Last night Diane had had a twenty-minute conversation with Byron over the phone; he rattled off the things they did in school and concluded, “You know, Mommy, I think I’m going to like growing up.”
“Oh,” Diane said, and held herself back from laughing. “How come?”
“Well, Daddy said I go to school for eighteen years while I grow up. I think I’m really going to like that.”
Peter got on afterward and sounded like a competent parent of many year’ experience It was bizarre.
Maybe I was the problem. Me. With my ceaseless demands, my endless criticism.
Whom did I do all that work for? Nobody needed it. Nobody wanted it.
“We miss you,” Peter said last night at the end of her conversation with Byron. But he didn’t sound sincere. The facts didn’t bear him out.
My mother needs me, she answered herself walking into the cardiac care unit. Do I take her back to New York? Insist to Peter we move into a larger apartment with a room for Mom?
That frail, scared, greedy, foolish woman. Diane loved her.
Diane set her face into a strong look of confidence and walked into the room.
The bed was empty.
“Ma?” she called out.
And she was hovering outside the window, looking at the Diane in the doorway: dressed in nice clothes, her hair brushed, her face made up, carrying the newspapers, and a take-out container of coffee.
“Ma?” this nice person called out.
Diane rushed to herself, smashed through the window, across the linoleum floor, rushed up into her own body, became herself, and began to scream: “Where is my mother? Where is my mother?”
Two nurses, both of them familiar faces, ran in and began to talk, to her and at each other. A mistake had been made, they were trying to say, Diane was supposed to have been called.
They didn’t have to finish their explanations. Diane had forgotten to worry about this, about a sudden event during her absence. Diane had forgotten to be vigilant; she could have talked them into letting her sleep at the hospital, she could have—but she didn’t and so, of course, Lily was dead.
WHEN NINA told Tad’s secretary she’d call Eric back, Nina remembered the smell of Luke’s hair. She had bent down to kiss Luke as she left him at the play group, but he was being called by David, by Katy, by Josh, by Rachel—“Hello Luke!” “Luke! Look at my new shoes!” “Luke! come play with me!”—and Nina’s lips managed to catch only the top of Luke’s head as he moved toward his friends. Hours later, at work, she could still feel the fur in her nose, the smell of baked life from his scalp, fresh and warm: soft hair, hard skull.
To Nina and Eric’s astonishment, according to the two young women who ran the prenursery school, Luke was the favorite of his class, always in demand, chosen by the other children to arbitrate disputes or as a spokesman for their desires. Today’s easy separation from Luke was thoroughly different from the first month of taking Luke to the prenursery school. Then he had clung to Nina’s side, peering out from a lowered brow and half-concealed head. He was a growth on her body; baby kangaroo in the pouch. Now Luke woke up early, asking, “Is it time for school?” He squirmed out of her pouch, rushed from her at the entrance, ran to his world. He loved his new friends, their habits, their mistakes, their games. Nowadays Nina had to plan ahead for the weekends, ask Luke which friend he wanted to see, make a date, and then tactfully say no to the others when their mothers phoned, eager to reserve time with her Luke. Solitary Nina had raised a friend to all toddlers. She worried his popularity was merely a by-product of his poor self-defense mechanisms, but it didn’t seem to be in practice: Luke had the ultimate threat, that there were others who wanted to play with him, and so he was wooed, given what he wanted, without the need to demand it.
Luke’s development gave Nina confidence. When Tad turned over to Nina more and more of the supervision of the line, she felt competent, assured of the future, because her Luke, the mewling, unhappy, constipated, nervous infant, had grown into a strong, smart, loving, and happy child. Why didn’t it mean that to Eric? He was responsible for much of Luke’s maturation; why had Eric’s self-esteem declined?
Eric phoned in the midst of a hassle with two models. One had arrived late for a fitting and said she had to leave early for a shoot; Nina needed more time with her. Nina wanted to concentrate on persuading the model and Eric’s call was a distraction. “Ask him if I can call him back?” Nina said, and tried to reason with the model, but she overheard Tad’s secretary say to Eric, “Then where can she call you back?” and Nina smelled Luke’s hair from the morning: baked and soft and hard.
