Equal Love

by Peter Ho Davies

  She must think he’s one of those telesales people, but then he says his name and there’s a pause and her voice changes, “What a coincidence,” she says; she just moved back to town six months ago. Afterward, waiting for her, he mouths the words to himself: What a coincidence. Small world. What’s that line? he asks himself. In a big enough universe, anything can happen. And in a small enough world, he thinks. Something about the odds of it, he decides, the odds of his being here, of her still being in town, of its really being her, makes it feel implacably innocent—not like a choice, more like an accident of fate.

  …

  She teaches at the high school now, Joyce. “Substitute,” she says, “but they say it’ll be permanent in the spring.” Her husband’s a consultant for an educational software firm. He visits schools and colleges all over the country to give presentations. “This week St. Louis, I think.” Wilson says he’s in insurance but doesn’t want her to think he’s a claims adjuster.

  “I was never very good with numbers,” she reminds him, but he tries to tell her that what he does isn’t traditional insurance: writing policies for cars, houses, even lives is just accounting, but with new ventures there aren’t any statistics. “Risk assessment isn’t even about numbers, really,” he says. “It doesn’t matter if the chance of a car wreck is a million times higher than the probability of a radiation leak. People want to take their own risks, not have others impose them. Plus it’s not the size of the risk that counts, it’s the size of the consequences. The chance of getting caught might be vanishing, but if the penalty is bad enough, it changes the equation.”

  She tells him, “It all sounds very Catholic,” and he lets it drop.

  They make light, competitive small talk over dinner. Who remembers what. SAT scores. Colleges. Catching up with each other. Her honeymoon was on St. Barts. His handicap is fifteen. Her husband’s is twelve. “One to me,” she laughs, licking her finger and drawing a line in the air. She has three kids—three!—she says; six, five, and two; boy, girl, boy. “Wow,” he responds.

  “You wouldn’t be so wowed if you had any yourself, I’m thinking?” she says, and he smiles and looks in his drink and slowly shakes his head.

  “Okay, okay,” he says. “You win. Game over.”

  She tells him she’ll drink to that, and after a moment she asks after his parents and he after hers, and it doesn’t seem odd to him that these are their common points of reference.

  He dated her while his parents’ marriage fell apart. Back then, in their Irish Catholic enclave (not quite a neighborhood, but a kind of satellite, a moon of Southie, the main Irish community), he was the first kid he knew whose parents were divorcing. It made him feel watched, the worst thing for a fifteen-year-old. He felt as if he were on a cliff, on the edge of something, feeling that pressure at the back of his knees to jump before he fell. So he broke a few windows, got in some fights, drank. Tried to cut a tragic figure by wearing black and listening to the Clash. And people—kids, their parents—shook their heads but let him get away with it, made allowances. Joyce was the only one who wouldn’t tolerate him. She was in all honors classes, he in math only. When he made fun of her last name—“There once was a girl from Nantucket”—she came right back: “Who told some chickenshit to shut it.” He called her cunt and she told him, “Using your parents as an excuse is chickenshit.” Everyone else’s gentle sympathy made him want to smash things; her frankness just made him want to talk. So he told her about his parents. And she was by turns curious, sad, outraged in ways that magnified his feelings. He told her he loved her, and it was such a relief to have someone to say it to. He even nursed a fantasy that his love for her could somehow inspire his parents. He touched her constantly in front of them, even though it made her squirm with embarrassment. Always an arm around her, holding hands, thigh to thigh. But his parents ignored them or, worse, seemed goaded to fight in front of her, until she insisted he spend more time at her place.

