Equal Affections

by David Leavitt

  “What?” Nat said. “What do you want?”

  “Klee—klee—”

  “Kleenex?” Nat said. “You want a box of kleenex? Here’s kleenex.” He handed her the box.

  “No!” she said, and her face screwed up in irritation. “No, Nat!” A familiar tone of anger. “My—my—”

  “Oh!” Nat said. “I remember now! She hates the hospital kleenex,” he explained to Danny and April. “She wants her own box, from home. Right?”

  Weakly Louise nodded, and her head fell back on the pillow. The shaking seemed to subside slightly.

  “Danny, why don’t you ask the nurse if we could bring Louise her own kleenex, okay?”

  “Sure,” Danny said. He turned and pushed through the swinging door, back into the room Dr. Thayer had referred to as command central, where he pulled off the hat and mask and deposited them in the bins marked for that purpose.

  “You’re not going to believe this,” he said to a freckle-faced nurse who was making notes on a big chart and humming along with the Judds. “She says she doesn’t like the hospital kleenex and wants the real thing.”

  “I’ve heard stranger,” the nurse said. “But you can get them for her if that’s what she really wants.”

  “Thanks,” Danny said. He put on another hat, another mask, another pair of gloves. April and Nat had pulled up chairs and were sitting next to Louise’s bed.

  “A little more than ten weeks now,” April was saying. “I hope it’s a girl so I can name her after you.”

  Louise lay blessedly still, for once, giving out, with each breath, a soft wheezing.

  ___________

  What Danny thought of, while he was standing there, standing over his mother’s bed, was a photograph Nat had saved from the war, when she was working as a welder at a shipyard. She had been asked to model ladies’ welding uniforms for a catalogue, and in the picture she stood proudly against a cardboard backdrop in a jumpsuit of leather and metal, holding a blowtorch to one side. The suit was cut to the shape of what in those days was called a figure—something Louise had in spades—and now, as he looked down at her body in its tight white wrapping, what was surprising to Danny was that it looked young; it was the body of a sleek, athletic girl, with strong legs, flat hips, wide shoulders. It had never occurred to him that his mother might be in such good shape, since for years she had worn only the loosest, most matronly clothes, and for a moment Danny wondered if, in the brutal light of the burn unit, she’d been somehow brought back past modesty and wifeliness to the rebellious girl who in 1944 had held up a blowtorch in the name of liberty and America.

  A brown liquid flowed to her body through one tube; a yellow liquid flowed from it through another. Danny observed this flowing, and then the door opened and Dr. Thayer came in again, carrying a wet cloth in a stainless-steel pan. “Hello, Louise,” he said, leaning over her. “I brought something for you.” Cautiously he dabbed the cloth over her swollen and blistered eyes, and her face inclined toward his in pleasure. “Yes,” he said, “that feels good, doesn’t it?” slowly running the cloth down her cheeks, toward her lips. It was the sort of intimate moment which, had she had been in better shape, she would have forbidden her children to witness, but now she seemed oblivious to everything but the cool cloth. “Yes,” Dr. Thayer said. “Yes. Feels good.” Her mouth opened and closed, making over and over again, in that still and humid room, the gesture of a kiss.

  ___________

  Nat wanted to sit with her alone for a few minutes, so April and Danny took a long, last look before moving out the swinging door. They were both worried that she might be dead before they got back, but even in circumstances like that you can only look so long. Masks came off, gloves, flowered hats. Then the long corridor. The bags on their shoes came off; the robes came off. They crossed the corridor bridge to the modern, efficient, new part of the hospital. Things were almost cheerful here; women were walking up and down hallways, leading their IV poles like elderly grandmothers. All the ordinary calamities, broken legs and babies and cancers. April and Danny went down the elevator and out the sliding glass doors.

  On the steps of the hospital, in bright sunlight, April heaved breath like someone who has just emerged from a fire. Danny touched her arm. She heaved. He put his arms around her. The cotton of her blouse was soaked through with sweat.

