Equal Affections (11 page)

“Times change” was all Danny could think of saying.

“I'm thinking of going back to work, by the way. Do you know anyone who needs someone to sit in a dark office on a high stool, adding up numbers by candlelight? You know, like what's-his-name. The one who works for Scrooge.”

“Cratchit.”

“Cratchit, yes. That's the kind of job I'd like.”

“I can't think of anyone offhand.”

He could hear her rapping her fingers against the white formica of the kitchen counter.

“Maybe I'll apply at World Savings,” she said.

B
ut there was no high stool; there was no job. Instead, there was a new lump one morning (the body's old nocturnal betrayal) and a new regimen of chemotherapy. “The side effects aren't too bad,” Louise told Danny over the phone. “I just feel a little nauseous sometimes. Anyway, this chlorambucil's working like a charm. Dr. Sonnenberg says he's very impressed; he may even stop the treatments earlier than he'd planned.”

“That's great, Mom.”

“Your father is taking me out for sushi for our anniversary. You know how I love sushi.”

“I wish I could be there.”

“Well, why don't you fly out for the weekend? No, don't worry, I'm kidding. I understand about your busy life.”

“Come here and I'll buy you the best sushi you've ever had. There's a place on Third Avenue that has the most incredible sushi—”

“I know, I know, everything's always better on the East Coast, right, honey? New York sushi must be better than California sushi. Well, I'll have you know I'm perfectly delighted with our local Fuki-Sushi. It's just fine with me.” She laughed. “You're like a broken record, you know that? And what you sing is ‘New York's better, New York's better.'”

“Mom!” Danny said. “I do not!”

“Have you heard from your sister lately?”

“Yes, She's passing through here in a couple of weeks.”

“Well, that's good. At least you two will be together. I was hoping to have her home for our anniversary. But I understand, she's busy too, with her tours and what have you. The other day a woman came up to me in the supermarket and said, ‘Excuse me, but I've been given to understand you're April Gold's mother, and I just want to let you know how wonderful your daughter is and how very proud you should be and how great her songs are, especially “Marriage” and “Mother, Mother” and “Family Heirlooms,” you really should be proud of those songs, she's such a sensitive writer.'”

“What'd you say?” Danny asked.

“Oh, I didn't say anything. But I should have told her about my plan.”

“Your plan?”

“My song I'm going to write about the mother whose daughter is always writing songs about her, and what it feels like to listen to them. I think I'll call it ‘I Am the Mothers.' You like that title?”

“I think it's a great title.”

“Good. And I'll have you know I am also working on another idea: a hit squad composed entirely of terminally ill people. Isn't that great? They have nothing to lose, so they might as well take a few Latin American dictators along with them.”

“You have wonderful ideas.”

They agreed to talk again on the weekend.

But after she hung up, there was a strange, low buzz in the atmosphere, somehow, as if some machine, some essential, irreplaceable machine, were working just beyond Danny's sight. Like a broken-down boiler, patched in places, and all of them just waiting for it to give out. The space her voice had filled billowed out, a vast gasp reminding him, suddenly, of how high the stakes were. She would lose her life, and he would lose her, and at that selfish moment he simply could not determine which of them would register the greater loss.

___________

Walter often had to work late; it was not uncommon, on a workday evening, for him to remain at his office until one or two in
the morning. So when he felt he couldn't go home, felt he couldn't face Danny, he had an excuse. On those nights that he stayed in the city under false pretenses, he didn't go to bars and pick up hustlers, he didn't meet law clerks for illicit rendezvous in mid town hotel rooms. Instead, he sat in his dark office in one of the World Trade Center towers; smoked; stared out at the bluish night skyline of Wall Street, looking across the way at the other World Trade Center tower, the sporadic glowing squares which punctuated that dark mosaic, and beyond them more bright squares, miles of them, as if people were holding candles up to windows in memory of the lost and missing. He smoked low-nicotine cigarettes; he thought of Danny, alone in his own office a few blocks north, or in the living room in Gresham, the light from the TV casting shadows on his face. Their suburban life, the life he had urged Danny into, seemed absurd to him sometimes, even as he cherished its rituals. What right did they have to such a life? he asked himself. As if two men could be married, like anyone else! How the neighbors must snicker behind their backs! But really what kept him in the office—what kept him from going home—was the fear that he had swindled Danny, that he had betrayed him, and that soon—oh, the final act of betrayal, the final act of abandonment!—that soon he would have to leave him.