  Joyce’s parents, Mike and Moira, must have known about his home life, but they never talked about it, not a word, just welcomed him, treated him as if his being there every evening and all weekend were entirely normal. He became a fixture, ate with them, watched TV, took his turn washing up when Moira handed him a dishtowel, even went to church with them. Mike had been wary of Wilson at first, his reputation as a bad kid. Early on he’d taken him down to the basement, shown him his shotgun, his rifle, as if to say, You’re not so tough. But Wilson’s eyes had just lit up at the sight of the guns, their oily sheen. Besides, he knew Mike liked him. Joyce was the eldest of three girls, and Wilson figured her father enjoyed having a boy around (if only because he preferred to think of Wilson as a brother rather than a boyfriend to Joyce). It made him feel the value of being a son again, even as he felt guilty for cheating on his own parents.

  One weekend when Joyce was down with the flu, Wilson looked so lost that Mike even invited him hunting. “Really?” “Sure,” Mike said, although he had Moira call Wilson’s mother for permission. “Hunting in New Hampster?” Joyce croaked, when Wilson was allowed to see her. “I know you don’t want to turn into your dad. Just don’t go turning into mine.”

  It was Wilson’s first time, but he didn’t admit it until Mike had parked the station wagon and they’d waded out into the snowy woods, for fear the trip would be canceled. Mike stopped in his tracks. “Your dad never took you?” he said, and then fell silent, embarrassed to have mentioned the unmentionable and for seeming to criticize. Wilson told him it was okay, but Mike was subdued all morning. At lunch he tried clumsily to apologize: “I could kick myself.” Wilson, in trying to make him feel better, found himself talking about his parents. And once he began, unable to stop. Something about the woods, the cold, the guns beside them, the crouched anticipation of a deer, made him voluble. He even told Mike a dream he’d had of flicking through an old family photo album from back to front, seeing himself and his parents as they were now and then, as the pages turned, getting younger and younger. His father’s hairline, his mother’s hemline. Wilson himself playing with lost, broken toys, miraculously found and restored. Dropping to all fours, crawling, finally lifted up into their arms. “And in each photo they look happier and happier until in the very last, at the front of the book, they look as happy as I’ve ever seen them. And I’m gone.”

  He looked up and saw Mike staring at his hands, rotating the wedding ring on his finger. Wilson thought he was boring him, but then he saw him blinking, wiping his eyes. “The cold,” Mike said when he saw Wilson staring, and Wilson looked away. He heard Mike pop a beer and in a moment felt the can being tapped against his arm.

  “It’s a mess, all right,” Mike said, watching him drink. “But your folks, I’m sure they love you.” And because it sounded like sympathy, because it sounded like a line of his parents’, because he didn’t want Mike to feel bad for him, Wilson said, “Fuck ’em.” He meant it to be light, joky, a daring thing to say in front of an adult. But it didn’t come out right. The coldness of the beer made him sound choked. There was a long pause, and then, as if in return, Mike told him how he’d met Moira, both of them in high school. “Married at seventeen, parents at eighteen.” He shook his head. “We had no idea,” he said. And Wilson nodded, overcome by this confidence and something more. Because wasn’t that like him and Joyce? he thought. Wasn’t that them? In high school. In love. “You understand, don’t you?” her father was saying. And Wilson thought he did.

  The week after, drunk on stolen whiskey, in bed with Joyce for the first time—Mike, Moira, and the girls out at the mall—they held each other, almost but not quite slept together. It was wonderful, clinging together on the brink of sex, and yet they never came as close again. A week later she told him it was over. And though he called and called, her phone just rang until Mike picked it up and stiffly told him not to call again. “Sorry, son,” he said, while Wilson pleaded and cursed. “Sorry.” A month later, Wilson and his mother were gone, first to his grandparents and th
en west.

  So he and Joyce, over dinner and drinks, talk about their parents and not themselves.

  Wilson’s mother is remarried, he tells her, living in Lauderdale. His father is on Long Island with the latest in a string of girlfriends: the secretary he left Wilson’s mother for; a waitress; now a nurse. “There are three things in every man’s life he can be sure of,” Wilson tells her in his father’s voice. “Death, taxes, and a nurse.” He shakes his head. “The nurse was his date at our wedding,” he says. The funny thing, he tells her now, is that when he saw the wedding cake with its plastic bride and groom, he could think only of his parents, of their old wedding photo on the sideboard. He is silent a moment. After a second he asks about her folks, and she suggests the shots.

