Only Children

by Rafael Yglesias

  Luke nodded. “I made a tower,” he said, pointing.

  “Un-huh,” Pearl said earnestly, studying Luke’s little structure hard. “That’s for the guards.”

  Luke laughed. “To see!” he corrected.

  “Oh, of course it is!” Pearl said, shaking her head at her stupidity. “I should’ve known that.”

  Luke laughed loudly, his voice healing, his character reglued. “Yeah! Course, it’s for looking. What else could it be?”

  “That’s right,” Pearl agreed, her dentures gleaming. “I must be crazy to think it’s for guards.”

  “Yeah!” Luke said, getting to his feet to walk around his creation with pride. “Too small for people!” He roared at this and looked at them with joy, but his face, just as suddenly, went slack.

  The girl was back. She stood a few feet off, hands on her hips, staring at Luke’s castle with an envious conqueror’s rage.

  Pearl glanced at the little girl, lowered her voice to a threatening growl, and said, “Don’t be thinking of playing here. We’re playing here now. There’s plenty of room over there.” The girl shrugged her shoulders and moved off.

  “I want to go home,” Luke said anyway, and reached for Nina’s hand.

  “All right,” she agreed, the relief Pearl had brought, its refreshment, so quickly dissipated. “Thank you,” she said to Pearl. “How can I reach you?”

  “I’ll call you,” Pearl said, and wrote down Nina’s phone number. “I’ll talk to my woman tonight,” Pearl added when they left.

  At home that night Nina hesitated again, this time with Eric. She hesitated even though the idea of hiring Pearl wouldn’t be a shock. Eric knew that Nina planned to return to school in a month and he knew all about Pearl (although he’d never met her). Still, Eric, despite his apparent calm, would be nervous at the actual event of turning over Luke’s care to someone else. She worried he might balk at the last minute. Perhaps, on meeting Pearl, he would find fault with her to prevent Nina’s departure.

  Luke, despite the miraculous cure of his colic, had never become an easy child. He remained serious and careful, even his best moods diluted by a wary distrust. But he was a sweet two-year-old, very loving, and very smart—sometimes it seemed like a terrible intelligence to Nina, that it was the intelligence which made him difficult. Luke slept through the night, he didn’t fuss about his food, or going places, he could be taken anywhere, restaurants, movies, trips, he showed no signs of the terrible twos, and yet he was completely dependent on Nina—or Eric. He almost never played by himself. He asked constant questions. He wanted to know the name of every object. He noticed every street horror. He feared the crowd of other children at the playground. He let his pail and shovel be taken from him without a protest, preferring to be stripped of his possessions rather than fight for them. He seemed to want and need a limitless supply of love, not things, not showy attention, but real contact, conversation, reading, play, intimacy, and patience. He could detect even a subsonic whine of irritation in response to a request and would then refuse to accept the giving, like the Jesus of her childhood sermons, wanting only pure love, not grudging duty. But granted generous love and ungrudging devotion, he was a miracle of happiness: easy, laughing, witty, and kind.

  Most maddening of all, Luke never showed his good side to others. Adults expecting the usual performance by a baby—gurgling laughs at funny faces, easy clowning at his own infant clumsiness, automatic pleasure at their friendliness—were shocked by Luke’s obvious suspicion of them, his unforgiving self-critical attitude at his own failures, his anger at being teased, his obvious desire to be their equal.

  “Do you remember me? Give me a kiss. I brought you a present. Would you like me to play with you?” All those offers (always made, Nina noticed, with every expectation by the adults that their generosity was special, impossible to refuse), offers made by grandparents, uncles, aunts, neighbors, friends, were answered by Luke ducking his head and mumbling: “No.” He would give them nothing, no matter how high the bribe. It almost frightened her; his lofty lack of self-interest sometimes seemed inhuman.

  To have found Pearl, someone whom he did like, someone who gave to children without vanity, without expectation of reward— that was Pearl all right, a woman of apparently limitless self-sacrifice and patience—to have found her and for Luke to already know and like her … it was a miracle. Surely Eric would understand that.

