Equal Affections by David Leavitt Read Free Book Online Page B

gawking, skinny boy with the sunken chest whose mother sometimes came over for coffee. Sometimes she waved to him on the way out to the beach, where there were better fish to fry. At sixteen he was a virgin; at sixteen she had been having an affair for two years with a forty-year-old Portuguese sailor who had only three fingers on his left hand. Of course the summer, which allowed her almost no opportunity to see Xavier, was difficult; she wrote him love letters and assuaged her loneliness in the company of Tommy Burns, the lifeguard. She loved Tommy Burns almost as much as Xavier, loved his WASPish good looks, his blond hair, his strong, chiseled face. (“Mark my words,” Louise’s mother had said, “the grandma was raped by a Cossack.”) Tommy Burns picked her up sometimes in the early Nahant evenings, and they walked down to the shore to eat fried clam bellies. An extraordinarily intense memory for Louise: how hungry Tommy was, and how blue his eyes were, and how the grease from the clam bellies spread its grayness over the paper cone in which they were piled. He always ate half of her portion as well as his own. Afterwards, on the beach, they crawled behind the rocks to a well-worn place, and Tommy stood before her and took off his clothes. The first exhibitionist she had ever known, she realized later, but she didn’t know the word yet. All she knew was that he liked to strip for her, and that by the time he was standing naked, his penis stood red and hard, nearly touching his navel. He had to be completely naked—not even his high school ring could stay on his finger—but Louise he kept fully clothed, so that he could hover and grunt over her schoolgirl’s skirt and cashmere sweater, splendid in his maleness. She had to admit, she took as much pleasure in the contrast as he did; it was as if he were not a creature of this earth at all, but a god descended upon her, ravishing her through the prim clothes her mother had forced her to dress in, the very clothes her mother imagined might protect her. Afterwards, when she got home, there would be stains on the skirt, stains she sometimes touched her tongue to before she went to sleep.
    She had hoped Tommy Burns might ask her to marry him. She would have willingly given Xavier up for Tommy Burns.
    Then everything went topsy-turvy. Her little sister, Eleanor, contracted polio.
    For weeks and weeks that hot summer they were quarantined. They could not leave the house, could not go to the beach or to the store. Only the horror of what was happening to her sister quelled Louise’s rage, numbed her into a kind of complacency. She helped her mother as best she could, put aside concerns for her own health. Only at night she thought about Tommy Burns. He never called or sent messages. He was not a patient boy; probably he had found some other girl to stare at him. Many years later, when she went to a therapist for the first and only time in her life, Louise found herself talking about Eleanor and their strained, unhappy relationship, and at the same time talking about Tommy Burns and his exhibitionism. It was one of those revelatory moments so prized in therapy. “Do you think,” Dr. Quinlan had said, “that you resent Eleanor now because she separated you and Tommy? And perhaps you feel guilty for that resentment—guilty because it wasn’t Eleanor’s fault? She was sick, and might have died, after all.”
    Louise had looked away. “I think,” she said, “that I resent Eleanor because if she hadn’t gotten sick, I never would’ve married Nat.” And suddenly she laughed. For there, finally, there it was: the ugly bead of truth she’d come to search for.
    Eleanor got sick, and Tommy disappeared. Everyone disappeared. Everyone, that is, except for Nat, the skinny boy whose mother had visited, coming by on his bicycle to shout news and gossip to her through the bathroom window. She always acted