Equal Affections (7 page)

“Are those women here?” he'd ask Danny.

“Yup.”

“How long?”

“An hour or so.”

Then Nat would open the refrigerator, take a spoonful of jam from a jar on one of the shelves, and sit down at the kitchen table to eat it. Eventually, when it became clear the meeting was going to last a long
time, he'd put the spoon in the sink and retreat, via the back porch, to his bedroom, where Danny would often find him a few hours later, half asleep, watching
Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom
with one open eye.

___________

April made her debut as a singer in the fall of her junior year, at an on-campus coffeehouse called Harriet Tubman's. At that time she was billing herself as lead female vocalist for Conway's Garage, the group led by her boyfriend, joey Conway. Joey rode a motorcycle and had a thick, soft brown beard Danny longed to touch. He and April lived together in a big room in an off-campus house dedicated to nonviolent change, but sometimes, when Nat and Louise were away, they'd come over and sleep in their giant hotel-sized bed, and Danny would listen to them moaning through the thin wall that divided him from them. In the morning once, after April had rushed off to a meeting, he crept into his parents' room and stared at April's diaphragm and the big, half-squeezed-out tube of Ortho-Gynol jelly sitting on Louise's night table. He had never seen a diaphragm before, and he fingered the slippery rubber rim curiously, trying to figure out how thé thing worked. Then the bathroom door opened, and Joey walked out, naked from the shower. Danny couldn't keep from looking at his penis, which was hanging down out of what seemed to him an astounding quantity of pubic hair.

“So you found that stuff, hey, kid?” Joey said as he pulled on his underwear. He smiled. “How old are you?”

“Almost twelve,” Danny said.

“You know what it's for?” He came close, put his hand on Danny's thin back. “Yeah, you'll know,” he said. “You'll know all about that soon enough.”

He turned from Danny and pulled a red T-shirt over his head. “Your sister,” he said. “Your sister—has one fucking fantastic voice.”

“I like to hear her sing too,” Danny admitted.

“Yeah, well, she is good at a lot of things,” Joey said, picking up the
diaphragm. He smiled. “I'll bet you already can't wait to get laid,” he said, “can you?”

Danny turned around, and Joey laughed.

After that Danny didn't like Joey, though he longed to see him naked again. This was an essential contradiction he was bound to come up against again and again throughout his life.

___________

It was Joey, not April, who concocted the interest scale. He complained that Danny talked too much, and it was true: Danny was given to repeating the plots of movies he'd seen, or books he'd read for school, or National Geographic specials about termite colonies.

April sat him down one day to discuss it. “All adults,” she said, “before they say anything, think about the interest scale. They think to themselves, ‘This thing I'm about to say, where does it rank on the interest scale? Is it a one? Is it a ten?' The rule is, Don't say anything under eight.”

Danny took the interest scale seriously. He thought it was an essential fact of adulthood that one should have to measure oneself against some common rule. And yet he had questions: Were shy or silent people shy or silent because they had nothing worthwhile to say? Danny could think of plenty of adults (Joey Conway among them) who, in his opinion, neglected to consult the interest scale, as well as others who were quiet, but who he suspected would have had plenty to say if they'd wanted to.

He asked his sister about this. She said, “These questions rate about a three-point-four.” It was a mean period in her life in which it seemed Danny couldn't win, couldn't say anything without her or Joey laughing and shaking their fingers at him like old-fashioned schoolteachers. “Now, Danny, remember the interest scale!” But the interest scale worked. In a matter of weeks Danny moved from excessive talkativeness into a state of almost painful shyness, in which he barely said anything at all. April didn't seem to notice. She still liked to have him
around, sitting on the big beanbag chair in her room, like a kind of mascot. Her friends offered him pot and alcohol, both of which he steadfastly refused.

As for Joey, he remained in the picture, sleeping with April every night on the big mattress she had spread on the floor of her room, plucking his guitar while she practiced his songs. Sometimes he came by the house for dinner with Nat and Louise. While Louise cooked, he and Danny played long games of Spit, the cards slapping and flying in a frenzy of motion, all the while Danny imagining situations in which Joey once again took off his clothes.