“Wait!” she called out. “I’ll take it.”
“Nina?” Eric’s voice answered her hello. He called out from the bottom of a canyon of New York noise—trucks, horns, shouting pedestrians.
“Eric? Where are you?”
“On the street.” He was desperate. “Can you—are you busy?”
“What’s wrong?”
“I’ve had it with Joe!” The words were strong, but Eric’s tone was scared.
“You’ve quit?”
“No, I—uh—I just told him. I’m going short the market, I can’t— I sold out all the stocks, your father’s stocks, and I’m gonna go short.”
Short meant betting against them, Eric had once explained to her. Over the years, Eric always made going short sound dangerous, immoral. It was something he was tempted to do and feared; he often spoke of it the way teenagers talk of breaking some rule; trying something adult they weren’t supposed to: sex, drugs, running away from home. She knew that much; it was a step Eric feared and desperately wanted to take.
He was babbling his financial talk now: “The P/E’s are too high, interest rates aren’t coming down anymore, everybody’s bullish— so who’s gonna buy? Everybody’s in the market, so there’s no one left. All the greater fools have bought. There’s the Iran-contra scandal, there’s—we’ve had a great run, but it’s over, it’s 1929 again. Joe says it’s 1928, but that’s exactly the way people get trapped, convincing themselves—”
“Eric,” Nina interrupted. He could go on endlessly and never state his problem. Like Luke, wanting you, the one he loves, to discover it for him. “Why aren’t you in the office? Have you had a fight with Joe or did you—”
“Yeah—I shouldn’t have left. I’ve gotta talk to Billy on the floor. I haven’t gone short yet. Just sold the longs. Nina!” he cried out. Music passed by him; a truck roared.
“What!”
“Nina,” he said again, this time in a sad, hopeless tone.
“Do you want to come here, Eric?”
“Can you come downtown?”
“No,” she managed to stammer out past her feeling that she was wrong to deny him her presence. But she had promised Tad the dresses would be fit today. “I just can’t. If you can come here, I can—”
“No, I—I gotta get back. Do you think I should call your father? Tell him what I’m doing?”
She felt disappointed by this. She had thought Eric wanted her, needed her—not her relationship to her father. “He’s put you in charge,” she answered. “Isn’t that right? Are you supposed to consult him on every move?”
“This is a reversal. What if Joe—he could be calling Tom right now.”
They were looking at her, the models, the tailor, Tad’s secretary. Waiting for her to take charge. Why did Eric have to stir the pot? Their life was so good, they were so lucky compared with everyone else, why couldn’t he let their happiness simmer quietly, why did he have to bring everything to a furious boil?
“Why don’t you come here, Eric? I’ll almost be done—we can go to lunch.”
“No. I gotta go. Call you later.”
And he was gone.
But, like Luke, his absence was incomplete. His voice inhabited the model’s clothes, shone on the tailor’s pins.
Months ago, after she had ignored Sal’s protestation of love, he had backed her against the wall on a
stairway at FIT and pushed his mouth at her. Nina had forced him off and said, “I don’t want you.” It had leapt out of her, this impolite sentence.
“I want you,” he had answered.
“But I don’t want you,” she shouted back. She couldn’t say that to Eric. She couldn’t say that to Luke. Sal’s face reddened. “You’re a cunt,” he said finally, and walked away.
Rejection met with rejection. The way of the world. Say yes or I’ll hate you. She had always said yes to Eric, now she said maybe, or do it my way, and he hung up quickly, cut her off from his confidences, looked at other women while walking with her, and his eyes were pained, wounded, a child without his chocolates.
I don’t care if you make money, Eric. She wanted to shout at him: I don’t care about money. We have enough.
What would he say?
She knew what he would feel. He would hate her.
THE LINEN was thick. Peter held the corner of the tablecloth between his index finger and thumb. He felt its solid weight.
