Equal Affections

by David Leavitt

  “Coming to you like this, it’s my salvation,” Nat said. “But as soon as I’m here, I start thinking, Why does it have to end in the morning? God, why do I have to go back, why do I have to go back? God help me, I wish she would die. I can’t believe it, I wish she would die.”

  “It’s okay,” Lillian said. “It’s okay.”

  “But, Lil, I’m so scared when I think that. I hate myself for thinking that. I mean, it’s all my fault.”

  “What’s your fault?”

  “Everything. The cancer, everything. Her whole life is my fault.”

  “No,” Lillian said, and pushed his head away. “Now look at me, Nat. She may be miserable and she may have cancer and you may have done some shitty things to her, but her life is not your fault. No one’s life is anyone’s fault. God knows, it took me long enough to learn it, but I did. We make our own choices, all of us, Louise as much as anyone else.”

  “I guess, Lil.” He sniffled and, taking a kleenex from a box on the coffee table, blew his nose.

  “Nat, I’ve told you before—”

  He shook his head.

  “Nat, it could be the best thing you could do. For her as well as yourself. It could be just what it takes to force her to take her life into her own hands.”

  “She can’t live without me,” Nat said quietly.

  “Don’t be so sure,” Lillian said. “Women have made remarkable recoveries, they’ve come to life in ways you wouldn’t believe, and I think Louise could too.” And then, suddenly, she laughed. “Me, the great feminist,” she said. “The other woman. I mean, looking at it objectively, it’s Louise I’m interested in, Louise I want to help. But I don’t suppose she’d accept my help. Oh, well. The great, selfless Lillian Rubenstein-Kraft deludes herself again. Thinking I want you to leave her for her sake.”

  Thus admitting for the first time that evening her own unhappiness with the situation, Lillian turned away.

  Nat laughed a little at that as, standing from the sofa, Lillian drew the living room blinds.

  The phone rang. Immediately they both turned to look at it and, like people willed into enchantment or hypnosis, froze.

  “I’m not going to get it,” Lillian said.

  “Don’t get it,” Nat said.

  “I’m not going to get it.”

  They kept standing there, and as the phone kept ringing, they looked intently into each other’s eyes across the room. Counting. Finally, when it was silent, they breathed and moved to each other in the center. Their hands intertwined.

  “It is okay,” Lillian said. “Remember, what we have is okay. We have rich, full lives. We’ll take what we can get for the moment, and in the future?” She shrugged. “Who knows what’ll happen? Right?”

  Nat smiled. “Right,” he said. “God, I wonder if that was her calling.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Lillian said. “For the moment it really doesn’t matter. It could have been my kids, but they’ll call back. You know anyone can call back.”

  “Yes,” he said. “You’re right. But you know—oh, I don’t know, maybe I should go home tonight. I mean, she was so upset, out there on the street, barefoot. I don’t trust her. It’s come far before; it’s never come this far. Could it go farther? I mean, we are on the very horizon of finally saying the truth to each other, and yet somehow we hold back before saying it—you know, I’m in love with Lillian,’ ‘You can’t leave me until I’m dead, I won’t let you,’ ‘I can’t live with you,’ ‘I can’t live without you.’ All of it. So we keep going in circles, and I think sometimes maybe the anxiety is giving her the cancer, or making it worse—I’ve read that could happen—and I think—God forgive me—sometimes I think I’m glad, I think I want her to get sicker so I can get on with my life, but then other times I’m just flooded with memories, flooded with memories of the children, us as a family, and I look at her and try to imagine not looking at her—I mean, her not being there to look at, you know? Her not being there to make a fuss or object or yell. You fill the dishwasher the wrong way and instead of a lecture—nothing. Because she’s gone. And I think of turning on the dishwasher and the dishwasher starting and her being gone and, Lil, something caves in—it’s like I’m gone too. I just can’t stand the thought of losing her, I guess is what I’m trying to say. Which is maybe also why I can’t leave—not just for her sake. I mean, Lil, forty years! Jesus God, forty years!”

  For a moment they were both silent. Lillian looked away.

