Only Children

by Rafael Yglesias

  “Well, I only saw him once before. Why would he know me?”

  “That’s right,” Eric said. “He needs time.” He carried the bags in.

  “Maybe he’s cold,” Wendy said.

  “Hello, Wendy,” Joan said. “I haven’t greeted you.”

  “I’m fine,” Wendy answered.

  Joan nodded as if this were very gratifying news. “Good.” With that she went inside the house.

  Luke’s screams had become muffled moans and whimpers. He nuzzled his face into Nina’s breasts. His tears had primed them. But it was an hour before his next feeding, and what’s more, Nina felt her pride was at stake. She had said to Joan that Luke wasn’t hungry.

  “Are you going to feed him?” Wendy asked. She was the only one left outside.

  Nina’s breasts dripped. Luke squirmed and moaned. He could probably smell their sour residue. Her left nipple throbbed. She gave in, opened her shirt, and lowered the flap that covered her left nipple. Luke latched on.

  “Can I touch them?” Wendy asked.

  “What?”

  Wendy put out her hand and held it only an inch or two from Nina’s right breast. “Can I touch it?”

  “They’re sore,” Nina answered, too thrown to know what else to say.

  “I’ll be gentle,” Wendy said with a hint of irritation that Nina might think otherwise. Wendy lowered the flap and cupped the breast, holding the thick knob of Nina’s nipple tenderly between her index finger and thumb. “What does it taste like?”

  “I don’t know!” Nina said, wanting to pull away, but frightened to. What if Wendy didn’t let go?

  “Come on,” Wendy said. “You must have tasted it. Eric must suck on it sometimes. Does he like the taste?”

  “He does not!”

  Wendy, her face only a few inches from Nina, smiled knowingly, and shook her head no, almost with pity, as if Nina’s attempt at lying were too foolish even to merit a contradiction. Then Wendy lowered her head—Nina watched unbelievingly, sure that Wendy would stop, couldn’t mean to—and put her lips around the nipple, licking its tip with her tongue. Luke moved his feet out of Wendy’s way, but was otherwise unperturbed, staring up at Nina with his serious blue eyes and sucking lazily.

  Nina, panic in her throat, grunted to stop herself from screaming, and put her free hand on Wendy’s blond hair, gathering a bunch of it. Nina yanked hard.

  Wendy screamed, backing away, her hands protecting the top of her skull. “Jesus! Are you crazy! That hurt.”

  Eric opened the door violently. He looked agitated. “What was that! Is he all right?”

  Wendy walked through the open door, and then glanced back, her look resentful. “You’re not very motherly. I don’t think. Maybe you don’t like people needing you.”

  “You’re crazy,” Nina said without energy, merely stating a fact.

  “What’s going on?” Eric pleaded.

  “Maybe that’s why he cries all the time,” Wendy said, her face made small by vindictiveness, the eyes, nose, and mouth coming together in a blur of squints, twitches, and frowns. “He knows you don’t mean it.”

  Nina instinctively turned Luke away from Wendy and her accusation. She wanted to cry, although she couldn’t bring the sorrow to precipitation. The unhappiness floated inside her chest like a heavy, heavy cloud—the dark swollen cloud of her lifelong failure to please or impress anyone.

  THE CONCRETE and insulation manufacturers filed for financial reorganization under Chapter 11, claiming that the outstanding lawsuits, if decided against them, would be an economic catastrophe and that since no insurance could be obtained to protect them, they had to go “out of the insulation business” because every day they continued manufacturing exposed them to more litigation. This shifted the issue from their culpability to their liability (what they would pay on all debt included future debt such as negligence judgments), even though their guilt was still not settled. The maneuver was Stoppard’s invention, but Diane was essential in finding a precedent to allow the bankruptcy filing to begin before a judgment was in existence. Threatened with the possibility of winning their suits, but having no one to pay them, the ex-employees agreed to settle en masse for a quarter of what Stoppard and Diane had thought a court would be likely to award. She knew making partner at Wilson, Pickering had become a certainty. Stoppard would sponsor her wholeheartedly and he was the firm’s brightest star.

