Equal Affections

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Equal Affections Page 26

by David Leavitt


  “And your fans?”

  “What about them?”

  He affected an interviewer’s voice, a high falsetto he had heard on a Lily Tomlin album once. “How does the feminist community feel about this revolutionary step you’re taking, Ms. Gold?”

  “Well, it certainly is the talk of the town,” April said. “Especially Tom’s involvement—a few of them don’t approve of that, but most do. As for the having-a-baby thing, it’s no big news anymore. I’m hardly the first to have succumbed to the invading pleasures of a turkey baster.” She laughed. “I like to think,” she said, in a more serious tone, “that Tom and I are serving as role models.”

  “Role models, yes,” Danny said. “You always have wanted to be that.” He paused a moment. “Dad called me last night, by the way. You know he’s going to that computer expo in Montreal tomorrow? So he said, ‘I just want you to know where we’ll be staying.’ Slipped in the ‘we’ll,’ like I wouldn’t even notice it.”

  “True to form,” April said. “It doesn’t surprise me.”

  “I tried to change the subject, and then he said, ‘You know, Lillian used to be up at McGill; she’s got lots of friends in Montreal.’ Just like that. That night you fell, on the way back from the hospital, he promised he’d tell me everything, explain everything, as soon as he was ready. But he never did. Then he calls me up and tells me Lillian’s going with him to Montreal as if I’ve known all along who Lillian is, what her name is, as if we’ve had a hundred big conversations about it, when the fact is, everything I know about Lillian I know from you. Something’s missing here, some conversation’s been skipped.”

  “He knows you know and you know he knows you know, so therefore he doesn’t have to ever actually tell you,” April said. “It’s called blanketing the posterior. Covering your ass. This way, if you object or make a fuss, you’ll be the one who sounds hysterical, and he’ll be all innocence; he can just accuse you of overreacting and chalk it off as more craziness from his children. I know the tactic. I’ve called him on it.”

  “It was my fault, too, I guess. I guess I really didn’t want to know all these months—”

  “What did you say when he told you?”

  “I just said I hoped he’d have a good time. It’s none of my business anyway.” He was quiet a moment. “Have you spoken to him lately?”

  “Oh, he called the other night, to ask which of Mom’s jewels I wanted. I said I’d come down next week to go through them—provided he promised he wouldn’t be around. He was certainly happy to agree to that.” She laughed unpleasantly, then said, “I hope you don’t think I’m still mad at him just because of what happened after the party, Danny. I’m over that. The problem is, that’s just the tip of the iceberg.”

  “Oh?”

  “Well, among other things, his way of informing me about this Lillian Rubenstein-Kraft or Kraft-Rubenstein or whatever her name is—let’s just say it wasn’t too sensitive. First he tried on me what he tried on you. For a week last month he kept calling me up and saying things like ‘Lillian and I are going to the faculty senate dinner next week.’ ‘I thought I’d take Lillian to the Ebers’ party.’ I knew what it was all building up to, and sure enough, before I knew it—the clincher. ‘April, Lillian and I would like you to come down and have lunch with us next week.’ ” April mimicked this final request in a high, singsong voice.

  “Ah,” Danny said. “Well—did you?”

  “Are you kidding? I said, ‘Dad, I can’t believe you’re actually asking me to dignify this affair of yours. And while we’re at it,’ I said, ‘I really wish you’d have enough respect for my mother’s memory to wait a little while before you start parading Lillian around in public.’ ” She paused. “You know what he said to that?”

  “What?”

  “He said, ‘April, it’s none of your goddamned business,’ and hung up. Except for the call about the jewels, that’s the last time I spoke to him.”

  “Oh.”

  “I wasn’t surprised. I know what he’s up to. He knows it’s lousy of him to be out in public with this woman just—what?—two months after his wife’s death, he knows everybody thinks it’s lousy, including me, so what he does is, he projects all his guilt onto his convenient guilt-absorbing daughter. It’s a very old pattern, taking out his anger on me for what he’s done wrong; believe me, it’s happened plenty before. But the difference is, this time I’m not going to let it get to me. He can think whatever he wants, I’m not playing his game. I’m not sixteen anymore; I’m a grown-up woman with a life of my own. Fuck him, as far as I’m concerned.”

