Only Children (7 page)

Peter squinted at the goofy blue- or pink-bordered labels, trying to pick out the
B
of Byron and the
H
of Hummel; the initials were all he could hope to spot through glass smudged by the anxious vanities of a dozen set of grandparents. He found Byron at last: at the far end, against a wall, next to a vacant incubator. Byron was still, the little form of his body visible against the taut cotton blanket. His big, slightly protruding eyes were shut; the lids had the lifeless dignity of cool marble.

Peter stared at Byron, transfixed. His son was unmoving, except for an occasional worried pursing of his lips. Peter thought nothing. He felt a proud sadness, pleasure in Byron’s existence, but dismay at the expanse of his uncertain future. After many minutes, Peter found himself thinking it was hard on Byron to be in that big, bright room with all those other babies. One of them was screaming its head off, and although that didn’t seem to awaken the others, Peter couldn’t help imposing his adult sense of how frightened Byron must feel: to be thrust into the world and find it a place flooded with fluorescent light, crying creatures, and giant black women in stiff, rustling garb who, from time to time, would toss one about, removing things, wiping things, adding things. And soon someone would come and slice off part of his penis, probably while chatting about the stock market or the traffic on the FDR Drive.

The last thought, of the circumcision, obsessed him. Everybody knew it was unnecessary. Diane, however, had been adamant. She had accepted his refusal to tolerate a
bris
, but the notion of an uncircumcised son actually caused her to laugh scornfully, as though Peter had proposed something pretentious and ludicrous, such as giving Byron a gold crown to wear at the playground.

When Peter forced Diane to discuss it seriously, she had found several books on child rearing that maintained although there was no medical benefit to circumcision, father and son should be similarly outfitted, lest the difference cause anxiety in the child. It had been done to Peter, so—

Yes, it was done to me, Peter thought, so how bad could it be?

He wanted to wave good-bye or blow Byron a kiss (just walking away after such a long communion seemed almost rude), but he was made self-conscious by the sympathetic and slightly patronizing gaze of the nurse. Peter waited until the nurse turned her back before waving his farewell to Byron. Peter kept up the wave so long, however, that the nurse caught him at it anyway. In response, made mute by the glass partition, the nurse mouthed, “Good night, Daddy.” Peter was disgusted.

He left humiliated and stood uncomfortably in the peculiar carton-shaped elevator (we are eggs, he thought) next to a lot of pale, puffy faces that housed enervated eyes. Peter held his breath, convinced the air must contain an infinity of deadly germs. With each stride across the marble lobby, Peter hurried toward life, through the swivel doors, and trotted out of New York Hospital’s cul-de-sac for First Avenue, where the cars rode a concrete conveyor belt in awkward starts and stops.

Peter was late for his dinner at Rachel’s and these days it was a mistake for him to give her any cause for complaint. And he wasn’t lucky in catching a taxi, so that by the time he entered the somewhat dark vestibule of the town house and rang the buzzer for Rachel’s apartment, he suspected (as always seemed the case with him and women) that things would begin badly.

Indeed, when he had finished trudging up the four flights, he found Rachel waiting at her door with a sad tilt of her head, biting her lower lip. She said immediately, despite the pretty green dress and heavy makeup, “I think we should have canceled.”

“Nonsense,” he answered, and led her in, shutting the door before embracing her. Her wide mouth remained closed and dry, although she arched her body into him pliantly. “I’ve missed you.”

“Oh, God,” she answered, and buried her head in his chest.

He looked down at her curly head of black hair, parted severely on one side. The white of her scalp gleamed in the tangle and reminded him of his son’s small head: both were fragile and in his care. He didn’t feel unhappy, disgusted by his desires and absurd immorality. He felt exuberant. “Cheer up,” he said, pulling her out from hiding against his body.

She looked shyly into his eyes and her chin quivered. But she spoke sharply: “That’s a pretty hopeless request.”

“No, it isn’t,” he insisted, and leaned forward, kissing her lightly, backing away, and going in again, this time pressing harder, staying longer, parting the lips slightly. “You’re sweet,” he whispered.

“Yeah, yeah,” she whispered, and ducked her head down to avoid another kiss. “What do you want to drink?” she continued, and walked away from him, down the short, narrow hallway, into her one-room apartment.

