy were on a farm somewhere near Salinas and couldn’t be disturbed, or she and Margy were performing at a women’s festival in Minnesota. “It’s incredible,” she told him over the phone. “Two thousand women, and all of them naked. I had no idea there were so many different kinds of breasts.” This was the sort of remark she could make only to him. And then it was no longer April and Margy; they had “reached an impasse” but were still friends. Anyhow, no matter how Margy might have thought it, it was really April all those people were coming to listen to anyway.

  And when he wasn’t in Berkeley, he was with her, on tour. His parents were perplexed but resigned. “Well, at least you kids seem to be having a good time,” Nat told them over the phone, and they agreed—“Oh, yes, Dad”—whether they were freezing at a pay phone at a gas station in Nevada or sitting in leather chairs in the stage manager’s office at some impressively grand university concert hall. Danny drove. Danny totaled up the bills and tried to keep the books balanced, even though April, who had no head for money, seemed always to be losing the checks she was handed after the concerts. Then Danny had to call up whoever had issued the check, arrange for its cancellation and replacement. He sieved through her fan mail. He washed her underwear. Four years, and somehow, that whole time, he never questioned any of it, never doubted that it was anything less than his duty to take care of her this way.

  And yet sometimes it got to him; sometimes, after the concerts, when the women sat in a circle at April’s feet, passing joints and laughing at whatever stories she had to tell, he’d lift the tiny nub of ash and flame to his lips and recognize in a new way that he might disappear from this room right now and no one would even notice—not until morning, when she needed him to get gas, or make a call, or bring her coffee. He smoked the joint down to a nugget, then flicked it away into the long gray-streaked hair of a woman in front of him, who jumped slightly, instinctively touched her hand to her hair, brushed at it. And then, suddenly, a strange sensation: April was looking at him. April had seen what he had done. Across the crowded room a look of frustration, of older sister’s annoyance with baby brother, which he met challengingly, sitting up straight, crossing his arms. She turned away from him, went on with what she was saying. Perhaps she recognized, even more than he did himself, how close he was to leaving her, how he was just waiting for the right excuse.

  Sometimes he mattered to her; sometimes she came up from behind him and terrified him with an unexpected hug. “Powderfoot,” she’d say, “I don’t know what I’d do without you. I don’t know what any of us would do without you. Remind me to buy you a present.” He didn’t remind her, and she didn’t buy him a present, but occasionally, during a concert, she’d pick up her guitar and say, “This next one is for my brother, Danny,” and sing “Family Heirlooms.” It got to the point, toward the end of the four years, where he’d have to leave the room while she sang that song, just in order to preserve his resentment. It seemed unjust to him that she should be graced with such gifts, not because he envied her the gifts themselves but because somehow the beauty of her singing allowed her to get away with so much else that was so unbeautiful. She understood too well: All she had to do was open her mouth to sing, and the world forgave her everything.

  Chapter 7

  Nine mysterious and crucial years separated April’s birth from Danny’s. This meant that when Danny was nine, his sister was eighteen and had lived twice as long in the world as he had. The difference never seemed so vast, so insurmountable, as it did that magical year, for as they got older, nine years became less of a gulf and more of a bridge. Danny met and befriended people older than April all the time now, as peers, a fact the nine-year-old baby brother in him still couldn’t help but marvel at; when he was a child, she and her friends had seemed so immutably older than he was. Now people April’s age worked under him. He paid them. He could have them fired.

  But the year April was eighteen, the year when nine years seemed an insurmountable eternity, it was a differe
nt story. That was the year April went into therapy. The university health services psychiatrist, Dr. Groening, told her that Danny probably envied her the time she had had alone with their parents, before his birth, and she was quick to pass on the news. Was it true? he wondered. Did he envy her those years? Bewilderment seemed a more appropriate word, or simply detachment. After all, April and his parents had been a family long before he came along; they shared with each other elaborate and entrenched rituals, masses of common history, so much that in his early childhood he was always having to ask questions: Where did the piñata above my bed come from? The trip to Mexico we took when your sister was five. What is the house in this picture? Our old house, where we lived in Boston, when April was born. Who are these women holding babies? That is your grandmother, who you never knew, holding your cousin Joanne. And that is your aunt Eleanor, holding your cousin Markie. And that is your mommy, holding your sister. He studied the photographs, memorizing the faces he would never see in real life, because the people they belonged to were dead or had aged beyond the point of recognition. It was like homework, like memorizing the parts of the body or the capitals. But the pictures he paid closest attention to were the ones his parents had had taken when April was a baby. There were hundreds of them—ten or twenty taken on a single day, sometimes, marked and dated and captioned, as if Louise and Nat had been under some sort of picture-taking enchantment, brought on by the miracle of first birth. “11/22/52: Mommy giving April her bottle.” “11/23/52: Daddy puts April in her bath.” Danny didn’t know this energetic young couple, busily engaged in the rituals of baby care, and yet there were his father’s ringed eyes and sharp nose on the face of that skinny boy; there was his mother’s slightly upturned lip, her blazing dark eyes. What surprised him most was a sequence of pictures taken on the beach, in which their bodies were exposed: Nat stood paunchless and tanned in a bathing suit with a drawstring; Louise, next to him, knelt on the sand in an early two-piece suit that must have been terribly risqué, with pointy, conical breastpieces. Her abdomen—now crisscrossed with a variety of scars—was flawless, smooth. The color in these pictures had faded, and so the beach had a bleached, white aspect, the bright flowers on Louise’s breasts fading, as if at the end of their season.

