Equal Affections

by David Leavitt

  “We’re all a little overexcited here,” Walter said. “Why don’t we try to calm down?”

  They were pulling into the driveway. Almost immediately Nat switched off the ignition, moved to open his door.

  “You act like you loved her so much,” April said. “That’s what I can’t believe. That’s what absolutely kills me.”

  “And just what do you mean by that?” Nat said, turning to face her. “Are you saying I didn’t love your mother? Then I would like to ask you, April, what the hell gives you the right to judge whether or not I loved your mother?”

  “Because if you loved her, you wouldn’t have been fucking someone else,” April said.

  There was a sudden silence.

  “Don’t act so surprised,” April said. “It didn’t take a genius to figure it out.”

  Slowly Nat removed his hand from the door latch and leaned his head against the steering wheel. “Oh, God,” he said quietly. “Oh, Jesus.” And he started to cry.

  “Yeah, you cry,” April said. “You cry.” She got out of the car and, running into the driveway, started spinning herself in a mad circle, her arms in the air, the way she often had as a little girl, whirling and whirling until it seemed to be the world that was whirling. In the midst of it all she jumped up once, heaved her arm into the sky, as if the moon were a ball she wanted to catch, and, flailing suddenly, landed hard on her behind.

  “Shit!” she said. Walter jumped out of the car after her, shouting her name.

  “I’m okay!” she said with some annoyance. “Just leave me alone!” She was sitting with her legs spread in front of her on the asphalt, her hands between her knees, and Walter stood back from her. “I’m okay,” she said again. “I just need to sit here a minute and I’ll be okay.” And she bent over double, gasping.

  Then it was as if the world had turned upside down, and nothing would ever feel quite the way it had before, nothing would ever be good again. It was like Louise had died. April had her head between her knees, she was moaning loudly, and already Nat was out of the car, pulling her away from herself and, with Walter’s help, easing her up. Danny ran inside to call the emergency room and tell them they were coming, and even though April protested that it wasn’t necessary, she gave in to the arms loading her into the backseat, her father’s urgings to lie still, the familiar atmosphere of terror and emergency. Nat was behind the wheel again, starting the ignition, and as they pulled out, April was conscious not just of hurting but of a peculiar sense of relief, as if they were finally heading the way they should have been all along, away from comfort and toward the depths of grief.

  Chapter 21

  For a long time afterwards Danny couldn’t help but wonder if April had meant to hurt herself. Even after it became clear that everything was going to be fine, that she wasn’t going to lose the baby, he still couldn’t help but wonder, and not because he imagined April might secretly want to get out of the pregnancy everyone seemed so convinced she’d entered upon unwisely. No, his suspicion was rooted in a belief about his sister that was both simpler and more sinister than that. For April (as he knew better than anyone) had always been a scene stealer, from the moment she’d first strode onto that coffeehouse stage to sing “No More Vietnams,” to her famous eclipsing of Margy McLaughlin in concert, to the afternoon she’d gone to Louise’s hospital room barefoot and eaten all that candy. She had even stolen the scene from Danny the one moment in his life he’d made any real trouble, the night he told his parents he was gay, by airing, in the middle of it all, an unrelated but pressing grievance: She was tired of being treated like a scapegoat whenever Louise was in the hospital, she said; yes, she’d come barefoot, yes, she’d eaten the candy, but her father behaved inconsistently, one minute telling her it was her duty to take care of her mother, the next ordering her out of the room. April, Nat had said, that’s all very well, but is this the time? It most certainly is the time, she had answered. And even though Danny was in a certain way relieved—the pressure, after all, was now off him—he still resented her timing. It seemed she couldn’t bear anyone taking away her starring role on the stage of family crisis.

  When they arrived at the emergency room that night, April couldn’t stand up. Hunched over, she leaned up against the receiving desk, her hands on her stomach, and gave her name. A Jamaican nurse then put her arms around April’s middle and maneuvered her, cranelike, through a set of swinging doors, murmuring, “You’ll feel just fine in a minute, honey, just fine. We’ll let you know how she is,” she added to Nat as the doors swung shut.