Once, presumably, the Chelsea town house had been a family residence and this small box of a room had belonged to the maid, the nanny or served as the nursery. The small brick fireplace still remained; but what must have been detailed moldings were now covered by featureless plasterboard, and the pretty lead-glass windows had become blank squares of Thermopane, their metal casings painted white in a futile effort to conceal their modernity. The first time Peter had seen the apartment it had been in a state of college-girl disarray. The sleeper couch was still open from the previous night (embarrassed, she had immediately closed it up, not bothering to straighten the sheets, so that one end continued to wink out even after the cushions were replaced), there were clothes everywhere, and a portable typewriter and a portable television were sharing space on the round butcher-block table. Beside them were an overflowing ashtray and several take-out coffees, one of them still half full.

Tonight, however, everything was in order or, at least, in the order it would appear for a social evening. The couch was a couch, the butcher-block table was set for two, and both the television and typewriter were put away on the white shelving that framed either side of the fireplace. Even the last was dressed for the occasion; several small, gray pieces of wood were stacked, unlit, inside. The results might have seemed pathetic to most, but knowing Rachel, knowing what it cost her to admit she wanted his good opinion, to masquerade as domestically female in any way, Peter was impressed with her bravery, no matter how small the tangible results.

“Do you want wine or scotch?” she asked.

“Wine.”

“How’s Diane?” Rachel asked after his wife’s health with a remarkable absence of tension, hostility, or curiosity.

“Ugh.” The memory of that scene in the hospital room weighed him down onto the couch. “She’s got post-postpartum blues. Raging hormones.”

“Who doesn’t these days?” Rachel said, her quick comic timing running smoothly. “God, I’m horrible. I can’t open this,” she added, bringing the bottle of red wine to Peter with the cork only slightly lifted out by her primitive opener. Peter had to hold the bottle between his feet and pull with both hands before succeeding in an almost explosive release. He looked absurd right afterward, hanging on to the corkscrew for dear life, the bottle still between his feet, a monkey botching a man’s job.

“Cheers,” Rachel said. “Let’s see if you can get it to your mouth like that.”

“Why don’t you get a decent corkscrew? This is a joke.”

She held out a glass for him to fill. “What should we drink to—your newborn baby? Or maybe to a second child?” She looked at him coldly, her black, black eyes challenging him.“Isn’t this fun?”

He started to pour. “It’s going to be.”

E
RIC FELT
like a murderer, a poisoner who has administered a dose strong enough to kill, but not kill quickly, and is forced to watch his victim’s death agony, the killer’s remorse and terror mounting even as he knows he cannot undo the deed. Nina had fallen apart in front of him, an exhausted, cursing, delusional wreck, and he was reduced to a wide-eyed child, speechless with fright.

Eric’s duties as a coach had been superseded hours before, first by one of the nurses and then by Dr. Ephron. Nina had shown absolutely no respect for Eric’s instructions. At one point, she answered him, “Fuck off.
You
breathe!” Not that she spoke to Ephron any differently. “Get your hands off me, asshole!” Nina had screamed during one of the internal examinations. My God, she was a tough lady underneath all that dreamy contemplativeness and girlish yearning for cuddles and hugs.

During transition Eric changed his evaluation. Nina wasn’t tough. The cursing, the wildness of her desire to be free of the pain showed a remarkable lack of endurance. Although he understood that she was going through the worst kind of delivery, over twenty hours of severe back labor, nevertheless her endless requests for painkillers (that had eventually provoked Ephron, he suspected, into overdosing Nina, since she was way too sleepy, passing out in between contractions) seemed cowardly and immature to him. Although Eric hated to think that—to criticize someone who is dying horribly of a poison you’ve injected didn’t strike Eric as polite—still, along with his awe at Nina’s free expression of rage, he was disappointed by her lack of guts.

Eric had another preoccupation while he waited in the trench for the next round of shelling—namely, whether Gomez was back asleep in his chair or lying dead in a pool of blood on Ninth Street. Along with that came the humiliating memory of his own cowardice and passivity. He had been impressed with Nina’s behavior on the street, until, in a discussion while they waited for the nurse to give her an enema, he discovered that Nina had never seen the switchblade; indeed, she argued vehemently that it didn’t exist. Until then, because Nina and the cabdriver had been so casual at the scene, Eric assumed he had exaggerated Gomez’s jeopardy. But if Nina didn’t know about the knife, then perhaps they
had
made a fatal error. Eric didn’t want to bring his child into the world already owing God one life.

