Authors: David Leavitt
(There was nothing blond about Walter. He had dark, curly hair. His body was slack from lack of exercise; he was turning into his father.)
For diversion he typed:
>What's ur name?
>Thaťs cool
Again the question he didn't want to answer. He said good-bye (“huggers” was the eompu-term), logged off quickly, leaving Ford alone, despondent, before his own terminal, before one of the hundreds of lit windows glowing all over town tonight. He put on his jacket, walked out into the hall. A black man was maneuvering a vast polisher over the marble floor near the elevator bank. Down and down, the whoosh of the elevator, which even now, after so many years, made his ears pop. It was a windy night; in the unnaturally illuminated plaza that separated the towers pieces of newspaper blew into the air, garbage hurried along the cement pathways as if on urgent errands, as if there were a whole life of objects, a life of old cookie fortunes and paper bags, inspirited by the wind with a sense of destiny or occupation.
He rode the PATH train to Hoboken, the mostly empty local through the string of suburbs to his own small station and the small, chilly car he had left there that morning. Down quiet streets he drove to this house that was his only according to some logic he failed to understand, this house he never would have noticed, never would have recognized, had it not been where he slept, where he ate, where on weekends he tended the garden.
Danny was in bed, reading, when Walter came in. Their dog, Betty, lay curled up next to him, but as soon as she heard the door, she jumped up to investigate. She really was Danny's dog; she had no loyalty to Walter. She exploded into life as soon as he entered, bounded upon him, but it was only because he was a distraction, a new smell. Soon enough she was back in bed.
And a few moments later Walter was lying in bed himself, Danny across from him, breathing, breathing. New flannel sheets patterned with lambs. The house vacuumed, pristine, the dishwasher humming. Danny had aged better than Walter. He was still slim, his body had retained its natural boyish musculature. Whereas Walter was getting fat, had a lawyer's paunch, cut himself while shaving. Sometimes at night like this he could look across the bed and see in Danny the same earnest-faced boy whose frank, unwavering smile had so entranced him that night, almost eight years ago, at that women's bar. The magic, the perversity of that meeting thrilled him still on occasion, though they rarely talked about it.
“What did you do today?” Walter asked quietly.
“Got home from work about six. Chatted with your mother.”
“Anything else?”
“The dog groomer called again. He wants to have an affair with me.”
“Should I be worried?”
“I don't think so.”
They lay there, unmoving. “I can't sleep,” Danny said. “This stupid song keeps running through my head.”
“What song?”
“ âI gave my love a cherry that had no stone . . .'”
“Oh, that song ...”
“ âI gave my love a chicken that had no bone . . .'”
“I remember that song. I always thought it was so strangeâa chicken that had no bone. Like a monstrosity born after an atomic bomb.”
“But what comes next?” Danny said. “Da-da-da-da-da-da-da? What's the next line?”
Walter was silent for a moment. “I gave my love a cornbread that had no pone.”
Danny let out a snort of laughter.
“I gave my love a test tube that had no clone.”
“SorryâI gave my love a
Castro
that had no clone.”
“I gave my love a problem that had no known.”
“I gave my love a brass band with no trombone.”
“I gave my love a heating that had no zone.”
Their laughter rising up like bubbles in a fishtank.
T
he first time Walter and Danny saw a pornographic movie was in New Haven, a few weeks after their first meeting. It was calledâafter Jerry Lewis, Danny supposedâ
Sinderfella
, and it was awful, forgettable, nothing like the sleek videotaped productions of their present lives. Even so they had walked, giddy and thrilled, through the ruined streets of New Haven, grateful to be able to indulge such a forbidden curiosity with each other rather than alone. The shoulders of their coats brushed against one another; every few steps Danny slipped on the ice, and Walter caught him before he fell. The theater was called the New Regency, and its elaborate marquee and foyer suggested it had seen better days. The old-fashioned ticket booth in front was boarded up and empty. Inside, an Indian woman with a black dot on her forehead collected the money at what must have been once the candy counter. Then they went through another door; they stumbled blindly for seats; they sat there in the dark and watched it. Danny didn't remember much about the film itself, except that it was done in a cheap and grainy eight millimeter that gave the bodies of the young men in it a strange, whitish cast, as if they were composed not of flesh but of light itself. The evil stepmother and the fairy godfather were both played by a shrill-voiced, bald, fat man in a muu-muu, and in the end, when the prince went off to find Sinderfella, he knew which one he was because, of all the young men in the town, only
Sinderfella could take the prince's “gargantuan manhood.” It was the sort of movie where people used phrases like “gargantuan manhood.” The heads of the few other patrons sporadically punctuated the vast glimmer of the theater, as did the shadowy figures of men moving about the perimeter. Danny and Walter held hands, grateful for love and each other in such a strange, cold place.
