Equal Affections

by David Leavitt

  As for regret, it was—it is—chronically postorgasmic. The VCR clunked and rewound, and Walter, his pants around his ankles, invariably found himself overcome with sadness, as he stared at the expansive living room of his perfectly nice house, the living room that might have been lifted whole from the window at Conran’s. As the film rewound, he rewound; he thought of Paris, he saw himself, suddenly, vagrant, in a dirty rooming house in Paris. Danny claimed it was generational, the children of the divorced or unhappy households of the seventies seeking to re-create in adulthood the stable family home they never had, but hoped for, all through their growing up. They do not run away; they do not go to ashrams or to visit the Great Wall. They stay home. They open Insured Market Rate Accounts.

  At least as far as Walter was concerned, Danny had a point in pointing all this out. His own growing up, after all, had been less than secure. His father, Morry, had left home when Walter was twelve, and in the intervening years Walter had seen him only in restaurants—expensive, loud restaurants filled with the tumultuous machinery of giant organs; restaurants on the edges of highways that served things like buffalo chicken wings and fried potato skins; restaurants in the city with waiters and sous-chefs and porcini mushrooms; suburban Mafia dens with gold flatware, buffets, platters of jumbo shrimp, heaping bowls of chocolate mousse. Oh, his father had a house, not that far away, which he shared with a woman named Leonie. But somehow he never had occasion to ask Walter to visit that house, and Walter had never had occasion to press the issue. As for Iris, his mother, she was quiet and frugal, a schoolteacher, recently retired. After the divorce she had of course had to move out of the big family ranch house, which was quickly sold at immense profit. Years of solitude and suffering had led her to a sort of peace with herself. She lived in a condominium complex for singles, in an apartment rich with maroon carpeting, and she had a boyfriend, a retired elementary school principal named Hal. She remained a diligent mother. Often, when Walter got home from work, he’d find packages of home-baked bread waiting on his kitchen counter or a pot of soup simmering on the stove. The sink shone; there was a package of colored sponges sitting on the table with a note that said, “Remember—green for dishes, yellow for counters.” Iris and Hal had subscriptions to the state opera and symphony, and sat in on a music history course at a local community college. In the summer they went on tours. In buses, with guides, they walked Rome, the Greek islands, and a good portion of the Great Wall of China; they saw Cairo and Istanbul; they “did” Moscow, where, under the watchful eye of the KGB, Iris delivered a letter from the children of their synagogue to the children of some refuseniks and openly, daringly took pictures of forbidden things. “The guard just looked at me,” she explained, “and I looked at him, real tough. You think he’d take on an American lady who’s likely to scream bloody murder? No way.” And she laughed, passing around blurry snapshots of smiling couples, and street carts, and large gray buildings—what was forbidden about all of this even Iris couldn’t say.

  Walter saw his mother almost every day; he saw his father exactly twelve times a year—the very same visitation agreement provisioned by the original divorce. After their monthly luncheons, the dates of which were emblazoned in Iris’s memory, she always called on some pretext and after a few moments, inevitably, asked how things had gone, how Morry was. “Fine,” Walter always said.

  “And did he have his woman there?”

  “No, Leonie stayed home.”

  “It figures. I guess he was ashamed to be seen with her in public.”

  That was his family.

  Funny how much more stable his own life appeared, at least in the eyes of the world. His parents were the ones, after all, who had trusted in the god of stability.

  And so, pulling up his pants, Walter thought, perhaps Danny was right. Perhaps he really had chosen this life. Although, he reflected, as the mouth of the VCR spit out the rewound tape like a black tongue, it was more comfortable to believe that it had been chosen for him, foisted upon him, that given the option, he would have been in Paris now, writing novels or painting pictures. Asking questions.

  Danny was in the other room of course, busy with something. Talking to his mother, his sister, his father on the telephone.