  “Well, April,” Danny said, “he is our father. And if he’s going to be with Lillian, then we have to deal with it.”

  “Why do we have to deal with it? Why do we have to have a relationship with him?”

  “Because,” Danny said. “Because he’s our, father.”

  “Plenty of people I know don’t speak to their fathers. I’m sure plenty of people you know don’t speak to their fathers either.”

  “Yes—and I never wanted to be one of them. Frankly, I’m surprised you’re treating this so lightly.”

  “I’m not treating it lightly,” April said. “I am not treating it at all lightly. Look, he has just walked all over me, and walked all over Mom, long enough. It’s time I stood up for myself. It doesn’t mean we’ll never reconcile; it just means for once in his life he’s got to make the first step. I’m tired of always being the one to make the first step, Danny; I’m sick of being the peacemaker, the one who forgives, the one who comes back and in effect admits yes, April’s crazy, April acted crazy, and now she’s coming back begging, she’s not saying it, but look, she’s back. That’s what he thinks, and I’m tired of letting him think that. I’m not going to do it anymore. He has to call me this time. And if he doesn’t—well, I don’t need him. I honestly don’t need him.”

  Danny was silent.

  “By the way, I’m almost done with that bootie,” April said. “Did I neglect to tell you, in my new maternal mode, I’m becoming an ace knitter? I sit in front of the television with my feet in furry slippers, and while I watch whatever shenanigans are going on on Santa Barbara, I knit. Every Sunday I do the crossword puzzle too.”

  “That’s great,” Danny said.

  “Ah, well, enough about me. What do you think of my songs?”

  Danny was silent.

  “That was a joke,” April said. “Ha-ha.”

  “I got it,” Danny said.

  “Oh, we’re Mr. Serious today, aren’t we?” April said. “Mr. No-Sense-of-Humor.”

  “April!”

  “How’s Walter?”

  “He’s fine. We’re taking our vacation next month. We’re going to rent a house out on Long Island, by the beach. You should come visit. Lie in the sun, get more pregnant.”

  “Maybe I will,” April said. “Maybe I just will.”

  “I hope you do, April. I have this incredible desire to see what you look like pregnant. Frankly, I can’t quite imagine it.”

  “Fat,” April said. “Mostly I look fat.”

  ___________

  Later that afternoon Danny called his father.

  “I understand you and April had another little fight,” he said.

  “April had the fight,” said Nat. “Not me.”

  “Well—what’s going to happen?”

  “What’s going to happen,” Nat said wearily. “As far as I’m concerned, what’s going to happen is, I’m going to go ahead and lead my life the way I see fit, not the way my daughter sees fit. The rest is up to her.”

  “Funny,” Danny said. “She thinks the rest is up to you.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Nat said. “All her life April has managed to shove the responsibility for her own problems onto other people.”

  After a strangled second or two Danny said, “I wanted to ask you—how serious is this thing with you and Lillian?”

  Nat was silent for a moment. “Serious,” he said. �
��Well, that’s hard to say. Pretty serious, I guess. Yes.”

  “I was just curious.”

  “You’ve met Lillian.”

  “Of course. She’s very nice.”

  “Oh, I’m glad you think so. I remember you saying her son Steven was in your class in high school? Well, he’s married now. He lives up in Sun Valley, Idaho. We may be going next weekend to visit him. First time in my life I’ll have been skiing.”

  “That would be fun to watch,” Danny said.

  “Very funny,” Nat said. “Anyway, I’ll just be on the kiddie slopes. Starting to ski, at my age!” He sounded, for a moment, wistful.

  “Do you disapprove of what I’m doing, son?” he asked.

  “Dad—” Danny said, “I don’t know. I mean, it really isn’t any of my business.”

  “I’m glad to hear you feel that way. Now I only wish your sister would come round to the same conclusion. She seems to have it in her head that she has to protect your mother’s memory, or that I never loved Louise, or some nonsense like that.”

  “She’s upset, Dad. Mom hasn’t been gone that long.”

  “But what she doesn’t realize—and this is what your mother, more than anyone else, realized—is that once someone is gone, they’re gone. Life is for the living. Danny, I loved your mother. I know that and Louise knew that. I don’t have to prove it by going through some ritualistic period of mourning, especially to April. I’m going to be sixty-four next month, you know.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “And there just isn’t enough time. I hope you can persuade your sister of all this, because she won’t listen to a word from me.”

