Equal Affections Read Free Page A

at recess; they played with it at lunch. Their shoes left muddy dents in the beach of snow. There was not really enough for a snowman, but some of them tried anyway. Then the sun came out again, and the snow started to melt. It was gone by evening.
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    Danny grew up; he went east. He followed his famous sister, April, all over the country and halted one February in New Haven. He never went back except for visits. And yet, even after he had been in and around New York almost eight years—he was twenty-seven by then, mired with his “life partner,” Walter Bayles, in a morass of shared properties too extensive even to contemplate escaping—he still had trouble, admitting the extent to which that original coast had become his home. Perhaps that was why he refused to trade in his California driver’s license, that same license he’d been issued when he was sixteen, with that same ugly picture of his sixteen-year-old self—wild-grinned, big-nosed—staring out at him. Every four years the renewal arrived, forwarded by his mother. Every four years he thought about exchanging it and didn’t exchange it. It was more than laziness; something in him refused to relinquish that single last link to his birthplace. Too many times a year he still had to zigzag across the continent to see his parents, back and forth, back and forth, until he could no longer tell which coast was his childhood and which his adulthood, which his past and which his future. After a while it was no longer back and forth; he was always traveling back, no matter which direction he was going in, carrying with him the heavy weights of attachment, throwing them down, binding himself to whatever land the plane’s wheels had just touched down on.
    There had been a time when the vastness of the country, the splitting of his life between the two coasts had seemed to him a metaphor for his destiny. Visiting his parents, he felt as if he were going back in time. He’d walk the wide avenues of the shopping mall and happen upon his twelve-year-old self, locking his bicycle to a streetlamp, crouched over, his fingers racing to get the combination. His real life—the apartment in New Haven, the nights he spent studying on the old Salvation Army sofa with Walter—seemed to shrink to nothing then, like the town in the musical April had starred in in high school,
Brigadoon
—a place which, once you slipped out of it, you might never have the chance to return to. But of course years had passed; he had made the journeymore times than he could count. It seemed he had surpassed that spirit in himself which craved nothing more than to get out of there, that spirit which had flung him to New Haven, and cold, rainy nights in February, waiting to meet Walter when the law library closed, cold nights when, walking along the stone alleyways of the old stone campus, he breathed with gusto the moldering smell of the borrowed trench coat he was wearing, here, in this region of the world where people wore coats. That part of his youth was over. These days the winter made his bones ache. He kicked and swore at the once-beloved snow. Some days he wanted more than anything to return back west (yes, he had said it; those very words); other days the smell of warm smoke rising from subway grates renewed his old passion, as if the pendulum had ceased swinging in perfect arcs and were instead flying round and round in circles, tying itself in knots.
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    Danny’s fantasy: He is twelve years old, riding his bicycle to the shopping mall to read soap opera magazines. A sunny Saturday afternoon, the shopping mall quiet, full of women in tennis dresses and plump teenage girls, their stomachs bulging out of stiff jeans, who’ve come here in gangs to smoke. Danny is wearing shorts, a T-shirt emblazoned with the name of the university where his father teaches, tube socks, tennis shoes. His legs are brown from the sun, the hairs on