Only Children (8 page)

They asked, “Any flatulence yet?” every time she complained, but their persistence didn’t persuade her. Farting couldn’t possibly relieve this. Her headache was gone now—evaporated by a sweaty afternoon nap—but this was worse, pressure building inside, a thick rope twisting against raw skin, pushing on her sore incision, appearing in her dreams as a snake she had swallowed, weakening her legs, and dismaying her appetite.

She was awake when they brought a wailing Byron in for a 2:00 A.M. feeding. This time he clamped onto her nipple immediately, a fierce warm sucking engine for a few seconds, desperate, thirsting. Then he lapsed into sleep, his lids shutting as if weighted, his little nostrils resting on her swollen skin. She depressed the point of contact with her finger so he could breathe and nudged his cheek to rouse him. He sucked again a few times, but then his body shuddered into sleep, overwhelmed by pleasure. She cuddled his littleness in her arms. His mouth, open with exhaustion, slid partly off her. The sight of her expanded breast, the thick nipple projecting like a bullet at his little face made her feel big, potent, and full of affection.

Byron started suddenly. His mouth closed to find succor. In that half-off position his hard little gums bit right onto the nipple. Diane screamed from the pain and yanked him away. Byron’s eyes and nose collapsed together, his mouth opened wide in silent agony, and then a piercing cry of betrayal and loss shattered the hospital hush, while his little arms yearned out clumsily, pleading for something to hold. She clutched him to her, frightened and humiliated.

“Oh, baby, baby, Mommy loves you, Mommy loves you,” she begged him, embarrassed, convinced his cries had exposed her to the whole maternity wing, to every mother in Manhattan as incompetent and insensitive. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she pleaded, filling his open, agonized mouth with her nipple to alert him that his desire was still there to be had. He finally got the message and gnawed away frantically for a while, before he sighed deeply and passed out again.

She kept at it faithfully, rousing him, careful now to make sure her nipples weren’t in danger, tapping him on the back with a finger to keep him awake, and, as promised by the books, slowly, but surely, he seemed to get the idea, that persistence was rewarded with actual milk. After a while, her unused breast tingled, abruptly and uncomfortably alive, numbed nerves prickling to consciousness—and the leak of moisture that quickly followed proved she had at last succeeded.

He was feeding! He was getting real milk; the transfer of her life, the illnesses she had fought off, every genetic asset, was flowing from her to him—she had succeeded. The heavy weight of dismay, discomfort, and despair lifted off; at last, her energy surged, lights and heat turning on in the family home after a long absence.

She leaned forward and kissed his little brow—soft, raw with newness. His lids opened; his jaw stopped working; the wide, unfocused liquid eyes peered unknowingly at her. And then they came together; the pupils narrowed; he seemed to see her.

“Hello, baby,” she said gently. “I’m your mommy.”

His eyes shut and his mouth worked again, at a regular pace now, no longer wanting, but taking it in, taking from her, with the calm of trust and love.

N
INA WOKE UP
cold beneath her bedroom window. Air blew on her uncovered legs. She had fallen out of bed. She heard them laugh downstairs, parents enjoying a mysterious life, unknown to her. She couldn’t move. She called out. She was freezing to death. Somehow she got up and started to run, run down the hallway to the staircase, but it receded with each step, the walls lengthening, the floor buckling. …

“Okay, Nina, okay, Nina! Let’s try again. It’s starting.”

I’m here in the hospital. I’m about to have a baby. She found Eric’s face, a nervous smile. “Breathe in, out.”

“Push, Nina!” Ephron shouted. “Push hard!”

I can do this! It felt so good to explode out, to finish.

“Push from your rectum! Push hard! Okay, breathe in, breathe out. Here comes another.”

I can do this, I can do this, I’ve made it, I’ve made it.

“Big push now, Nina!”

Come on out, baby, come out of my life, free me, free me.

“All right, dear. Cleansing breath.” Ephron looked sorry. She said something. “We’re going to move into OR. We may have to do an emergency C section.”

“Is it all right?” There was such sadness in Ephron’s voice, such loss and confusion on Eric’s face.

“There’s some fetal stress. I don’t think we can wait for you to push baby out. You’ll sleep through it. Everything will be fine.”

“Eric—” He grasped her hand. What was he saying? “They’re putting me to sleep?” What did he say?

“All right,” Ephron said. “Let’s try one more time, Nina. It’s happening again. Push hard, baby’s almost out, let’s push him out.”

