Only Children (33 page)

Look at those boys in the park. Carrying swords or whirring, flashing guns. Planting their feet, little hands on little hips, chins out, fists in the air: “I have the power!” Humming cartoon sound tracks, smashing castles with their feet, chasing pigeons with murderous delight.

Soft, sweet Luke, with his milk skin and dark mop of hair, his big bay water blue eyes, resting his head against her breasts, just wasn’t mean enough for the big boys. He had a year or two before having to face them, before her protection would no longer be reasonable, before he would be considered weak.

Someone had to push him, push him out into the world. Luke couldn’t afford to be like her. He needed big Eric, angry, hungry, greedy Eric, to darken Luke’s skin and cover those vulnerable eyes with the opaque shine of ambition and callousness.

“N
O!” BYRON
shouted. The glass that wasn’t slid up and down easy. But it wouldn’t stay. How funny. Push it closed. Let go. It dropped!

“Byron. Stop it.”

“Taxi! Taxi! Taxi!” Byron said, and dove into his mother’s lap.

“Do you know what that’s for?”

“What’s for?”

“What you were playing with. You put the money in there.”

“There?”

“Yes. So the driver can take it and give you change.”

“Silly,” Byron said. He slid down, down, down into rubber depths where it smelled of the dark. Mommy pulled at him. He grabbed the rope of her arm and swung, monkey in a tree.

“Byron! Stop it. You have to sit up here.”

Her fingers dug into the pockets under his shoulders. Felt like they poked through. Hurt. “
Owww
!” She put him back onto the seat. He kicked at the glass that wasn’t. He kicked at the money drawer and banged it up. Bang! It fell back right away.

“Stop!” Mommy held his leg down. He pressed against her a bit to feel the strength, the firmness of her grasp.

“Is that glass?” he asked.

“What?”

“That!” He flung his arm in the direction of the partition.

“No, it’s plastic.”

“No, it isn’t!” he shouted. Plastic was a toy.

“Yes, it is. It’s plastic.”

“Plastic has colors!” Mommy never told the truth.

“This is clear plastic.”

She sounded fast. Running away. “What’s clear?” Byron shouted, and bounced against her, bounced against the mommy wall.

“No color.” She pushed him away. “We’re here. I have to pay.”

“I wanna pay!”

“No!” Mommy shouted.

M
OMMY AND DADDY
were going to leave him. Luke knew. He knew suddenly. Mommy and Daddy were going to go outside. But not with him. Outside into the dark. The glowing dark. He knew. Grandma and Grandpa were there because Mommy and Daddy were going.

“Hey, Luke. Can Grandpa hold you?”

No, Luke thought. He turned away. The sea rug floated between him and Daddy. Daddy wants to go. Luke ran to stop him.

“Luke,” Daddy said sadly.

Luke ran into the arm basket, jumped into the elevator, up in the air to Daddy’s big face and got a kiss. But that was bad. Daddy’s arms held him tight. Too tight. “Nina!” Daddy called, his voice crying.

Grandpa was next to him. Holding a stuffed bear. “What’s his name?”

Luke pressed against Daddy’s shirt. It smelled hot and flat and new. Daddy was going.

Mommy came. Her shoes crashed on the hallway floor. They weren’t her staying-home shoes. They sounded like spoons crashing. She was leaving.

“Mommy!” Luke put out his arms.

She took him, tossed him, rolled him in her arms. She wore smooth clothes, like his blanket, soft and slippery. She smelled like Grandma and stores and bathrooms—not home Mommy. She was going out. Out into the glowing night.

“Play with me,” he said.

She kissed his stomach, his neck, his cheek—warm, liquid, soft bites. Then she held him up to her face. Her lips were crayon red; her eyes glowed like the night. Outside.

“Play with me,” he said.

“Mommy and Daddy are going out. Grandma and Grandpa are going to stay—” Mommy sounded hard, like television.

“We’re gonna have lots of fun,” Grandpa said, close, very close, his big daddy face and white head a bright light, a scary bright white.

Luke ducked into Mommy, into her smelly blanket, her soft pillow chest. He wanted to be wrapped in her, and sleep warm in her bed.

“Should we do the bedtime things before we go?” Mommy asked, the real mommy, her voice like the sunny day, clear and lit, not glowing. “Daddy can read you a story—”

“You read me,” Luke said, and felt his eyes hurt and squeezed and wet. He knew he was lost now. They would leave.

