Only Children

by Rafael Yglesias

  “Mommy said no,” Byron blubbered.

  “We’ll get another,” Peter said, and felt much better. Forgive all this. He had his motive right at last. Forgive it all, his mischief, her rage. “We’ll get another. You’ll play.”

  “No, we won’t.” Diane was there, like a ghost, appearing whole, from silence to full volume. “You can’t fix everything with your money for him. He broke it. That’s it. He has to learn that what he does has consequences.”

  Byron shivered in Peter’s arms. He pressed himself against Peter’s chest, an animal hiding in a cave.

  “You can’t just appear and make everything magically perfect,” she said to Peter. Her eyes burned black in the ringed hollows of her dark face.

  Peter clutched Byron and made no answer.

  She’s declared war on us, he thought, and his throat dried up again.

  “YOU’D BETTER get me something to read about being Jewish,” Nina said, watching the streaming lights of the West Side. The car bucked and slid on the patchwork repairs of the decaying highway. Their roughness had done nothing to prevent an exhausted Luke from immediately passing out in his car seat. His head lolled to one side as if partially severed.

  “Huh?” Eric said. He glanced away from the road to show her, in the glowing half-light, an incredulous face.

  “Or you’ll have to explain to Luke what the stories are.”

  “What stories? The ovens? How Woody Allen became a sex symbol? What are we talking about?”

  “God, Eric. I mean, Passover”—she hesitated before pronouncing the word—“Hanukkah. The stories of the holidays.”

  Eric didn’t answer. He nodded to himself, with a sneer on his lips. “Okay,” he said after a bit.

  “I’m going to tell him about Jesus.”

  “You are?”

  “Yes. So you’d better give Judaism equal time.”

  “Why the hell are you gonna tell him about Jesus? You don’t go to church.”

  “It’s part of who he is. He’s half Jewish and he’s half Christian—”

  “This is ’cause of fucking Sadie! I could kill that woman!” Eric lurched forward in his seat. He took his hands off the steering wheel and made as if to strangle the windshield. The car weaved slightly out of their lane.

  “Eric!” Nina reached for the wheel.

  He grabbed it back. “Calm down. I’m not gonna kill us. God, that woman is a walking migraine. She’s just trying to get under your skin with all that crap about whether—”

  “It’s got nothing to do with Sadie. I’ve thought—”

  “Of course it does! She’s the Howard Cosell of Passover. She goes to aggravate people!”

  Nina laughed. “Eric, you know Luke. He heard all that talk. Tomorrow he’ll start asking questions. I have to answer them. And even if Sadie hadn’t done it, sooner or later it would come up. You can postpone it for a while, but eventually you have to tell him who he is and what it means.”

  “He’s our son!” Eric shouted as he wildly switched from one lane to another to pass a sluggish car. “He’s not a kike or a goy. He’s our goddamn son.”

  “Eric, you can’t teach Luke to hate himself because he’s Jewish.”

  “What?” Eric looked hurt, not that surface turbulence of irritation at Sadie, but the deeper worry, the look of self-doubt, that he often brought home from the office.

  “Sometimes, from the way you act with your family, it makes me think you married me because I’m not Jewish.”

  “That is one of the reasons I married you.”

  Nina let this hang in the air for a moment, sniffing it for malodorousness.

  Eric glanced at her. “What’s wrong with that? Isn’t one of the reasons you married me because I’m not a Wasp?”

  “I didn’t think about it,” Nina answered.

  “Oh, come on, you must’ve.”

  “Did you also marry me because of my money?” Nina felt brave asking this; she felt reckless.

  Eric sat up and straightened his usually hunched shoulders. He didn’t look at her and his tone was clipped and formal. “What money? You didn’t have any. And you still don’t.”

  This evasion disappointed Nina. Made her angry. “You know what I mean. My family money.”

  “When I met your family, I thought they had to be broke. They wore crappy clothes, they complained about every nickel, they bragged about how cheaply they got things—”

  “You’re not being honest, Eric.” She got that out, but then turned away to look out her window at the bouncing city, long and dark, secret and shining.

