Only Children (58 page)

I’m Eric, the Wizard of Wall Street. One day I’ll duck into limousines, past the hoards of admirers, my camel-hair coat swirling around my legs, my jaw set, my brain a machine that never knows fear, or hesitation, or error.

“Think about it,” Joe said. “One week and then if nothing changes, I may have to call the Boston Beans and even your father-in-law and tell them I don’t agree with your current approach.”

That would finish Eric. They’d either give Joe control or withdraw.

“You know something, Daddy?” Luke shouted. He was dancing across the living room floor, ecstatic now that the sludge was out of his system. “I’ll have better ideas when I’m older. Right?”

“Better ideas?” Eric said. He tried to think back to the meeting with Joe again, to continue the rerun, but Luke had said—Maybe I can’t adjust on the stocks because I’m busy with his damn bowels. If Nina were a real wife, if she cared about money! If she only knew what money means on this earth!

“Yeah, Byron has better ideas right now—”

“Better ideas about what?” Eric’s tone was so sharp that Luke paused, his clear, glowing blue eyes clouding to a deeper, worried color.

“Forget it,” Luke said, and swung his arm in the air. “I have the power!”

“No, no,” Eric said, and got on one knee. “Say it again, I’m sorry, I was thinking—say it again.”

“When I’m older, I’ll have better ideas than Byron. When I get to be older than he is.”

“I’m sorry, Luke, I don’t understand.”

“Daddy!” Luke clenched his fists in frustration. “Okay,” he said with a manly sigh. “Byron is older than me, right?”

“Not really.”

Luke stood still. He stared into Eric’s eyes like a deer frozen in the lights, paralyzed by surprise.

“Byron is six weeks older than you, Luke. That’s nothing. We call that being the same age. A year, two years, that’s older. But six weeks is nothing. And another thing,” Eric said, a chill running down his spine as he realized what he was really saying and to whom he was saying it, “age has nothing to do with whether your ideas are good or not. Even if Byron was much older than you, it doesn’t mean his ideas are better.”

“Yeah,” Luke said slowly. “I don’t think his ideas are so good. But he said—”

“I don’t care what he said, Luke!”

“Okay.” Luke bowed his head, shamed. “I’m sorry.”

“No!” Eric picked him up so they were face-to-face. “There’s nothing for you to be sorry about. Byron is a liar!”

“What!” Nina had been peacefully reading on the couch. “Eric, what did you say?”

Ignore her. She doesn’t know. She thinks we’re going to survive just because we’re good people, because we love each other. Maybe we don’t. And maybe we’ll go under.

“What did Byron say to you?”

“Nothing.” Luke tried to look away. He squirmed in Eric’s hand.

“Come on, Luke.”

“He said because he’s older, his ideas are better.”

Nina laughed. “He’s not older than you, Luke.”

“He isn’t?”

“No,” Eric said. “He isn’t. And even if he is older, that doesn’t make his ideas better.”

“Okay, Daddy.” Luke smiled.

Eric put him down on the floor.

“I have the power,” Luke called. Eric watched him run, swinging his invisible sword.

Nina, her face soft, solicitous, said, “What was that about?”

“That Byron is a bully.”

“That’s what Pearl said today. He’s very bossy, but Luke loves him.”

“Maybe it isn’t love.”

“Oh, no,” Nina said. “He can’t wait to get to the park to play—”

“That might not be love.”

“Eric,” Nina said, frowning at him. “Byron is pushy, but Luke holds his own, and if he can’t, he has to learn to. There are plenty of bullies in the world.”

Luke was back. “Watch how fast I fly, Mommy.” He ran with his hands out in front. “I’m Superman! I’m Superman!” The little toddler, his legs still chubby, his head still a little too big for his body. “I’m Superman!”

I’m gonna go in there tomorrow and scream at Joe. How dare he tell me he’s going to take the Boston Beans away? That’s my fucking money to win or lose.

Lose.

Lose.

Lose.

“What did you say, Eric?” Nina asked.

He gasped. Can’t tell her. Would Tom call her?

“You were mumbling,” she said. “What did you say?”

“Nothing,” Eric answered, and lowered his head, ashamed.

D
IANE HELD
her mother’s hand as they walked into the hospital. The smell, a mixture of baked institutional food and cleansers, overwhelmed her mouth. She took a deep breath to suck in the despair and sickness all at once and be fast acclimated.

