Only Children (23 page)

“I didn’t realize it was such a big party,” Diane said. “I wouldn’t have come like this.”

“Didn’t Brian tell you?” Paula was amazed. She shook her head of frizzy hair. “He’s perverse. You look lovely. Have you met Sasha and Rachel? Now that you’re new parents, I thought you might like to see the future. Sasha, Rachel, this is Diane and Peter Hummel.”

“Hello!” Peter said, and put out his hand to Sasha, who regarded it like a loathsome vegetable on a plate.

“How old’s your son now?” Paula asked.

“Six months. He turned over yesterday!” Diane announced.

“Uh-oh.” Paula laughed. “Your life is over.”

“He did?” Peter asked Diane. He still had his hand in Sasha’s face.

“Yes, I told you,” Diane answered defensively. She might not have. Peter’s lack of interest in fatherhood was unfashionable, and it would reflect badly on her if Paula Kramer knew Diane tolerated it. “He’s only done it the one time.”

“Shake Peter’s hand,” Paula urged her son, Sasha.

Sasha put out his small hand limply. Peter shook it gently. “Where do you go to school, Sasha?”

Now the boy looked up, sure of himself. “Hunter,” he said, naming a free public school in Manhattan specially created for bright children.

Hunter? Diane thought. Stoppard makes six hundred thousand a year; Paula’s a best-selling writer. What the hell are they doing taking up a place at Hunter?

“It’s great!” Paula said. “You have to get your boy in. Best school in the city.”

“Better than the private schools?” Diane asked.

“Sure, you don’t get that miserable homogeneous population of spoiled rich kids,” Paula said eagerly. “Besides, at Hunter everybody’s there on merit. They studied pointillism in kindergarten! It’s amazing.”

“Well,” Peter said diffidently. “You have to be something of a genius to get in. I don’t think Byron’s in that class.”

“Oh, they’re not geniuses,” Paula said. “Patty! Hi!” she called out to another celebrity, Patty Lane, entering just then. “If your boy is normally bright and you read to him a lot, he’ll score great on the test and get in. Excuse me.” She rushed on and moved to the door, pulling her children with her.

“Why the hell did you say Byron’s not smart?” Diane whispered.

“I didn’t,” Peter said. “I said he’s not a genius.”

“How do you know what he is?”

Peter closed his eyes, irritated. “He’s not a genius.”

“Peter!” Tony Winters called. He waved them over. Diane felt her stomach flutter at the prospect of meeting the movie stars. Because of Peter’s job, Diane had met celebrities, although they were of the theater, not film, and she had even witnessed the surprising flattery they bestowed on Peter in hopes of getting money for particular projects, but this group, Garth and Delilah especially, had been world-famous since Diane was a teenager. To see their faces in reality, in her boss’s living room, her husband beside her, wearing her boring clothes, was bizarre. Betty made the situation stranger by asking, as Diane and Peter approached, “Did Byron turn over again?”

“No” was all Diane could manage in answer to Betty under Delilah’s bored stare.

“I just heard about this,” Peter said.

“She didn’t tell you!” Betty exclaimed.

Because he wouldn’t care, you fool, Diane thought.

Tony made the introductions and added, to get the conversation going again, “I’m trying to convince Bill to return to the stage.”

“In a play of yours, I hope,” Peter said.

Betty, meanwhile, both to Diane’s relief and irritation, maneuvered Diane aside from the stars and began to babble about children. They talked on the phone regularly now, but it wasn’t a comfort. To each step in Byron’s development, Betty said, “Oh, I remember that. Wait until he starts—” and then she’d name something better yet to come. Like everything else in New York, even mothers talking about their babies were a competition.

“Do you know what Paula told me?” Betty whispered now. “Sasha, her son, goes to Hunter. They were studying Seurat and pointillism in kindergarten!”

“That must be her standard speech to the wives,” Diane said. “She just told me the same tiring.”

“Oh, my God!” Betty said with a squeal of pleasure. “I thought it was directed at me because Nicholas didn’t get in.”

“To Hunter? Nicholas’s old enough to apply to school?”

Betty stepped back and looked at Diane under lowered brows in mock astonishment. “My dear, you have to apply a year ahead of time. And if you want to have any hope of getting your child into a decent school, you must get him into one of the feeder preschools at the age of two.”

“You mean this starts at one year old!” Diane said, her astonishment genuine.