___________

The first songs Joey and April performed were written by Joey. They were by and large bad—angry anthems decrying the wrongs being perpetrated by the university's administration. At the coffeehouse debut, Danny sat in the front row with April's housemates, Paula and Phyllis, nice girls with vaguely leftist sympathies, while on the stage Joey did something called “Talking Blues.” This meant that someone in the audience would shout out a topic, and Joey would sing about it. Usually the topics were political. “Governor Reagan!” someone shouted, and Joey strummed his guitar and sang:

“Gonna sing you a song ‘bout Gov'nor Ron,
He's got ice cream in his head,
He's got a wife named Nancy who dresses fancy,
And he wears his cowboy hat to bed!”

The game thrilled Danny. Song, it seemed, could be born from anything, any topic, any word. All one had to do was speak it, and Joey, like an old-fashioned magic lantern, would grant the wish. “Turkey!” Danny shouted. “Pizza! Bowling!” By this time Joey was getting annoyed. “Whipped cream!” Danny said, and a mischievous look came over Joey's face.

“I wonder what erotic dreams
This young boy has about whipped cream!”

As intended, this shut Danny up for the rest of the evening. He cowered between Phyllis and Paula and tried to avoid looking at Joey, who was now singing some dreadful love song he'd written called “When You Lay Me, Baby.” He hated Joey now, but he was determined to sit through his set, if only for April's sake.

And finally—remarkably, thrillingly late, it seemed (and yet his parents had given him permission, for the first time, to stay out as long as he wanted)—it was April's turn. She strode onto the stage with what would later be called by reviewers “her characteristic performing confidence.” Danny was entranced. Here was his sister, with whom he had grown up sharing a bathroom, and she was on a stage, a famous singer. She had long blond hair brushed over her shoulders and was wearing a peasant skirt and an Indian blouse with dozens of little mirrors sewn into it. “Thanks,” she said to the audience, taking the guitar in hand. “I'm real happy to be here tonight with Conway's Garage.”

After finishing four or five of Joey's awful songs—but were they awful, Danny asked himself sometimes now, or had he simply allowed April's accounting of these events to influence his own memory?—April said, “And now I'd like to sing a song in sympathy with the people of Cambodia and Vietnam, which Joey and I wrote together. It's called ‘No More Vietnams.' And if you please, I'd like everyone to join in on the chorus.”

She picked up her guitar; the lights faded to a crescent, surrounding her in darkness. Conway's Garage disappeared; this was April's moment; no accompaniment but her own would be necessary.

She sang. It was the sort: of song that protest singers dream of writing—so vivid in its compassion, so powerful in its fury, that hearing it, Danny wondered how people could not be moved to change their lives. The song called for change. “Change!” April sang.

“Will we never learn?
I am too young to watch young flesh being burned.
Well, as long as I've a voice to sing, I'll cry out to the world,
I want no more Vietnams!
(Come on, everybody!)
I want no more Vietnams!”

It seemed to Danny that night that hearing April sing, no human being could possibly keep from seeing the light of left-wing ideology.
Not even Roger Krauss. Not even Roger Krauss's father. Sitting there in the front row, he fantasized somehow sneaking April's song over the public-address system at the National Rifle Association. How, after hearing it, could those men not be compelled to lay down their guns and join in?

April finished with a triumphant bow. The audience was on its feet in seconds. And then, when the applause was at its peak, Danny noticed Joey standing in the background, on the little stage. He was smiling tightly, as if he were trying to keep from hiccuping. Danny could tell from his expression that April was simply being kind when she said Joey had cowritten that song with her, and this realization pleased him fiercely, because it meant that April was the special one, April the one who would go far. Not Joey. And yet Danny suspected April did not recognize what was special in herself. “I owe it all to Joey,” she was now saying to the campus newspaper reporter who was interviewing her. “Joey Conway, my partner. Come on, Joey, come down.”

