Only Children

by Rafael Yglesias

  The third Friday he was alone with Luke, Eric had, over Joe’s objections, bought a small position in one of the new genetic-engineering stocks, DNA Technology. DNA had dipped on an overall down day for the market, and Eric wanted to jump on at the low price. Joe argued, and whined, and teased. But Eric bought anyway, and then Joe said his worst: “All right, have it your way. But you’re on your own. Just your father-in-law, nobody else.”

  Joe’s words were like a curse, a poisonous cloud hovering about Eric’s shoulders. Eric went home in this gloomy atmosphere. Pearl greeted him nervously.

  What? She’s worried I don’t have her money?

  Eric immediately produced her salary, two hundred and fifty dollars, to forestall any concern, counting out the bills and placing them on the kitchen counter.

  We should pay her more, he thought. It’s too much already, he also thought.

  “We went to the park to play with Byron. You know, he’s a rough boy, not like Luke. So sweet. Well, Byron was teasing this other boy—”

  Eric looked into the living room for Luke. Usually, at the sound of Eric’s key in the lock, Luke was at the door, little man, way down below, his head tilted up to see Daddy, his bright blue eyes open with excitement and wonder. No one had ever waited for Eric with such longing or hugged Eric with so tight an embrace of joy.

  “—and he threw some sand. It got into Luke’s eye.”

  Eric saw Luke. He was huddled, collapsed really, into a corner of the couch. Luke’s blanket covered half of his face. The television was on, but Luke had only one eye on it.

  “I put some water in it. My, he didn’t like that. But, you know, to clean it out—”

  “Hi, Daddy,” Luke said in a sad, small, tired voice.

  “Let me see your eye,” Eric said, in a calm voice, but he was terrified to look. Luke lowered the blanket reluctantly.

  It was wet. The surrounding skin was red. Eric reached to lift the lids, but Luke pulled his head away.

  “I just want to look,” Eric said.

  “I put some salt in the water and boiled it first to make sure it was purified,” Pearl said.

  “Salt?” Eric thought: that’s got to be wrong.

  “He says it feels better now. I think it’s all washed out,” Pearl went on in a hasty tone of apology. “This big boy threw sand in his eyes. I yelled at the woman taking care of him. I’ve seen her. She’s no good. She don’t pay no mind to what he does.”

  “I’m sure it’s okay,” Eric said. He prayed it was. He had no idea what to do. Call a doctor? And say what? He’d sound like a fool. Take him to a doctor? On Friday night? They’re all heading to the suburbs. He kissed Luke on the forehead. The skin felt soft and weak and moist—newborn again.

  Pearl kept talking. Eric repeated over and over, “I’m sure it’s fine, I’m sure it’s fine,” made nervous by the account of her nursing. Pearl only made things worse when Eric finally got her to the door. “He didn’t poop today,” she whispered. “That’d be the fourth day now.”

  Eric didn’t know that. Why hadn’t Nina told him Luke’s constipation had returned?

  Eric returned to the living room and sat next to Luke. Luke rested against Eric’s body, the blanket once again covering the wounded eye.

  He’s not right. He’s not moving; he’s not asking me to toss him in the air, play catch, pretend to be a horse; he’s not standing in the middle of the living room and telling about what happened in the park. Nothing about Luke was normal. He didn’t yell with pain, he didn’t moan—but the whole personality was different from usual on a Friday afternoon. This was the quiet, mournful Luke awaiting a separation, the frail Luke-flower closing his petals in the twilight just before Eric’s parents arrived to baby-sit.

  Luke laughed at something on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Eric turned and saw Luke’s face open up and relax … and then Luke brought a hand quickly to his eye, his face contorted, and he moaned.

  “Let me take another—”

  “No.” Luke groaned and hid his head in the blanket.

  “—just to see if there’s any more sand.” Luke didn’t stir. Eric put a hand on Luke’s back and patted. It was a miniature of a man’s, swelling with Luke’s life, so small and so strong. “Let me see. I won’t put anything in it.”