  “Okay,” Nat said. He looked at Danny and smiled oddly. “Well,” he said, “here we are again. Guess we just couldn’t stay away, could we?” He laughed. Across the room an elderly man in a dinner jacket was pacing a small stretch of linoleum near which a black teenager lay spread across a few plastic chairs.

  “I guess we ought to get comfortable,” Walter said. “We might be here awhile.”

  They staked out their territory with the expertise of natives; almost immediately Nat had procured coffee, Walter magazines, Danny was taking off his shoes. And why not? For over a week now, a fluorescent-lit limbo very much like this one had been their home. Their eyes had long ago adjusted to its brutish yellow light.

  Nat was just stretching out on one of the vinyl couches by the back wall when a doctor issued from between the swinging doors and called out, “Mr. Cooper, please.”

  Immediately all three of them were on their feet.

  “I’m Dr. Carpenter,” said the doctor, a hesitant-looking young man with freckles. His eyes were fixed on Nat, for reasons of seniority, Danny suspected. “I just wanted to let you know your daughter is fine, and so’s her baby. Tight as a drum in there, really. Usually a fall like that does more damage to the mom. Anyway, she does have some bumps and bruises—nothing serious, but we’d like to keep her here overnight, for observation, just to make sure there aren’t any problems. She asked me to tell you folks not to worry.”

  “Thank God,” Nat said. He put a protective arm around Danny’s shoulder. “You know, it’s funny for us being back in a hospital right now, because my wife died just yesterday, up at the St. Francis burn unit. I think the last thing any of us expected was to be at the hospital again tonight.”

  “Dad—” Danny said.

  “Oh, I see my son thinks it’s a little strange for me to tell you all this, given that I’ve just met you and all. But you’re a doctor. You see people die every day.”

  “Well,” Dr. Carpenter said, and cleared his throat. “Even so, I am sorry to hear about it. In any case, she’s being moved to a room right now. It’s a little late for visiting hours, but if you want, you can pop in, just for a second, to say good-bye.”

  “Great,” Nat said. “Which way?”

  “Room four-eight-two. Fourth floor. Oh, and by the way,” Dr. Carpenter said, smiling white teeth at Danny and Walter, “which one of you is the lucky dad?”

  They looked nervously around the room for whoever it was he was speaking to before realizing it was them.

  “Actually, I’m her brother,” Danny said.

  Dr. Carpenter looked expectantly at Walter. “I’m with him,” said Walter.

  “Oh,” said Dr. Carpenter. He coughed again. “Well. She’s going to be in room four-eight-two, on the fourth floor. You can take the elevator over there. And take care.”

  After Dr. Carpenter had shaken all their hands, they put their shoes back on, cleaned up their campsite, and rode the elevator to the fourth floor. There was a long, empty corridor, a series of closed doors. Down the hall a charwoman was swabbing the floor with ammonia.

  “You must be the Coopers,” a nurse said as they approached a bank of rooms. “It’s past visiting hours, so you’ll have to make it quick. You can come back tomorrow morning at ten.”

  She led them through the door marked “482” into a dark room with a curtain down the middle. On the other side of the curtain, closer to the window, light was pouring from an
elevated television, even though the sound was off.

  “You’ll have to whisper,” the nurse said. “Mrs. Ellingboe is asleep.”

  Nat assured her that they would. In the bed closer to the door was April. She wore a green hospital gown; her hands were crossed over her pale, slightly freckled chest.

  “Hi,” she said in a soft voice. “I’m a little woozy; they gave me something to make me sleep.”

  “Hi,” Danny said.

  “The baby’s going to be fine,” April said. “The doctor checked, and he says there’s no problem.”

  “I’m glad,” Danny said. “So is Walter.”

  “Is Daddy here?”

  “I’m here,” Nat said.

  “I’m sorry we had a fight.”

  “Well, um—I am too.”

  “Good.” April stretched her arms behind her head. “Here we are, back in the hospital, only now it’s me in the bed instead of Mom. Funny, huh?”

  “Funny,” Danny said.

  “Guess they just can’t get rid of us so easily.”