  Chapter 11

  Louise was watching Women in Love on cable and doing her hands. She had turned it on in the middle, so she didn’t know what was going on. Men and women in antiquated dress, running around in the British countryside. There seemed to be sexual tension. Her mind was wandering—she was worrying about a dentist’s appointment on Friday, a follow-up to root canal work, as well as a peculiar rash on her feet which itched—when suddenly something came on the screen that dazzled, and she was lost. A dark, bearded man was making love to a woman in an elaborate Victorian dress; the woman lay back on the grass, her skirts hiked up, and he hovered over her, naked, his hips bucking and thrusting. Louise caught back her breath and put her hand to her mouth, but of course for the moment she didn’t have a hand. Nonetheless she did not move her arm—not until the man had finished, shuddering upon the girl’s layered gowns, and the bland, soft taste of warm terry cloth and fabric softener began to cloy against her teeth.

  The scene ended. The film returned to its previous confusing plots. Soon the characters were in a snowy landscape, running around in furs. She switched off the TV with the blunt, feelingless end of the terry-cloth arm.

  But as she unwrapped her hands and peeled the wax from them, she was amazed at how vividly Tommy Burns returned to her. She assumed she had lost him; assumed that the intervening years, with their hard work and hard duties, not only had deprived her of the opportunity to experience such intense moments as those she had lived with him but indeed had robbed her of memory itself, dulling forever the sharp edges of her experiences, so that she hardly believed they had taken place at all.

  When she was a little girl, she had once woken up from a nightmare, and her mother had said to her, “Don’t worry, darling, it was just a dream.” “But how can I tell when it’s a dream and when it’s not?” Louise asked, and her mother balanced a finger against her lip and said, “Pinch yourself. If you don’t feel it, it’s a dream.” This had consoled Louise for forty years; she had pinched herself through forty years of dream-filled nights.

  So she believed her affair with Tommy Burns was, or was something like, a dream. She remembered him, remembered the passion with which they had burned together. But it was the numb giving of other flesh, not her own, that strange sensation of pinching and pinching, and feeling nothing.

  She thought of the bearded man, his body fevered, the girl in the layered skirts, and she was returned to the smell of Tommy Burns’s breath, clam bellies smothered in fat, as vividly as if that dented, spitting vat had materialized in her own kitchen, along with the tattooed man and the fryer basket shaking in the bubbles. This made her move toward the bedroom, where Nat lay snoring, with a renewed sense of pleasure. The springy give of the carpet felt good against her itchy feet, almost as good as it had felt when it was new, back in their past, when carpeting itself had seemed such an extravagant luxury. So perhaps the carpeting really was new, and it really was ten years earlier, the past rushing forward to reclaim her for youth.

  She took off her robe, climbed into her half of the vast bed. It was bigger than king size, an ocean of a bed; the sheet and blanket rippled like waves as she pulled them over. She couldn’t sleep, so she tried to imagine what her life would’ve been like if Eleanor hadn’t gotten sick and Tommy Burns had asked her to marry him. Then she’d be living in Los Angeles, in a house on a cliff, a house with huge windows, maybe overlooking the ocean. She would have different children as well; she had invented them and named them: Brad, the son, a doctor, handsome as his father but given to bouts of depression; Susan, a daughter, a lawyer, pretty and professional with carefully manicured nails. She didn’t particularly love these imagined offspring—ultimately the fantasy of them made her grateful for her own imperfect children—but
at the same time she believed in them; she believed they were the children she and Tommy Burns would have had in that other life, that life in which she was a Hollywood wife—heavily made up, with thickly glossed nails and a string of pearls around her neck. As it was, she never wore makeup.

  ___________

  Nat was gone when she woke up in the morning. He rose silently each day at the crack of dawn and disappeared. As he slept soundly, unmoving, his absence really felt no different from his presence.

  It was the day of her appointment. At noon, at the hospital, the news was that one of the black mollies had given birth; the tiny fry swam round and round the little nursery tank that Dr. Golden had suspended onto the side of the big tank, like one of those backpacks young mothers carried their babies in. Eventually her name was called; she went into the examination room and soon was relieved to see Dr. Wolff, the good resident, coming through the door. One reason Dr. Wolff was the good resident was that she didn’t keep Louise waiting. Dr. Tallcott, the bad resident, had once kept her waiting in the examination room for more than an hour. She despised Dr. Tallcott, his clumsy hands and stupid humor, but would do anything for Dr. Wolff, whose gentleness and normalness were such a relief in that frightening place that she was often moved to tears, to extravagant praise at dinner parties, monologues of adulation that left the other guests nodding and nervous, not sure what to say, grasping for new subjects—anything to avoid the awful mention of the disease’s name. But Dr. Wolff was slightly grave today as she felt Louise’s lymph nodes. “Just a long night last night,” she said when Louise asked, and smiled. “Thanks for noticing.” Louise might easily have called Dr. Wolff by her first name—Deborah—except that she enjoyed the fact that this splendid young woman was a doctor and wanted to give her every opportunity to exult in that achievement. So she was always calling her Dr. Wolff. Dr. Tallcott she avoided addressing.

