Equal Affections (34 page)

When they were at the hospital, when Louise was dying, Walter had stood for hours just outside the glass partition of her room. Inside, beyond the glass, Danny and April and Nat wept and raged and struggled through Louise's death, Louise struggled through Louise's death. All that separated him from the spectacle of them was a piece of glass. It could have been a television, or a window, or a mirror, but in fact it was a door, and every hour or so someone came out, usually crying. What right did he have to complain? He was just there for Danny; it wasn't his mother. Yet there was a door. And someday, probably not too long from now, he was going to have to walk through that door; he was going to have to confront himself what was waiting for him on the other side of that door.

The computer was not a door.

He shut off his computer. Somewhere across the house was Danny. What to do? What to say to him? He started walking, then, for a moment, hesitated. Don't be an idiot, he chided himself. Go to him.

Danny was sitting at the kitchen table, reading the newspaper. Approaching him from behind, Walter was suddenly flushed with
affection for his clean-shaven neck, his comfortable, round head.

“Danny—” he said.

“Yes?”

“Danny, I—” He faltered. Danny put down the paper, swiveled the chair around to face him.

“What is it, Walt?”

“I missed you,” Walter said.

Danny looked up at him. Walter had his arms folded behind his back and his head bent forward, like that of a penitent child.

“But I haven't gone anywhere,” Danny said quietly.

“I have.”

Danny reached up a hand, lightly brushed it over Walter's cheek.

“And are you back?” he said.

“I'm back,” Walter said. “I'm back.”

F
or two weeks that July Danny and Walter rented a little cottage on the beach in eastern Long Island. A few days after they'd arrived, April came to visit. They met her at the airport. For some reason Danny was worried he wouldn't recognize her, worried that pregnancy would have changed her appearance in a substantial and unpredictable way, but when she got off the plane, she was, quite simply, herself, April, at her most beautiful. All through her life Danny had watched his sister alternate between periods when she looked overweight and drab and other periods in which a splendid, unexpected beauty bloomed in her, and now it seemed she had made the crossover once again. Her hair, sun-baked, glowed at the tips; her once-pasty skin had a deep golden cast. Indeed, as she waved and smiled from the crowd of emerging passengers, Danny couldn't help but remember that time when her career was at its peak and each night she stepped from backstage into an onslaught of flowers.

She was definitely pregnant, he saw from where he stood amid a gaggle of other welcomers, her belly humping up beneath her dress in a way that reminded him of Flemish Madonnas. But she also looked—and this surprised him—thin and fit, as if she'd just emerged from one of the rigorous tuna and tofu diets she sometimes subjected herself to, rather than weeks of soap operas and milk shakes. Her dress was sewn from a rich, burnished orange fabric and, like the dresses she'd worn as
a teenager, had little mirrors embroidered into it. She had her hair tied in a braid that coiled over her shoulder like the tail of a neck-riding pet mink, and her ears were studded with various tiny and delicate earrings—stars, moons, and planets—from the midsts of which two low-hanging pendants of beaten silver drooped.

“I am so glad to be off that plane, Powderfoot!” she said as she kissed him among the other little reunions. “When are we going to the beach? Now?”

“Of course. We drove in from there.”

“And Walter?”

“He's waiting in the car.”

“Goody! I can't wait to hit the sand! I even brought one of those special maternity swimsuits. You should see it, I look ridiculous.”

They gathered her luggage from the carousel and headed outside. It was a hot, muggy New York summer day; outside the airport, cars and taxis fought for the few free inches of curb Walter had managed to monopolize. In sunglasses and a Bermuda shirt, he kissed and hugged April and hoisted her luggage into the trunk. “Thank God for air-conditioning,” April said as she struggled to pull the seat belt over her distending belly. “I forgot how humid New York gets in the summer.”

“Well, you won't have to think about it anymore,” Walter said, “because we are hitting the beach!” And with a few sharp honks of his horn, he cleared the snarl of the arrivals curb, taking them out onto the highway.

