Equal Affections

by David Leavitt

  “Jesus,” Walter said.

  Bulstrode was silent for a moment. “It was,” he said, in his careful Kentucky accent, “one of the finest moments, one of the truly finest moments, of my life. I helped save someone from the jaws of death.”

  He laughed softly. “Walter,” Bulstrode said, after a few seconds of silence. “Can I tell you something?”

  “Sure,” Walter said.

  “I really like you.”

  “I like you too.”

  “No, I mean it. What I mean is, I—I love you.”

  “Ah—” Walter said.

  “Are you upset to hear that?”

  “No, not upset, just—”

  “Just what?”

  “Well—we’ve never met.”

  “I feel as if we have.”

  “It’s just—I don’t know, it seems weird to me. How can you love someone you’ve never seen?”

  “I’ve seen you. In my imagination I’ve seen you. And isn’t that better? That way nothing can spoil you for me. That way you’ll always be perfect.”

  “But I’m not perfect,” Walter said. “And that isn’t love.”

  “Everyone has his own definition of love,” Bulstrode said. “Anyway, don’t get so uptight. I’m not demanding reciprocation or anything. I just wanted you to know—the level my feelings had elevated to.”

  Walter was quiet for a moment, grasping for something to say. “Well, I’m glad you told me,” he said finally. “I am, uh, touched.” He cleared his throat. “Listen, I think I’d better go now. I’ve got to get going.”

  “Aren’t you horny?” Bulstrode asked.

  “Not tonight, really. Maybe tomorrow—”

  “What time?”

  “I don’t know—sevenish.”

  “Shall I call?”

  “No, let’s meet on the computer. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Walter hung up. He felt suddenly ashamed, and frightened, as if he really had been having an affair and the affair had gotten out of hand. Of course that wasn’t true. He could change his number, elect never to turn his computer on again, and Bulstrode would disappear from his life. There would be nothing to confess to Danny; Danny would laugh. Disappear! he would say. How could Bulstrode disappear? He hardly existed. Who he was, what he looked like, how old he was, even his name—all these things were mysterious. His house was mysterious; his clothes were mysterious. Yet he and Walter had had the conversations lovers have, had brought each other to orgasms as lovers do. Where are you? Bulstrode had asked. What are you wearing? Are you hard? Unzip your pants. Open your shirt. Imagine I’m kissing you, undressing you.

  Imagine I’m loving you.

  Bulstrode, it seemed, had ceased to believe in the barrier between imagination and act. And why not? What are we, after all, Walter wondered, but voices, synapses, electrical impulses? When one person’s body touches another person’s body, chemicals under the skin break down and recombine, setting off an electric spark that leaps, neuron to neuron, to the brain. Was that really all that different from what happened when fingers pushed down buttons on a keyboard that sent signals across a telephone wire to another keyboard, another set of fingers? Wasn’t there, in all of that, something of a touch? All around him, Walter heard people complaining about how they wished they were different, wished they were bigger, smaller, smarter, sexier, thinner. Bulstrode had found a way around all that; he had found out how to become the self he imagined, the self his real life, apparently, constricted him from fully being.

  And Walter understood. More than once he had stopped in front of the mirror in the lobby of the World Trade Center, stunned by the dark-suited, well-groomed man who faced him with such confidence and easy, necktied glamour, and wondered how that man could possibly be himself. Some people invented themselves. And yet there were others—Danny, his mother—who seemed to say, Who I am is who I was, where I come from, who my mother and my father were. The past forms me. The past owns me. The pit of family called endlessly for Walter, voices beseeched him to acknowledge his own inseparable link to all the hands and voices and smells, the dark nails and wet kisses, the bloody lipstick smears, while on the other side, there was Bulstrode, patently himself, declaring to Walter his strange, disembodied love. Did Bulstrode want Walter to leave Danny for him? And if so, where would he go? Would they live forever in the constricted little corridor of noncorporeality, an endless private chat? Would his world be a phone booth? Thinking all of this, he became frightened and longed, suddenly, to be touched.