  “Well—I’ll try.”

  “Thank you, son,” Nat said. “By the way, for whatever it’s worth, the results of the autopsy came in. They showed Louise had a tumor in her lungs. A big one.”

  “Oh,” Danny said.

  “The doctor had been worried about that. Louisy didn’t want me to tell you. It means that even if she’d survived the burn unit, she probably wouldn’t have lived a year.”

  “Oh,” Danny said again.

  “I thought you might find that comforting. I thought you might find it made the suddenness of her death a little easier to bear. Does it?”

  Danny thought about it for a moment and said, “Not really.”

  “No,” Nat said rather miserably. “It doesn’t make a shit’s worth of difference to me either.”

  Chapter 23

  Inside Walter’s computer, meanwhile, the erotic masque continued unabated. So many newcomers were logging on that the channel was often packed, particularly on Friday nights. You could try to get through for hours and receive nothing but a busy signal, a situation that enraged the old-timers; Bulstrode was constantly collecting signatures on electronic petitions, or sending angry e-mail to the administrative offices of the service, which were located in Duluth. Other than that, things went on as usual; every time he logged on, Walter was happy to see a few familiar names embedded in the pornographic cast list. Lies continued to be told and tolerated. What did it matter? It was not as if any of them would ever actually meet. Two of the regulars, Mastermind and PandaBear, had met, and it had been a disaster; they had arranged a secret rendezvous in a Washington, D.C., hotel, yet when the momentous weekend finally arrived, no sooner were they checked into their room than they had logged back onto the computer, under the joint handle “Master/Panda.” All Friday evening they were there, and Saturday as well. What had gone wrong? Walter wondered. Had the sight of the other’s physical body been more than each of them could bear? Or had each merely been so disappointed at the unmasked reality of the other that in order to salvage what they could of their fantasies, they had elected to return to the electronic medium where their courtship had begun? The problem with real intimacy, Walter had long ago learned, is that you cannot just shut it off. Real people have a way of banging against the doors you’ve closed; they know your name, your phone number. They live with you. And that, he decided, was not altogether bad. What the computer had offered was the safety of isolation, the safety of control. Voices, words, telephone numbers came through the circuits, but you could always hang up, you could always log off. There was nothing to risk, nothing to lose, even with Bulstrode. And even so, from those heights of safety, those heights of self-protection and anonymity, Walter longed for nothing more than the rich landscape of the dangerous human earth. It was funny—for most of his life he had kept his eyes focused straight ahead, on the law, or else on some fantasy of escape, to Europe, to Asia; he had assumed that by looking only forward, he could eventually lose the sadness and dissatisfactions of his childhood. But the further he went, the more Walter realized that, like it or not, he was inextricably bound with the people who had mattered to him and who mattered to him now, the people whose loves defined him, whose deaths would devastate him. He would never, could never be Bulstrode, self-invented, untouchable, a journeyer among the keys. And for this he was glad.

  When they were at the hospital, when Louise was dying, Walter had stood for hours just outside the glass partition of her room. Inside, beyond the glass, Danny and April and Nat wept and raged and struggled through Louise’s death, Louise struggled through Louise’s death. All that separated him from the spectacle of them was a piece of glass. It could have been a television, or a window, or a mirror, but in fact it was a door, and every hour or so someone came out, usually crying. What right did he have to complain? He was just there for Danny; it wasn’t his mother. Yet there was a door. And someday, probably not too long from now, he was going to have to walk through that door; he was going to have to confront himself what was waiting for him on the other side of that door.

  The computer was not a door.

  He shut off his computer. Somewhere across the house was Danny. What to do? What to say to him? He started walking, then, for a moment, hesitated. Don’t be an idiot, he chided himself. Go to him.

  Danny was sitting at the kitchen table, reading the newspaper. Approaching him from behind, Walter was suddenly flushed with affection for his clean-shaven neck, his comfortable, round head.

  “Danny—” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “Danny, I—” He faltered. Danny put down the paper, swiveled the chair around to face him.

  “What is it, Walt?”

