Equal Affections (12 page)

T
he first time Walter and Danny saw a pornographic movie was in New Haven, a few weeks after their first meeting. It was called—after Jerry Lewis, Danny supposed—
Sinderfella
, and it was awful, forgettable, nothing like the sleek videotaped productions of their present lives. Even so they had walked, giddy and thrilled, through the ruined streets of New Haven, grateful to be able to indulge such a forbidden curiosity with each other rather than alone. The shoulders of their coats brushed against one another; every few steps Danny slipped on the ice, and Walter caught him before he fell. The theater was called the New Regency, and its elaborate marquee and foyer suggested it had seen better days. The old-fashioned ticket booth in front was boarded up and empty. Inside, an Indian woman with a black dot on her forehead collected the money at what must have been once the candy counter. Then they went through another door; they stumbled blindly for seats; they sat there in the dark and watched it. Danny didn't remember much about the film itself, except that it was done in a cheap and grainy eight millimeter that gave the bodies of the young men in it a strange, whitish cast, as if they were composed not of flesh but of light itself. The evil stepmother and the fairy godfather were both played by a shrill-voiced, bald, fat man in a muu-muu, and in the end, when the prince went off to find Sinderfella, he knew which one he was because, of all the young men in the town, only
Sinderfella could take the prince's “gargantuan manhood.” It was the sort of movie where people used phrases like “gargantuan manhood.” The heads of the few other patrons sporadically punctuated the vast glimmer of the theater, as did the shadowy figures of men moving about the perimeter. Danny and Walter held hands, grateful for love and each other in such a strange, cold place.

It was February—and yet that might be wrong; Danny tended to remember his years in New Haven as a perpetual drizzling February, though he knew there had to have been glorious spring mornings as well, and stifling August afternoons—“February in New Haven,” Walter used to say, “when the city's boring, your classes are boring, but most of all, you're boring.” They were still new to each other then; everything that was stale and depressing for each of them alone seemed to be, for the two of them together, a discovery, a journey, a revelation.

Now they lived through machines, they were addicted to machines. They owned two nineteen-inch color television sets; two wireless remote-control VCRs; a Japanese stereo system with separate graphic equalizer and compact disc player; many compact discs (luminous arcs that still amazed Danny to look at); two sleek computers, each with a modem and printer; many kinds of software; a telephone that answered itself and redirected calls to other numbers; three air conditioners; a Cuisinart; a microwave oven; a can opener hinged to the bottom of the cabinet; a fancy German toaster; a coffeemaker that knew how to turn itself on at a prearranged time; a water pick; a garage door opener. And in the basement, in the backs of cabinets, rarely in use, other things, mostly gifts from Walter's father or mother: a machine on which hot dogs might be impaled and electrocuted; a yogurt maker; several kinds of ice-cream makers; a hamburger cooker for griddling a single patty at a time; a candlemaker; a plastic bag sealer; an electric toothbrush; a pasta roller; a gun that punctured red tape with capital letters; a card shuffler; a fondue melter; three hot pots; an electric knife; a pressure cooker.

There were not enough plugs. The outlets were stuffed with extenders; the extenders were stuffed with extension cords; wires tangled like matted hair under desks, cabinets, beneath the sofa. Electricity hummed through the house even when everything was turned off, wires connected to other wires, other machines, and on and on
across the dark landscape of middle-of-the-night Gresham, New Jersey.

They had a piece of furniture—it was just invented, it didn't have a name yet—to house their collection of videotapes. Walter was an expert, a collector. He had mostly thirties comedies and pornography. One of each was usually the order of the night, like some peculiar rehashing of the old double-bill tradition. He had friends with whom he talked about the pornographic tapes the way other men talked about bottles of wine or racing cars. Gone were the days when pornography was something secret, something to be ashamed of; those funny black boxes with their spools of shiny celluloid were just part of the furniture now, as respectable as classical music. Walter even knew people who knew some of the greater stars of that strange pornographic universe. They were proud of what they did these days, his friend Dennis said; they even had their own little Academy Awards ceremony every year, with prizes given for acting, directing, costumes. (“Costumes?” Danny asked.) The stars wore jockstraps. Medals closely resembling those given at the Olympics were hung round their necks. And after that, presumably, more filming at poolside locales in Southern California. The voices of these films were background music to Walter and Danny's lives, a barely intelligible dialogue, dismembered by Valley Boy accents.

