Equal Affections (3 page)

Usually by eleven-thirty a tiredness like a drug laid them out flat.

Sometimes the phone rang after midnight. Only one person ever called that late.

“Hi, it's me.”

“Hi,” Danny said.

“Did I wake you?”

“Well, um, I was in bed—”

“Oh, shit, I always forget—the life of a working stiff. Forgive me, Powderfoot. I live this crazy way, I go to sleep at four and get up at twelve. I forget some people are in bed before midnight.”

“It's okay, it's okay—where are you?”

“Northampton. Staying with Ellie and Claire—remember them?”

“I think so—the black woman with the braids and the little blond woman?”

“Yup. The concert just ended half an hour ago. It went pretty well. Well, not exactly a huge audience, but they were enthusiastic. They seemed to like everything we played.”

“So when are you arriving in the Big Apple?”

“A couple weeks, as planned. I hope you don't mind putting me up again. You don't, do you, Danny?”

“Of course not.”

“And Walter doesn't mind?”

“No.”

“Because I could stay with Eileen Herlihy in the East Village or else on this farm in Bucks County. But that's so far. And Eileen's apartment is small. And anyway, why would I stay with them when I could visit with my favorite baby brother?”

“April, you know you're welcome. You're always welcome.”

“Good. I'm glad.”

“I should be getting to sleep—”

“Oh, sure. Sorry. Forgive me. I'll hang up. Just wanted to say hi! And that I love you—”

“I love you too—”

Walter shuffled next to him. He didn't hear any of it; he slept with wax balls in his ears, a black visor pulled over his eyes. But Danny was awake again. He lay back, stretching his arms out, his hands behind his head. It was almost one o'clock.

___________

April was a singer of moderate fame. In the world of women's music her fame was much more than moderate, and she had made successful crossovers into the worlds of folk music and protest music as well. When they were growing up, she had a nylon-stringed guitar which she taught herself to play, and in the afternoons she sat in her room and practiced chord progressions from the Peter, Paul and Mary songbook. “Something's wrong,” Nat remarked when he heard her singing. “No white girl is allowed to have a voice like that. Louise, were you fooling around with Nat King Cole behind my back?” In fact, like everyone, he was amazed by the deep voice coming out of April's slim throat. She was sixteen and Danny was seven, and she had taught him the harmony for “Leaving on a Jet Plane.” While she played guitar, they sang together, and Nat, by the third chorus, had tears in his eyes. It meant a lot to him, so much that even years later, when they were home for Christmas, he still bugged them to sing “Leaving on a Jet Plane” for him. “Come on,” he'd say, “you remember. Leavin' on that jet plane, don't know when I'll be back again?” “Oh, Dad,” April would answer, tossing back her hair, laughing, “you're still tone-deaf.” And though Danny was by that time completely tone-deaf as well, and April—well, April was famous; April was a star—they would sit down together and sing it, all the way to the end, April strumming her old nylon-stringed guitar as inexpertly as she had when she was sixteen. Nat hummed along as best he could, and smiled, transported by the music to some region of nostalgia probably reserved for fathers of grown children. Danny, on the other hand, had no room in himself for nostalgia, at least where April was concerned.

He had lived through much of her fame, in both senses. He had gone along for the ride. For two years he had watched as doors were opened to her, and loaves of seven-grain bread baked for her, and lovers procured for her in towns all over America. Most often they were smaller towns—Iowa City and Northampton and New Haven—places where rents were cheap and universities predominant; places where, in earnest, women who love other women had been for years collecting.

