Equal Affections (5 page)

Her children had gone to high school with his children. Eric had had a crush on April all through their senior year, she admitted one afternoon at lunch. Now he was an attorney in Santa Barbara.

“He wouldn't get too far with her today,” Nat said, and she blushed. Very little embarrassed Lillian, except when Nat alluded to his children's homosexuality. Then she never knew what to say.

Louise, of course, didn't like her, had never liked her, not even in the old days, when they had seen each other every week at faculty wives' lunches. “I have never trusted a woman with fingernails like that,” she told Danny. “Not since I saw
The Women
.” (She had seen it first when she was twenty, and it was still her favorite movie.)

In fact, Danny thought Lillian was a nice woman, though a little excessive in her enthusiasms, her desire to be approved of and taken seriously. She said she looked forward to completing her Ph.D. so that she could call herself Doctor. Danny remembered her younger son, Steve; he had been the star of the varsity tennis team in high school and had had beautiful, tapered legs. And now, Lillian told him, Steve was a ski pro; he lived with his wife, Cindy, in Sun Valley, Idaho. “I
told him I saw you again, by the way,” she said. “He says to give you a big hi.”

“Tell him hi from me too,” Danny said, embarrassed, wondering if Steve remembered the boy who used to stare at his legs in the warm first days of school, averting his eyes only when he heard the bell ringing for class to begin.

___________

Sometimes, when he was home in the summer, Danny followed his father around the garden, watching him crunch snails with his shoes.

“Your mother certainly was a wild one in her youth,” Nat said to him once, out of the blue.

“Oh?”

“Yes, indeed. A firebrand. A real hot potato.”

“How so?”

“Now, Danny, you know how Louise feels about being talked about behind her back.”

“I guess I do.” It was characteristic of his family to offer a secret, then retract it.

It was early August. Crickets shrieked in the warm garden; rotten guavas and persimmons littered the lawn. Through the kitchen window Danny could see his mother washing dishes, as well as the face of Dan Rather delivering the news on the little kitchen television. Nat picked up a hose and aimed it at some immense zucchini that were lounging in the vegetable garden. “It wasn't always easy for me,” he said. “I realize your mother's having her hard time now, but I've had my share as well. Those first few years she made my life a living hell.”

Danny listened to the water spraying against the zucchini's hard shells. The intimacy of Nat's tone embarrassed him—he wanted to run away from it—but he held fast, thinking he should hear him out.

“You've heard about Tommy Burns, I know. Unfortunately that was just the tip of the iceberg.” He smiled. “Oh, well. Someday I'll tell you the whole story. Aha!” He put down his hose and aimed the flashlight
anew. “So you thought you'd escaped, did you? Well, no such luck, my friend. See where he is, Danny? Right there.” He spotlighted a snail in the grass, its slick body rearing from inside the fluted brown shell. “The snail carries his house on his back,” Danny remembered a distant, teacherly voice telling him, and envisioned now what he had envisioned then: inside the snail shell a little bed, a light, a toilet.

“Gotcha, you bastard.” Nat's shoe came down with a crack. He lifted it up again and aimed the flashlight at what remained. The snail had shattered like an egg; there were tiny bits of brown shell and a smear of what looked like snot. Strings of mucus stretched from the bottom of Nat's shoe to the grass.

“What I've told you tonight,” Nat said, “please don't mention to your sister. For all I know, she'll write a song about it.”

“Don't worry,” Danny said. “I won't.”

“Good.” Once again Nat aimed the flashlight out onto the grass. “Someday I'll tell you the whole story,” he said again, and Danny knew that by “someday” he meant when his mother was dead. He looked across the yard at the kitchen window. Dan Rather's tiny face was still in the television, but Louise had walked out of range.