Gail was across from him, studying the Four Seasons menu. Peter watched her face consider choices; thick with age and thought, it was the face of a very smart woman. At a cocktail party, Gail showed only a vacant pleasantness in her eyes, and her smooth hair, pulled back, seemed to strip her of weaponry; but in this pose, considering her choices, her eyes were clever and concentrated, her hand strong as it caressed her naked forehead. He imagined kissing his mother’s neck, her long, thin neck, and feeling her head lean on his in surrender to the pleasure.
Peter squeezed his eyes shut to dissolve the image, as if it were really happening.
She must have been deliciously sexy, a tempting prize: thin body, arrogant mind, teasing wit. Kyle, his stepfather, had wanted her; he still puffed up proudly when he was introduced as her husband. Kyle had made his money years ago, when Peter was six; that unsophisticated westerner, his millions made by age forty, had come to New York and seen this jewel of the East, daughter of privilege, helpmate of the arts, and Kyle wanted his cock to conquer her, to be more important to her than even her own son.
I’d like to kill him.
(“Really?” Kotkin asked.“It’s your stepfather you want to kill?”
(Kotkin thinks I’m wrong, she thinks I’m really angry at my mother. “Maybe I hate my father.”
(“Why? If he didn’t have the affair?”
(“For not keeping her. For not making her happy?”
(“You mean, your father didn’t have a big enough cock to keep your mother happy?”
(No. Don’t say this. No. Let me be. I don’t want to know this. Maybe if I lie quietly and don’t speak, Kotkin will leave me alone.
(“Did you think you didn’t have a big enough cock to keep Larry happy?”
(“No, no,” he begged Kotkin.)
“What am I having?” Gail wondered aloud.
Me. You’re having me. I’m born again, without Jesus, without lies.
(“I didn’t know!” he shouted at Kotkin. “How could I project my fears of my father losing my mother when I thought my father had left her, had cheated on her? ‘Your father wasn’t satisfied with me,’ that’s what Gail told me.”
(“She said that?” Kotkin alert, happy, on the scent of some trail in her notebooks.
(“I don’t know what she said,” Peter despaired. “Give me a break. Gail never tells the truth. How can I know what she said?”
(“What do you think she said? Do you remember the night she told you?”
(Mom and Dad sat on the big chairs. Gail smoked.)
Gail smoked?
“Did you used to smoke?” Peter asked.
“Yes,” Gail said with a fond smile of remembrance. She raised her hand for the waiter’s attention. “I have exciting news, Peter. We’ll order and I’ll tell you.”
“What is it?” Peter blurted with a harsh, nervous laugh. “You’re pregnant?”
Gail looked at him as if he were vomit, her lips in a curl of disgust.
(“No,” he told Kotkin, thinking again. “That was when she told me she was going to have my half sister. They sat me on the couch and told me. She smoked throughout.”)
“We’d better order. You must be hungry,” Gail said, dismissing Peter’s joke. When they were done, Gail leaned forward, eager and happy. “I’m going to be appointed cultural commissioner.”
I could sell my story to the New York Post. Cultural czar son abused by neighbor. He laughed.
“You find that funny?” Gail blinked at him. “What’s wrong, Peter? You’re behaving horribly.”
(“Do you remember when they told you about the divorce?”
(“I guess not.”
(Silence. Disapproval. Kotkin thinks I’m lying, I’m blocking, I’m repressing, I’m ruining the session. Her notebooks are full. Empty them, Peter. Make her feel she’s a good therapist.)
“Do you remember Larry?”
“What?” Gail seemed distracted. She pushed her plate, scanned the table.
“Larry. Gary’s cousin. He was a child abuser. He felt us up.”
Gail sat, the screened sunlight trailing across half her face and body. The water glasses shimmered. Her lips parted. The perfect edges of her teeth glowed beneath the red. Her tongue appeared and touched them. “What do—he did that to you?”
“And Gary. Nothing horrible. Just safe sex.” Peter laughed again. People use wit to blunt their evil, he thought.
Gail covered her face, lean hands over her eyes and nose and mouth like a mask. She bowed her head.