  He went to Danny. Calling his name, he tore across the house, to the bedroom, where Danny was watching TV, and threw himself on him, professing his love as loudly and suspiciously as a husband who has just come from a hooker. Danny laughed and pushed him away. “I can’t breathe,” he said. “You’re choking me. Jesus.” Walter rolled over, panting. “What’s with you?” Danny said. “You’re never like this.” Walter panted. On the television white-coated doctors hurried through hallways, pushing fearful-eyed patients on stretchers.

  He had known a deaf woman once. She had lived in the other half of the two-family house he and his mother shared right after his parents’ divorce. Her name was Jeanette, and she sold hot pants door to door. Walter remembered his mother squeezed into the tight red shorts, her legs wobbling like Jell-O as she turned in front of the mirror, murmuring, “I just don’t know.” The deaf woman was talkative, and had a vague, throaty, approximate voice that he loved to listen to. What amazed him was that even though she had never heard a single sound, she was nonetheless pushing forward the muscles of her throat, trusting that whatever communications resulted would come to life in that world which existed for her only as an act of faith. And wasn’t love always like that, in the end, a mere gesture made across unknowable miles? If that was true, then Bulstrode, in his isolation, his reaching across the continent, was merely, consummately human.

  Still, Walter couldn’t bear the thought of hearing his voice again. Instead he clung to Danny; he spent every moment he could hugging or kissing Danny. A week or so later, when he finally logged on again, he was surprised to find no messages, no e-mail from Bulstrode. He wasn’t sure why, and he also wasn’t sure if he was glad. Perhaps Bulstrode was ashamed to have been rebuffed at that tenderest moment; perhaps, in his narrow world, he could not bear the sound of Walter’s voice anymore, or even the sight of his name, now that Walter had received and ridiculed his most intimate offering. But Walter thought it was more likely that he had simply found someone else out there among the Hunky Dudes and Top Guns, another distant friend with whom to talk and laugh and confide across all the miles, and pass the loneliest of hours.

  Chapter 15

  The rash, whatever it was, brought Nat back to her. It was almost like a manifestation of his guilt, like stigmata, and indeed, her palms and feet were red, parched, and could be scratched bloody. He came back to her in sorrow, as he always did when she became sick, and for a week he was there every night. No fighting. He endured her crying, her middle-of-the-night terrors, her insistence she couldn’t take another day of it. He accompanied her to the doctors—the dermatologist, who shrugged his shoulders; the allergist, who shrugged his shoulders; the second dermatologist, who ordered tests and mentioned dental trauma—supportive, unwavering, as he always managed to be under such circumstances. If she hadn’t been so uncomfortable, she would’ve felt gratified, loved, except she knew it was not out of love that he was comforting her, merely out of guilt and fear. (He did fear losing her.) And to his credit, he took care of her very well, very convincingly. Still, if she hadn’t been suffering, he wouldn’t have been home—this was the equation their lives had come down to—and so she wondered if perhaps her subconscious really had willed the rash into being, as a way of keeping him there. No, she had lived enough through pain and its ravages to know her subconscious would never have been so stupid as to bring physical grief upon the body just to satisfy the thin needs of the soul. Pain was worse than sadness; there were mom
ents when, waking up in the middle of the night, raw and itching, she would have gladly divorced Nat if in return she could have been divorced from her own skin.

  Baths helped her. Also, she had checked out from the library some works of Catholic theology, most of which she found dull and hard to concentrate on. It didn’t matter. Faith, she understood, didn’t have to be a matter of intellect. She had only to watch Clara, who cleaned her house, maneuvering her way through the rooms with an earphone plugged into her ear, sermons every second of the day, to understand that faith didn’t have to be a matter of intellect. Faith—if not blind, then mindless—had accompanied Clara through all the thousands of miles of vacuuming that had been her life these last twenty years. It accompanied her through quick lunches of canned olives dumped in a bowl, through the drive back and forth from the small stuccoed house she shared with a hazy collection of fellow churchwomen, children, new arrivals from the islands. Faith, Louise was coming to understand, was not an argument in a book; faith was a little radio, cheaply made, a wire crawling up a white uniform and creeping, like an earwig, into the ear. Something you listened to every moment of the day. She knew what Clara would have thought of it all. What was an itch, what was cancer, compared with the ravages suffered by Christ? Live chastely, Louise had heard her mutter more than once. Tithe gratefully.