As for regret, it was—it is—chronically postorgasmic. The VCR clunked and rewound, and Walter, his pants around his ankles, invariably found himself overcome with sadness, as he stared at the expansive living room of his perfectly nice house, the living room that might have been lifted whole from the window at Conran's. As the film rewound, he rewound; he thought of Paris, he saw himself, suddenly, vagrant, in a dirty rooming house in Paris. Danny claimed it was generational, the children of the divorced or unhappy households of the seventies seeking to re-create in adulthood the stable family home they never had, but hoped for, all through their growing up. They do not run away; they do not go to ashrams or to visit the Great Wall. They stay home. They open Insured Market Rate Accounts.

At least as far as Walter was concerned, Danny had a point in pointing all this out. His own growing up, after all, had been less than secure. His father, Morry, had left home when Walter was twelve, and in the intervening years Walter had seen him only in restaurants—expensive, loud restaurants filled with the tumultuous machinery of
giant organs; restaurants on the edges of highways that served things like buffalo chicken wings and fried potato skins; restaurants in the city with waiters and sous-chefs and porcini mushrooms; suburban Mafia dens with gold flatware, buffets, platters of jumbo shrimp, heaping bowls of chocolate mousse. Oh, his father had a house, not that far away, which he shared with a woman named Leonie. But somehow he never had occasion to ask Walter to visit that house, and Walter had never had occasion to press the issue. As for Iris, his mother, she was quiet and frugal, a schoolteacher, recently retired. After the divorce she had of course had to move out of the big family ranch house, which was quickly sold at immense profit. Years of solitude and suffering had led her to a sort of peace with herself. She lived in a condominium complex for singles, in an apartment rich with maroon carpeting, and she had a boyfriend, a retired elementary school principal named Hal. She remained a diligent mother. Often, when Walter got home from work, he'd find packages of home-baked bread waiting on his kitchen counter or a pot of soup simmering on the stove. The sink shone; there was a package of colored sponges sitting on the table with a note that said, “Remember—green for dishes, yellow for counters.” Iris and Hal had subscriptions to the state opera and symphony, and sat in on a music history course at a local community college. In the summer they went on tours. In buses, with guides, they walked Rome, the Greek islands, and a good portion of the Great Wall of China; they saw Cairo and Istanbul; they “did” Moscow, where, under the watchful eye of the KGB, Iris delivered a letter from the children of their synagogue to the children of some refuseniks and openly, daringly took pictures of forbidden things. “The guard just looked at me,” she explained, “and I looked at him, real tough. You think he'd take on an American lady who's likely to scream bloody murder? No way.” And she laughed, passing around blurry snapshots of smiling couples, and street carts, and large gray buildings—what was forbidden about all of this even Iris couldn't say.

Walter saw his mother almost every day; he saw his father exactly twelve times a year—the very same visitation agreement provisioned by the original divorce. After their monthly luncheons, the dates of which were emblazoned in Iris's memory, she always called on some pretext and after a few moments, inevitably, asked how things had gone, how Morry was. “Fine,” Walter always said.

“And did he have his woman there?”

“No, Leonie stayed home.”

“It figures. I guess he was ashamed to be seen with her in public.”

That was his family.

Funny how much more stable his own life appeared, at least in the eyes of the world. His parents were the ones, after all, who had trusted in the god of stability.

And so, pulling up his pants, Walter thought, perhaps Danny was right. Perhaps he really had chosen this life. Although, he reflected, as the mouth of the VCR spit out the rewound tape like a black tongue, it was more comfortable to believe that it had been chosen for him, foisted upon him, that given the option, he would have been in Paris now, writing novels or painting pictures. Asking questions.

Danny was in the other room of course, busy with something. Talking to his mother, his sister, his father on the telephone.

L
ouise was watching
Women in Love
on cable and doing her hands. She had turned it on in the middle, so she didn't know what was going on. Men and women in antiquated dress, running around in the British countryside. There seemed to be sexual tension. Her mind was wandering—she was worrying about a dentist's appointment on Friday, a follow-up to root canal work, as well as a peculiar rash on her feet which itched—when suddenly something came on the screen that dazzled, and she was lost. A dark, bearded man was making love to a woman in an elaborate Victorian dress; the woman lay back on the grass, her skirts hiked up, and he hovered over her, naked, his hips bucking and thrusting. Louise caught back her breath and put her hand to her mouth, but of course for the moment she didn't have a hand. Nonetheless she did not move her arm—not until the man had finished, shuddering upon the girl's layered gowns, and the bland, soft taste of warm terry cloth and fabric softener began to cloy against her teeth.