  She pulled him down onto the cement steps and started to cry. Her head fell onto his chest; she was crying wildly, oblivious to the fact that strangers surrounded them. Her hair was in his mouth, the long strands soft and faintly sweet-tasting, and he was crying too.

  But how long can you cry? They couldn’t cry forever. They had no burns; their bodies felt good to them.

  Finally April extricated herself from Danny. She wiped her nose with her left arm. Her skin was pale and freckled, and looked astonishingly innocent. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she said, and blew her nose.

  They got up from where they were sitting on the steps and stumbled back into the hospital lobby, where Danny, at a pay phone, dialed Walter’s number.

  “Walt,” he said.

  “What? Danny, what’s happened?”

  “I need you to come out,” Danny said, closing his eyes. “I need you here.”

  After Walter had agreed, Danny hung up and leaned against the wall. Soon April was back, her face wet and shiny.

  “I suppose we should go back up,” she said.

  “No, not quite yet. Let’s rest a minute. Or maybe take a walk.”

  “Okay,” April said.

  But they didn’t move.

  Chapter 18

  There was, in the burn unit, a kind of perpetual arrhythmia, as in a fun house. Nothing ever happened when or how it would have anywhere else. Work went on in the middle of the night, dinners were eaten at dawn. The only event of any regularity was bath hour, every afternoon at one, during which the patients were maneuvered into big steel tubs, soaked in some stinging yet miraculous broth, scrubbed and debrided. The baths were unspeakably painful, and as a result bath hour was the one period each day when visitors weren’t allowed in the unit, so when one o’clock came around, Danny and April and Nat usually put on their jackets and lumbered outside to have lunch. The brilliant sunshine made them squint and stumble, and seemed intended for other creatures than themselves. Whatever was fiery drew them: fierce Thai curries, Korean vegetables pickled with red peppers, sushi smeared with wasabi. When Walter arrived, he went along, but like a mute witness, an observer from the world outside. “Listen,” Danny said to him, “April wants to go to this Japanese place that has these big bowls of noodles, but I’m in the mood for Chinese. What do you think?”

  “Whatever,” Walter said, “whatever,” not quite believing Danny cared so much about lunch at a time like this, but at the same time not wanting to make trouble; what did he know of it, after all?

  All the rest of the day the life of the burn unit took them over. Things were serious enough here that vague or contemplative questions took on a harsh edge of answerability. How long can you cry? Danny had wondered that first day, when he and April sat gushing on the hospital steps. Well, there was an eight-year-old boy in the room across from Louise’s who had been crying for thirty-six hours. The noise he made was rageless—a low, hoarse, grieving lament that sometimes pitched and sometimes faded, but never ceased, and finally blended with the other noises of the burn unit, the humming, pumping, and churning of the various cruel and life-sustaining machines, and the country and western music from the tape deck, and the hushed joke-telling of the nurses gathered at command central. It seemed that there was nothing you could not get used to.

  The boy was named Jaime Delgado. Around the time April and Danny were getting off their plane from New York he had been applying a lit match to a gasoline canister. His parents, Jesús and Dorell, themselves never wept, though they smoked and chewed their nails. Jesús was a biker, not quite a Hell’s Angel; he was of a type familiar to April, who in earlier days had sometimes accep
ted the protection of bikers during potentially violent concerts. Nat had never met a biker in his life, much less straddled or even imagined straddling the warm leather seat of some mufflerless machine, but it didn’t matter here. In the burn unit old distinctions—age, wealth, religion—ceased to have any meaning. Here was the perfect democracy; suffering, the great equalizer. Gallows humor, yes, but also gallows compassion, gallows clearheadedness.

  Jaime Delgado had third-degree burns over most of his body, and Nat was full of questions and concern for his recovery; at the same time Dorell—a woman who seemed to be all elongations, long black hair, spindly legs and fingers, predatory red nails—couldn’t seem to get enough information about Louise’s situation. She nodded earnestly as she absorbed everything Nat was only too glad to tell her. One symptom of the waiting room was not being able to stop talking; “How’s your wife doing?” was a risky question, bound to trap the unexpecting querier in a good half hour of conversation, so the nurses and receptionists and social workers deftly avoided small talk on their way to and from lunch. Fortunately Nat and Dorell seemed to be able to draw relief from each other, or at least distraction. They leaned close together, and spoke so softly that usually all anyone else in the waiting room made out of their conversation were matchbook strikings of tongue against palate, and slow givings out of breath, and expelled grunts of disbelief mixed with horror.

