Only Children

by Rafael Yglesias

  He wanted to put his cock there, in that amazing mouth, always full of words—words that cut through the world, that said exactly what is, words without compromise or modesty or shame. Peter always felt obliged to keep up with her, to be just as witty, just as honest, just as perceptive. One of the reasons he felt no desire to live with Rachel was the exhaustion he felt after several hours of their bantering. He might as well have played three sets of squash against an intimidating opponent. At least, this return of serve was a remarkable success. Peter could count on one hand the number of times he had made her laugh so hard. On the evenings he’d spent with some of her playwright friends, all of them homosexual, they had done it regularly, with ease. She’d break them up and they’d return the favor. But their wit was merely cruel or fantastic or perverse—never honest, abrasive, or insightful like hers. He and Rachel had slept together four times, each occasion followed by agonized guilt on both their parts (their nonconsummating dates had no unpleasant residue; somehow just seeing her, even necking with her, didn’t make him feel he had betrayed Diane), but she had never made a move for his penis. He wished she would. He wanted to dam up her mouth with his hard-on, to live inside her words, to be kissed and sucked by their manufacturer.

  Actually, their lovemaking was a disappointment, a tedious anticlimax to their feverish, hungry talks—sluggish digestion following a delicious meal. Rachel, for all her lively wit and energetic body, seemed frightened to death when he made love to her. She looked pale, her eyes were solemn and earnest, she made no sounds, her body was in constant retreat from exploratory kisses; even after penetration, her hands lit on his back reluctantly, as if the gesture might be too bold. He liked her thin body, flattened pillows that hinted at real breasts, a puff of jet black hair covering her hard pubis, slight thighs meeting muscled calves with big, quizzical kneecaps joining them. She wasn’t a beauty; but she was distinctive, and if she would only bring the wit, energy, and fearlessness of her conversation to bed, she would be a great lover. Partly, he was grateful she wasn’t. He wasn’t terrific in bed either, a fact he had long ago resigned himself to. And he found her personality, her talk, her being, so interesting, so addictive that if she were also sexually thrilling, he’d have no control, no brake to stop from utterly surrendering his will to her.

  That was being in love, he supposed. It had happened to him once and he hoped it would never happen again. Things were better this way, Diane and Rachel satisfying different longings. Rachel enlivened the mind, warmed the spirit; Diane kept order and regularly exercised his sex. At least, the last was true until Diane got pregnant. In the beginning he hadn’t minded the physical changes, the breasts gelling, Diane’s belly swelling into womanhood, her olive skin ripening, but then things got out of hand: the breasts laden, the belly explosive, the skin strained and exhausted. He found himself fearing the sight of Diane’s body. Toward the end, a glimpse of her nakedness could almost stop his heart with fright. And the fantastic growth within seemed to have taken its energy from her brain, drained her of the light in her eyes, of the desire to talk or even the capacity to think. Her personality became nothing but complaints, yearnings, and moody silences. When she moved to embrace him, he instinctively shied away from her size and awkwardness, as though a city bus had come too close to his position on the curb.

  It was then he first slept with Rachel and converted their friendship into an affair. He knew now that had been a mistake, but he didn’t regret it. In human relations, Peter believed, error and failure were unavoidable.

  I won’t sleep with her tonight, he decided.

  “THIS IS … ”—an unintelligible name followed—“the anesthesiologist.”

  The narrow face of an Asian woman loomed in Eric’s way. Her eyes had a lifelessness that seemed hostile. “When did the patient last eat?”

  Eric looked down at Nina, her skin bleached by the bright operating-room lights. Although her eyes were closed, she gripped his hand with unrelenting force and her legs shifted uneasily from side to side. When did she last eat? That soup.

  “Soup,” he said. His mouth worked slowly pronouncing the word.

  “When?”

  “Oh,” he said. He tried to look backwards through the night, rewind to their arrival at the hospital, but the tape got stuck and froze the images. He looked at the wall clock. Six-fifty. In the morning? No, night.

  “Was that more than twenty-four hours ago?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  All around the room there was activity. They had been wheeled from the labor room to the operating room so rapidly that Eric had no memory of the move, except that with each step they were joined by someone else, dressed, as he was, in a gown and mask.

