Only Children (61 page)

No. He can’t mean this, he can’t be this crazy. “What are you talking about, Eric? You’re not stupid.”

“Well, everyone is always telling me I am. But not Luke. They can all go fuck themselves now, for all I care.” He let out air, not a sigh, but an explosive release. “Your parents will always pay for Luke’s schooling, right?” Eric asked abruptly. His face was back to that mask of rigid worry. “I mean, no matter what. They’ll always pay for him to go to good schools?”

Nina studied Eric. He wanted to tell her. “What’s wrong, Eric? Are you losing everything?”

“No!” Eric was disgusted. He shook his head at the floor, sighed, leaned back, and shook his head at the ceiling. “That’s what’s so fucking crazy about it. I’ve given back some of the profits, that’s all. Tom’s still way ahead. His friends are still way ahead. These guys. They’ve never known what it is not to have money. And yet they’re so greedy.” Eric looked at her, with reproach. “You never told me your father was so greedy.”

“So if you’re not losing, what’s the problem?” Nina wanted to stay in pursuit of the disease, not be distracted by all these symptoms.

“Joe has called up your father and the others. He’s told them he can’t stand behind my investment decisions.” Eric mocked Joe’s voice—prissy, pompous, Henry Kissinger on Vietnam: “ ‘We disagree on the kind of stocks, not the direction of the market. And I no longer wish to associate the firm with Eric’s selections. Of course, he’s still here. I simply wish to give you the option of changing the current management philosophy without going to the extreme of taking your funds elsewhere.’ ” Eric cackled. He jumped up from the chair, ejected back into the furious pace of his thoughts. “Funds! Joe can’t even say the word ‘money’! For God’s sakes. Money!”

Nina had never understood Eric’s relationship to Joe. She had concluded after many years that Eric’s complaints must be pro forma, that the stories had to be exaggerations. No sensible person would continue to work with the Joe Eric described. “That’s disgusting,” she said. She felt it too, Joe’s betrayal was conjured as a dark cloud of villainy, an incomprehensible force of nature; when she thought of it, it had no context in her experience. “Father told you Joe said all this?”

“Joe said it in front of me!” Eric’s voice squealed. Eric got up on his tiptoes; his forehead crinkled; his hands spread out and arched to the ceiling in agony. “He made the call right in front of me, in front of the entire office!”

And now, the nameless dread was hers. What was Father’s answer? He had her husband’s self-respect in his hands, maybe the happiness of her marriage, probably the future of her son. She waited for Eric to volunteer the information.

But Eric said nothing. He brought his agonized fingers to his rumpled forehead. He massaged the skin, as if the tips could push something back into his leaking brain.

Help him, Nina. Help him. He’s like Luke, he has no real weapons to fight with.

But Nina had lived to be free of her family. She had married Eric and lived in New York to be away from them. Now, like some nightmare, everything in her life depended on the one thing she had never been able to count on: her father’s love.

W
HAT IS
he thinking? that he should come out and meet me here, in the reception area? That he’d be safer in public? But not if I start talking. What is he thinking?

I’ve spent the better part of my life wanting to know what he was thinking. Did he think at all, or was it just a physical craving, nothing diabolic, nothing calculated, an addiction, a yearning he couldn’t squelch?

The assistant returned. She looked unfriendly. “Mr. Hummel? Come with me.”

Peter followed her.

Is this a trick? Will I be led into a room of security guards and thrown out?

They passed the usual lineup of secretarial cubicles opposite medium-sized private offices, the doors open, overdressed men and women on phones talking the friendly chatter of a phony business:

“Bill? Hello, how was London? Yeah, I hoped you could—”

“Are you kidding? I’m fatter than ever!”

“Great. Let’s do the Tea Room? I know it’s a bore—” We’re heading for the corner office, Peter knew. He rubbed his palms. They were wet. His throat felt thick and clogged. In a moment of panic, he thought he might not be able to talk. He could see himself, a hand on his Adam’s apple, choking, mute.

He cleared his throat. He wanted to shout before he entered. There were only a few more feet to go.

Speak! Make sure you can speak!

The assistant stopped a foot or so before the door. It was open. Peter could see an L of couches, empty, cornering a huge black glass coffee table. Larry was out of sight, probably behind a desk. The assistant gestured for Peter to go inside alone.