On the way April told them about her summer. She hadn't lasted too long with Tom and Brett, she explained. “It was way too confining, and Tom was really being a pain in the ass with this whole healthful-pregnancy thing of his. I mean, I'd take a Tab from the refrigerator, and he'd say, ‘Are you sure you need that, April? It could be bad for the baby.' It got to where I had to hoard my Tabs in my room and drink them secretly at night. Anyway, finally we both agreed it would be better if I moved out. His heart's in the right place, and he's going to be a great father, but in the end I just couldn't take his watching me like a hawk all the time. So I decided to go to Margy's—she's been living the last couple of months in this house up in Muir Woods, and since her lover just left to take a job with the Foreign Service, she said she'd be glad for the company. It's a beautiful place, and—guess what?—next
door there's a couple of women—Jane and Melinda are their names—who have two children by artificial insemination, a boy and a girl. I got to talking to them, and they turned out to be just great. They told me about the problems their kids were having in school, and what they did to help them, and how they'd explained to them who their fathers were. Neither of them knows who the fathers are, incidentally, it was all kept secret, so in a lot of ways my situation is going to be totally different. But it was a great education anyway. I'm sticking to your car.” She lifted her thighs from the vinyl car seat and pulled her dress down back down under them. “So how's your stay been so far, boys?”

“Fine,” Danny said.

“Quiet,” Walter added.

“Although we certainly have been enjoying the beach house.”

“How long have you been out?”

“Just five days now.”

“Nine to go.”

“It feels like we've been there forever, and just a few seconds, both at the same time,” Walter said. “I think next summer we're going to rent the place for longer and go on weekends.”

“And when's Dad coming?”

“Saturday. You'll stay, won't you?”

“Oh, sure,” April said. “Dad and I get along great now. Ever since I made him go to that shrink with me, he's been a pussycat.”

“What happened with the shrink exactly?”

“Well, she was just so eminently reasonable and sincere that Daddy had to agree with her, even if he didn't with me—you know, that it wouldn't be such a big sacrifice to take it easy with Lillian, especially if I agreed not to guilt-trip him. Ever since then we're best buddies.”

Danny couldn't tell if she was speaking sarcastically. Nat's version of the reconciliation had been—to say the least—more subdued.

“He
is
coming alone, isn't he?” April asked.

“Of course.”

“I'm just asking because he didn't tell me one way or another, and you know that's one of his favorite tricks—to not say anything and then—surprise—bring her along. He did that last week. Made a big deal about wanting to have a reconciliatory dinner with me. I get to the restaurant, and there she is.”

“And how was that?”

“Well, it was funny. I'd decided in advance that whenever the inevitable meeting happened, I was probably going to have a tantrum or something as soon as I got to the restaurant, and that maybe that wasn't such a bad thing, maybe it was actually necessary, you know, to clear the air and all. But then I got there—remember, I wasn't expecting her—and I was totally taken aback. I mean, here she was, this perfectly nice, politically enlightened, feminist woman, really. Very pleasant, very bright. Couldn't be more different from our mother.”

“How?”

“Confident. Self-assured. Not a vulnerable bone in her body, as far as I could tell—at least that's the impression she wants to give.”

“Well, I don't think he's bringing her this time,” Danny said. “I mean, on a big trip like this, where he's staying with us, I think he'd have had to say something—don't you?”

“I'm sure he's not bringing her, Danny,” Walter said.

“Not that I'd mind so much if he did; it's just that we really don't have room. The cottage has only two bedrooms plus a pullout couch.”

They were well away from the airport now. Outside, the city smog began to dissipate, letting in squares of sunlight. In spite of the air-conditioning, April opened the window, as she was so fond of doing, and let her hand drag with the wind. “Oh, I almost forgot,” she said suddenly, pulling it back in, “I brought something for you.” She rummaged through her purse, fishing out at last a cassette tape, which she handed to Danny. “A present.”

