Equal Affections

by David Leavitt

  “Fine,” Danny said.

  “Quiet,” Walter added.

  “Although we certainly have been enjoying the beach house.”

  “How long have you been out?”

  “Just five days now.”

  “Nine to go.”

  “It feels like we’ve been there forever, and just a few seconds, both at the same time,” Walter said. “I think next summer we’re going to rent the place for longer and go on weekends.”

  “And when’s Dad coming?”

  “Saturday. You’ll stay, won’t you?”

  “Oh, sure,” April said. “Dad and I get along great now. Ever since I made him go to that shrink with me, he’s been a pussycat.”

  “What happened with the shrink exactly?”

  “Well, she was just so eminently reasonable and sincere that Daddy had to agree with her, even if he didn’t with me—you know, that it wouldn’t be such a big sacrifice to take it easy with Lillian, especially if I agreed not to guilt-trip him. Ever since then we’re best buddies.”

  Danny couldn’t tell if she was speaking sarcastically. Nat’s version of the reconciliation had been—to say the least—more subdued.

  “He is coming alone, isn’t he?” April asked.

  “Of course.”

  “I’m just asking because he didn’t tell me one way or another, and you know that’s one of his favorite tricks—to not say anything and then—surprise—bring her along. He did that last week. Made a big deal about wanting to have a reconciliatory dinner with me. I get to the restaurant, and there she is.”

  “And how was that?”

  “Well, it was funny. I’d decided in advance that whenever the inevitable meeting happened, I was probably going to have a tantrum or something as soon as I got to the restaurant, and that maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing, maybe it was actually necessary, you know, to clear the air and all. But then I got there—remember, I wasn’t expecting her—and I was totally taken aback. I mean, here she was, this perfectly nice, politically enlightened, feminist woman, really. Very pleasant, very bright. Couldn’t be more different from our mother.”

  “How?”

  “Confident. Self-assured. Not a vulnerable bone in her body, as far as I could tell—at least that’s the impression she wants to give.”

  “Well, I don’t think he’s bringing her this time,” Danny said. “I mean, on a big trip like this, where he’s staying with us, I think he’d have had to say something—don’t you?”

  “I’m sure he’s not bringing her, Danny,” Walter said.

  “Not that I’d mind so much if he did; it’s just that we really don’t have room. The cottage has only two bedrooms plus a pullout couch.”

  They were well away from the airport now. Outside, the city smog began to dissipate, letting in squares of sunlight. In spite of the air-conditioning, April opened the window, as she was so fond of doing, and let her hand drag with the wind. “Oh, I almost forgot,” she said suddenly, pulling it back in, “I brought something for you.” She rummaged through her purse, fishing out at last a cassette tape, which she handed to Danny. “A present.”

  “Really? What is it?”

  “Just some early recording I’ve been doing for my next album. I was hoping you’d play it.”

  “Great!” Walter said. “Put it on.”

  “Now?” Danny asked.

  “Sure, why not? We’ve got at least another forty-five minutes to the beach.”

  Danny took the cassette out of its case and fed it into the tape player.

  “One-two-three,” a woman’s voice said. Then guitars, drums, and April, singing the lullaby she’d started to compose at their house, just before Louise got sick. It seemed to have happened years ago.

  “It sounds good,” she said. “It sounds better than it did before.”

  “Yes, it does.”

  “It’s great.”

  Then April began to sing along with herself in a loud, sure voice.

  ___________

  When they arrived, Danny and April took a walk on the beach. It had gotten suddenly, surprisingly chilly, chilly enough so that April—to her disappointment—had to forgo her maternity bathing suit. Now she walked barefoot along the tide line, hitching up her dress with her hands to keep the ends from getting wet. She had very fat, very white feet, with thick toes and bluntly cut, yellowing nails. Whenever they stopped a few seconds in one place, the sand swept up and buried April’s feet. She seemed fascinated by this phenomenon and stood observing it until the sand was up to her ankles. “It’s like quicksand,” she said to Danny. “When I was a kid, on TV and in movies, people were always falling into the quicksand. I used to have nightmares about it. Now you don’t see quicksand so much anymore.” She shook her head, feeling, apparently, old, and swiftly pulled her feet out of the sandy muck.

  They moved up the beach. “There’s this guy who usually sits right over there,” Danny said, pointing at a small hillock dotted with sea grass, “who I was really hoping to show you. He sits there all day in this tight little swimsuit with this positively huge erection, and everyone who walks by does a double take. It’s like Candid Camera. The other day Walter and I sat here for hours, just watching different people’s reactions—an old lady with a dog, a young mother, a couple of real tough-looking local boys. No one, and I mean no one, can miss it. They look, they kind of go into a spasm, sometimes they turn around to take another look, and this guy, he just smiles at them. He wears these terrifying reflective sunglasses that blast your own face back at you. And he must be incredibly turned on by showing himself off like that, because it never goes away—the erection, that is.” Danny sighed audibly. “Too bad he isn’t here. He’ll probably be back tomorrow.”

  “You boys certainly do find novel ways of keeping yourselves entertained,” April said.

