Only Children (37 page)

Eric reached Luke and lifted him to his feet. “Are you okay?”

Luke nodded.

“Play, Luke!” Byron called from the sandbox. Luke went toward him, in his slow, careful walk, distrustful of the earth.

“How old is Luke?” Diane asked the moment Eric returned.

“Two years two months.”

“Six weeks younger than Byron. He speaks really well. Did he start talking early?”

“About nine months.”

“Really? I’ve heard a few girls speak that well at his age. But no boys. I thought Byron was the most precocious, but Luke makes real sentences.”

Eric was pleased she had noticed, and surprised she had so quickly, from merely one exchange. “From what I heard Byron speaks well,” Eric said.

“Yeah, I thought he was the best. But Francine had told me that Luke was amazing.”

“Well, he likes to talk, although he’s shy. But his mother and he have long, long conversations. Even when he was a little infant, it would calm him if we talked to him.”

“Byron won’t stand still long enough to have a conversation.”

Eric sat down on the bench next to Diane. She didn’t have the small pillow of maternal belly; her thighs looked lean; even her posture, despite the exhaustion in her face, suggested girlish energy. “Look at them!” Eric said in a reflex of surprise when he glanced at the sandbox.

Luke and Byron were digging a hole together. Their bowed, concentrated heads almost touched, and even from that distance, the music of their voices—Byron’s, piercing, upper register, Luke’s, low and sweet and melodious—could be heard as one song played harmoniously by two distinct instruments. “Isn’t that great?” Diane agreed. “Francine told me they were real friends, but—it’s very precocious of them. Usually, it’s parallel play at this age. They look like they’re cooperating.”

Luke isn’t so frail, his wings are strong, Eric thought.

“You work on Wall Street, right?”

“You can tell just by looking?”

“No.” Diane wasn’t amused. “I gossiped with Francine. She told me your wife has been at home, but she’s going back to work.”

“Well, to school first. She wants to design clothes, so she’s taking some courses at FIT.”

“Oh,” Diane said, her eyes doubtful. “Did she used to do that before?”

“No, she dabbled in photography. Did some work as a graphic designer. Flirted with acting when she first came to New York. You work?”

“I’m a lawyer.”

“Criminal?”

“Corporate.”

“And your husband?”

“He’s in charge of the Stillman Foundation’s funding to the lively arts.”

“Really? That’s interesting.” Diane named her and her husband’s jobs in a casual tone, as if they were unremarkable and ordinary. Since, in fact, they weren’t, her manner made Eric feel that she must believe herself and her husband to be very successful, perhaps too obviously successful, so that an open show of pride would be redundant. “Is he at work?”

“He’s asleep,” she said with a grunt. She poked her hands into her jacket, slumping down on the bench, like a benched ballplayer enviously eyeing his active peers. “And your wife?” she asked, turning her head for the first time to look directly into Eric’s eyes.

Reflexively, he couldn’t face them. “She’s asleep too.”

“Well, aren’t they lucky?” Diane said with another disgusted grunt.

“Yes, they are.”

“And how did we get to be such suckers?”

Eric laughed and with the laugh let go of his succession of worries—how can I get Luke to the park? how can I get him to be less shy? how can I get him to be less afraid? how can I make more money? how can I learn to make it on my own? How? How? How? He laughed them out and up, ugly pigeons on the wing, soaring into the open patch of the New York sky.

T
HAT MISERABLE
day when Diane took Byron to the IQ test, expecting triumph and ending instead with hurling Byron into a cab, that miserable day, like so many others, found her happy to return to work. She had noticed long ago that the parents of young children were happy to be at the office on Monday mornings. That afternoon she was grateful for the obligation to get out of the house, away from her cranky two-year-old.

She settled at her desk, returned the accumulated phone calls, and finished the memo she had to prepare for Stoppard, all in record time, more than making up for her absence in the morning.

Then her mind wandered. She knew she should go home. Peter wouldn’t be there; he had a fund raiser and then a show. Peter had asked her to come along, she could call the baby-sitters, but the prospect of getting to bed at midnight or even later, only to be roused at three or four in the morning if she was unlucky (the nights they went out Byron tended to wake) or six-thirty if she was fortunate had defeated her. She should go home, deal with Byron. Maybe all the absences of parents had made him temperamental. She had to force Peter to develop a closer relationship with Byron. Maybe another child would help. Sure, Byron would be jealous, but he would have a companion.

