Equal Affections (20 page)

“Oh, we never met,” Bulstrode said.

For the space of a beat, Walter was silent. “You never met?”

“Oh, no. We just talked on the phone.”

“Oh.”

“Yes. Every day, sometimes two or three times. And then one day I call him up and he says to me he can't take it anymore, it's getting too intense. Just like that, he breaks it off. Personally I think it was his dad. His dad was putting a lot of pressure on him, about being gay. The next thing I knew, he'd changed his phone number. I left him e-mail, but he just ignored it.” Bulstrode sighed. “Too bad. I really went for him. And we were sexually in tune, you know? The way few people are in life. Jesus, I've never had sex like that.”

“You mean phone sex,” Walter said cautiously.

“Yes, of course. The most intense, incredible, horny, hot phone sex I have ever had. Sometimes we'd be on the phone five, six hours. He always came three or four times, but I held back. I wanted to wait until the very end and then really make it big.”

“You always like to wait a long time before you come?”

“I sure do. How about you?”

Their conversation took a different direction. Afterwards, sweaty and spent, Walter crawled into bed next to Danny, who lay rigid, facing the wall.

“Have fun with your boys?” Danny said.

“Sure,” Walter said. He tried to laugh at what had just happened to him, turn it into a joke, a light diversion, as Danny imagined it was, but all that night, Walter couldn't get Bulstrode out of his mind. There was something irresistible about him, about the very noncorporeality of him, as if he really were that imaginary friend most children invent at some moment or another. Before Bulstrode, Walter had been resolutely anonymous over the computer, but now something in that lilting voice persuaded him to tell all. How astonishing to live like that, without ever having to touch, without ever having to show your face! A life of that sort required no care, had no accountability!

At home, with Danny, Walter had been plagued by a numbness lately, a lack of sexual feeling toward his lover's body, which he could not fathom; here, after all, was the same flesh for which he had felt incomparable lust just months before, and it might as well have been a lump of raw bread dough, for all the arousal it now mustered in him. Was it time? he wondered. Did it happen to every couple eventually? Perhaps there is only so much lust a single body can inspire in another,
perhaps only so many orgasms before the loved one's body simply becomes drained of that mysterious, pleasure-seeking juice of attraction. And yet Danny didn't seem to have the same problem. That night, after Walter had rolled away to face the wall and sleep, Danny was suddenly on him, taking Walter in his arms and reaching his hand down toward his belly, possessed, clearly, even now, of the same old desire that had started up so many years ago, in a dorm at Yale.

“Not now,” Walter whispered. “I have to sleep.”

“What's the matter?” Danny said. “Saving it for Hung Jock?” He laughed in what Walter thought was a sarcastic way and turned away from him.

“Bulstrode,” Walter said, but it was without breath; no sound escaped his lips.

Across hundreds of miles of telephone wire, the next evening, Walter told Bulstrode about his father and mother, his sister, his dog. He confessed his increasing sexual ambivalence toward Danny. He admitted he was addicted to pornography. All this Bulstrode absorbed, an enormous crackling silence on the other end of the telephone line. He offered close to nothing in return because he had almost nothing to offer. From what Walter could tell, over several years Bulstrode had given more and more of himself to the computer until his outer life, his life in the world, eroded, broke off, a dry husk. As for the life of the channel, that was a different matter. Here he was full of stories, anecdotes, events. One evening a group of men in or near New York had been discussing the pleasures of sex in the aisles of the Adonis, a gay porno theater near Broadway. “I just love the Adonis,” one of the men had written. “The atmosphere there positively emulates sex.” Both Bulstrode and Walter had been on at the time, and later they laughed about it. “Can you believe it?” Walter said. “I was really tempted to type something mean, like ‘Truer words have not been spoke.' But I didn't. Instead, I sent him a message, saying, in effect, ‘I think you mean “emanate.”' Then he tells me to check my dictionary program! Jesus, these guys are so arrogant!”

Bulstrode was laughing, hard. “The thing you've got to realize,” he said, “is that most of these guys, for all their computer wizardry, don't know very much about the English language. Some of them are positively subliterate. What I love is when words get reduced to letters—
you know, ‘What are you up to?' with the ‘are' and ‘you' as letters and the ‘to' as a number. That always gives me a chuckle.” His voice suddenly grew pensive. “Did I ever tell you about Rudy?”

