Only Children

by Rafael Yglesias

  “Did you breast-feed me?” he asked.

  “Nobody did in those days. Are you hurt?” Gail teased Peter with the question, her thin, bloodless lips (pale even with red lipstick) pressed together, holding back a smile.

  “Diane says, or, rather, the books say, that some chemical is transferred which helps brain development—”

  Gail caught up to him quickly, as always. “So I’m at fault for your bad LSAT’s.”

  “I guess you were breast-fed,” Peter parried. “You’re too clever.”

  “I gave you good genes, Peter. It’s up to you to make something of them. And you have. I’m proud of you.” Gail turned her head, apparently to search for a waiter (she raised her unadorned hand in the air to attract attention), but Peter felt she meant to avoid intensifying her words by meeting his eyes. A waiter appeared. “I’d like some ice water please.” Gail loved cold water, was the first in the Hamptons to brave the spring ocean, kept a pitcher of fresh water, loaded with ice, to drink as a cocktail years before people gave up hard liquor, and liked, when sailing with her second husband, to stand with her face vulnerable to the spray, not wincing at its cool spit. The hand with which she had gotten the waiter’s attention went to her undyed hair, gray (although not stiff or yellowed) and brought back in a simple bun. Her hand smoothed hairs that were not out of place, arranging the arranged. “How’s Diane?”

  “Fine. She’s bounced back from the C section.”

  “Strong girl,” Gail said, with a nod to herself, confirming previous knowledge. “I admire her for planning to go back to work so soon. I should have.”

  Peter closed his eyes and sighed. Since women’s liberation had made such talk fashionable, Gail spoke this way, in little phrases of sacrifice, about her now-defunct ambition to be a painter. Even the recent trend toward praising women for staying home, for the benefits of a nonworking mother, hadn’t discouraged the subtle complaints. Peter’s irritation made him provocative: “You’re chief fund raiser for the most important museum in New York. If you’d gone back to work earlier, you couldn’t have accomplished anything more. You merely would have done it sooner.”

  Gail smiled to herself. “I meant my painting. You can’t not garden for ten years and expect to have fertile soil when you return.”

  “What about Grandma Moses?”

  “What are you saying, Peter?” Gail picked up her ice water and took a healthy gulp. There was nothing dainty about her physically; she might push her emotional food about with a reluctant appetite, but she swallowed the real meal with gusto.

  “Since Diane fired Mrs. Murphy, I haven’t gotten a solid eight hours. I must be cranky.”

  “You’re saying I’m a dilettante,” Gail commented.

  “If you’re a dilettante, what does that make me? No, I’m saying, if you had wanted to paint, you would have. You didn’t sacrifice it for your children.”

  “Well, thank you. I’m glad to find that out. Why did Diane fire Mrs. Murphy?” Gail moved on, but without rush, her tone not making a point of changing the subject—simply altering it.

  Peter laughed. “I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings.”

  “That’s nice of you. Did they have a fight? Was she a nuisance?”

  “Diane likes things done her way.”

  “Good for her. But she’s going to get some help?”

  “She has to. To go back to work.”

  “Trying to make partner means late hours,” Gail said. She squinted at the bright light coming from the restaurant’s windows. “I remember that much from being married to your father. Are you going to take the load?”

  “No. Now that I’ve convinced the foundation to commit more money to theater, I’II have to go more often. We’re funding six theaters in the city and maybe one particular production. That means a lot of cocktail parties and openings.”

  “When is my grandson going to see his parents then?” Gail asked without emotion, despite the accusation of neglect.

  “On the weekends. You’re not making sense, Mother. You regret giving up your career, but attack—”

  “There’s a difference between going to work from nine to five and never being there.”

  “I’ve never done anything right in my whole life. You know that. Why should this be any different?” Peter smiled pleasantly, held his head still, his eyes returning her irritated glance evenly. The bluff seemed to work. She opened her mouth to speak, but then shut it, looked off, and frowned. Peter’s heart beat loudly while waiting to see if she would fold, but taking in the chips seemed a lonely victory after all.

  “When you screw up with children,” Gail said, her head still turned away, the small diamond in her earlobe washed out by the strong light, “you mess up a person, not a project.” She looked at him. “And you’re faced with your failure for the rest of your life.”