  “Nope.”

  “Too bad it’s not the same hospital. I liked that hospital better than this one.”

  The nurse raised her eyebrows, then mouthed that it was time to go.

  “April,” Danny said. “We have to go now. We’ll be back in the morning.”

  “Oh, that’s fine,” April said. “Whatever they gave me, I’ll sleep like a baby. It’s better than Valium.”

  Once again the nurse made a gesture of departure.

  “Bye,” they all whispered, this time in unison. By then she was out cold. The nurse stealthily tiptoed across the room and switched off the television before following them out the door.

  ___________

  “You know,” Nat said in the car on the way home, “there’s really no reason for you two to stick around here anymore. You might as well head back to New York.”

  Danny hadn’t allowed the thought of going back to enter his head for several days, but now that Nat mentioned it, he remembered his house, his dog, his job; he remembered the way time normally moves.

  “I do need to get back,” Walter said quietly.

  “But what about the clothes?” Danny asked. “What about sorting through Mom’s clothes?”

  “I can take care of that. Well, actually, I was sort of assuming April would help me, but now I’m not so sure I can ask her.”

  “Not so sure!” Danny said. “Why?”

  “I just don’t know if she’ll want to, that’s all.”

  “Oh, Dad, you know April gets over her temper tantrums in about two seconds.”

  “April can always get over April’s temper tantrums. The problem is, it can be a lot harder for the rest of us.” He laughed. “Jesus, she just has to put herself in the center of everything. Louise dies, so April has to almost have a miscarriage.”

  “It’s not like she planned it that way,” Danny said, even though he was wondering if she had. “She was very upset. We all were.”

  “It’s embarrassing to me, the whole thing,” Nat said. “I mean, God, the whole thing was so stupid. You know, I was afraid they were going to think I beat her up or something, even if she told them the truth, that she fell. Isn’t that what beaten wives and children are supposed to say, after all? They fell? They walked into the refrigerator? I was having fantasies of going to jail, and every time April said, ‘Really, I fell,’ the nurses and social workers saying, ‘Sure, honey, sure,’ and thinking, It was her goddamned father. I guess April just doesn’t look the victim type.”

  “Dad, she did fall.”

  “Do you know what time it is?” Nat said. “Three thirty-eight A.M. Funny, I’m not a bit tired.”

  “Neither am I.”

  “Neither am I,” Walter echoed.

  They turned into the garage, where Nat switched off the ignition and leaned over into the backseat, close to Danny’s face.

  “What April said,” he said.

  “Dad, we don’t have to—”

  “What April said—I know you’re probably curious whether it’s true or not and what the story is. Well, I’m prepared to tell you, but I have to ask that you give me some time. I’m not quite ready—for anything yet. You see, I had no idea April knew. I had no idea anyone knew, except your mother.”

  Danny made a noise of protest, then was silent.

  “Give me a little time on this one, okay?” Nat said. “I just need a little time to figure things.”

  “Sure, Dad,” Danny said. “As much time as you need.”

  ___________

  He left home. He left home and he went home. In Gresham there was soup on the stove, stew in the freezer. Iris had left a sympathy card perched against a vase of flowers on the shiny kitchen table. “Your loss has touched our hearts, and we feel it with you,” the card read. “Lots of love, Iris and Hal.”

  “She sent one to my father too,” Danny said to Walter, who was sorting through the mail. “Nice of her, considering they’ve never met.”

  “My mother is like that,” Walter said.

  He went to pick up the dog, and Danny unpacked. The only thing he had brought back with him that he hadn’t originally left with was the picture of his mother in the leather-and-metal welding suit, and he put it on the refrigerator. “People used to tell me I looked like Gene Tierney,” Danny remembered her saying once, when she was showing him this picture. “She went mad, you know.”

  “She was beautiful,” Danny had said.

  “Yes, she was,” Louise had said, gazing at the photograph of herself. “Too bad she went nuts.”