Companion in misery?

It wasn’t that bad. She remembered last Saturday in the park, watching Byron play with that boy Luke. He was happy. And they were the two smartest kids there, she knew that. The parents around her and Luke’s father, Eric, stared openly when Byron and Luke returned from building their sand castle and went into a kind of elaborate duet of speech, their words fashioning the turrets their small awkward hands could not, their language sculpting details that the crude sand couldn’t define.

“How old are they?” one mother asked.

“Two,” Diane said.

The mother shook her head in unhappy confirmation and her eyes went to her own kid, a lummox, his eyes dull, his mouth hanging open moronically. He had pathetically tried to horn in on Byron and Luke’s creation. Luke had immediately backed off, Diane had noticed. She had felt Eric tense beside her, but her Byron had saved the situation.

“We’re building! Not you!” Byron had commanded and the dullard had stumbled back on his heels, as if pushed.

If only Byron had cooperated with the tester! What a show he would have put on! Diane had learned the various questions and tasks the IQ test put to the children and she knew Byron could manhandle them.

She liked Luke’s father. He was a huge man, well over six feet, with big, broad shoulders, his face wide and cheerful, his kinky hair glowing in the sun. His big, meaty hands were warm—he had touched her on the arm to emphasize some story—and he had a bearish love for his son. He gathered Luke into his thick arms when Luke finished gabbing about the castle and thus miniaturized Luke. Luke was swaddled like a newborn infant against Eric’s powerful chest. Eric’s full lips kissed Luke on the forehead unselfconsciously, with none of the shy affection Peter occasionally gave to Byron, with none of the false, presumably male heartiness of the typical American dad, but with a strong desire, fierce and desperate and comforting. “You’re great, Luke!” Eric had said, almost wildly, a stage character bursting into song.

She imagined going to bed with Eric, made small and warm and protected by his body, swamped by his wet lips, her hands on the tight engine of his ass. … “You’re great!” he might sing at the end.

She felt contempt for Peter.

Of course, Peter still shone bright; he was smooth, a polished precious gem, a jewel compared with other husbands. Eric might be good for a night, but probably the brain was oafish, his ability to understand her limited.

Yet she felt disdain for Peter. He was a jewel, but what use was it? What real value did she get out of his refinement? His wit? His charm? His impeccable taste? If Peter could take her to dinner and a show and then become a bear in bed, a hungry mammal, instead of a self-conscious civilized man, then …

That wasn’t it. It wasn’t sex. Peter didn’t feel passion, not for his child, not for her, not even for life. He felt only ironies. He understood when someone portrayed passion on the stage, but he’d flee from the roaring reality.

Byron had passion. He had energy and the love of doing, and his mind had the refinement to make something of life.

She missed Byron. Diane called home.

“The Hummel residence,” Francine’s obviously black accent answered.

How weird, Diane thought, at the picture of her life that was summoned by having a black servant answer with that antique phrase. “Hi, Francine, it’s Diane. How’s it going?”

Francine lowered her voice. “He’s playing in his room. Seems happy, but he keeps talking about”—she laughed, embarrassed—“keeps talking about how you don’t love him.”

“What?”

Francine whispered. “ ‘Mommy don’t love me, Mommy don’t love me,’ that’s what he keeps saying. I told him to stop.” She laughed again. “He told me I was fat.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I don’t mind, I just gave him a good hard pinch, told him he was too short to be telling me I was fat. That stopped him. He’s all right. Just likes to get his way. Who doesn’t?”

“I’m coming straight home,” Diane said.

“Not if you have work. He’s fine.”

“I’m done. That’s why I called. I’ll be home in twenty minutes.” She hung up and moved quickly, as if her house were burning down. I was wrong, I was wrong, she thought, clearing her desk.

Didi walked in just as Diane was ready to go. “Get your coat. We’re going for a drink with our mentors.”

“I can’t.” But she stopped still, waiting for permission to leave.

“Something wrong at home?”

“I have to go,” Diane said, but not moving.

“Half an hour?”

“It’s never half an hour.”

“Maybe they want to tell us we’re making partner.”

