Free Equal Affections by David Leavitt

with her, and this realization pleased him fiercely, because it meant that April was the special one, April the one who would go far. Not Joey. And yet Danny suspected April did not recognize what was special in herself. “I owe it all to Joey,” she was now saying to the campus newspaper reporter who was interviewing her. “Joey Conway, my partner. Come on, Joey, come down.”
    Nervously he climbed down from the stage. Danny didn’t know Joey very well, but he knew that he had visions of glory for himself and April, and in those visions it was always he who was asked for the interviews and April who waited patiently to climb down from the stage. Things did not look good for him right now, standing there, his face tight, as if he were confronting right then, for the first time, the terrible disparity that often falls between one person’s desire and another’s talent.
    Still, she loved him. A few nights later, having climbed out of bed for a glass of milk, Danny heard her confiding to Louise across the kitchen table. “To be honest,” she said, “I’m addicted to his cock.”
    â€œApril!” Louise answered, and clamped her hand over her mouth. Tiny peals of laughter spilled through her fingers, like bubbles escaping a pot that was boiling over.
    ___________
    After that, “No More Vietnams” became such a popular anthem that April and Joey were persuaded to copyright and, finally,record it. Unfortunately, on that early, 45 rpm record—now a collector’s item, since April is still listed as April Cooper—she is accompanied by Joey, whose voice simply cannot stand up to hers. He realized this soon enough, and agreed simply to play while April sang, and, shortly after that, to abandon Conway’s Garage. And then of course it was only a matter of weeks before the shouts of “Ap-ril” from big audiences transformed “Joey Conway and April Cooper” into “April Cooper with Joey Conway.” Soon enough, in a fashionable gesture toward matriarchy (and because it sounded better, she later admitted), April Cooper took on Louise’s maiden name; she became April Gold, SHOWER OF GOLD, reviewers headlined. Then underneath: NEW SINGER SHINES IN UNEVEN DUO. In his notebook of April’s career Danny had an old, yellowed clipping from the University of Oregon paper—saved no doubt with vengeful zeal—in which April and Joey are called “the peace movement’s Sonny and Cher; once again, a phenomenally talented woman singer has doomed herself to be paired with a partner who is both smugly unappealing and musically inept.”
    Of course they broke up; one day April arrived home from the apartment she’d been sharing with Joey in a station wagon filled to the brim with clothes and books and announced that she was never going to sing again. It was an old station wagon, the same one they’d used to move her into her freshman dorm. She wouldn’t leave the house for days after that; she sat for hours around the kitchen table, watching game shows and cracking peanuts out of their shells—a habit picked up from Nat. She gained weight. She could not sing without him, she declared one night at dinner, then headed off to the bathroom to vomit.
    Once, during those six months or so that April was living at home, she took out a personal ad in the
Bay Guardian,
which read: “Zaftig leftist woman, 23, seeks inspired and enlightened man with movement experience for friendship.” Everyone in the family was surprised—it seemed a rather uncharacteristic gesture for April—but then again, no one dared object to something that might lead to her starting up her life again. For a while there were no respondents, and then one morning April made a show of inviting Danny to lunch at a huge, steam-filled Chinatown dim sum house. “I want to take you to lunch,” she said. “Anywhere you like.”
    Danny liked