“Okay,” Mommy said like a kiss.

P
ETER TOLD
Rachel. At least, he tried to tell her about Larry. She tilted her head and listened with open, wondering sympathetic eyes. But Peter felt she was puzzled. After all, what did it amount to? When Peter was eight and nine, Larry, taking advantage of opportunities created by living with Gary, asked Peter a lot of leering questions, made suggestions about masturbation, reached in Peter’s pants and rubbed his penis, once put it in his mouth; the incidents were all brief, never brutal, and when Peter finally was able to refuse, Larry stopped. Peter told this to Rachel guiltily, his eyes averted, his voice low, halting, summarizing the items, a sinner confessing. She looked puzzled when he came to the end. Was that all? her look seemed to say.

But then Rachel hugged him for an answer. She put her hand behind his head and pressed his nose into her shoulder. “Poor baby,” she prayed over him. “You must have been so scared.”

She trapped him in the embrace, as if he were slipping away and had to hang on.

He felt awkward in Rachel’s arms, irritated by her motherly softness, although that’s what he had come for, that’s why he had called the office to say he would miss the staff meeting. That’s why he had told her: to be petted, to be soothed. But once in her arms, he wasn’t a sad little boy anymore; he was a disgruntled teenager. He wanted to shake free, peel off her sticky affection.

“It’s okay,” he said, and pushed his way out of her spidery love.

“It must have made you angry.”

“I’m not angry,” Peter answered, and looked at his watch. He wanted to leave. The nervous morning, going to Larry’s building, coming to Rachel’s, had made nonsense of his day. He had told his secretary he had family business to take care of—how could he show up now?

“You’re not?”

“No,” he answered, surprised at her perceptiveness. “I’m not angry at you—I just needed to breathe.”

“At me? Why would you be angry at me? I meant at that man.”

God, what a mistake. No, he wasn’t angry at Larry. He didn’t believe Larry still existed; that’s why Gary’s account of Larry’s current activities was a surprise; that’s why he had gone to the building lobby, to see if Larry really had such a company. Larry was a fossil of his past. Like
Tyrannosaurus
standing gaunt in a museum, Larry was a bone-dead terror; this abrupt growth of muscle and skin was more weird than anything else.

And there was another worry, something he felt constrained to tell Rachel, because she was his mistress and Peter didn’t think he should talk about his son with her. Byron, when he was grabbed in the park by a pervert, brought home the implication of Larry’s continued presence. There must be other boys, other lives being— what? Ruined. No, hardly. But touched, touched forever. Not merely the temporary contact of lust, but the lingering interrogation of the past. Not merely the cracks it made in sexuality, but also faith in parents, the trust of authority, and the vague, but persistent, disgust with intimacy. Other boys. Other boys. Happening now. Peter could see their faces, and (he had to admit this) what happened to them was partly his fault.

Wasn’t it?

He could stop it, couldn’t he?

Couldn’t he? Well, perhaps—

Couldn’t he?

N
INA KISSED
Luke’s sweet soft cheek as she laid him down into his crib. He had grown so big that letting go of him was a relief.

“Ma, Ma,” he said through his pacifier.

“Shhh,” she whispered. “If you need anything, Grandma and Grandpa will get it.”

Luke whimpered. He pressed his face into the mattress, his legs curled up, and he sucked hard on the pacifier.

Nina inhaled, held her breath, and turned. She walked out purposefully (she heard Luke sit up and make a sound of protest) and did not look back.

Eric confronted her in the hall, his body worried and inquisitive. She shushed him before he could speak and made for the door.

“I didn’t say good—” Eric began.

Nina took his arm. “Just go,” she said. This wasn’t their first departure from Luke, but it was the first Luke knew of. Their other dates—they felt like dates, arranged in advance, dressing up, having a time limit—had been when Luke would fall asleep at six-thirty or seven. They would read him his bedtime stories, give him his bottle, rock him to sleep (Luke almost never woke up during the night, and when he did, it was in the early hours of the morning), and only then would the sitter arrive and Nina and Eric leave. In his infancy, when they were most confident Luke would stay asleep, they used a widow who lived in their building. The widow knew Luke only from encounters in the lobby or elevator, not from her vigils in their apartment. Luke had never stirred, had never known she was there. But finally, as he got older, his bedtime later, his consciousness of the world keener, Nina had decided the deception was too risky, even though they had begun to use Eric’s parents, whom Luke knew well. He might guess, he might delay going to bed just long enough to make them late for an eight o’clock show. He had a tendency to lie awake for up to an hour before falling asleep; if he called out (as he sometimes did) to ask for water, or tell some observation, and Grandma or Grandpa walked in … Well, it was a betrayal, a horrible betrayal, and Luke would be shocked, unforgiving, inconsolable. However difficult telling Luke in advance might be, that honest hurt would keep more important feelings unbruised.