  At length Dr. Wolff said good-bye; Dorothy came in and took a sample of blood. “That’s it, honey,” she said as she removed the needle, daubed the wound with cotton, and put on a Band-Aid. “You’re free.”

  “Thanks,” Louise said, reaching behind to untie the starchy white gown. Temporary freedom wasn’t an insult to her anymore, it was a gift.

  She dressed quickly, hurried outside. On the lawn next to the parking lot, the usual bunch of right-to-lifers were marching their beleaguered-looking children in a perpetual, droopy circle, as if they had been condemned to play ring-around-the-rosy for eternity. There were only women this afternoon, pale-skinned and moon-faced and young, in pink and green down coats; they carried signs that read, PROTECT THE UNBORN and THIS HOSPITAL COMMITS MURDER. Louise always nodded her head crossly when she encountered them, turned the corner with aggression, thrust off their petitions with fists. It was a weak gesture compared with the inexhaustible determination of these pale-skinned enemies, but it was all she could muster. She lacked the stamina of belief. Most people she knew assumed that cancer had made her a cynic and an atheist, but in fact she had been that way since well before cancer; what had fueled her hard work for progressive causes all those years was not hope for the ideal of a perfect world—man, she believed, was brutal and stupid, utterly imperfectible—but the endless end-of-fall burning of the endless dry leaves of hopelessness. All you could do was do what you could, stave off the chaos, one day at a time.

  Before cancer, she had had fighting spirit; she had believed she held the power to change minds. Back then, when the protests were fresh, she took part in counterdemonstrations, and the tired-looking young women, in response to the statistics on teenaged pregnancy fired out by Louise and her friends, fired out scriptural quotation with mechanistic devotion. It was like a game show she had once seen on CBN, or the Christian Bimbo Network, in which contestants vied to identify biblical phrases as quickly as possible: “Corinthians one: seventeen!” “Matthew thirty-four: twelve!” It became clear to her pretty quickly she wasn’t getting through; she’d never get through this armature of belief. She backed off. She hated the antiabortionists, but she was also cowed by the power of their belief. It was like nothing she herself had ever come close to feeling.

  She was tired. She looked tired. Several years ago she had ceased to concern herself with vanity, as she put it; now she kept her hair cut short, no longer bothered to dye out the gray. Usually she dressed in big sweaters and denim skirts or jeans. Her skin was dark and carved with deep grooves, like the bark of a tree. “What do I need with fancy clothes?” she said, when her old friends Myra Eber and Joyce Rosen tried to get her to go out shopping with them. “I don’t need to look nice anymore. I don’t have time.” She meant it. What good did it do to spend hundreds of dollars on dresses from Saks, to pay outlandish dues to the temple just so you could hear the rabbi paraphrase, in lieu of a sermon, the entire plot of some movie he’d seen on HBO the night before? (“But, Louise,” Joyce implored, “that only happened once! Rabbi only did that once!” “Once was too much for me,” Louise said.) Her friends bought sleek Norma Kamali gowns and wore them to Rosh Hashanah services. Louise stayed home. She had no need for services. She had no time. After years in which the time stretched out, a dull horizon calling to be filled, for the first time in her life her days were numbered, and she was not going to waste a second pretending to piety in that so-called sanctuary, that hive of expensive clothing and gossip about who was getting divorced, who was cheating on whom, who was dying. She craved more than that. She craved the very thing she didn’t believe in, the very thing the temple (she felt) could give her none of: She craved belief itself.

