Equal Affections (4 page)

___________

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 living 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.

F
or 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.

But slowly, as their power grew, these younger colleagues had taken a more condescending position. They suggested that he of all people would be best suited to teach the giant introductory undergraduate course “Applications of Computer Engineering”—nicknamed by the students Tools for Fools—because of his great knowledge, his sense of history. Previously the youngest, least experienced members of the department had taught that course, but now, it seemed, they were needed for other things. The graduate students were demanding the
attentions of the young stars;
they
were the power of the department; they—not Nat—were the basis of its, and hence the university's, reputation. Indeed, no one was interested in what Nat had to say except for the woman from History of Science who was writing her dissertation on the origins of the discipline of computer science. Her name was Lillian Rubenstein-Kraft, and she was the provost's ex-wife; she had gone back for her Ph.D. after her children had left home. Each week Nat sat with her at the faculty club and told her stories about the “old days”—he was finally getting used to calling them the “old days”—and she took notes with that peculiar zeal that only historians can manage to muster. She was forty-seven, very thin and elegant-looking, with short-cropped, frosted hair and painted nails. She told him about her divorce, how ugly it had been, how Leon had hired a bastard lawyer and fought her every step of the way. “Trying to convince the judge that I'd been adulterous when he was popping every little coed who went by his office,” she said. “Disgusting, if you ask me. But justice prevailed, I'm glad to say. The judge saw the truth, and granted in my favor. Mental cruelty, physical cruelty, adultery.” She licked her lips with pleasure, listing his offenses, recalling how he had stood there, staring at his hands, when the judgment came down.