Read Online Equal Affections by David Leavitt - Free Book Online

eat them right there in the store.
    In Danny’s elementary school civics class, he debated Roger Krauss on the grape-boycotting issue. Roger Krauss’s father was the president of the local chapter of the National Rifle Association. “Would you like to sleep in a dirty shack?” Danny argued, but because Roger Krauss was more popular, the decision, by vote, went to him. It enraged Danny, already, the way that politics worked.
    Afterwards, at lunch period, Roger Krauss and his friends wouldtorment Danny—dangling the little bunches of grapes over their faces, eating them as seductively as women in Maxfield Parrish posters.
    Shortly after all this happened Salvador Allende was assassinated in Chile.
    Danny remembered April crying hysterically at the kitchen table. “It was the fucking CIA!” she shouted.
    â€œCome on, April,” Nat said. “The CIA! Really! You kids, with your conspiracy theories. What does the CIA have to do with Chile?”
    â€œI wouldn’t be surprised,” Louise said. She was doing dishes, her hands deep in sudsy water. “Mark my words, Nat,” she said. “I would not be a bit surprised.”
    â€œHa!” Nat said. “Ha-ha!” He considered the possibility so absurd that when the weekend news marked Louise’s words, he had to retreat to his toolshop in the garage for the rest of the afternoon. Louise walked around the house looking shell-shocked. To her own surprise, she was surprised. “Surprise,” she later wrote, in a speech to be delivered to the Mothers Against the Draft, “was perhaps the single most important factor in awakening a backwards, middle-aged housewife like me to the problems in the world I lived in.”
    Sometimes, when Danny was in his late teens—all this years after April had dropped out of college, changed her name, and begun touring the country with her songs—Louise would have the Mothers Against the Draft over to the house for coffee and cake, the way she used to have the faculty wives. Nat, back early from his computers, slunk into the kitchen, alarmed by the collection of station wagons crammed into the driveway, and there he’d find Danny drinking Tab and suffering through an internal debate as to whether or not he too should register for the draft when the time came. Louise, oddly enough, felt that he should in order to protect his status as a conscientious objector; Nat, who took the whole thing far less seriously, disagreed.
    â€œAre those women here?” he’d ask Danny.
    â€œYup.”
    â€œHow long?”
    â€œAn hour or so.”
    Then Nat would open the refrigerator, take a spoonful of jam from a jar on one of the shelves, and sit down at the kitchen table to eat it. Eventually, when it became clear the meeting was going to last a longtime, he’d put the spoon in the sink and retreat, via the back porch, to his bedroom, where Danny would often find him a few hours later, half asleep, watching
Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom
with one open eye.
    ___________
    April made her debut as a singer in the fall of her junior year, at an on-campus coffeehouse called Harriet Tubman’s. At that time she was billing herself as lead female vocalist for Conway’s Garage, the group led by her boyfriend, joey Conway. Joey rode a motorcycle and had a thick, soft brown beard Danny longed to touch. He and April lived together in a big room in an off-campus house dedicated to nonviolent change, but sometimes, when Nat and Louise were away, they’d come over and sleep in their giant hotel-sized bed, and Danny would listen to them moaning through the thin wall that divided him from them. In the morning once, after April had rushed off to a meeting, he crept into his parents’ room and stared at April’s diaphragm and the big, half-squeezed-out tube of Ortho-Gynol jelly sitting on Louise’s night table. He had never seen a diaphragm before, and he fingered