  ___________

  In any case she should have known better than to confide in her sister. Every time in her life she’d confided in anyone, especially her sister, it had turned out dreadfully. But Eleanor had a way of coaxing things out of her.

  For one thing, she always came unexpectedly, and never without substantial gifts of food—cakes, pies, casseroles, pâtés, sometimes a whole turkey or roast beef. This gave her a reason to stay awhile, whereas if Louise had had her way, she would’ve invented excuses, put Eleanor’s visits off, one after the other. Her little sister, whom everyone assumed to be her older sister—Eleanor was fatter, her hair grayer, her eyes more worn, not to mention the brace and the cane—was mostly an annoyance to Louise, a source of guilt, frustration. Why did she live the way she did? Why would anyone choose to live that way? She had married Sid Friedman, after all, supposedly a psychologist, in Louise’s opinion a rogue, and passed thirty years with him on the constant brink of bankruptcy; they were always putting money into talentless songwriters, or “prime land” that turned out to be tumbleweed-strewn desert, or dubious kitchen gadgets that sat unused in Eleanor’s drawers for years. More than once the meandering small talk of Eleanor’s food-bearing visits had led to requests for loans or tales of no-risk schemes, airplanes and pyramids, in which it would be a crime for Louise and Nat not to invest. Louise, who had never borrowed a dime in her life, wondered, Does she have no shame? She wondered this even as she wrote the check. And Eleanor was “litigious,” a crossword puzzle word, meaning she sued people—contractors; plumbers; drivers whose cars scraped the paint off her fender; people from whom she had bought dogs, garage door openers, motorbikes, washing machines. Her motivation was not so much justice, or even revenge, as it was a sportsmanlike determination to get the most she could out of her small misfortunes. “I take an optimist’s view of the hazards of daily life,” she liked to say. “Everything’s an opportunity, if you look at it the right way.” Louise studied her coffee.

  For three years now Sid and Eleanor had been living a town away from Louise and Nat. Before that, for two decades, it was Los Angeles—an easier distance for Louise, since it meant having to see her sister only once or twice a year, on holidays. In those days, when Eleanor flew up, Louise invariably dragged Danny to the airport to pick her up, only to find she was not among the passengers disembarking from the plane. Then Louise would hear herself paged—always a terrifying experience, her own name booming through the loudspeakers—and at the white courtesy telephone listen as Eleanor promised to be on the very next flight, an hour from now. Often, by the time Eleanor actually got off the plane, Louise and Danny had been waiting three or four hours. Still, finally, there she was, stumbling down the long airport corridor with her children (still children then), her messy hair flying, waving her cane, and saying in a mock child’s voice, “Oh, gee, Mommy, is Auntie Louise mad at us? Won’t Auntie Louise forgive us for being a teeny-weeny bit late?”

  “Three hours is not a teeny-weeny bit late, Eleanor.”

  “But we’re so sorry, Auntie Louise, and we couldn’t help it, the traffic was so terrible! Oh, dear, what can we do to make Auntie Louise love us again?”

  This was Eleanor at her worst.

  Eleanor at her best was the morning her oven exploded. Louise stood with her in her kitchen, examining the charred interior. She was still in her pink bathrobe and furry slippers. “Ellie,” Louise said, “I’m sorry. I know how important an oven is to you, and that this one was expensive. I’m sorry.”

  But Eleanor only shut the oven door and said, “Look.” The glass had fractured without breaking and was run through with a network of intricate and tiny cracks.

