Equal Affections Read Online Free PDF Page B

woman,” she said in her little introductory patter. “So I’d like to dedicate this song to my brother, Danny, and his lover, Walter, two men who took the brave step of letting the world know.”
    Have we? Danny wondered. They kept no secrets. The secretaries at Walter’s office all knew who Danny was, and vice versa, but the wide-faced men who employed them seemed to look right through their presences in each other’s lives, as if they were mere complications to each other, better left ignored. So: what it was really like, their living together. Danny and Walter are sitting in the living room on a Sunday afternoon, their pants around their ankles, having just watched
Bigger in Texas
on the VCR.
    â€œWhich of us is the man?” Walter asks casually.
    Danny looks across the sofa at him. “Well,” he says, “I suppose you’re the man because you go to work every morning in the city.”
    â€œBut you go to the city every morning too!” Walter says. “And you put in those three-pronged outlets. With your screwdrivers and wrenches and drills.” He looks satisfied.
    â€œI also do the dishes, wash the sheets, and make the beds. You take care of the garden.”
    â€œYes. With a big hoe.”
    â€œYou like boys with hairless chests and tight buttocks,” Danny says, “and I like big hairy men with low swinging balls. Besides, I cook.”
    â€œYou fuck
me
,” Walter says.
    Danny is quiet for a moment, trying to think of a retort to that seemingly definitive fact. “I stayed home all day last Monday and talked to your mother about Debbie Klinger’s divorce,” he says finally.
    â€œWell, then, I guess you are the woman,” Walter says. He aims the remote control at the VCR, commanding
Bigger in Texas
to rewind.
    â€œI’d like to get that one with Brad Harden next time. What was it called?
Frat House Initiation
?”
    â€œI think it was
Frat House Frenzy
.”
    The VCR makes a thunking sound, indicating that it has finished rewinding. Walter opens the cabinet under the television and slips
Bigger in Texas
into its place in his library of pornographic videos. Danny scans the familiar titles:
Jock Itch, Boys Will Be Boys, Bigger and Bigger, Hot Oil, Grab a Hunk
. In the kitchen, something bought long ago in the gourmet deli section of King’s defrosts; the sprinklers start their automatic cycle. They pull their pants up and move to opposite sides of the house, each thinking about order, contentment, each wondering whether they are sinking.
    Later, when they go to bed, their bodies reach for each other instinctively in the dark; legs fold into legs, arms cross over chests in that trusted way which it seems no length of time can render ordinary. What they have given up, they have given up for the sake of settledness, and yet Danny is learning that settledness has its own complex weather. He’ll be standing in the kitchen—say, he’s washing dishes, his arms deep in the suds—when a prickling intimation of unease brushes up against him, lightly, like a hand on his shoulder. He lifts his gloved arms from the sink, looks around, sees only the microwave oven, the food processor, the coffeemaker, all the ordinary things shimmering in their ordinary ways. Outside the window is night. Across the house is Walter. So what is it, then, this sudden conviction that everything he imagined would stave off disaster is itself on the verge of blowing up?
    Across the house is Walter. Danny envisions the hairs curling from the pale dent at the small of his back. A wave of repulsion passes swiftly through him, an astonishment that for so many years he has allowedhimself such intimacy with another body. Is there any scar he hasn’t fingered, any scab he hasn’t scratched? He knows the dirt between Walter’s toes, the food between his teeth.
    He moves away from the sink, still half full of dishes, and sits down at the