Only Children (54 page)

Diane’s eyes went down, purposefully, to Eric’s lips, kissing them with her glance.

Oh, for Christ’s sakes, for once in your life, make a decision without tiptoeing through fields of bullshit—

He kissed her. Her mouth was soft. He hadn’t expected that. With her black hair and sharp chin, her dark, bold eyes and lean, angled body, he had anticipated meeting something hard and solid, charged with energy. But she was soft, melting at his contact, absorbing him. He could taste her lipstick, smell her perfume. She was fresh-baked, not yesterday’s roll; he wanted more.

“No!” Byron shouted.

Eric pushed Diane away, his body shocked, jumping back. He lost his balance, his ass sliding off the edge of the couch, and fell like a bulky package, thudding onto the rug. He looked to see—

But there was nothing in the doorway.

“No!” Byron shouted. The voice came from the other room. The boys were still safely ignorant. Eric looked up at Diane, who seemed dazed. “They’re playing,” she said.

She should be laughing. She must be pretty far gone if she’s not laughing. “This is crazy,” Eric said.

“They’re allowed to be crazy,” she answered “Why can’t we?”

“ ’Cause we’re the parents,” Eric said, and he laughed.

But the laugh didn’t escape his throat, and he saw himself, big and clumsy and old, bussing a married woman on her couch, and he coughed, needing to laugh, and then he did laugh, again and again, until there were tears in his eyes while he laughed, and he didn’t stop laughing until the boys ran in to ask what was so funny.

F
OR WEEKS
diane had used eric to stimulate her bath orgies. Night after night Eric lifted her to the ceiling and consumed her from the bottom up, swallowing her below and raising her above, until she flew up to the yellow globe, the bowl of popcorn quavering big, then little, the orange bowl squeezed to red, then white. Eric took her in the hallway with Peter just in the other room, and she had to press her lips tight to hold the freedom inside, gulping back her pleasure, Eric moving over her, restless, loving, frantic, ravenous—

Diane hadn’t expected her fantasy to become real.

Night after night she loved Eric’s image, until she found herself inviting him over on impulse, as if reality had become soft and she could, at will, puncture it with her dreams. She used the boys as a beard, picked a night when she knew Nina and Peter would be elsewhere, dressed up for Eric, bought wine and cheese and flowers, picked out music, restraightened the living room, as if it were a date, a special night, assuming all the while: of course, I won’t do anything.

And then she made him kiss her. She couldn’t stop herself, didn’t even think about the risk that he might not, and thus expose her desire to ridicule.

Only when Eric fell off the couch, frightened by the mere sound of children—she hadn’t heard the noise that startled him, at least not consciously, although she knew why he broke off contact—only when Eric fell off the couch and was so scared that he became hysterical, only then did Diane pause and think.

When the boys discovered Eric on the rug, they were delighted by his collapsed position. Luke jumped all over Eric with a familiar joy, shouting references to games they must play every night, Byron stood and watched for a moment, amazed by the giant daddy toddler. Peter never lowered himself. Eric played like a kid, diminished in both size and dignity, a huge child shouting back phrases from He-Man, pretending right along with his son, falling over when a little fist bounced harmlessly off his massive chest—she had one fantasy with Eric’s chest hairless, another in which she pressed her lips against a soft mossy bed—and he growled fiercely when he counterattacked. Byron hung back, not shy, but baffled, until Eric suddenly grabbed him also—

Byron’s face spread open into a wide smile and he tried to play along. However, Byron’s punches were in earnest. Diane knew she should scold Byron, but she was fascinated into silence. She watched Eric take the blows politely at first, his face showing confusion, and waited to see how he would deal with it.

“Hey.” Eric grabbed Byron’s hand, after he had taken two socks on the chin. “We’re just pretending to hit. You don’t actually do it.”

“Yeah, yeah, Byron. You don’t actually—” Luke showed him, swinging hard and then stopping his little fist just an inch before meeting Eric’s body. “You know what I mean. You just pretend.”

“This is what you do,” Eric said. “You let Luke distract me and then you jump on me from behind.”

“Okay,” Byron said agreeably, and that worked. Byron followed orders and the three of them ended up in a heap, the boys triumphant, Lilliputians climbing atop the giant prone body, cheering themselves and proclaiming victory over evil.