  “Another one’s starting,” a nurse said. Eric followed Ephron’s glance to the two monitors, one counting the baby’s heartbeats per minute, the other measuring Nina’s contractions. The red digital numbers of his child’s heartbeat flashed: 80, 65, 77, 58. He knew, although no one had said anything, that they were too low. All through the long labor those numbers had been much higher, 150, 166, 188 during one powerful contraction. Nina and he, before she completely lost the ability to notice details, had commented on it and the nurse had reminded them that a fetal heartbeat was supposed to be between 150 and 180 beats per minute. Eric had known that, but only as a fact. To hear the wild, rushing noise of the amplified heart, pounding on the door, racing to be born, made the fact new. He had been frightened by it, first the sound, then later, when they turned the volume off, the numbers. The sheer speed, the mad rush, the wildness—they implied so much need, so much wanting, so much longing.

  Now he wanted that back. His baby was in trouble. He could see in all their eyes (the masks showed nothing else) the concentration of people in crisis.

  “Don’t put her under,” Ephron said. “We’ll try one more time.” The anesthesiologist stopped from putting a hypodermic into Nina’s IV. A nurse lifted the upper torso of Nina’s body. They put her feet into stirrups. “Come on, Nina! One more time! We’re gonna push baby out.”

  “Baby’s almost out!” the others said, like fans at a ball game.

  Eric looked at Nina, her head rolling from side to side, yearning for sleep. She moaned. He knew if she could talk, she’d beg them to let her alone. Does she know that our child may be dying? Her pain was so great she probably wouldn’t care—but later … Nina would never recover from that tragedy.

  “One big push! From your rectum!”

  “One big push,” others said.

  Someone grabbed Nina’s chin and shook her. Her eyes opened; the pupils were blank moons.

  “Push, Nina!”

  She tried. Dutifully, an exhausted animal, she strained her limp muscles. The baby monitor changed to a steady tone. The red numbers flashed—50, 44, 31.

  Stop it, he begged them.

  The words were unspoken.

  He grabbed their instruments and cut, rescuing his child.

  He stood still while the fingers of his left hand turned purple from Nina’s grip.

  “Fetal stress,” a nurse said with casual emphasis, ordering a slice of pizza at a crowded counter.

  “One big push, Nina!” Ephron pleaded now, panic washing over her authoritarian tone. “Baby wants to come out!”

  “Baby wants to come out!” others parroted.

  Nina’s eyes focused briefly, her dry, cracked lips came together, and she strained, her neck swollen, its interior anatomy visible, like a snake swallowing an animal whole.

  A bell rang from the monitor. The red numbers held steady now: 31, 31, 31, 31.

  Breathe my baby, Eric yelled into the corridor of his mind.

  “Put her out!” Ephron shouted. There was no pretense of professional calm. “We’ll use forceps!”

  The anesthesiologist’s thumb pushed down on the hypo.

  “Eric?” Nina whimpered.

  He said, I’m here, my darling, I’m with you forever.

  But his lips were stuck together wi
th terror.

  “Come on!” Ephron yelled to no one and to nothing in particular.

  Nina’s legs went first, sagging in the stirrups. Then her shoulders lost the tension of life; her head rolled back; the mouth yawned open. Still, her hand clutched Eric’s; her fingers were rigid and cold, like steel. Her upper arms died. Ephron shouted something and he heard the word “episiotomy.” Nina had dreaded that inevitable nicety, he knew, and no wonder. They were going to cut the tenderest, most private part of her body. They shoved a large plastic funnel into her mouth; it looked so long, Eric thought, it must go all the way down her throat.

  Her hand died. The ferocious taut muscles sighed away into a limp stillness.

  A hose was put into the funnel in her mouth. Her skin was white, absent of the color of life; her muscles were dead, helpless against gravity; only her chest rose and fell slowly to indicate her continued existence.

  Now he hung on to her hand because he needed to feel her presence, to know she lived. There was still warmth in the delicate fingers and narrow palm. Around him many people made noise, hustling about frantically, but a silence enveloped him. He felt the center of his head yawn queasily from fatigue. He was exhausted by the fight to get to this finish, a climax he had assumed would be triumphant, beautiful, ecstatic. Eric looked at her destroyed body and he knew he was looking at death.

