Only Children (13 page)

There was more wailing.

“Okay, let’s walk around.”

“No,” Nina said.

“But you just said—”

“They’re bringing him in afterwards to be fed. To help comfort him. I’d better stay. You go for a walk.”

“No,” he answered, angry that she could be casual about his presence. “I want to make sure it’s still on, for Christ’s sake.”

“Eric!” she said, laughing, but her eyes teared. “Don’t say things like that.”

“Well, that’s what we’re worried about! What’s the point in not saying it?”

“Nothing is going to happen,” she chided.

“You’re so full of shit with your brave act.”

“Come on,” she said, and offered her hand for comfort. “Shut up.”

He took her slim hand in his big, thick palm, disarranging her fingers so they were like pencils stored in a bowl. They waited.

“I can’t take this,” he whispered.

“Shhhh,” she said.

“How are you feeling?”

“Fabulous.” Her voice was listless.

“Seriously. How are the stitches?”

She winced at the mention of them. “I lied to them.”

“What?”

“I told them I had taken a crap. I haven’t.”

“You have to take a crap?”

“Before they let you go.”

“What? They won’t let you go until you take a dump? What kind of country are we living in?”

She tried to smile, but her worry weighed her mouth into a sorry grin. “They just want to make sure everything’s working okay. That the stitches and everything”—She shut her eyes, as if she could see the wound.

Eric nodded. The wailing could still be heard. “Maybe you shouldn’t be lying to them.”

“It’s nobody’s business whether I go to the bathroom!” Nina sat up with outrage, her back stiff with rebellion.

“Yeah, I think that’s in the Constitution.” He winked at her.

“That’s right,” Nina agreed. She tried another smile. Her skin was exhausted; even her freckles had paled into virtual nonexistence.

There was a knock on the door. A nurse looked in. “Put on your smock,” she said to Eric. “Baby’s here.”

Eric took the cloth gown from the hook on the door. It was wrinkled and stained with coffee from yesterday’s visit. “This is dirtier than my shirt.”

“There are laundered smocks at the nursery,” the nurse said, opening the door for Eric to pass. Beside her in the hallway, asleep in his bin, was Luke. Nina peered at Luke, an alert deer. “He’s sleeping,” the nurse told Nina. “How are you feeling? Haven’t done any more fainting, I hope?”

“Fainting?” Eric stopped on his way out, next to Luke. He looked down at his son. Luke’s exhausted head lay on its side. The eyelid looked puffy, worn-out.

“Nothing,” Nina said. “First night I was here, I got a little dizzy. Did they do the circumcision?”

“Didn’t the doctor come by?” the nurse asked with surprise.

“No,” Eric asked, afraid. “Why?”

“Supposed to,” the nurse said with disdain.

“Is everything all right?” Nina asked.

“He’s perfect,” the nurse said. “He’ll sleep for a while and then want to eat.”

Eric left and went to the nursery, finding a clean gown in a basket at the entrance. On his tall body, it looked like a short dress. The nurse on duty laughed at the sight. “You could use two of them,” she said.

He smiled pleasantly, but he wanted to punch her out. With their faint air of contempt and amused anticipation of nervousness and incompetence with children, the nurses made Eric feel he was a baby. When Eric got back to the room, the other nurse was lecturing Nina on how to change Luke’s diaper until his penis healed. Eric forced himself to listen. Some Vaseline had to be put on a gauze strip and placed on the wounded tip, “to prevent the raw skin from getting stuck to the diaper,” she said casually.

The image pushed Eric down into a chair and he crossed his legs. He wanted to laugh at himself, but couldn’t. His eyes went to Luke. Circumcision is insane, he judged, despite the ghosts of thousands of his forebears. More Jewish insanity, he thought. An image of the local Washington Heights temple, a tiny ugly modern building squeezed between two tall apartment houses, answered Eric unconvincingly. He remembered the first time his father took him to services. He was squeezed, like the temple, between the tall men, pushed along will-lessly, overwhelmed by their heavy smells and frightened by their low, rumbling voices. When the rabbi spoke of his people wandering for forty years in the Sinai, Eric imagined shuffling slowly amidst a crowd of the Washington Heights devout. He thought of the wandering as a rush-hour subway ride on the IRT, rather than a lonely journey in an immense desert.