“Haven’t you been reading all the pieces in the
Times
and
Town Magazine?
”

“I was skipping them! My God, I have a six-month-old! I thought I had time!”

“Are you mad, woman?” Tony Winters said, leaning into their conversation without warning. “One slip now and your child ends up a bum on welfare in twenty years.”

“What’s this?” Delilah said.

“Oh, the New York private school madness,” Tony explained to the movie stars. “The yuppies have made the mediocre education of New York not only more mediocre, but it costs more and the pressure is worse.”

“Really?” Peter said. “When my mother moved me here as a teenager, I don’t think there was much pressure to get in.”

“Maybe for you,” Delilah said. “It’s tough in L.A. too. No problema if you got a series on the air.”

“It
is
different now,” Betty said to Peter. “The competition is fierce. Public schools are much worse and also there are all these well-to-do parents who’ve been told that early education is the most important of all.”

“It’s all bullshit,” Tony said. He lowered his voice. “Paula told me Hunter is great because it’s more real than going to a private school. More real? Everybody in the class has an IQ of one fifty or better. That’s real? When those kids go out into the world and work for people whose IQs are in two figures, we’ll see how well prepared they are. More real. Sure—the world is loaded with black, Hispanic, Oriental, and Jewish kids with IQs of one eighty.”

“I guess your boy didn’t get in, huh, Tony?” Garth said, and roared with laughter to cover the insult.

“Yeah,” Tony said effortlessly. “Now he’ll have to become an actor.”

Diane burst out laughing, more at the unexpectedness of Tony’s return of serve—since he was a screenwriter, she assumed he’d let any abuse go unanswered by a big star like Garth. Delilah and Amy Howell both scanned Diane after her guffaw, noticing her for the first time. Delilah gave Diane a thorough going-over, up and down. “You’re a lawyer, I bet,” Delilah said to Diane in a sluggish tone. Amy smiled reflexively.

“How did you
know
?” Betty said, delighted, missing the implied insult, her face open with wonder, a child delighted by a card trick.

“Yes, I am,” Diane said.

“Did you see
Legal Eagles
?” Garth asked.

“What’s that?” Diane asked.

Garth was stunned. Tony laughed, deeply and resonantly. “Grown-ups who don’t work in the movie business don’t go to the movies,” Tony said to Garth. “They don’t even think about movies.”

“It must be hard having a kid and being a lawyer,” Delilah said to Diane. “Do you work, Betty?”

“Not anymore. Our housekeeper left suddenly—”

“Suddenly last summer,” Tony mumbled.

“—and I decided to quit and stay home.”

“How do you like it?” Amy Howell asked. “I couldn’t stand just being home. I need to work.”

“I like it fine,” Betty said primly, a hint of self-righteousness in the tone.

“How about you?” Delilah asked Diane, her voice tough, almost like a street kid making a dare.

Diane, for a moment, couldn’t think, looking at this famous face from her youth, from when she used to smoke grass, protest the war, dream of arguing in front of the Supreme Court, and lived, in general, convinced that she would never imitate the conventions of her parents’ generation. If, the first time she had heard Delilah sing, someone had shown Diane her future—married to a respectable, balding Peter, a son home with a baby-sitter, working to defend a major American corporation from its disabled employees, her stomach still puffy from childbirth, the whole dreary list of things and decay that had changed her, changed her utterly from a tough young girl eager for life to a cautious aging woman fighting to hang on to what she had—if someone had abruptly presented the future, skipping all the gradations of the change, using her first sight of televised-Delilah to now in-the-flesh-Delilah, Diane would have screamed, fled college, run to the countryside, and, like some of her friends, raised vegetables, let her armpit hair grow, and scoffed at the ones who stayed.

I’m thirty-six years old, she thought; in four years I’ll be forty. I am closer to death than I have come from birth. My life has hardened in the mold. I am riding an express to the glassy-eyed, hearing-impaired, bladder-weary terminus. I am thirty-six years old and my growing is over.

“Diane?” Peter said, looking at his arm.

Diane followed his glance: she had a desperate grip on his sleeve. All Diane could see, for the moment, was the tweed fabric bunched up in her fingers.

“Are you all right?” Peter asked.

