Equal Love

by Peter Ho Davies

  They’d had to hide them quick when they heard Billy’s mother come in, and afterward, when Johnny asked him what he’d done with the photos, Billy told him he’d burned them.

  “Why?” Johnny had demanded, suddenly furious.

  “I was bored,” Billy said.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Don’t then. They burned great.”

  Johnny didn’t know what to say to that. He’d always thought of himself as the leader, even though Billy was nine months older. It made him feel strange to think of Billy burning the pictures alone, without telling anyone.

  When Billy went missing, a policewoman asked all the children if they could think of anything that might help find him. “Did anyone ever see Billy playing by the water?” she asked, crouching down to look in their eyes. All Johnny could think of was the magazine and the pictures. He thought if he opened his mouth he’d blurt it out, so he kept his lips pressed together and shook his head when it was his turn to answer. “Nothing at all?” the policewoman asked him, and he shook his head again. He gave Michael a look across the room, and when it was his turn he did the same.

  …

  Days went by and there was still no sign of Billy. Johnny’s parents forbid him and Michael to play near the water, but the police divers had moved downstream by now, following the river to the coast, so the boys didn’t mind. People began to whisper that Billy wasn’t coming back. Johnny thought of the toys and said to himself, What a waste.

  Billy’s father did reappear briefly in the second week. The children watching from the wall wondered if he was also going to be hidden away in the house as an incentive for Billy to come home, but he came out within an hour and got back in his car and drove off. The local paper said he was staying in a nearby hotel, waiting for word.

  Johnny remembered the week that Billy’s father had “vanished.” It had been his and Billy’s first week at school in long trousers. He remembered his mother telling him what had happened and waiting for Billy in the playground one morning, meaning to say something. Their friends David and Paul asked him what they should do and Johnny said, “We should say how sorry we are, that’s all,” but when they thought of saying it, and of the serious grown-up faces they would have to pull, they just looked at each other and fell about laughing.

  That was also the first week they had a proper games class at school. Before, they had just taken their sweaters off and put on trainers and gone out on the field. Now they had to go to the changing rooms and put on their nylon running shorts and their new white T-shirts. On their first day their teacher, old Mr. Robinson, told them to change while he set out equipment in the gym. But when he came back they still weren’t ready. “Get a move on, you lot,” he said. “You’ll waste half the period at this rate.” They all went so slowly because they were shy. A wave of nervous laughter passed from one cubicle to the next as they looked at one another’s pale hairless bodies. Johnny turned sideways while he undressed, but Billy just laughed. “I can see you,” he said. Johnny didn’t say anything, but he couldn’t help noticing the thin dark hairs curling around Billy’s privates.

  …

  Finally, one evening at the end of the second week, Mrs. Burns came to her door. The children playing in the street stopped what they were doing to watch her. She beckoned them. No one moved. She pointed at each of them in turn and crooked her finger, but no one went to her. Then she looked at Johnny and he heard someone call out, “He’s the oldest.” He didn’t want to, but he took a step forward in case anyone should think he was scared. He went right up to the door, ready to turn on his heels in a second, and stood there. Mrs. Burns looked him up and down, reached behind her, and put a parcel in his hands. When he turned round, the others were beginning to form a line.

  She gave out toys to all of them. They could take as many parcels as they wanted, but of course no one knew what was in them, and no one would open the boxes in front of Mrs. Burns. Girls and boys spent the whole night swapping back and forth. Johnny got a book that he already had and Michael got a cowboy hat too small for him. They kicked through the piles of wrapping paper as if they were leaves, looking for their Action Men. In the end they found three and not two.

  “One must be Billy’s,” Michael whispered. “I can’t tell which.” They looked around at all the children running up and down the street brandishing new toys and wondered how many other of Billy’s things were mixed in with the new presents. “Don’t touch anything,” Johnny told his brother, and they slowly backed out of the wrapping paper.

  …

  Johnny was at school when the police made the official announcement. A special assembly was called, and all the pupils lined up in their forms. Johnny could see Michael two ranks in front of him, and the other children, David and Paul and Martin, around him. On the far side of the hall would be Cathy, and right at the front his sister, Susan.

  Mr. Johnson, the headmaster, had put on the black gown he normally wore only for prize-givings. “Batman,” Johnny muttered under his breath, and then, “Pass it on,” but no one did. Mr. Johnson told them that William Burns’s body had been found washed out to sea. Billy had drowned.

  That evening there was a big picture of Mrs. Burns on the front page of the newspaper, with a smaller one of Billy beside it. Johnny thought she looked old, and he was glad she wasn’t his mother. Johnny’s father read from the newspaper that she was going back to Scotland, where she had family, and that the funeral would be in Glasgow.

  “Will they bury him or cremate him?” Johnny asked.

  “It doesn’t say.”

  “I think I’d prefer to be cremated,” Johnny said, and his mother said, “John!”

  There had been a reporter outside the gates at the end of school, and there were quotes in the paper from some of the children in Johnny’s class.

  “Didn’t they ask you?” his father said, and Johnny lied and said, “No.”