“Poor baby,” Eric heard Nina say as she pulled the bin beside her. The nurse had left. Eric couldn’t speak. He watched Luke; his head rested heavily on the tiny mattress, revealing only a profile to study. The mouth worked from time to time for invisible succor. The bruises of birth were almost gone; Luke looked pretty, the small skull covered by a chaotic mass of black hair, curling up on the compressed fat nape of his neck. His back rose and fell with effort. His eye winced at a memory.

“Sorry,” Eric heard himself say.

Nina looked at Eric with remorse and affection. “He won’t remember,” she said, sounding unconvinced.

“How do you know? Now I feel like I remember.”

“No,” Nina protested, but uncertainly.

“And with me they had some schmuck do it. ‘The
mohel
is very safe,’ Dad said, trying to get me to do it with Luke. ‘Much safer than some
schwartzer
intern.’ ”

“Shhhh,” Nina said.

“Dad wants to drive us home,” Eric said casually, praying for an easy passage of this bill.

“Okay,” she said. “The doctor said they can’t feel it.”

“Oh, yeah? Fuck the doctor. What’s she been doing, interviewing the newborns?”

“Something about the nerves,” Nina said. She put a protective hand on the bin. “They aren’t really developed.”

“Oh, bullshit. They say that to make us feel better.”

“Eric, calm down.”

He tried. He shut his mouth and folded his arms, but his leg hopped up and down nervously. Luke shuddered and that quieted Eric—he froze in position. Luke’s head moved, and then, abruptly, his mouth opened, his face reddened, and he let out a pained squeal.

They reached for him simultaneously, but Eric backed off at the last moment. Nina picked up Luke. He curled in the air, his legs drawn up, his head falling forward, a spineless creature shrieking in pain—an outraged, betrayed series of squawks that terrified Eric.

“Oh, poor baby,” Nina said. But her tone was confident, casual. She cradled Luke in one arm while slipping her gown off with her free hand. She brushed her mane of brown hair off her shoulder and exposed her breast; it was expanded, puffed like a torpedo, her nipple thick and dark red—unrecognizable to Eric. Luke cried, helpless, and flopped in her arms, muscleless, his delicate features twisted by his agony.

Hurry, hurry, Eric thought, disgusted by her slow movements, her calm. “Yes, baby, yes, baby,” she said, picking up Luke again (his body curled pathetically, impotent in her hands) and speaking to his distorted face. “Mommy’s going to feed you.”

“Hurry up, for Christ’s sakes!” Eric shouted.

Nina was startled. She stared at Eric for a long moment, deciding how to react. She frowned, finally, and then brought Luke, now a sobbing wreck, to her monstrous tit. Luke opened his tiny lips, the cavern of his mouth yawned, and somehow, despite being overmatched, he surrounded the giant nipple. Luke clamped on it,
hard
, sucking madly. His eyes closed with a desperate satisfaction, his puffy cheeks rippling from the suction within.

“Yes, baby,” Nina whispered to Luke. Her hand, fragile and slim in Eric’s grip, encompassed the whole of his son’s skull, forceful and dominant. Luke sighed. The breath of relief shook Luke’s entire body, despair and loneliness trembling out of him like a fever passing. She had drained him of his despair and sorrow, applied balm to his wounded and betrayed soul, with the ease of someone flipping a light switch. All she had to do was bring Luke to her breast.

What could Eric do? Hold that tiny head to his chest? To his hard, hairy breast? What a fucking joke.

Nina looked big, an ocean liner docked on the hospital bed. Luke was quiescent at her breast, hardly longer than half the length of her arm, the dark hair of his head even blacker against her white skin. The gown slipped off her other shoulder. She was nude from the waist up, her beautiful long neck and wide shoulders as balanced, as delicate, and as graceful as a dancer’s. This was a sight that normally would have made Eric hard. Her breasts had always been big and firm: ripe for him. Now they seemed monstrous, the free nipple inflated so that the porous holes were visible, the swollen base of her breasts so free from their origin they might be glued on; they were the exaggerated boobs of a pornographic magazine, of an adolescent boy’s nightmarish wet dream.

Luke, abruptly, pulled away and shrieked.

“Shhh,” she said, and pushed Luke’s head toward her, butting his mouth with her rubbery nipple. His mouth yearned for it instantly, cutting off the scream of pain in mid-note. He jawed at her with unabashed greed, lustful, comically desperate.

“I’m going to check on the market,” Eric said, nervous and irritated. He stood up. And waited.

Nina didn’t look at Eric. She was absorbed by Luke. She stroked his black mess of hair, petting him.

