Passage I

PROSE FICTION: This passage is adapted from the novel Equal Affection by David Leavitt (© 1989 by David Leavitt).

Nine mysterious and crucial years separated April’s birth from Danny’s. This meant that when Danny was nine, his sister was eighteen and had lived twice as long in the world as he had. The difference never seemed so vast, so insurmountable, as it did that magical year, for as they got older, nine years became less of a gulf and more of a bridge. Danny met and befriended people older than April all the time now, as peers, a fact the nine-year-old baby brother in him still couldn’t help but marvel at; when he was a child, she and her friends had seemed so immutably older than he was. Now people April’s age worked under him.

April and his parents had been a family long before he came along; they shared with each other elaborate and entrenched rituals, masses of common history, so much that in his early childhood he was always having to ask questions: what is the house in this picture? Our old house, where we lived in Boston, when April was born. Who are these women holding babies? That is your grandmother, who you never knew, holding your cousin Joanne. And that is your aunt Eleanor, holding your cousin Markie. And that is your mommy, holding your sister. He studied the photograph, memorizing the faces he would never see in real life, because the people they belonged to were dead or had aged beyond the point of recognition. It was like homework, like memorizing the parts of the body or the capitals. But the picture he put closest attention to were the ones his parents had taken when April was a baby. There were hundreds of them—ten or twenty taken on a single day, sometimes, marked and dated and captioned, as if Louise and Nat had been under some sort of picture-taking enchantment, brought on by the miracle of first birth. “11/22/52: Mommy giving April her bottle.” “11/23/52: Daddy puts April in her bath.” Danny didn’t know this energetic young couple, busily engaged in the rituals of baby care, and yet there were his father’s winged eyes and sharp nose on the face of that skinny boy; there was his mother’s slightly upturned lip, her blazing dark eyes. What surprised him most was a sequence of pictures taken on the beach. The color in these pictures had faded, and so the beach had a bleached, white aspect, the bright flowers on Louise’s bathing suit fading, as if at the end of their season.

As April grew, as her unspecified baby face book on the familiar features of his sister, the gaps between when the pictures taken grew as well, until instead of every day, it was every six months, and then every year, at her birthday party,. Then there were no dates. Then there were no more binders, just an old shoebox filled with snapshots, very few pictures existed of Danny’s own babyhood, and when he asked his mother why, she looked at him strangely and put her hand on her forehead. “Oh, Danny,” she said, laughing a little. “I’m sorry.” He hadn’t, until that moment, thought of it as anything to apologize for.

When Danny was growing up, he had a red rubber ball he liked to bounce. After school, in the afternoon, he’d walk for hours, bouncing this ball, spinning out in his head the plots of imaginary movies and television shows, and later, when April started singing, making up songs. She had told him that if he wrote a song good enough, she would sing it. But somehow it was always someone else’s tune he came up with during those predusk hours he spent outdoors, bouncing, bouncing. When he started college, that familiar, thunking beat was what Louise said she missed most; she couldn’t stand the silence, she told Danny, and joked about paying a neighborhood child to play handball against her garage. And later, when he was living in the east and went home for visits, he’d find the red ball waiting for him on his bed, and sometimes, when he had something to think through, he’d take it up and bounce it, thought it was soft where once it had been tight, and riddled with tiny, unsalable holes. Louise, doing the dishes, or ironing, felt a rare peacefulness come over her as she listened to that familiar thumping of her son and his ball outside.

Danny remembered those hours bouncing the ball as ones of supreme contentment and security. He had a vision, sometimes, of Wall Street at rush hour, men in business suits, women in pastel-colored tennis shoes, but not hurrying as usual toward the subway; instead, they are just shuffling along, bouncing, and in the world there is a sound like thunder as a thousand balls, hit the pavement at once, fly again, into the air, at once.