Only Children (49 page)

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, “Good,” 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.

U
NCONSCIOUS
. 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 proud 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—

Because why? Whose fault was this difficulty? Luke’s anatomy or some mistake that Eric and Nina had made?

“Get off my back!” Eric shouted at Sammy. Eric had been too good, too strong, too brilliant to be the meek Eric anymore.

Joe sternly glanced at Eric’s noise. Eric stared that old man down. I am this firm, Eric thought. They would have lost most of their clients if we’d stuck with Joe’s lemminglike picks, buying whatever the institutions did, a coattail investment strategy that a six-year-old could imitate. “You want to look at my performance compared to the S and P over the last year?” Eric yelled in answer to Sammy, but he looked at Joe.

“Whoa!” Sammy teased. “Hey, Wizard, don’t turn me into a toad!”

With the growth of their assets, the firm had new employees, two additional secretaries, Carlton still there to handle the smaller clients, and a solemn Conservative Jew, Aram, who ran the computer programs that kept their books. Everyone was seated at the circular table and they all laughed or smiled at Sammy’s mockery.

“I can’t work like this! I can’t handle this kind of money if I’m gonna have everyone in my hair all the time!” Eric shouted at Joe. It was like working in a subway car, everywhere you turned a face. No silence, no rest, phones always tweeting like sick birds, Quotron keys clacking dully like lamed crickets.

“Take it easy,” Joe said, and glanced at Sammy with something like a private exchange.

“What does that mean?” Eric demanded. “Take it easy! I’m a big winner for two years. And two fucking days! Two lousy goddamn fucking days my stuff doesn’t move and this asshole’s on my back! I don’t have to come in here, you know. I can sit at home and phone in the trades. Hell, I can call the floor myself, I don’t need Sammy to do it for me.” He was blasting into the atmosphere, breaking up gloriously, sparks flying into the night sky, free of their gravity, ten years of their drag, free and alone—

“I was kidding!” Sammy squeaked. Sammy was scared.

He should be, Eric thought. I could insist Joe send Sammy home to his mother.

“I’m sorry! Jesus Christ! I’m sorry,” Sammy pleaded.

Why, the little prick was almost begging.

“I’m going for a walk,” Eric said. Eric knew the liquid fuel of his rage would burn out and he’d feel stupid, crashing to earth with stammering apologies. He wanted to go before humiliation followed righteousness.

He went outside during the trading day. When had he ever done that, except for a quick bite to eat? He loved the numbers of the Quotron, changing with a little blip, a quick dance, never still, a new game every day. Now that he had a past to live up to, they were terrible, but once the promise of tomorrow had been his friend, a consolation.

What a relief to be away, away from the possibility of erosion. What should he do? Close out his positions? Had the market topped? Was this October 1929?

He could lose it all: the income, the respect, the control of Nina’s family money. Tom had even talked of creating a trust for Luke. Eric was so close to victory.

On the street, he was lost. Away from the money, he was confused. Eric bought a hot dog from an Asian on a street corner, even though he had already eaten. It tasted horrible, nothing like the kosher franks Eric used to get as a kid from the neighborhood deli in Washington Heights. The deli was owned by a white sausage of a man: Morris. Morris made the franks behind the tall glass display of his meats and handed the buns over the top of that cliff. On his wrist, stretched bluish black numbers were tattooed. “Enjoy,” Morris said. God, they were good. Hot and thick and juicy, the mustard tangy, the sauerkraut warm and crunchy, the bun crust firm.