Equal Affections

Equal Affections Read Free Page B

Book: Equal Affections Read Free
Author: David Leavitt
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them bleached white. He is locking his bicycle to a lamppost, unscrambling the combination with dirty fingers, when he feels the proximity of another body, feels warm breath against his hair. He turns around, still crouched, and a man is standing over him, a tall man in a gray leather jacket and jeans, a man who is at once a stranger and oddly, intimately familiar to him—but where from? A student of his father’s? A cousin he doesn’t remember? “Excuse me,” the man says, “I’m sorry to bother you, I—” He puts his hands in his pockets, looks away. “Danny,” he says. “Danny.”
    Danny’s eyes suddenly fill with tears. His cheeks flush. He looks at the ground.
    â€œI’m you,” the stranger says. “I’m who you’re going to become. And I’ve come to tell you—to reassure you—you’re going to be fine, just fine.”
    The boy stands. Of course he sees it now, all of it—that face so familiar because it is his own, but also so strange, because he’s never seen his own face before, not really, except in a mirror, and now he understands how mirrors distort, and where his legs will stretch to, and the awkward unpuzzling of his own face. Tears are welling in his eyes, and in his grown self’s eyes as well, as the man bends down, leans over him, puts a hand on his shoulder. “All the things you’re worried about,” he says, “all the things that make you suffer—they’re nothing. They’re smoke. I know. And I’ve come so you’ll know, so you won’t have to suffer anymore. For you’re going to be fine. You’re going to leave California and head East, just like you hope. And you’ll have love, Danny. I know you can’t believe it now, I know everything you feel. You don’t imagine anyone will ever love you, you can’t conceive how anyone could love you. But someone will. You’ll see.”
    The hand on his shoulder—larger, thickly veined, bristled with short brown hairs—is his own hand. Young Danny, crouching still by his bicycle, runs his own fingers over those long fingers, feels the warmth of the skin. One after the other he traces them, until his hand comes to rest on a slender silver ring. Slowly he strokes the ring’s rounded outer edge; slowly he rotates it around the finger on which it’s lodged. Under the ring is a perfect white band where the skin has not been touched by the sun.

Chapter 3
    T hey were Walter’s hands, Danny understood later; man’s hands. Bronze-colored, the skin tough and slightly dry, so that you could see the lines traced as if in white ash. Thick veins tunneling just under the surface of the skin; the nails blunt; a shiny gold Rolex slung low on the wrist, beneath the brilliant white cuff, the black sleeve.
    At home Walter took off his shoes and dropped his pants almost as soon as he was in the door. The pants fell heavily and suddenly, the change and keys in his pockets made a crashing noise as they hit the ground. Then for an hour or so he wandered from room to room in black socks, boxer shorts, and suit jacket, seemingly incapable of undressing any further, biting into apples, tearing open bills and throwing the envelopes on the floor. Danny felt a strong impulse to shed the outfits of his working day as soon he was back; before he did anything else he was in a T-shirt and jeans and white socks, he was a boy again. He was usually home earlier than Walter; he didn’t work as hard or as late. So when Walter stumbled through the door, Danny said hello and kissed him, he asked how his day had gone. Their suburban nights stretched out shapelessly, a series of corridors with many turns. They rarely ate formal meals, rarely ate together at all. Walter spooned reheated gourmet frozen dinners from tinfoil containers he had to balance on potholders to keep from getting his fingers burned. Hewalked as he

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