“Rudy? I don't think so.”

“Well, Rudy was this really sweet working-class kid, eighteen or so. He used to spell like that, which is why I was reminded. Anyway, I got to know him pretty well on the channel. He was a nice kid, he liked older guys, he said. We had phone sex a few times, which was hot—he got off on me calling him son and him calling me Daddy—and sometimes afterwards we'd talk seriously. That was when I started to realize he was really in trouble—you know, out of work, the father's an alcoholic who beats him up, the mother's gone. No wonder he wants to call me Daddy. Anyway, one evening a bunch of us, maybe ten of us, were on, when Rudy logs on, and he says, I've just taken thirty-seven Valium.' Suddenly there's this incredible panic. Everyone's trying to keep him awake, you know, the way you're supposed to, to distract him, but pretty soon he just stops answering our messages. Of course we can't call him; the phone's hooked up to his computer, and he's still logged on. But we knew where he was from, and a couple of us had his phone number, so what we did was, this guy called Snapper, he called nine-one-one and got the emergency number for his area and told them what had happened and gave them the number. They had a book to get the address from the number, got over there, and sure enough, there he was, slumped over his desk with the machine on. A couple of weeks later he came on and told us we'd saved him. We'd saved his life.”

“Jesus,” Walter said.

Bulstrode was silent for a moment. “It was,” he said, in his careful Kentucky accent, “one of the finest moments, one of the truly finest moments, of my life. I helped save someone from the jaws of death.”

He laughed softly. “Walter,” Bulstrode said, after a few seconds of silence. “Can I tell you something?”

“Sure,” Walter said.

“I really like you.”

“I like you too.”

“No, I mean it. What I mean is, I—I love you.”

“Ah—” Walter said.

“Are you upset to hear that?”

“No, not upset, just—”

“Just what?”

“Well—we've never met.”

“I feel as if we have.”

“It's just—I don't know, it seems weird to me. How can you love someone you've never seen?”

“I've seen you. In my imagination I've seen you. And isn't that better? That way nothing can spoil you for me. That way you'll always be perfect.”

“But I'm not perfect,” Walter said. “And that isn't love.”

“Everyone has his own definition of love,” Bulstrode said. “Anyway, don't get so uptight. I'm not demanding reciprocation or anything. I just wanted you to know—the level my feelings had elevated to.”

Walter was quiet for a moment, grasping for something to say. “Well, I'm glad you told me,” he said finally. “I am, uh, touched.” He cleared his throat. “Listen, I think I'd better go now. I've got to get going.”

“Aren't you horny?” Bulstrode asked.

“Not tonight, really. Maybe tomorrow—”

“What time?”

“I don't know—sevenish.”

“Shall I call?”

“No, let's meet on the computer. Okay?”

“Okay.”

Walter hung up. He felt suddenly ashamed, and frightened, as if he really had been having an affair and the affair had gotten out of hand. Of course that wasn't true. He could change his number, elect never to turn his computer on again, and Bulstrode would disappear from his life. There would be nothing to confess to Danny; Danny would laugh. Disappear! he would say. How could Bulstrode disappear? He hardly existed. Who he was, what he looked like, how old he was, even his name—all these things were mysterious. His house was mysterious; his clothes were mysterious. Yet he and Walter had had the conversations lovers have, had brought each other to orgasms as lovers do. Where are you? Bulstrode had asked. What are you wearing? Are you hard? Unzip your pants. Open your shirt. Imagine I'm kissing you, undressing you.

Imagine I'm loving you.

Bulstrode, it seemed, had ceased to believe in the barrier between imagination and act. And why not? What are we, after all, Walter
wondered, but voices, synapses, electrical impulses? When one person's body touches another person's body, chemicals under the skin break down and recombine, setting off an electric spark that leaps, neuron to neuron, to the brain. Was that really all that different from what happened when fingers pushed down buttons on a keyboard that sent signals across a telephone wire to another keyboard, another set of fingers? Wasn't there, in all of that, something of a touch? All around him, Walter heard people complaining about how they wished they were different, wished they were bigger, smaller, smarter, sexier, thinner. Bulstrode had found a way around all that; he had found out how to become the self he imagined, the self his real life, apparently, constricted him from fully being.