  “I’ve made more money for your family in the last year than any of them have for two generations,” Eric said, in a rage. The rage of the guilty, Nina thought. “They never gave us a nickel! We’re the only one of their children who remember their anniversary, who’ve given them a grandchild, and the only money we get is a percentage, a tip, a gratuity, for making them millions. My parents, who have nothing, nothing, gave us twice as much money when we got married—”

  “I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” Nina said, still watching the city, dark and glowing on the water—

  “I see. You insult me and then the discussion’s over. Great.”

  She wanted to cry. This wasn’t the funny, excited boy she married. He was as ugly as these concrete streets, dirty and unchanging, lit up for show, but dark and lonely, the welcoming glow nothing more than a lie.

  “All right,” Eric suddenly said as if answering a question, although they had been silent for a while. “The truth is I married you because you were completely different from all the girls I had ever met. I didn’t marry you for your money, but I knew money and you were connected, that one way or another it would come along.”

  Of course, he knew I would one day inherit, he knew that Father’s cheapness only meant there was lots of money, he must have known, and that’s why he wanted a child, an heir, the only grandchild so far, the firstborn.

  MOMMY. MOMMY. Warm in the cool, whispering, “Shhh, we’re almost home.”

  “Do you want the stroller?” Daddy’s strong voice asked.

  “Shhh,” Mommy said, and Daddy sang to her.

  In the great green room there was a telephone, and a red balloon—

  Way, way up, in the slice between the buildings, floating on the sky, was the moon.

  “Moooon,” Luke tried to say in his sleepy throat.

  “Yes,” Mommy whispered. “It’s a full moon.”

  So big to look at. He closed on her soft pillows, pressed his nose on them, and felt her blanket arms cover him. …

  Byron says: come on Luke, stay with me. We don’t like the grown-ups. And they don’t like us.

  No!

  Come with me, Luke. We don’t like the grown-ups. And they don’t like us.

  No!

  Byron dances in the sand. He calls from the top of the slide. Always faster. Always stronger. Come with me, Luke.

  “Mommy!”

  “Shhhh, we’re just in the elevator. You’ll be in your nice crib soon.”

  “I love you, Luke.” Daddy scratched a kiss.

  Press into the pillows and fall on the arms.

  “I like them, Byron.”

  Come with me, come with me. We don’t need the grown-ups.

  Good night, Moon.

  Good night, Luke.

  Part Three

  13

  D IANE LET GO. She opened her clenched fingers and watched her identity float up, away from impossible standards, smaller and smaller against the passive blue sky of her surrender.

  Peter said, “I’ll take Byron to the violin lessons,” and she dared him, with a release: “Good.”

  When Byron appeared at the bedside, rubbing his eyes, saying, “I peed in my bed,” she said, “Good.” And turned on her side, away from him, back into the dark, the private night of sleep.

  Her mother said, “I’ll come up, stay with you for a few days and help with Byron’s birthday.” And Diane said, “Go
od,” a spectator while her mother ran the house for the week.

  I quit, she had told Stoppard.

  I quit, she told Peter.

  I quit, she told Byron.

  I’m glad you came, she told her mother.

  Diane made the bathroom her pleasure palace, retiring there almost every night with a paperback mystery, a glass of wine, a pack of cigarettes, a box of something to munch, cereal, popcorn, M & M’s, anything little and crunchy, and treated herself, her stomach, her mind, her clitoris, climaxing with closed lips, surrounded by the paper wreckage of her snacks, the low moans drowned by the mumping water.

  She shopped, the horizon of her wardrobe widened to infinite distance by her escape from the legal compound. She could dress like a Greenwich Village wife, or a suburban bourgeois, or a bag lady for that matter. She was shy at first, and needed a girlfriend for company and permission. Diane took along Betty Winters, or Didi, or her old friend from summer camp, Karen, whom Diane had seen less and less of with each passing year of marriage to Peter; but now Diane reversed that trend. Each was good for prodding Diane to experiment with different looks—Betty bourgeois, Didi seductive single, Karen outright weird. Diane spent uncounted thousands (she refused to total up the credit-card bills) and, after ruthlessly discarding her old clothes, put the new things in her closet. Each morning, she was tempted into wearing one of the new outfits, but more often than not, she ended up in her comfortable worn jeans, a soft cotton T-shirt, and a loose sweater. Only those incredibly expensive boots Karen had talked her into buying got real use. Even at self-indulgence, she was a failure.

