Rafael Yglesias: Only Children

They went downstairs. Peter smiled at the obsequious doorman, who made a big show of rushing to the door to open it for them. “Good luck,” the doorman said in his Spanish accent. Peter smiled confidently.

Diane kept her head down and watched her big body move. She put a hand on her belly when she felt the air rush over her face. Poor thing, she thought about her child, you don’t want to come out. The chauffeur had already opened the black limousine’s door. Lights glowed from the interior, darkened by its green tinted windows. The chauffeur offered his hand to help her in. “Watch your step, ma’am,” he said. She looked at his face. He was young, no sign of a beard on his clear skin. That, and his attitude toward her, made her feel ancient or, worse, finished as a sexually desirable woman. Not merely for now, in the full state of pregnancy, but forever.

Peter doesn’t look at me anymore, she thought to herself as they got under way. She stared at her husband’s profile, intent on the view ahead, and tried to remember the last time they had sustained eye contact. Whenever Peter glanced at her, his eyes immediately trailed down to her belly and then, guiltily, away from her altogether, as though he had been caught staring at a cripple. Diane hadn’t expected Peter to remain sexually interested once she began to show, but to avoid even looking at her suggested a deep loathing and disgust. And right now he wasn’t solicitous or tender. On the brink of this fateful event, just when she imagined Peter would hold her hand or put a reassuring arm around her shoulder, instead he sat a foot away, his body held rigidly, as though he feared she might touch him.

She did. She reached for Peter’s hand, resting on the leather next to his leg, and covered it, her fingers arching over his knuckles — a crab climbing a rock. To her surprise, he turned his palm up and grasped her firmly. Peter’s cold hand squeezed desperately as though he were drifting toward a waterfall and she were a rope to the safety of shore. But the rest of him remained aloof. He’s scared, not disgusted, she thought with relief.

Peter hated hospitals. He had had an appendectomy in the middle of his sophomore year at Harvard, and all his dealings with doctors, nurses, orderlies, admissions and billing bureaucrats had been infuriating. Throughout Peter’s life he had had great success dealing with institutions — indeed, he worked for a large organization — but hospitals were the exception. Because one was ill, there was no way to bargain successfully with the medical establishment. Going into a hospital was to be stripped of all civil rights, Peter often said, and having lost battle after battle in the past, he was now shy of the simplest encounter. He fully expected them not to have Diane’s operation scheduled, to have no idea of who she or her doctor was, in short, to find everything in a mess. This pessimism wasn’t alleviated by the precautions he had taken — namely, getting to know the chief of medicine at New York Hospital through his boss at the Stillman Foundation as well as using the top obstetrician (Dr. Stein) despite the fact that Diane didn’t like Stein’s manner. One of the good things about the Caesarean was that it guaranteed the presence of this hotshot. Stein’s associate might have ended up doing the procedure if Diane went into labor at an inopportune time, which, in the case of Dr. Stein, seemed to be any hours after six at night and before nine in the morning on weekdays. Weekends were totally out of the question. Peter didn’t say so to Diane, but he suspected Dr. Stein ordered the Caesarean because Peter, using his cultivated acquaintance with the chief of medicine as a lever, kept tilting Stein toward an agreement that he would be on call outside his normal hours.

Nevertheless, it turned out Peter’s preparations did work. Everything was in order. Diane’s private room was ready for after the procedure; the instructions to where they should proceed in the Gothic caverns were accurate; she was expected there; the forms he had filled out a week before were present; Dr. Stein arrived shortly after Diane was in her hospital gown and Peter had struggled into a smock and cap.

Dr. Stein examined Diane with his long pink hands. Peter looked away when things got too intimate, thinking what an oddly disgusting profession gynecology must be: making the mysterious mundane.

“Nothing happening,” Stein said cheerfully. “We could try to induce labor, but—” he shook his head sadly—“in the end, that rarely works.” He winked at Diane. “You’ll never see the scar.” She had complained to Peter about Stein’s tendency to wink. She said it always preceded the mention of anything bad: a good-humored father chuckling and joshing his weeping children over some disappointment.

“That’s easy for you to say,” Peter answered Dr. Stein with a pleasant smile. Peter had learned, years ago at Harvard, to say the most challenging things with a bright smile. To show the handle of the knife, but not the blade. “Doctors are always doing that, aren’t they?” he went on to Diane, almost as if Dr. Stein weren’t in the room. “Being brave about their patient’s misfortunes.”

“I was reassuring my patient,” Dr. Stein answered petulantly.

“It’s fine, Doctor,” Diane said. “I’m not worried about the scar.”

“Of course not,” Peter said with emphasis, appalled that he might have implied an unseemly vanity on her part.

Stein said they would be moved into the operating room in a few minutes and then left them alone. “For God sakes, Peter,” Diane said. “He’s about to cut my body open. Don’t piss him off.”

“He’s an arrogant little shit,” Peter mumbled, but he nodded penitently. “I’ll be good,” he added.

They rolled Diane into the tiled room; it reminded Peter of the huge common showers in school gymnasiums. He walked beside her horizontal body, watching his feet move in the oversized blue plastic coverings. It was all so tacky and undignified. The only thing modern medicine had left to childbirth was the fear; its spiritual mystery, its grandeur were obscured as thoroughly as if a high-rise apartment had been built on top of a cathedral.

Diane felt useless and stupid while the technicians worked around her. Dr. Stein explained what they were doing in a mumble. He was repeating information she already knew; the childbirth classes had included a long lecture and film on Caesarean sections. As promised, the spinal block didn’t hurt. They put a tentlike cover above her abdomen and a stool beside her head for Peter to sit on. Peter took his place, his face white, his hand, moist with terror, clenching hers. He stared at Diane, his eyes large and unfocused, unwilling even to glance in the direction of the activity.

“Do you want to watch?” Stein asked. He nodded at a thick rectangular mirror on top of a long stainless-steel pole. Diane was reminded of the security mirrors placed on elevators and at the rear of stores. She could keep her eyes on the lower region and see if they mugged her uterus or shoplifted the baby.

“I don’t think so,” she answered in a querulous voice. She rolled her head to the side and gazed into Peter’s eyes. “You agree?”

Peter closed his eyes and then nodded his head up and down slowly. He opened his eyes. “Oh, yeah, I agree.”

“We’re going to make the incision,” Stein said. “You might have a vague … very vague sensation. But if you feel anything clearly, sing out.”

“I will,” she said. She tensed in anticipation. She imagined a patch of her skin slicing open — a tearing sound, blood gushing up all over Dr. Stein. But there was nothing, nothing at all. This is going to be easy, she thought, and felt glad.

ERIC BECAME aware of their bizarre positions. His whale of a wife knelt on all fours in front of the television, her great belly sagging only an inch from contact with the living-room rug while she made the strained huffing sounds of natural-childbirth breathing. Eric sat on the coffee table in order to be above her and pressed his clenched fist into the small of her back. Eric could picture how perverse the scene might look to an observer.