  Her parents, she tells him at the bar, the drinks lined up before them, are splitting up, and it takes him a moment to realize she’s serious. He feels himself groping for some fact, and she gives it to him. “Thirty-four years,” she says, “they’ve been together. He’s fifty-two and she’s fifty-one.” Wilson shakes his head as if to clear it. He feels something at the back of his throat, filling his chest. It’s sorrow for her. He can feel his eyes prickling, and he blinks hard. He knows it’s the drink, he knows it’s nostalgia, some mutated self-pity, but still. She consoled him all those years ago, and now he leans in close, asks her how she’s doing, and she gives a short laugh. She’s been better. It’s been bad. “I couldn’t make sense of it for a long time. I wanted to punish them. I even threatened to stop them visiting their grandkids.” She snaps a shot back and purses her lips. “I kept asking why, you know, why bother, and my mother got so angry. She’s met someone else. She told me the way I looked at her it was as if her life was over, as if she couldn’t change it.” She pauses while the bartender fills their glasses. “And then I realized I was just angry at them. They’re being so selfish. I kept thinking, what about me?”

  “Well, what about you?” he says, and he takes her hand, and she lets him, but she says, “No. It’s not like it was for you. You were a kid. I’m a grownup. I’m a mother, for crying out loud. It’s not a tragedy. It’s not the end of the world, really. How’re you supposed to feel? I always thought you got through your teens and your parents were still together and you were safe somehow.” She takes another shot and he matches her.

  “Cheers,” he says.

  “Actually, you know how I feel?” she asks, her voice thick. “You really want to know?”

  He tells her yes.

  “I feel ridiculous.” She is crying, and he puts his arm around her as she wipes the tears away and says again, “Ridiculous.” She lays her head on his shoulder, and he worries for a moment that someone might catch them. But then he realizes there’s no one left in his home town who knows him. No one except her. He smells her hair, and crazily, it’s the same as sixteen years ago. He thinks of that time in bed. Touching her. It was the only time they were naked together. He remembers thinking how wonderful that was, to be naked with her, and how they had so much time, how they could wait for sex. He doesn’t think either of them came that afternoon. They fell asleep, exhausted by desire, and woke in a panic to the sound of a door slamming downstairs. They dragged their clothes on like characters in a French farce, and he remembers almost laughing, not because it was funny but because he knew it would be, knew that they’d look back on it and it would be part of their history and they’d find it hysterical. Do you remember when? He was relieved that it was only her mother when they sauntered downstairs. He felt cocky, could hardly hide his grin, but she seemed preoccupied, too confused to notice. Mike had forgotten something at the store. If it had been him, Wilson thinks, he would have seen right through them.

  Joyce excuses herself to go to the bathroom, and while she’s away he thinks about reminding her of the story now, seeing if they can laugh about it, but he doesn’t. He remembers something else. For two years afterward, until he lost his virginity freshman year of college, he had thought of that moment, masturbated to it, remained faithful to her.

  When she comes back, she is weaving slightly.

  “Boy,” she says. “Get me out of here before someone sees me like this.”

  In the car outside the bar, he kisses her. It makes her laugh, and then she kisses him back. She tastes the same too, and the memory is sharp. “Shall we drive somewhere?” she asks. Her house is close—just a few blocks from her old home—but she doesn’t want to go back like this. Mike still lives at the old place—she moved back, in fact, to be close to him—and he’s sitting for her. Wilson’s a little unsteady himself, wants to park, and without thinking about it does something they never did but he always wished they had. He drives them to the outskirts of town, to a small deserted lookout over Fresh Pond, the local lovers’ lane. The dark water is frozen. They recline the seats. There’s something about the childishness of it, the nostalgia of it, the ridiculousness—he catches one of his belt loops on the hand brake, she pushes the cigarette lighter in with her toe—that makes it seem less serious, not like faithlessness, not like betrayal, not like sex, at least not until it’s over and the car windows are fogged and they pull their clothes on again. Or perhaps having started, neither of them has the heart to stop.

