Only Children (19 page)

But Francine wasn’t pretty; she stood there like a badly made sausage, her kinky hair dyed a strange orange that was meant to be blond, her skin a filmy, uneven brown, her face dotted with pimples, and sweat oozed from her forehead, neck, and underarms. How could Byron prefer Francine? He doesn’t. He’s just punishing me.

Byron whined, his little hand out for Francine, the fingers calling for her. Diane kissed his stomach, rubbing her mouth into his navel, knowing that would tickle him into laughter and cover the embarrassment of this scene. His stretchy was soft and smelled of Byron’s life—formula, Francine, and baby powder.

Byron did laugh, but only reflexively. The moment Diane pulled back to look at his delighted toothless mouth, he stopped, his cherubic fluted lips closing tight. He pushed out with his legs and arms, trying to swim away from Diane. He groaned with the effort as if to say to Francine: take me back, take me away from this witch.

Francine smiled at him and shook her head. “Oh, you’re a bad boy. Now don’t tease your mommy like that. She has to work just like everybody. She’d stay home with you if she could.”

“No, I wouldn’t,” Diane said.

“No?” Francine laughed, uneasy, but pleased by Diane’s honesty.

“I’d go crazy stuck home with a baby.”

“I don’t mind,” Francine said, patting the protrusion of her stomach, upholstered in denim. “Only problem is it keeps me too close to the refrigerator.” Throughout all this Byron continued to squirm recklessly, willing to hurl himself out of Diane’s arms to reach Francine.

The doorbell rang. Francine answered it and Peter entered, his voice loud with greeting, walking in wide paces, steadying himself on a rocky boat. He’s tipsy, Diane thought. “Hello, hello!” he called to them.

Byron jerked himself in Diane’s arms, attempting to sit up. His feet moved rapidly, walking in the air. His hands shot out in spasms of excitement.

“Hey, fella!” Peter said, and once again, the glorious sunrise of happiness dawned in Byron, his head rolling from side to side, his mouth open with ecstasy.

“O! O! O!” Byron hooted.

“He’s saying hello!” Peter bragged to Diane, obviously expecting this would delight her. “He’s saying hello to me!” he repeated with naïve pride. “Hey!” Peter said to Byron, rubbing the little ball of a stomach with his hand. Byron arched with pleasure, hunching his shoulders, his chin doubling, his mouth smacking open and closed as if Peter were a delicious food Byron hoped to eat.

“Well, since he’s saying hello to you, why don’t you change his diaper?” Diane snapped, and offered the squirming, chuckling Byron to Peter.

Peter stepped back, alarmed, shying away from Byron like a timid man confronted by a wild animal. “I just got in.”

“So did I,” Diane answered.

“I’ll change his diaper,” Francine said.

“No.” Diane sneered at both of them. “I was just kidding.” She marched out of the hallway to Byron’s room. The baby’s quarters were the smallest in the apartment, twelve feet by six feet, designed three generations ago to be used by a maid. Byron really ought to be in the second bedroom, she thought for the millionth time. Peter had insisted on keeping that space to himself for use as a study. Peter’s study, she repeated to herself contemptuously.
I’m
the one who has the real work and I get a small desk in our bedroom.

Byron had moaned while she carried him away from Francine and Peter and, as she laid him on the changing table, continued to grumble with complaints.

“Let’s find you something nice to sleep in,” she said.

Byron averted his face, turned to the wall, and groped it with his left hand, cooing at the shadows.

“Bye!” Francine called into the room. “Good-bye, Diane. Bye, bye, Byron!”

Byron swiveled his head and bounced his legs. “Hoo! Hoo! Hoo!” he went on and on, an owl high on speed.

“Good-bye, Francine,” Diane said, and lifted the excited Byron by his feet, sliding a fresh diaper under his pink bottom, leaving it open and unfastened for the moment to let him air—the best protection, she had read, against diaper rash. She bent down to open the drawer with his outfits and found herself at a level with his body, staring directly at Byron’s genitals.

His pencil stub of a penis was rigid, pointed at the ceiling, framed by his tightly packed testicles. The hairless arrangement was white and pure, unlike the muddy, overgrown garden of semen-bearing men. And yet this prepubescent creature was erect. Usually, his penis was soft, the head hiding like a turtle, melted into the pillows of his balls. Not now. It was straight up, divining to the heavens, while he thrust his legs out, his arms also rigid, the fat hands, with dimples for knuckles, grabbing for things out of reach—the edge of the diaper, the blue box of wipes, the pink bottle of powder. He seemed fierce with desire and strength, comical in such a small body, but impressive also for the same reason.

