Equal Affections (2 page)

When he was grown up, Danny liked to tell people he'd been born nowhere, in a town that might have been blown away to nothing as quickly as it had been scuffed up from nothing, a town only a year older than he was. The town was called Carrollton, California, and it was built on garbage; “bayfill” was the polite term. A few years before, there had been water there, fishes, perhaps dolphins. But the San Francisco Bay was being chemically narrowed, filled in. People slept and argued and cooked and had children on a sponge of reconstituted paper towels, kleenex, cigarette cartons, squeezed-out toothpaste
tubes, dented cans. Years and years of human detritus, forged into earth. It had been Nat's idea to move there, even though, as Louise constantly reminded him, they could have easily afforded better. He liked the idea of Carrollton, the ideal of Carrollton, because it seemed like the future: biodegradable, recyclable, energy-efficient. But Carrollton's planners ran out of money; the hull of an unfinished shopping mall stood out against the multihued and pollutant horizon of the bay like an excavated dinosaur skeleton. The plumbing system broke down constantly; where there were cracks there were leaks, where there were leaks there were rats. Soon enough Louise had had enough of it, she put her foot down, and they moved Danny and April across the freeway, to the university town where Nat taught, and where the buildings had at least had a few generations to sink into the ground. Already Danny was imagining a day when, in a place far away, he'd describe this town to strangers, and the strangers would laugh.

Nat was a computer scientist. This was back in the days before the invention of the microchip, when computers were immense, ungainly things—nothing like the sleek devices of the present—and when athletic minds seemed to occupy only undernourished bodies. Nat was pale and bony, with hair the color of weak tomato soup. He didn't trim his beard, which was sometimes stuck with bits of food. He was, in his own way, a visionary, but a visionary crippled by a kind of myopia; he lived in a hive of machines, an endless corridor of technology, and seemed ignorant or confused when confronted with the goings-on of the rest of the world. (“He needs eyeglasses for his soul,” Louise used to joke to her friends at the faculty wives' luncheons she hosted on occasional Tuesday afternoons.)

Still, Nat had a vision; he liked to describe to Danny and April how in twenty years the computers he worked would liberate men and women from the daily labors they now endured. “Just think,” he'd tell his sister-in-law, Eleanor, who wrote a cooking column, “there'll be a day when you'll want to make something for your column and won't know what. So what'll you do? You'll punch some buttons, and lo and behold, a wonderful recipe will appear before you—along with all the ingredients, premeasured, many of them fabricated by the computer. For we'll be able to manufacture foods artificially by then. The breaking down of molecules and their re-formation in preselected forms;
even today we have some of the technology.” Eleanor turned away, affronted at Nat's lack of respect for her creativity, his inability to accept her column as an expression of artistic intent. No one took Nat's fantasies of the future very seriously. She turned away from him, but years later—when the world, and particularly their region of it, really did change, and in some ways just as Nat predicted—she (and the rest of the family) were retroactively impressed, and proud of Nat, in spite of the fact that a stubborn attachment to a wrongheaded notion had long since waylaid him, leaving him sidetracked in his obscure laboratory, while others carried the torch and changed the world forever. By then the future seemed no longer an endlessly postponed abstraction, but a present reality, a preordained age of electronic grace whose time had finally come.

___________

The town they lived in was filled with refugees. The horrors of the urban East—the horrors they had left behind, for good—were everyone's favorite topic: broken air conditioners, stinking subways, rats in the kitchen. And there were other people, older, for whom the horrors stretched even farther east, across an ocean: old men who sat puffing cigars all day at the coffee bar, dressed in thick wool suits in spite of the heat; women with helmets of gray hair, in pale jeans and Birkenstocks, serving cookies at the Unitarian Church Disarmament Coalition meetings, their German accents almost undetectable, but there, in the back of the throat, behind the new language. Every adult Danny knew, growing up, craved the good karma, the endless sunshine, the clean air. And still they complained, as if under their tanned hides, inside their souls, factories were belching black smoke, and they had to let it out. “The third time I got mugged, I decided I'd had enough.” “A naked woman, right there in the elevator!” And always, at the end, the familiar refrain: “Never again. Never again am I going back east.”

