Only Children

by Rafael Yglesias

  “This is really Nina’s responsibility,” Joe said. “I know it’s none of my business, but despite women’s lib and all that, it’s unfair of her to expect you to earn money for the family and also take on caring for your son. What you do here”—he tapped the desk with his fingers—“that is caring for her and your baby.”

  “It’s just six weeks,” Eric said in a tired, exasperated voice that amounted to a whine. Please, oh, please. Look Joe in the face, he told himself. “After that, I’m here. There’ll be no more of the new daddy stuff.”

  “Why don’t you hire a woman to help her? What about your mother, or her mother, for God’s sakes?”

  “Joe, cut the crap. How about it—yes or no? It’s your choice.”

  “Eric, I’m hurt by that. I don’t ask you questions as a boss. I’m trying to help. Her mother could be a great consolation to Nina now. It’s a wonderful time for mother and daughter—the birth of a grandchild. It is, anyway, if they’re Jewish.”

  Eric covered his face with his hands. “Oh, God,” he said, rubbing his fingers into his tired eyes. Eric hated asking for favors because of the intimacy they allowed; they opened up the account books of your life and gave everyone the right to audit your management ability. Now Luke’s colic was due to his mixed marriage. “That’s why I need the time off,” Eric said, lowering his hands. He had rubbed his eyes so hard that Joe looked blurry. “We’re going to her parents’ summer house in Maine. They’ll be coming up and can help us.”

  “Ah,” Joe said, nodding. He had talked himself into a corner with his criticisms. “Then why don’t you stay here and let them handle it?” he argued.

  “Joe—”

  “Visit on the weekends. Take a week—”

  “I’ve been useless anyway. I’m no good like this. You don’t need me.”

  “If she and the boy are away, you’ll be getting rest. Then you will be of use. Don’t ever say I don’t need you.”

  “My son needs me more.” Eric’s tone was final. He challenged Joe with a stare.

  Joe took off his bifocals and cleared the Journal away. He lifted the newspaper gingerly, holding its creased middle with his fingers, giving it the respect of a holy text. “How much will you need?”

  “A month’s income. Seven thousand.”

  “Seven? And how are you going to repay it?”

  “Take it out of my commissions when I return.”

  “You’re going to generate fourteen thousand in commissions in September? I don’t want you churning accounts to pay me off. That’s how you lose clients.”

  “Forget about the money,” Eric said, and turned to head for the door. “I’ll get it from a bank.”

  “No, no!” Joe put his hand up, rising from his chair. “You’re being very insulting. Making me out to look like a miser. I’m concerned. I don’t want you under any pressures you can’t handle.”

  He had been brusque in his manner, Eric had to admit. Joe’s dignity was important to him, even more important than his money. Eric slowed the pace of his emotions, sighing, and said evenly, “I’m grateful you’re giving me the time off. That’s the important part. I can borrow the money from Nina’s parents or mine.”

  “What about your pension fund?” Joe said with abrupt happiness—delighted at his discovery of an out for both of them. “Why don’t you borrow from that?”

  “Oh. Yeah, sure. I’ll do that. Anyway, I’d like to clear out of here this morning.”

  Before Eric could depart, Joe repeated his assertion that he valued Eric and would miss his help in the firm. Joe insisted on a solemn good-bye, clasping Eric’s hand in both of his own while he looked earnestly into Eric’s eyes: “You’re more than a partner to me, you know that, Eric. Take care of yourself.”

  “Thanks, Joe. I’ll be back in six weeks and everything will be kosher.”

  Eric went out to the trading room and told Sammy. “What!” Sammy said with disgust. He listened to Eric’s explanation with a stare, his thin lips disappearing altogether into a tight pout. When Eric finished, Sammy nodded, said, “Bye,” and turned his back, hitting keys on his terminal.

  “Come on, Sammy. Don’t be like that.”

  “You’re going away for six weeks—it’s no big deal. Good-bye.”

  Eric packed up various investment surveys and annual reports to read in Maine and said his farewells to Irene and the other secretaries. Sammy continued to ignore him. Irene walked Eric to the door, hugged him, and said, her voice trembling, “You’re a sweet man.”

  Her emotion gave Eric the creeps, made him feel he would never see any of them again, or, worse, that Irene believed Luke really was a burden that would cripple Eric. Eric opened the door and looked back. “Bye, Sammy!”