  “Okay, I’m cutting,” he heard Ephron say, and he winced.

  The monitor’s numbers were unforgiving: 32, 40, 33, 31.

  “Baby’s down. We won’t do a section. I’ll use forceps.”

  A nurse approached with enormous metal hands; they stretched from her arms like the grotesque fingernails of a monster robot. He realized only a second before Ephron put their wide scoop-shaped ends into his wife that they were the forceps. Surely they would tear Nina to shreds and squash his infant’s head. Why were they killing them?

  He closed his eyes, finally unable to look, beaten even in his passivity as an observer.

  “Head’s out!” someone yelled.

  He looked. Growing out of Nina like a melon was a huge, slimy skull. Around its neck, thick as a hangman’s noose, and just as tight, was the umbilical cord.

  “Cord! Cord!” Ephron screamed as though it were a ghastly creature. “Clamp! Clamp!” Someone instantly put a metal clamp on the umbilical cord. “We’ll cut now!” Ephron was handed what looked like shears, and she angrily cut the umbilical cord right behind the baby’s neck, freeing it of the stranglehold.

  “We’ll clear the shoulders.”

  “Left,” said someone.

  “Right,” said Ephron, and the baby was out. Two huge testicles, discolored and explosive, dominated Eric’s vision. It is a boy, he thought, utterly unexcited by the fact.

  “Baby’s out!” someone said.

  Others, who had been standing behind Ephron like spectators at an accident, grabbed his son and rushed over to a table at the rear. Ephron and the rest turned to watch. He couldn’t see, couldn’t imagine what so many people could even do to a tiny thing like that. It must be dead, he thought. Of course, it’s dead, he argued.

  A fragile wail, a squeak of discomfort broke the suspense. He sighed, but Ephron and the others showed no relaxation; they continued to look over.

  The cries got louder. He saw two of the people move away, tossing cloths into pails. A glimpse of his son: skin bluish, face distorted with pain, a huge, distended belly overwhelming tiny limbs.

  There’s something wrong with him. He’s crippled. He’s brain-damaged. I have a broken son.

  “Placenta,” a nurse said. Ephron returned her attention to forgotten Nina, her body dead, her mouth violated by the medical equipment.

  “Baby’s good,” a man at the table said. “Six, ten.”

  “Your baby’s fine,” a nurse repeated to Eric.

  Eric nodded. Ephron looked at him. Her eyes peered into Eric’s. He tried to smile at Ephron, thinking she needed a sign of his gratitude, but then he realized his mask covered his mouth. Ephron continued to stare at him. She pulled her mask off. Her mouth opened. Then closed. Around him the others seemed embarrassed, lowering their eyes. “What are you doing here?” Ephron asked sharply.

  The question baffled Eric with its existential possibilities. He didn’t know what he was doing there. He was holding Nina’s hand, clutching the narrow palm and long fingers, stuck to its weakness in the hope it could give him strength.

  Ephron’s face changed from irritated surprise to her professional manner. “You’re not supposed to be here when the mother is under total anesthesia.” He didn’t answer. Ephron relaxed some more, coming close to her office manners. “Now that you can see mother and baby are all right, could you wait outside?”

  He nodded stupidly, agreeing. But Ephron talked nonsense. His wife was ruined on the table. His son might be breathing, squalling, but he had come out blue, starving for sustenance. How could they know he was all right?

  He let go of Nina’s hand to leave.

  Nina’s arm dropped like a weighted pendulum to the floor.

  “Strap her arm down, for God’s sakes!” Ephron shouted at a nurse. Nina’s fingers touched the floor: limp, killed. Eric walked out rapidly, through the metal doors into an empty hallway, the corridor narrowed by unused equipment pushed against the wall.

  He closed his hot, swollen eyes, feeling weak. His stomach was so empty the middle of his body seemed ready to collapse under the weight of his ribs. He turned around and watched the operating-room doors. There were windows placed high on each of them, but at six-six he could easily see. They had put Nina’s arm on her belly, not strapped as ordered. They were fussing with her vagina, sewing up the episiotomy. His son was hidden from view, however, by the tall body of what he assumed was the pediatrician on call. A nurse came out and walked past him as if he didn’t exist.

