Equal Affections (35 page)

April smiled. “Okay. The answer is no, I haven't missed it—because—” She straightened out her legs, pulling her dress over her knees. “Now, Danny, can I trust you to keep this secret? Not a word of this must be breathed to anyone, not even Walter.”

“Swear to God and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye,” Danny said.

“Okay. Well. The answer is no, I haven't missed it because I have done it a few times—a
few,
mind you—over the last several years.”

“You mean you've had sex with men?” Danny sat up, smiling.

“Don't sound so gleeful about it! Jesus. But yes.”

“How many?”

“A few.”

“How many is a few?”

“Three, all right?” She laughed at his indignation. “It doesn't mean I'm not gay, it doesn't mean I'm any less committed to lesbian causes, it just means I—transgressed, I guess is the word, a few times. The ‘thrust,' Fran used to call it. She always talked about missing the ‘thrust.' Well, I never missed the thrust so much, but I've always believed in doing what you want, sexually; I think it's important for women not to be enslaved by notions of what they should or shouldn't do—and I don't care if those notions come from their mothers or uptight orthodox lesbians who think dildos are signs of male oppression. It was for variety's sake, if nothing else. Anyway, I liked them fine—the men, that is—although frankly, all this fuss about penises I don't understand. They strike me as basically ugly.”

“Ugly is in the eye of the beholder.”

She looked at him impishly. “You like them, I imagine.”

“Oh, yes.”

“You like them big?”

Danny's face turned bright red. “April!”

“I answered your question, now you answer mine. You like them big?”

He stammered. “Well—sure—I guess—”

“Is Walter's big?”

“April, I refuse—”

“Come on.”

“I don't know, size isn't that important—”

“So it's small.”

“No!”

“Then it
is
big!” She slapped her knee. “I knew it. They say you can
tell from the way a man walks, though I've never been sure if that meant his attitude or, literally, how he walked—”

“Well, it's not
huge,
April—”

“How big?”

Danny made an approximation with his hands.

“Is that as big as the guy who lies on the beach?”

“No,” Danny said. “But it's—big enough.” He fell back on the sand, grinning with embarrassment. A light wind blew by, bringing up prickles of coolness on his skin, and then for a few brief seconds the sun emerged from between some clouds. “Ah, that feels nice,” April said. She lay on her back, pointing her full stomach toward the intermittent sun, and hitched her dress up over her legs, her underpants, the rounding soccer ball of her stomach. There, in shocking contrast with her face and legs, the skin was the color of Cream of Wheat.

“If my baby's a boy,” she said, “and he's gay, like his father and his uncle and his mother, then I want you and Walter to take extra-special care of him, to see he turns out all right. Tom's loving, but he's not exactly worldly—I mean, I don't want my son growing up to be a herbalist.”

Danny laughed. “What makes you think it's going to be a boy? You didn't have that test, did you?”

April shook her head. “It's just that I have a feeling. Call it woman's intuition.”

The sun disappeared again, and she pulled her dress down.

“I've been trying to come up with names. What do you think of Bartholomew?”

“Bartholomew,” Danny said. “I like it. And he could be Bart for short.”

“At school.”

“But what would his last name be? Bartholomew Gold? Bartholomew Cooper? Bartholomew Neibauer? Or are you thinking of hyphenating? Bartholomew Gold-Neibauer. That's an awful lot of syllables for a little baby.”

“You know, I hadn't thought to discuss that with Tom,” April said. “I assume, however, his name will be Bartholomew Gold.”

“And if it's a girl?”

April lifted her head and looked crossly at her brother.

“Oh, of course.” Ashamed, Danny peered through squinting eyes at the disappearing sun.

“Louise,” he said.

April put her head back, closed her eyes. “Louise,” he said again. It pleased him and surprised him, the sound of her name in his mouth, and he realized he hadn't spoken it in many weeks. “Louise,” he said. “Louise. Louise.”