  “Okay,” Luke said in a dying voice. He let Eric look, wincing when Eric pulled back the lids.

  Eric couldn’t tell. How could he? How would he know if there was a microscopic grain? It wouldn’t survive Pearl’s eye bath, could it? If she was thorough. What about that salt? Well, she said she boiled the water with the salt. Maybe it had boiled away.

  Maybe constipation was Luke’s real complaint. That was getting worse with each month. Their pediatrician had prescribed a mild laxative, some kind of chocolate stuff, the consistency of pudding, to give Luke before bed. That helped for a while, but it seemed to be getting worse again.

  After Eric gave up looking for the invisible grain of sand, he saw Luke squirm, rub his behind back and forth.

  “Do you have to go to the bathroom?”

  “No!” Luke shouted. That was so rare it startled Eric. The vehemence convinced Eric that the constipation was the real villain.

  It’s because he’s sitting still, Eric decided. He got up and turned off the television. It was obscene, a child watching that much. Luke looked alarmed. “Wanna play He-Man?” Eric said, on his knees on the rug. “I’ll be Skeleton”

  Luke was so pale. He smiled a little. “Okay.”

  Eric put his heart into the pretend. “I will destroy you, He-Man!”

  “No, you won’t,” the tiny, bowlegged, soft-faced two-year-old answered. “I have the power!” Luke raised his plump arm to the ceiling and thrust his ballooned belly forward.

  Eric jumped to his feet and ran. He made Luke chase him from one room to another. After a few minutes, Luke stopped, his head lowered slightly, his legs coming together. Eric charged him, made Luke keep moving, keep the system going. His eye’s fine. He just needs to take a shit.

  Luke’s face suddenly went red and he stopped again.

  “Daddy, I have the Feeling.”

  “That’s okay. Don’t worry about it.”

  “It hurts.”

  “Come on, He-Man. I’ll get to Castle Grayskull before you do and tear it to pieces.”

  “No, you won’t!” Luke forgot his bowels and ran again, his miniature body rocking from side to side as he tried to imitate strength. Luke got ahead of Eric and put his arm out. “Stop, Skeletor! I won’t let you pass!” Luke beamed with pride at his successful defense. He smiled into Eric’s face, full of his triumph.

  Then Luke closed his mouth. His knees buckled slightly; he lowered his chin. He scrunched his neck down. He began to strain, his skin reddening.

  What a life, Eric thought as he remembered his dream of managing hundreds of millions of dollars. What a pathetic life, he thought, while he watched his son try to empty his bowels. What a fool I am to dream of millions, he thought, as he cheered Luke on with the intensity of a fan rooting for the home team to score.

  THAT PETER might not do what Diane wanted when it came to major decisions, such as having a second child, was an unexpected discovery.

  “You’re really surprised?” Betty Winters said over lunch, a few days after Peter had spoken so cruelly on the subject. “He didn’t want to have Byron.”

  “I thought he loved Byron. I thought he’d gotten to like being a father.”

  “I’m sure he loves Byron.”

  “I think he hates us,” Diane said. She felt so beat. The landscape had been utterly changed. She had worked so hard to make a home, and she’d found too late that the foundation stood on muddy ground. “I’ve been kidding myself about Peter. I’ve been telling myself that all his negative talk was just talk, that deep down he wanted me to push him forward, push him to grow up and be a man. He doesn’t. He wants to spend his life going to the theater, to museums, talking pretentious nonsense with his artist fri
ends. I thought all that was just being young, you know, something you do when you have the time to do it—”

  “But it’s Peter’s work to go to the theater,” Betty said, her sympathetic expression gone. She sounded impatient.