  Jesús Delgado was less inclined to discuss his son’s condition, but he liked to talk. He told Nat about the three times he’d crossed the country by motorcycle. “That’s my idea of an education, Professor.” (He and Dorell called Nat Professor, which was more than he could say for his students.) “Seeing the world, the wind at your back and all that. Going real fast, watching everything pass by. It’s a big country. Now I don’t pretend to know nothing like you must know, but I know how big things are.”

  “I wish I knew that,” Nat said.

  “But maybe you can tell me something else, Professor. Maybe you can tell me why us instead of anyone else, any of those other people, have to be sitting here tonight, instead of at home eating dinner? And don’t say God, I stopped believing when I was twelve.”

  He looked across the waiting room at his ancient mother, Aurora, who, dressed in black, was crocheting roses onto a pink background and murmuring novenas to herself. “Lucky she don’t understand English too good,” Jesus said, and, smiling at her, laughed. She raised her eyes and smiled back.

  “So what’s your answer?” Jesús said a moment later, and Nat pulled himself up, back straight.

  “Well,” he said, fumbling, “statistical probability suggests that bad things happen to everyone sometime. In other words, chance.”

  “The old wheel of fortune,” said Jesús. “Spinning, spinning, spinning.”

  “Yup,” Nat said. “But in real life, you can’t put it on a gift certificate.”

  At that Dorell raised her eyes and laughed. “Oh, that’s funny,” she said. “You know, I tried out for that show last time I was in L.A. Made it to the final nine. Too bad, I would’ve loved a trip to the Bahamas, Puerto Rico. Someplace you could lay out in the sun and relax.”

  “Yup, that would be nice,” Jesús said, stretching his arms behind his head, “laying on a beach right now.”

  His mother suddenly lifted her eyes, looked at them all, then returned to her crocheting.

  __________

  In the waiting room, cigarette butts filled stained and weather-beaten plastic ashtrays; periodically someone sitting there got disgusted and emptied them into the wastebasket. As night wore into day—a single, timeless progression, marked only by the departure of the secretaries (there were no windows)—the one substandard fluorescent light tube flickered, dimmed, but never blew out. Sometime in the late evening a custodian passed through with a bucket of strong disinfectant and swabbed the linoleum floor until, for a few brief minutes, it actually shined.

  ___________

  Dinner time. Too many friends always had the good idea to bring food. Eleanor arrived with platters of turkey and roast beef, homemade mayonnaise, rye bread, and tomatoes; Danny went out for cartons of Chinese noodles, fried rice, chicken with Peking sauce; Jesús’s Aunt María brought enchiladas, flautas, chiles rellenos. There was too much food, an overwhelming abundance of food; plates and trays covered the coffee table as well as a good portion of the floor. No one knew where to begin, except Eleanor, who loaded her plate with everything. “Oh, this is so delicious!” she said as she tasted the chiles rellenos Jesús’s aunt had brought. “What is your recipe?”

  She addressed this question to Jesús’s mother, Aurora, who looked at her blankly and smiled. “You like?” she said.

  “Oh, I like very much,” Eleanor said. “I write a cooking column.” The old woman nodded.

  “A cooking column—you know, in the newspaper—and I’d like to write one about you.” Eleanor pointed at her and said, “You.”

  The old woman nodded some more.

  “Yes,” she said. “Mexican cooking very good.”

  ___________

  Inside the burn unit was a life of perpetual battle, small headway against huge disaster.

  Nat was always there already when April and Danny and Walter arrived in the morning; either he’d been there all night or he’d come before dawn from the dingy apartment he’d been given across the street. Around eight when they pulled in, smelling of wind and car exhaust, he’d fill them in on the night’s activity, and then the four of them would meet with Dr. Thayer, usually in the waiting room, sometimes in the little conference room.

