Rafael Yglesias - Only Children

“Hey.” Eric grabbed Byron’s hand, after he had taken two socks on the chin. “We’re just pretending to hit. You don’t actually do it.”

“Yeah, yeah, Byron. You don’t actually—” Luke showed him, swinging hard and then stopping his little fist just an inch before meeting Eric’s body. “You know what I mean. You just pretend.”

“This is what you do,” Eric said. “You let Luke distract me and then you jump on me from behind.”

“Okay,” Byron said agreeably, and that worked. Byron followed orders and the three of them ended up in a heap, the boys triumphant, Lilliputians climbing atop the giant prone body, cheering themselves and proclaiming victory over evil.

Only the arrival of the pizza saved Eric from endless defeats.

This is the kind of man I want, Diane realized. I’m not horny. I’m married to the wrong person.

In all the confusion, Byron’s birth, Peter’s emotional withdrawal from the marriage, her resignation from the job, her rages, that simple answer had never occurred to her. That she had a bad marriage, yes. That Peter probably didn’t love her, yes. That she might not love him anymore, yes. But all those thoughts, and the thousands of others they spawned, were part of a jungle — wet vines and laden ferns obscuring her view of the horizon: I married the wrong man. I wanted someone to be with, someone simple and ordinary like Eric, someone to handle at least half of life. Then I could work. I need a man. A partner. A husband.

I don’t want to sleep with him, I want to substitute him for Peter.

Then they were alone again, Eric spoke quickly, guilty and embarrassed. “I’m sorry about — you know—”

“That’s okay.”

“I guess I’m a little nuts these days.”

He’s going to back down. That bothered her. Even though she no longer wanted to go on, his doing it first was irritating. “I wanted you to,” Diane said.

“You did, didn’t you?”

“Yes.” He knows that. Why is he pretending he doesn’t?

“But we couldn’t. How? And—” He looked the point, his eyes going toward the sounds of their sons playing in the other room.

“We can do anything we want,” Diane answered, unwilling to let him get away that easily, with the excuse of practicality. Why didn’t he admit he was a coward? Or at least claim decency.

Eric sighed. “I just can’t handle it. That’s all. I’m barely hanging on right now. Anything else and I’d sink.” He pointed straight down. “Boom!” He looked at where he had crashed his imagined self, shaking his head over the phantom corpse. “I want to,” he said softly. A little bit like Luke, head down, desire spoken to the floor.

“Anytime, I’m here all day, every week. I can always get away.” Why not? At least I’ll make love. Anyway, he won’t do it.

Eric raised his head and stared. “Okay,” he said.

“PETER! PETER!” his mother called him. Gail’s angled head popped up between the hairdos, her face briefly covered by passing gowns and elegant suits, then exposed just as briefly. She sought Peter in the confusion, pressing flat her already ironed hair with nervous exasperation.

Opening night at the ballet. Peter had forgotten how archaic it seemed, an evening of privilege, of meaningless beauty, attended by a weird marriage of the wealthy and the artistically obsessed. A charming or pathetic scene, depending on one’s mood. Some were openly watching the celebrities, leaning over the balcony above, or standing on their level, but away, at the perimeter, all eyes on the center vortex, rich patrons waltzing about the stars.

“Here you are,” Gail said when Peter reached her. “This is my great friend Ann. And her daughter Juliet—”

“The cellist,” Peter acknowledged, and shook hands with a tall, very shy girl of eighteen. She was a prodigy, an actual success, a proof of early music education.

“Peter’s boy, he’s only three, is studying the violin.”

“Suzuki?” Juliet said. To Peter’s surprise, she seemed to blossom at the introduction of this subject. She straightened her shoulders, held her head up. She had a pasty face and thin lips, but her big, solemn eyes, beneath a high brow that wrinkled and smoothed itself expressively as she talked made her interesting, if not beautiful. “How does he like it?”

Peter thought: being a parent means condensing the truth into a lie. “He doesn’t like the work of it. But he loves it when he can do it.”

She nodded and smiled to herself. “Yeah, I know how he feels.”

“Now, now, no complaints,” her mother said. “It was worth it.”

Gail rattled off Juliet’s accomplishments, although she had told Peter about them before. Juliet listened to herself being discussed without self-consciousness or vanity. She was used to it. More people joined them, more arts funders, people whom Peter felt he had known from the moment of his birth, people who nodded at him as if he were a boring landmark. I could be stark naked and they wouldn’t notice, he thought. The crowd began to move back in, and in the flow, Peter found himself standing next to Juliet. She smiled up at him, a slow, wise, mournful smile.

“Can I ask you a dumb question?” Peter said on an impulse.

She smiled at that too, as if all she had ever been asked were dumb questions. “Sure.”

“I know your mother started you early—”

“Five. Your son’s got me beat.”

“—but when did you decide you wanted to be a musician?”

“This way, dear!” her mother called, and tugged her into a different tributary from Peter’s.

Juliet looked back at him, very serious, wanting to tell him: “I never did.” And she was carried off, like a piece of paper riding a current, looking back at him, her eyes still answering.

He moved to his seat, entranced by Juliet’s answer. Does anyone have any choice about what they become? When a steelworker’s son becomes a steelworker, does anyone wonder if that’s bad? If I force Byron to become a musician, is that really so terrible? My mother never demanded I be anything; she let me drift, so long as I had the right opinions on politics, on culture, so long as I showed no interest in things she didn’t approve of. Sure, she made no demands of accomplishment, but was that good? I feel useless. Wouldn’t I prefer being pushed, oppressed into some kind of brilliance?

He settled in his seat and thought of Mozart. Peter didn’t know the real story of Mozart’s life; he knew the play Amadeus , he knew snatches, enough to sound educated. If Byron were pushed, relentlessly, unforgivingly, made into a freak, an unsociable unhappy person — but someone who could create like Mozart — would that really be worse than a normal upbringing?

But what if Byron isn’t talented? What if all I accomplished was to make Byron a neurotic, imprisoned by soulful despair, and without a key of genius to unlock the sorrow?

Like me? The therapy had taught Peter one thing: there was no escape. He could understand, he could protect himself, he could learn to forgive, he could enjoy what he had; but there was no undoing the divorce, his father’s neglect, his mother’s rejection, or Larry—

He hadn’t thought of Larry for a while, not after the sessions with Kotkin recalled more of the incidents, not after settling them— your parents weren’t around, you felt abandoned, and this man touched you, wanted you, and you liked the wanting, but not the touching, but you were scared to complain because no one had ever behaved as if your complaints mattered. Did your complaints stop your father from leaving your mother? Did your complaints make your mother stay with you, instead of her new man?

Child molesters are clever; they have a keen scent for loneliness.