Only Children (38 page)

Stoppard surprised her. He lifted his chin and laughed up at the buildings. When he was finished with this exhibition of hilarity, Stoppard looked at her with pity. “Go home, dear. Think about what I said.”

She was baffled and found herself inside the car, without remembering getting inside. She sat stupefied, her brain stuck on the last exchange. Why did he laugh? “I think you’re overreacting.” What’s funny about that?

D
ADDY HOME
. Daddy home. Daddy home.

Luke was free of gravity again. He twirled in the air, the long wait over.

“Look, Luke, I brought you something.” Daddy pulled out a shiny package, a toy in a bubble, with bright-colored letters all around.

It was He-Man!

“Do you know what this is?” Daddy said. “Byron’s mommy told me about it.”

“Is that one of those action figures?” Mommy said.

“Yes, it’s He-Man!” Luke said. She didn’t know, couldn’t know. “That’s He-Man!” Luke said loud, very loud, so she would know.

“He’s pretty special, huh?” Mommy said.

“It has a story with it,” Daddy said, holding a bright square of still cartoons in his hand.

“Read it to me,” Luke said, worried it was too soon. Daddy still had his coat on.

“Sure. Let’s see, ‘He-Man meets Ram Man.’ ”

“Why don’t you take your coat off first?” Mommy said.

Daddy looked at Mommy.

“Hello,” Mommy said to Daddy, as if they’d just met.

Luke laughed. Mommy knows Daddy.

“Hi. How was your day?” Daddy said to Mommy.

“A little tiring,” Mommy said.

Mommy didn’t tiring. She didn’t sleep. “Sorry,” Daddy said.

He began to bump and shake. He-Man danced in Luke’s hands. He-Man’s body moved! Just like Byron’s He-Man. It was the same!

“Look.” Luke showed them. The arms punched. The legs walked. The stomach twisted. He-Man was the same as Byron’s, but brighter, his colors everywhere, not missing like Byron’s.

“I think you’d better hang it up,” Mommy said.

Luke clutched He-Man. He wanted to keep it. “It’s okay here,” Daddy said, and pushed his coat away. How did he get it off?

Daddy read about He-Man. He could smash walls. He made friends with Ram Man, who had a metal head and legs that jumped. And there was an evil, which means bad, man made of bones. When Daddy finished, he said, “He-Man has his own TV show. Did you know that?”

“Yes,” Luke said. But what is a show?

“It’s on in the morning. We can watch it together.” Daddy looked at Mommy. She nodded at him. “Did Mommy tell you about Pearl coming tomorrow to play with you?”

“No.” Why here? Why not in the park?

“Pearl’s gonna come here and play and help Mommy.”

“Help Mommy?”

“You know, clean. And stay here with you if Mommy has to go out.”

Luke looked at Mommy. She had her sad mouth, her chin smashed in, her eyes sideways.

“You know how Francine sometimes stays with Byron,” Mommy said.

“She always stays with him,” Luke said. Daddy’s body got hard. Byron’s mommy was never there, Luke wanted to say, but Daddy’s body got too hard, Mommy’s mouth too broken.

“Not like that,” Mommy said. “Not all the time.”

“Just for part of each day,” Daddy said.

“Each day!” Luke knew now. Mommy was leaving him, like the other mommies. Pearl wasn’t Mommy. She wouldn’t know how to do things.

“Nothing’s gonna happen for a while,” Mommy said fast. “Pearl and I are both gonna be here for a long time. I won’t go away until Pearl knows everything about you and how you like things. Okay?”

Mommy was leaving. Her broken chin told him the truth. She was leaving.

“Look at what He-Man can do!” Daddy said, and made the tan body twist and punch.

Luke closed his eyes to escape them, Daddy’s toy, Mommy’s worried face.

Daddy’s body got soft, his arms hard, and he squeezed.

Luke cried. He let his worries go into the shake of his chest and the wet of his eyes.

“Don’t worry, Luke,” Mommy said.

“Let’s play with He-Man,” Daddy said.

“No!” He wanted to be away from their leaving. He shut his eyes and wept. He wanted to be free from their going.

“Don’t worry, Luke,” Mommy said.

“Everything’s all right,” Daddy said.

“No!” Luke tried to yell, to break away, but they wouldn’t let him go—go away from their going.

T
HE WATER
loves me, Byron thought. The thunderous fall from the faucet blasted the bubbles. He looked into the hole.

