Family Dancing
Authors: David Leavitt
Praise for
FAMILY DANCING
“A genius for empathy . . . [Leavitt’s] stories show great talent, and many a writer would be grateful to have written them.” —
The New York Times Book Review
“He is in full command of a sharp, elegant style, and he already displays in these nine stories a knowledge of others’ lives, their pains and losses, that a writer twice his age might envy.”
—
USA Today
“A first collection of unusual finesse. Leavitt has justly been praised for his deft handling of sensitive themes.” —
Newsweek
“A fine first appearance, the very sort of book that makes one immediately want more.” —
Chicago Tribune
“A most impressive entrance into contemporary fiction.” —Associated Press
“Leavitt has succeeded in balancing familiarity and insight. The stories are so recognizable that you’ll want to read more to learn your own secrets.” —
Vogue
“Remarkably gifted.” —
The Washington Post
“Astonishing . . . David Leavitt is an extraordinary talent . . . This young writer shows promise of becoming one of what Virginia Woolf called the great truth-tellers. Every story in his collection is immediately gripping and completely believable.” —
The Plain Dealer
(Cleveland)
“Luminous, touching and splendid. There isn’t a one of them that isn’t riveting and perceptive.” —
The Sun
(Baltimore)
“Regardless of age, few writers so effortlessly achieve the sense of maturity and earned compassion evident in these stories . . . Mr. Leavitt’s stories have the power to move us with the blush o f truth” —
The New York Times
“Brilliantly written.” —
San Francisco Chronicle
“An insightful portrait of people in turmoil.” —
Los Angeles Times
“America has a brand-new, sharp-witted observer in its midst . . . a perceptive, probing chronicler of our time . . . a skilled and artful storyteller who in the course of his writing is able to capture the textures and traumas of middle-class life.” —
The Sacramento Bee
For my mother
and for Debbie Keates
.
.
. Though white is
the color of worship and of mourning, he
is not here to worship and he is too wise
to mourn—a life prisoner but reconciled.
With trunk tucked up compactly—the elephant’s
sign of defeat—he resisted, but is the child
of reason now. His straight trunk seems to say: when
what we hoped for came to nothing, we revived.
Marianne Moore, “Elephants”
Contents
Neil’s mother, Mrs. Campbell, sits on her lawn chair behind a card table outside the food co-op. Every few minutes, as the sun shifts, she moves the chair and table several inches back so as to remain in the shade. It is a hundred degrees outside, and bright white. Each time someone goes in or out of the co-op a gust of air-conditioning flies out of the automatic doors, raising dust from the cement.
Neil stands just inside, poised over a water fountain, and watches her. She has on a sun hat, and a sweatshirt over her tennis dress; her legs are bare, and shiny with cocoa butter. In front of her, propped against the table, a sign proclaims:
mothers, fight for your children
’
s rights—support a non-nuclear future
. Women dressed exactly like her pass by, notice the sign, listen to her brief spiel, finger pamphlets, sign petitions or don’t sign petitions, never give money. Her weary eyes are masked by dark glasses. In the age of Reagan, she has declared, keeping up the causes of peace and justice is a futile, tiresome, and unrewarding effort; it is therefore an effort fit only for mothers to keep up. The sun bounces off the window glass through which Neil watches her. His own reflection lines up with her profile.
Later that afternoon, Neil spreads himself out alongside the pool and imagines he is being watched by the shirtless Chicano gardener. But the gardener, concentrating on his pruning, is neither seductive nor seducible. On the lawn, his mother’s large Airedales—Abigail, Lucille, Fern—amble, sniff, urinate. Occasionally, they accost the gardener, who yells at them in Spanish.
After two years’ absence, Neil reasons, he should feel nostalgia, regret, gladness upon returning home. He closes his eyes and tries to muster the proper background music for the cinematic scene of return. His rhapsody, however, is interrupted by the noises of his mother’s trio—the scratchy cello, whining violin, stumbling piano—as she and Lillian Havalard and Charlotte Feder plunge through Mozart. The tune is cheery, in a Germanic sort of way, and utterly inappropriate to what Neil is trying to feel. Yet it
is
the music of his adolescence; they have played it for years, bent over the notes, their heads bobbing in silent time to the metronome.
It is getting darker. Every few minutes, he must move his towel so as to remain within the narrowing patch of sunlight. In four hours, Wayne, his lover of ten months and the only person he has ever imagined he could spend his life with, will be in this house, where no lover of his has ever set foot. The thought fills him with a sense of grand terror and curiosity. He stretches, tries to feel seductive, desirable. The gardener’s shears whack at the ferns; the music above him rushes to a loud, premature conclusion. The women laugh and applaud themselves as they give up for the day. He hears Charlotte Feder’s full nasal twang, the voice of a fat woman in a pink pants suit—odd, since she is a scrawny, arthritic old bird, rarely clad in anything other than tennis shorts and a blouse. Lillian is the fat woman in the pink pants suit; her voice is thin and warped by too much crying. Drink in hand, she calls out from the porch, “Hot enough!” and waves. He lifts himself up and nods to her.
