Only Children (64 page)

He couldn’t stand this indecision, this waiting.

“Market’s open,” Sammy said. The red numbers began their undulation across the ticker.

Eric picked up the phone, their direct line to Joe’s two-dollar floor broker.

“What are you doing?” Sammy asked.

Fuck you. Eric stared ahead. “Billy?”

“Hey, Eric. Got something for me?”

For months now, Eric had absorbed the white noise of market opinion, thousands of pages of it, hours and hours of statistics and interpretation. The market was at an all-time high. He was going to sell it. The overwhelming majority of traders were bullish. In history, great fortunes on the Street were made by going against the crowd, exiting against the mob rushing in, or entering while they ran out, shouldering through the babbling herd with no apologies to ease the way.

“I’m gonna sell the market, Billy. In the Winningham account, I want to clear out all positions. I’ll give them to you—”

“Eric!” Sammy tapped him on the shoulder. “Eric!”

Eric went ahead with the recital of Tom’s positions, ignoring Sammy.

Sammy rolled his chair over, bumping Eric’s. “Eric, have you lost your fucking mind? You can’t go to cash in this market. Tom can invest in cash by walking to the fucking bank. He doesn’t need us to earn six percent.”

There was heat in Eric’s body, terrible heat. It flashed through him; he put his face at Sammy’s pale ferret face. “You shut your fucking mouth! I don’t want to hear a goddamned word out of you! Shut your fucking mouth!”

“Eric?” Billy called out plaintively through the phone. “Eric? Is that you?”

The room clicked and whirred into action. Sammy moved; the secretaries looked over; Joe pushed his chair away from his monitor. Eric shielded his eyes, stared down at the list he had made weeks ago, and talked to the phone, only to the phone. He finished reading off Tom’s stocks. “Okay? That’s the exchange. I’ll handle OTC. Now, when you’re done getting out, I want you to go short these Dow stocks in thousand lots: IBM, GM, International Paper—”

“Eric!” This was Joe now. “Eric, I’m long those stocks. They’re very strong.”

Eric continued the recital of his list—

“Use the options! Or the futures! If you want to hedge, that’s the right vehicle!” Joe’s voice sounded nearby.

Eric glanced up. Joe had left his chair.

I got the old bastard off his perch.

Joe’s hand landed on Eric’s shoulder. “Listen to me. This is not the way to be short.”

Eric stared ahead, down at the sheet with the short list, scrawled in his hand one late night months ago when he had dreamed of this, of a decisive triumph—

“Good evening, our guest tonight on
Wall Street Week
is Eric Gold, chief investment officer of Washington Heights Management, his own firm. Mr. Gold went short the stock market at its all-time high two years ago. We’ll find out tonight—”

“Eric,” Joe whispered in his ear. “I’m asking you to delay for an hour. Let’s have a talk in my office first. I’m sure we can work out a mutual strategy—”

“Hold it, Eric,” Billy said on the phone in Eric’s other ear. “Let me close out the long positions first, then I’ll get the shorts.”

“Okay. Get back to me.” Eric pushed away from his desk, bumped into Sammy’s chair, and got free of Joe’s hand. “It’s done,” he lied. It wouldn’t be done until Billy called back. “There’s nothing to discuss.”

“It’s inappropriate for you to be short stocks that I’m long.”

“Then get out of your stocks.”

“Eric,” Joe said, and put his hand out again, gesturing to his private office. His voice was low, seductive. “We need to talk.”

If I go in there, he’ll manipulate me out of it. I don’t have the strength to fight him.

“Forget it. What’s done is done. I’m going for a walk.” He rushed out, ran from Joe’s plea—“Eric!”—and from Sammy’s insult—“You’re an asshole!”

“Tell us, Mr. Gold,” they will ask me. “Tell us, Mr. Gold,” they will honor me. “What was it like to go against the crowd? When everyone was sure, when no one had the courage, how did you feel?”

I am strong. I stand alone. I am strong. Nothing was given to me in this world; my father let me go into the world without weapons, with nothing to make me equal to the rest. I stand alone now—Eric Gold, the Wizard of Wall Street, brave and lonely and brilliant.

D
IANE DECIDED
to stay in Philadelphia with her mother throughout the recuperation. She believed that Lily’s health and her own life were inextricable. She offered to take Byron down to Philadelphia during the nursing of Lily, but to her surprise, Peter said no.