“They wouldn’t do it like that.”

“Harold said he’d take us to the Century Club.”

“I’ve been there,” Diane answered.

“Me too,” Didi said in a little girl’s whine, and stuck out her tongue.

Diane laughed. She let her shoulders sag and laughed. Didi’s eyes twinkled. Diane envied her freedom. Didi hadn’t steered into the wife and mommy expressway, with only a narrow breakdown lane for divorce, its next exit middle age.

“Have Peter take care of the kid,” Didi said. “He can order a pizza for dinner.”

Again, Diane laughed at this picture. Didi tilted her head, curious, the way she looked when listening to an important but self-deluded client. “Peter’s not home,” Diane answered.

Brian Stoppard looked in. “Ladies?”

“Diane has to go home,” Didi answered.

“Just for half an hour,” Stoppard said. “My car will take you home. Won’t be much longer than if you fought that.” He nodded toward the traffic below. “Take you half an hour to find a cab or get there in the subway.”

His argument was specious, but he had appealed, like a good lawyer should, to Diane’s self-interest. She went, and quickly downed two drinks, talking too fast, squeezing in everything, conscious that, once she left, Didi would have Harold and Brian to herself, and besides, she noticed how they both looked at Didi, especially Harold, that old fart, his watery eyes lingering on the swell of Didi’s blue blazer, dazzled by the small diamond earrings uncovered by Didi’s boyish haircut. She’s much prettier than I am, Diane thought, seeing Didi through her whitened liquored vision: young, self-assured, a movie actress playing a lawyer, some kind of capitalist wet dream, a killer associate with tits. Didi had highlighted, or dyed, or hennaed, or something’d, her hair. It was redder, fresher. Sure, Didi had time for hairdressers and Saks and winter vacations, and late sessions at the office.

“I gotta go,” Diane said. The sentence came out as a single slurred word. I’m high, she thought.

“I’ll walk you to the car,” Stoppard said, and by God, he took her arm, as if she might not be able to walk.

Stoppard held her elbow as they walked down the gloomy Century Club staircase to its gloomier lobby. The old black men who took the coats, stood guard at the front desk, and opened the door seemed funereal, only recently freed by the Civil War, still mourning President Lincoln’s loss. The thought made her giddy. She turned to Stoppard. “Are Didi and I gonna make partner?”

He smiled. “You’re drunk,” he said cheerfully.

“Be responsive. I don’t care anymore. I’d just like to get over the suspense. I hate suspense.”

Stoppard just smiled, that fucking poker smile, slight, ironic, tasting some future delight, contemplating some past triumph. He went to get her coat. Diane tried to make eye contact with one of the black retainers. Her glance made him uncomfortable.

“Good evening, ma’am,” he said at last, somewhat desperately.

Stoppard helped her on with her Burberry. She was so tired of it and the rest of her lawyer uniform. She missed the frayed oversized army coat she had worn in college. Inside, the army had felt like a comfortable blanket, but she looked tough in the mirror. “No answer, huh?” she said when Stoppard took her outside to his limousine.

Stoppard paused this time, his face dark and aged, his eyes glowing black in the amber haze of the street lights. “Are you seeing a therapist?”

“No!” She was insulted that he would think she might. Therapists were for people like Peter, for all those spoiled princesses. Therapists were there to console people after their defeats.

“I think you should.”

“Huh?” I must have heard him wrong. Stoppard recommending a therapist? Would he make someone a partner who had cracked as an associate?

“Before you had your baby, you would never have blundered and asked me a question like that. And then I give you a chance to think it over, and you repeat the mistake. You never would have shown that you had any doubt you’d make partner in the old days. That’s the kind of insecurity I expect from Didi. If you doubt it, maybe I’ll start to doubt it. I don’t know if it’s motherhood or your marriage or what, but something’s got you off-balance.”

She felt her stomach contract on the day’s emptiness. Taking Byron to the test had been her lunch, the cocktails her only sustenance. Her mouth went dry. She tried to replay Stoppard’s speech even as he was finishing; she tried to calculate whether he was advising, admonishing, or dismissing. Was he friend or foe now? “I think you’re overreacting,” she said quickly, knowing, from somewhere, that that response was the perfect camouflage for confusion.