Only the arrival of the pizza saved Eric from endless defeats.

This is the kind of man I want, Diane realized. I’m not horny. I’m married to the wrong person.

In all the confusion, Byron’s birth, Peter’s emotional withdrawal from the marriage, her resignation from the job, her rages, that simple answer had never occurred to her. That she had a bad marriage, yes. That Peter probably didn’t love her, yes. That she might not love him anymore, yes. But all those thoughts, and the thousands of others they spawned, were part of a jungle—wet vines and laden ferns obscuring her view of the horizon: I married the wrong man. I wanted someone to be with, someone simple and ordinary like Eric, someone to handle at least half of life. Then I could work. I need a man. A partner. A husband.

I don’t want to sleep with him, I want to substitute him for Peter.

Then they were alone again, Eric spoke quickly, guilty and embarrassed. “I’m sorry about—you know—”

“That’s okay.”

“I guess I’m a little nuts these days.”

He’s going to back down. That bothered her. Even though she no longer wanted to go on, his doing it first was irritating. “I wanted you to,” Diane said.

“You did, didn’t you?”

“Yes.” He knows that. Why is he pretending he doesn’t?

“But we couldn’t. How? And—” He looked the point, his eyes going toward the sounds of their sons playing in the other room.

“We can do anything we want,” Diane answered, unwilling to let him get away that easily, with the excuse of practicality. Why didn’t he admit he was a coward? Or at least claim decency.

Eric sighed. “I just can’t handle it. That’s all. I’m barely hanging on right now. Anything else and I’d sink.” He pointed straight down. “Boom!” He looked at where he had crashed his imagined self, shaking his head over the phantom corpse. “I want to,” he said softly. A little bit like Luke, head down, desire spoken to the floor.

“Anytime, I’m here all day, every week. I can always get away.” Why not? At least I’ll make love. Anyway, he won’t do it.

Eric raised his head and stared. “Okay,” he said.

“P
ETER! PETER
!” his mother called him. Gail’s angled head popped up between the hairdos, her face briefly covered by passing gowns and elegant suits, then exposed just as briefly. She sought Peter in the confusion, pressing flat her already ironed hair with nervous exasperation.

Opening night at the ballet. Peter had forgotten how archaic it seemed, an evening of privilege, of meaningless beauty, attended by a weird marriage of the wealthy and the artistically obsessed. A charming or pathetic scene, depending on one’s mood. Some were openly watching the celebrities, leaning over the balcony above, or standing on their level, but away, at the perimeter, all eyes on the center vortex, rich patrons waltzing about the stars.

“Here you are,” Gail said when Peter reached her. “This is my great friend Ann. And her daughter Juliet—”

“The cellist,” Peter acknowledged, and shook hands with a tall, very shy girl of eighteen. She was a prodigy, an actual success, a proof of early music education.

“Peter’s boy, he’s only three, is studying the violin.”

“Suzuki?” Juliet said. To Peter’s surprise, she seemed to blossom at the introduction of this subject. She straightened her shoulders, held her head up. She had a pasty face and thin lips, but her big, solemn eyes, beneath a high brow that wrinkled and smoothed itself expressively as she talked made her interesting, if not beautiful. “How does he like it?”

Peter thought: being a parent means condensing the truth into a lie. “He doesn’t like the work of it. But he loves it when he can do it.”

She nodded and smiled to herself. “Yeah, I know how he feels.”

“Now, now, no complaints,” her mother said. “It was worth it.”

Gail rattled off Juliet’s accomplishments, although she had told Peter about them before. Juliet listened to herself being discussed without self-consciousness or vanity. She was used to it. More people joined them, more arts funders, people whom Peter felt he had known from the moment of his birth, people who nodded at him as if he were a boring landmark. I could be stark naked and they wouldn’t notice, he thought. The crowd began to move back in, and in the flow, Peter found himself standing next to Juliet. She smiled up at him, a slow, wise, mournful smile.

“Can I ask you a dumb question?” Peter said on an impulse.

She smiled at that too, as if all she had ever been asked were dumb questions. “Sure.”

“I know your mother started you early—”

“Five. Your son’s got me beat.”

“—but when did you decide you wanted to be a musician?”

“This way, dear!” her mother called, and tugged her into a different tributary from Peter’s.