  “Well.” Danny blushed. “Even you would notice this one, April.”

  “One of those horrid things, and huge to boot? Yes, I’d probably notice it. I’d probably notice it and run screaming in the other direction. ‘Penis alert!’” She laughed. “That was an old joke of Fran’s, probably the only funny thing she ever said in her life, the bitch.” She looked suddenly bitter, remembering her ex-lover, and put a piece of sea grass she’d picked up into her mouth.

  They sat down. Danny uprooted several pieces of grass and formed them into a tic-tac-toe board, the squares of which he filled with X’s and O’s dragged into the sand with a stick, while April gazed intently into the surf.

  “April,” Danny said.

  “Yes?”

  “Do you ever—you know—miss it?”

  “Miss what?”

  Danny looked away. “Sleeping with men.”

  “Oh, that. Why do you ask?”

  “Well, you know, Mama never really believed you when you came out to her. She told me once, just last year. She said, ‘I know how that girl thought about boys, and it’s just impossible for me to believe she was faking the whole time. I think she’s faking now.’ ”

  “Mama, like many women of her generation, believed what she wanted to believe. I mean, certainly, I thought I was attracted to men back then, I thought I liked sex with them.”

  “So you’re saying that was all a societal delusion? That you were somehow being tricked?”

  “Well, not exactly. It’s just—sure, I liked having sex with men, but it wasn’t as important to me as sex with women. It didn’t mean as much.”

  “So answer my question. Do you miss it?”

  April shot him an older-sister glance. “Since when,” she asked, “have you been given permission to ask me questions of a personal nature?”

  “Come on.”

  April smiled. “Okay. The answer is no, I haven’t missed it—because—” She straightened out her legs, pulling her dress over her knees. “Now, Danny, can I trust you to keep this secret? Not a word of this must be breathed to anyone, not even Walter.”

  “Swear to God and hope to die, stick a needle in
my eye,” Danny said.

  “Okay. Well. The answer is no, I haven’t missed it because I have done it a few times—a few, mind you—over the last several years.”

  “You mean you’ve had sex with men?” Danny sat up, smiling.

  “Don’t sound so gleeful about it! Jesus. But yes.”

  “How many?”

  “A few.”

  “How many is a few?”

  “Three, all right?” She laughed at his indignation. “It doesn’t mean I’m not gay, it doesn’t mean I’m any less committed to lesbian causes, it just means I—transgressed, I guess is the word, a few times. The ‘thrust,’ Fran used to call it. She always talked about missing the ‘thrust.’ Well, I never missed the thrust so much, but I’ve always believed in doing what you want, sexually; I think it’s important for women not to be enslaved by notions of what they should or shouldn’t do—and I don’t care if those notions come from their mothers or uptight orthodox lesbians who think dildos are signs of male oppression. It was for variety’s sake, if nothing else. Anyway, I liked them fine—the men, that is—although frankly, all this fuss about penises I don’t understand. They strike me as basically ugly.”

  “Ugly is in the eye of the beholder.”

  She looked at him impishly. “You like them, I imagine.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “You like them big?”

  Danny’s face turned bright red. “April!”

  “I answered your question, now you answer mine. You like them big?”

  He stammered. “Well—sure—I guess—”

  “Is Walter’s big?”

  “April, I refuse—”

  “Come on.”

  “I don’t know, size isn’t that important—”

  “So it’s small.”

  “No!”

  “Then it is big!” She slapped her knee. “I knew it. They say you can tell from the way a man walks, though I’ve never been sure if that meant his attitude or, literally, how he walked—”

  “Well, it’s not huge, April—”

  “How big?”

  Danny made an approximation with his hands.

  “Is that as big as the guy who lies on the beach?”

  “No,” Danny said. “But it’s—big enough.” He fell back on the sand, grinning with embarrassment. A light wind blew by, bringing up prickles of coolness on his skin, and then for a few brief seconds the sun emerged from between some clouds. “Ah, that feels nice,” April said. She lay on her back, pointing her full stomach toward the intermittent sun, and hitched her dress up over her legs, her underpants, the rounding soccer ball of her stomach. There, in shocking contrast with her face and legs, the skin was the color of Cream of Wheat.

  “If my baby’s a boy,” she said, “and he’s gay, like his father and his uncle and his mother, then I want you and Walter to take extra-special care of him, to see he turns out all right. Tom’s loving, but he’s not exactly worldly—I mean, I don’t want my son growing up to be a herbalist.”

  Danny laughed. “What makes you think it’s going to be a boy? You didn’t have that test, did you?”

  April shook her head. “It’s just that I have a feeling. Call it woman’s intuition.”

  The sun disappeared again, and she pulled her dress down.

  “I’ve been trying to come up with names. What do you think of Bartholomew?”

  “Bartholomew,” Danny said. “I like it. And he could be Bart for short.”

  “At school.”

  “But what would his last name be? Bartholomew Gold? Bartholomew Cooper? Bartholomew Neibauer? Or are you thinking of hyphenating? Bartholomew Gold-Neibauer. That’s an awful lot of syllables for a little baby.”