“I feel a little faint,” she managed to answer. “I’d better—” She stumbled out of the noisy room, back to the foyer. Paula was still there with her children, surrounded by a half dozen new arrivals. Peter and Betty followed Diane, Peter taking her arm, Betty appearing in front, peering at her.

“You look green,” Betty said.

“Hey!” said Patty Lane, the celebrity author, tapping Betty on the shoulder. “No hello?”

Betty glanced back at Patty. “Oh. Hi. My friend—have you met?—she’s not feeling well—”

Diane looked at Patty’s beautiful body, displayed by tight black stretch pants and a loose pink blouse unbuttoned to reveal the tops of her black bra, and she thought: all these women are more famous and more beautiful than I am.

Patty’s pleasant party smile evaporated, her big green eyes widening. “We’re fainting,” Patty announced, and pushed Peter away, taking Diane’s other arm. “There’s a bedroom this way,” Patty said.

The two women half carried Diane to a huge sedate bedroom, all the fabric beige and the furniture made of light, glistening wood. Patty shut the door in Peter’s startled face, as if he were a molester.

“That’s her husband,” Betty explained.

“Who cares?” Patty answered.

“Diane, this is Patty Lane—”

“I know,” Diane said. Diane had read and enjoyed Lane’s two novels of distressed young womanhood in New York, pitying and envying the main characters’ woes.

“This is your friend Diane!” Patty said with recognition. “Didn’t you just have a baby? Should you be out in a mob scene like this?”

Betty laughed. “She had the baby six months ago.”

“Oh,” said Patty. “So? I’d still be in bed.” There was a knock on the door. “If it’s your husband, do you want him?” Patty asked.

Diane nodded, although she felt much better alone with the two women. Younger, at ease, free from the world’s intense demands.

Patty opened the door. But it wasn’t Peter. Paula Kramer bustled in, asking questions, suggesting remedies, mentioning Stoppard’s concern that Diane rejoin the party to talk with the Gedhorn people. At the mention of the clients, Diane stiffened. Her anxiety at the chaos of the universe focused into tension at the demands of the present. Diane declined Patty’s and Betty’s suggestion that she rest for a while and instead returned to the party, ignoring Tony, Peter, and the group that she had embarrassed herself in front of, joining, instead, Stoppard and the Gedhorn people.

Diane felt sure of herself the moment she was back in her element, making fun of the way opposing counsel had deposed the vice-presidents, bolstering Stoppard’s ego as he became expansive and predicted victory.

Once they all went to the buffet, she was split from the Gedhorn people and found herself beside Delilah. The star winked at her and said, “You feeling better?”

“Yeah,” Diane answered. “I’m not getting enough sleep.”

“Does your husband help with the baby?” Delilah asked, but in a tone that implied she already knew the answer.

“Of course not,” Diane answered, relieved the secret was out. Yes, I am a failure as a feminist.

Betty, Patty, and Paula waved her over to a corner of the dining room and Diane ate ravenously while they talked. Paula continued to praise Hunter, perversely egged on by Betty, and in the cab ride home, the words of the mothers about getting their children into a good school stayed in Diane’s mind. Betty had said to Diane, “You don’t have to worry—Peter’s mom can get you into any of the good private schools.”

The baby-sitter reported that Byron had been an angel, playing happily on the rug until nine, and falling asleep without any fuss the moment he was rocked. While Peter paid her, Diane went into Byron’s quiet room and stood over his crib.

Paula’s prideful remarks—“They get into Hunter on merit”— Tony’s envious ones—“They all have IQs over one fifty”—Paula’s advice—“If you just read to your boy a lot, he’ll score high on the test”—and Peter’s infuriating “He’s not a genius” were replayed over and over in her mind.

Diane was smart. She had gotten into Yale from a mediocre public school and from there gone to Harvard Law. Her brain was ferocious, alive, calculating. Her mind could concentrate absolutely on a subject, relentless to the finish, immaculate at arranging the details. More than anyone she knew, certainly more than Peter, she was here, in New York’s fast lane, on merit.

Diane put her hand down on Byron’s back and stroked gently. Then she let her fingers stray on his warm skull.

“He’s not a genius,” his father had said.

Byron could make do with Peter’s connections and become one of those mediocre children of the successful, lazy intellectually and spoiled by physical comfort.

Diane felt her mind pulse with energy. She imagined her tough, active brain could flow down through her arm, into her fingertips, and into Byron, into the soft, impressionable dough of Byron’s mind.