  She talked about this with no one. She had no reason to. Her agnostic mother had taught her that religious feeling, like sexual feeling, was something slightly embarrassing, something you dealt with quickly and privately, if you had to, and didn’t talk about in public. And that had been fine. For the first thirty-five years of her life she’d had no reason to think about belief, she was so busily engaged in existence. Still, things had happened she hadn’t been prepared for: cancer, for one, and no one in her childhood had warned her, in between all that talk of marriage and family, that sons sometimes preferred the company of sons, daughters the company of daughters. Well, she had coped with that. She had coped with all of it, coming through the hurdles splendidly, she believed, as a result of an uncommon combination of lust for life and unrelenting pessimism. Odd that those two opposed tendencies should go hand in hand, but they did, and indeed, their doing so seemed to Louise perfectly sensible; in that unlikely pairing it seemed to her was the germ of religious feeling.

  For in spite of her difficult and simple life, Louise had a dream, a lust, a vision. It was unlikely, unimaginable, so much so that she spoke of it to no one. There stood near her house, between the looming architectures of two corporate presences, a small, white, stuccoed building where the windows were always closed. It was a cloistered convent; for twenty-five years the nuns had never emerged, and no one (except, presumably, new recruits) ever went in. Food and linens and other necessities were supplied by a kind of carrier nun, who passed them through a turnstile inside the front door. Sometimes Louise stopped her car in front of the convent and stared through the trees at the yellow-lit windows, and once she thought she saw a glimmer of a face, a fleeting old face, passing by, not stopping to look out.

  This was her lust: She dreamed of being a nun. Not a crusading nun who offered immune, self-immolating sanctuary to refugees or risked her life nursing children in war-torn Central American countries; no, Louise wanted to be a cloistered nun, a nun who loved Jesus alone, a nun who swathed herself in white cotton, and slept in a cold, still room, and pushed linens through old-fashioned roller washers. A silent nun, who had sworn never to speak, never even to mumble, not even in her sleep, not even when no one could hear. It was that cold, clear, silent life, and that life alone, which tempted her, that life so far from her own, with its frantic demands and waverings and deathly fears.

  There was a legend about Louise in her family.
Her own mother, Anna, told how once she had taken Louise—six years old—on a bus and sat her down opposite a pair of nuns. “Mommy,” Louise had said, “why are those ladies dressed so funny?” Anna had laughed nervously and, clenching her teeth, given her daughter a look to suggest what terrible punishments would result from an inappropriate remark, before answering in a clear, dental voice, “Because they’re nuns, dear.” To which Louise responded, with a small but bewitching smile, “But aren’t they beautiful?”

  Louise loved this story, though she could not remember the incident happening. Her mother loved it too; she told it for forty years, sitting around the table after dinner or with her friends at the Chiffon Beauty Shoppe in Maiden. And always it was Louise’s wit that was praised, her know-how, her sensitivity to unspoken threats. “She knew what to say, I’ll tell you,” Anna told her laughing friends, assuming all the while that Louise’s feeling about the nuns, even at ten, was the same as her mother’s: bemusement and bafflement. Contempt. That old-world disdain. What surprised Louise was that no one had considered the possibility that she might have really thought the nuns were beautiful.

  Louise, in her car, at stoplights, on long, luminous, empty avenues. Always when driving, from her house to the hospital or to the grocery store, she was nurturing this fantasy: the dream of a clean and clear life in which belief translated exactly into strength. A life in which she would rise early and go to bed early and never feel tired (as she always did now). A life in which all the photographic borders would crystallize and come into a sharper focus, and she would know, moment to moment, how it was she was meant to live, and why.

  But of course this was just a wish, an idle fancy. She was a cynic and an atheist. She was a foe of the antiabortionists, doubted she would ever forgive the pope his audience with Kurt Waldheim. In her actual life, her nondream life, pragmatism prevailed. She was addicted to nasal sprays, could not sleep or breathe without them. Every morning and every evening she guiltily snorted from small bottles, imagining that this fear of not being able to breathe must be what was at the heart of being an alcoholic, a junkie. Garbage cans overturned, yogurt spilled in shopping bags, there were always forgotten places filling with dust. Some futile urge to order the world kept her moving, but the forces of chaos in her life were stronger than that other urge by far. Like Penelope she knit—sweaters, mittens, sometimes skirts and dresses. Unlike Penelope she put her knitting aside at night and slept, though fitfully. And what foiled her in her knitting was nothing more than the ordinary tangles of misread instructions.