It was Februaryâand yet that might be wrong; Danny tended to remember his years in New Haven as a perpetual drizzling February, though he knew there had to have been glorious spring mornings as well, and stifling August afternoonsâ“February in New Haven,” Walter used to say, “when the city's boring, your classes are boring, but most of all, you're boring.” They were still new to each other then; everything that was stale and depressing for each of them alone seemed to be, for the two of them together, a discovery, a journey, a revelation.
Now they lived through machines, they were addicted to machines. They owned two nineteen-inch color television sets; two wireless remote-control VCRs; a Japanese stereo system with separate graphic equalizer and compact disc player; many compact discs (luminous arcs that still amazed Danny to look at); two sleek computers, each with a modem and printer; many kinds of software; a telephone that answered itself and redirected calls to other numbers; three air conditioners; a Cuisinart; a microwave oven; a can opener hinged to the bottom of the cabinet; a fancy German toaster; a coffeemaker that knew how to turn itself on at a prearranged time; a water pick; a garage door opener. And in the basement, in the backs of cabinets, rarely in use, other things, mostly gifts from Walter's father or mother: a machine on which hot dogs might be impaled and electrocuted; a yogurt maker; several kinds of ice-cream makers; a hamburger cooker for griddling a single patty at a time; a candlemaker; a plastic bag sealer; an electric toothbrush; a pasta roller; a gun that punctured red tape with capital letters; a card shuffler; a fondue melter; three hot pots; an electric knife; a pressure cooker.
There were not enough plugs. The outlets were stuffed with extenders; the extenders were stuffed with extension cords; wires tangled like matted hair under desks, cabinets, beneath the sofa. Electricity hummed through the house even when everything was turned off, wires connected to other wires, other machines, and on and on
across the dark landscape of middle-of-the-night Gresham, New Jersey.
They had a piece of furnitureâit was just invented, it didn't have a name yetâto house their collection of videotapes. Walter was an expert, a collector. He had mostly thirties comedies and pornography. One of each was usually the order of the night, like some peculiar rehashing of the old double-bill tradition. He had friends with whom he talked about the pornographic tapes the way other men talked about bottles of wine or racing cars. Gone were the days when pornography was something secret, something to be ashamed of; those funny black boxes with their spools of shiny celluloid were just part of the furniture now, as respectable as classical music. Walter even knew people who knew some of the greater stars of that strange pornographic universe. They were proud of what they did these days, his friend Dennis said; they even had their own little Academy Awards ceremony every year, with prizes given for acting, directing, costumes. (“Costumes?” Danny asked.) The stars wore jockstraps. Medals closely resembling those given at the Olympics were hung round their necks. And after that, presumably, more filming at poolside locales in Southern California. The voices of these films were background music to Walter and Danny's lives, a barely intelligible dialogue, dismembered by Valley Boy accents.
As for regret, it wasâit isâchronically postorgasmic. The VCR clunked and rewound, and Walter, his pants around his ankles, invariably found himself overcome with sadness, as he stared at the expansive living room of his perfectly nice house, the living room that might have been lifted whole from the window at Conran's. As the film rewound, he rewound; he thought of Paris, he saw himself, suddenly, vagrant, in a dirty rooming house in Paris. Danny claimed it was generational, the children of the divorced or unhappy households of the seventies seeking to re-create in adulthood the stable family home they never had, but hoped for, all through their growing up. They do not run away; they do not go to ashrams or to visit the Great Wall. They stay home. They open Insured Market Rate Accounts.