Alone in an office with Larry. Come with me, Peter wanted to say to this neutral woman. Come with me. Don’t leave me alone with him.

“I
T’S ME
, Grandpa,” Luke called at the door. Eric knelt at his son’s height, and saw the sight he had seen all his childhood, the door to his parents’ apartment towering in front of him, a tall, fat guard with its one circular metal eye, blind and fixed.

“Hey! Hey!” Barry said from the other side, and the police lock clanged. Luke hopped up and down. The door opened and they were in each other’s arms, the bookends of Eric’s life, his softhearted father, his sweet-spirited son.

They don’t need me, he thought. No one needs me.

Since Eric had become cruel to Luke, the implacable explicator of life (everybody goes to the bathroom, Luke, it’s time), since then, Luke had flourished. Gone were all the moody reactions to new things. The shyness remained, but only a normal amount. The intelligence test proved Luke was more than sound. Nina’s success at work proved she was more than sound. Gone were all their difficulties. Luke adored her. Unlike Eric, Nina still got the gift of Luke’s tender side, his baby self. “Mama,” Luke would say when she got home, and wrap his legs around her stomach, rest his head on her shoulder, and gaze into her eyes with absolute concentration.

Eric entered the home of his parents unheralded, an afterthought, a nanny. His mother and father circled about Luke, chattering over his height, listening to him talk, telling him what he could have, what they might do, and Eric wandered in unnoticed. He went to the kitchen, in search of coffee. He looked for coffee all the time now, because his brain never seemed to reach consciousness, because he never got enough sleep, because only coffee was warm and for him alone, only coffee narrowed his vision to the thing he had to solve.

Which was what, exactly?

The Boston Beans were gone, had moved their accounts to Joe’s supervision. Therefore, Eric had lost half his management fee. Tom had done nothing, which was good and bad. Tom hadn’t called Eric after speaking with Joe, hadn’t phoned to say that he continued to have confidence in Eric. And when Eric discarded his pride and initiated a call to Tom, Tom didn’t reassure Eric, didn’t say that his refusal to let Joe take over the management was permanent, or merely a final trial of Eric’s abilities.

What do they want? Two bad quarters after eight good ones! Do I have three months to keep Tom? Do I have six? Do I have nine? Do I have a week?

Eric could have asked Tom to declare his intentions. But he didn’t. He convinced himself that to pretend with Tom that nothing had happened showed self-confidence. Later Eric realized it was an excuse for cowardice.

Nina’s response to the situation wasn’t helpful. Leave, she said. Open up your own firm. You can work out of our apartment. Next fall Luke will be in school, we can make it on what you earn from Tom’s money, and my salary, and soon we won’t need Pearl anymore—

Work alone? With no one to tell me what I should think, no one to fight off, no one to give in to, no secretaries, no coffee machine, pay for my own Quotron, pay commissions to some broker … it was sickening, impossible. Nina’s suggestion caused despair, forced Eric to face himself in a way he had hoped never to.

I don’t have the guts. And if Tom left me then, I would be ruined. Maybe we could make it without my salary for a while, as Nina had suggested, maybe I would get some of Joe’s clients, the ones who know me, people like Fred Tatter, to come along, but then I would have to produce every day, every week, and—

Eric’s father had tried and failed. Barry had left the store where he had worked for ten years, where they had valued him, although that was a low estimate, as a mere floor manager. Eric’s mother thought Barry could be more, pushed Barry until he opened his own store; but Barry was too nice, he let the clerks steal, he got bad prices, he let people slide on the layaways, he didn’t change locations when he should have—

“Hello, Eric,” his mother said, floating into the kitchen on her slippers, her hands out to take hold of his face and kiss him. “We ignored you,” she said. She kissed. “That’s only because your son is so gorgeous.”

“I don’t mind,” Eric said, and he meant it. He would have hated it if his parents didn’t make a fuss over Luke, if they were civilized about grandparenthood, like Nina’s parents.

Last Thanksgiving, Nina’s mother had finally acknowledged Luke’s superiority. “He’s very handsome,” she had said. “And very intelligent.”

“Yes,” Eric had answered, pleased that Nina’s mother had finally said the obvious.

“I guess all grandmothers think that about their grandchildren,” she went on, and spoiled it. Civilized. Sensible. Nina’s parents could only see a miserable gray in every rainbow.