  So—nervous—Nina told Eric about her conversation with Pearl. Eric had begun to watch a videotape of a cable show about the stock market and he asked her to wait until it was over. She sat patiently while Eric shouted answers to the people on the program, applauding or booing as if the opinions were base hits or errors. Finally he listened to Nina. Eric nodded, said great, and that he would arrange to be home early any day that Pearl could come by. But Eric’s legs jiggled up and down, his eyes became solemn (like Luke’s thoughtful, worried look before nap time), and it was obvious to Nina that Eric was scared by the prospect of leaving his son in the care of a stranger.

  She finally understood, after two years, that Luke was a possession of Eric’s. Not one of many, but the possession. Eric loved only through ownership, so for him the emotion wasn’t false, it was real love. Nevertheless, it required performance, that Luke, like some stock, gain in value and popularity. Eric ended every night with a prayerful litany: “Luke remembered such and such Luke can say such and such, he listens when I read, he’s so handsome—” and so on. All of that was true, but this wasn’t pleasure, it was pride.

  She almost hated Eric for the way he loved Luke. She felt jealous of the admiration, fearful of its hubris, and worried by the implication of pressure in the future. Eric had already begun to fuss about Luke’s education, clipping articles about the IQ test used for admittance to private nursery schools. He assessed the motor and language skills of other children in the park, noting that Luke was taller than others his age, and had a much larger vocabulary. He bragged about Luke’s remarkable memory to their friends, and worst of all, Eric’s conversations with Nina were always about Luke. Eric laughed about Luke; he hugged Luke as if he were clutching a life preserver; he taped the financial TV shows to have more time to play with Luke and watched them during the few hours she and Eric were alone. All of Eric’s energies were directed at the stock market and at Luke; there was nothing for her.

  “He’s just like me,” Eric would say about anything Luke did well.

  “That’s the Wasp in him,” Eric would say about Luke’s shyness or his passivity in fighting off other children in the sandbox.

  And Luke adored his daddy. Daddy came home with toys, freed Luke from gravity, carried him into the atmosphere, high above the world on his broad, thick shoulders. Daddy never yelled. Daddy never said no.

  But Nina had to say no. Nina was always there. Nina yelled. She was vain enough to think that her parenting was better, her love more genuine. But did Luke know that? Did he seem happier with his father because he really was or because Luke knew that Daddy couldn’t take anything else? When Luke crashed into something and cried, the look on Eric’s face was more pathetic. When Luke lost a pail to a marauding toddler, he seemed even more humiliated than usual if Eric was around. Luke would burst into tears, not at the loss of the object but at Eric’s painfully slow method of recovery or, even worse, Eric’s monologues of advice to Luke about how to handle the next confrontation. Luke would listen, head bowed, his chin tight, hating himself, hating his father’s supposedly reassuring tone, eyes darkened in their pain. In dreadful pain, she knew. She knew. She knew how much the kindly advice of a disappointed father can bruise and bruise and then bleed later.

  But how could she tell Eric? Eric would never believe her conviction that if he blew up at Luke and yelled with all his might, told Luke to bash the next grasping two-year-old in the face, that Eric’s rage, for all its apparent brutality, would be better for Luke than Eric’s labored critique, delivered in a compassionate tone.

  Luke ha
d taken to refusing to go to the park on weekends, something Eric encouraged, it seemed to Nina, and she believed their twisted relations with each other about the other kids was the cause. She wanted to correct Eric, to get him to behave like a father, to push Luke, out into the world, to open his big arms and let go.

  But every attempt to introduce her observations provoked immediate defensiveness: “I said that to him! But he gets too upset. I can’t. I think—I mean, he’s two years old, he’s got plenty of time to learn how to defend his things. I mean, I think he’s kind of noble—not worrying about his possessions, but worrying over the other kid’s feelings.”

  Eric’s attitude, his casual acceptance of Luke’s lack of aggression, seemed bizarre and self-contradictory. All Eric cared about, in his own life, was money. The gathering and growing of money. How could he accept Luke’s passivity?