“Okay?” Eric asked.

Now she looked up slowly, her eyes liquid with pleasure. “Sure,” she said in a bedroom voice.

“Want me to get you anything?”

She frowned at him. “Where are you going?”

“To check on the market.”

“Why don’t you use the phone here?” Luke yanked away, angry again, his face protesting, screeching. She shushed him, urging his head back, poking him with her nipple, its magnetism overpowering him once again into intent chewing.

Eric watched, stunned. Absorbed.

“Why don’t you call from here?” she said.

“What? Oh. I want to get myself some coffee. You want anything?”

“I need cigarettes.”

“And you a nursing mother.”

“Give me a break.”

He kept watching. “He seems okay.”

She stroked his head. “He’s perfect.”

“That’s what the nurse said.”

“Did she?” Nina smiled with innocent delight. “Well, she’s right.”

“Good-bye,” he said, and walked out into the hall briskly. Eric passed two Orthodox Jewish women wearing babushkas, shuffling along. Behind them were, he presumed, their husbands, hot in their black suits, their fat, fleshy faces covered with thin, kinky hairs. The men spoke rapidly, their voices gruff and arrogant. The two women were silent and serene together, their duties fulfilled; the two men battered each other with words about business. Eric wanted them all dead.

Downstairs in the lobby he found a quiet, old-fashioned booth and dialed Sammy’s private line. “Hi, how we doing?”

“You fucked up again,” Sammy said, with enthusiasm. “Telecom went into the toilet. Everything got stopped at seven.”

“Fifteen percent. So what? That’s the rule.”

“Yeah, fifteen percent loss, fifteen percent loss, fifteen percent loss, and pretty soon Mrs. Shwartz is actually trying to live on Social Security.”

“What about ITT?”

“Flat! That’s a dog. You should get them out.”

“Do you have any good news?”

“Dad’s play short on the oils netted twenty percent. You were wrong again, bozo.”

“You didn’t tell him I disagreed?”

“Disagreed! You went along with your clients. That’s the only reason you didn’t lose them all today.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Eric sighed. He closed his eyes and tried to visualize the accounts. He couldn’t. “Look. I’m gonna take off the rest of this week. I can’t handle things—”

“No commissions on our ideas if you’re not in the office.”

“I know, asshole. Tell your papa. I gotta go.”

“How’s your baby?”

Eric opened his mouth to answer—but what? The great feeling he had for that insensible creature: how to describe that? “He’s perfect.”

“Must have gotten it from his mama.”

“Good-bye,” Eric said, and hung up on Sammy’s laughter. He had no spirit for their competitive banter today. He had been wrong again on the oil stocks. He had been wrong on Telecom. ITT had done nothing. He was a jerk. He had tried hard the last three years, read all the material, taken Joe’s (Sammy’s father and Eric’s boss) principles to heart, but nothing worked. Eric had done better when he went on instinct, buying stocks without any knowledge of their fundamentals.

That baby up there needed money. Needed to be free of the jokes of Sammy, the advice of Joe, and the whimsy of the market. Luke needed money. I have to do better. Go back to daring hunches if necessary. I have to do better. Money, money, money, money. That was the milk he could give Luke to quiet the screeching pain of life.

4

D
IANE HAD INTERVIEWED NINE WOMEN SO FAR, ALL NO
good. Her once-clear picture of the ideal nanny to take care of Byron was now blurred by reality’s greasy fingers.

She had begun the search confidently, had set down (in her organized fashion) the qualities she wanted: speak English well (so as not to retard Byron’s language development); forty years old or under (for vigor), either childless or with grown children (Byron should not have to compete for the woman’s heart); reside within fifteen or twenty minutes by subway (in case of emergencies); have references (appearances are deceiving); and look attractive (since appearances are important).

Diane would sit with Byron beside her in an infant seat, a legal notepad listing her requirements in her lap, and question the prospects, checking off how well they met them. Not long into the process she added more things to her list. One woman, eager, like all of them, for the job, chatted nervously and let slip that she supervised her invalid mother’s care. When Diane warned her that the hours might be irregular, considering both her and Peter’s jobs, this woman, unconvincingly, maintained that her sister could always stay with their mother in the evenings. Another said she would be happy to stay late but would need cab fare home, or have to sleep over, because her neighborhood was dangerous. Therefore, flexible hours became another item, along with no responsibilities to anyone else, not even a husband.