She told herself the erection was caused by the cool air, a physical reaction to temperature, not a sexual statement. But she was frozen in position, her mouth only inches from his little flag of sex. I’m here, I’m here, it seemed to say. I’m also this, his wide brown eyes and pursed lips insisted. I have a cock, I have a cock, the tough little body proclaimed. Absurd but frightening, too. Does it begin that early?

Who is this erection for? she wondered. Me or Francine?

She shuddered at herself. And then quickly fastened Byron’s diaper. She closed him up so hard she got an image of the stiff penis snapping off, an icicle yanked from the eaves.

Wanting to obliterate these pictures, she searched for the softest and bluest of his stretchies. Her favorite, a deep navy blue outfit with red feet and a bear stitched on the chest, was getting tight on Byron. She had to bend his thick thigh forcefully to get his second leg in, and even then, when Byron stretched full out, the material was pulled taut at his groin—the puffy front of his diaper gave him the look of a sumo wrestler wrapped in a loincloth.

Byron whined impatiently while she closed the snaps and picked him up. She hugged him close. She put a hand on the back of his bobbing head and tried to urge him into the crook of her neck, to snuggle him, to feel the quiet warmth, to caress what he had once been: tiny, adoring, senseless.

But his strong neck pushed against the hand. His feet kicked at her belly, thumping her like a drum. A hand reached for her mouth, pushing open her lips. The fingers grabbed her teeth, the nail digging into her gums like grappling hooks, and his toes poked her ribs, feeling for a foothold—she was the mountain he wanted to assault and conquer, the height he would use as springboard to leap off into the world.

“Diane!” Peter called from the living room. “Diane!”

Byron kicked harder at the sound of his father’s voice, excited, his legs bicycling as if to power her forward. Diane carried him out. “Yes?” she said on seeing Peter.

“What are we doing for dinner?” he asked. Peter had a glass of ice water in his right hand and a copy of the
Times
in his left. He had taken off his blue blazer and looked resplendent, although plump, in his pink Brooks Brothers shirt. Peter’s body had begun to show the effects of his sedentary life. A belly had formed, a soft wave ready to splash over the brown leather belt, and his cheeks had settled, thickening his jaw, giving his face a placid appearance of self-satisfaction. His reddish blond hair seemed to grow reluctantly at his forehead; there was no longer enough of a mane to sweep across his brow and a portion stuck out, waving for help.

“I don’t know,” she answered, keeping the irritation she felt out of her tone.

“Do you want to go out? To I1 Cantinori?”

“With him?” she said, ducking away from another of Byron’s swipes at her mouth.

“We can’t take Byron there. Can’t we get a sitter?”

“I haven’t seen Byron all day, I’d like to be with him. No, it’s too big a deal. Let’s order pizza or something.”

Peter frowned. He pursed his lips. Then he looked down at the
Times
and seemed to become absorbed in an article.

“Hello!” she called.

“The theater’s dying,” he said. He looked up at her. “I was hoping for a romantic evening. Dinner. You know.”

He meant, she knew, that they had made love only once since Byron’s birth. Peter had brought up the subject recently and she had told him that after a day at the office and four hours of caring for Byron she felt tired, and certainly not sexy. Presumably Peter hoped a meal out, just the two of them, would put her in the mood. She hated to think about making love. Before the baby, they had often made love after evenings out, sometimes briskly, even perfunctorily, but that was all right. Planning was not. She hadn’t enjoyed the wait, the pleasantly nervous anticipation, of dating; to experience delayed gratification with a husband of eight years struck Diane as ludicrous.

“Peter, if you’re horny, why don’t you just say so?”

He smiled and blinked at her wonderingly. “Well, well. And they say romance is dead.”

“I don’t have time for romance. Let’s have pizza. We can still go to bed.”

Peter smiled and sat on the couch. “Will you order it?”

“Sure,” she said, and handed over Byron, who arched and yearned in his father’s direction anyway. She looked up the phone number and dialed, going through the schedule: pizza arrive fifteen minutes, half hour to consume, one-hour play with Byron, then bath for Byron, and bedtime rocking, forty-five minutes, sex with Peter an hour (make that half an hour), shower (to avoid rushing in the morning), and then to work on the brief. “I’d like a pie with sausage and mushroom, please.” Should be able to get to rewriting the draft by nine-thirty, ten at the latest. Six hours should do it. I’d even get three hours’ sleep.