The women sit on the porch and chatter; their voices blend with the clink of ice in glasses. They belong to a small circle of ladies all of whom, with the exception of Neil’s mother, are widows and divorcées. Lillian’s husband left her twenty-two years ago, and sends her a check every month to live on; Charlotte has been divorced twice as long as she was married, and has a daughter serving a long sentence for terrorist acts committed when she was nineteen. Only Neil’s mother has a husband, a distant sort of husband, away often on business. He is away on business now. All of them feel betrayed—by husbands, by children, by history.
Neil closes his eyes, tries to hear the words only as sounds. Soon, a new noise accosts him: his mother arguing with the gardener in Spanish. He leans on his elbows and watches them; the syllables are loud, heated, and compressed, and seem on the verge of explosion. But the argument ends happily; they shake hands. The gardener collects his check and walks out the gate without so much as looking at Neil.
He does not know the gardener’s name; as his mother has reminded him, he does not know most of what has gone on since he moved away. Her life has gone on, unaffected by his absence. He flinches at his own egoism, the egoism of sons.
“Neil! Did you call the airport to make sure the plane’s coming in on time?”
“Yes,” he shouts to her. “It is.”
“Good. Well, I’ll have dinner ready when you get back.”
“Mom—”
“What?” The word comes out in a weary wail that is more of an answer than a question.
“What’s wrong?” he says, forgetting his original question.
“Nothing’s wrong,” she declares in a tone that indicates that everything is wrong. “The dogs have to be fed, dinner has to be made, and I’ve got people here. Nothing’s wrong.”
“I hope things will be as comfortable as possible when Wayne gets here.”
“Is that a request or a threat?”
“Mom—”
Behind her sunglasses, her eyes are inscrutable. “I’m tired,” she says. “It’s been a long day. I . . . I’m anxious to meet Wayne. I’m sure he’ll be wonderful, and we’ll all have a wonderful, wonderful time. I’m sorry. I’m just tired.”
She heads up the stairs. He suddenly feels an urge to cover himself; his body embarrasses him, as it has in her presence since the day she saw him shirtless and said with delight, “Neil! You’re growing hair under your arms !”
Before he can get up, the dogs gather round him and begin to sniff and lick at him. He wriggles to get away from them, but Abigail, the largest and stupidest, straddles his stomach and nuzzles his mouth. He splutters and, laughing, throws her off. “Get away from me, you goddamn dogs,” he shouts, and swats at them. They are new dogs, not the dog of his childhood, not dogs he trusts.
He stands, and the dogs circle him, looking up at his face expectantly. He feels renewed terror at the thought that Wayne will be here so soon: Will they sleep in the same room? Will they make love? He has never had sex in his parents’ house. How can he be expected to be a lover here, in this place of his childhood, of his earliest shame, in this household of mothers and dogs?
“Dinnertime! Abbylucyferny, Abbylucyferny, dinnertime!” His mother’s litany disperses the dogs, and they run for the door.
“Do you realize,” he shouts to her, “that no matter how much those dogs love you they’d probably kill you for the leg of lamb in the freezer?”
Neil was twelve the first time he recognized in himself something like sexuality. He was lying outside, on the grass, when Rasputin—the dog, long dead, of his childhood—began licking his face. He felt a tingle he did not recognize, pulled off his shirt to give the dog access to more of him. Rasputin’s tongue tickled coolly. A wet nose started to sniff down his body, toward his bathing suit. What he felt frightened him, but he couldn’t bring himself to push the dog away. Then his mother called out, “Dinner,” and Rasputin was gone, more interested in food than in him.
It was the day after Rasputin was put to sleep, years later, that Neil finally stood in the kitchen, his back turned to his parents, and said, with unexpected ease, “I’m a homosexual.” The words seemed insufficient, reductive. For years, he had believed his sexuality to be detachable from the essential him, but now he realized that it was part of him. He had the sudden, despairing sensation that though the words had been easy to say, the fact of their having been aired was incurably damning. Only then, for the first time, did he admit that they were true, and he shook and wept in regret for what he would not be for his mother, for having failed her. His father hung back, silent; he was absent for that moment as he was mostly absent—a strong absence. Neil always thought of him sitting on the edge of the bed in his underwear, captivated by something on television. He said, “It’s O.K., Neil.” But his mother was resolute; her lower lip didn’t quaver. She had enormous reserves of strength to which she only gained access at moments like this one. She hugged him from behind, wrapped him in the childhood smells of perfume and brownies, and whispered, “It’s O.K., honey.” For once, her words seemed as inadequate as his. Neil felt himself shrunk to an embarrassed adolescent, hating her sympathy, not wanting her to touch him. It was the way he would feel from then on whenever he was in her presence—even now, at twenty-three, bringing home his lover to meet her.