  For a moment there was no response. Then Sammy, without turning around, called out, “Call in every week. I’ll tell you what’s going on.”

  “Okay.” That made Eric feel better about leaving. It was hot outside, but not humid. New York glowed from the light: peopled by bright-colored clothes; street corners flagged by the umbrellas of vendors; brokers carrying jackets in their wake, dappling the gray buildings with the pinks and blues and yellows of their Brooks shirts; the sallow or black faces of the service workers winked past Eric, and the tanned or burned faces of the middle class glanced curiously at his load of investment books. Eric was suddenly apart from them, free from their concerns. With his job on hold, Eric’s dismay at the future shriveled in the sun. He felt excited at the struggle ahead of him, his hands unbound, ready to fight.

  Eric hailed a cab and endured the drive impatiently, irritated by what he thought were inept choices by the driver. He dashed into the lobby, got into the elevator, and hopped from one foot to the other at its slow ascent. When the doors opened, he moved out blindly and bumped into Luke’s baby carriage.

  “Eric!” Nina said. She looked wan, but peaceful. He had been so distant from her emotionally that her appearance, her drained look, astonished him.

  “I got six weeks off. We’ll go to your parents’ place in Maine.”

  She stared at him. Not unhappily. Dully.

  “Okay?” he asked, and kissed her.

  She didn’t move her lips. “Okay,” she said, nodding. “That’s a good idea.”

  “The sea air. Maybe that’ll help Luke,” Eric said.

  “Maybe,” she said, nodding more vigorously.

  “I love you,” he said.

  “I love you too,” she answered, and put her arms around him. She squeezed herself to him and put her head against his chest.

  “We’re gonna be okay,” he promised.

  DIANE AND PETER entered brian Stoppard’s Park Avenue apartment at five minutes after eight. Diane was astonished that the door was opened by a uniformed man and woman who took their Burberrys and umbrellas and asked if they wanted a cocktail. Astonished because the presence of servants implied a big, formal dinner—after all, Stoppard had invited Diane offhandedly, no embossed card in the mail, just a casual aside at the office: “We’re having some people over for dinner next Saturday, including the unhappy Gedhorn trio. Can you and Peter come?” The Gedhorn suit, insulation manufacturers whose former employees were suing over unhealthy working conditions, had been Diane’s primary assignment for a year, assisting Stoppard on the brief; thus she had assumed dinner would be the two Gedhorn senior vice-presidents and the in-house counsel. And she knew from Betty Winters that she and her husband, Tony, were invited, presumably because Tony, being a playwright and screenwriter, knew Stoppard’s wife, novelist Paula Kramer. Such a disparate combination of people would make Diane and Peter ideal guests, since Diane could chat up the Gedhorn trio, see a friendly face in Betty, while Peter, Tony, and Paula discussed show business.

  But this was a much bigger event. At least twenty people were already in the living room. Stoppard should have warned her. Betty definitely should have warned her. Diane looked at the women’s clothes and instantly felt inadequate in her lawyer outfit, worn to soothe th
e Gedhorn clients. She was in a gray skirt, a white blouse with ruffles at the collar, and a blue blazer. Diane cursed herself for allotting no time to shop since Byron’s birth.

  Peter waved to a group by the piano at one end of the living room: Tony and Betty Winters were talking to a cluster of movie stars, William Garth, Delilah, and Amy Howell. The women, even the normally dowdy Betty, were dressed. Delilah, with her long black hair draped down her back, was almost naked, swathed from her left shoulder to her groin in skintight white, her nipples darkly oozing through the fabric, her legs snaked by gold lamé, like a Roman soldier. Amy Howell looked like a child wearing a man-sized gangster’s suit, utterly covered by thick, woolly Japanese-designed clothes, her shoulders padded, her waist bound briefly, then billowing out and down to the ground. Normally cautious Betty had on a red jump suit and a short, unevenly cut hairdo; the look, instead of seeming punk to Diane, reminded her of middle-aged Jewish ladies in their weekend stretch pants. But that group, given its bohemian stature, wasn’t Diane’s problem. A glance at the corporate wives and dates truly made Diane feel unequal: they looked like Bendel’s manikins come to life. In her work clothes dress, with her big nose and horn-rimmed glasses, Diane thought she might be mistaken for—for what? I am a lawyer. That would be no mistake.