  Diane stayed clear of Byron. When he refused an order, she walked away and left him undressed, the toilet unflushed, the meal uneaten, the park unexplored, the toys strewn on the floor. During the week there was Francine to do those things and, on the weekends, she noticed that every once in a great while, like the appearance of Halley’s comet, Peter would actually straighten the living room, take the bag of cookies away from Byron, take Byron to the park (well, that happened only once), or charm Byron, as if he were a reluctant foundation board member, into another bite of vegetable.

  But the applications to schools were due soon. Diane waited for Peter to volunteer. She mentioned the fact.

  “You’d better get going,” he said.

  She was so beaten, so fearful of insisting on anything, she said meekly, “Will you help?”

  “I don’t have time,” Peter answered. “I think you do,” he added, the closest he had come—yet—to a complaint about her sloth.

  She set aside one day, and groaned herself up to the task. It was like starting a car that had been idle all winter. She needed seven cups of coffee in succession to clear the sludge in her system and make the phone calls. She hired a limo for the day, an insane extravagance, and went by each institution to get its forms. Her hand trembled when she filled out the application for Byron to take another IQ test, a prerequisite for all these fancy schools. The first try at that had been the birth of her rages at Byron. Peter’s got to take him to the test, she said to herself.

  When Diane stopped by Hunter to get its application, she felt old hopes rise, but sickeningly—a rich meal gone bad in her belly. All the parents Diane knew were obsessed by Hunter and the other top schools. When Luke’s parents came to brunch, that was all they talked about, Hunter, Dalton, Trinity, Collegiate—and whether the Grace Church School in their own neighborhood was good enough.

  If Byron gets into Hunter, she thought, clutching the forms as the hired car pulled away from the curb, then no one will know I’m a failure.

  Hunter wanted something none of the other schools did: “Please write a description of your child’s accomplishments and abilities. If more space is needed, you may attach additional sheets.”

  What? My child’s accomplishments? Well, he forced me to face the fact that I have no endurance. He can break a violin in a single gesture. He’s the only person in the world who had the nerve to inform my mother-in-law that she is going to die. I think it was news to her. He also knows the network scheduling of cartoon shows by heart, now that I’ve given up discipline and let him watch hour after hour after hour.

  Abilities? Well, he can eat three slices of pizza and top that off with ice cream, but a stalk of broccoli makes him full. He can climb up slides, he can come out of a bath dirtier than he went in, he can program a compact disk player to repeat the same cut of Cats, but he can’t put on underpants.

  What if she didn’t hype Byron on the applications? What if all the mothers and fathers told only the bad rather than the good? Could Hunter still pick out the best and brightest? Were there brilliant bad qualities?

  She sat at home, Hunter’s blank page in front of her. I could call his brattiness independence, his stubbornness determination, his knowledge of television schedules a sign of concentration and memory. I could say he’s honest and forthright for telling his grandmother she’s going to die, and his refusal to dress shows a love of nature.

  “Mommy!” Byron pushed in the door, no knock, self-assured, a prince with run of the castle. “Can I have a cookie?”

  She nodded. She had resigned her authority, but she couldn’t actually speak the words of acquiescence. Her head was forever bobbing, like one of those dolls, semidecapitated, a spring allowing the head to bounce when touched ever so lightly.

  “Mommy says I can!” Byron shouted to Francine, and he skipped off, humming a cartoon-show theme.

  I could say that his ability to sleep in urine-soaked pajamas shows a brave disregard for personal comfort. And the way Byron orders his one friend, Luke, around, insisting he build everything, turning Luke into a mere spectator, pushing Luke like a cart from one spot to another, thoroughly dominating him, shows leadership qualities. Never mind that it’s the same kind of command Hitler mastered.

