Rafael Yglesias - Only Children

THE WORK was great. Nina was good at it. She knew, not simply because Tad, her teacher and part-time boss, told her so, but because she could feel her own mastery.

Of course, it was nothing, coloring the designs, making a suggestion here and there about hue — very, very gently, creeping through the lair of a sleeping monster. Tad never woke to roar at her. But he sure did yell at the others, especially the pretty young men. Tad would push the loose, bulky sleeves of his sweater up to his elbows for emphasis, and his reedy voice, ill suited for the sounding of anger, squealed up to the fourteen-foot tin ceiling. But never at her. “No, dear,” was the worst he would say.

Is Tad gentle with me because he’s gay? she wondered. Couldn’t the reverse be true just as easily? She mentioned this question once to Eric.

“He’s a fag?” Eric said, chewing the word up in several tones of disgust. He sounded like a real New Yorker then; the word came out of his mouth unvarnished from the raw prejudices and fears of his adolescence. “Of course, he’s a fag,” Eric added. “He’s a dress designer. That’s a relief. I was worried you were having an affair with him.”

“You were?” Nina was amazed. Not at the idea that Eric would be jealous if she had an affair, but at the discovery that he had the imagination to think she might. “You were, really?”

“Yep.”

Nina was pleased for several hours, until it occurred to her that maybe Eric didn’t think any man would want her to work for him unless she was putting out.

“Why didn’t you tell me he was a fag?” Eric asked the next night.

She was angry by then. “Stop calling him a fag.”

Eric laughed, with the indulgent laugh of a parent. “Sorry. Why didn’t you tell me he’s gay?”

“Why should I?” Nina asked. I don’t like what he’s become, Nina thought. Eric was dressed in a suit because he had had to have drinks with a potential client. Eric’s kinky bush of hair was pressed flat, his eyes were circled by fatigue, he spoke loudly, probably from the alcohol — everything smelled of business and money and grown-up maleness. Nothing soft, nothing imaginative, nothing natural, nothing beautiful.

“I don’t know.” Eric flipped through a copy of Forbes —he always had some money publication in front of him. “Just gossip.” Eric peered at an article and then spoke abruptly. “Aren’t you worried about AIDS?”

Nina wondered where that came from. She stared.

He tossed the Forbes away. “You know, with all that sewing, if he’s gay, couldn’t there be some blood—”

She stared at him. He was kidding. He had to be.

Eric paused and looked nervous, aware he had said something stupid. “I just thought — you know there might be—”

“He doesn’t do any sewing!” Nina shouted. She chuckled at the thought. “You think I’m sitting in a room sewing?” She burst out laughing. Is Eric so out of it, so totally uninterested in me, that he thinks I’m sewing in a sweatshop?

“No, of course not,” Eric said, a grave mask lowering over his innocent bewilderment.

“He sketches designs. I help color them sometimes, draft variations on his instructions. He lets me try out a few little things. Tiny, tiny things — you wouldn’t even notice the changes.”

“Why does he need help coloring them?” Eric asked.

“He doesn’t.” Nina shook her head. She must have explained this before. “He doesn’t want to go through the tedious process of trying different shades. These are just for him to look at, rough sketches, and it’s a way of us learning about the unity of color and design — the whole creative process.”

“You mean, this is the school part?”

“No, not exactly.”

“Is his company publicly traded?” Eric said, and reached for a copy of the Wall Street Journal . He flipped to the stock listing noisily, an animal rustling through a bed of leaves.

“I don’t know,” Nina said.

“Could you ask him?”

“No.”

“No?” Eric raised his eyebrows. “Nothing to be embarrassed about. Tell him your husband manages fifty million dollars — he’ll be happy to tell you whether there’s stock for me to buy.”

“Un-huh,” Nina said, and tried to think of something to do or say that would end this. She couldn’t. She stared back at Eric and tried to smile pleasantly, but her chin felt tight, defensive.

Eric leaned forward and spoke with eager condescension. “Really. You see, if he has a publicly traded company, then he’ll own a lot of shares himself, and if I buy for my clients, that’ll send the price up, which increases his worth. Understand?”

“Yes,” she managed to get out. She willed herself to smile brightly, but her muscles rebelled and restrained that desire into a regretful pout.

“You’ll ask him?”

“Un-huh,” she mumbled, convinced that this evasion wasn’t as bad as a direct no.

Eric nodded. He glanced at the stock listings and let the newspaper drop to the floor. “Did Luke take a crap today?”

Nina shook her head. Not this again. What could she do about it? She followed the doctor’s impossible directions: get Luke to take this chocolate pudding stool softener, but don’t make a big deal about his constipation. How could she do both? Luke had never been told to do a particular thing and had the reason why withheld from him. “Just tell him it’s something to make him grow,” the pediatrician said, irritated, wanting to go on to the next patient, to give another quick answer to someone else. But that would be like Luke’s vitamins and she never made him take his vitamins. This laxative had to be administered every night or it wouldn’t work. So she told Luke what it was for and he was scared.

Luke doesn’t want to go to the bathroom, she admitted to herself. Luke’s not constipated. He doesn’t like the sensation, and so he holds it in and then becomes constipated.

“Don’t make an issue of going to the bathroom,” the doctor had told Nina. “If you make it a test of wills, things will get worse.”

“It will make it softer,” she told Luke, and offered him a reward if he took it.

Luke took the chocolate pudding softener and, for several months, it helped. He would move his bowels every three or four days with a lot of complaining and straining, but he’d manage it at last. Afterward he was so happy, racing everywhere, hungry for activity and very hungry for food. But by the next day, she could see him occasionally flex his buttocks tight, pushing it in, stopping his actions, his mood changing. …

She hadn’t told Eric her observation. He would argue. Because Nina had once confided to Eric that she was constipated as a child, he was convinced Luke’s problem was genetic. Her fault, more to the point.

“How long has it been?” Eric asked.

The intervals were lengthening, and so were the stools. “Five days,” she said.

“We have to take him back to the doctor.”

“I’m not taking him back to the doctor,” Nina said instantly. “He’s examined him and there’s nothing organically wrong.”

“There has to be!” Eric pleaded. He got up from the chair and removed his suit jacket, ready to get to the dirty work. “How could he be holding it in?”

“He just holds it in!” Nina said.

“But how?”

“Don’t you ever hold it in?”

“No,” Eric inhaled, his chest puffing. “Why would I?”

“You’re not near a bathroom! You have to hold it in. What would you do, go in your pants? Of course, you can hold it in.”

“I go every morning, right after my coffee. Unless my stomach’s upset.”

“Terrific. Let’s get your mother to toilet-train Luke. She did a great job with you.”