Lily squeezed Diane’s fingers at each sight of illness, gasping at each bit of news. Go in there. Undress. The doctor will do such and such. This is a tranquilizer. No, we can’t put you out. You get to watch your heart on a monitor.

Squeeze. Gasp.

“I don’t need to see that!” Lily said, and managed a laugh, although its sound was brief and pained.

“May I stay with her?” Diane asked Dr. Klein, the cardiologist, when he came in.

He looked astonished at the suggestion. “No. Hospital procedure wouldn’t allow that.”

“Can I read a book or something?” Lily said in an aggrieved tone. “Just lying there—I’ll be bored!”

Lily had come up with these inappropriate statements every few minutes since Diane had arrived in Philadelphia. She was obviously terrified, but she kept up a pretense, not a convincing one, that she was only bothered by the inconvenience and fuss.

Lily maintained this fiction, except for the night Diane arrived.

“They told me everything would be fine with your daddy,” Lily had said that night, her hands nervously rubbing the knot in her robe’s belt. The translucent skin, stretched across her bony knuckles, looked tired, as if it might peel off. When did that happen to her hands? “They said your daddy would recover from the heart attack if he watched his diet—and then the next morning he’s dead. So I don’t believe them. Not that they’re lying. They don’t know what they’re doing. And the worst thing is they think they know.”

Diane explained to Lily that fifteen years had gone by since then, that medicine had learned and developed a great deal in heart treatment. “It’s the most successful area of medicine there is,” Diane said.

“You’re smart,” Lily said. Her chin buckled under her upper lip. “You’re my smart girl,” she repeated.

Diane felt her heart expand, warm against all the years of silence, hot and red, glowing against the ice age that had formed between them. Diane took the bony fingers, cold with fright, in her palm. “Don’t worry, Ma. They do know what they’re doing.”

“If they make me into a horror,” Lily said, “just shoot me. I don’t want to lie someplace, drooling all over myself.” Lily laughed, a ghastly hysterical laugh, at this thought. “That’s all I need—to end up wearing diapers with some
schwartzer
to change them.”

“Will you please not call them that, Ma?”

Lily took offense. Loudly proclaimed she wasn’t a racist. Her proof: she paid her girl (a black woman of sixty) a dollar more an hour than the going rate for housecleaning.

My mother is dumb. How is that possible? Was Daddy so brilliant? He owned and managed three record stores and made a good living, but he was hardly Einstein. Where did I get my SAT scores from? There must be some intelligence in this woman; there had to be gold buried beneath the layers of conventional attitudes and dull gossip.

Maybe not. I was probably kidnapped from a roving band of intellectuals, hijacked away from a life of the mind and forced to live in the suburbs of Philadelphia.

Diane called home while waiting for Lily to emerge from the catheterization. She had read in the release disclaimer there was a 1 percent chance that insertion of the catheter would provoke a heart attack. The document was pretty good legally, but nothing could protect the hospital from a clever lawyer.

“I’m a lawyer,” Diane had heard herself saying to Dr. Klein, just as stupidly as Lily had. Even dumber, Diane had lied, saying, “I’m an associate at Wilson, Pickering.” She had been so intent on scaring the doctor with this fact that she had forgotten to say her tentative farewell to Lily, her just-in-case good-bye. “Don’t worry, Ma,” she had planned to say. “I love you.”

After the doctor left, Diane had another opportunity, but Lily distracted her, throwing a temper tantrum about her legs being uncovered because her gown was too short. “I’m a small woman!” she began to shout. “This must be for a child!”

“It doesn’t make any difference, Ma,” were the last words Diane had spoken to her mother before she went in. “You’re not going to a bar mitzvah. Don’t worry about your outfit.”

That farewell was a far cry from “I love you, Ma!” She’s going to be all right, so it doesn’t matter. Diane reached Francine at home. Byron was out again with Peter. Diane’s absence seemed to be a blessing. Peter had taken off three days in a row, treating Byron to a movie, the circus, and now, although it sounded unlikely, according to Francine, to a play.

Diane sighed and stared out the waiting-room window at the hospital’s half-empty parking lot. A drizzle had begun. There was nothing to see but the cars, put in slots like empty shoes in a closet, longing for use. Diane had enjoyed that nighttime drive down from New York. Alone, urgent, scared, music playing out of the darkened hollow beneath her, the dashboard lights glowing like cat’s eyes.