  Of course. Betty’s husband’s a playwright; she thinks it’s a worthwhile life too. Diane didn’t. Although it was fun meeting the behind-the-scenes people, going to opening night, not merely following the cultural lemmings of New York, but helping to lead them to a nice cliff, nevertheless, it wasn’t the real business of life. Although Tony Winters’s plays were amusing, they were quite silly. His movie scripts were pleasant, reminiscent of the great old romantic comedies; however, those classics were inconsequential and Tony’s modern versions were adolescent. There wasn’t a single play that Diane had seen during the ten years she had accompanied Peter to the theater which she could, even for an instant, consider in the same class of seriousness with Shakespeare or Chekhov. And if such a genius was out there, Diane doubted that Peter would be of any use to him. Deep down, did they really think what they did was important, was real in any way, that it was somehow worth a life of childlessness, worth discarding the very tangible result of child rearing? Was Tony Winters ever going to write a play as extraordinary as his handsome, intelligent six-year-old son, or as brave and beautiful as his one-year-old daughter? No matter how many theaters Peter funded, no matter how many lunatic gays or depressed straights he helped with the foundation’s money, nothing could equal the glory of creating Byron.

  It was so obvious to Diane, a truth glowing in the sky as big and bright and warm as the sun. How could Peter find shadows in this brilliant light?

  “Peter’s like Tony,” Betty said. “He has the sensibility of a creative artist. They go through moods; they can’t stand to think that they’re married and have kids. Makes them feel ordinary—”

  “They are ordinary,” Diane said, relishing the reassurance of common sense, of what she loved in the law, its ruthless disregard for the distortions of self-delusion, its insistence on fact.

  “Well, they’re not your average men.”

  “Feeling that having kids is a drag on your freedom ain’t exactly a sophisticated or unusual male reaction,” Diane said, enjoying her denigration of Peter and Tony, pleased to irritate Betty’s pride in her husband. Tony was worse than Peter, Diane thought. Tony not only ignored his children and, according to Peter, whined about them privately, but also put on a public display of loving them, waxing sentimental at parties on the joys of fatherhood, even exploiting the current rage for involved fatherhood in his recent play. The hero, a thinly disguised portrait of Tony, was shown as a brilliant and charming but adulterous and insecure man, who is finally redeemed when circumstances put him in sole charge of his child during a dangerous illness. “Unconvincing,” the Times had said about the play’s final scene. But the stupid thing ran for almost two years, flattering a city full of yuppie men and reassuring their maltreated, eager-to-be-fooled wives. Like me, Diane thought, suckers desperate to believe they had bested their mothers, had gotten their men to be different.

  “You really feel bitter about Peter,” Betty said.

  “Yeah, I do. I gave him all the room in the world. I got up with Byron every morning, even though my work is hard. Peter has a staff meeting a week, he has a lunch date. That’s his workday. The rest of it is going to openings, eating at Orso—some tough life. But I get up with Byron, I make sure there’s food in the house—” Diane damned the flow and swallowed the rest of her complaints.

  “It’s too hard,” Betty said quietly. “There’s too much stress in your work—”

  “My work isn’t stressful.”

  “—Along with having a baby? Diane, it’s too hard.”

  Betty, of course, had downgraded to part-time employment after her first child. With the birth of her second, she had quit altogether. People always believed, no matter what they said, that everyone should copy their life choices. Even if they were miserable. And whether Betty admitted it or not, Tony’s play was a public humiliation for Betty, an advertisement that he was consistently unfaithful to her, that he stayed in the marriage only because he loved his children. This point of view was a lie. Diane knew it was a lie. Tony would collapse without Betty; the stuffing would come out of his bright suit of clothing like a scarecrow rotting in an abandoned field. But Tony had manufactured this falsehood into a play, and everybody took it to be true and felt sorry for Betty. Diane wanted so badly to say this to Betty, to make her know the fucking truth. “I’ve been thinking of quitting,” Diane said instead.

  “You have.” Betty nodded with an obnoxious, knowing air. “You can afford to, right?”

  “Peter’s rich.” That was another thing wrong with Peter, another free pass he’d been given that had made him spoiled and selfish. “Maybe I should do what he’s probably doing. Go out and get myself a lover.”

  Betty, to Diane’s surprise, laughed. She looked off musingly. “I’d do it too. But aren’t you scared of AIDS? God, when I read those articles, when Tony tells me about—you know Raul Sabas has it?”

