Only Children (48 page)
“It hurt me.” Byron put out his index finger. “See?”
There was nothing wrong with Byron’s finger. Diane looked at it with a curious expression, as if she had never seen Byron’s finger before. Peter got her attention and raised his eyebrows in silent inquiry, hoping she would explain. But her body sagged in response, her eyes looked vacant—I’m not here, they said.
“Your finger looks okay,” Peter said.
“It hurts!” Byron yelled with a whoosh of air into Peter’s face. The speed and fury were startling. Peter rocked back on his heels.
“I’m not arguing with you. I just don’t understand. How does it hurt your finger?”
“He’s lying,” Diane said in a listless voice, gazing off at some view, something mysterious and beautiful that wasn’t there.
“Am not!” Byron’s eyes got red and he was crying. His dissolution into tears happened so fast that logic told Peter the unhappiness must be fake. But Byron wept with conviction. Byron stood between them, making no move to be consoled, standing independent in his deserted sorrow.
And then the truth came to Peter, clear as a message from God. The simple truth shone through the pleasant fog of Peter’s assumption that Byron was a privileged, even spoiled child, doted on by his mother, and loved by Peter, if somewhat casually. After all, Diane had given up her career only a few months ago for Byron; even Peter had taken to staying home three or four nights a week. There were layers and layers of evidence that Byron had an especially charmed life: Francine, his nanny, was there for him as well as Diane; Diane’s mother made regular visits and brought all the newest and most expensive toys, such as that disgusting castle; Diane had applied to put Byron into the best private schools; Byron had swimming classes, violin classes, tumbling classes, summers in the Hamptons, a trust fund set up by Peter’s father, even a friend, that little boy Luke, who lived a block away. Surely this was a childhood that would amaze Charles Dickens. Peter had often said to Kotkin, “I envy him. I resent him having a happy childhood.” But now, suddenly, watching this creature, this baby, stand alone in the well of his despair, his face mottled by Diane’s rage, Peter knew: this is not a happy child. We are raising him badly. He is suffering. And it’s up to you, his father, to make it right.
“Come here,” Peter said, and opened his arms.
“No,” Byron interpolated in his sobbing. Byron hugged his arms to his chest and swung gently from side to side, rocking himself.
He only trusts his own love, Peter thought, and a nauseating wallop of fear and self-disgust hit Peter in his gut. “Come on,” he said, and reached for Byron, not only to comfort his son, but to find a bottom for his own sinking hopes. Byron fought the embrace. He pushed against Peter’s arms and averted his kiss.
“Let go,” he moaned.
“I love you,” Peter said. The words almost hurt his throat.
Diane grunted. Peter looked up at her, but she had no expressiveness on her face. She leaned against the hallway walls, her head resting on a poster of
The Titan
.
I didn’t make that show, Peter thought, I made this misery. Kotkin wouldn’t approve of that judgment, Peter scolded himself. Byron eased in Peter’s arms, accepting the hug. The sobs went from a gallop to a trot, slowing, quieting. Byron’s rigid resistance melted into a limbless bundle of warmth. If only Peter could hold Byron forever, in this simple unity of love and good intentions, then being his father would be easy.
“Are you okay?” Peter said.
“Yeeessss,” Byron moaned.
“Does your face hurt?”
“No,” Byron mumbled.
That had to be a lie. Was he scared to complain of Diane’s … abuse?
This can’t be happening to me, Peter thought. She just hit him once, for God’s sakes. Calm down. Again, he looked at her for something, an explanation, help, consciousness.
“I told him I was sorry,” she said this time. There was no apology in the tone, however.
“Mommy got angry,” Byron said. He looked at Peter hopefully, wanting his answer to satisfy.
What do I do? If I don’t say she’s wrong, am I approving it for Byron? If I criticize her, am I wrongly faulting her for a minor incident?
What about the violin playing? Is that lost forever? But Byron was so proud, so handsome when he practiced. Wasn’t Byron going to reject any attempts in the future to apply himself to the demands of art if this calamity is the only memory of an attempt?
“Can I see the violin?” Peter asked. He wanted to inspect the one tangible thing in all this.
“It’s broke,” Byron said, lowering his head.
“Does that make you sad?”
“Yeesss,” Byron sobbed. “Mommy says I can’t play anymore!” he wailed.
He wants to play? Maybe it was just an accident. No, she said he threw it. Or did she? “What happened?” Peter said bravely to Diane. “He dropped it?”
“No! Don’t you listen! He refused to practice and he threw it—” Her exasperation was too great. She closed her mouth and stamped her foot. Byron startled in Peter’s arms. “I can’t talk about it,” she said, and leaned back against the poster, shutting her eyes and sighing. “I’m an asshole,” she mumbled. “Just forget it!” she shouted at the ceiling.
“I don’t think anyone’s going to forget it.”
“Fine. You deal with it.” Diane went into the kitchen. She banged something. Byron jerked again in Peter’s arms. He’s terrified of her. How could that be? He adores her. How could one slap destroy all that, all her sacrifice, almost three years, month after month, week after week, hour after hour, of love and care and pride—gone? From one slap?
Maybe Byron and I want too much.
“Daddy,” Byron said.
“Yes?”
“Would you play with me?”
Peter felt trapped. He didn’t want to be with Byron. He wanted to pursue Diane, to correct her, reengage her attention on Byron. She seemed ready to resign from her role as a mother. That had to be prevented. Peter couldn’t substitute for her, that would be even worse for Byron. “Show me the violin,” Peter said.
“No!”
“Maybe it can be fixed.”
Byron opened his eyes wide. He looked normal. Active, his body ready to perform, full of hope. “Okay.” He pulled Peter into his room. The violin must have been left where Byron had thrown it. Diane must have been too upset to do anything about it.
It was finished, all right. The neck had been severed, its back thoroughly cracked, and a strip about an inch wide had caved in.
“We could tape it,” Byron said, excited now. A project, a repair, an erasure of his wrong and Mommy’s anger: attention, correction, and forgiveness all in one package. Peter had given him hope. That was stupid of me, Peter realized, holding the dismembered instrument in his hands.
“I’m sorry, but it’s too broken.”
Byron stared at the corpse for a moment, then his cheeks puffed, his mouth got tight, and he cried. “I wanna play it,” he wailed in harmony with the sobs.
“We’ll get you another one,” Peter said, hugging him, hugging him hard.
“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.
“Y
OU’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.
M
OMMY. 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.
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.