Luke knew Eric’s parents, even had something of a relationship with them, especially with Eric’s father, Barry. How bad could it be for Luke? Leaving him with his grandparents, surely that was nothing, nothing, nothing. Everything was going to be fine.

They got outside, onto the lively Village street, full of students in their wild outfits, full of gays in their wild outfits, full of tourists looking at the wild outfits, full of yuppies in dull outfits not looking at anyone. There were so many people strolling, laughing, on their way to something, that the street had a party atmosphere, a late spring night in New York, too early for the desertion to the Hamptons, or the return to provincial homes after graduation. The Friday release made the gray week of law, banking, publishing, psychiatry into a memory. The black night changed the monochromatic day to fuzzy glowing reds and yellows, winking pinks and blues, bouncing lights everywhere, the city a torchlight parade of celebrants, some decayed, some naïve, some earnest, and some mad.

Nina was glad to be back among them, in the free world, released from the dress gray of motherhood.

“What should we do?” Eric asked. A group of college kids, in torn bulky rags, their young cheeks red with excitement, came bounding by, splitting Eric and Nina.

“Sorry—” one of the girls called back.

“What can we do?” Eric wondered.

They hadn’t made a plan in case Luke’s reaction caused a delay. Now it would be hard to get into a good restaurant without a reservation. “A movie?” Nina asked, thinking of the early days together (only three years ago in fact, but eons in memory) when a movie and late dinner were their coziest, happiest times.

Eric looked doubtful while they rushed around the corner to the stationery store (about to close its doors) and bought a paper to see what was showing. They were out of sync with the local theater’s starting times, but Nina figured out they could go to midtown, grab a bite, and get into a nine o’clock show of a movie they both wanted to see. “Let’s go,” she said, excited, pulling Eric’s large, thick warm hand to get him to the corner.

He hung back, his weight a dragging anchor. “I don’t think we should,” he said, after almost toppling them both.

“Why not?”

“Shouldn’t we stay close by?”

“It’s ten minutes by cab.”

“Should we be in a theater? We can’t call—”

“Sure we can! Eric, he’s with your parents.”

“Some recommendation. Look what they did to me.”

“What did they do to you?” Nina demanded. She thought his mother and father odd, but mostly in a good way, protective, concerned, loving.

“Made me a nervous wreck about my son.”

“Eric, I don’t want to spend our first night out in three months in the lobby of our building.”

“Okay, but.” He sighed. Eric turned his back to her and looked downtown. The World Trade towers could be seen standing alone in the distance, two fat boxes of dotted lights. “Let’s just have dinner. I don’t want to rush uptown.”

“We have plenty of time,” she argued, but with a hopeless feeling. For a moment, among the other partygoers, she had felt young, abrupt, unscheduled.

“We can go to that new restaurant in SoHo.”

“We’ll never get in.”

“Come on,” he said, his big hand pulling her in tow.

She thought: we’ll end up eating crummy bar food, Eric’ll talk about Luke and the market, he’ll say we should get home early to make love, we will, his parents will stay for an hour raving over Luke, Eric will enter me and push in and out tediously until I come, and he’ll come, itching to get out of bed to watch his tapes of the business show, to read his research, fiddle with his numbers, and start that late-night mumble, the chant of dreams—“Low earnings multiple, half book value, possible takeover.”

Try to be cheerful, she ordered herself.

Nina tried. She put her arm through Eric’s, she talked about going back to school, she walked among the others, the ones with real parties to go to, trooping down Broadway past the winking, leering lights, and pretended it would go differently.

But it didn’t.

T
HE WOMAN
came down, her round face came down, a balloon floating right into Byron’s eyes. “Hello, Byron. My name is Tracy. We’re going to go in here and play some games. Your mommy’ll wait for you out here.”