  “Are you—”

  “No, I’m not,” again faster than he could be. “But I came close. I think it’s my duty to warn you. I’ve told you many times, there are no hidden meanings in what I say. If there’s something I don’t want to admit to, I say nothing. I don’t believe in lying. People always know, or can guess, or, worse, find out.”

  She doesn’t have to lie, he thought. She can contradict herself with absolute conviction, sometimes within a sentence. “How old was I when you and Dad split up?”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “I don’t know how old I was.”

  “You were five. Your fifth birthday was the last party we hosted together.”

  “I presume that was when you came close.”

  Gail blinked her eyes. “Came close to what? Are you done? Do you want more coffee?”

  “Yes. I mean, no, I’m finished.”

  She signaled to the waiter, again the hand up, assertive, but casual, and made a writing motion. She looked back at him, with cocktail cheerfulness. “Going back to the office?”

  “Yes. Was it the divorce?” Peter asked.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Was it the divorce that came close to screwing me up forever, is that what you meant?”

  “What gave you that idea?” The waiter handed her a leather case with the check inside. She opened it and frowned. “Outrageous.”

  “Let me put it on the foundation,” he offered.

  She laid a platinum American Express card down. “Let your stepfather pay.”

  “He has a platinum card!” Peter couldn’t suppress his horror at this foolish ostentation.

  “He likes to remind himself he’s rich. I think he worries it’s all a dream and needs to pinch himself.”

  “Never thought discounting electronics would bring Gimbel’s and Macy’s to their knees?”

  “Exactly. He chuckles every time he sees one of their sales in the Times.”

  “He does?” Peter was again unable to keep disdain out of his tone.

  “Kyle had to struggle for everything he has—you wouldn’t understand.”

  “I know, I know. I’m spoiled, privileged.”

  “Well, you are privileged, Peter. You can’t deny it.”

  “I was admitting it.” He felt the exhaustion of being with Gail; he had spent the lunch shoring himself up against the surf of her critical and whimsical tide, but erosion was inevitable. Time to move away from her ocean.

  He put Gail in a cab and walked back to his office in the humid, smelly midtown streets. Only when standing above the central air conditioning vent under his office window, feeling the cool billow his shirt, did he remember that he never got an answer.

  Was it the divorce, Mom? Did that almost crush me?

  Why wouldn’t she answer? Habit?

  She didn’t want to answer. She admitted that herself.

  The cold air snaked up his arms and chilled their hollows. He shivered. I am crushed, crumpled in her pocketbook like a forgotten phone message. Your son called.

  Like a recalcitrant city agency, she just never got back to him. So what? He inspected himself
for damage. He didn’t feel a thing. His mother was a vain woman who took out his father’s desertion on him. She neglected Peter to cater to her new husband, making sure she didn’t lose another. So what?

  Diane would never do that. She loved Byron. Couldn’t stand anyone, not even Mrs. Murphy, handling him. Diane was ferocious, a lioness. There was no danger. At least he’d done that one thing right: found a real mother to his son.

  “I’M GONNA drive you home from the hospital,” Eric’s father had insisted on the phone that morning. “I don’t want some schmuck cabdriver killing my grandson.” Eric had tried to dissuade him, knowing that Nina would want their first experience at home with Luke to be private, but lost the battle.

  Later he and Nina sat together, ashamed to look each other in the eyes, while they knew Dr. Ephron was doing the circumcision in the nursery next door. Nina’s mother, Joan, interrupted with a phone call. She wanted to fly in for the weekend, along with Nina’s youngest sister, and “help with the transition home,” as Joan put it.

  “I can’t talk right now. But I think you should wait until the following weekend. Give us a chance to settle in.” Nina listened for a second and insisted, “I can’t talk right now,” and hung up. Faintly they heard a baby wailing. Eric looked at her. Nina dismissed his silent question. “Could be anyone. We should walk around. Do something.”

  Eric swallowed. He felt so stupid. The picture of his son’s penis, that pinkie between curled frog’s legs, being cut—Eric shuddered at the image, at the ease with which castration could occur. They weren’t having a bris because of Nina, but Eric was glad for selfish reasons. He could never witness the event, much less celebrate it in a ritual.