  Afterward, they sit side by side, staring at the snow melting on the windshield. Her hair clip rests on the dash where she must have tossed it, the long curving teeth interlocked, like the fingers of folded hands. He holds the steering wheel and tries not to think. There is a hollow feeling in his stomach. He recognizes this, it’s a tendency he has to make a bad thing worse, to tip accident into tragedy, jump before the fall. Every so often a breeze stirs the trees above them and a sudden shower of snow thumps hollowly onto the roof. Finally she says, “Well, that’s one way to sober up.” She needs to get back to her kids, and he starts the engine.

  On the way, he says, “Unfinished business,” and she says, “Yes,” and what they both know is that it isn’t unfinished anymore.

  At her place she sits beside him for a few moments before going in. Wilson tells her he hopes it all works out. She nods. “The worst of it . . .” she says after a second. “The worst of it is that I always wondered about my parents. You know, when we were kids. I wondered about them, worried about them splitting up. They fought. A lot. When I was very young. Less when my sisters came along, but still sometimes with real hatred. It’s one of the reasons I was drawn to you, I suppose. To see how bad it was. Only now,” she says, “I wonder if they stayed together for us, my sisters and me. If we kept them together.” She pulls her coat around her. “I guess it’s not ridiculous I feel. It’s guilty.”

  She looks across at him and he shakes his head.

  “Parents,” he says.

  “And now I am one.” She picks up her bag from between her feet, finds her keys. “If you don’t want to turn into your parents, don’t have kids, right?”

  Cars shush past them on the pale street, snow piled on their roofs, six, eight, ten inches deep, like white luggage.

  “Hey,” he says quickly. “You know, I’ve always meant to ask.” He actually blushes. “About us, what happened.”

  She plumps the bag on her lap, tells him she can hardly remember. “There was a fight. My mother and me. She thought you were dangerous, thought I’d get pregnant.”

  “What about your dad?”

  “Stayed out of it, but then he always let her do the dirty work.” She shrugs. “I told them I loved you”—and hearing her say it still gives him a strange thrill—“but even as I said it, I knew it wasn’t true. In love with something, maybe. In love with love, but not each other.”

  Wilson lets it go. He isn’t so sure, but he lets it go, and besides, they’ve had sex and it hasn’t changed anything after all these years. He can still hear them when they lay together, him telling her he loved her, her telling him back. “We’re so unoriginal,” he’d said, and they had laughed.

  She looks tired, exhausted.

  “I’ve made things wors
e,” he says, but she waves him off. “Just not better, huh?”

  “You know,” she says, looking at him sideways, “you don’t have to compare everything. Your wife, me, our parents. Not everything’s comparable.”

  “Right,” he says.

  “I’m happy,” she says. “In my marriage. With my children. Really.”

  He’s quiet.

  “Children don’t fuck up marriages,” she says. “Grownups do. You didn’t fuck up your parents’ marriage. Just don’t fuck up your own.”

  “That’s a little ironic,” he says.

  “And you’re a shit to say so.”

  “She’s pregnant,” he tells her back, and she stares at him for a long beat.

  “Motherfucker,” she whispers.

  There’s a moment of stillness—the engine ticks off slow seconds—and then they both burst out laughing, fall against each other, shaking.

  “You’ve never done this before,” she says when she catches her breath. “Have you?”

  He wipes his eyes, shrugs.

  “Well, take it from me, it’s not the end of the world. Sex isn’t the only thing holding you together. Some people fight more when they have kids. You know why? Because they can.”

  She leans over and kisses him chastely on the cheek. So that’s it, Wilson thinks. It occurs to him that he has been looking for some kind of out, but now he knows he’s going to have to carry this night, swollen as he feels with it, forever.