  “You know, I hadn’t thought to discuss that with Tom,” April said. “I assume, however, his name will be Bartholomew Gold.”

  “And if it’s a girl?”

  April lifted her head and looked crossly at her brother.

  “Oh, of course.” Ashamed, Danny peered through squinting eyes at the disappearing sun.

  “Louise,” he said.

  April put her head back, closed her eyes. “Louise,” he said again. It pleased him and surprised him, the sound of her name in his mouth, and he realized he hadn’t spoken it in many weeks. “Louise,” he said. “Louise. Louise.”

  Chapter 25

  No one lived in the cottage during the year; it was rented and occupied only for summers, and as a result its rooms had a transient, restless feel about them, as if a lot had happened there but none of it had been allowed to settle in. The living room had bleached white floors and was furnished with a hodgepodge of elderly sofas and armchairs, each of which gave off the scent of rot and long, unheated winters. But Nat liked it. “It reminds me of Little Nahant,” he said, pushing open the doors onto the terrace. There, in the distance, were dunes, ocean, sky. “That smell of salt and fish in the wind. Makes me remember how I used to bicycle to see your mother that summer I was seventeen.” He was quiet for a moment, his eyes following the vapor trail of an airplane writing a message in the sky. Then he turned to face his family.

  “So here we are,” he said. “All together again.”

  “That’s right,” April said. She stood against a wall, guitar in hand, fingering the strings in a way that suggested restlessness for an audience. “All together again,” she more or less sang, plucking with her index finger. Walter picked up a dust bunny and three pennies that had dropped on the floor, while Danny, in the kitchen, did dishes; he had been doing dishes all week. The first time these four people had been together since Louise’s death three months earlier. Was it wrong that they should be gathered here, of all places, in an anonymous rented cottage thousands of miles from the house and kitchen table which, like it or not, was the natural locus of at least three of their lives? And yet perhaps there was something to be said for reconvening on neutral ground, far away from everything familiar, and the ghost, even now pulling on rubber gloves to wash dishes in that other, faraway sink.

  Nat looked thinner than before, tanned, well rested. He was doing some renovating, he announced to his children. The burnished orange shag carpeting they had put in when Danny was a teenager had been torn away, replaced by industrial gray. Ditto the yellowing white wallpaper with its pattern of black flowers—flowers from Hades, Louise had called them; the walls were white now. “My aim is to streamline,” Nat said, and Danny could tell how relieved he was to be finally stripping away the layers of old wallpaper, returning the house to its elemental forms—plywood and pine and oak, plaster and sheet-rock. Perhaps, when it was over, it would become a place he could go on in.

  Walter had bought swordfish steaks for dinner. “We were going to go out,” Danny told his father, “but the restaurants around here are overcrowded and overpriced and just not very good, especially this time of year. Last time Walt and I had to wait an hour for a table.”

  “Well, it’s a good thing then, because you know how your mother feels about waiting,” Nat said.

  “Feels?” April said, lifting her head from a magazine, and Nat closed his eyes.

  “Correction. How your mother felt about waiting.” He laughed nervously. “Funny, isn’t it? Even now sometimes I forget. She wouldn’t wait in line for anything, your mother. Plus she was always getting in fights with waitresses, or sending things back, or complaining about the service. She’d say something was undercooked and then, when it came back, that it was overcooked. Sometimes I think pieces of meat got cold in the middle just in terror of her inspecting them.” He laughed at his own joke—his children laughed too, out of respect—and then he smiled and pulled his hands behind his head. “You know, I just remembered something. Once we were in a restaurant, your mother and I, and she asked to have some kind of fish broiled instead of sautéed, and when the waiter said he wasn’t sure the chef would do that—it wasn’t a bad restaurant, it just was some sort of fish you’re supposed to eat sautéed—she looked at him and she said, ‘Young man, in France there is
a man who every several years goes to the very finest, the most expensive restaurants and orders a boiled egg. And if the restaurant is really fine, he is brought a boiled egg, and it is the most delicious boiled egg he’s ever had. But if the restaurant is not fine, if the waiter harasses him, if the cook makes the egg badly, this man, who happens to represent France’s most illustrious restaurant guide, takes away one of the restaurant’s stars. Some of the finest chefs in France have killed themselves over a boiled egg.’ Well, needless to say, I couldn’t believe it. God knows where she heard that story. But there it was. So then the waiter disappears, and we’re sitting there, Louise drumming her nails against the table because she’s hungry, goddammit, and all of a sudden there’s some sort of commotion at the front of the restaurant. Who should it be but the chef himself coming out of the kitchen in his big hat, holding a huge silver tray with a top on it that was big enough for a roast suckling pig. He starts marching very solemnly down the center of the restaurant, coming closer and closer, and I can tell your mother’s getting nervous. The next thing we know, he’s there, at our table. He puts this huge tray down in front of Louise—I swear, the thing takes up the whole table—and at this point your mother looks up at him, kind of scared, like maybe she’s gotten in over her head. ‘Madame,’ he says, ‘your dinner.’ And very timidly, like she’s afraid a snake’s going to jump out, she lifts up the top.”