If she dies, I’ll get in the car and disappear. Drive and drive and drive. If she dies, I’m an orphan. And orphans wander. Alone.

N
INA WANDERED
the aisles of the drugstore until she found the laxatives. She hadn’t needed them in years; the worst of her constipation had ended in college when she began to drink coffee.

Maybe I should start Luke’s day with three cups of espresso, she thought.

Tad had asked her to work for him on next year’s line. He suggested she drop her courses at FIT and work full-time.

“You’re not one of these children,” Tad had said. “You don’t need this. Work for me for a few years and they’ll all be going to you behind my back and offering you the world.”

She almost believed him. She said yes, she would drop her courses and become his assistant, my number two, as Tad called it. But she hadn’t told Eric the news. That was wrong. But she needed at least a few days to think up her explanation of why taking the job was so important. She knew it was, but she couldn’t explain why.

There were lots of new twists to the laxatives, so-called natural laxatives, but when Nina studied their labels, they all had chemicals of one sort or another and cautioned that regular use might lead to dependence. Eric wouldn’t accept that for his son. Although Luke was getting the shit out, his body wasn’t making it easy. She called the behavioral psychologist and he said, “Well, as long as he’s trying and doing it, you can continue the mineral oil to make it easier.”

But Eric had said no to that. “He’ll be on it for the rest of his life,” Eric said.

The Perfectibility of Man. But Eric was right. Luke was happier, freer, his spirit blossoming. He played for hours now, no longer comatose on the couch, staring at television. He concentrated on his pretend games, learned the alphabet merely by osmosis, used the slide fearlessly, let go of her and Eric in the mornings with assurance—Luke was tougher, more decisive, surer of himself.

She found something new. Fiber biscuits. She read the package carefully. All natural ingredients. Can be used as a daily supplement without a risk of dependence.

Don’t be dependent. Don’t need anyone. Dress yourself, fight your own battles, carry your sword into the world and conquer it. There’s love at home, but there’s happiness outside.

She showed the biscuits to Eric. He read the box three times. “It doesn’t seem to have chemicals or anything bad,” he admitted, but with suspicion. “What do we do? Have him eat one a night?”

“Why not? It’s just bran, that’s all. He can have it before he goes to bed, right after pooping.” Luke now made a regular trip to the toilet with Eric right before his bedtime stories.

It was all so absurd, so laughable. But it wasn’t, not really, she knew it wasn’t.

Over dinner, she tried to tell Eric about Tad’s offer, but she couldn’t let go, sever herself from being Eric’s wife, always convenient, always willing to make things easy.

What do I say if Eric says, no, I need you to be here, I’m under a lot of pressure?

Eric
is
under a lot of pressure. His face seemed to be pulled so tight that he couldn’t loosen enough to smile. He sat at dinner, staring into space, not hearing Luke’s happy monologues: “You know something? It’s not so good to build something very tall, because they fall down. Unless you make a bottom—”

“Foundation,” Nina said. “A foundation is what goes on the bottom and holds up the building.”

“Yeah! A foundation. You have to make a big foundation or something tall will fall down.”

Eric stared off. His eyes were big and absent. Their brown color usually had depth, allowing light to penetrate into his soul; these days they were clouded, a muddy pond, no reflection, no transparency, just swirling, stormy dark.

“Are you with us?” Nina asked softly, touching Eric’s hand.

“Has your mother called you lately?” he asked, quickly, as if an answer were urgent.

“No. I have to call her. I haven’t—why?”

“Nothing.”

He was like a baby. Eric said, “Nothing,” just the way a petulant child does, a concealment so inept it might as well be a confession.

“Sounds like it’s something,” Luke said, his broad mouth smiling, his blue eyes shining love at his father.

Eric answered Luke with a confused look, as if he didn’t recognize him. “It does?”

“Yeah,” Luke said. “Are you winning these days, Daddy?”

When Luke was two, he had asked Eric what he did at work. He had been told that buying and selling stock was like a game, that you won points or lost points each day. For a while, Luke would ask, “Did you win today, Daddy?” Lately, he hadn’t.

“No,” Eric said, but he looked at Nina. “I’m not winning.”

“Well”—Luke put out his hand, palm up, and shrugged his shoulders, an imitation of Eric’s cool manner about the pooping—“you’ll have to try harder.”