  There was more wailing.

  “Okay, let’s walk around.”

  “No,” Nina said.

  “But you just said—”

  “They’re bringing him in afterwards to be fed. To help comfort him. I’d better stay. You go for a walk.”

  “No,” he answered, angry that she could be casual about his presence. “I want to make sure it’s still on, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Eric!” she said, laughing, but her eyes teared. “Don’t say things like that.”

  “Well, that’s what we’re worried about! What’s the point in not saying it?”

  “Nothing is going to happen,” she chided.

  “You’re so full of shit with your brave act.”

  “Come on,” she said, and offered her hand for comfort. “Shut up.”

  He took her slim hand in his big, thick palm, disarranging her fingers so they were like pencils stored in a bowl. They waited.

  “I can’t take this,” he whispered.

  “Shhhh,” she said.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Fabulous.” Her voice was listless.

  “Seriously. How are the stitches?”

  She winced at the mention of them. “I lied to them.”

  “What?”

  “I told them I had taken a crap. I haven’t.”

  “You have to take a crap?”

  “Before they let you go.”

  “What? They won’t let you go until you take a dump? What kind of country are we living in?”

  She tried to smile, but her worry weighed her mouth into a sorry grin. “They just want to make sure everything’s working okay. That the stitches and everything”—She shut her eyes, as if she could see the wound.

  Eric nodded. The wailing could still be heard. “Maybe you shouldn’t be lying to them.”

  “It’s nobody’s business whether I go to the bathroom!” Nina sat up with outrage, her back stiff with rebellion.

  “Yeah, I think that’s in the Constitution.” He winked at her.

  “That’s right,” Nina agreed. She tried another smile. Her skin was exhausted; even her freckles had paled into virtual nonexistence.

  There was a knock on the door. A nurse looked in. “Put on your smock,” she said to Eric. “Baby’s here.”

  Eric took the cloth gown from the hook on the door. It was wrinkled and stained with coffee from yesterday’s visit. “This is dirtier than my shirt.”

  “There are laundered smocks at the nursery,” the nurse said, opening the door for Eric to pass. Beside her in the hallway, asleep in his bin, was Luke. Nina peered at Luke, an alert deer. “He’s sleeping,” the nurse told Nina. “How are you feeling? Haven’t done any more fainting, I hope?”

  “Fainting?” Eric stopped on his way out, next to Luke. He looked down at his son. Luke’s exhausted head lay on its side. The eyelid looked puffy, worn-out.

  “Nothing,” Nina said. “First night I was here, I got a little dizzy. Did they do the circumcision?”

  “Didn’t the doctor come by?” the nurse asked with surprise.

  “No,” Eric asked, afraid. “Why?”

  “Supposed to,” the nurse said with disdain.

  “Is everything all right?” Nina asked.

  “He’s perfect,” the nurse said. “He’ll sleep for a while and then want to eat.”

  Eric left and went to the nursery, finding a clean gown in a basket at the entrance. On his tall body, it looked like a short dress. The nurse on duty laughed at the sight. “You could use two of them,” she said.

  He smiled pleasantly, but he wanted to punch her out. With their faint air of contempt and amused anticipation of nervousness and incompetence with children, the nurses made Eric feel he was a baby. When Eric got back to the room, the other nurse was lecturing Nina on how to change Luke’s diaper until his penis healed. Eric forced himself to listen. Some Vaseline had to be put on a gauze strip and placed on the wounded tip, “to prevent the raw skin from getting stuck to the diaper,” she said casually.

  The image pushed Eric down into a chair and he crossed his legs. He wanted to laugh at himself, but couldn’t. His eyes went to Luke. Circumcision is insane, he judged, despite the ghosts of thousands of his forebears. More Jewish insanity, he thought. An image of the local Washington Heights temple, a tiny ugly modern building squeezed between two tall apartment houses, answered Eric unconvincingly. He remembered the first time his father took him to services. He was squeezed, like the temple, between the tall men, pushed along will-lessly, overwhelmed by their heavy smells and frightened by their low, rumbling voices. When the rabbi spoke of his people wandering for forty years in the Sinai, Eric imagined shuffling slowly amidst a crowd of the Washington Heights devout. He thought of the wandering as a rush-hour subway ride on the IRT, rather than a lonely journey in an immense desert.