“Come on, Nina!” Eric said, so sadly, like a good-bye.

She felt the horrible quaking below. I have to do this, I have to do this.

“Push, Nina! Come on, push!”

Finish! Finish! Finish! Finish!

“Good, Nina! Push! Push hard!”

I’m doing it. Come on, baby! Finish!

It was over!

She didn’t feel the awful pressure, the draining weight. She was so happy. She looked at them.

Eric kissed her hand.

“Let’s go,” Ephron said. “We’ll do a C section.”

“It’s not out?” Nina pleaded. The room started to move. There were so many people around her and the light got bright.“It’s not over?”

“Everything’s fine,” Eric said.

I couldn’t do it. I never finish, she realized, and fell, fell down onto the cold floor, beneath an empty window. I never finish, she called out to the merry voices below. I can never finish.

R
ACHEL GAVE
him a dinner of unguine and pesto. While Peter mixed them together, dyeing the white pasta green, he talked of Byron and Diane, coloring his true feelings dark, not black, not melodramatically miserable, but the brighter tones were absent: pride in Byron’s existence, and respect for Diane’s competence, tinted with fear of responsibility and boredom with staid values.

“Isn’t the baby going to hurt her chances for a partnership at Wilson, Pickering?” Rachel asked, focused, as always, on women’s careers.

“I thought it might, but she says no, that’s old-fashioned, and anyway, she’s only taking six weeks’ leave.”

“Does she like being a lawyer?”

“Rachel, I don’t want to talk about my wife.”

“Not talking about her seems to me like being in combat and not discussing the enemy.”

He laughed, picked up his glass of wine, smiled at her over the rim, took a sip, pursing his pale lips slightly after the swallow. “You’re too clever for me.” He said this with conviction, no hint of irony or sarcasm.

“That’s a nice way of saying—shut up.”

“Hey!” He put the glass down hard and it wobbled uncertainly.

“I mean it. You have the nicest way of deflecting anger. It’s amazing. Makes me angrier and angrier. More determined than ever to get a rise out of you.” She ducked her head, bit her lip, and mumbled to her plate, “No pun intended.”

“I don’t have the right to get angry at you. Anyway, you’re not telling the truth. You’re angry at me.”

“Oh, please! No messages from Freud. God!” She shook her head, shaking off his irritating remark like a fly.

“You deny you’re angry at me?”

“Do you know what Ted Bishop said about me and men?”

“He doesn’t strike me as an ideal expert on heterosexual relations.”

“I don’t know. Sometimes I think the homos see this junk clearer than the rest of us. Anyway, he said all my relationships with men are a copy of me and my brother. I worship at the feet of smart men who only want to play with me occasionally. A heartbroken prepubescent girl chasing after her tolerant, but slightly bored, big brother.”

“Well, well. That’s not a Freudian insight, is it?” Peter turned his head, frowning with disgust at the fireplace.

“I thought it was very smart of him.”

“Have you told him about us?” Peter peeked at her fast, an interrogating cop hoping to catch her in a lie.

“No!” she insisted, but she lowered her head and brought an index finger to her mouth to chew on the nail.

“You have,” he said quietly.

“I haven’t!” she shouted. “I wouldn’t! I’d be humiliated to tell him. My God, I’m supposed to be a feminist writer. It’s a joke, a bad joke, written by a vicious male chauvinist satirist.”

“No, it isn’t. Where does that come from? You’re a much better playwright than simply a feminist. And anyway, what’s that got to do with the price of fish? What’s so humiliating about it?”

“I’m sleeping with another woman’s husband while she’s lying in the hospital having his baby. Somehow I don’t think Simone de Beauvoir would approve.”

“No, but she’s probably done it.”

Rachel burst out laughing, raucously, almost sexually delighted by his cynicism. She couldn’t stop and she covered her mouth to dam up the flood.

He wanted to put his cock there, in that amazing mouth, always full of words—words that cut through the world, that said exactly what is, words without compromise or modesty or shame. Peter always felt obliged to keep up with her, to be just as witty, just as honest, just as perceptive. One of the reasons he felt no desire to live with Rachel was the exhaustion he felt after several hours of their bantering. He might as well have played three sets of squash against an intimidating opponent. At least, this return of serve was a remarkable success. Peter could count on one hand the number of times he had made her laugh so hard. On the evenings he’d spent with some of her playwright friends, all of them homosexual, they had done it regularly, with ease. She’d break them up and they’d return the favor. But their wit was merely cruel or fantastic or perverse—never honest, abrasive, or insightful like hers. He and Rachel had slept together four times, each occasion followed by agonized guilt on both their parts (their nonconsummating dates had no unpleasant residue; somehow just seeing her, even necking with her, didn’t make him feel he had betrayed Diane), but she had never made a move for his penis. He wished she would. He wanted to dam up her mouth with his hard-on, to live inside her words, to be kissed and sucked by their manufacturer.

