Equal Affections

by David Leavitt

  This was, Danny knew, what she was always afraid of happening, what she was convinced would happen if even for a second she let down her guard. “Her precious guard,” April called it. Now that was a title for a song.

  Chapter 8

  It seemed sometimes to Danny that the family could not get together for a birthday or holiday without April being compelled to air a grievance, vent an irritation, or ask an indelicate question. Psychological stillness seemed to her by necessity a sign of stagnation; it was as if she felt periodically obliged to stir up the dust of the time they had all lived together in the same house, a time which each year they seemed to have less of a grasp on, which each year seemed more and more a part of their history.

  Here they are, then, a few nights before Christmas 1982, having just finished a dinner of lasagne and a cake April has made. (She reverts to old habits when she is home, dispenses with her celebrity, bakes from mixes, in Bundt pans, recipes from Betty Crocker Bake-Off cookbooks.) “Mom, there’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you,” she says in a tone the solemnity of which everyone has come to associate with trouble.

  Louise puts down her cake fork and looks at Nat.

  “I know there have been a lot of secrets in this family,” April says, “things you assumed we didn’t know. But there are things I’ve learned recently—I’d prefer not to say how.”

  “What?” Louise says, still looking at Nat.

  “I know,” April says, “that you were married to someone else before Daddy.”

  Louise throws down her fork; it jangles, reverberates against the table. “Oh, Christ,” she says. “Did your father tell you that? Nat, did you tell her?”

  He looks away. He doesn’t say anything.

  “Or was it Eleanor?” she says.

  “It doesn’t matter who,” April says. “What’s important is it’s been told, and I’m glad to know. I want to know.”

  “It wasn’t Eleanor,” Nat says.

  Louise turns away from Nat. She turns away from April. “I don’t see why you’re making such a big deal out of it,” she says. “It was nothing. It just embarrasses me, that’s all. It’s like a big messy BM you had once. It’s not something you like to talk about.”

  Everyone is quiet. Louise’s eyes move from one face to the next. “All right,” she says. “It’s true. There, that’s done. Now I don’t want to talk about it ever again. Understand?”

  April opens her mouth to question further.

  “Sentence. Paragraph,” Louise says.

  She gets up from the table, gets up to do the dishes. Stretches tight rubber gloves over her hands. Fills the sink with suds. There are always dishes to be done, always some activity for her hands. Louise has beautiful hands, very dark and smooth, with whorled, soft skin over the knuckles. When Danny was growing up, she played the piano two or three hours in the late afternoon. Whatever piece she was learning, its stops and starts, its tricky phrases kept him from sleeping for nights afterwards, as if those awkward repetitions of practice were in themselves a kind of harmony, superimposed over the actual music. She knit so well she could read while she did it, cracking the spine of the book so that it would lie flat on her lap. Her fingers crossed the knitting needles, her eyes moved back and forth along the page. Most of the books in the house had been ruined that way, their backs broken in sacrifice to her ruthless industry.

  Now Nat gets up from the table, approaches her from behind. “Honey,” he says, “I didn’t mean to upset you. But I was telling April about our youth, she was asking, and—it just slipped out. I was feeling nostalgic, and it slipped out. Anyway, why does it matter that the kids know? Really, it’s not that big a deal—”

  “That’s for me to decide,” Louise says hotly. The steam rises in her face. Nat puts his hands on her shoulders, and her shoulders thrust them away.

  “Just leave me alone,” she says.

  “Okay, whatever you say.” He walks to the refrigerator, takes out a jar of jam.

  “Why don’t you shut up?” she says softly.

  Nat takes a spoonful of the jam and carries it out of the room with him. Louise’s shoulders rise and sink. Her hands slow, still. Her head falls toward the suds. “Why does everyone in this family expect me to clean up their goddamned messes and jam jars and dirty spoons?” she says.

  “Jam jars!” April says. “Jesus, Mother, I don’t see why we have to pretend so much! Jam jars has nothing to do with it! It’s like you’ve expected us to bury everything just because you have.”