Eric’s parents neglected him, blind to Eric’s dimmer light, a boring streetlamp compared with Luke’s fireworks—but that was all right. In loving Luke, they were really loving Eric.

“You look tired,” Eric’s mother said. “Are you working too hard?”

Eric peered out of the kitchen, past their dull, by now ancient green living room furniture. His father and Luke were gone: probably into Eric’s old room, to play with Eric’s old toys. “Tell me something, Mom. You think Dad made a mistake going into business by himself?”

Miriam narrowed her eyes suspiciously. She saw criticism everywhere, especially from Eric. “I told him to go into business by himself.”

“I know. Think you were wrong to push him?” That relaxed her. Open attack didn’t bother her; she liked that. “He would have driven me crazy if he didn’t try. I told him to go ahead, but I was really telling him what he wanted to hear. He would never do something he didn’t want to do because of what I said. He’s stubborn. He’s a stubborn man,” she said, and rubbed her stomach thoughtfully. “How are you doing with your father-in-law’s money?” she asked.

She always asked. Every visit, “How are you doing with your father-in-law’s money?,” her anxiety irrepressible, her lack of confidence in Eric almost a nervous tic.

“Okay.”

“Just okay?” she said, suspicious again. She opened the refrigerator. “Are you hungry? Did you eat?”

“No. We haven’t had lunch. You’ll have to get something.”

“Luke’ll want hot dogs at the deli. Maybe—” She looked excited. “Maybe I can fool Luke into having a good hot lunch here. I could make my crazy lentil soup with the pieces of hot dog in it.”

Eric knew that soup well. “He’ll love it.”

“You’ll have some?” she asked eagerly, pleased at the hope she might succeed with both of them.

“Absolutely.”

She began to get the makings. She moved with the deliberation of age and her natural carefulness: every gesture evaluated first, then executed with slow pleasure.

Miriam and Barry took very few chances. There had been one big risk, and its failure had shut all the windows and doors. They had locked themselves in their little cave in upper Manhattan, hibernating until the cold, wild world came to an end. In everything there was the old look of failure, the old smells: mistakes and regret unventilated. That was his home, and the frightened part of Eric was glad to be back.

But he couldn’t stay in their cave, in their warm misery. To be so doomed, eking out a reasonable but unspectacular existence would kill Eric. Better to take one chance and lose everything than live a slow progress to death.

P
ETER THOUGHT
his legs would buckle. New joints seemed to have been created, a leg of knees, each one bending out of sequence, collapsing his stride. He hoped to get to the couch and sit.

Larry was behind an enormous black glass desk that matched his coffee table. It was the worktable of a man who does no work. The sight of Larry was an immediate shock. He was hairless. Peter couldn’t remember the color Larry’s hair used to be, but he remembered large quantities of it, bushy, thick, waves in conflict, like a romantic painting of a stormy sea.

“Hello, Peter,” Larry’s voice said. He stayed in his high-backed chair. The tall black leather back rose above his bald head like a tombstone.

Larry was real, after all. Not a nightmare. But real.

Peter got himself to the couch. It put him all the way across the room from Larry. There were floor-to-ceiling windows behind the desk and to its side; they showed a static, sickening view of glass boxes with no ground in sight.

“You sure have grown,” Larry said with a smirk. A hand went to his hairless pate. He ran his palm from the forehead back, feeling for what was gone. “Would you like something to drink?”

Larry’s socks were too short. Peter could see a stripe of very white skin just beneath the gray fabric of his pants leg. Peter couldn’t speak. He shook his head.

“To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?” Larry seemed to be smirking. He regarded Peter with amusement and contempt. Peter had expected shame, fear, wariness—certainly not arrogance.

“I wanted to talk,” Peter mumbled.

“Uh-huh.” Larry nodded, encouraging a half-wit. “About what?”

This was impossible. Larry’s sham, his show of ordinariness, made the introduction of the topic—“You were wrong,” Peter blurted.

Larry got out of his chair quickly. He was shorter than Peter expected. The memory of Larry was different, distorted by childhood scale. Larry moved right at Peter.

Peter prepared to defend himself. Peter’s legs pressed against the couch, his arms flexed. But Larry detoured at the coffee table and moved to the open door, shutting it. He stood with his back to it, looking down at Peter.