  And as April grew, as her unspecified baby face took on the familiar features of his sister, the gaps between when the pictures were taken grew as well, until instead of every day, it was every six months, and then every year, at her birthday party. Then there were no dates. Then there were no more binders, just an old shoebox filled with snapshots. Very few pictures existed of Danny’s own babyhood, and when he once asked his mother why, she looked at him strangely and put her hand on her forehead. “Oh, Danny,” she said, laughing a little. “I’m sorry.” He hadn’t, until that moment, thought of it as anything to apologize for.

  When Danny was growing up, he had a red rubber ball he liked to bounce. After school, in the afternoon, he’d walk for hours along the perimeter of the swimming pool, bouncing this ball, spinning out in his head the plots of imaginary movies and television shows, and later, when April started singing, making up songs. She had told him that if he wrote a song good enough, she would sing it. But somehow it was always someone else’s tune he came up with during those predusk hours he spent outdoors, bouncing, bouncing. When he started at Berkeley, that familiar, thunking beat was what Louise said she missed most; she couldn’t stand the silence, she told Danny, and joked about paying a neighborhood child to play handball against her garage. And later, when he was living in the East and went home for visits, he’d find the red ball waiting for him on his bed, and sometimes, when he had something to think through, he’d take it up and bounce it, though it was soft where once it had been tight, and riddled with tiny, unsealable holes. Louise, doing the dishes or ironing, felt a rare peacefulness come over her as she listened to that familiar thumping of her son and his ball outside.

  Danny told Walter about the red ball. After that, whenever he seemed lost, distant, in his own world, Walter would say to him, “Bouncing your ball again?” and Danny would laugh and insist he wasn’t. Still, he remembered those hours circling the pool as ones of supreme contentment and security. He had a vision, sometimes, of Wall Street at rush hour, men in business suits, women in pastel-colored tennis shoes, but not hurrying as usual toward the subway; instead, they are just shuffling along, bouncing, and in the world there is a sound like thunder as a thousand balls hit the pavement at once, fly again into the air, at once.

  ___________

  The summer just before April broke up with Joey, Nat and Louise rented a house on the beach for the family to spend a weekend. April and Joey were very excited about a game they’d learned and wanted to play after dinner. “April, you know how I feel about games,” Louise said, but April insisted. “It’s a very special game,” she said. “You’ll like it.”

  “How do you play?” Louise asked. “Is it tricky?” She had a native distrust of things that were tricky.

  “It’s easy. On the way down Joey and I made up a story about each of you, and now all you have to do, each of you, is ask yes-or-no questions. Then we answer them and thatj way you try to guess the story.”

  “That sounds fun,” Danny said.

  But Nat shook his head. “Not me,” he said. “You’re not roping me into this.”

  “Danny can go first,” April said.

  “Does this story take place in my house?” he asked.

  “No,” April and Joey answered in unison.

  “Does it take place in California?”

  “No.”

  “Does it take place on the East Coast?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does it have to do with my telling a story?”

  “Sort of—sort of.”

  “Does it have to do with my telling a poem?”

  “Yes!”

  As the game continued, the story came into focus: Danny was riding in a boat with April off the coast of New York, reading a poem aloud, and April got bored because it was a boring poem and pushed him off the boat into the harbor.

  “April,” Louise said, “that’s a terrible story to tell about your brother!”

  April and Joey laughed into their hands, and April said, “Now it’s your turn, Ma! Your turn next!”

  “Does this story take place in my house?”

  “No!”

  “Does this story take place when I’m out?”

  “Yes!”

  “Does this story take place in the supermarket?”

  “Yes!”

  “I don’t know about this,” Louise said. “Do I get sick in this story?”

  “Sort of!”

  Here is the story: Louise was shopping at the supermarket and got diarrhea. She couldn’t find a toilet anywhere. Eventually she had diarrhea in the store. By the time they reached the conclusion, everyone was for some reason laughing hysterically, wildly. Danny especially; he was on the floor, heaving and flopping like a fish just pulled out of the sea.

  “All right, I think it’s time to fess up to what’s going on here,” Nat said.

  “What do you mean, Dad?” April asked, all innocence, between laughs like hiccups.

  “I’m a scientist. I can recognize systems. Tell them, April, or I will.”

  “All right, all right.” But April couldn’t stop laughing. “You tell them, Joey.”

  “Well,” Joey said, “the truth is, Mrs. Cooper, we didn’t make up any stories. We just answered no to every question that ended with a vowel, and yes to every question that ended with a consonant—”

  “And if it ended with y we said, ‘Sort of,’ ” April added, still laughing.

  “Unless of course the question was so good we couldn’t resist saying yes,” Joey said.

  “So you see,” April said—and finally, now, she was calming down—“those were your stories. You made up your own stories.”

  Everyone had a good laugh then. “Imagine,” Louise said, grim-faced but smiling
. “Well, I don’t know what Dr. Freud would have to say about my story.”

  Of course, it was never played again. The game was in that category of phenomena that by their very natures can happen only once.

  But the stories, oddly enough, lived on in Danny’s memory, as vivid as dreams. He remembered the way the boat rocked in the noisy harbor, how April’s hands pushed, and how the dark water seemed to swallow him. He remembered as if he were there—a mute witness, a child alongside the cart: the panic in the aisles of the supermarket, the women raising their hands to their noses. The bottles and boxes and pieces of fruit fly from Louise’s overturned cart, rolling along the floor. And in the midst of it all, Louise herself, as she saw herself: befouled, degraded, humiliated beyond measure.