Equal Affections Page 3
“Aww,” the women in the van said. “That’s sweet.” And Lourene, taking the piece of cherry-colored notepaper from April’s hand, added, “You know what I’d say if I got a letter like that? I’d say, ‘Honey, what’s your number? Lourene’s coming to town.’ ”
April went on to the next one. “I was the woman with the red hair in Iowa City,” she read. “You smiled. I sent you a note backstage. I waited two hours for you at that juice bar. What happened? Sonia.” And April frowned. “Sonia,” she said. “Sonia. I just don’t remember a Sonia in Iowa City.”
She had a lover then, a magazine editor in San Francisco who was brusque and businesslike and secretive. Her name was Fran.
Only with Fran, it seemed, could April lose control. Sometimes Danny noticed her, locked for hours in a phone booth, digging her fingers into her scalp while they fought through one enraging passion or another. Afterwards, in her dressing room, she brushed eyeliner into her lashes, combed out her hair, which was at that time cut very short, like a Dutch boy’s. She wore silk pants, a shirt unbuttoned to the clavicle, a gold chain with a women’s symbol dangling from it. “Do I look all right?” she said. Danny nodded. She tuned her guitar. Then she went and peered out at the vast stage rounding like a horizon to the dark clamor of the crowd. Someone signaled. She readied herself. One of Danny’s jobs was to make sure everyone in the band was in position, that there were no last-minute string breaks, that Jennifer, the sign language interpreter, had the songs in the right order and was perched already on her stool. And then, finally, the familiar chant from the impatient audience: “Ap-ril, Ap-ril, Ap-ril.” She blushed a little; though she should have been used to it, she still seemed bemused, perhaps even perplexed by the scale of her worship. Finally the announcer’s voice: “Good evening, ladies and ladies.” Laughter. Faint applause. More chanting. “Don’t worry, we’re not going to keep you waiting anymore.” A final twitch at a string. A strand of hair brushed from her forehead. At that moment, always, Danny felt her cease to be aware of him. “And here is April Gold.” A roar like nothing else, like the ocean, sounded, and he knew that he could call and call, and it would be as if he were standing halfway across the world, and she’d never hear him. April smiled, thrilled by the sound of applause. She strode out. Flowers flew onto the stage, and she raised her arms up to catch them, raised her face to the shower of petals. She was someone else now, and once she opened her mouth to sing, no one would be able to resist her.
At the bar, after the New Haven performance, April was swarmed by fans, all eager to touch her, to kiss her, to ask her to dance. There were hundreds of them, it seemed, and invisible in their maleness, Walter and Danny slipped out and went to a twenty-four-hour grocery store, where they bought chocolate chip cookies and Coca-Cola to take back to Walter’s room. It was a cold night, and the old pipes knocked, making a sound like children playing with drums. Outside the little room with its diamond-shaped windows they could hear the occasional loud revels of drunken football players on their way home from parties, as well as a conversation about diaphragms being conducted by some serious-voiced young women down the hall. “Morons,” Walter said, eating a chocolate chip cookie and settling himself into a tattered leather armchair. “Ingrates. Not an ounce of respect for other people’s sleep.” He had always been a good boy, much to his chagrin; in college, he explained, as he downed his Coca-Cola, he had wanted to be a writer, but his father had persuaded him to go to law school instead. As a result, he was full of a barely contained rage that seeped out at odd moments—a rage directed at himself, for not having followed his own instincts and become “some sort of artist,” but instead having taken the cowardly path of law school. He understood, it seemed, which was the easy, unadventurous choice, and yet he had known no way of stopping himself from making it. In his oxford shirt and polished loafers he explained his self-loathing, and Danny nodded, pretending sympathy. Ironically, it was this good-boy side to Walter—the side of himself he himself despised—that Danny was falling in love with that evening, sitting across from him in that cold little room. His careful haircut, his neatly pared nails, the bleached underwear ironed and stacked on a shelf—all these things seemed to Danny the most erotic of details.
