Equal Affections

by David Leavitt

  Eleanor knew it. She knew it, and now she was exacting her revenge.

  Louise looked at the clock. It was four o’clock. At five Nat would come home and take her to see another doctor. At once she understood that she would never call the rabbi back, though she failed to recognize exactly what it was that was going to intervene.

  She took up her knitting and a book; both kept falling into her lap. The Benadryl had made her drowsy, too drowsy to move to the bed. All that hour she kept falling into something close to sleep, and then she was with Eleanor again, the killers of Christ, clutching hot metal as the merry-go-round whirled faster and faster, and the O’Brady sisters’ arms went one over the other, one over the other, like something being braided. The world was a dizzy blaze of color then, their screams slurred by the rackety clanking, and it felt as if someone were trying to pull her by the ankles, though her feet held tight, and her mouth filled with wind, and she wanted it to go on, she wanted it to go on and on.

  Chapter 16

  For several days April didn’t call her mother to tell her she was pregnant. She didn’t feel strong enough for censure or disapproval, she told Danny, and that was exactly what she was sure she would get from Louise. Danny disagreed. “This will be wonderful news for her,” he insisted across the kitchen table. “Up until now she’s all but given up hope for grandchildren. Think how happy, how surprised she’ll be.”

  “I wish I could be so sure,” April said. They were sitting together early one evening, finishing the last of some chicken soup Iris had dropped off that afternoon. “I don’t think I need to remind you that Mom has never once publicly praised anything I’ve done to anyone, anywhere. Hell, usually it feels like she’s doing the opposite—you know, playing down my singing career to her friends like it was just counterculture weirdness, some adolescent phase I’m going through.” She laughed. “I can just imagine her casting her eyes heavenward and saying something like ‘Jesus, April, what have you gotten yourself into now?’ And that, my dear brother, I simply do not need.”

  “Look, April,” Danny said, “you’re right, she isn’t very good at expressing praise. It’s some tic from her upbringing; I’m sure it has to do with Grandma. But you must remember, in her own way, she’s very proud of you, even if she can’t say it. Remember the scrapbook, after all.”

  “The scrapbook,” April said, as if it were a joke. Yet it was true. For years Louise had methodically cut and pasted the detritus of April’s life into a brown leather album, every review and interview and advertisement and article and flyer and concert poster and even ticket stubs, when she could get them, always replacing the album afterwards on the piano, where it sat, never spoken of or called attention to, but available for all inquisitive visitors or curious cousins to peruse.

  “Oh, all right,” April said finally. “I’ll call tonight.”

  “Why don’t you call now?” Danny asked.

  “Danny! I can’t call now—”

  “Sure you can. Why not? Why put it off?”

  April looked frightened. Danny picked up the phone and handed it to her.

  “Jesus,” she said.

  She had only to press one button—it was that sort of phone—and then there was Louise’s familiar, oddly childlike hello, which always made strangers think she’d been crying.

  “Hi, Mom,” April said.

  “Hi, honey,” Louise said. “You at Danny’s still?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Having fun with your brother doing all those wonderful East Coast things we poor savages out West are deprived of?”

  April laughed. “Well,” she said, “it’s true, you don’t have Friendly’s out there.”

  “What’s Friendly’s?”

  “A restaurant.” April cleared her throat. “Listen, Mom, what would you think would be the most surprising news I could give you right now?”

  “Right now? That you’re getting married.”

  “Well,” April said, “I’m not getting married, but I am—pregnant.”

  “Pregnant,” Louise said.

  “Yes.”

  There was a sort of strangling sound, and then Louise was crying.

  “Mom,” April said. “Mom, why are you crying?”

  “I’m sorry,” Louise said. “I’m just—it’s just—oh, God, I just never in a thousand years—pregnant! April, how?”

  “It’s a long story,” April said. “Suffice it to say the father is a nice, responsible man who lives in San Francisco, and we won’t be getting married. And it wasn’t an accident, it was something we planned—”

  “Planned? What do you mean, planned?”

  “We just decided to have a child together,” April said. “Artificial insemination.”

  “Jesus,” Louise said. “Never in all my life—artificial insemination! April, why didn’t you tell me you were doing this?”

  “I didn’t think it would work,” April said. “I didn’t want to get your hopes up.”

  “Hopes up!” Louise suddenly sounded angry. “Listen, you better not be expecting me to raise this baby for you, April—”

  “What?”

  “Because if that’s what you’re thinking, you can just forget that—”

  “Mom, what are you talking about? I don’t expect anything like that from you. I was just calling to tell you you’re going to be a grandmother.” She let out a frustrated sigh. “You know, I knew you’d react this way. Danny said, no, no, she’ll be happy, but I knew you’d just use it as one more reason to get angry at me.”

  Louise was silent. “No one ever told me,” she said, “I would have to deal with something like this.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You know, you’ve never thought responsibly about anything, April, you’ve always just gone ahead and made your decisions—”

  “Mom, I do not need your responsibility lecture right now—”

  “So how are you going to raise this baby, I’d like to know? Traveling all the time the way you do, what kind of life is that going to be for a baby? Did you think about that?”