Nervously he climbed down from the stage. Danny didn't know Joey very well, but he knew that he had visions of glory for himself and April, and in those visions it was always he who was asked for the interviews and April who waited patiently to climb down from the stage. Things did not look good for him right now, standing there, his face tight, as if he were confronting right then, for the first time, the terrible disparity that often falls between one person's desire and another's talent.

Still, she loved him. A few nights later, having climbed out of bed for a glass of milk, Danny heard her confiding to Louise across the kitchen table. “To be honest,” she said, “I'm addicted to his cock.”

“April!” Louise answered, and clamped her hand over her mouth. Tiny peals of laughter spilled through her fingers, like bubbles escaping a pot that was boiling over.

___________

After that, “No More Vietnams” became such a popular anthem that April and Joey were persuaded to copyright and, finally,
record it. Unfortunately, on that early, 45 rpm record—now a collector's item, since April is still listed as April Cooper—she is accompanied by Joey, whose voice simply cannot stand up to hers. He realized this soon enough, and agreed simply to play while April sang, and, shortly after that, to abandon Conway's Garage. And then of course it was only a matter of weeks before the shouts of “Ap-ril” from big audiences transformed “Joey Conway and April Cooper” into “April Cooper with Joey Conway.” Soon enough, in a fashionable gesture toward matriarchy (and because it sounded better, she later admitted), April Cooper took on Louise's maiden name; she became April Gold, SHOWER OF GOLD, reviewers headlined. Then underneath: NEW SINGER SHINES IN UNEVEN DUO. In his notebook of April's career Danny had an old, yellowed clipping from the University of Oregon paper—saved no doubt with vengeful zeal—in which April and Joey are called “the peace movement's Sonny and Cher; once again, a phenomenally talented woman singer has doomed herself to be paired with a partner who is both smugly unappealing and musically inept.”

Of course they broke up; one day April arrived home from the apartment she'd been sharing with Joey in a station wagon filled to the brim with clothes and books and announced that she was never going to sing again. It was an old station wagon, the same one they'd used to move her into her freshman dorm. She wouldn't leave the house for days after that; she sat for hours around the kitchen table, watching game shows and cracking peanuts out of their shells—a habit picked up from Nat. She gained weight. She could not sing without him, she declared one night at dinner, then headed off to the bathroom to vomit.

Once, during those six months or so that April was living at home, she took out a personal ad in the
Bay Guardian,
which read: “Zaftig leftist woman, 23, seeks inspired and enlightened man with movement experience for friendship.” Everyone in the family was surprised—it seemed a rather uncharacteristic gesture for April—but then again, no one dared object to something that might lead to her starting up her life again. For a while there were no respondents, and then one morning April made a show of inviting Danny to lunch at a huge, steam-filled Chinatown dim sum house. “I want to take you to lunch,” she said. “Anywhere you like.”

Danny liked the dim sum houses, where women in white uniforms rolled carts down the aisles between the tables, shouting out the names
of various steamed and fried dumplings, thick rice soups, sweet buns. “You know why there are no windows in dim sum restaurants?” he asked as he caught the warm smell of steam from an approaching cart. “Because you pay by the plate. If there were windows, people would throw the plates out the windows to save money.”

“Danny,” April said, “this is the tenth time you've told me that story. Remember the interest scale.” He looked away, bit into something ambrosial wrapped in rice noodle dough. A perfect afternoon, other than that remark, an afternoon of thanks and love and goodness, offered by his sister to him in repayment for . . . services rendered? And yet, as was usual with April, things were not as they seemed, which in no way meant her intentions were less than honorable, her love for him less “than genuine, only that there was a small other matter, something she needed help with, and she had hoped he wouldn't mind. And presently a pale-skinned man in a pressed white shirt and tortoiseshell glasses ambled down the aisle and asked if she was April and, when she said she was, shook her hand and sat down. The man looked at Danny next, somewhat confusedly, until April said, “Uh, Jim, this is my brother, Danny. Danny, this is Jim . . . I'm sorry, what did you say your last name was?”

“Tully. Jim Tully.”

“Yes, sorry.”