  “Oh, Ellie,” Louise said.

  “It’s kind of pretty, isn’t it?” Eleanor said, running her finger over the shattered glass. “I almost like it better this way.” And smiled. She had managed to look beyond the destroyed oven, the son in Alaska, the daughter who would never have children, not to mention the unpaid mortgage and the upcoming court date and the ever-present threat of destitution and ruin. In the midst of a terrific fight with Louise once, screaming as they drove along a Boston highway to visit their senile mother, screaming as they got out of the car in the nursing home parking lot, screaming as they approached the electric doors, Eleanor had suddenly stopped and said, “Look at that flower, growing in the cement.” And in a second she was on her knees examining the little flower that had struggled through the stone, so thoroughly delighted that Louise could only step back, silenced, impressed. Eleanor had forgotten her argument in the noisy cement parking lot; she had forgotten her sister and her mother and her children. She had forgotten them all.

  As little girls they had sat together on a two-seat toilet, their underpants around their ankles, perched on the edges of the twin bowls that reached from the common tank like two fused cherries on a stem. They liked to sit for hours like that, and talk in quiet voices, as little girls do, close enough in age, back then, not to notice the difference. As they got older, it became clear that Eleanor would always be the uglier, the less intelligent, the less lucky of the two, yet also, in many ways, the more contented. She could sit, as a teenager, in the grass, her crutch by her side, and look in a way that Louise knew meant she was really seeing things, seeing them in a way Louise envied. She noticed grass, flowers, trees, stars, and remarked on them. “Look at the stars, Louise!” she might say, and Louise, to whom they were only stars, only nodded, ashamed at her lack of vision. In high school, in spite of the crutch, Eleanor met and fell in love with Sid Friedman and dated him happily, gratefully until their wedding, untroubled by his bad breath and awkward haircuts. What a pathetic choice, Louise had always thought, and yet she could not help but feel slightly disgusted, slightly surprised that Eleanor, four years younger, was married and settled first.

  They grew up contentious, at odds. In adulthood Louise resented Eleanor, avoided her, considered herself—resolutely—the lucky one, without a cane, without a brace, with (relatively) normal, happy, healthy children. Eleanor never expressed even the slightest resentment of her sister; she was constantly, infuriatingly loving, no matter how cruel Louise might be. Her nonstop, smiling affection was a tactic, a weapon, Louise decided. Revenge came through the mail: obscure articles about sibling homosexuality, as well as alarmist tabloid clippings about AIDS, slow death, and postinfectious promiscuity, and photographs of gaunt, dying men clutching teddy bears. All, Louise reminded herself, because of her own tragic children. In person Eleanor was all smiles, always the bearer of gifts, and made no mention of the letters. She lived in one of a hundred identical houses built in the fifties, in cramped quarters, wh
ere the furniture was old and catscratched, the carpet stained. Only in the kitchen had no expense been spared, and yet even that room was constantly littered with empty boxes and cans and rotting vegetable rinds. Odd—Louise had always assumed that Eleanor must have hated having to live under such circumstances, must have grown hot with jealousy when she walked into Louise’s clean-smelling, commodious kitchen, with its tile floor and window-ledge hummingbird feeders. And yet, she sometimes wondered now, children aside, was it right to assume that Eleanor longed for more than she had, longed for the stable bank account and big house her sister cherished and nurtured? Sometimes it seemed to Louise as if turmoil itself somehow powered Eleanor’s life, as if she and Sid staved off settledness and certainty—those still pools—in favor of living always in the wave, the furious ocean, of going after things, of getting. Thus disaster—or at least the sensation of disaster—eluded Eleanor. She had said it herself: Everything’s an opportunity, if you look at it the right way. If you thought about it, her life had unfolded as an endless chain of opportunity, possibility, while Louise sat in her perfect house, awaiting the mutiny of the cells. If you thought about it that way. But of course, Louise had to remind herself, few people would have thought about it that way, and fewer would have chosen Eleanor’s life over her own.