  “There’s a father, Mom.”

  “What do you mean, you’re leaving him with the father? Who is he? Who is this guy?”

  “A very nice man. Very responsible. He’ll take care of the baby when I’m traveling.”

  “What’s his name? What does he do?”

  April was quiet for a moment. “I’ll tell you that later.”

  “Christ,” Louise muttered. Then: “Oh, why, why you had to tell me this now—look, I want to forget we had this conversation. I just want to strike it from the record. You haven’t told me anything, I don’t know anything—”

  “But, Mom.”

  “I’m sick, April!” And once again she was crying.

  “Mom,” April said in a shocked, silenced way. “I’m sorry, Mom.”

  “You don’t know the half of it.” She seemed to be blowing her nose. “Look,” she said, “for now we haven’t had this conversation. When I’m better, you can tell me again. Okay?”

  “I don’t know,” April said. “Okay.”

  “Good. Listen, I have to go now, I need to take some medicine.”

  “Mom—”

  “Good-bye!”

  April put the phone down.

  “April,” Danny said.

  “You were wrong.”

  “April, I’m sorry. But look, I’m sure she’ll come around.”

  “She said she was sick,” April said, twisting her hair around her pinkie.

  “She had some sort of rash.”

  “It sounded terrible. It sounded really awful.”

  Danny put his hand on his sister’s shoulder. “I wouldn’t worry about that, April,” he said. “It’s just a rash, after all. Since when has a rash been such a big deal, especially compared to everything else Mom’s gone through?”

  April didn’t answer.

  “She’ll be fine,” Danny said. “Fine. And believe me, once she’s feeling better, she’ll be glad.”
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  ___________

  They did not hear from Louise or Nat until later in the week. All that afternoon April tried to write songs; first about the scrapbook, but it sounded too much like an elegy, she complained, and her mother wasn’t dead yet. Then a kind of feeding frenzy overtook her—she ate most of a box of Oreos—and then a frenzy to create, a furious, willed insistence to write one song, just one goddamned song, before dusk. She thrashed around the house, swinging her guitar into the air like a fencing sword, then swooping down onto any available bed or couch to resume her creative posture—half sitting, half lying, guitar in hand, music pad and pen at her side. By five she was desperate for ideas. “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” she said to Danny. “Which means that as my baby develops, it goes through the entire process of evolution. Isn’t that miraculous? Is there something there for a song?”

  “I think that theory’s been disproved,” Danny said. “Or at least significantly abbreviated.”

  April tried a few experimental chords on her guitar. “First a fish—first a cell—first…” She raised her eyebrows, smiled, and immediately sang out, clear as day, “Is there a moment of conception, a moment when you began to be… Oh, shit,” she said. “This is going to piss off the pro-choice people. I’d better start again.”

  And back to the notebook, her fingers rifling through her long hair, chasing after inspiration with hands like claws. The sun close to setting. “April,” Danny said, “remember that afternoon you took me to dim sum and it turned out you had a blind date with that guy who had answered your ad?”

  “Vaguely,” April said, between chords. “It’s not a period of my life I look on fondly, full as it was of penises.”

  “Well, I’ve been really pissed off about that for a long time now.”

  April looked at him. “Pissed off? Danny, it must have been fifteen years ago.”

  “Yes, it was, and, well, it seems to me you set me up. You told me you wanted to take me to lunch, and really you just wanted to use me as protection in case your blind date was a creep. Which, as I recall, he was.”

  “Danny,” April said, putting down her pencil, “you are so full of crap I can’t believe it. Yes, I did want you to protect me, but I asked you first, and you said sure, anything to get your beloved dim sum! I was straight with you from moment one! Jesus, you really must not think much of me if you’ve twisted things around that much.”

  “So it’s my memory against yours?”

  “Afraid so.”

  “And of course because you’re the famous singer who can write a song about all of it, your word wins. Great.” He stood up and marched into the kitchen.

  “What are you getting so upset about?” April called after him. “We’re talking fifteen years ago. Fifteen years! This is ancient history!”

  “Thirteen,” Danny said. “It was ’seventy-five.”

  “Forgive me,” April said. “Look, I’m trying to write a song here, do you mind?”

  Aside from “This is my house,” which he didn’t like the sound of, Danny could think of no response to a line like that. He went into the kitchen. There was nothing to do there, so he poured himself a cup of coffee and sat at the table. Outside, rain poured down steadily. The street was full of blurry yellow light, occasional streaks of red when a car went by. Even here, behind the swinging door, he could make out the clicking sound of Walter chatting away at his computer, as well as the muted chords of April’s guitar, ambling toward creation. All in all, a peculiarly satisfying scene, though he wasn’t in the mood to admit it: his house, on a rainy Sunday, full of the noise of other people’s lives, and Danny, like his mother, just sitting in the kitchen, trying to take it all in, once again a child in the midst of his summer vacation who sits down and tries as hard as he can to appreciate the rapid passage of pleasure and to make of appreciation itself a pleasurable state. “I appreciate this moment,” Danny said now, “I feel this moment,” and was instantly sixteen again, sitting across from his mother at the Neiman-Marcus lunchroom, eating a sandwich called a Towering Pagoda. Of course, just as then, even as he said it, the moment was slipping away.