Actually, their lovemaking was a disappointment, a tedious anticlimax to their feverish, hungry talks—sluggish digestion following a delicious meal. Rachel, for all her lively wit and energetic body, seemed frightened to death when he made love to her. She looked pale, her eyes were solemn and earnest, she made no sounds, her body was in constant retreat from exploratory kisses; even after penetration, her hands lit on his back reluctantly, as if the gesture might be too bold. He liked her thin body, flattened pillows that hinted at real breasts, a puff of jet black hair covering her hard pubis, slight thighs meeting muscled calves with big, quizzical kneecaps joining them. She wasn’t a beauty; but she was distinctive, and if she would only bring the wit, energy, and fearlessness of her conversation to bed, she would be a great lover. Partly, he was grateful she wasn’t. He wasn’t terrific in bed either, a fact he had long ago resigned himself to. And he found her personality, her talk, her being, so interesting, so addictive that if she were also sexually thrilling, he’d have no control, no brake to stop from utterly surrendering his will to her.

That was being in love, he supposed. It had happened to him once and he hoped it would never happen again. Things were better this way, Diane and Rachel satisfying different longings. Rachel enlivened the mind, warmed the spirit; Diane kept order and regularly exercised his sex. At least, the last was true until Diane got pregnant. In the beginning he hadn’t minded the physical changes, the breasts gelling, Diane’s belly swelling into womanhood, her olive skin ripening, but then things got out of hand: the breasts laden, the belly explosive, the skin strained and exhausted. He found himself fearing the sight of Diane’s body. Toward the end, a glimpse of her nakedness could almost stop his heart with fright. And the fantastic growth within seemed to have taken its energy from her brain, drained her of the light in her eyes, of the desire to talk or even the capacity to think. Her personality became nothing but complaints, yearnings, and moody silences. When she moved to embrace him, he instinctively shied away from her size and awkwardness, as though a city bus had come too close to his position on the curb.

It was then he first slept with Rachel and converted their friendship into an affair. He knew now that had been a mistake, but he didn’t regret it. In human relations, Peter believed, error and failure were unavoidable.

I won’t sleep with her tonight, he decided.

“T
HIS IS
… ”—an unintelligible name followed—“the anesthesiologist.”

The narrow face of an Asian woman loomed in Eric’s way. Her eyes had a lifelessness that seemed hostile. “When did the patient last eat?”

Eric looked down at Nina, her skin bleached by the bright operating-room lights. Although her eyes were closed, she gripped his hand with unrelenting force and her legs shifted uneasily from side to side. When did she last eat? That soup.

“Soup,” he said. His mouth worked slowly pronouncing the word.

“
When?
”

“Oh,” he said. He tried to look backwards through the night, rewind to their arrival at the hospital, but the tape got stuck and froze the images. He looked at the wall clock. Six-fifty. In the morning? No, night.

“Was that more than twenty-four hours ago?”

“Yes,” he said.

All around the room there was activity. They had been wheeled from the labor room to the operating room so rapidly that Eric had no memory of the move, except that with each step they were joined by someone else, dressed, as he was, in a gown and mask.

“Another one’s starting,” a nurse said. Eric followed Ephron’s glance to the two monitors, one counting the baby’s heartbeats per minute, the other measuring Nina’s contractions. The red digital numbers of his child’s heartbeat flashed: 80, 65, 77, 58. He knew, although no one had said anything, that they were too low. All through the long labor those numbers had been much higher, 150, 166, 188 during one powerful contraction. Nina and he, before she completely lost the ability to notice details, had commented on it and the nurse had reminded them that a fetal heartbeat was supposed to be between 150 and 180 beats per minute. Eric had known that, but only as a fact. To hear the wild, rushing noise of the amplified heart, pounding on the door, racing to be born, made the fact new. He had been frightened by it, first the sound, then later, when they turned the volume off, the numbers. The sheer speed, the mad rush, the wildness—they implied so much need, so much wanting, so much longing.