A
bout their children's homosexuality Louise and Nat maintained an attitude of hopeful resignation. Their final words on the subject seemed to be: Well, there are worse things in the world. And there were worse things: Louise had friends whose children were heroin addicts, and gunrunners in Nicaragua, and—worst, unaccountably worst—friends whose children were dead, too many, it seemed, dead from car crashes, or drug overdoses, or strange cancers caused by drugs their mothers had innocently swallowed in their youth. She herself hadn't taken DES, thank God, but her sister, Eleanor, had, and now Joanne, Eleanor's daughter, was suffering the consequences: a hysterectomy at twenty-two, the difficulty of adoption, and of course the threat of cancer looming over her, as it would continue to loom over her until it was replaced by something worse or better or at least more definable, the reality of cancer, which, as Louise knew, at least carried with it a sort of reassurance of definition: You knew what you were fighting. In the long run, she recognized, she had been lucky.

She chose to ignore the articles Eleanor sent her, clipped from Sid's obscure psychology journals, knowing that it was only jealousy which made Eleanor pass them on: “The Recurrence of Homosexuality in Siblings: Nature or Nurture?” “Families with Multiple Homosexual Children: A Survey,” “The Sissy-Boy and Tomboy-Girl Syndrome:
New Evidence Links Childhood Behavior to Homosexual Life-styles.” Always neat photocopies, with a note paper-clipped to the first page, a note prefaced by a picture of a happy cook stirring a pot and the words GOOD NEWS FROM ELEANOR FRIEDMAN'S KITCHEN. “Just thought you'd be interested in reading this—E”; “Sid thought you might want to take a look at this—E.” But Louise had long since given up trying to understand the complicated argot of the articles or following the elaborate graphs. She slipped them, unread, in a file marked “H” and tried to remember the tragedies of Eleanor's own life: the cane and the brace, and of course the daughter who would never have children and the son she never heard from, working in a canning factory in Alaska, his mind blown apart like a stereo speaker that has been played too loud. Eleanor's son, Markie, had killed the cat. He had put headphones on the cat and turned the volume up full, and then he had put the cat in the bathtub, and then he had put it in the microwave—all the result of a bad trip, he said later, when she and Sid got home. I must remember that, Louise always thought when the articles arrived in the mail; I must remember how Eleanor found the cat and how she had to clean the oven afterwards.

Anyway, Louise didn't really believe she had two homosexual children. She still didn't fully accept April's homosexuality. She remembered too vividly how in high school and college April had been so boy-crazy, how she had fallen passionately for one boy or another up until Joey Conway—the pinnacle of her passion. And Louise knew she meant it; she knew. She recognized from her own youth the crazed look in her daughter's eyes, the look that meant she would do anything for this man, anything to continue having this man. As far as Louise could tell, April's homosexuality was more political than anything else, a phase she was going through, having more to do with feminism than desire. (She chose to ignore the fact that this “phase” was now entering its tenth year.) Danny was a different matter; with Danny there didn't seem to be a choice. She had guessed it early on, not so much from conventional symptoms—he didn't dress up in her clothes or play with dolls or anything like that—but from the way he tended to resist certain activities—sports and watching football games and working in the garden with his father—in favor of standing in the kitchen with Louise, just talking to her while she cooked, or sitting in his room, cutting pictures of nature out of magazines and pasting them in a notebook he
had already filled with Magic Marker psychedelia. She smiled to think of these things afterwards; and anyway, at least he was safe now, he wasn't running around the underside of San Francisco, he was living with a responsible man in a neat house in a suburb. He was a lawyer. Successful. It could have been worse. He could have been in Alaska, working at a canning factory. He could have been dead.

Of course at first she had been angry; she had brought to bear upon him all the pent-up humiliations of her own youth. It had seemed to her on that afternoon so long ago that the world she had grown up in was infinitely less questioning, more rigid than the one her son was speaking to her from, and yet she had clung to those rigidities, understanding that their motives were to protect, to keep things stable, to keep the neighborhoods of neat houses and clean grocery stores from blowing apart altogether. “Don't you think it's selfish of you to just indulge every sexual whim you have?” she had said to him, but she meant something slightly different; she meant to ask him how he could bear to go against such a strong current as that of convention merely in order to indulge a desire, when it meant turning the world upside down, turning everything upside down. It seemed insane and also terribly brave. A bomb hovering over the neighborhood, about to drop, because this single pin, her son, had come loose. For she had grown up believing that the stability of the planet, its even orbit, required one to maintain one's own stability, one's own orbit, one's own quiet, steady attendance to the rules. She herself had been reckless, and even now, thirty years later, she was still feeling the aftershocks of that recklessness; she had irrevocably shaken the groundwork, weakened the foundation of her family. Of course she was hardly the only rebel in the world—she understood about trends—and still she believed that on some level this revelation, this news of Danny's, was the direct result of her own bad behavior, almost as if it had been transmitted through the blood.