  “You always have to have center stage, don’t you?” Louise says. “No one else in the world is allowed to suffer except you.”

  April stands then. Danny stands. It is almost rehearsable, this scene, the variations from Christmas to Christmas are so slight. Danny walks out of the room, into his parents’ bedroom, where Nat has already turned the TV on loud enough to drown out the noise of Louise and April fighting.

  “Are they at it again?” Nat asks.

  “Yes,” Danny says.

  “Okay,” Nat says. “Looks like we’re in for a long night.” He holds the remote control on his lap. He flips from channel to channel, bringing on a barrage of contradictory images: children holding toothpaste tubes, the moving mouths of newsmen, the famous wheel of fortune spinning, spinning, landing on bankrupt.

  There is a hangman puzzle on the television, the letters slowly filling in.

  “So are you surprised?” Nat asks.

  Danny shrugs. “I guess it’s just hard to think of your mother as a sexual being—that is, sexual with someone else besides your father.”

  “I know,” Nat says. “I had the same problem with my mother.”

  “I’m not going to ask for any details, even though I’m tempted.”

  “Someday I’ll tell you the whole story. Christ, I knew your mother would react this way.”

  “Then why’d you say anything to April? You know she’s a time bomb.”

  “I suppose,” Nat says, “that I knew April would tell Louisy. I suppose I finally wanted to get things out in the open.”

  “You’re asking for trouble.”

  Nat continues looking at the TV.

  “Sabotage,” he says.

  “What?”

  “Sabotage.”

  Confused, Danny looks again at the hangman puzzle. But the answer is becoming clear, and it isn’t sabotage.

  “A PIECE OF THE ACTION,” Nat says, guessing just before the contestant on the television. Danny looks at him. His lips are tight, his brow wrinkled.

  ___________

  Whatever fight happened happened in silence. Nat and Louise muffled themselves when Danny and April were home, locked themselves in the bedroom and had it out in fierce whispers—not for the children’s sake but for their own. Both of them carried around a tenacious belief in keeping things private, an assumption that the witnessing of their battles would bring down on them the greatest shame possible. The door to the bedroom stayed closed for hours, a silent, aching abscess at the heart of the house, and of course Danny knew better than to knock.

  Around ten o’clock April took her car and left; “to visit a friend,” she said. Danny was sitting at the kitchen table, watching a rerun of Saturday Night Live: Gilda Radner as the pathetic, palsied child visiting a child psychiatrist. “Which one of these toys is Mommy?” the psychiatrist asks, and the child chooses the Barbie doll. “And which is Daddy?” the psychiatrist asks, and the child chooses the Ken doll. “And which is you?” the psychiatrist asks, and the child picks up a package of scotch tape.

  “That Gilda Radner’s funny,” Lpuise said. Danny hadn’t heard her come in. Her voice was a little hoarse, and she was wearing her pink bathrobe and slippers.

  “Yes,” he said. “She is funny.”

  She went over to her desk. There was a tub of clear, hot wax there into which she twice a day dunked her arthritic hands. From where Danny sat he watched the familiar submersion, the swift pulling out. She held her hands dripping over the t
ub until the wax hardened, then wrapped them in towels and sat down at the kitchen table. Bolts of soft cloth emerged from her pink bathrobe sleeves, and Danny remembered how the milky, opaque wax took the shape of her hands exactly—every vein, every nail.

  “Is Daddy asleep?” Danny asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you okay?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “I’m not in the mood to talk, Danny.” He thought of asking more, but on the TV Gilda Radner was back again, this time as Rosanne Rosanna-Danna, describing tiny things, tiny news of the body, which both of them found difficult to ignore.

  After that there was a commercial. She unwrapped her hands, peeled the white wax from her skin. It formed a soft, pale ball in her palm. She dropped it into the tub to melt again. Her hands glistened and gave off the faint, sweet aroma of paraffin.

  “I’m not going to ask you any questions,” Danny said. “I don’t want to make you feel bad. But I think I should tell you—it really doesn’t bother me. I mean, when April made her little announcement, my first thought was relief. I thought, Is that all?”