“He’s started at nursery school, we have the IQ test next week. He can’t miss them. We’ll visit on the weekends.”

Peter’s self-assurance amazed her. And she felt relieved not to have to put on a show for Byron. Whenever Diane was away from Lily’s sight, she had a tendency to burst into tears. It infuriated her because she didn’t feel like crying. There was no gentle lull of self-pity beneath the weeping. It happened at the images: Lily broken on the wheel of modern medicine; the angry stitching down her chest, a zipper branded on her skin; Lily’s pale, dead face; her eyes, weak and scared, pleading for everything to be all right. Diane hated the reversal of nature: her mother, the great force she had resisted, surrendered to, run from, railed against, prayed to, was a scared kid now, utterly at Diane’s mercy. There were no more criticisms of Diane’s dress, or Diane’s values, or Diane’s eating habits, or Diane’s marriage, or anything else—just gratitude, and a pathetic conviction that Diane’s reassurances were guarantees.

Lily’s doctors told Diane they didn’t want to discuss Lily’s condition unless Diane was present. Without Diane, there were hysterics, accusations, and misunderstandings. The doctors talked to Diane while Lily listened. She lay smashed on the bed, an oxygen mask over her month, her eyes on Diane, trusting when Diane approved, nervous when Diane, by asking further questions, seemed not to be satisfied.

“She’s doing well,” the internist would say.

“You’re doing well,” Diane would say to Lily as if the doctor had spoken in a language unknown to Lily.

Lily would nod at Diane with a ridiculous and sad faith.

Back at her mother’s kitchen table, Diane cried every time she thought of Lily.

And Diane hated herself for her tears, hated the discovery that she needed her mother’s madness, her mother’s irritations, her mother’s crummy values. They were gravity; without them, Diane clutched at the spinning earth, holding on by her fingernails. She had to save this woman, she couldn’t let her go. It meant nothing to Diane, made no sense, that of course, someday Lily must die. It was gibberish. Lily was the world, the never-satisfied world, and she could not die.

Every day Diane woke up with iron in her belly—long, hot rods stuck through her stomach. She had to press in with her fingers to break them; they cracked and she’d belch their metal out.

But new rods were stuck through Diane the minute she relented; they reappeared instantly, burning and sizzling inside her. Only when Diane got into her mother’s car, a decrepit and wheezing vehicle, to drive to the hospital did the metal in her stomach dissolve and leave her free to feel happiness. She loved driving. It reminded her of the last two years of high school and her college days. She bought a dozen tape cassettes of sixties music and played them loud. They filled the vacuum of the car with memories and exploded her present, sent her back to the happy past: young and intense, full of energy and hope. No death, no failure, no compromise.

But the drive was short. In the parking lot, Diane was overwhelmed with guilt that she had had such a good time in the car. She sang back to the music, laughed at the snapshots of her past—lovers, arguments, ancient happiness.

Your mother is very ill, she scolded. Today the drive seemed to end even more quickly, the joy of it over so fast. Diane darkened her face as she stepped into the hospital, ready to heap mounds of phony confidence over her terror and hopelessness about Lily’s condition. She had hours of vigil ahead, sitting beside her split-open mother. Lily, exhausted and on painkillers, would sleep on and off, always clutching Diane’s hand, as if it had life to spare. The linen, the hospital noises, Lily’s fear never changed. It was boring. Very scary and very boring.

Diane tried to remember New York. Her real life, she would have said a few weeks ago. But Peter and Byron, their apartment, her old job, her friends—they had no tidal force to draw her to them. It seemed life had always been this way: Lily and Diane, fighting nature.

Peter and Byron didn’t need Diane, anyway. According to Peter, this time Byron had taken the IQ test without any problem. He had gone to the prenursery school with typical enthusiasm and come home babbling about the activities.

Last night Diane had had a twenty-minute conversation with Byron over the phone; he rattled off the things they did in school and concluded, “You know, Mommy, I think I’m going to like growing up.”

“Oh,” Diane said, and held herself back from laughing. “How come?”

“Well, Daddy said I go to school for eighteen years while I grow up. I think I’m really going to like that.”

Peter got on afterward and sounded like a competent parent of many year’ experience It was bizarre.

Maybe I was the problem. Me. With my ceaseless demands, my endless criticism.

Whom did I do all that work for? Nobody needed it. Nobody wanted it.

“We miss you,” Peter said last night at the end of her conversation with Byron. But he didn’t sound sincere. The facts didn’t bear him out.

