Equal Affections by David Leavitt Page B

and it isn’t sabotage.
    â€œA PIECE OF THE ACTION,” Nat says, guessing just before the contestant on the television. Danny looks at him. His lips are tight, his brow wrinkled.
    ___________
    Whatever fight happened happened in silence. Nat and Louise muffled themselves when Danny and April were home, locked themselves in the bedroom and had it out in fierce whispers—not for the children’s sake but for their own. Both of them carried around a tenacious belief in keeping things private, an assumption that the witnessing of their battles would bring down on them the greatest shame possible. The door to the bedroom stayed closed for hours, a silent, aching abscess at the heart of the house, and of course Danny knew better than to knock.
    Around ten o’clock April took her car and left; “to visit a friend,” she said. Danny was sitting at the kitchen table, watching a rerun of
Saturday Night Live:
Gilda Radner as the pathetic, palsied child visiting a child psychiatrist. “Which one of these toys is Mommy?” the psychiatrist asks, and the child chooses the Barbie doll. “And which is Daddy?” the psychiatrist asks, and the child chooses the Ken doll. “And which is you?” the psychiatrist asks, and the child picks up a package of scotch tape.
    â€œThat Gilda Radner’s funny,” Lpuise said. Danny hadn’t heard her come in. Her voice was a little hoarse, and she was wearing her pink bathrobe and slippers.
    â€œYes,” he said. “She is funny.”
    She went over to her desk. There was a tub of clear, hot wax there into which she twice a day dunked her arthritic hands. From where Danny sat he watched the familiar submersion, the swift pulling out. She held her hands dripping over the tub until the wax hardened, then wrapped them in towels and sat down at the kitchen table. Bolts of soft cloth emerged from her pink bathrobe sleeves, and Danny remembered how the milky, opaque wax took the shape of her hands exactly—every vein, every nail.
    â€œIs Daddy asleep?” Danny asked.
    â€œYes.”
    â€œAre you okay?”
    She shrugged her shoulders. “I’m not in the mood to talk, Danny.” He thought of asking more, but on the TV Gilda Radner was back again, this time as Rosanne Rosanna-Danna, describing tiny things, tiny news of the body, which both of them found difficult to ignore.
    After that there was a commercial. She unwrapped her hands, peeled the white wax from her skin. It formed a soft, pale ball in her palm. She dropped it into the tub to melt again. Her hands glistened and gave off the faint, sweet aroma of paraffin.
    â€œI’m not going to ask you any questions,” Danny said. “I don’t want to make you feel bad. But I think I should tell you—it really doesn’t bother me. I mean, when April made her little announcement, my first thought was relief. I thought, Is that all?”
    Louise laughed and lifted her eyes to the ceiling. “Thanks, honey,” she said. “I just feel as if I’ve been paying long enough. Really, how long can you be expected to keep paying?”
    â€œPaying who?”
    She was looking toward the window, shiny as patent leather tonight as it reflected the bright kitchen lights.
    â€œGood question,” she said. “Well, I should go to bed. Good night.”
    ___________
    So there was a wildness. A wildness in her youth.
    Then, as far as Danny could tell, she had done a kind of penance forthat wildness, she had willed a purgatory to grow up around her, and there, in this landscape of her own invention, she had endured for years the slow paying off of a slow-burning debt of guilt. No one had demanded this penance of her; it was entirely her own choice.
    Of course there had always been hints. “Every married person cheats,” she said to him once. “I just want you to know so you won’t be hurt. There’s no such thing as marital