  “Well,” he said. “Well. What to do now?”

  “I feel like a criminal,” Lillian said quietly. “You know, for my own sake, I’m encouraging you to do things I’m not sure I really, objectively believe you should do, not in my heart.”

  “Everyone deserves some happiness, Lil,” Nat said. “But you can only obligate others to your own happiness so long—up to a certain limit, that is. So the question is, When do you reach the limit? I mean, is marriage like sharecropping or something? Is it perpetual debt?” He shook his head crossly. “I refuse that model. I’ve given Louise enough to satisfy my own—moral code. Now I have to think of myself.”

  “And not leave her,” Lillian said.

  They were silent for a few breaths.

  “And not leave her,” Nat said.

  ___________

  Later that night Louise, who was in truth far too fearful of Lillian’s voice even to consider phoning there, heard her own phone ring. She was sitting in the living room in her bathrobe, the knitting needles knocking gently, one against the other, the television talking in the background. When she heard the phone, she stood slowly, wondering if it might be Nat. She thought she should let it ring a few times, then changed her mind and lifted the receiver to her ear.

  “Mom, it’s me,” Danny said.

  “Oh, Danny, hi!”

  “How are you?”

  “Oh, you know. Okay. How are you?”

  “I’m fine. I was wondering if I could talk to Dad, I have a money question—”

  “Well, actually, Danny, he’s not home.” She paused to come up with an excuse for him, then decided he didn’t deserve one. “He’s visiting a friend,” she said.

  There was a moment of silence during which Danny apparently decided not to pick up on her cue. “It’s nothing urgent,” he said. “Can he call me tomorrow?”

  “Sure he can.”

  “Good. Anyway, anything important up?”

  “Not much,” Louise said. “I’m thinking of becoming a Catholic.”

  There was another brief silence. “Excuse me?” Danny said.

  “I just said I was thinking of becoming a Catholic.”

  “A Catholic. Why?”

  “I think Catholicism offers a lot to people who have to be alone.” (In fact, this idea hadn’t occurred to her until that moment, but it seemed true as she said it.)

  “Well,” Danny said, flustered, “I don’t know much about Catholicism. Forgive me, Mom, if I sound surprised, but I never thought you were a religious person.”

  “I haven’t been up until now. But my life is changing, Danny. I need to do something—because of my life.” Suddenly she felt herself on the verge of crying, talking about her life like that. Already she had gone too far; she didn’t want him to know she was crying. So she covered the mouthpiece with her hand and struggled to control her breath.

  “I think it’s great that you want to change your life, Mom, but—well, what about getting a job? Wouldn’t that be a good idea? You were talking about that last week!”

  “Danny!” she said. “Who would hire me?”

  “Lots of people! Anyway, I thought you were going to apply at World Savings.”

  She laughed. “Don’t be silly. A dumb old lady who doesn’t have a college degree—what would they want with me at World Savings?”

  “Mom, you’re not dumb or old. You’re very smart.”

  “Well, that’s very sweet of you, son, to say so.”

  “I mean it.”

  “Thank you. It
’s always nice to know you can depend on your children for flattery, even when you’re an old rotten hag.”

  “Mom, for Christ’s sake!”

  “Listen, Danny,” she said, “I have to go—something’s in the oven.”

  “Mom, I—”

  “I’ll talk to you soon, honey. Don’t worry about me, I’m fine.”

  “Mom—” He sighed, whether with relief or frustration she couldn’t tell. “Okay, then. Bye.”

  She hung up quickly, blew her nose. Instinctively she moved to the kitchen, as if there really were something in the oven. But of course there wasn’t. She turned it on to clean itself.

  But as she walked back to the living room, the vision returned to her: the vision of the stone cell, the white robe, the gentle relinquishing as the scissors snipped away and the hair fell in locks to the floor. It stunned her, this vision; she suddenly had no strength, and she crouched where she stood, in the middle of the dining room, almost in a position of prayer. With her hands she pressed shut her eyelids, as if by pressing she could really block out the vision encroaching upon her. “Dear Lord,” she said. “Dear God. Dear Lord.”