  Peter said, when she bragged of her achievement, that it was a swindle, no better than, after you’ve blinded a man, robbing him of his beggar’s cup of coins. Of course, that had been her reaction when she had been brought onto the case. But it was true that the company would have been destroyed by the ex-employees’ suit. Thousands would have been thrown out of work, work that was now safe anyway, or at least met federal safety standards. The villain, the owner who had buried the warnings of the medical data, was dead. The law would be punishing his grandson, who had watched his inheritance halved by a rapid decline of orders and an even faster increase in insurance payments, along with wage raises, legal fees, and general Wall Street dismay. Most of the lawsuits were not from the victims, but from their heirs. Was it justice to punish today for yesterday’s sins? Stoppard had asked the court. And the victims did get some money. Anyway, someone else would have contributed the legal know-how she had. The end result would have been the same.

  They took Byron to the park the weekend of her triumph. She had persuaded Peter to spend Sunday afternoon with them. Although Byron had first walked only a week ago, he was already competent, striding pigeon-toed, his full melon belly forward, a miniature sumo wrestler, his mouth open, exclaiming at the pleasures of his mobility. “Ahhh! Ahhh! Ohhh? Da!” He pointed to the trees and yelled: “Zat!” He grabbed the black iron bars of the playground gate and shook it. Byron teetered from the recoil and then tried to get a footing on a low rung, intending to climb it.

  “Just like you,” Peter said. “He has no sense of boundaries. No responsibility.”

  She didn’t know what he meant. She didn’t think Peter knew either, except that he resented Byron’s joy, Byron’s vigor. She looked at the other parents, all fascinated by her son, some with smiles, others with worry. They were in the small park at Washington Square, full of immobile babies, and only a few toddlers under two. The other one-year-olds were still crawling, or able to walk only a few steps before they wobbled and then crashed with a whoosh on the puffed bottoms of their diapers. They cried at every obstacle, at every frustration.

  Not her Byron.

  He stood at the edge of the sandbox, arms out at his sides in an attitude of command, erect on his chubby legs, still and steady, the Captain of Babyland.

  The other parents were forever having to pick up their children, encourage them to try again, to dig in the sand, to leave their side, to engage life.

  Not Diane.

  She could sit on the bench beside Peter. She had to get up only to stop Byron from walking off with the pails and shovels of two-year-olds, who, despite their size and age advantage, lost tugs-of-war with Byron. Byron had mastered the technique. He closed his fat fingers tight around the plastic treasures, held his balance, and yanked hard. His calm will to win gave him extra strength; the two-year-olds, made anxious by the possibility of defeat, already half looking for a parent to help them, had their attention divided and their power diluted.

  “I’m sorry,” Diane would say to the scrunched, embarrassed, irritated face of the bawling two-year-old’s parent. “Give it back, Byron.”

  “Ohh!” he’d say, and loosen his grip at Diane’s request, unperturbed by the loss of red shovel or yellow pail, ready for another conquest, a good grab of sand, a stamping, hopeless chase of the pigeons, another assault on the gate. Byron took defeat and victory as one.

  Diane could breathe deeply and smell her satisfaction. She had the best baby in the park. She was a success.

  PETER SLEPT with rachel again. and again. and again. for the past month they had had a regular date
each week, going to the theater and retiring afterward to her apartment of convertible furniture.

  Their lovemaking was sad. Done silently, quickly, the copulation seemed mostly to be an excuse to hold each other. He felt hopeless about life and the world. The foundation had cut its arts funding to a third of what it had been two years before. He saw Diane alone for a mere hour a day during the week and little more on the weekends. And during those few hours, she yawned, undressed, bathed, complained, and wanted nothing from him but casual chatter and a brotherly kiss.

  He knew, he knew, he knew—he knew all the psychological clichés. He’d lost his mother again, he felt competitive with Byron, and on and on. The problem was that they were true. His son grows up while he grows down. Byron moves into the future, Peter into the past.

  He called Gary. He hadn’t spoken to or seen Gary, the best friend of his childhood, for a decade. “Peter!” Gary exclaimed, and began to babble, asking questions and giving information before he even heard the answers.

  They met for lunch. The ghost of Gary’s slightly goofy, pale, boyish face hovered in fat and manly features. Gary wasn’t married, although he lived with a woman.