  Louise laughed and lifted her eyes to the ceiling. “Thanks, honey,” she said. “I just feel as if I’ve been paying long enough. Really, how long can you be expected to keep paying?”

  “Paying who?”

  She was looking toward the window, shiny as patent leather tonight as it reflected the bright kitchen lights.

  “Good question,” she said. “Well, I should go to bed. Good night.”

  ___________

  So there was a wildness. A wildness in her youth.

  Then, as far as Danny could tell, she had done a kind of penance for that wildness, she had willed a purgatory to grow up around her, and there, in this landscape of her own invention, she had endured for years the slow paying off of a slow-burning debt of guilt. No one had demanded this penance of her; it was entirely her own choice.

  Of course there had always been hints. “Every married person cheats,” she said to him once. “I just want you to know so you won’t be hurt. There’s no such thing as marital loyalty.” He must have been five or six at the time. What could have prompted her to say such a thing, he wondered sometimes now, especially to a tiny child, for whom such advice could not possibly have done any good? But of course it was naive to assume his good was really at the heart of her words, as she insisted. Really it must have been a slip, like whispering, “I hate you, I want you to die,” to your lover while he lies sleeping next to you: a test, a fantasy. Danny had done that to Walter once. Probably she never imagined he’d hear or remember those words. He was a child. It was like talking to the air.

  But what could have been so shameful, so terrible that she felt this strong obligation to secrecy? A marriage in her youth? That was nothing. That was almost charming. And yet he had to remember that she was the daughter of a different generation, a different coast, a different idea of sin. It had become a crutch for her, that difference. She leaned on it when she didn’t want to accept things as they were; when Danny first told her he was gay, she picked the crutch up and hit him with it. For a long time he believed it was merely an excuse for not changing, an excuse for resisting the disparity between how things were and how she had expected them to be, but now he wondered. He tried to hear the voices of his mother’s mother and aunts, telling her what a bad girl she is, how she will never be anything but bad, how she doesn’t deserve such a nice boy as that Nat Cooper. The voices, playing over and over in her head, joined, perhaps, by Nat’s voice? Had he at some point reached a limit with her wildness? Were there flirtations, threatened (and perhaps real) adulteries?

  “Sabotage,” he said that night at Christmastime. But that was a long time ago. And after that, it seemed, the family was never together all at once: April was touring at Christmas; Danny developed a convenient and paralyzing fear of planes.

  Sometimes it seemed as if Louise had changed. As if her self-imposed term of punishment had finally come to an end and she had paid in full. As if guilt and sin were a kind of mortgage, slowly, slowly winding down to nothing.

  Walter and Danny were living in Manhattan the year after that particular Christmas. Danny hadn’t asked, Louise hadn’t told him anything. She called him up, and there was a new kind of lightness in her voice, a throwaway humor he barely recognized. She told him that Mr. Mulligan, the family accountant, had disappeared on vacation in Mexico. “They were in Guadalajara. According to his wife, he just stepped out to get cigarettes, and that’s the last they’ve seen of him for a week. It’s funny. I keep envisioning old Mr. Mulligan wandering around the Mexican desert in his suspenders. Because, you see, at first everyone assumed he was dead, but now the consensus seems to be that he was running away from everything. From his life. Just dropping it all.” She laughed. “It’s a shame. You know how much he charged to do our taxes? Fifty dollars. I challenge you to find another accountant in America who’ll do a tax return for fifty dollars.”

  “Times change” was all Danny could think of saying.

  “I’m thinking of going back to work, by the way. Do you know anyone who needs someone to sit in a dark office on a high stool, adding up numbers by candlelight? You know, like what’s-his-name. The one who works for Scrooge.”

  “Cratchit.”

  “Cratchit, yes. That’s the kind of job I’d like.”

  “I can’t think of anyone offhand.”

  He could hear her rapping her fingers against the white formica of the kitchen counter.

  “Maybe I’ll apply at World Savings,” she said.