  “Poor baby,” Eric heard Nina say as she pulled the bin beside her. The nurse had left. Eric couldn’t speak. He watched Luke; his head rested heavily on the tiny mattress, revealing only a profile to study. The mouth worked from time to time for invisible succor. The bruises of birth were almost gone; Luke looked pretty, the small skull covered by a chaotic mass of black hair, curling up on the compressed fat nape of his neck. His back rose and fell with effort. His eye winced at a memory.

  “Sorry,” Eric heard himself say.

  Nina looked at Eric with remorse and affection. “He won’t remember,” she said, sounding unconvinced.

  “How do you know? Now I feel like I remember.”

  “No,” Nina protested, but uncertainly.

  “And with me they had some schmuck do it. ‘The mohel is very safe,’ Dad said, trying to get me to do it with Luke. ‘Much safer than some schwartzer intern.’ ”

  “Shhhh,” Nina said.

  “Dad wants to drive us home,” Eric said casually, praying for an easy passage of this bill.

  “Okay,” she said. “The doctor said they can’t feel it.”

  “Oh, yeah? Fuck the doctor. What’s she been doing, interviewing the newborns?”

  “Something about the nerves,” Nina said. She put a protective hand on the bin. “They aren’t really developed.”

  “Oh, bullshit. They say that to make us feel better.”

  “Eric, calm down.”

>   He tried. He shut his mouth and folded his arms, but his leg hopped up and down nervously. Luke shuddered and that quieted Eric—he froze in position. Luke’s head moved, and then, abruptly, his mouth opened, his face reddened, and he let out a pained squeal.

  They reached for him simultaneously, but Eric backed off at the last moment. Nina picked up Luke. He curled in the air, his legs drawn up, his head falling forward, a spineless creature shrieking in pain—an outraged, betrayed series of squawks that terrified Eric.

  “Oh, poor baby,” Nina said. But her tone was confident, casual. She cradled Luke in one arm while slipping her gown off with her free hand. She brushed her mane of brown hair off her shoulder and exposed her breast; it was expanded, puffed like a torpedo, her nipple thick and dark red—unrecognizable to Eric. Luke cried, helpless, and flopped in her arms, muscleless, his delicate features twisted by his agony.

  Hurry, hurry, Eric thought, disgusted by her slow movements, her calm. “Yes, baby, yes, baby,” she said, picking up Luke again (his body curled pathetically, impotent in her hands) and speaking to his distorted face. “Mommy’s going to feed you.”

  “Hurry up, for Christ’s sakes!” Eric shouted.

  Nina was startled. She stared at Eric for a long moment, deciding how to react. She frowned, finally, and then brought Luke, now a sobbing wreck, to her monstrous tit. Luke opened his tiny lips, the cavern of his mouth yawned, and somehow, despite being overmatched, he surrounded the giant nipple. Luke clamped on it, hard, sucking madly. His eyes closed with a desperate satisfaction, his puffy cheeks rippling from the suction within.

  “Yes, baby,” Nina whispered to Luke. Her hand, fragile and slim in Eric’s grip, encompassed the whole of his son’s skull, forceful and dominant. Luke sighed. The breath of relief shook Luke’s entire body, despair and loneliness trembling out of him like a fever passing. She had drained him of his despair and sorrow, applied balm to his wounded and betrayed soul, with the ease of someone flipping a light switch. All she had to do was bring Luke to her breast.

  What could Eric do? Hold that tiny head to his chest? To his hard, hairy breast? What a fucking joke.

  Nina looked big, an ocean liner docked on the hospital bed. Luke was quiescent at her breast, hardly longer than half the length of her arm, the dark hair of his head even blacker against her white skin. The gown slipped off her other shoulder. She was nude from the waist up, her beautiful long neck and wide shoulders as balanced, as delicate, and as graceful as a dancer’s. This was a sight that normally would have made Eric hard. Her breasts had always been big and firm: ripe for him. Now they seemed monstrous, the free nipple inflated so that the porous holes were visible, the swollen base of her breasts so free from their origin they might be glued on; they were the exaggerated boobs of a pornographic magazine, of an adolescent boy’s nightmarish wet dream.