  The reporter had pushed his tape recorder toward Johnny and asked him what Billy was like, but the man couldn’t hear him over the other kids, thrusting up their hands and calling, “Me! Ask me!”

  “What was that, son?”

  “He was all right,” Johnny repeated. “I said he was all right.” But the reporter was already turning away.

  …

  The school organized a memorial service at the local church for the children and their parents, and that was where Mr. Johnson announced that there would be extra swimming lessons on Saturdays. Mr. Robinson and all the other teachers who could swim had agreed to come in and work for nothing to teach everyone how. The boys in Johnny’s year were scheduled to start their class that Saturday at 9 A.M. They would be first.

  On Friday night, Johnny lay in the bath. He studied himself for a moment, then leaned back and slid down until the warm water lapped under his chin. He closed his eyes, but only for a second, to see what it was like. The water was hot, and he felt the sweat beading on his forehead. It was odd, he thought, that you could sweat in the bath. He closed his eyes again and sank down until the water almost touched his lips. He felt a wave run over his stomach and stir the hair that lapped around his privates.

  Downstairs he heard Michael complaining loudly that he would miss Saturday morning cartoons “because of stupid swimming.” Someone tried to open the door, and his father said, “John? Why have you locked this door?”

  “I’m fine,” he said, sitting up so fast the tub squeaked. “Just a second.”

  When his mother came up to kiss him goodnight, Johnny told her, “I always wanted to learn, really,” and she said, “Good. There’s a big boy.”

  …

  Johnny’s class went into the changing rooms at 8:55, undressed, and put on their trunks. Johnny placed his by his feet so that when he pushed his trousers down, he needn’t look around for them.

  “Don’t worry, lads,” Mr. Robinson said. “It’s the easiest thing in the world.” At nine o’clock sharp, he led them out and lined them up along the edge of the s
hallow end, where the water was only four feet deep.

  “When I blow the whistle,” he said gently, “I want you all to hop in smartish.”

  They stood there and shivered while their parents and the next class sat and watched from the benches on one side. People’s voices sounded funny in the pool, echoey, so they talked very quietly. Johnny curled his toes over the edge of the tiles. He looked to one side and saw his parents, with Susan on his mother’s lap and Michael standing between his father’s legs. He looked down the row of boys and saw David and Paul and Martin all looking ahead.

  Then the whistle blew and he began to cry.

  Equal Love

  DIXON WAS MAKING COFFEE, listening to the spit and splutter of the percolator, waiting for his best friend’s wife to come downstairs. That sounded bad, he thought, but he tried to remind himself that nothing bad, nothing terrible, nothing irretrievable had happened yet. He looked out the kitchen window, down the long garden into the trees beyond. It was March, spring break, and his best friend and his best friend’s wife had come to visit for the first time in almost two years. They’d come east for a cultural anthropology conference in the city—a series of mediocre panels on rites of passage, according to the best friend—then driven up to Dixon’s place in rural Maine for a couple of days.

  Dixon had cotton mouth. They’d drunk two bottles of wine the night before, mostly him and his best friend’s wife. Dixon’s own wife had a class this morning—they both taught at the local state college, she English, he psychology—so she’d turned in early, and his best friend never drank much. His wife—the best friend’s—liked to tell a story of him throwing up on their first date, explaining how he lacked the enzymes to break down alcohol. “She makes me sound dickless,” the best friend complained mildly. “Someone has to drive,” he added—an old line—although no one had had to drive last night. It slightly annoyed Dixon, his friend’s reticence with drink, the way he would sip at a glass of red for hours, finally get bored, and dump it into his wife’s glass. The driving thing was a joke, but not just a joke. The best friend gave off this aura of readiness, as if he were raring to take someone to the hospital, the all-night pharmacy, the airport. As if he and not they were ready for disaster, the designated cool head. “Driving, remember?” the best friend said with a smile when Dixon offered him another, and the best friend’s wife pretended she held an imaginary steering wheel in her hands. “Driving,” she mimicked, crossing her hands, making the sound of screeching tires. “Driving where?” And the best friend said dramatically, “Who knows?” as if nothing could surprise him, nothing could catch him off guard. And in fact many years before, the best friend had been the only one sober enough to take Dixon’s daughter to the emergency room when she woke up late one night with an acute ear infection.

  Dixon poured wine for himself and an almost brimful glass for his best friend’s wife to kill the bottle. Dixon had known his best friend since college, but they’d barely been acquaintances then. It was only when they’d met again in graduate school, each part of an established couple, that they’d become close, become each other’s first adult friends (so they’d congratulated themselves), learned to measure their relationships and then their marriages against each other’s. Dixon wondered how long his best friend had irritated him, and if he’d be his best friend if, in fact, Dixon had any other friends at all.