Such thoughts were driven from his mind by the increased pace of Nina’s agony. He had a mounting dread of the end result. Ephron seemed nervous now. At first, her reaction to Nina’s pain had been impatient and stern. Ephron pushed Eric out of the way and took over coaching Nina, shouting at her, holding her head so she’d make eye contact, even scolding her. Eric got angry at Ephron, wanted to fire her on the spot, but of course, that was impractical. For a while Ephron’s brutality worked. Nina did the breathing, and it seemed to distract her from the pain. But when the internal heart monitor (a clear disk smeared with a sticky ointment) was inserted inside Nina onto the baby’s head—the thin multicolored wires running out of Nina to the beeping machine made it seem as though she had a phone inside—Nina had to lie flat on her back to avoid disconnection. The pain then overwhelmed everything, and Ephron started administering drugs.

They’d been warned repeatedly that hospital procedures such as the internal heart monitor made back labor worse, that painkillers didn’t really stop the hurt; they simply disoriented the patient, making the memory less vivid in time, but not soothing it at the moment. Ultimately, what they had learned merely made it clear that with back labor everything would conspire against them. Eric told himself to insist to Ephron that they disconnect the machine and let Nina get on her feet so the pressure on her spine would be lessened, but he knew that the counterargument would be the danger of not tracking the fetus’s heart—that if something did go wrong, and the baby died, Eric would have to live with the responsibility for a lifetime.

This situation, which made all the childbirth advice and training useless, reminded Eric of his work as an investment counselor. What was Nina’s pain worth? It seemed like a stock decision in the midst of a panic. If you hang on, you can come out a big winner most of the time, but there is always the once-in-a-lifetime catastrophe to fear, the slight chance whose consequences are so grave that no victory is worth the risk.

So he let events topple on him, not wanting the burden of decision to fall on him, preferring someone else to take the responsibility of disaster. But he hated himself for this, knew that it was his worst fault, that it had been his father’s weakness, that it was what held him back from being a great man.

And reliance on anyone else was always wrong. He could see Ephron’s confidence and resolve weaken. Nina’s wild thrashing and incoherent pleas got stronger and more urgent, rather than diminishing, and Ephron’s predictions of when the end would come, when Nina could begin to push, kept being wrong. It was over an hour longer than Ephron had originally guessed, and Nina hardly seemed human. Her skin was like translucent china; her pupils were huge, filled with terror and confusion; her rich brown hair was soaked, a colorless wet mop stuck to her skull. She seemed so weak, barely able to lift her head, that to expect her to have enough strength to push out the baby was absurd. Always, always, it had been Eric’s assumption that Nina’s giving birth was safe, that there were no real risks—he hadn’t even really considered that the baby might be brain-damaged or malformed—and he had certainly never worried that a nineteenth-century event such as Nina’s death might occur.

But now Ephron’s nervousness, the sudden appearance of a resident, and two other nurses opened an abyss he had never looked into or guessed might be in his path. He saw Nina dead and him alone.

Now, at last, Nina had been told to push. He tried to brace her as he was supposed to, but she had no muscularity to buck up, she seemed made of clammy, boneless flesh. Her attempt to push was pathetic, all of it coming from her neck and face, rather than from below as it should.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a red light flash on the monitor, followed by rapid beeping. Ephron and the resident exchanged looks, but what they said to each other was lost because Nina was hoarsely begging him, “Is it out? Is it coming out?”

“You’re doing great, honey,” he said, and let her slip back into a delirious sleep. I’ve killed her, he realized. To have a stupid replica of myself, I’ve killed this good woman.

D
IANE THOUGHT
: they’ve left a scalpel inside me. Maybe a clamp. There is something large, mobile, and sharp in my intestines. In the night of the hospital—hushed talk from the nurses’ station, occasional laughter, the whisper of a patient’s slippers en route to the lounge for a cigarette, the soft flop of an orderly’s mop—she became certain that the rippling movements in her belly and the stabbing jolts in her bowels couldn’t simply be gas built up by an inactive system.