It was not that he didn't love him; no, he adored Danny! He loved him the way most people love only those lovers they invent in their dreams. For when they had met., Danny
was
Walter's dream. He was freedom itself. And Walter—well, Walter had tied himself for ten years to the stake of the law, he had learned discipline, he had taken steps to assure himself a moneyed safety for the rest of his life. Danny traveled around the country with his sister; he had gone to cities no business would ever bring Walter to, had stayed in communal houses instead of motel rooms. Walter loved the slightly flaky exoticism of that picaresque existence, and the curious, bewildered look that seemed to go with it, the unashamed voice, the eagerness for sex.

Danny held nothing back with Walter—no fantasy, no wish, no expression of pleasure. Other lovers Walter had had in college imposed strict rules—sex, yes, kissing, no—or they insisted on silence, there was a football player asleep across the thin wall; or they would call a passing stranger “That faggot!” almost as if the man were a different
species. (“Well,” this particular young man had said, when Walter called him on it, “you and me, we're different; we're not like them. We're normal guys who happen to like to have sex with other normal guys.”) That tempting armature of deception Walter had managed, after some struggle, to slash down with the machete of his will. When he met Danny, he determined to say anything he wanted, do anything he wanted; but he had to train himself; he had to practice, mouthing forbidden sex words in front of the mirror. Danny was alarmingly unreserved, which Walter attributed to his growing up in that state of grace, California. He cried out, kissed passionately, as if no one had ever taught him these things were shameful, these things were forbidden. As they walked along the streets together, gangs of tough New Haven boys called out, “Fucking queers.” Danny wouldn't hear. And it was not as if he blocked it out but rather, as if he were a little deaf, as if he lacked the capacity to pick up the coarser, the uglier frequencies. His freedom, his easy, generous lust (not unbridled, for there had never been any bridling; Walter's lust was unbridled)—these qualities had often moved Walter to tears in those early days. Hadn't he imagined, after all, when they first met at that lesbian bar, that Danny had been sent by some guardian angel, sent: to save him, to carry him away from the law library in his gypsy caravan? Instead the caravan left—that collapsing van—and Danny stayed; rather than take Walter away, he had asked Walter to take him in like a foundling, fold him into his own ordered plans. And now, standing alone in his office, staring out at the lonely skyline of Wall Street at night, Walter wondered once again how it had come to happen that way, with him leading and Danny following and all the time Walter secretly wishing he were somewhere else, someone else.

Since their meeting in New Haven they had swum around in a series of fishtank apartments, and now they owned a fishtank of a house in the town where Walter had grown up. In the mornings they shaved together at twin sinks in the bathroom; they changed side by side into their gray suits and rode the commuter railway into Manhattan. On the train they sat opposite each other and read the newspaper. (Each had his own copy; they had reached that point in their relationship where it had become worth the extra thirty cents a day not to have to fight over the metropolitan section.) Just two ordinary suburban husbands, on their
way to work, not particularly distinguishable from the hundreds of others who shared the train with them. Unless of course someone noticed the discreet good-bye kiss at the World Trade Center; but by then they were in the city, where such things were commonplace.