  And now he hits adults if you say no to him. Bunches up his little hand into a bony fist and whacks you on the shoulder. That shows a sense of equality with authority.

  The tip of her pen inadvertently touched the paper and a little squiggle appeared. She was exhausted from her ride around the city. I quit my job so I could do more with Byron and instead I do less. The pen kept on sliding, like Byron, with a mind of its own. The squiggle went down the page, a thin blue river running on the white landscape to nowhere.

  UNCONSCIOUS. A basketball player hitting three pointers. A home-run hitter on a streak. Beating every stoplight on a drive through the city. Being high. Closing your eyes, and becoming the music, your body moving to the rhythm with the sound—even before you heard the notes.

  Every stock Eric picked, every sale, even on prices, he got right every time. The words in the business pages burned into Eric’s consciousness, and sparked immediate decisions. He could glance at a headline and see a stock result. He could listen to an economist and know whether he was right or wrong. The air itself was full of nourishment. Unconscious. Don’t wake me. Don’t let this reality become a dream.

  Oh, to be sure, the market had rallied across the board, everyone was doing well, but not as well as Eric. Between the second and third year of handling Tom’s money, with the market up 40 percent, Eric had tripled his father-in-law’s portfolio, his own, and those of Joe’s clients who let Eric trade for them. In effect, that was the entire clientele, since Joe now tagged along with Eric’s choices, still making some moves of his own, but few, very few. Joe went with the hot hand.

  Eric almost woke up when he realized that all the discretionary money of the firm, fifty million dollars, danced from stock to stock at his tune. Sammy nicknamed Eric the Wizard, duplicating Eric’s fantasies. Of course, Sammy said it with a sneer, but a thin one, and he listened respectfully when Eric talked, his previously hectoring tone erased by Eric’s profits.

  Everybody loves a winner.

  Everybody but Nina.

  For eight years Eric had felt shame, embarrassed that he hadn’t produced for Nina, that he wasn’t a figure of success for her to be pro
ud of, and now, now that he stood gleaming in triumph for all the world to see, she walked past him as though he were a familiar statue covered with pigeon shit.

  She’s jealous ’cause her family is so proud of me, Eric decided, and thus forgave, or at least ignored, Nina’s cool behavior.

  Eric didn’t have time for Nina anyway. Eric’s success with Tom’s money was bragged about at Boston dinner parties, and country-club foursomes. That meant nights out with prospective and current clients.

  It changed his relationship with Luke. Luke sadly lowering his head as Eric approached for a good-bye kiss, Luke pretending another evening without Daddy was okay, Luke talking while Eric tried to read the endless flow of business reporting, tried to brand himself with more information—yes, yes, yes, Luke, okay, Daddy has to read, Daddy has to think—Luke’s watching Eric go with baleful eyes became almost a nightly event.

  But Eric had to keep on. The money rushed in, what he had most wanted, what he had thirsted for, waves of it, and he needed new ideas, he couldn’t just keep buying the same stocks. Tom’s friends gave Eric even more than Tom had originally. These days, if Eric tried to take a position in a thinly traded stock, his own buying would send the price up 3 to 4 percent.

  And then one day, one innocuous day, Eric’s luck hit the wall.

  The averages all went to new highs. But three-quarters of Eric’s stocks didn’t move at all. The portfolios—their daily value printed out with ruthless accuracy at the market close and put in Eric’s hands to study at home—showed a slight loss.

  Okay. Not serious.

  The next day, another record for the Dow Industrials, for the S&P Five Hundred, third-highest trading volume in Stock Exchange history. The few picks Joe had stuck with, boring, obvious blue-chip stocks, went wild. Eric’s stocks, the high-flying OTC growth issues, just died, dumb spectators at the carnival.

  Sammy was on Eric immediately: “Your stuff’s looking constipated.”

  The word enraged Eric. Constipation was Luke’s one flaw, a problem that had gotten worse with every solution, a single malfunction that threatened the entire mechanism. The doctor’s chocolate laxative did nothing. Days went by with nothing coming out and Luke got less active with each one, until finally Luke sat immobilized, frightened to do anything, because—