  Brian Stoppard and Paula Kramer stood among the corporate people, their son and daughter huddled between the legs of the grown-ups. The boy was six, Diane knew, the girl three. Paula saw Diane and Peter, and came toward them just as they were handed their drink orders. Paula had her children reluctantly in tow. The boy, especially, hung back, his head down, his mouth closed in a sullen, shy pout. “Hi, glad you could make it,” Paula said breathlessly.

  “I didn’t realize it was such a big party,” Diane said. “I wouldn’t have come like this.”

  “Didn’t Brian tell you?” Paula was amazed. She shook her head of frizzy hair. “He’s perverse. You look lovely. Have you met Sasha and Rachel? Now that you’re new parents, I thought you might like to see the future. Sasha, Rachel, this is Diane and Peter Hummel.”

  “Hello!” Peter said, and put out his hand to Sasha, who regarded it like a loathsome vegetable on a plate.

  “How old’s your son now?” Paula asked.

  “Six months. He turned over yesterday!” Diane announced.

  “Uh-oh.” Paula laughed. “Your life is over.”

  “He did?” Peter asked Diane. He still had his hand in Sasha’s face.

  “Yes, I told you,” Diane answered defensively. She might not have. Peter’s lack of interest in fatherhood was unfashionable, and it would reflect badly on her if Paula Kramer knew Diane tolerated it. “He’s only done it the one time.”

  “Shake Peter’s hand,” Paula urged her son, Sasha.

  Sasha put out his small hand limply. Peter shook it gently. “Where do you go to school, Sasha?”

  Now the boy looked up, sure of himself. “Hunter,” he said, naming a free public school in Manhattan specially created for bright children.

  Hunter? Diane thought. Stoppard makes six hundred thousand a year; Paula’s a best-selling writer. What the hell are they doing taking up a place at Hunter?

  “It’s great!” Paula said. “You have to get your boy in. Best school in the city.”

  “Better than the private schools?” Diane asked.

  “Sure, you don’t get that miserable homogeneous population of spoiled rich kids,” Paula said eagerly. “Besides, at Hunter everybody’s there on merit. They studied pointillism in kindergarten! It’s amazing.”

  “Well,” Peter said diffidently. “You have to be something of a genius to get in. I don’t think Byron’s in that class.”

  “Oh, they’re not geniuses,” Paula said. “Patty! Hi!” she called out to another celebrity, Patty Lane, entering just then. “If your boy is normally bright and you read to him a lot, he’ll score great on the test and get in. Excuse me.” She rushed on and moved to the door, pulling her children with her.

  “Why the hell did you say Byron’s not smart?” Diane whispered.

  “I didn’t,” Peter said. “I said he’s not a genius.”

  “How do you know what he is?”

  Peter closed his eyes, irritated. “He’s not a genius.”

  “Peter!” Tony Winters called. He waved them over. Diane felt her stomach flutter at the prospect of meeting the movie stars. Because of Peter’s job, Diane had met celebrities, although they were of the theater, not film, and she had even witnessed the surprising flattery they bestowed on Peter in hopes of getting money for particular projects, but this group, Garth and Delilah especially, had been world-famous since Diane was a teenager. To see their faces in reality, in her boss’s living room, her husband beside her, wearing her boring clothes, was bizarre. Betty made the situation stranger by asking, as Diane and Peter approached, “Did Byron turn over again?”

  “No” was all Diane could manage in answer to Betty under Delilah’s bored stare.

  “I just heard about this,” Peter said.

  “She didn’t tell you!” Betty exclaimed.

  Because he wouldn’t care, you fool, Diane thought.

  Tony made the introductions and added, to get the conversation going again, “I’m trying to convince Bill to return to the stage.”

  “In a play of yours, I hope,” Peter said.

  Betty, meanwhile, both to Diane’s relief and irritation, maneuvered Diane aside from the stars and began to babble about children. They talked on the phone regularly now, but it wasn’t a comfort. To each step in Byron’s development, Betty said, “Oh, I remember that. Wait until he starts—” and then she’d name something better yet to come. Like everything else in New York, even mothers talking about their babies were a competition.

  “Do you know what Paula told me?” Betty whispered now. “Sasha, her son, goes to Hunter. They were studying Seurat and pointillism in kindergarten!”