  And her own disgust with Luke’s meek, selfless manner, Luke’s horror of argument or disapproval, his total absence of competitiveness—wasn’t that like herself? Nina never cared when one of their friends bought a new car, got a house in the Hamptons; she was never provoked by others bragging or teasing, by their accomplishments, honors, possessions. Like Luke, she preferred to sit with nothing, to have herself and the universe, rather than squeeze into the squashed planet of things. Why shouldn’t her son, with her blood, her bones, her eyes, be the same?

  She knew the answer. Because he was a man. She hated the answer. But the answer was in her heart, not her head. He was a man and they would take things from him if he didn’t fight. Maybe feminism had changed things for women (she doubted it, but she hoped so), but for the men? No. They still slaughtered their own.

  Look at those boys in the park. Carrying swords or whirring, flashing guns. Planting their feet, little hands on little hips, chins out, fists in the air: “I have the power!” Humming cartoon sound tracks, smashing castles with their feet, chasing pigeons with murderous delight.

  Soft, sweet Luke, with his milk skin and dark mop of hair, his big bay water blue eyes, resting his head against her breasts, just wasn’t mean enough for the big boys. He had a year or two before having to face them, before her protection would no longer be reasonable, before he would be considered weak.

  Someone had to push him, push him out into the world. Luke couldn’t afford to be like her. He needed big Eric, angry, hungry, greedy Eric, to darken Luke’s skin and cover those vulnerable eyes with the opaque shine of ambition and callousness.

  “NO!” BYRON shouted. The glass that wasn’t slid up and down easy. But it wouldn’t stay. How funny. Push it closed. Let go. It dropped!

  “Byron. Stop it.”

  “Taxi! Taxi! Taxi!” Byron said, and dove into his mother’s lap.

  “Do you know what that’s for?”

  “What’s for?”

  “What you were playing with. You put the money in there.”

  “There?”

  “Yes. So the driver can take it and give you change.”

  “Silly,” Byron said. He slid down, down, down into rubber depths where it smelled of the dark. Mommy pulled at him. He grabbed the rope of her arm and swung, monkey in a tree.

  “Byron! Stop it. You have to sit up here.”

  Her fingers dug into the pockets under his shoulders. Felt like they poked through. Hurt. “Owww!” She put him back onto the seat. He kicked at the glass that wasn’t. He kicked at the money drawer and banged it up. Bang! It fell back right away.

  “Stop!” Mommy held his leg down. He pressed against her a bit to feel the strength, the firmness of her grasp.

  “Is that glass?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “That!” He flung his arm in the direction of the partition.

  “No, it’s plastic.”

  “No, it isn’t!” he shouted. Plastic was a toy.

  “Yes, it is. It’s plastic.”

  “Plastic has colors!” Mommy never told the truth.

  “This is clear plastic.”

  She sounded fast. Running away. “What’s clear?” Byron shouted, and bounced against her, bounced against the mommy wall.

  “No color.” She pushed him away. “We’re here. I have to pay.”

  “I wanna pay!”

  “No!” Mommy shouted.

  MOMMY AND DADDY were going to leave him. Luke knew. He knew suddenly. Mommy and Daddy were going to go outside. But not with him. Outside into the dark. The glowing dark. He knew. Grandma and Grandpa were there because Mommy and Daddy were going.

  “Hey, Luke. Can Grandpa hold you?”

  No, Luke thought. He turned away. The sea rug floated between him and Daddy. Daddy wants to go. Luke ran to stop him.

  “Luke,” Daddy said sadly.

  Luke ran into the arm basket, jumped into the elevator, up in the air to Daddy’s big face and got a kiss. But that was bad. Daddy’s arms held him tight. Too tight. “Nina!” Daddy called, his voice crying.

  Grandpa was next to him. Holding a stuffed bear. “What’s his name?”

  Luke pressed against Daddy’s shirt. It smelled hot and flat and new. Daddy was going.

  Mommy came. Her shoes crashed on the hallway floor. They weren’t her staying-home shoes. They sounded like spoons crashing. She was leaving.

  “Mommy!” Luke put out his arms.

  She took him, tossed him, rolled him in her arms. She wore smooth clothes, like his blanket, soft and slippery. She smelled like Grandma and stores and bathrooms—not home Mommy. She was going out. Out into the glowing night.

  “Play with me,” he said.