  “I can’t believe,” Gary said, “of the two of us, you’re the one with a wife and kid. ”

  “Why?” Peter asked, worried, possibly even offended.

  “I don’t know. I just thought you’d think it was bourgeois or something. I really expected you to be an actor.”

  “’Cause of high school?”

  “Yeah. You loved it! And you were good.”

  Peter couldn’t concentrate on the conversation. He was lurking behind pleasantries, hidden in ambush with his real question. “Whatever happened to Larry?” he asked casually when the check came.

  Gary answered with suspicious rapidity, as if he’d been waiting to. “He doesn’t talk to us anymore. Broke off completely with my mother five years ago.”

  “How come?”

  “You know we put him up for a year, when he was—when you knew him. He was a mess. Mom kept him together. And, I don’t know, I guess when he got to be a success again, he must have decided we were beneath him. He’s become rich, you know.”

  “I always thought he was.”

  “Well, he put it on. Got a big PR firm now, does work in Washington, Philly, L.A. I think they even have an office here.” Gary changed the subject, talking again about the old days, the games they played, what had happened to other friends. Obviously Gary didn’t want to discuss the child abuse and Peter let it go without a fight, although that was his only purpose in the meeting.

  At the park with Diane and Byron, Peter listened to his memory’s recordings of everything he and Gary had said to each other, as children and teenagers, about Larry’s fondlings. There had been few. Gary always insisted Larry didn’t mean any harm, hadn’t meant it to go any further. The one time Peter challenged that point of view, Gary was flustered and upset. “Yeah, so he’s queer. Just ’cause we didn’t know to stop him doesn’t mean we are.”

  Clichés, clichés, clichés.

  Gary’s fear wasn’t what Peter had wanted to know. He wanted to know if Gary’s mother had suspected anything while it was going on, if she had in fact known. If not, hadn’t she thought it odd that a forty-year-old bachelor spent so much time in the children’s room? She had known Larry was homosexual; that much he had gotten out of Gary. Hadn’t she wondered about all the gifts he thought Gary and even Peter? Why hadn’t Gary told her what was going on? Why hadn’t Peter told his own mother?

  It was so boring in the park. All these anxious middle-class parents, all these lawyers, professors, so-called painters, actors, writers, doctors, accountants, pretending they cared. All with the same MacLaren strollers, the same Nuk pacifiers, the Snuglis, the Fisher-Price toys, some kind of strange herd instinct, a weird consumer fascism.

  Peter noticed a man wander into the playground area without a child or a baby. The stranger nodded at various parents. They nodded back, but obviously didn’t know him. He was dressed in a suit. That seemed odd. Peter wanted to point him out to Diane, but she was off somewhere saving some poor child from Byron’s imperialism. The stranger didn’t hook up with any of the mothers or kids already there. He had a long face, his complexion pale, small lips underneath a big nose, wide-set eyes, and a broad forehead. He settled on a bench and watched the children. He smiled benignly at their activities and laughed out loud at something.

  Peter felt uneasy. He glanced at the park’s border to see if a police car was about. There was. Then Peter realized he couldn’t say anything to the cops. Or could he? The sign on the gate read: ONLY FOR CHILDREN AND THEIR PARENTS OR GUARDIANS. If the stranger was alone, the police could ask him to move on. Peter simply didn’t have the nerve to do something so presumptuous, so rude.

  He got to his feet without thinking and looked for Diane. She would have the nerve. He couldn’t see her. He glanced at the bench to check on the stranger. He was gone. But he saw Diane, sitting right near where the stranger used to be, talking to a woman, intent on the conversation.

  Peter walked over. Diane just glanced at him and continued talking. “Where’s Byron?” Peter asked, not because he missed him, but because he didn’t know how to bring up the question of the strange man.

  “Here,” Diane said, and pointed to a sandy area near her feet. But her gesture froze. “Where is he?”

  An elderly woman rocking an infant in a carriage called out, “Is this your husband?” and pointed to Peter. Diane nodded. “That man is—”

  Peter sighted him, the pale man in the suit he had worried about. He saw the stranger walking away, outside the children’s area, holding Byron in his arms. The man walked casually, Byron quiet in his arms, approaching the arch, heading for the park’s perimeter.