  And he felt invisible. Stripped of all his possessions, of all his faith in life and the future. He waited stupidly, blinking his sore eyes at the smudged metal of the doors, sure that bad news was going to issue forth.

  AFTER DIANE farted once, she couldn’t stop. It was comical, walking back and forth in the dreary private room, from the sink to the foot of the bed, releasing gas like a vulgar practical-joke cushion.

  Visitors were allowed now. They arrived, filling the room with flowers, little boxes with little clothes, blue balloons saying “Happy Birthday,” and always with big smiles, exclamations of praise and wonder. “He’s so cute!” “He’s gorgeous!” “He’s so tiny!” She got candies and fruit and kisses and encouragement and attention, endless attention to everything she had experienced or felt over the last few days.

  There were flowers and messages of congratulations from Wilson, Pickering but no visitors—“I’m buried by the Hobhouse case,” her peer and work friend Didi said on the phone. Diane’s boss, the brilliant Brian Stoppard, included a note with a basket of fruit—“A trumpet of welcome to your new associate.” That, along with Didi’s call, reminded Diane of the risk she had taken in her goal of partnership. Diane reasoned that if she had her child while still an associate and proved that it didn’t affect her work, then instead of motherhood’s being a fault, it would be seen as a virtue, an event the partners would still have to fear with a childless associate, but not with her. Diane reasserted to herself the cleverness of the plan to soothe her nerves.

  They were jangled again when she got her first view of the gap Byron’s existence would create with her female friends. Most were childless, although they all had plans or ambitions in that direction. She told them little or nothing of the painful agony following the operation and spoke of the necessity of the procedure itself (which had been a relief) as a disappointment. She didn’t know why she lied, except possibly out of altruism and feminist bravado. Most of them were squeamish about pain.

  To her friend Betty Winters, her one close friend with a child (although they had seen little of each other since Betty’s delivery three years ago), Diane immediately to
ld the truth. They had a long, happy, gossipy talk, of the kind they used to enjoy in college.

  “Breast feeding is so boring!” Diane said to her.

  “I know! You can’t do anything but watch television—”

  “I can’t even concentrate on that—”

  “I know—”

  They rushed to finish each other’s sentences, in a hurry to establish their unity of feeling. Betty reassured her about the future. “You’ll see, it’s hard, but you’ll love it,” she answered to every query. She recommended one child-care book: “It’s my bible, I’ve worn out two copies.” Betty left, repeating as she backed out the door, “Call me anytime, day or night, if you need advice or a shoulder to cry on.”

  Peter’s mother, Gail, and his stepfather, Kyle, were depressing visitors. They sat on chairs at the foot of the bed, overdressed in formal clothes, their faces stilled by polite smiles. They looked like wealthy tourists who had been mistakenly booked into a seedy hotel for the night but were determined to make the best of it. Diane thought she was used to Gail’s coldness—shocking in a mother—but that Gail maintained her reserve even about the birth of her first grandchild startled Diane anew. Peter’s father, Jonathan, and his stepmother hardly improved matters by phoning to say that they had a partner’s wedding to attend (“Second marriage, you know, he’s sensitive about our support”) and couldn’t come up from Philadelphia until next week. All this made Diane pity Peter, as she had years ago when they were first dating.

  Of course, Peter had been reluctant to have a child. Look at the parents he had: divorcing when he was five, his mother an iceberg, his father obsessed with his law firm, hardly able to squeeze Peter in between cases and business dinners. It was a miracle Peter had ever gotten married.

  On the day they left for home, Diane checked the room to see if she had packed everything. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched Peter hold Byron. By hospital rule Byron wore a cap on his head. Lily had given Peter a puffy insulated baby bag from L. L. Bean to carry Byron. It was more suitable for winter than May. Little of Byron was visible, but Peter stared at that bit: big eyes closed, flat little brow, bright lips pursed, open at the center, ready for a nipple. Peter stared at all that with a frown, puzzling over the arrangement of features, possibly searching for a missing item.