After they made love, Danny crept down dark medieval halls, looking for the bathroom, and, finding it, peed among stones, echoes, bits of hallway conversation, gargoyles, and old, old grass. All so far from that run-down house on Eld Street, where April was sleeping then, with who knew who, or how many.
___________
Danny never left New Haven. The tour moved on north without him—to Middletown, Providence, finally Boston. It was midterm, and he made sure there was coffee for Walter when he got back from the library. Eventually, when it became clear he wasn’t going to go home, Danny rented a small apartment and got a job serving falafel at a restaurant called Claire’s Cornercopia. In the evening, after he’d finished studying, Walter would pick him up at the restaurant, and then they’d go together to the twenty-four-hour grocery store and buy more chocolate chip cookies and Coca-Cola and take them back to the apartment. Danny enrolled as a special student at Yale; the next year his transfer from Berkeley was accepted. And then, Walter’s wonderful job offer; Danny’s stint as a paralegal; his own acceptance at NYU Law. It all seemed far away to them now, those early days, for as is common with lawyers, they quickly grew rich, and their lives—linked together by some inevitability they were never called upon to name—changed considerably. They lived an hour from Manhattan now, in Gresham, New Jersey, the town Walter had grown up in, in a house twenty-five percent of which they actually owned. Each Wednesday night they attended the Gay Homeowners’ Association meeting at the Unitarian church, and the pastor, Janice Ehrlich, asked, “Has anyone experienced any homophobia this week?” and Mady Kroger—it was always Mady Kroger—raised her hand. “This lady looked at me in the supermarket,” she’d say, “and I knew she was thinking,’ What a dyke.’ ”
Sometimes April wrote Danny letters. “Dearest Powderfoot: We are in Iowa City. I sip orange juice at the Six-Twenty and think of you, leading your lovely suburban life. Have written a new song about Winnie Mandela which I think is pretty good. I’ll be trying it out tomorrow. Remember, the tour hits the Big Apple in five weeks. Love to you—”
She never signed these letters, just as, when she called, she never announced herself. As if he wouldn’t recognize, instantly, her breathy hello. She knew (and why shouldn’t she?) that even through two thousand miles of telephone wire, he’d always hear her calling him: “Danny! Danny! Come sing! Daddy wants to hear us sing!”
___________
April wrote a song that she dedicated to Walter and Danny. It was called “Living Together,” and the lyrics went like this:
After the years of the baths and the bars
And the one-night stands in the backseats of cars
And the nights we spent with so many different men
It feels so good to come home to you again.…
I’m so happy living together with you,
There are apples on the table,
Yes, I’m happy living together with you,
And as long as I’m able,
I’ll take care of you.…
Each Sunday morning through curtains of lace,
The sun shines and draws lines of light on your face,
We spread out the paper and lie in our bed
And there’s no place on earth I would go to instead.…
Now the neighborhood ladies all whisper our names,
Two young men so handsome, it seems such a shame,
One has a daughter, another a niece,
You smile and say, “Won’t they give us some peace!”
I bring you aspirin when you’ve got the flu
And you make good omelets and great oyster stew,
And while you’re a work in the city all day,
You know you’ll come home to someone who will say,
I’m so happy liv
ing together with you,
All our friends join round the table,
I’m so happy living together with you,
And as long as I’m able,
I’ll take care of you.…
The lace curtains were an invention; so was the oyster stew, and so were the neighborhood ladies, and so, for that matter, were the baths and the bars, neither Walter nor Danny having ever done more than dip his toes in the great, cold, clammy river of promiscuity. Still, when he listened to April singing that song on her live album, tears which went against his better judgment filled Danny’s eyes. “Sometimes I think the most political thing a gay man or woman can do is to live openly with another gay man or woman,” she said in her little introductory patter. “So I’d like to dedicate this song to my brother, Danny, and his lover, Walter, two men who took the brave step of letting the world know.”
