Rafael Yglesias - Only Children

“Your dad?”

“No, Reggie Jackson! Yeah, asshole!”

“For a walk. He’s gone for a walk after the close ever since I’ve known him.”

“He goes to get laid.”

Eric had gotten his first job at the age of eighteen clerking for Joe at Bear Stearns. It was temporary, a summer job, but Joe had adopted Eric, kept him on as his assistant, and taken him along three years later, when Joe opened his own firm. Thus Sammy treated Eric as if he were a brother and Eric felt obliged to listen to his troubles. But he was tired. Eric rubbed his forehead to keep awake. He had averaged three hours of sleep a night since Luke’s birth four weeks ago. He was making trading mistakes right and left. Eric hadn’t come up with art idea for his, or Joe’s, client list since Nina went into labor. He had been passing along Joe’s picks. And Joe was hot, his trades finding fast profits in a sluggish market. Only Joe’s belief in family, and especially in fathering a son, had prevented Joe from castigating Eric and confiscating his commissions. Under normal circumstances, with Eric fallow, Joe would demand half of Eric’s commissions — all on the days Eric had been absent. Instead, benignly, Joe had let Eric mooch off his brain without compensation, asking careful questions about Luke’s health, passing along remedies for colic from his wife, Ceil. Joe’s uncharacteristic benevolence toward Eric, a pardon given because of Eric’s new stature as a father, had turned Joe’s gruff paternal face to reveal a tender profile: he believes in fatherhood, Eric now knew, he really loves Sammy.

Eric used to feel completely sympathetic to Sammy’s fits of temper about his father, believing that Joe had crushed his son’s self-confidence in boyhood and kept Sammy working in the firm as his final act of sadism. Eric had forgiven Sammy his adolescent behavior toward Joe, the combination of worship and hate, although it was sick in a twenty-five-year-old, because he thought Sammy a victim.

Now Eric wondered — because of the mewing, unhappy Luke at home — whether Joe hadn’t merely been an unlucky father, and was doing his best to help Sammy; angry, to be sure, at the weak product of his loins, but with a fury that concealed love and protectiveness. Until the birth of Luke, Eric had perceived the son as the victim and given him a moral blank check to write punishing amounts against the father; he wasn’t sure anymore and wished he had never allowed Sammy to confide in him. Eric rubbed his forehead. He wanted to go home. “What are you talking about?”

“Pop!” Sammy said, happy to be full of knowledge, even if the news was bad. “He goes to a whorehouse every day at four.”

“You don’t know that!” Eric yelled. Sammy looked surprised. Sammy was used to the reverse: Eric enjoying it when Sammy spat at the idol; hating it when Sammy worshiped.

“Yeah, I do!” Sammy exclaimed in an aggrieved teenager’s voice. “I followed him when you were out playing papa. He went to the same place every day, a dingy little building by the river. In, out. So I checked. It’s a whorehouse.” Sammy reached into his pants, leaned against the door, and took out a vial of cocaine. “Can you imagine that? Mr. Pious.” Sammy lifted a little hill of powder out of the container with a miniature spoon. A baby’s spoon, Eric thought. Sammy pressed one nostril closed and snorted the drug into the other, replenished the spoon, and repeated the procedure for the neglected one. Sammy offered the vial.

Eric shook his head no and tried to picture Joe fucking a prostitute: proud Joe, his big head squashed onto a square, stocky body, squinting skeptically at the world, like a Jewish owl commanding a Wasp barn; wise, arrogant, petty, vain, cold Joe — with his pants off, humping a twenty-year-old in hot pants.

Sammy urged Eric again with the vial. “Keep you up for the baby.”

“No, I’ll be too wrecked later.”

“Get yourself some for home, you cheap bastard. Keep you going through the night.”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea to raise a kid on coke. Besides, I can’t afford it.”

“Oh, this is gonna be great! I’m gonna get myself another job.”

Eric thought: ignore him, get up and go. Instead: “Why? ’Cause I don’t want a hit?”

“You need this stuff. You’re fuckin’ dead on your feet. You haven’t had a decent pick in three weeks.”

“Fine. I’ll have a hit tomorrow morning. I don’t want to go home stoned.”

Sammy looked at his watch. “Pop’s probably getting his cock sucked right now.”

“This is sick, Sammy. Why don’t you go out and get laid? Stop thinking about your father’s prick and take care of your own.”

Sammy put the drug back in his pocket. “My poor mother,” he said, with eagerness, not regret. “What a husband.”

Eric left the office before Joe returned. He rode his bike back home; that had replaced swimming as his daily exercise. Near Canal Street Eric began to feel woozy and almost got hit by a cab when he weaved making a turn onto Sixth Avenue. His heart pounded from the fright and he paused before continuing.

Eric didn’t want to believe Sammy’s story about Joe. Not that he thought going to a prostitute was so bad. The routine, every day at four for half an hour, although ludicrous on the surface, seemed the worst thing about it — treating sex as something which could be regulated, like evacuation, just a necessary daily body function.

Eric resumed his ride, pedaling slowly, walking himself through the intersections. His body was off: his calves ached and his hand movements came several seconds after he ordered them, as if his brain were making a transatlantic phone call. Nothing was right with him.

Nothing was right with Luke.

The thought that he, like Joe, was stuck with a lemon — yes, there was no other word for Sammy — haunted Eric. He thought of himself as loving and kind, very different from the pompous, selfish Joe. Eric assumed his character, his desire for a strong, healthy son, would guarantee him success as a father. He hadn’t considered it a speculation like the stock market — he had gone into the pregnancy confident of a certain minimum of control. He hadn’t believed in that control consciously; he realized the expectation only now, after it had been shattered. Now he could see how foolish he had been. Having children as something you could control: obviously idiotic.

Absorbed, Eric overshot Ninth Street and had to turn off Sixth at Eleventh. A shopper darted out between two parked cars. Eric swerved away from the pedestrian, scraping his right leg against one of the cars. The shopper hurried on. “Look out next time!” Eric called after him.

A cabbie who was stopped at the light, snickered, saying through the open window, “You gotta be crazy to ride a bike in the city.”

“Yeah, and driving a cab makes sense, right?” Eric answered.

The cabbie’s thick face set, hardened into challenge. “Fuck you.”

Eric got off his bike. That put his huge frame beside the cab’s window. “What did you say?” he asked grimly. Eric felt his strength return with the flow of his anger. The rage filled his body, air inflating a float, and forced out the limp sensation of abstraction he had felt for weeks — powerful Eric back in contact with himself.

“Take it easy,” the cabbie mumbled, looking away from Eric’s body. The light changed and the cab hurried off.

For a moment, Eric was relieved, rid of the oppressive thoughts, that he was a failure as a broker, and a failure, genetically, as a father. He looked down at his pants. There was a tear on the right leg. He lifted it; a broad line, oozing crimson, made a stripe below his knee. He hadn’t felt the scrape at first. Now it hurt. He walked his bike onto the sidewalk, ignoring the curious glances of several people, and leaned it against a concrete wall.