  So she remained, on her knees, in the dining room, for what seemed like several hours. She was trying not to think of her husband and his two-named lover, but instead to feel the ecstatic release as those inevitable shears—cutting, cutting—removed from her the burdens of her life.

  Eventually she stood up. One of her feet had fallen asleep, and the buzzing was like a cry uttered by her body, a cry for life anyway.

  She hobbled toward the bedroom. It was well past two. One more day of life, one more day in the world, she thought, and tried to remember—as she got into the bed, penitent, purified, and vowed to eternal silence—that this in itself was something to be happy for.

  Chapter 12

  From their first meeting Walter had felt a curious affinity for Louise. Some quality of unadmitted hesitancy, in eyes that would have looked, to most people, steadfast and determined, came through to him as he shook her hand at the San Francisco airport. It was the end of the first semester of his second year at law school, and even though they’d known each other only a month and a half, Danny was bringing Walter home for Christmas. (“But isn’t it a little premature for that?” Walter had asked. “No, no,” Danny said, “it’s right, it feels right to me.”) Once Walter agreed, Danny lied over the phone, telling his mother they’d known each other nearly six months. Apparently his need to show Walter to his family was so urgent that he felt no qualms about stretching their brief courtship out like that, and not only to Louise; soon he was telling everyone they’d known each other six months; he even had himself convinced they’d known each other six months. (Six months! It had seemed an inconceivably long time then, since it was nearly six times as long as they had, in fact, been together. Now six months passed in a breath, an instant, and each day that point at which their time together would be doubled receded further and further into the future.)

  Louise and Nat stood in the crowd of airport welcomers, not really that different from their photographs, nervous but smiling. In theory they had already evolved into the kind of parents who, without reservation, make up the double bed in the guest room for their son and his “friend,” but they hadn’t yet had to put the theory into practice. Even so, what strain Louise was feeling, as she shook Walter’s hand, she covered brilliantly; only someone with equal skill at subterfuge would have been able to see through the cracks in her makeup. She had met her match in Walter, who noticed in her face that afternoon all sorts of things she would have preferred no one notice, chief among them an expression—how could he put it right? Wildness, yes, but tamed, or long suppressed. Whatever it was, it was vivid to him in her eyes, which looked quickly away, and in her mouth, which held fast and stayed closed, and when he heard the stories about her, the impression only became stronger: There was the history of desires felt, indulged, deemed improper by mysterious authority, then relegated to some back attic of the mind, not to be thought about again; and there was the wear of years spent nose to the grindstone of a life she imagined to be more suitable than the sort of life her nature made her lean toward.

  How strong she was! How much stronger than Walter, who, a coward in both directions, had neither truly indulged nor fully rejected his urges toward what he imagined to be the unsuitable. He was too undisciplined, he had realized early on, to shake his homosexuality altogether, or hide it in the corners of an otherwise heterosexual life, yet at the same time he contemplated the late-night, cigarette-reeking prowl of the city with both distaste and apprehension. And so he had determined to do something quietly revolutionary: to incorporate his sexual nature into a life of suburban domesticity, uproot the seed of homosexuality from its natural urban soil and replant it in the pure earth of his green garden. It had, by and large, worked, and yet he realized he’d made a singular mistake. For it wasn’t just the love of a man he’d been drawn to in his early days in the city; it was the rank garden of the city itself, with its brief yet intense gratifications, its dangers and easy disappointments. In contrast, Louise apparently had had her share of wildness. Under different circumstances, she might have been reckless; Walter could imagine her spilling champagne, at dawn, into the Grand Canal or sleeping on donkey back. But she was stubborn and afraid, and had settled instead for a house, where what satisfactions there were derived from order and clarity, warmth, early bedtimes. She did crossword puzzles in her bathrobe till nine. At eleven she watched the news, soaking her hands in wax while the violent upheavals of the world splattered like gore itself against the inner side of the glass screen. To Danny and April she was a muddle, all rage and inexplicable longing; they were afflicted with the egotism of children looking at mothers, they saw her mind as a series of puffed layers, each concealing a slightly less soggy, slightly more essential truth; she was angry that the dishes weren’t done; no, she was angry that no one helped her; no, she was angry that her husband took her for granted, and she had given him everything, everything. And that was it, as far as they were concerned; they returned to this model of layers every time she called, or came up in conversation, until that model seemed to Walter as much of an evasion, a layering, as anything they could accuse Louise of.