At least that was what she believed the day Danny told them.

Within a few weeks she felt better. She remembered why she had left Boston, left her childhood, moved with Nat to California; it was precisely in order to find a freer, less rulebound world, a place where Nat could study his computers and not be frowned upon for it. And of course Danny was the child of that world, his own world, not hers. As for Nat, he was as always impregnable; he took the news in stride, seemed hardly to react to it. He had been bullied so much as a child—
bullied for nerdiness or being too smart or being too strange—that he lacked the armature of prejudice most fathers walked around in. It really hardly seemed to matter to him.

They had met one summer in their teens, when both their families had taken houses on an island called Little Nahant, just off the coast of Boston. Nat loved Louise instantly, or so he claimed; she hardly noticed him—he was nameless to her, that gawking, skinny boy with the sunken chest whose mother sometimes came over for coffee. Sometimes she waved to him on the way out to the beach, where there were better fish to fry. At sixteen he was a virgin; at sixteen she had been having an affair for two years with a forty-year-old Portuguese sailor who had only three fingers on his left hand. Of course the summer, which allowed her almost no opportunity to see Xavier, was difficult; she wrote him love letters and assuaged her loneliness in the company of Tommy Burns, the lifeguard. She loved Tommy Burns almost as much as Xavier, loved his WASPish good looks, his blond hair, his strong, chiseled face. (“Mark my words,” Louise's mother had said, “the grandma was raped by a Cossack.”) Tommy Burns picked her up sometimes in the early Nahant evenings, and they walked down to the shore to eat fried clam bellies. An extraordinarily intense memory for Louise: how hungry Tommy was, and how blue his eyes were, and how the grease from the clam bellies spread its grayness over the paper cone in which they were piled. He always ate half of her portion as well as his own. Afterwards, on the beach, they crawled behind the rocks to a well-worn place, and Tommy stood before her and took off his clothes. The first exhibitionist she had ever known, she realized later, but she didn't know the word yet. All she knew was that he liked to strip for her, and that by the time he was standing naked, his penis stood red and hard, nearly touching his navel. He had to be completely naked—not even his high school ring could stay on his finger—but Louise he kept fully clothed, so that he could hover and grunt over her schoolgirl's skirt and cashmere sweater, splendid in his maleness. She had to admit, she took as much pleasure in the contrast as he did; it was as if he were not a creature of this earth at all, but a god descended upon her, ravishing her through the prim clothes her mother had forced her to dress in, the very clothes her mother imagined might protect her. Afterwards, when she got home, there would be stains on the skirt, stains she sometimes touched her tongue to before she went to sleep.

She had hoped Tommy Burns might ask her to marry him. She would have willingly given Xavier up for Tommy Burns.

Then everything went topsy-turvy. Her little sister, Eleanor, contracted polio.

For weeks and weeks that hot summer they were quarantined. They could not leave the house, could not go to the beach or to the store. Only the horror of what was happening to her sister quelled Louise's rage, numbed her into a kind of complacency. She helped her mother as best she could, put aside concerns for her own health. Only at night she thought about Tommy Burns. He never called or sent messages. He was not a patient boy; probably he had found some other girl to stare at him. Many years later, when she went to a therapist for the first and only time in her life, Louise found herself talking about Eleanor and their strained, unhappy relationship, and at the same time talking about Tommy Burns and his exhibitionism. It was one of those revelatory moments so prized in therapy. “Do you think,” Dr. Quinlan had said, “that you resent Eleanor now because she separated you and Tommy? And perhaps you feel guilty for that resentment—guilty because it wasn't Eleanor's fault? She was sick, and might have died, after all.”