  Good news was not plentiful, but it came sometimes. “She’s looking good,” Dr. Thayer said on Tuesday, “really rallying.” By Wednesday the respirator was in place—no more talking—and her fever was up to 104º. Wednesday afternoon it was down again, and the antibiotics were taking hold. Early Wednesday evening her kidneys failed. The doctors and nurses huddled round to work on her; that was the phrase Kitty, the night nurse, used. “They’ve been working on her a couple hours now, trying to fix her up.”

  Inside Louise’s room, machines with inscrutable dials and red-lit readouts spun lines of blue light that told her heart and breathing rates. The smell of burning rubber subsided, or seemed to—maybe they just adjusted to it. Even Louise herself looked more like herself, in spite of the tubes that snaked into her throat and nose and under bandages into both her arms, one leg, her right side. Her hands had been unwound; she was kept covered with a light blanket. But when she slept, her head fell to the side, her jaw hung loose and open. Danny watched her sometimes through the glass as she slept, while around her the machines continued to draw the progress of her life in their fine, glowing hands. There was something brutal about her having to lie there like that, alone among all that life-sustaining technology.

  Thursday morning she was lucid and had things to say. Nat sat with her for three hours, engaged in a game of charades, Louise gesturing as best she could with her hands, Nat struggling to interpret the gestures. Mostly she wanted to tell him things he already knew. She couldn’t breathe; she was afraid of suffocating; she wanted her own kleenex. Sometimes she tried to write. The sheets piled up, her illegible messages usually zigzagging off the page in a pencil-breaking scrawl of rage.

  Outside Cousin Joanne had arrived for a visit. “Hello,” she said to Dorell Delgado. “I know we haven’t met. I’m Joanne Finkel, Louise’s niece? And I heard about your son, I was so sorry but, um, I wanted to give him this.”

  She handed Dorell a Macy’s bag inside which was a big box wrapped in Masters of the Universe gift paper.

  “It’s a Lego assortment,” Joanne said. “You know, for building airplanes, houses, cars. The guy at the store says boys love it. And it should keep him busy, once he’s feeling a little better.” She smiled, looked away. “I don’t know, I just thought he might like it. You can return it if you want.”

  “Thank you,” Dorell said. “That was nice of you.”

  “Oh, good,�
�� Joanne said. She fell back against the wall, relieved, apparently, not to have the present thrown back in her face. “I do what I can,” she said. “I’m like my mom that way, only not so good a cook. And I love kids. I don’t have any of my own—yet.” She looked up at the ceiling and said, “I guess what I’m trying to say is just, I don’t know you, but I feel for you. Woman to woman. You know what I mean?”

  “Listen, I’m sure Jaime will like this. He’s probably gonna be here a long time; he needs toys like this to keep him busy. I’ll show it to him today.”

  Joanne smiled, looked at the floor. “Great,” she said. “Thanks. I mean, you’re welcome. I mean, thanks.” She laughed. “Thanks and you’re welcome,” she said. “Isn’t that the right thing to say?”

  ___________

  In the late afternoon Walter and Danny broke their vigil and walked the length of gridded streets, up and down steep hills, until the bay and the red-ribbed Golden Gate Bridge were staring at them. San Francisco may be the quietest city in the world, especially on a brisk, bright afternoon when the wind lurks and surprises, coming out of nowhere among the steeply staggered houses, then disappearing again into its hiding place. Chimes, somewhere. A dog scampering up a sidewalk, its own leash in its mouth.

  They stood for a while, gazing at the panorama of boats and blue water.

  “I think we should probably get back,” Walter said after a few minutes.

  “Oh, Walt. Do we have to? Couldn’t we walk a little more?”

  “I think your dad will be wanting us back.”

  So, regretfully, they headed back, stumbled down the same hills they’d marched up, across the parking lot and through the sliding doors and into the elevator. Here, on the elevator, Danny visibly tightened with fear. The doors finally opened, and in the main waiting room Walter took Danny’s hand; he turned; they hugged. A middle-aged nurse, walking by, said, “Really, couldn’t you be more discreet?”