And Walter understood. More than once he had stopped in front of the mirror in the lobby of the World Trade Center, stunned by the dark-suited, well-groomed man who faced him with such confidence and easy, necktied glamour, and wondered how that man could possibly be himself. Some people invented themselves. And yet there were others—Danny, his mother—who seemed to say, Who I am is who I was, where I come from, who my mother and my father were. The past forms me. The past owns me. The pit of family called endlessly for Walter, voices beseeched him to acknowledge his own inseparable link to all the hands and voices and smells, the dark nails and wet kisses, the bloody lipstick smears, while on the other side, there was Bulstrode, patently himself, declaring to Walter his strange, disembodied love. Did Bulstrode want Walter to leave Danny for him? And if so, where would he go? Would they live forever in the constricted little corridor of noncorporeality, an endless private chat? Would his world be a phone booth? Thinking all of this, he became frightened and longed, suddenly, to be touched.

He went to Danny. Calling his name, he tore across the house, to the bedroom, where Danny was watching TV, and threw himself on him, professing his love as loudly and suspiciously as a husband who has just come from a hooker. Danny laughed and pushed him away. “I can't breathe,” he said. “You're choking me. Jesus.” Walter rolled over, panting. “What's with you?” Danny said. “You're never like this.” Walter panted. On the television white-coated doctors hurried through hallways, pushing fearful-eyed patients on stretchers.

He had known a deaf woman once. She had lived in the other half of
the two-family house he and his mother shared right after his parents' divorce. Her name was Jeanette, and she sold hot pants door to door. Walter remembered his mother squeezed into the tight red shorts, her legs wobbling like Jell-O as she turned in front of the mirror, murmuring, “I just don't know.” The deaf woman was talkative, and had a vague, throaty, approximate voice that he loved to listen to. What amazed him was that even though she had never heard a single sound, she was nonetheless pushing forward the muscles of her throat, trusting that whatever communications resulted would come to life in that world which existed for her only as an act of faith. And wasn't love always like that, in the end, a mere gesture made across unknowable miles? If that was true, then Bulstrode, in his isolation, his reaching across the continent, was merely, consummately human.

Still, Walter couldn't bear the thought of hearing his voice again. Instead he clung to Danny; he spent every moment he could hugging or kissing Danny. A week or so later, when he finally logged on again, he was surprised to find no messages, no e-mail from Bulstrode. He wasn't sure why, and he also wasn't sure if he was glad. Perhaps Bulstrode was ashamed to have been rebuffed at that tenderest moment; perhaps, in his narrow world, he could not bear the sound of Walter's voice anymore, or even the sight of his name, now that Walter had received and ridiculed his most intimate offering. But Walter thought it was more likely that he had simply found someone else out there among the Hunky Dudes and Top Guns, another distant friend with whom to talk and laugh and confide across all the miles, and pass the loneliest of hours.

T
he rash, whatever it was, brought Nat back to her. It was almost like a manifestation of his guilt, like stigmata, and indeed, her palms and feet were red, parched, and could be scratched bloody. He came back to her in sorrow, as he always did when she became sick, and for a week he was there every night. No fighting. He endured her crying, her middle-of-the-night terrors, her insistence she couldn't take another day of it. He accompanied her to the doctors—the dermatologist, who shrugged his shoulders; the allergist, who shrugged his shoulders; the second dermatologist, who ordered tests and mentioned dental trauma—supportive, unwavering, as he always managed to be under such circumstances. If she hadn't been so uncomfortable, she would've felt gratified, loved, except she knew it was not out of love that he was comforting her, merely out of guilt and fear. (He did fear losing her.) And to his credit, he took care of her very well, very convincingly. Still, if she hadn't been suffering, he wouldn't have been home—this was the equation their lives had come down to—and so she wondered if perhaps her subconscious really
had
willed the rash into being, as a way of keeping him there. No, she had lived enough through pain and its ravages to know her subconscious would never have been so stupid as to bring physical grief upon the body just to satisfy the thin needs of the soul. Pain was worse than sadness; there were moments when, waking up in the middle of the
night, raw and itching, she would have gladly divorced Nat if in return she could have been divorced from her own skin.