She finished giving the order and hung up. She looked at Byron, held aloft, jumping up and down on Peter’s thighs. She didn’t feel up to a long-winded sexual exchange: necking, massage, genital foreplay, lengthy screwing—the four-course meal that Peter would want.

I’ll give Peter a blow job right after rocking Byron to sleep, she decided. I can always masturbate later.

“M
ARKET’S CLOSED
,” Sammy said in the manner of a public-address announcer at Yankee Stadium.

Joe, Sammy’s father, Eric’s boss, pushed his chair away from his Quotron. “A good day,” he judged. Joe had a pompous voice to accompany his stolid figure and unsmiling face. “I’m going for a walk,” he said, and strolled to the door like a king wandering out of his castle. “I’ll be back at four forty-five. Sammy, have the totals ready.”

“I’ve already got ’em!” Sammy said, his leg hopping nervously, always the eager son ready to anticipate demands.

That stopped Joe. “Indeed?” he said, “The numbers change right up to close—”

Sammy smiled triumphantly; outperforming his father’s expectations was his ultimate satisfaction. “I keep a running total using the spread sheet. Up-to-date every thirty seconds. Want the numbers now?”

Joe shook his head no. “Very impressive. Print them out for later.”

Sammy grinned at Eric—exhausted Eric, red-eyed Eric, disgusted Eric, weary of life and of defeat and of these two and their repetitive psychological conflicts.

Joe continued to the door. “Very impressive.” He opened the door. “But unnecessary.” And left.

“Fuck you!” Sammy said, furious, without any irony or self-consciousness.

Eric tried to explain. “He just pretends he’s not pleased, Sammy. He’s very proud of you.”

“He doesn’t want to give me the satisfaction. He’s a son of a bitch!”

Irene, Joe’s secretary for thirty years, got up from her position at the phones. “Sammy!” she warned, like an indulgent aunt.

“Oh, shut up!” Sammy screamed, a spoiled nephew, casually insulting, confident of clemency. “Come on,” he said to Eric. Sammy got up and beckoned Eric to the one private room in the fifteen hundred square feet Joe had leased from Bear Stearns. This private corner room, which had a sweeping view of the southern end of Manhattan, was ostensibly Joe’s, although he stayed in the main room with Sammy and Eric for most of the day.

“I have to go home,” Eric said, but with hopelessness in his tone.

“Ten minutes!” Sammy said. “The baby can wait ten minutes.”

Dutifully, Eric rose. He had been in the chair since lunch. He had to steady himself on the desk for a moment, his circulatory system shocked by the change, and then went into Joe’s office. Sammy shut the door. “You know where he went?” Sammy said, his face in a sneer of contempt.

“Your dad?”

“No, Reggie Jackson! Yeah, asshole!”

“For a walk. He’s gone for a walk after the close ever since I’ve known him.”

“He goes to get laid.”

Eric had gotten his first job at the age of eighteen clerking for Joe at Bear Stearns. It was temporary, a summer job, but Joe had adopted Eric, kept him on as his assistant, and taken him along three years later, when Joe opened his own firm. Thus Sammy treated Eric as if he were a brother and Eric felt obliged to listen to his troubles. But he was tired. Eric rubbed his forehead to keep awake. He had averaged three hours of sleep a night since Luke’s birth four weeks ago. He was making trading mistakes right and left. Eric hadn’t come up with art idea for his, or Joe’s, client list since Nina went into labor. He had been passing along Joe’s picks. And Joe was hot, his trades finding fast profits in a sluggish market. Only Joe’s belief in family, and especially in fathering a son, had prevented Joe from castigating Eric and confiscating his commissions. Under normal circumstances, with Eric fallow, Joe would demand half of Eric’s commissions—all on the days Eric had been absent. Instead, benignly, Joe had let Eric mooch off his brain without compensation, asking careful questions about Luke’s health, passing along remedies for colic from his wife, Ceil. Joe’s uncharacteristic benevolence toward Eric, a pardon given because of Eric’s new stature as a father, had turned Joe’s gruff paternal face to reveal a tender profile: he believes in fatherhood, Eric now knew, he really loves Sammy.

Eric used to feel completely sympathetic to Sammy’s fits of temper about his father, believing that Joe had crushed his son’s self-confidence in boyhood and kept Sammy working in the firm as his final act of sadism. Eric had forgiven Sammy his adolescent behavior toward Joe, the combination of worship and hate, although it was sick in a twenty-five-year-old, because he thought Sammy a victim.