Have we? Danny wondered. They kept no secrets. The secretaries at Walter’s office all knew who Danny was, and vice versa, but the wide-faced men who employed them seemed to look right through their presences in each other’s lives, as if they were mere complications to each other, better left ignored. So: what it was really like, their living together. Danny and Walter are sitting in the living room on a Sunday afternoon, their pants around their ankles, having just watched Bigger in Texas on the VCR.
“Which of us is the man?” Walter asks casually.
Danny looks across the sofa at him. “Well,” he says, “I suppose you’re the man because you go to work every morning in the city.”
“But you go to the city every morning too!” Walter says. “And you put in those three-pronged outlets. With your screwdrivers and wrenches and drills.” He looks satisfied.
“I also do the dishes, wash the sheets, and make the beds. You take care of the garden.”
“Yes. With a big hoe.”
“You like boys with hairless chests and tight buttocks,” Danny says, “and I like big hairy men with low swinging balls. Besides, I cook.”
“You fuck me,” Walter says.
Danny is quiet for a moment, trying to think of a retort to that seemingly definitive fact. “I stayed home all day last Monday and talked to your mother about Debbie Klinger’s divorce,” he says finally.
“Well, then, I guess you are the woman,” Walter says. He aims the remote control at the VCR, commanding Bigger in Texas to rewind.
“I’d like to get that one with Brad Harden next time. What was it called? Frat House Initiation?”
“I think it was Frat House Frenzy.”
The VCR makes a thunking sound, indicating that it has finished rewinding. Walter opens the cabinet under the television and slips Bigger in Texas into its place in his library of pornographic videos. Danny scans the familiar titles: Jock Itch, Boys Will Be Boys, Bigger and Bigger, Hot Oil, Grab a Hunk. In the kitchen, something bought long ago in the gourmet deli section of King’s defrosts; the sprinklers start their automatic cycle. They pull their pants up and move to opposite sides of the house, each thinking about order, contentment, each wondering whether they are sinking.
Later, when they go to bed, their bodies reach for each other instinctively in the dark; legs fold into legs, arms cross over chests in that trusted way which it seems no length of time can render ordinary. What they have given up, they have given up for the sake of settledness, and yet Danny is learning that settledness has its own complex weather. He’ll be standing in the kitchen—say, he’s washing dishes, his arms deep in the suds—when a prickling intimation of unease brushes up against him, lightly, like a hand on his shoulder. He lifts his gloved arms from the sink, looks around, sees only the microwave oven, the food processor, the coffeemaker, all the ordinary things shimmering in their ordinary ways. Outside the window is night. Across the house is Walter. So what is it, then, this sudden conviction that everything he imagined would stave off disaster is itself on the verge of blowing up?
Across the house is Walter. Danny envisions the hairs curling from the pale dent at the small of his back. A wave of repulsion passes swiftly through him, an astonishment that for so many years he has allowed himself such intimacy with another body. Is there any scar he hasn’t fingered, any scab he hasn’t scratched? He knows the dirt between Walter’s toes, the food between his teeth.
He moves away from the sink, still half full of dishes, and sits down at the kitchen table. His mother, her hands bolts of fabric. What one loves can often be the most frightening. Sometimes it bears him aloft, this life, bears him higher and lighter than ever before. Then he and Walter are in a balloon, skimming the land, careering toward a cliff, waiting for that moment when suddenly the world will sink beneath them, and they will look down at the tiny details of the earth, and either they will keep flying or the balloon will fall, everything will fall. If Danny wrote a song, it’s the weather he would write about: the stretches of calm, the hurricanes, how once it rained for years.
But of course he doesn’t—he never will—write songs.
Chapter 4
For almost twenty years now Louise had had cancer. The disease seemed to be following a haphazard progress of its own devising; it disappeared for years at a time, then emerged just when everyone seemed finally to have forgotten it. Louise mostly found the lumps when she was in the shower. Then she’d come into the kitchen, her hair wrapped in a towel, and Nat could tell from her face, could tell from how she held on to the coffeepot and breathed small breaths that in a few minutes she would be calling Dr. Sonnenberg’s office. But first, a cup of coffee, slowly taken in. A deep breath. The familiar flipping of the address book, the rapid punch of telephone buttons. “Hello, Dorothy, it’s Louise Cooper. Yes. Okay. I’m afraid I need to make an appointment.”
