Rafael Yglesias - Only Children

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.

NINA 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.

RACHEL 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.