East. In Danny's childhood the word had an incantatory quality, almost a voodoo about it. It was always “back east.” No one ever referred to California as “back west.” Which meant to Danny that in spite of all its terrors, that distant coast with its calmer seas was still the original, the inescapable mother culture, of which California would always be the mere rebellious child. Indeed, Louise seemed to view the East in much the same way she viewed her own dead mother, Anna—as a harrowing, exhausting, debilitating presence she had had to escape getting sucked up by.

Danny wondered if it was his destiny, from an early age, to crave that origin, that older place his parents had fled from. His father was extremely fond of pendulum theories, Danny grew up listening to pendulum theories. Therefore, it made perfect sense: The child of refugees, the child of pioneers, longs to return to the ancestral homeland, longs to go back. Anyway, he knew he didn't belong in California, among sun worshipers and Buddha worshipers. He glamorized the East, its crime and noise, grime and smokestacks. He tried to affect a New York accent. When he couldn't sleep, he pretended his bed was a plane, winging him over fields and mountains to the glittering, towered cities, the ivy-clung walls, the old, cold stone buildings with their carvings of gargoyles and monster heads. Muggings, rats, subways. Leather chairs in mildewed reading rooms. And, of course, seasons. He read books in which it snowed at Christmas. He grew furious about the fact that it never snowed at Christmas; he complained to his mother. Then one day it did snow. One day in seventeen years. Danny was eleven; he was walking to the school bus when the snowflakes started to fall. At first he couldn't believe it. He thought it was a dream. But the snow kept falling, and at the bus stop he and his friends formed it into balls, threw it into the air. They knew what to do with the snow. It was almost instinctive. All morning the snow came down outside the windows of Danny's classroom until the schoolyard was thinly blanketed in that still, white powder, fine as sand on a beach, but so much brighter. Again they played with it at recess; they played with it at lunch. Their shoes left muddy dents in the beach of snow. There was not really enough for a snowman, but some of them tried anyway. Then the sun came out again, and the snow started to melt. It was gone by evening.

___________

Danny grew up; he went east. He followed his famous sister, April, all over the country and halted one February in New Haven. He never went back except for visits. And yet, even after he had been in and around New York almost eight years—he was twenty-seven by then, mired with his “life partner,” Walter Bayles, in a morass of shared properties too extensive even to contemplate escaping—he still had trouble, admitting the extent to which that original coast had become his home. Perhaps that was why he refused to trade in his California driver's license, that same license he'd been issued when he was sixteen, with that same ugly picture of his sixteen-year-old self—wild-grinned, big-nosed—staring out at him. Every four years the renewal arrived, forwarded by his mother. Every four years he thought about exchanging it and didn't exchange it. It was more than laziness; something in him refused to relinquish that single last link to his birthplace. Too many times a year he still had to zigzag across the continent to see his parents, back and forth, back and forth, until he could no longer tell which coast was his childhood and which his adulthood, which his past and which his future. After a while it was no longer back and forth; he was always traveling back, no matter which direction he was going in, carrying with him the heavy weights of attachment, throwing them down, binding himself to whatever land the plane's wheels had just touched down on.

There had been a time when the vastness of the country, the splitting of his life between the two coasts had seemed to him a metaphor for his destiny. Visiting his parents, he felt as if he were going back in time. He'd walk the wide avenues of the shopping mall and happen upon his twelve-year-old self, locking his bicycle to a streetlamp, crouched over, his fingers racing to get the combination. His real life—the apartment in New Haven, the nights he spent studying on the old Salvation Army sofa with Walter—seemed to shrink to nothing then, like the town in the musical April had starred in in high school,
Brigadoon
—a place which, once you slipped out of it, you might never have the chance to return to. But of course years had passed; he had made the journey
more times than he could count. It seemed he had surpassed that spirit in himself which craved nothing more than to get out of there, that spirit which had flung him to New Haven, and cold, rainy nights in February, waiting to meet Walter when the law library closed, cold nights when, walking along the stone alleyways of the old stone campus, he breathed with gusto the moldering smell of the borrowed trench coat he was wearing, here, in this region of the world where people wore coats. That part of his youth was over. These days the winter made his bones ache. He kicked and swore at the once-beloved snow. Some days he wanted more than anything to return back west (yes, he had said it; those very words); other days the smell of warm smoke rising from subway grates renewed his old passion, as if the pendulum had ceased swinging in perfect arcs and were instead flying round and round in circles, tying itself in knots.