  Chapter 9

  But there was no high stool; there was no job. Instead, there was a new lump one morning (the body’s old nocturnal betrayal) and a new regimen of chemotherapy. “The side effects aren’t too bad,” Louise told Danny over the phone. “I just feel a little nauseous sometimes. Anyway, this chlorambucil’s working like a charm. Dr. Sonnenberg says he’s very impressed; he may even stop the treatments earlier than he’d planned.”

  “That’s great, Mom.”

  “Your father is taking me out for sushi for our anniversary. You know how I love sushi.”

  “I wish I could be there.”

  “Well, why don’t you fly out for the weekend? No, don’t worry, I’m kidding. I understand about your busy life.”

  “Come here and I’ll buy you the best sushi you’ve ever had. There’s a place on Third Avenue that has the most incredible sushi—”

  “I know, I know, everything’s always better on the East Coast, right, honey? New York sushi must be better than California sushi. Well, I’ll have you know I’m perfectly delighted with our local Fuki-Sushi. It’s just fine with me.” She laughed. “You’re like a broken record, you know that? And what you sing is ‘New York’s better, New York’s better.’”

  “Mom!” Danny said. “I do not!”

  “Have you heard from your sister lately?”

  “Yes, She’s passing through here in a couple of weeks.”

  “Well, that’s good. At least you two will be together. I was hoping to have her home for our anniversary. But I understand, she’s busy too, with her tours and what have you. The other day a woman came up to me in the supermarket and said, ‘Excuse me, but I’ve been given to understand you’re April Gold’s mother, and I just want to let you know how wonderful your daughter is and how very proud you should be and how great her songs are, especially “Marriage” and “Mother, Mother” and “Family Heirlooms,” you really should be proud of those songs, she’s such a sensitive writer.’”

  “What’d you say?” Danny asked.

  “Oh, I didn’t say anything. But I should have told her about my plan.”

  “Your plan?”

  “My song I’m going to write about the mother whose daughter is always writing songs about her, and what it feels like to listen to them. I think I’ll call it ‘I Am the Mothers.’ You like that title?”

  “I think it’s a great title.”

  “Good. And I�
��ll have you know I am also working on another idea: a hit squad composed entirely of terminally ill people. Isn’t that great? They have nothing to lose, so they might as well take a few Latin American dictators along with them.”

  “You have wonderful ideas.”

  They agreed to talk again on the weekend.

  But after she hung up, there was a strange, low buzz in the atmosphere, somehow, as if some machine, some essential, irreplaceable machine, were working just beyond Danny’s sight. Like a broken-down boiler, patched in places, and all of them just waiting for it to give out. The space her voice had filled billowed out, a vast gasp reminding him, suddenly, of how high the stakes were. She would lose her life, and he would lose her, and at that selfish moment he simply could not determine which of them would register the greater loss.

  ___________

  Walter often had to work late; it was not uncommon, on a workday evening, for him to remain at his office until one or two in the morning. So when he felt he couldn’t go home, felt he couldn’t face Danny, he had an excuse. On those nights that he stayed in the city under false pretenses, he didn’t go to bars and pick up hustlers, he didn’t meet law clerks for illicit rendezvous in mid town hotel rooms. Instead, he sat in his dark office in one of the World Trade Center towers; smoked; stared out at the bluish night skyline of Wall Street, looking across the way at the other World Trade Center tower, the sporadic glowing squares which punctuated that dark mosaic, and beyond them more bright squares, miles of them, as if people were holding candles up to windows in memory of the lost and missing. He smoked low-nicotine cigarettes; he thought of Danny, alone in his own office a few blocks north, or in the living room in Gresham, the light from the TV casting shadows on his face. Their suburban life, the life he had urged Danny into, seemed absurd to him sometimes, even as he cherished its rituals. What right did they have to such a life? he asked himself. As if two men could be married, like anyone else! How the neighbors must snicker behind their backs! But really what kept him in the office—what kept him from going home—was the fear that he had swindled Danny, that he had betrayed him, and that soon—oh, the final act of betrayal, the final act of abandonment!—that soon he would have to leave him.