N
o one lived in the cottage during the year; it was rented and occupied only for summers, and as a result its rooms had a transient, restless feel about them, as if a lot had happened there but none of it had been allowed to settle in. The living room had bleached white floors and was furnished with a hodgepodge of elderly sofas and armchairs, each of which gave off the scent of rot and long, unheated winters. But Nat liked it. “It reminds me of Little Nahant,” he said, pushing open the doors onto the terrace. There, in the distance, were dunes, ocean, sky. “That smell of salt and fish in the wind. Makes me remember how I used to bicycle to see your mother that summer I was seventeen.” He was quiet for a moment, his eyes following the vapor trail of an airplane writing a message in the sky. Then he turned to face his family.

“So here we are,” he said. “All together again.”

“That's right,” April said. She stood against a wall, guitar in hand, fingering the strings in a way that suggested restlessness for an audience. “All together again,” she more or less sang, plucking with her index finger. Walter picked up a dust bunny and three pennies that had dropped on the floor, while Danny, in the kitchen, did dishes; he had been doing dishes all week. The first time these four people had been together since Louise's death three months earlier. Was it wrong that they should be gathered here, of all places, in an anonymous rented
cottage thousands of miles from the house and kitchen table which, like it or not, was the natural locus of at least three of their lives? And yet perhaps there was something to be said for reconvening on neutral ground, far away from everything familiar, and the ghost, even now pulling on rubber gloves to wash dishes in that other, faraway sink.

Nat looked thinner than before, tanned, well rested. He was doing some renovating, he announced to his children. The burnished orange shag carpeting they had put in when Danny was a teenager had been torn away, replaced by industrial gray. Ditto the yellowing white wallpaper with its pattern of black flowers—flowers from Hades, Louise had called them; the walls were white now. “My aim is to streamline,” Nat said, and Danny could tell how relieved he was to be finally stripping away the layers of old wallpaper, returning the house to its elemental forms—plywood and pine and oak, plaster and sheet-rock. Perhaps, when it was over, it would become a place he could go on in.

Walter had bought swordfish steaks for dinner. “We were going to go out,” Danny told his father, “but the restaurants around here are overcrowded and overpriced and just not very good, especially this time of year. Last time Walt and I had to wait an hour for a table.”

“Well, it's a good thing then, because you know how your mother feels about waiting,” Nat said.

“Feels?” April said, lifting her head from a magazine, and Nat closed his eyes.

“Correction. How your mother
felt
about waiting.” He laughed nervously. “Funny, isn't it? Even now sometimes I forget. She wouldn't wait in line for anything, your mother. Plus she was always getting in fights with waitresses, or sending things back, or complaining about the service. She'd say something was undercooked and then, when it came back, that it was overcooked. Sometimes I think pieces of meat got cold in the middle just in terror of her inspecting them.” He laughed at his own joke—his children laughed too, out of respect—and then he smiled and pulled his hands behind his head. “You know, I just remembered something. Once we were in a restaurant, your mother and I, and she asked to have some kind of fish broiled instead of sautéed, and when the waiter said he wasn't sure the chef would do that—it wasn't a bad restaurant, it just was some sort of fish you're
supposed
to eat sautéed—she looked at him and she said, ‘Young man, in
France there is a man who every several years goes to the very finest, the most expensive restaurants and orders a boiled egg. And if the restaurant is really fine, he is brought a boiled egg, and it is the most delicious boiled egg he's ever had. But if the restaurant is not fine, if the waiter harasses him, if the cook makes the egg badly, this man, who happens to represent France's most illustrious restaurant guide, takes away one of the restaurant's stars. Some of the finest chefs in France have killed themselves over a boiled egg.' Well, needless to say, I couldn't believe it. God knows where she heard that story. But there it was. So then the waiter disappears, and we're sitting there, Louise drumming her nails against the table because she's hungry, goddammit, and all of a sudden there's some sort of commotion at the front of the restaurant. Who should it be but the chef himself coming out of the kitchen in his big hat, holding a huge silver tray with a top on it that was big enough for a roast suckling pig. He starts marching very solemnly down the center of the restaurant, coming closer and closer, and I can tell your mother's getting nervous. The next thing we know, he's there, at our table. He puts this huge tray down in front of Louise—I swear, the thing takes up the whole table—and at this point your mother looks up at him, kind of scared, like maybe she's gotten in over her head. ‘Madame,' he says, ‘your dinner.' And very timidly, like she's afraid a snake's going to jump out, she lifts up the top.”