Water washed his head. Water everywhere, in his mouth, in his eyes, warm on his chest.

“Byron! Watch yourself!” Francine said.

Hard. Hard, it hit his head, like the sky smacking him. He felt his skull break open.

He screamed at it! He screamed at the pain. Francine’s hand closed on the hole. He could feel her hand on the skin. He still had his head.

“I told you! Now, it doesn’t hurt that bad. Just a bump on the head. You got a hard head. Poor baby. Told you! You got to keep away from that faucet.”

“What is it! What is it! What is it!” Mommy was there. Dressed in the door.

“He hurt himself on the faucet,” Francine explained. “Ducked his head under, then came right up, bang!”

“It hurts, Mommy.”

“Sweetie.” She came and picked him up from the warm water and held him against her. He pressed into the paper of her clothes, his wet lips into her black hair.

“I love you, Byron,” Mommy said. “Don’t forget. I always, always love you.”

10

P
ETER WENT
for a consultation with a psychiatrist. the doctor was a squat old man whose big, watery eyes stared back, unmoved by Peter’s attempts to be, by turns, witty, earnest, lively, calm, self-confident, querulous. Peter hinted at a full deck of childhood traumas for the psychiatrist to choose from, and none was taken. The enervated listener didn’t push Peter to give more particulars. He watched Peter coldly, a reptile observing prey with unblinking eyes. When they did move, it was to the clock on his desk. The sight of time prompted the doctor’s longest speech. He suggested analysis. That, in practical terms, meant five sessions a week on the couch at a hundred and fifty an hour.

Peter said he’d think about it, and he did, only with outrage and despair, and then went on, at Rachel’s insistence, to see a mere psychotherapist recommended by a friend of Rachel’s. This time, maybe because this doctor, or Ph.D. anyway, was a mere female, an elegantly dressed, heavily perfumed nice middle-class lady in her late forties, this time Peter blurted it all out, his parents’ divorce, the child molestation, the affair, his sexual numbness with Diane, and even his elaborate fantasies, admitted to no one, that Diane and Byron would die in some accident and leave him free, tragically and gloriously free.

“Free of what?” Kotkin, Ph.D., asked.

He was so sure of his answer—the tedium, the responsibility— that Peter was surprised to hear himself say instead, “The guilt.”

“What are you guilty about?” Kotkin asked.

“I don’t know. Of the affair?”

“But you said these fantasies started when you had stopped seeing Rachel. Before you resumed the affair.”

“That’s true. I don’t know. The guilt of failing them?”

“How have you failed them?”

“The affair?”

“But the fantasies started while you weren’t having the affair.”

“Right. Well, of not loving them.”

She nodded, almost bored. “What can I do for you?”

This question baffled him. Somehow, he realized, he thought he was supposed to do something for her. “Cure me?”

Kotkin smiled. “You’re cured. What else can I do?”

He stared at her and then laughed. Her flip answer made him replay his confession and hear how solemn, how dreadful he had made his life sound. But was it really? “I don’t know,” he said at last.

She said she thought they could work together, that she could help him explore his past. My bothersome past, he thought, and missed hearing the rest of her soothing vision of their future. Twice-a-week visits to this nice lady to chat about his feelings. That’s somehow the way it came out. Her perfume, her long dress, the quiet earth tones of her furniture— the reality was softer than the cement blocks of abstract words she spoke.

He suspected this feeling was transference. Because he knew both too much and too little of analytic theory to be sure if he was right to prefer her to the psychiatrist, he ignored his doubts and let the abrupt suffusion of protection and warmth he felt afterward flow into his chilled, timid arteries.

Peter went to the next few sessions eager to be a good patient, his mouth yawning words, emptying himself of all the evil, yes, evil in him. I hate my wife. I hate my son. I’m getting bored with Rachel. I want my mother to beg my forgiveness. I liked Larry playing with me. I hated Larry playing with me. I want to know why I let him. I let him because I liked it. I let him because my father left me. I want to leave New York, and live alone in another city, sleeping with lots of pretty girls, who aren’t smart and mature like Diane, or funny and loving and wise like Rachel, but silly with big tits and fatless hips. I wish I were an artist. I’m glad I’m not. I love Diane. I love Byron. If they were dead, I could be happy.