  ___________

  Toward six o’clock April had her song. Walter and Danny sat down on the sofa to listen:

  “Oh, my baby, growing in me,

  You are the earth and you are the sea,

  You are every creature that ever came to be,

  Oh, baby, go to sleep…

  You saw the earth as a primeval place,

  You watched the dinosaurs crawling its face,

  You swam the waters, and the vastness of space,

  Oh, baby, go to sleep…

  You are the fish and you are the fowl,

  The ones that bray and the ones that howl,

  You are the tiger and the wise hoot owl,

  Oh, baby, go to sleep…

  You are the best and you are the worst,

  You are the last and you are the first,”

  The phone rang.

  “ ‘You are the only one’—goddammit to hell!” April shouted, putting down her guitar. “The fucking phone always interrupts me the first time I play a song!”

  “I’ll get it,” Danny said, and hurried into the kitchen to pick up.

  “Danny, it’s your father.”

  “Hi, Dad.”

  He waited for Nat to say everything was fine, but Nat didn’t say anything, and then a few seconds passed, and still he didn’t say anything.

  Part Two

  Chapter 17

  The last time Louise thought she was dying, she was dying. Refracted light, light coming from some mysterious source; there didn’t seem to be any windows. And pain, somewhere, dwelling in, or on, her body. The only thing was, she didn’t seem to be dwelling in or on her body. It was as if the pain had displaced her and she were floating somewhere in its perimeter, coming close, then floating away again. Occasionally she tried to get back in, to lift her eyelids like the garage door, and what she saw was machinery, something pumping, and heads in masks, and funny flowered hats. A pair of eyes under black-rimmed glasses stared down at her—Nat’s, of course. “The way she feels now, it’s like she’s washed down ten Valium with twenty martinis,” said a doctorish voice, and she wanted to laugh, because of course, it didn’t feel that way at all—she didn’t feel good, only removed, pushed back from herself and the pain that was herself, that seemed to have taken over. “Everything’s going to be okay, Louise,” Nat said, laying a rubberized hand over her own hand. “I know this seems pretty rough, I know, but we’ll get through it. All the doctors are confident.” He spoke as if she were terrified; she wasn’t, though apparently, not so long ago, terror had been near. She remembered: an ambulance in the driveway, and the surprising, brilliant blue midday sunlight as they brought her out the kitchen door, still in her nightgown. Terror, yes, and sorrow. Feeling that way seemed to have happened years ago.

  “The children are on their way,” Nat said. “They’ll be here in the morning.”

  So I must be dying, Louise thought. It’s okay, she wanted to say, I’m not so afraid now, but something blocked her throat.

  ___________

  Danny stood at the luggage carousel with April and Eleanor, watching a planeload of suitcases thunking down the conveyor belt. He was naming the colors to himself as they fell over the lip: blue, green, gray, yellow, gray, gray.

  “You’re staying at your house, April,” Eleanor was saying. “That nice couple who are renting it said it would be fine, they’ll turn down the couch.”

  “You mean we aren’t going home?” April said. She had taken a Valium on the plane and was still woozy from it, running her fingers through her hair.

  “Well, honey,” Eleanor said, “they’re moving your mom tomorrow morning to the burn unit in San Francisco. It’s a long drive. We figured you’d want to be closer.”

  “The burn unit,” April said.

  “They’ve been talking about it since yesterday morning, sweetheart. Didn’t your
dad tell you?”

  “Yes,” Danny said.

  “She’s not burned. It was a rash,” April said.

  “I know, I know, she’s not burned, but what’s happened to her, they think they can treat it better at a burn unit, where they have special equipment and doctors for dealing with skin problems like that. And anyway, those nice friends of yours, Jeff and Tina, I called them and explained everything, and they said it would be fine for you to stay at your house.”

  “Jeff and Nina.”

  “Yes. Sorry. As for your dad, the hospital has some apartments across the street, so they’re putting him up in one of those. And by the way, Joanne wanted me to tell you, anything she can do, she will. I know you two haven’t gotten along that well, but cousins are cousins.”

  April put her hand on her forehead. “I can’t believe this,” she said. “I mean, we were just sitting in Danny’s living room, in New Jersey, and I was singing, and everything was normal—”

  “There’s my bag!” Danny said, and ran for it.

  ___________

  After they’d collected the suitcases, Eleanor led them out onto the curb. “Sid should be pulling around any second with the car,” she said. “You know it’s impossible to park here these days, so he’s been circling. What a day.”