  “That must be her standard speech to the wives,” Diane said. “She just told me the same tiring.”

  “Oh, my God!” Betty said with a squeal of pleasure. “I thought it was directed at me because Nicholas didn’t get in.”

  “To Hunter? Nicholas’s old enough to apply to school?”

  Betty stepped back and looked at Diane under lowered brows in mock astonishment. “My dear, you have to apply a year ahead of time. And if you want to have any hope of getting your child into a decent school, you must get him into one of the feeder preschools at the age of two.”

  “You mean this starts at one year old!” Diane said, her astonishment genuine.

  “Haven’t you been reading all the pieces in the Times and Town Magazine?”

  “I was skipping them! My God, I have a six-month-old! I thought I had time!”

  “Are you mad, woman?” Tony Winters said, leaning into their conversation without warning. “One slip now and your child ends up a bum on welfare in twenty years.”

  “What’s this?” Delilah said.

  “Oh, the New York private school madness,” Tony explained to the movie stars. “The yuppies have made the mediocre education of New York not only more mediocre, but it costs more and the pressure is worse.”

  “Really?” Peter said. “When my mother moved me here as a teenager, I don’t think there was much pressure to get in.”

  “Maybe for you,” Delilah said. “It’s tough in L.A. too. No problema if you got a series on the air.”

  “It is different now,” Betty said to Peter. “The competition is fierce. Public schools are much worse and also there are all these well-to-do parents who’ve been told that early education is the most important of all.”

  “It’s all bullshit,” Tony said. He lowered his voice. “Paula told me Hunter is great because it’s more real than going to a private school. More real? Everybody in the class has an IQ of one fifty or better. That’s real? When those kids go out into the world and work for people whose IQs are in two figures, we’ll see how well prepared they are. More real. S
ure—the world is loaded with black, Hispanic, Oriental, and Jewish kids with IQs of one eighty.”

  “I guess your boy didn’t get in, huh, Tony?” Garth said, and roared with laughter to cover the insult.

  “Yeah,” Tony said effortlessly. “Now he’ll have to become an actor.”

  Diane burst out laughing, more at the unexpectedness of Tony’s return of serve—since he was a screenwriter, she assumed he’d let any abuse go unanswered by a big star like Garth. Delilah and Amy Howell both scanned Diane after her guffaw, noticing her for the first time. Delilah gave Diane a thorough going-over, up and down. “You’re a lawyer, I bet,” Delilah said to Diane in a sluggish tone. Amy smiled reflexively.

  “How did you know?” Betty said, delighted, missing the implied insult, her face open with wonder, a child delighted by a card trick.

  “Yes, I am,” Diane said.

  “Did you see Legal Eagles?” Garth asked.

  “What’s that?” Diane asked.

  Garth was stunned. Tony laughed, deeply and resonantly. “Grown-ups who don’t work in the movie business don’t go to the movies,” Tony said to Garth. “They don’t even think about movies.”

  “It must be hard having a kid and being a lawyer,” Delilah said to Diane. “Do you work, Betty?”

  “Not anymore. Our housekeeper left suddenly—”

  “Suddenly last summer,” Tony mumbled.

  “—and I decided to quit and stay home.”

  “How do you like it?” Amy Howell asked. “I couldn’t stand just being home. I need to work.”

  “I like it fine,” Betty said primly, a hint of self-righteousness in the tone.

  “How about you?” Delilah asked Diane, her voice tough, almost like a street kid making a dare.

  Diane, for a moment, couldn’t think, looking at this famous face from her youth, from when she used to smoke grass, protest the war, dream of arguing in front of the Supreme Court, and lived, in general, convinced that she would never imitate the conventions of her parents’ generation. If, the first time she had heard Delilah sing, someone had shown Diane her future—married to a respectable, balding Peter, a son home with a baby-sitter, working to defend a major American corporation from its disabled employees, her stomach still puffy from childbirth, the whole dreary list of things and decay that had changed her, changed her utterly from a tough young girl eager for life to a cautious aging woman fighting to hang on to what she had—if someone had abruptly presented the future, skipping all the gradations of the change, using her first sight of televised-Delilah to now in-the-flesh-Delilah, Diane would have screamed, fled college, run to the countryside, and, like some of her friends, raised vegetables, let her armpit hair grow, and scoffed at the ones who stayed.