Dorothy, Dr. Sonnenberg’s nurse, always said something soothing then, something Nat—sitting at the kitchen table, pretending to read a cereal box—couldn’t make out. “I know, I know,” Louise said. “It had to happen sooner or later. I guess I was just hoping, that’s all. Well, this afternoon will be fine. Yes. Just fine.” She put the phone down, and Nat stood.
The waiting room was what bothered her the most, the waiting room with its fishtank and piles of old House & Gardens. The hours she spent there, thumbing through the magazines, watching to see if the albino catfish would ever emerge from the plastic shipwreck into which it had swum, were purgatory, she told April on the phone. It was the bubbles she concentrated on to keep sane, the bubbles rising steadily, one after the other, from the plastic diver standing amid the black glass gravel on the fishtank’s floor.
Dr. Sonnenberg always smiled and embraced her in the examining room. “Well, Louise,” he said, “I can’t exactly say I’m happy to see you here.” And then she smiled too, and they both almost laughed, Louise looking away at the window, blushing a little, like a girl whose date to the prom has just told her how beautiful she is.
But she always came out all right; she was lucky over and over again. A kind of cheerful hysteria took over then. “I just want to let you know,” she’d call to tell Danny, “I’m having a little radiation, and it’s working like a charm. Shrinking everything back down to size.”
“Good,” Danny would say, standing befuddled in the kitchen in his dress shirt and boxer shorts. “I’m glad, Mom.”
“Just wanted to let you know,” she’d say again.
___________
She was not alone in her illness. Doris Buxbaum’s husband, Fred, for instance, just fine one day, spry as a daisy, then the next hooked up to a respirator, a tumor as large as a fist closing in on his kidneys. Nat’s colleague Dale Wilson, getting along, getting by with occasional radiation: thin as a rail, but still alive. Leona from the hairdresser’s, having just received the bad news, trying to open her eyes wide enough to absorb the dreadful panorama before her. Even Dr. Schoenberger, the wonderful surgeon who had saved her that first time; she never in a million years would have imagined that she would outlive Dr. Schoenberger.
It seemed to her the final twist
of the knife that those who cured should also be stricken.
___________
As for Nat, he endured; he did the best he could. He sat patiently with her in the waiting rooms when she needed him; he held her hand. Other times, when Danny was visiting, as he did at least every three months, he took over for Nat and went with her to the radiation center. There was a homey, almost suburban feel to the place, Louise greeting her friend Leona as casually as if they were passing in the supermarket.
Nat was having a hard time. A student had recently written on an anonymous course evaluation form that he was “an old fart.” He had always thought of himself as being on the forefront of things, belonging to the future. Now the dean asked him every few weeks if he was thinking about early retirement.
What had happened was simple. He had been hopelessly sidetracked by a series of wrongheaded and visionary notions—all too arcanely theoretical for anyone outside his academic circle to understand—and, in laboring to perfect these notions, had let the true innovations of the day pass him by. Thus he had dismissed home computers as a trivial sideline; he was nowhere near the microchip, though it was being invented down the hall from him; he hadn’t heard of Steven Jobs when the Macintosh was introduced. Trapped in his laboratory, he had become an old fart—an idea he didn’t like, but what could he do? Knowing he was kept on only because of the ironies of tenure, his younger colleagues laughing at him behind his back, behaving cordially and eating lunch with him only because they knew he was now on the tenure committee and could have some influence on their futures. They were a far cry from his own youth. They wore Calvin Klein underwear and worked out at the gym on their lunch hours. Their futures were very brilliant. They commanded five-thousand-dollar fees for speaking engagements. Still, he accepted their flattery, their sycophantic attentions at lunch. He let them let him pick up the bill. And when it came time for the tenure committee meetings, he was generous. He voted yes more than no.