Rafael Yglesias - Only Children

“You know, clean. And stay here with you if Mommy has to go out.”

Luke looked at Mommy. She had her sad mouth, her chin smashed in, her eyes sideways.

“You know how Francine sometimes stays with Byron,” Mommy said.

“She always stays with him,” Luke said. Daddy’s body got hard. Byron’s mommy was never there, Luke wanted to say, but Daddy’s body got too hard, Mommy’s mouth too broken.

“Not like that,” Mommy said. “Not all the time.”

“Just for part of each day,” Daddy said.

“Each day!” Luke knew now. Mommy was leaving him, like the other mommies. Pearl wasn’t Mommy. She wouldn’t know how to do things.

“Nothing’s gonna happen for a while,” Mommy said fast. “Pearl and I are both gonna be here for a long time. I won’t go away until Pearl knows everything about you and how you like things. Okay?”

Mommy was leaving. Her broken chin told him the truth. She was leaving.

“Look at what He-Man can do!” Daddy said, and made the tan body twist and punch.

Luke closed his eyes to escape them, Daddy’s toy, Mommy’s worried face.

Daddy’s body got soft, his arms hard, and he squeezed.

Luke cried. He let his worries go into the shake of his chest and the wet of his eyes.

“Don’t worry, Luke,” Mommy said.

“Let’s play with He-Man,” Daddy said.

“No!” He wanted to be away from their leaving. He shut his eyes and wept. He wanted to be free from their going.

“Don’t worry, Luke,” Mommy said.

“Everything’s all right,” Daddy said.

“No!” Luke tried to yell, to break away, but they wouldn’t let him go — go away from their going.

THE WATER loves me, Byron thought. The thunderous fall from the faucet blasted the bubbles. He looked into the hole.

Water washed his head. Water everywhere, in his mouth, in his eyes, warm on his chest.

“Byron! Watch yourself!” Francine said.

Hard. Hard, it hit his head, like the sky smacking him. He felt his skull break open.

He screamed at it! He screamed at the pain. Francine’s hand closed on the hole. He could feel her hand on the skin. He still had his head.

“I told you! Now, it doesn’t hurt that bad. Just a bump on the head. You got a hard head. Poor baby. Told you! You got to keep away from that faucet.”

“What is it! What is it! What is it!” Mommy was there. Dressed in the door.

“He hurt himself on the faucet,” Francine explained. “Ducked his head under, then came right up, bang!”

“It hurts, Mommy.”

“Sweetie.” She came and picked him up from the warm water and held him against her. He pressed into the paper of her clothes, his wet lips into her black hair.

“I love you, Byron,” Mommy said. “Don’t forget. I always, always love you.”

PETER WENT for a consultation with a psychiatrist. the doctor was a squat old man whose big, watery eyes stared back, unmoved by Peter’s attempts to be, by turns, witty, earnest, lively, calm, self-confident, querulous. Peter hinted at a full deck of childhood traumas for the psychiatrist to choose from, and none was taken. The enervated listener didn’t push Peter to give more particulars. He watched Peter coldly, a reptile observing prey with unblinking eyes. When they did move, it was to the clock on his desk. The sight of time prompted the doctor’s longest speech. He suggested analysis. That, in practical terms, meant five sessions a week on the couch at a hundred and fifty an hour.

Peter said he’d think about it, and he did, only with outrage and despair, and then went on, at Rachel’s insistence, to see a mere psychotherapist recommended by a friend of Rachel’s. This time, maybe because this doctor, or Ph.D. anyway, was a mere female, an elegantly dressed, heavily perfumed nice middle-class lady in her late forties, this time Peter blurted it all out, his parents’ divorce, the child molestation, the affair, his sexual numbness with Diane, and even his elaborate fantasies, admitted to no one, that Diane and Byron would die in some accident and leave him free, tragically and gloriously free.

“Free of what?” Kotkin, Ph.D., asked.

He was so sure of his answer — the tedium, the responsibility— that Peter was surprised to hear himself say instead, “The guilt.”

“What are you guilty about?” Kotkin asked.

“I don’t know. Of the affair?”

“But you said these fantasies started when you had stopped seeing Rachel. Before you resumed the affair.”

“That’s true. I don’t know. The guilt of failing them?”

“How have you failed them?”

“The affair?”

“But the fantasies started while you weren’t having the affair.”

“Right. Well, of not loving them.”

She nodded, almost bored. “What can I do for you?”

This question baffled him. Somehow, he realized, he thought he was supposed to do something for her. “Cure me?”

Kotkin smiled. “You’re cured. What else can I do?”

He stared at her and then laughed. Her flip answer made him replay his confession and hear how solemn, how dreadful he had made his life sound. But was it really? “I don’t know,” he said at last.

She said she thought they could work together, that she could help him explore his past. My bothersome past, he thought, and missed hearing the rest of her soothing vision of their future. Twice-a-week visits to this nice lady to chat about his feelings. That’s somehow the way it came out. Her perfume, her long dress, the quiet earth tones of her furniture— the reality was softer than the cement blocks of abstract words she spoke.

He suspected this feeling was transference. Because he knew both too much and too little of analytic theory to be sure if he was right to prefer her to the psychiatrist, he ignored his doubts and let the abrupt suffusion of protection and warmth he felt afterward flow into his chilled, timid arteries.

Peter went to the next few sessions eager to be a good patient, his mouth yawning words, emptying himself of all the evil, yes, evil in him. I hate my wife. I hate my son. I’m getting bored with Rachel. I want my mother to beg my forgiveness. I liked Larry playing with me. I hated Larry playing with me. I want to know why I let him. I let him because I liked it. I let him because my father left me. I want to leave New York, and live alone in another city, sleeping with lots of pretty girls, who aren’t smart and mature like Diane, or funny and loving and wise like Rachel, but silly with big tits and fatless hips. I wish I were an artist. I’m glad I’m not. I love Diane. I love Byron. If they were dead, I could be happy.

Gradually, Peter became aware that the sessions were making his time at home with Byron and Diane easier. Diane asked only perfunctory questions about the process, her interrogation atypically brief and vague. Presumably she was afraid of what Peter might discover. Rachel, on the other hand, was nosy. Eager, too. And she got increasingly frustrated by Peter’s answers.

“You know, I’m at exactly the age my father was when he left my mother,” Peter commented to Rachel a month into his therapy.

“Does Dr. Kot think that’s significant?” Rachel asked, with a worried brow and concentrated frown.

“Kotkin, her name is Kotkin.”

“I know, honey! I think it’s funny to call her Dr. Kot. I like to think of you on Dr. Kot’s couch.”

“Making up cute names about authority figures strikes me as a way of making them even more intimidating, rather than less so.”

“Peter, you’re being defensive.”

“Darling, there’s one thing I’ve definitely learned from my therapy — I’m defensive about everything . I’m defensive when I’m on the offensive. I’m afraid that inanimate objects are going to leap at me—”