My mother needs me, she answered herself walking into the cardiac care unit. Do I take her back to New York? Insist to Peter we move into a larger apartment with a room for Mom?

That frail, scared, greedy, foolish woman. Diane loved her.

Diane set her face into a strong look of confidence and walked into the room.

The bed was empty.

“Ma?” she called out.

And she was hovering outside the window, looking at the Diane in the doorway: dressed in nice clothes, her hair brushed, her face made up, carrying the newspapers, and a take-out container of coffee.

“Ma?” this nice person called out.

Diane rushed to herself, smashed through the window, across the linoleum floor, rushed up into her own body, became herself, and began to scream: “Where is my mother? Where is my mother?”

Two nurses, both of them familiar faces, ran in and began to talk, to her and at each other. A mistake had been made, they were trying to say, Diane was supposed to have been called.

They didn’t have to finish their explanations. Diane had forgotten to worry about this, about a sudden event during her absence. Diane had forgotten to be vigilant; she could have talked them into letting her sleep at the hospital, she could have—but she didn’t and so, of course, Lily was dead.

W
HEN NINA
told Tad’s secretary she’d call Eric back, Nina remembered the smell of Luke’s hair. She had bent down to kiss Luke as she left him at the play group, but he was being called by David, by Katy, by Josh, by Rachel—“Hello Luke!” “Luke! Look at my new shoes!” “Luke! come play with me!”—and Nina’s lips managed to catch only the top of Luke’s head as he moved toward his friends. Hours later, at work, she could still feel the fur in her nose, the smell of baked life from his scalp, fresh and warm: soft hair, hard skull.

To Nina and Eric’s astonishment, according to the two young women who ran the prenursery school, Luke was the favorite of his class, always in demand, chosen by the other children to arbitrate disputes or as a spokesman for their desires. Today’s easy separation from Luke was thoroughly different from the first month of taking Luke to the prenursery school. Then he had clung to Nina’s side, peering out from a lowered brow and half-concealed head. He was a growth on her body; baby kangaroo in the pouch. Now Luke woke up early, asking, “Is it time for school?” He squirmed out of her pouch, rushed from her at the entrance, ran to his world. He loved his new friends, their habits, their mistakes, their games. Nowadays Nina had to plan ahead for the weekends, ask Luke which friend he wanted to see, make a date, and then tactfully say no to the others when their mothers phoned, eager to reserve time with her Luke. Solitary Nina had raised a friend to all toddlers. She worried his popularity was merely a by-product of his poor self-defense mechanisms, but it didn’t seem to be in practice: Luke had the ultimate threat, that there were others who wanted to play with him, and so he was wooed, given what he wanted, without the need to demand it.

Luke’s development gave Nina confidence. When Tad turned over to Nina more and more of the supervision of the line, she felt competent, assured of the future, because her Luke, the mewling, unhappy, constipated, nervous infant, had grown into a strong, smart, loving, and happy child. Why didn’t it mean that to Eric? He was responsible for much of Luke’s maturation; why had Eric’s self-esteem declined?

Eric phoned in the midst of a hassle with two models. One had arrived late for a fitting and said she had to leave early for a shoot; Nina needed more time with her. Nina wanted to concentrate on persuading the model and Eric’s call was a distraction. “Ask him if I can call him back?” Nina said, and tried to reason with the model, but she overheard Tad’s secretary say to Eric, “Then where can she call you back?” and Nina smelled Luke’s hair from the morning: baked and soft and hard.

“Wait!” she called out. “I’ll take it.”

“Nina?” Eric’s voice answered her hello. He called out from the bottom of a canyon of New York noise—trucks, horns, shouting pedestrians.

“Eric? Where are you?”

“On the street.” He was desperate. “Can you—are you busy?”

“What’s wrong?”

“I’ve had it with Joe!” The words were strong, but Eric’s tone was scared.

“You’ve quit?”

“No, I—uh—I just told him. I’m going short the market, I can’t— I sold out all the stocks, your father’s stocks, and I’m gonna go short.”

Short meant betting against them, Eric had once explained to her. Over the years, Eric always made going short sound dangerous, immoral. It was something he was tempted to do and feared; he often spoke of it the way teenagers talk of breaking some rule; trying something adult they weren’t supposed to: sex, drugs, running away from home. She knew that much; it was a step Eric feared and desperately wanted to take.