Equal Affections Read Free

later—when the world, and particularly their region of it, really did change, and in some ways just as Nat predicted—she (and the rest of the family) were retroactively impressed, and proud of Nat, in spite of the fact that a stubborn attachment to a wrongheaded notion had long since waylaid him, leaving him sidetracked in his obscure laboratory, while others carried the torch and changed the world forever. By then the future seemed no longer an endlessly postponed abstraction, but a present reality, a preordained age of electronic grace whose time had finally come.
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    The town they lived in was filled with refugees. The horrors of the urban East—the horrors they had left behind, for good—were everyone’s favorite topic: broken air conditioners, stinking subways, rats in the kitchen. And there were other people, older, for whom the horrors stretched even farther east, across an ocean: old men who sat puffing cigars all day at the coffee bar, dressed in thick wool suits in spite of the heat; women with helmets of gray hair, in pale jeans and Birkenstocks, serving cookies at the Unitarian Church Disarmament Coalition meetings, their German accents almost undetectable, but there, in the back of the throat, behind the new language. Every adult Danny knew, growing up, craved the good karma, the endless sunshine, the clean air. And still they complained, as if under their tanned hides, inside their souls, factories were belching black smoke, and they had to let it out. “The third time I got mugged, I decided I’d had enough.” “A naked woman, right there in the elevator!” And always, at the end, the familiar refrain: “Never again. Never again am I going back east.”
    East. In Danny’s childhood the word had an incantatory quality, almost a voodoo about it. It was always “back east.” No one ever referred to California as “back west.” Which meant to Danny that in spite of all its terrors, that distant coast with its calmer seas was still the original, the inescapable mother culture, of which California would always be the mere rebellious child. Indeed, Louise seemed to view the East in much the same way she viewed her own dead mother, Anna—as a harrowing, exhausting, debilitating presence she had had to escape getting sucked up by.
    Danny wondered if it was his destiny, from an early age, to crave that origin, that older place his parents had fled from. His father was extremely fond of pendulum theories, Danny grew up listening to pendulum theories. Therefore, it made perfect sense: The child of refugees, the child of pioneers, longs to return to the ancestral homeland, longs to go back. Anyway, he knew he didn’t belong in California, among sun worshipers and Buddha worshipers. He glamorized the East, its crime and noise, grime and smokestacks. He tried to affect a New York accent. When he couldn’t sleep, he pretended his bed was a plane, winging him over fields and mountains to the glittering, towered cities, the ivy-clung walls, the old, cold stone buildings with their carvings of gargoyles and monster heads. Muggings, rats, subways. Leather chairs in mildewed reading rooms. And, of course, seasons. He read books in which it snowed at Christmas. He grew furious about the fact that it never snowed at Christmas; he complained to his mother. Then one day it did snow. One day in seventeen years. Danny was eleven; he was walking to the school bus when the snowflakes started to fall. At first he couldn’t believe it. He thought it was a dream. But the snow kept falling, and at the bus stop he and his friends formed it into balls, threw it into the air. They knew what to do with the snow. It was almost instinctive. All morning the snow came down outside the windows of Danny’s classroom until the schoolyard was thinly blanketed in that still, white powder, fine as sand on a beach, but so much brighter. Again they played with it