  Peter heard the thunder of his heart. Felt a sharp bang on his leg. Saw faces, startled, nervous, go by. “Byron!” he called into the thunder.

  The world was moving. The stranger turned and glanced at Peter.

  “Byron!” Peter shouted into the roar. His shoulder whacked against someone.

  The stranger stopped and waited for Peter. The man was calm. He watched Peter approach.

  Peter kept running, but he felt dread as he got near, awed that the stranger had stopped and was waiting for him, apparently unafraid.

  “Put him down.” Peter meant this to be a command. It sounded tentative, almost a question. Peter stopped himself several feet off, frightened to go closer, although he kept telling himself: Byron belongs to you—take him!

  “I’m his father,” the stranger said, and kissed the side of Byron’s head.

  The sight made Peter sick. He felt his stomach bend in a hard place, somewhere that was supposed to be inflexible. His mind, too, was hurt—stalled by the stranger’s lie.

  “No, you’re not,” Peter said, like a baffled child, unable to fight the lie.

  “Yes, I am,” the stranger said.

  “Get your hands off him!” Diane was screaming from somewhere, screaming with all the rage and assertion that Peter felt, but couldn’t get past the dam in his throat. “Police! Get your hands off him! Police!”

  The stranger, rather gently, put Byron down, and broke into a run.

  Byron held up his arms to Peter.

  Diane rushed past, past Peter and Byron, and ran after the stranger.

  “Da, Da,” Byron said to Peter.

  Peter’s shoulders got heavy, made him collapse. He fell to his knees and put his arms out. Byron waddled into them, chuckling, gurgling laughter, delighted by his father’s reduction in size.

  “Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t,” Peter heard himself mumble while he kissed the sweet soft cushions, the ice-cream smoothness of his baby’s cheeks.

  People stood around, watching Peter, broken to his knees on the sidewalk, clutching Byron. Diane had returned, saying, “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!”

  “Da! Da!” Byron said to Peter, his thin brown eyebrows curved into a worried a
rchitecture above his eyes.

  Peter was crying, felled on the pavement, embracing Byron, and crying. He got to his feet, Diane was saying lots of things, talking breathlessly, but Peter got to his feet, not listening, and kept his face, his wet face, pressed against Byron’s. Peter carried his son home, directly home, his arms a steel embrace, his heart panting with love and terror.

  ERIC DECIDED to say nothing to his father-in-law, Tom, about me money. He wouldn’t have to anyway: Brandon had volunteered to remind Tom. But a week went by, a miserable seven days and nights, without Brandon saying a word, at least not in Eric’s presence.

  Maybe Brandon had discussed it in private with Tom and been told to fuck off. Maybe Brandon was intimidated. Eric certainly was. Tom Winningham was a tall, elegant man, his undyed hair still mostly black, still distinguished by the waves and sheen of youth. His posture was like a column’s; it was a shock to see that he could bend over. His blue eyes were pale and lifeless. They hovered in his skull without purpose, rarely focusing on anything, and when they did briefly catch Eric’s eye, their boldness pushed Eric’s face aside, a gentle but tangible blow.

  Eric had been alone with Tom only once that week. One night, Eric wandered into the living room at 3:00 A.M. after a session of rocking Luke back to sleep. He found Tom seated in the dark, looking out at the bay, his thin face silver from the moonlight. Tom moved his head slowly at the sound of Eric entering, like a movie ghost, with a gradual ominous turn. “Excuse me,” Eric blurted, horrified, and skulked out.

  Meanwhile, Luke’s colic, even though he was almost three months old (supposedly the age when colic goes away), seemed to get worse. Maybe it was the presence of the others. Luke wailed if any of them touched him. He woke up every two hours at night, taking as much as forty-five minutes to fall back to sleep, as if he feared that Eric and Nina would leave him with these strangers.

  The second morning after Joan arrived, she walked into the nursery ahead of Nina, thinking she could give Eric and Nina extra sleep. At the sight of Joan, Luke let out screams of horror that shot Eric from the lowest level of sleep to total consciousness with the G force of a rocket blast into space. “I scared him,” Joan confessed as Eric and Nina rushed past her into the nursery. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled, and left them to clutch the trembling baby to their bosom.