(“What do you think your mother would say if you told her?”
(“I don’t know.”
(“Do you want to tell her?”
(“Yes. More than anything else. I want her to know what she did. I’d like someone to know, just for once, what stupid little shits they are. For once, I’d like someone to admit they did wrong and that nothing—nothing—explains it, or makes it right.”
(“Is this just your mother we’re talking about? Or everyone?”
(“Everyone.”
(“Including you?”
(“Not me.” Peter shifted his head and saw Kotkin’s shoes. “Not me,” he told Kotkin’s Reebok sneakers. “I’m perfect.”
(“And me?” Kotkin asked. “Am I also a little shit?”
(“You’re not real. You don’t exist.”)
Gail moved her hands away, twisting them together above her empty plate, wringing something out of them. “I didn’t know,” she said.
“I wasn’t a bad son, Mother. You were a lousy mother. My father wasn’t a lousy husband. You were a selfish, adulterous bitch.”
My God, I’m free.
Gail’s face trembled. She got small and wrinkled and old.
My God, I’m home. I’m out. I’m out of the sea of lies.
“Peter,” his old mother pleaded.
Beg me, Mother. Beg me for my love.
“Peter, that’s not true,” her voice watered, words sagging out of her throat, drowning in the air.
“You tell lies to protect yourself. I thought it was to hurt me. But the lies are to cover your nakedness. I’m not your son anymore. And Byron will have nothing to do with you. I don’t want to be reminded of your existence. It’s crazy—”
(“What do you think will happen if you say this to your mother?” Kotkin asked.
(“I think you’ll be out one customer.”
(Silence. Kotkin thinks I’m acting out, crazy, escaping from one jail cell into another.)
“It’s crazy, I know,” Peter groaned to the old woman who was his mother. “But I’ve never really been your son anyway. So let’s make it real. Let’s take away the fiction. Why should you have your illusions? I don’t have reality! Let’s take away your dreams, then maybe I can have some.”
He was crying. Happy five-year-old Peter was back in his cheeks, in his mouth, in his eyes, in every part of himself, crying at what they did to him, crying at their stupid, selfish love.
He pushed away from th
e table, fought to stand on the teetering world.
“I’m going home.”
Her face was strange, something old and different. I didn’t even know her.
“Home,” he sang to her. Maybe the word would tell her. Tell her his regret. “I wanted to love you.”
Peter covered his face on his way out. He didn’t want to see himself in the stranger’s eyes.
Go to the love you’ve got, Peter. Get there fast.
MOM DIED alone.
The doctor said it had happened fast, mostly during her sleep. Lily woke up with the episode already well under way; she suffered little, he claimed.
What bullshit. He was also in bed when it happened.
Diane tried to be rational. She went to the doctor, listened to his explanations, spoke to Lily’s friends, asked them where to arrange a funeral, found the director, made all these plans, all to happen quickly, to bury Lily as Lily would have wished: a respectable Jewish woman, with a solemn rabbi and a full house of her peers. Diane spent the day of her mother’s death being a good girl. She made all the right arrangements.
But orphans wander. In Philadelphia she was an orphan.
At first, she tried to stay. She sat in her mother’s kitchen, after the long, incredible day, and the event came to the door, entered, and sat at the table: Hello. Your mother died today. How do you feel?
She jumped up. Turned on the television. Cried.
Peter called to check on her and asked, Should we come down right now?
No, wait till the morning. Brave Diane. I’ll be all right.
We’ll come over, Lily’s friends said when they phoned.
No, no, brave Diane said, tomorrow. I want to be alone tonight.
Everyone said, We understand.
But Diane didn’t understand why she turned them away. Because I wasn’t there. I didn’t save her. And she cried, moaned in agony on her mother’s furniture. Peter said, “I’m very sorry. She loved you very much.”
For a second, she thought he was kidding her. He liked to be ironic, so ironic that the slow-witted took him literally and never knew they had been insulted.
But his voice choked when he repeated it: “I’m so sorry. She loved you very much.”
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