Juliet looked back at him, very serious, wanting to tell him: “I never did.” And she was carried off, like a piece of paper riding a current, looking back at him, her eyes still answering.

He moved to his seat, entranced by Juliet’s answer. Does anyone have any choice about what they become? When a steelworker’s son becomes a steelworker, does anyone wonder if that’s bad? If I force Byron to become a musician, is that really so terrible? My mother never demanded I be anything; she let me drift, so long as I had the right opinions on politics, on culture, so long as I showed no interest in things she didn’t approve of. Sure, she made no demands of accomplishment, but was that good? I feel useless. Wouldn’t I prefer being pushed, oppressed into some kind of brilliance?

He settled in his seat and thought of Mozart. Peter didn’t know the real story of Mozart’s life; he knew the play
Amadeus
, he knew snatches, enough to sound educated. If Byron were pushed, relentlessly, unforgivingly, made into a freak, an unsociable unhappy person—but someone who could create like Mozart—would that really be worse than a normal upbringing?

But what if Byron isn’t talented? What if all I accomplished was to make Byron a neurotic, imprisoned by soulful despair, and without a key of genius to unlock the sorrow?

Like me? The therapy had taught Peter one thing: there was no escape. He could understand, he could protect himself, he could learn to forgive, he could enjoy what he had; but there was no undoing the divorce, his father’s neglect, his mother’s rejection, or Larry—

He hadn’t thought of Larry for a while, not after the sessions with Kotkin recalled more of the incidents, not after settling them— your parents weren’t around, you felt abandoned, and this man touched you, wanted you, and you liked the wanting, but not the touching, but you were scared to complain because no one had ever behaved as if your complaints mattered. Did your complaints stop your father from leaving your mother? Did your complaints make your mother stay with you, instead of her new man?

Child molesters are clever; they have a keen scent for loneliness.

And Larry’s still out there, still doing it, still twisting simple melodies of unhappiness into dissonant symphonies of pain.

I have to deal with Byron, with Diane’s collapse. Kotkin was no help, said nothing. Why do you think anything has to be done? she asked. No answers; his questions were bounced back.

Maybe I can’t deal with Diane and Byron until I deal with Larry.

How many children has Larry hurt? Gary never did anything to save Peter, and denied and lied even to this day. I’m just as bad, aren’t I?

But Larry’s an old man, he’s managed to survive his perversion, to escape, like some Nazi war criminal living in New Jersey, and now, Larry being old, wasn’t it merely cruel to—

What? He chuckled at the thought of going to the police to report Larry, he chuckled out loud, right in the middle of a pas de deux that had everyone transfixed. The woman next to him turned her head to stare—what in the world could he be laughing at?

It occurred to Peter that Larry might be in the audience. He scanned the rows from his position in the center ring, to the right, then to the left, studying the men in their sixties, trying to reconstruct Larry’s features and decay them appropriately. He might be bald now.

Maybe he’ll die of AIDS, Peter thought with a mixture of revulsion and pleasure. The pleasure faded at the memory of his visit to Raul Sabas in the hospital. Paralyzed, bone-thin, wheezing—

You’re disgusting, he told himself. And if Larry has AIDs, he might be giving it to young boys. Who knows what he does now, who knows how far he’s gone in twenty-five years of perversion? Maybe he does more than merely touch now, maybe he finds runaways, maybe he kills them—

This is madness. The audience applauded. Peter staggered out with them, back into the intermission parade outside, people gawking from above, swirling groups plucking hellos from the air, quick opinions whispered to the floor—

“Hello.” Juliet was at his elbow.

“What did you mean?” Peter said.

“Before?” She smiled at him sweetly. Does she ever get to meet any normal boys, or are they all freaks like her? “No one in the history of the world ever decided to be a musician,” she said. “Your parents have to decide for you. Otherwise, it’s too late. If you start as an adult, you can only be an amateur.”

“How do you know you want to do it, then? When does it belong to you?”

“It belongs to me,” she said, looking down at her shoes, mumbling, “because it’s all I’ve got.”

“And if you had something else, would you give it up?”

“Something else, like what?” She smiled now, looking off, enjoying this. “Husband and kids?” she offered, as if they were a wild possibility, flying to Mars or something.