Equal Affections by David Leavitt Read Free Book Online Page A

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 hehad 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