Gradually, Peter became aware that the sessions were making his time at home with Byron and Diane easier. Diane asked only perfunctory questions about the process, her interrogation atypically brief and vague. Presumably she was afraid of what Peter might discover. Rachel, on the other hand, was nosy. Eager, too. And she got increasingly frustrated by Peter’s answers.

“You know, I’m at exactly the age my father was when he left my mother,” Peter commented to Rachel a month into his therapy.

“Does Dr. Kot think that’s significant?” Rachel asked, with a worried brow and concentrated frown.

“Kotkin, her name is Kotkin.”

“I know, honey! I think it’s funny to call her Dr. Kot. I like to think of you on Dr. Kot’s couch.”

“Making up cute names about authority figures strikes me as a way of making them even more intimidating, rather than less so.”

“Peter, you’re being defensive.”

“Darling, there’s one thing I’ve definitely learned from my therapy—I’m defensive about
everything
. I’m defensive when I’m on the offensive. I’m afraid that inanimate objects are going to leap at me—”

“Me too.” Rachel laughed, leaning toward him, touching his arm, trying to move in closer. “Me too,” she kept saying, unloading her furniture into his emotional apartment, claiming the drapes, the rug were just like hers. “Me too,” she said. Peter had talked about Rachel’s claims of duplication in therapy.

(“She wants to be close to you in every way,” Kotkin said.

(“Yeah, but it’s so adolescent, like teenage love, or even teenage friendship,” Peter answered, expressing a judgment he hadn’t known he felt.

(“You prefer distance,” Kotkin said.

(“Give me a break. I prefer difference. Isn’t that what the relationship between men and women is about? Difference?”

(“I hope so,” Kotkin said with a mock sigh of despair.

(That was funny. Was therapy supposed to be funny?)

“You’re not defensive,” Peter argued to Rachel. “You’re insecure.”

“It’s the same thing,” Rachel complained, hurt, grabbing her furniture protectively.

“Yeah, the cause, I guess. But mostly you want approval. I want to hide.”

“What does she say about me?” Rachel asked.

“Nothing. She doesn’t say things. She asks questions.”

“I love you. Have you told her I love you?”

“Now you want approval from my shrink.”

This degenerated into a fight. Rachel ended up crying. “I can’t go on seeing you until you straighten out whether you’re going to stay married or not.”

Peter agreed. That made Rachel angry. He had seen her act resentful, dented, her head drooping, her arms closed, hiding her chest, but this was different. Her shoulders, usually slumped, got square, her arm gestures strong—she looked unpleasantly masculine. “Diane’s your mommy. You’re scared to leave her because she takes care of your life. Keeps everything in order. I’m your bohemian fling.”

Peter understood now that Rachel hoped for marriage or a commitment like it, that she had expected his therapy to make him feel that his marriage to Diane was an illness, or a symptom of an illness. This discovery had none of the shock of revelation; rather, it was like noticing a color in familiar wallpaper, seeing something close by, always there, but previously ignored. He was offended by Rachel’s presumption.

(“Aren’t you flattered?” Dr. Kotkin asked.

(“Flattered?”

(“That a bright, successful, attractive woman wants you?”

(“She’s not that attractive,” Peter said, and laughed sheepishly at his cruel joke.

(“If she were more attractive, would you be flattered?” Dr. Kotkin asked, suddenly stripped of her sense of humor.

(“No. Of course not. I’m just not flattered.”)

He was bored. Rachel believed she was very important in his life. Obviously that was her problem. Unless Peter gave her absolute confirmation, she would forever be unloading her things into his soul, matching her fabric to his, lighting the same areas, completing his set of china. If she couldn’t possess the thing of him— marriage—she wanted to own his feelings.

Rachel yelled at him. She told him she couldn’t see him for a while. Peter looked downcast, but was secretly thrilled. One less cloying person.

(“I want you to get rid of them.”

(“Get rid of who?”

(“In our first session you asked what I wanted from you. I want you to get rid of all of them. My mother, my father, my stepmother, my stepfather, Larry, Diane, Byron, Rachel. Get rid of them.”

(“And then what will happen?”

(“Then I’ll be happy. I’ll buy a Winnebago and drive to Wyoming and live free and wild.”

(“How can I get rid of them?”

(He took that one seriously. His legs felt stuck to Kotkin’s couch. His head sank into the pillow. He closed his eyes and the lids burned. “Make me not care about them. About what they say. Or what they want. Or what I owe them.”

(“And if you didn’t care about all that, then you’d be free of them?”