  “Really?” That was sad. Even in her rage at theater people, Diane got an image of Sabas dancing across the stage and singing of love, his face happy, looking to the sky. “Poor man,” she said.

  “Yeah, they’re saying it’s lymphoma, but it’s AIDS.”

  “Well, I might get it anyway,” Diane said, determined to be hard, to be truthful. “How the hell do I know who Peter’s screwing?”

  “Diane, stop it. That’s horrible.” Betty fussed with her napkin and then tossed it on the table. She picked up her purse and opened it nervously, then stopped. She looked puzzled. “I don’t smoke anymore. Can you believe that? I was going for a cigarette.”

  “Maybe he’s gay,” Diane said, bored by Betty, especially by her quitting smoking.

  “Tony gay!” Betty arched in a funny, cartoon leap, cat on a stove, paws in the air, voice screeching.

  “I don’t know, but I was talking about Peter. Be just like him— being in the closet. He’s in the closet about everything else, every other feeling. Christ, he’s got the biggest closet in New York. He lives his whole life in the dark.”

  “Calm down,” Betty ordered, obviously made uncalm herself by Diane. “Have you thought about seeing a therapist—”

  “Not you too!”

  “It’s helped Tony,” Betty stammered.

  “Maybe instead of my quitting,” Diane answered, “you should get your old job back. Everything is in terms of Tony.” Betty stopped fidgeting, a deer frozen by headlights. Betty’s look of shock and hurt slowed Diane down, but Diane couldn’t prevent a furious mumbled afterthought: “Tony, Tony, Tony.”

  Betty stared at Diane, her mouth tight. “Why are you so angry at me?” she asked in the tone of a judge challenging a defendant to express remorse about his crime.

  Last chance for mercy, Diane thought. What the hell, I’ll make it. “I guess because you’re happy, because Tony is happy, you got two kids, you don’t feel any conflict about work.”

  “Sure I do!” Betty said, at ease again. “I go out of my mind when Tony goes to L.A. for script conferences and I’m stuck with the kids for weeks. I don’t have anything to say when I’m at parties except that Gina is now talking, and Nicholas is starring in the Lower School Music Assembly. Maybe I should start working part-time again and you should cut back.”

  “Betty.” Diane couldn’t help chuckling at her naïveté. “There’s no way to make partner and work part-time.”

  “Is it really that important?” Betty asked gently.

  “Making partner?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re just a clerk if you don’t make partner. You take orders.”

  “I didn’t realize it was that important to you,” Betty said quietly. “Obviously, I knew you wanted to practice law, but—”

  Betty was right, Diane decided later, making partner wasn’t that important. Diane went back
to the office and ran into Didi, who was bursting with office gossip. One of the middle-aged partners had left his wife and shacked up with a first-year associate. Everybody was shocked at the partner’s many blunders: he hadn’t closed out the joint financial accounts; he hadn’t bothered to conceal that he’d moved in with the young associate; he hadn’t discussed it with Stoppard or the other powerful partners who might disapprove. And as for the first-year associate, well, her career was finished. “They’re both crazy,” Didi said.

  But they were in love. Maybe they had flipped, but if not, if it was passion, then why should the senior partner care if he got screwed in the divorce settlement, if he got hassled by Stoppard, why should the first-year associate worry about a possible partnership seven or eight years hence? Why should a career block happiness?

  Yes, Diane no longer believed that justice would prevail in the world, that blacks would ever be given equal opportunity, that there would be peace, that the rich would get poorer, and the poor richer, or that any of the dreams of her college days would come true—but to go to the other extreme, and decide that making partner in a law firm was more important than her own peace of mind, that was madness.

  Diane said none of this to Didi. She merely nodded at the titillated Didi and thought: I don’t even need the money. Once alone in her office, Diane called Peter.

  “Do you care,” she asked her husband without a preliminary, “if I look for other work?”

  “Like what?” Peter said.

  “I don’t know, teaching, maybe even public-interest law. No, that could be a heavy caseload. Anything that leaves me more time to be with Byron.”

  Silence. What was he calculating? The cost to him?

  “Are you worried about the money?” Diane asked.