At least as far as Walter was concerned, Danny had a point in pointing all this out. His own growing up, after all, had been less than secure. His father, Morry, had left home when Walter was twelve, and in the intervening years Walter had seen him only in restaurantsâexpensive, loud restaurants filled with the tumultuous machinery of
giant organs; restaurants on the edges of highways that served things like buffalo chicken wings and fried potato skins; restaurants in the city with waiters and sous-chefs and porcini mushrooms; suburban Mafia dens with gold flatware, buffets, platters of jumbo shrimp, heaping bowls of chocolate mousse. Oh, his father had a house, not that far away, which he shared with a woman named Leonie. But somehow he never had occasion to ask Walter to visit that house, and Walter had never had occasion to press the issue. As for Iris, his mother, she was quiet and frugal, a schoolteacher, recently retired. After the divorce she had of course had to move out of the big family ranch house, which was quickly sold at immense profit. Years of solitude and suffering had led her to a sort of peace with herself. She lived in a condominium complex for singles, in an apartment rich with maroon carpeting, and she had a boyfriend, a retired elementary school principal named Hal. She remained a diligent mother. Often, when Walter got home from work, he'd find packages of home-baked bread waiting on his kitchen counter or a pot of soup simmering on the stove. The sink shone; there was a package of colored sponges sitting on the table with a note that said, “Rememberâgreen for dishes, yellow for counters.” Iris and Hal had subscriptions to the state opera and symphony, and sat in on a music history course at a local community college. In the summer they went on tours. In buses, with guides, they walked Rome, the Greek islands, and a good portion of the Great Wall of China; they saw Cairo and Istanbul; they “did” Moscow, where, under the watchful eye of the KGB, Iris delivered a letter from the children of their synagogue to the children of some refuseniks and openly, daringly took pictures of forbidden things. “The guard just looked at me,” she explained, “and I looked at him, real tough. You think he'd take on an American lady who's likely to scream bloody murder? No way.” And she laughed, passing around blurry snapshots of smiling couples, and street carts, and large gray buildingsâwhat was forbidden about all of this even Iris couldn't say.
Walter saw his mother almost every day; he saw his father exactly twelve times a yearâthe very same visitation agreement provisioned by the original divorce. After their monthly luncheons, the dates of which were emblazoned in Iris's memory, she always called on some pretext and after a few moments, inevitably, asked how things had gone, how Morry was. “Fine,” Walter always said.
“And did he have his woman there?”
“No, Leonie stayed home.”
“It figures. I guess he was ashamed to be seen with her in public.”
That was his family.
Funny how much more stable his own life appeared, at least in the eyes of the world. His parents were the ones, after all, who had trusted in the god of stability.
And so, pulling up his pants, Walter thought, perhaps Danny was right. Perhaps he really had chosen this life. Although, he reflected, as the mouth of the VCR spit out the rewound tape like a black tongue, it was more comfortable to believe that it had been chosen for him, foisted upon him, that given the option, he would have been in Paris now, writing novels or painting pictures. Asking questions.
Danny was in the other room of course, busy with something. Talking to his mother, his sister, his father on the telephone.
L
ouise was watching
Women in Love
on cable and doing her hands. She had turned it on in the middle, so she didn't know what was going on. Men and women in antiquated dress, running around in the British countryside. There seemed to be sexual tension. Her mind was wanderingâshe was worrying about a dentist's appointment on Friday, a follow-up to root canal work, as well as a peculiar rash on her feet which itchedâwhen suddenly something came on the screen that dazzled, and she was lost. A dark, bearded man was making love to a woman in an elaborate Victorian dress; the woman lay back on the grass, her skirts hiked up, and he hovered over her, naked, his hips bucking and thrusting. Louise caught back her breath and put her hand to her mouth, but of course for the moment she didn't have a hand. Nonetheless she did not move her armânot until the man had finished, shuddering upon the girl's layered gowns, and the bland, soft taste of warm terry cloth and fabric softener began to cloy against her teeth.