“Really? What is it?”

“Just some early recording I've been doing for my next album. I was hoping you'd play it.”

“Great!” Walter said. “Put it on.”

“Now?” Danny asked.

“Sure, why not? We've got at least another forty-five minutes to the beach.”

Danny took the cassette out of its case and fed it into the tape player.

“One-two-three,” a woman's voice said. Then guitars, drums, and April, singing the lullaby she'd started to compose at their house, just before Louise got sick. It seemed to have happened years ago.

“It sounds good,” she said. “It sounds better than it did before.”

“Yes, it does.”

“It's great.”

Then April began to sing along with herself in a loud, sure voice.

___________

When they arrived, Danny and April took a walk on the beach. It had gotten suddenly, surprisingly chilly, chilly enough so that April—to her disappointment—had to forgo her maternity bathing suit. Now she walked barefoot along the tide line, hitching up her dress with her hands to keep the ends from getting wet. She had very fat, very white feet, with thick toes and bluntly cut, yellowing nails. Whenever they stopped a few seconds in one place, the sand swept up and buried April's feet. She seemed fascinated by this phenomenon and stood observing it until the sand was up to her ankles. “It's like quicksand,” she said to Danny. “When I was a kid, on TV and in movies, people were always falling into the quicksand. I used to have nightmares about it. Now you don't see quicksand so much anymore.” She shook her head, feeling, apparently, old, and swiftly pulled her feet out of the sandy muck.

They moved up the beach. “There's this guy who usually sits right over there,” Danny said, pointing at a small hillock dotted with sea grass, “who I was really hoping to show you. He sits there all day in this tight little swimsuit with this positively huge erection, and everyone who walks by does a double take. It's like
Candid Camera
. The other day Walter and I sat here for hours, just watching different people's reactions—an old lady with a dog, a young mother, a couple of real tough-looking local boys. No one, and I mean no one, can miss it. They look, they kind of go into a spasm, sometimes they turn around to take another look, and this guy, he just smiles at them. He wears these terrifying reflective sunglasses that blast your own face back at you. And he must be incredibly turned on by showing himself off like that, because it never goes away—the erection, that is.” Danny sighed audibly. “Too bad he isn't here. He'll probably be back tomorrow.”

“You boys certainly do find novel ways of keeping yourselves entertained,” April said.

“Well.” Danny blushed. “Even
you
would notice this one, April.”

“One of those
horrid
things, and huge to boot? Yes, I'd probably notice it. I'd probably notice it and run screaming in the other direction. ‘Penis alert!'” She laughed. “That was an old joke of Fran's, probably the only funny thing she ever said in her life, the bitch.” She looked suddenly bitter, remembering her ex-lover, and put a piece of sea grass she'd picked up into her mouth.

They sat down. Danny uprooted several pieces of grass and formed them into a tic-tac-toe board, the squares of which he filled with
X
's and
O
's dragged into the sand with a stick, while April gazed intently into the surf.

“April,” Danny said.

“Yes?”

“Do you ever—you know—miss it?”

“Miss what?”

Danny looked away. “Sleeping with men.”

“Oh, that. Why do you ask?”

“Well, you know, Mama never really believed you when you came out to her. She told me once, just last year. She said, ‘I know how that girl thought about boys, and it's just impossible for me to believe she was faking the whole time. I think she's faking now.' ”

“Mama, like many women of her generation, believed what she wanted to believe. I mean, certainly, I
thought
I was attracted to men back then, I
thought
I liked sex with them.”

“So you're saying that was all a societal delusion? That you were somehow being tricked?”

“Well, not exactly. It's just—sure, I liked having sex with men, but it wasn't as
important
to me as sex with women. It didn't mean as much.”

“So answer my question. Do you miss it?”

April shot him an older-sister glance. “Since when,” she asked, “have you been given permission to ask me questions of a personal nature?”

“Come on.”