  Dixon sometimes wondered about his friend, wondered who had done better. Perhaps it evened out, he thought. His own wife was quite successful, after all, and he felt a flush of slightly drunken pride in her. The best friend’s wife had never finished her Ph.D., never worked since their baby was born except occasionally as an adjunct teacher. But then it occurred to him that perhaps his friend had done better because of his wife’s situation. He’d been able to move on, take jobs at better universities, while Dixon and his wife had stayed put, found it too hard to move when they would both need new jobs. Now that Dixon thought about it, his best friend’s wife hadn’t finished her Ph.D. precisely because they’d moved for the best friend to take his first job. Come to think of it, Dixon realized, that was when they had married, the best friend and his wife. “I couldn’t very well ask her to give all that up and move halfway across the country with me unless I married her,” he recalled his best friend saying.

  Dixon and his own wife had stayed on until they both finished grad school. They’d had a couple of bad years right after they married when there’d been no money. Maybe they’d married as an insurance against those tough years. He recalled a pair of baggy mauve sweatpants his wife had owned. He used to make fun of her in them, call them her pink pants and her the Pink Pantster, sing the song from the cartoon: “Well, here she is, the Pink Pantster, the rinky-dink Pantster. Was there ever a Pantster so pink?” He thought he was being hilarious, and then one day she burst into tears and told him it was hateful, and he had found himself frozen halfway toward a gesture of comfort by the thought that he did hate those pants, hated that his wife had to wear ugly old pants and couldn’t afford to throw them out.

  After the wine, after his own wife had gone up and the kids, Dixon’s boy and his best friend’s daughter, had finished watching TV and said goodnight, Dixon brought out the Scotch—an inch of Oban and a new bottle of Longmorn the best friend had bought him. Dixon’s daughter came home around eleven after a movie, rolled her eyes at the empty bottles. Dixon had to resist the urge to cup his shot glass, hiding it in his big hands. “Kids today,” she said, and the best friend, her favorite, called out, “Mom!”

  Finally, around one, Dixon sneaked into the downstairs bathroom and found his last few desiccated buds of pot in an old film canister. He shook it beside his ear and then set it, with a grin at the other two, on the table between them. It had been so long—years—he didn’t even have rolling papers, but the wife—the remaining wife, his best friend’s wife, not his own—was into it. She disappeared upstairs to the guest room and came back, smug, with a tampon wrapper. It lay on the table, curling slightly until Dixon thought What the fuck and began to roll a joint. He paused for a second when he’d rolled it, gathered his spit, ran his tongue along the flap, and pasted the thing together, and really—“No, really,” he said—it didn’t look so bad. “Wish me luck,” he told them, surprised to find himself whispering. He went back into the downstairs bathroom to light up. It was too bright in there—in the mirror his eyes looked hooded and his face puffy; he had a zit on his temple—and too noisy with the din of the fan, but it was where he allowed himself to smoke. At forty-five, he was long past the irony of having once hidden his smoking from his parents and now hiding it from his children. I laugh at irony, he told his image in the mirror, narrowing his eyes, not at the irony but at the emptiness of irony, at the very irony of irony. And yet he knew too he was afraid of being caught by his kids, hadn’t done this in so long because of them, only felt safe now with his friends here. Behind the fan, he thought he heard voices, faint, indistinct, unintelligible—speaking to him or overheard, he couldn’t tell.

  The tampon wrapper worked surprisingly well, and he had taken a couple of long tokes when there was a knock at the door. It was his best friend and his best friend’s wife. “How is it?” they asked, and he grinned hugely, held it out. The best friend shook his head. “I’m beat. I’ll see you in the morning. Play nice.” He kissed his wife, and when they parted Dixon found that he was staring. The best friend gave him a look and lunged forward, planted a smacker on his forehead. “Je-sus!” Dixon cried and then, immediately, “Shh!” And when he realized he was the one making the noise, complained, “You’re letting the smoke out.”

  “Two words,” the best friend said, holding up a finger, putting it to his lips. “Toxic shock.”

  His wife plucked the joint from Dixon’s grasp, waved her husband away. “Drive safe,” she whispered.

  When his friend was gone, Dixon lay back against the wall to give her space to slip in and pull the door shut. “Shit,” she said, squinting in the gla
re from the smooth white walls. “I’d get these stuccoed if you’re planning on spending a whole lot of time in here.” They stood together, passing the joint back and forth. It was hard to talk over the white noise of the fan, so they stared at each other—a blinking contest—until he looked away and met her eyes in the bright, shiny mirror. She toyed with the little bowl of potpourri his wife had set on the counter. She sniffed her fingers, held them out to him. “Nothing,” he mouthed, shaking his head.

  She pinched the stub of the joint, took a long toke. “Whoo!” she gasped, passing it back to him. She sat down on the toilet lid, thought better of it after a moment, and stood again, smoothing her skirt.

  “It is a little sordid, don’t you think?” she asked him.

  He sucked at the end of the joint, offered her the last of it, but she shook her head. “Reminds me of masturbation,” he said, tossing the spent roach into the bowl and flushing. He regretted saying it immediately, but she laughed throatily. “Yike,” he whispered, shaking his head. He had a fleeting image of his son, the boy’s look of fear when Dixon had tried to talk to him about sex, a look he suddenly recognized as contempt. He opened the door to let her out, pulled it closed behind him with the fan still beating.