  She kissed his stomach, his neck, his cheek—warm, liquid, soft bites. Then she held him up to her face. Her lips were crayon red; her eyes glowed like the night. Outside.

  “Play with me,” he said.

  “Mommy and Daddy are going out. Grandma and Grandpa are going to stay—” Mommy sounded hard, like television.

  “We’re gonna have lots of fun,” Grandpa said, close, very close, his big daddy face and white head a bright light, a scary bright white.

  Luke ducked into Mommy, into her smelly blanket, her soft pillow chest. He wanted to be wrapped in her, and sleep warm in her bed.

  “Should we do the bedtime things before we go?” Mommy asked, the real mommy, her voice like the sunny day, clear and lit, not glowing. “Daddy can read you a story—”

  “You read me,” Luke said, and felt his eyes hurt and squeezed and wet. He knew he was lost now. They would leave.

  “Okay,” Mommy said like a kiss.

  PETER TOLD Rachel. At least, he tried to tell her about Larry. She tilted her head and listened with open, wondering sympathetic eyes. But Peter felt she was puzzled. After all, what did it amount to? When Peter was eight and nine, Larry, taking advantage of opportunities created by living with Gary, asked Peter a lot of leering questions, made suggestions about masturbation, reached in Peter’s pants and rubbed his penis, once put it in his mouth; the incidents were all brief, never brutal, and when Peter finally was able to refuse, Larry stopped. Peter told this to Rachel guiltily, his eyes averted, his voice low, halting, summarizing the items, a sinner confessing. She looked puzzled when he came to the end. Was that all? her look seemed to say.

  But then Rachel hugged him for an answer. She put her hand behind his head and pressed his nose into her shoulder. “Poor baby,” she prayed over him. “You must have been so scared.”

  She trapped him in the embrace, as if he were slipping away and had to hang on.

  He felt awkward in Rachel’s arms, irritated by her motherly softness, although that’s what he had come for, that’s why he had called the office to say he would miss the staff meeting. That’s why he had told her: to be petted, to be soothed. But once in her arms, he wasn’t a sad little boy anymore; he was a disgruntled teenager. He wanted to shake free, peel off her sticky affection.

  “It’s okay,” he said, and pushed his way out of her spidery love.

  “It must have made you angry.”

  “I’m
not angry,” Peter answered, and looked at his watch. He wanted to leave. The nervous morning, going to Larry’s building, coming to Rachel’s, had made nonsense of his day. He had told his secretary he had family business to take care of—how could he show up now?

  “You’re not?”

  “No,” he answered, surprised at her perceptiveness. “I’m not angry at you—I just needed to breathe.”

  “At me? Why would you be angry at me? I meant at that man.”

  God, what a mistake. No, he wasn’t angry at Larry. He didn’t believe Larry still existed; that’s why Gary’s account of Larry’s current activities was a surprise; that’s why he had gone to the building lobby, to see if Larry really had such a company. Larry was a fossil of his past. Like Tyrannosaurus standing gaunt in a museum, Larry was a bone-dead terror; this abrupt growth of muscle and skin was more weird than anything else.

  And there was another worry, something he felt constrained to tell Rachel, because she was his mistress and Peter didn’t think he should talk about his son with her. Byron, when he was grabbed in the park by a pervert, brought home the implication of Larry’s continued presence. There must be other boys, other lives being— what? Ruined. No, hardly. But touched, touched forever. Not merely the temporary contact of lust, but the lingering interrogation of the past. Not merely the cracks it made in sexuality, but also faith in parents, the trust of authority, and the vague, but persistent, disgust with intimacy. Other boys. Other boys. Happening now. Peter could see their faces, and (he had to admit this) what happened to them was partly his fault.

  Wasn’t it?

  He could stop it, couldn’t he?

  Couldn’t he? Well, perhaps—

  Couldn’t he?

  NINA KISSED Luke’s sweet soft cheek as she laid him down into his crib. He had grown so big that letting go of him was a relief.

  “Ma, Ma,” he said through his pacifier.

  “Shhh,” she whispered. “If you need anything, Grandma and Grandpa will get it.”

  Luke whimpered. He pressed his face into the mattress, his legs curled up, and he sucked hard on the pacifier.