  His own version of Louise was simpler: He saw her as a woman of guileless passion who, for one reason or another, had suppressed that passion and instead steadied her gaze on the dependable horizon of the domestic sphere. Of course he had heard about the early marriage, and Tommy Burns, not to mention all the mysterious gaps in her history. And unlike April and Danny, who shrugged their shoulders in mock bewilderment at the question of Louise’s youth—she was their mother, they seemed to be saying, how could she even have existed before us?—Walter had no doubt what filled those gaps in: men, most of them handsome and untrustworthy; men who thrilled, gratified, and ultimately abandoned her, proving again and again the truthfulness of her own mother’s warnings—he’s no good; there’s no future there; stay away from him, Louise. When, at twenty, she settled instead with cautious Nat, perhaps she was imagining that in the utopia of California, in that city of the future he was insisting they would soon live in, she would be able to satisfy the urges that had, up until now, pulled her away from Nat and toward a more disreputable, to her more natural kind of life. These days, in the landscape of Louise’s face, there was defiance just barely cracked by the beginnings of hesitancy, as if after forty years of telling herself not to look back, forty years arguing to herself the rightness of her life (and by that time what choice was there?), she was finally feeling the twitching in her neck, the urge to turn and ask the question to which the answer seemed so inevitable, so stupidly obvious: You shouldn’t have married him.

  ___________

  It was early March, the first day the thermometer by the window had crept past sixty, and the sun was too bright to stare into. In the morning Walter woke up looking—not happier exactly, but there was in his face a kind of zest fo
r occupation, like the dog, Betty, when after much barking a ball was thrown for her, or Danny’s mother when she first touched her sharp pencil to a new crossword. At ten he went to the nursery and at eleven came back with an assortment of tiny buds sprouting in green boxes, and envelopes on which were printed photographs of luminous lettuces, polished-looking cucumbers, fat tomatoes piled in baskets. For Danny, who had grown up in that part of the world where the shifting of seasons is something you have to look for to notice, there was something mythic and tender about this first defiant spring day and its attendant rituals. For months now Walter had spent his weekend mornings buried in bed, but today, at the sight of the new brightness through their bedroom curtains, he had bounded up, pulled on his shorts, and run outside into the yard. In the young sunlight, his legs were white as the paste in elementary school, white as something newborn—a larva bursting from its shell, the black hairs writhing like antennae. He knelt in the dirt, almost in a position of prayer, busying himself with the simple rituals of spades and shovels and soil. The T-shirt he wore rode up his back as he worked, revealing the white, vulnerable indentation just above his buttocks. Soon that spot would be brown, browner than the rest of him.

  Danny was happy for Walter, and relieved. Living with someone who is depressed is hard work, and for a long time now Walter had been sullen and ignoring, preferring the mute company of his computer to Danny’s fleshly companionship. Just last night, for instance, all night, the TV had been on; they had watched 20/20, and then a pornographic tape, and then Walter had stood in front of the mirror, naked, his belly jutting out, and said, “Behold man.” Danny beheld. He still thought Walter quite handsome, though really he had gained a lot of weight. Still, he wanted Walter to know he loved him, so he embraced him from behind, wrapping his arms tight around his diaphragm. Walter continued to stare into the mirror, but it wasn’t, Danny sensed, because he was so fascinated by what he saw there. Rather, his eyes seemed to have gone out of focus; he was gazing at a blur, a mass of unspecified flesh breaking up into planes before him. “We should go to bed,” Danny said, and Walter blinked and sighed at the newly reconstituted sight of himself. He had some sort of date to converse with a man in Memphis, so Danny went alone to bed, while across the house keyboard buttons clicked, conveying messages of lust and virility.