  “I missed you,” Walter said.

  Danny looked up at him. Walter had his arms folded behind his back and his head bent forward, like that of a penitent child.

  “But I haven’t gone anywhere,” Danny said quietly.

  “I have.”

  Danny reached up a hand, lightly brushed it over Walter’s cheek.

  “And are you back?” he said.

  “I’m back,” Walter said. “I’m back.”

  Chapter 24

  For two weeks that July Danny and Walter rented a little cottage on the beach in eastern Long Island. A few days after they’d arrived, April came to visit. They met her at the airport. For some reason Danny was worried he wouldn’t recognize her, worried that pregnancy would have changed her appearance in a substantial and unpredictable way, but when she got off the plane, she was, quite simply, herself, April, at her most beautiful. All through her life Danny had watched his sister alternate between periods when she looked overweight and drab and other periods in which a splendid, unexpected beauty bloomed in her, and now it seemed she had made the crossover once again. Her hair, sun-baked, glowed at the tips; her once-pasty skin had a deep golden cast. Indeed, as she waved and smiled from the crowd of emerging passengers, Danny couldn’t help but remember that time when her career was at its peak and each night she stepped from backstage into an onslaught of flowers.

  She was definitely pregnant, he saw from where he stood amid a gaggle of other welcomers, her belly humping up beneath her dress in a way that reminded him of Flemish Madonnas. But she also looked—and this surprised him—thin and fit, as if she’d just emerged from one of the rigorous tuna and tofu diets sh
e sometimes subjected herself to, rather than weeks of soap operas and milk shakes. Her dress was sewn from a rich, burnished orange fabric and, like the dresses she’d worn as a teenager, had little mirrors embroidered into it. She had her hair tied in a braid that coiled over her shoulder like the tail of a neck-riding pet mink, and her ears were studded with various tiny and delicate earrings—stars, moons, and planets—from the midsts of which two low-hanging pendants of beaten silver drooped.

  “I am so glad to be off that plane, Powderfoot!” she said as she kissed him among the other little reunions. “When are we going to the beach? Now?”

  “Of course. We drove in from there.”

  “And Walter?”

  “He’s waiting in the car.”

  “Goody! I can’t wait to hit the sand! I even brought one of those special maternity swimsuits. You should see it, I look ridiculous.”

  They gathered her luggage from the carousel and headed outside. It was a hot, muggy New York summer day; outside the airport, cars and taxis fought for the few free inches of curb Walter had managed to monopolize. In sunglasses and a Bermuda shirt, he kissed and hugged April and hoisted her luggage into the trunk. “Thank God for air-conditioning,” April said as she struggled to pull the seat belt over her distending belly. “I forgot how humid New York gets in the summer.”

  “Well, you won’t have to think about it anymore,” Walter said, “because we are hitting the beach!” And with a few sharp honks of his horn, he cleared the snarl of the arrivals curb, taking them out onto the highway.

  On the way April told them about her summer. She hadn’t lasted too long with Tom and Brett, she explained. “It was way too confining, and Tom was really being a pain in the ass with this whole healthful-pregnancy thing of his. I mean, I’d take a Tab from the refrigerator, and he’d say, ‘Are you sure you need that, April? It could be bad for the baby.’ It got to where I had to hoard my Tabs in my room and drink them secretly at night. Anyway, finally we both agreed it would be better if I moved out. His heart’s in the right place, and he’s going to be a great father, but in the end I just couldn’t take his watching me like a hawk all the time. So I decided to go to Margy’s—she’s been living the last couple of months in this house up in Muir Woods, and since her lover just left to take a job with the Foreign Service, she said she’d be glad for the company. It’s a beautiful place, and—guess what?—next door there’s a couple of women—Jane and Melinda are their names—who have two children by artificial insemination, a boy and a girl. I got to talking to them, and they turned out to be just great. They told me about the problems their kids were having in school, and what they did to help them, and how they’d explained to them who their fathers were. Neither of them knows who the fathers are, incidentally, it was all kept secret, so in a lot of ways my situation is going to be totally different. But it was a great education anyway. I’m sticking to your car.” She lifted her thighs from the vinyl car seat and pulled her dress down back down under them. “So how’s your stay been so far, boys?”

 

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