  ___________

  As for Hurricane Louise, she came and went; like Louise herself, in anger, the storm lost steam quickly; its entrance was less dramatic than the threats with which it preceded itself. A few telephone poles fell, here and there a tree, and then Hurricane Louise swept out to sea. Even so, Danny couldn’t help thinking how much his mother would have enjoyed it all. She had been born, after all, on the anniversary of the Great San Francisco Earthquake and never failed to mention the coincidence. Now, just a few days after her exit, her slow brownout, it seemed that Hurricane Louise had determined to rise from her birthplace in the Atlantic and at least threaten that famous coast from the loins of which Louise Gold had been ejected, which she had fled, which had stolen back her son. It was as if Danny’s mother were coming back in some harsher, more elemental form; as if she were declaring her refusal to leave this world quietly, with only a sealing party to see her go; as if she were insisting that for one trembling moment of silence, they all stand up and recognize the force of her departure.

  Chapter 22

  San Francisco is a city of edges and fear. There are streets so steep the sidewalks have steps. Cars park sideways, so that the upward-facing door you can barely open at all. When you open the downward-facing door, it falls so swiftly forward it can knock you over.

  It is usually while waiting for the light to change at the top of a hill like that, when you are wondering how, in that split second allotted you, you’ll be able to get from neutral to first before your car rolls back and smashes the one behind it, that you begin to recognize the precarious, tilted balance of this city, how everything is stacked in trembling perfection, like a house of cards, waiting for the inevitable, always threatened rumble underfoot. Here is where the body snatchers landed, after all, to replace the self with its nonself replica, burgeoning from a pod; and here is where the streets so often fill with candles and silence, in memory of those lost to more insidious invasions; and here is where a madman murdered the mayor and a supervisor, and was forgiven, and where nuns with beards ride motorcycles down crowded streets, and where people meet nightly in groups to talk out their terror of the quakes. Fear is in the fog, in the silence of streets so unbearably beautiful and still, late at night, they seem paralyzed. By the water, whole neighborhoods of houses shine white as teeth.

  It was into this high-strung and glittering city, this infectious and absorbing city
, this city of tall spires and bridges like arteries, carrying golden corpuscles to and from an irradiated heart, that April disappeared, as she so often had before, upon her release from the hospital. On doctor’s orders she had stranded her unfortunate band somewhere back east and left it to her manager to deal with the roadmapful of canceled concerts. Her house was still sublet, and not unusually, she was having money problems, so she fled from her father into the welcoming network of the earnest left, the small cells of sixties fervor that still smoldered in the city’s outer reaches, knowing her friends there would be sure to take care of her. First she was with Summer, the on-again, off-again lover who had so disapproved of her having a child, and then she was staying with a group of women in a house in Bernal Heights, and then she was with Tom Neibauer, the father of her child, and his deaf lover, Brett Wu. Their house was on one of the streets with sidewalked steps; it made her uncomfortable, she told Danny, the way she had to sit almost totally sideways in the passenger seat while Tom or Brett struggled to pull the huge door closed. “I keep thinking, here I am, round and pregnant, and I’m just going to roll out the door and right to the bottom of the hill.” Tom was taking wonderful care of her, though. His house was at the top of a forty-six-step outdoor stairway, and every time they went out he carried her up and down the stairway, like a bridegroom with his bride. During the day, while Tom and Brett were at their jobs, she drank fortified milk shakes he had blended for her the night before, and watched soap operas. Sometimes she baked whole wheat muffins and fruit breads, using apple juice instead of sugar. (Tom didn’t eat sugar.) Pregnancy, she declared, was proving so far to be a thoroughly agreeable state.

  “Are you showing yet?” Danny asked her. It was the middle of June, and he was calling her from work, in New York.

  “A little,” she said. “I’m starting to swell, I guess is how I’d put it. You can’t really tell in my clothes so much as when I’m naked. It’s interesting, I’ve always had a big stomach, but this is different. It’s tight, sort of. And sometimes I feel the baby inside, moving around, which is an incredible feeling. The best part is, being pregnant has made me more creative than I’ve ever been. My breasts pour out milk, my guitar pours out notes. I’m writing like a maniac, song after song, and Margy thinks it’s the best work I’ve done in years.”