___________

Danny's fantasy: He is twelve years old, riding his bicycle to the shopping mall to read soap opera magazines. A sunny Saturday afternoon, the shopping mall quiet, full of women in tennis dresses and plump teenage girls, their stomachs bulging out of stiff jeans, who've come here in gangs to smoke. Danny is wearing shorts, a T-shirt emblazoned with the name of the university where his father teaches, tube socks, tennis shoes. His legs are brown from the sun, the hairs on them bleached white. He is locking his bicycle to a lamppost, unscrambling the combination with dirty fingers, when he feels the proximity of another body, feels warm breath against his hair. He turns around, still crouched, and a man is standing over him, a tall man in a gray leather jacket and jeans, a man who is at once a stranger and oddly, intimately familiar to him—but where from? A student of his father's? A cousin he doesn't remember? “Excuse me,” the man says, “I'm sorry to bother you, I—” He puts his hands in his pockets, looks away. “Danny,” he says. “Danny.”

Danny's eyes suddenly fill with tears. His cheeks flush. He looks at the ground.

“I'm you,” the stranger says. “I'm who you're going to become. And I've come to tell you—to reassure you—you're going to be fine, just fine.”

The boy stands. Of course he sees it now, all of it—that face so familiar because it is his own, but also so strange, because he's never seen his own face before, not really, except in a mirror, and now he understands how mirrors distort, and where his legs will stretch to, and the awkward unpuzzling of his own face. Tears are welling in his eyes, and in his grown self's eyes as well, as the man bends down, leans over him, puts a hand on his shoulder. “All the things you're worried about,” he says, “all the things that make you suffer—they're nothing. They're smoke. I know. And I've come so you'll know, so you won't have to suffer anymore. For you're going to be fine. You're going to leave California and head East, just like you hope. And you'll have love, Danny. I know you can't believe it now, I know everything you feel. You don't imagine anyone will ever love you, you can't conceive how anyone could love you. But someone will. You'll see.”

The hand on his shoulder—larger, thickly veined, bristled with short brown hairs—is his own hand. Young Danny, crouching still by his bicycle, runs his own fingers over those long fingers, feels the warmth of the skin. One after the other he traces them, until his hand comes to rest on a slender silver ring. Slowly he strokes the ring's rounded outer edge; slowly he rotates it around the finger on which it's lodged. Under the ring is a perfect white band where the skin has not been touched by the sun.

T
hey were Walter's hands, Danny understood later; man's hands. Bronze-colored, the skin tough and slightly dry, so that you could see the lines traced as if in white ash. Thick veins tunneling just under the surface of the skin; the nails blunt; a shiny gold Rolex slung low on the wrist, beneath the brilliant white cuff, the black sleeve.

At home Walter took off his shoes and dropped his pants almost as soon as he was in the door. The pants fell heavily and suddenly, the change and keys in his pockets made a crashing noise as they hit the ground. Then for an hour or so he wandered from room to room in black socks, boxer shorts, and suit jacket, seemingly incapable of undressing any further, biting into apples, tearing open bills and throwing the envelopes on the floor. Danny felt a strong impulse to shed the outfits of his working day as soon he was back; before he did anything else he was in a T-shirt and jeans and white socks, he was a boy again. He was usually home earlier than Walter; he didn't work as hard or as late. So when Walter stumbled through the door, Danny said hello and kissed him, he asked how his day had gone. Their suburban nights stretched out shapelessly, a series of corridors with many turns. They rarely ate formal meals, rarely ate together at all. Walter spooned reheated gourmet frozen dinners from tinfoil containers he had to balance on potholders to keep from getting his fingers burned. He
walked as he ate; sometimes he sang. Danny tried to be more healthy. He made tuna melts on seven-grain bread. He vacuumed and cleaned the kitchen and ran the dishwasher. Usually at some point the VCR would switch on, but if it wasn't pornography they didn't concentrate; they entered and left, cleaned up or wrote out checks, catching snatches of whatever was on the television, asking each other who characters were, and what had happened to Joan Crawford, and what kind of creep was George Sanders playing now.