Danny met Walter in 1980, in a New Haven women's bar called Isadora's. They were the only two men in the bar, and both of them were tall, which was probably why they sought out each other's eyes above that crowded landscape of dancers, and why they smiled. Walter, who was at the time in his second year at Yale Law School, was in the company of seven women graduate students whose lesbianism, where not proclaimed, was at least incipient. They had invited him to come with them to the bar after April's concert, he told Danny later, while they lay huddled together in his twin bed, under blankets washed by his mother, and he had agreed to go on a lark; he'd never been to a lesbian bar before, and he wanted to see what one was like. And why had he gone to the
concert
? Danny asked. Well, Walter said, it wasn't because he was interested in women's music per se, but because he was a fan of April's earlier albums, her protest songs, which his older sister had liked to play when he was a teenager in the seventies. “This new stuff,” he said, “it's okay. But it doesn't have the power, for me, of her early songs—‘No More Vietnams,' say, or ‘Gathering in the Fields.' I wish she'd played those. The new songs—oh, I don't know. Maybe because I'm not a woman, I can't understand them.”

Of course, inevitably, he asked what Danny was doing at the concert, and Danny had to explain that he was April's brother as well as the assistant tour manager. “But I didn't see your name on the program,” Walter said, after several minutes of bafflement and insistence that Danny was joking. “It was all women's names.”

“Well,” Danny said, “that's true,” and explained that because it had been just a year since the release of April's landmark album,
Discovery,
there was a wariness among the women who worked on the tour, a feeling that the concerts had to be projects conceived by and for women alone. The inclusion of a man's name on an album cover or concert program, it had been decided, might be misperceived as a gesture toward patriarchy, putting or scaring off some women. Indeed, it was
only because April
was
women's music that year that in the end he had been allowed to come along at all. She needed him. He was renamed, on the program, Danielle Powderfoot. (A joke of April's; someone had complained that Native American women were underrepresented.)

For two months that year they zigzagged across the country in a rackety Volkswagen bus: Danny, April, her three-woman band, Vickie, the stage manager, and Jennifer Cavanaugh, the sign language interpreter. They never stayed in motels, less for financial than for political reasons. Women all over the country welcomed them into their houses and fed them potluck suppers, after which they would lead them on tours of their cooperative printshops. In New Haven they were to have been given accommodation at a communal women's household on Eld Street. At least that had been the plan, until the heads of the household laid their eyes on Danny. “He can't stay here,” remarked a woman with a beaky nose who appeared to be in a position of some authority. “I'm sorry, that's just the way it is.”

“But wait,” April said. “He's my brother, and anyway, he's gay.”

They called a house meeting to decide the matter. April and Danny and the band waited in a kind of anteroom, Danny looking into his lap and trying to ignore the stares of Vickie, the stage manager—she was the most feminist of the bunch and had disapproved of his involvement from the start. He knew that somewhere across the house those serious, stern-faced women were debating. Things never came to a vote with them; they believed in consensus, which as far as Danny could tell meant arguing until one or another side got tired and gave up.

“Cheer up,” Lourene, the drummer, said to comfort him, and handed Danny a piece of Bazooka bubble gum, which she was never without.

In the end the women decided that Danny could stay one night, but that after that he should try to find some other accommodations for the rest of the three-day layover.

“And I'll bet you were just hoping,” Walter said, in that little narrow bed in the law students' dorm, “that you'd find a nice Yale boy with a room to share.”

“I admit it,” Danny said, and smiled. He was nineteen; April was twenty-eight. Up until that night he had thought he would never love anyone as much as he loved her. When she sang, he was rendered speechless with pride and pleasure and, being tone-deaf like his father,
jealousy. He could not sing a note, would never be able to, and since he believed (as April believed) that there was nothing more noble or good in the world than song, no medium more powerful or lucid, he had decided that there was no reason he shouldn't be content to be April's flunky, her gofer, devoting his life to her work. As for April, she took Danny's devotion for granted. She was at her peak then—a brief span of years, as it turned out, when she could call herself a star.

Women all over the country worshiped her. In the Volkswagen bus she liked to read aloud the letters and poems they sent her. “Dear April: I'll bet you get a hundred letters like this, and are wondering why you should pay any attention to mine when there are so many, but I just want to say your record
Discovery
changed my life and that I love you and long to meet you someday. Sincerely, Jane Carmichael.”

“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.