“What's there?”

“I don't dare guess.”

“You got it,” Nat said. “One egg, boiled, in a silver eggcup.” He laughed and clapped his hands together once. “At first she looked all upset, like she was about to cry. But then the chef started laughing, and patted her on the back, and the waiters laughed, and soon everyone in the restaurant was laughing and applauding, though none of them knew exactly why. And sure enough, they took away the tray and presented her with whatever fish it was she ordered—broiled.” He was smiling broadly. “I always loved that story, but your mother, she made me promise I'd never tell it.”

“Why?” April asked.

“She said it embarrassed her. You know how she was, she got embarrassed easily. In fact, as I recall, that evening she was so upset she couldn't even eat the fish.”

“Speaking of fish, dinner's just about ready,” Walter called from the deck, where he was grilling.

“Goody,” April said. “I'm starved.”

They sat down at the table, where Walter distributed the swordfish steaks, each striped with light crustings of charcoal. A familiar conversation ensued, one the family had had many times, only this time Walter played Louise's role.

“Is it moist enough? I hope I didn't dry it out.”

“It's perfect.”

“It's not undercooked, is it? Because if it is, I can put it back.”

“No, it's perfect.”

“Mine's perfect too.”

“By the way, does anyone want some salad? There's salad.”

Plates were handed out for salad. How comfortable they were already, how inured to this new configuration! It was as if subtle shifts had been made in the apparatus of the family that compensated for the vast throwing off, the lightening, which the loss of Louise had caused. A new balance settled, neither unpleasant nor strange; indeed, life without Louise altogether was turning out to be neither unpleasant nor strange, but rather pretty much what each of them expected. It was easier. No fights, no sudden refusals, no admonitions to clean up the kitchen, goddammit. They could go to restaurants and wait hours for a table now. They could do the crossword puzzle when Sunday came. None of which meant each of them wouldn't have given up almost anything to have her back, even for an instant, even for the space of a breath.

And of course, because it was a family dinner, April had a question. “You know, Daddy,” she said, “I've been waiting for the right time to ask you something.”

“Oh?”

“I've been waiting to ask you what the real story was about Mama's first marriage—you know, what she wouldn't let you tell us that Christmas.”

“Is that all?” He laughed with relief. In the new order of things this once-dangerous question was almost quaint, it was to be welcomed, particularly considering the other things April could have brought up.

“Well, it's not really much of a story,” Nat said. “A couple of summers before we got married, your mother went off to spend August in
Provincetown. She told us she was working as a maid at a hotel, but it turned out she was really working as a barmaid in a honky-tonk. So her father sends Uncle Sid and me up to rescue her, only when we arrive, it turns out she has no intention of being rescued. She was living in a room behind the bar, and at night she'd get woken up by the sound of the bouncer throwing drunks against the wall. She was having the time of her life. And as you all know, once your mother got her mind set on something, there was no way of talking her out of it. So she stuck out the summer, and then—for reasons that to this day elude me—she decided to do something very bizarre. She decided to enroll at the University of Alabama.”

“The University of Alabama!” Danny and April said in unison.

“Now remember,” Nat said, “this was 1943. If you were Louise Gold from Maiden, Massachusetts, it simply wasn't an ordinary thing to enroll at the University of Alabama. But she was no ordinary girl, and I guess she thought maybe she could have some more adventures down there. Anyway, there was only one Jewish boy on the whole campus, one other Jew besides her, and he was this Orthodox fellow named Solomon Bloch. They met, and she married him, right there in Alabama. She must have been nineteen, twenty at the most. Apparently, as soon as she did it, she regretted it and ran back to Boston, and then the next thing we knew she was getting on the train to Reno for a divorce. That same train Norma Shearer takes in
The Women
, remember that movie, April?” April nodded. “And she stayed on one of those funny dude ranches for divorcing ladies, just like in the movie, for—six weeks, I guess it was—until she was free of Solly Bloch, at which point she came back to Boston and she and I started up again. We got married just a few months later, in a civil ceremony with no one but her parents and my parents and Eleanor and Sid.