Each day they worked industriously, advancing, advancing, making more money. Hundreds of pressed white shirts later, hundreds of suits later, still swimming around. How wrong it all was! Walter sometimes thought. Danny should have been on some communal farm in California, he should have been playing Go at a health food restaurant, and when he wasn't there, he should have been traveling, seeing the world with April! (Where had her last tour taken her? India? Beijing? Romania?) Or perhaps it was Walter who should have been traveling around, who should have been seeing the world. His favorite movie was
The Razor's Edge;
he fancied himself Tyrone Power, seeking some large-capitaled truth in Paris, in the Himalayas, waving his arms, and speaking earnestly about the inarticulatable. Sometimes he suspected Danny liked this life they were leading more than he did, that he belonged here, in Walter's hometown, in his business suit, more than Walter did himself. But he never asked Danny if that might be true. Such fundamental matter was the marrow of their lives; it was too tender to bear conversation.

Walter hadn't told anyone yet, but he was preparing to quit his job. Quietly, quietly he was readying things for a departure on March Seventh—not a randomly chosen date, for on March Seventh, it would be exactly five years since the day Walter had joined the firm he was now associated with. And what would he do then? He hardly knew. But he would sell that fishtank of a house in Gresham; he would go somewhere, somewhere else. And he would find someone else—someone fresh and young, as Danny had once been, and, as Danny had not once been, willing to take Walter away, to Europe or the Himalayas or San Francisco. Another nice young man.

Was it his fault that Danny had asked Walter to keep him? Was it his fault that Danny seemed so much more comfortable in their comfortable house, so much more acclimated to this life they had chosen to lead, so much more contented? And yet, Walter reminded himself, if they hadn't met that night, Danny probably wouldn't have become a lawyer at all, he wouldn't have become anything close to the person he was now. Whereas Walter, without Danny—he had to admit—would
have been exactly who and what he was with Danny: the same firm, the same house, the same life. Only the lover would have been different, or (more likely) there would have been no lover at all.

He put the cigarette out. (He must stop smoking for his new life.) He sat down at his computer terminal, pressed some buttons, typed some codes. And now, in the dark office, messages came to him through the glowing diodes, greetings, welcomes:

Hot Leather: Rehi, Hunky Lawyer!
Teen Slave Master: Hey Hunky Lawyer!
don, 17: What's hanging, teen slave master?
Bulging Strap: Did you hear Gary Grant died?
Teen Slave Master: You, 17, once i get you in my cellar.
NY Jock: Hunky lawyer!!!!!!!!!! How are those briefs??????

This endless conversation, to which he might always gain access, was the closest Walter came these days to actually cheating on Danny. He'd join in the dialogue, the circle of talk, and sometimes a message would appear, “Please talk with NY JOCk. To do so, enter /TALK 125.” Once it had gotten so frantic they had switched to the phone. Their voices caressed each other; they pretended their own hands were each other's hands. Afterwards, half naked, spent, Walter slumped in his chair, looking out the window at the skyline, the neat squares of intermittent light. His shirt was unbuttoned; a distant neon sign pulsed in reflection on his chest. He didn't give out his own number or his last name. What drew him to this game was the very fact of its anonymity, the fact that no one could pin him down, that he could say whatever he felt like saying, asking questions he'd never dare ask with his voice, and hear them answered. He had a strangely intimate rapport with these men whose faces he had never seen, whose voices he had never heard; he thought of them fondly during the day, hoped they'd be there when he turned on the computer in much the same way he'd gone to the local gay bar in college hoping one orlanother boy he liked would be there, drinking in the corner. Now, however, he didn't want more than the screen's veiled intimacy.

He was on a private channel now. A flow of letters announced the intimate presence of one “Sweatpants.”

>Hi
>What's up tonight, sweatpants?
>The same. Where are you?
>NYC
>A Southern Boy, huh?
>So—you wearing sweatpants?
<(grin)
>And under that?
>Sounds hot.
>oh yeah ...
>6'4, blond, blue eyes, 165 lbs. swimmer's build 7”, cut
<6'1, dark hair, mustache, 160 lbs. here. 8½. tight hairy balls.
>22
<20 here.

And on it would go into the night, sometimes for hours, this describing and assessing, this ferreting out of fetishes, this mutual indulgence and regard. So much of it was lies.