Rafael Yglesias - Only Children

Pearl kept talking. Eric repeated over and over, “I’m sure it’s fine, I’m sure it’s fine,” made nervous by the account of her nursing. Pearl only made things worse when Eric finally got her to the door. “He didn’t poop today,” she whispered. “That’d be the fourth day now.”

Eric didn’t know that. Why hadn’t Nina told him Luke’s constipation had returned?

Eric returned to the living room and sat next to Luke. Luke rested against Eric’s body, the blanket once again covering the wounded eye.

He’s not right. He’s not moving; he’s not asking me to toss him in the air, play catch, pretend to be a horse; he’s not standing in the middle of the living room and telling about what happened in the park. Nothing about Luke was normal. He didn’t yell with pain, he didn’t moan — but the whole personality was different from usual on a Friday afternoon. This was the quiet, mournful Luke awaiting a separation, the frail Luke-flower closing his petals in the twilight just before Eric’s parents arrived to baby-sit.

Luke laughed at something on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood . Eric turned and saw Luke’s face open up and relax … and then Luke brought a hand quickly to his eye, his face contorted, and he moaned.

“Let me take another—”

“No.” Luke groaned and hid his head in the blanket.

“—just to see if there’s any more sand.” Luke didn’t stir. Eric put a hand on Luke’s back and patted. It was a miniature of a man’s, swelling with Luke’s life, so small and so strong. “Let me see. I won’t put anything in it.”

“Okay,” Luke said in a dying voice. He let Eric look, wincing when Eric pulled back the lids.

Eric couldn’t tell. How could he? How would he know if there was a microscopic grain? It wouldn’t survive Pearl’s eye bath, could it? If she was thorough. What about that salt? Well, she said she boiled the water with the salt. Maybe it had boiled away.

Maybe constipation was Luke’s real complaint. That was getting worse with each month. Their pediatrician had prescribed a mild laxative, some kind of chocolate stuff, the consistency of pudding, to give Luke before bed. That helped for a while, but it seemed to be getting worse again.

After Eric gave up looking for the invisible grain of sand, he saw Luke squirm, rub his behind back and forth.

“Do you have to go to the bathroom?”

“No!” Luke shouted. That was so rare it startled Eric. The vehemence convinced Eric that the constipation was the real villain.

It’s because he’s sitting still, Eric decided. He got up and turned off the television. It was obscene, a child watching that much. Luke looked alarmed. “Wanna play He-Man?” Eric said, on his knees on the rug. “I’ll be Skeleton”

Luke was so pale. He smiled a little. “Okay.”

Eric put his heart into the pretend. “I will destroy you, He-Man!”

“No, you won’t,” the tiny, bowlegged, soft-faced two-year-old answered. “I have the power!” Luke raised his plump arm to the ceiling and thrust his ballooned belly forward.

Eric jumped to his feet and ran. He made Luke chase him from one room to another. After a few minutes, Luke stopped, his head lowered slightly, his legs coming together. Eric charged him, made Luke keep moving, keep the system going. His eye’s fine. He just needs to take a shit.

Luke’s face suddenly went red and he stopped again.

“Daddy, I have the Feeling.”

“That’s okay. Don’t worry about it.”

“It hurts.”

“Come on, He-Man. I’ll get to Castle Grayskull before you do and tear it to pieces.”

“No, you won’t!” Luke forgot his bowels and ran again, his miniature body rocking from side to side as he tried to imitate strength. Luke got ahead of Eric and put his arm out. “Stop, Skeletor! I won’t let you pass!” Luke beamed with pride at his successful defense. He smiled into Eric’s face, full of his triumph.

Then Luke closed his mouth. His knees buckled slightly; he lowered his chin. He scrunched his neck down. He began to strain, his skin reddening.

What a life, Eric thought as he remembered his dream of managing hundreds of millions of dollars. What a pathetic life, he thought, while he watched his son try to empty his bowels. What a fool I am to dream of millions, he thought, as he cheered Luke on with the intensity of a fan rooting for the home team to score.

THAT PETER might not do what Diane wanted when it came to major decisions, such as having a second child, was an unexpected discovery.

“You’re really surprised?” Betty Winters said over lunch, a few days after Peter had spoken so cruelly on the subject. “He didn’t want to have Byron.”

“I thought he loved Byron. I thought he’d gotten to like being a father.”

“I’m sure he loves Byron.”

“I think he hates us,” Diane said. She felt so beat. The landscape had been utterly changed. She had worked so hard to make a home, and she’d found too late that the foundation stood on muddy ground. “I’ve been kidding myself about Peter. I’ve been telling myself that all his negative talk was just talk, that deep down he wanted me to push him forward, push him to grow up and be a man. He doesn’t. He wants to spend his life going to the theater, to museums, talking pretentious nonsense with his artist friends. I thought all that was just being young, you know, something you do when you have the time to do it—”

“But it’s Peter’s work to go to the theater,” Betty said, her sympathetic expression gone. She sounded impatient.

Of course. Betty’s husband’s a playwright; she thinks it’s a worthwhile life too. Diane didn’t. Although it was fun meeting the behind-the-scenes people, going to opening night, not merely following the cultural lemmings of New York, but helping to lead them to a nice cliff, nevertheless, it wasn’t the real business of life. Although Tony Winters’s plays were amusing, they were quite silly. His movie scripts were pleasant, reminiscent of the great old romantic comedies; however, those classics were inconsequential and Tony’s modern versions were adolescent. There wasn’t a single play that Diane had seen during the ten years she had accompanied Peter to the theater which she could, even for an instant, consider in the same class of seriousness with Shakespeare or Chekhov. And if such a genius was out there, Diane doubted that Peter would be of any use to him. Deep down, did they really think what they did was important, was real in any way, that it was somehow worth a life of childlessness, worth discarding the very tangible result of child rearing? Was Tony Winters ever going to write a play as extraordinary as his handsome, intelligent six-year-old son, or as brave and beautiful as his one-year-old daughter? No matter how many theaters Peter funded, no matter how many lunatic gays or depressed straights he helped with the foundation’s money, nothing could equal the glory of creating Byron.

It was so obvious to Diane, a truth glowing in the sky as big and bright and warm as the sun. How could Peter find shadows in this brilliant light?

“Peter’s like Tony,” Betty said. “He has the sensibility of a creative artist. They go through moods; they can’t stand to think that they’re married and have kids. Makes them feel ordinary—”

“They are ordinary,” Diane said, relishing the reassurance of common sense, of what she loved in the law, its ruthless disregard for the distortions of self-delusion, its insistence on fact.

“Well, they’re not your average men.”

“Feeling that having kids is a drag on your freedom ain’t exactly a sophisticated or unusual male reaction,” Diane said, enjoying her denigration of Peter and Tony, pleased to irritate Betty’s pride in her husband. Tony was worse than Peter, Diane thought. Tony not only ignored his children and, according to Peter, whined about them privately, but also put on a public display of loving them, waxing sentimental at parties on the joys of fatherhood, even exploiting the current rage for involved fatherhood in his recent play. The hero, a thinly disguised portrait of Tony, was shown as a brilliant and charming but adulterous and insecure man, who is finally redeemed when circumstances put him in sole charge of his child during a dangerous illness. “Unconvincing,” the Times had said about the play’s final scene. But the stupid thing ran for almost two years, flattering a city full of yuppie men and reassuring their maltreated, eager-to-be-fooled wives. Like me, Diane thought, suckers desperate to believe they had bested their mothers, had gotten their men to be different.