Only Children (11 page)
Ramon, the small, plump doorman, was on duty. He pumped Eric’s hand. “
Un muchacho!
” he said. “A boy! You must be happy.”
Frances, a mother of three (she was explaining to the eldest that Eric and Nina had just had a baby), interrupted: “Now, now, a girl is just as good.”
Ramon nodded solemnly at her and then winked at Eric.
Eric went upstairs and walked into their empty apartment. Then he remembered that he had forgotten to ask if Gomez was dead.
He went into the bedroom that tomorrow he would have to set up as the nursery. Next to the phone was the list of friends he was supposed to call.
After four conversations, he quit. The tone of them was hollow, routine, drained of the pleasure he felt and wanted to go on feeling. The memory of that little face, scratched, puffy, needing him, came back over and over.
He left the phone off the hook and went into the living room, searching for the right cut on the
Messiah
, and gingerly put the needle down. He did something that Nina never allowed—he turned the volume all the way up:
“
And unto us a child is born
… ”
The thrilled voices drowned everything, the traffic, the vague echo of conversation from the courtyard. He climbed on top of the coffee table, shut his eyes, and swayed, embraced by their exhilaration and his joy.
“
And unto us a son is given
… ”
Yes, he had almost died. He was a gift snatched from death.
“
And He shall reign forever and ever
… ”
Beyond their deaths. Beyond their love. He would go on forever.
“
For unto us a child is born
.”
He had survived to be theirs, to be the perfect product of their union.
“
For unto us a son is given
.”
A gift from the heavens, from the pure universe. A chance to be perfect. He held his invisible son in his arms, the music cascading in the apartment, his eyes shut, seeing the little bruised face, and exulted: his son was born and the world would be changed forever and forever.
T
HEY NAMED
him Luke Thomas Gold.
Nina had wanted to honor her uncle Lawrence, Eric his grandmother Tessie. Eric’s religion, although he didn’t practice it, forbade Nina from using the actual name, so she settled for the same initial (choosing Luke from the New Testament), and Eric didn’t object. That was typical of his erratic obeisance to Judaism. “Luke was a Jew, wasn’t he?” Eric said. “All the early Christians were Jews.” Eric chose Thomas for Tessie—the connection seemed dim to Nina—and Luke won out as the first name because he was a son after all and was going to bear his father’s surname forever. Eric himself made that point. All in all she was pleased.
When Nina came out of the anesthesia, she phoned everyone she felt safe disturbing at midnight. They all said, “You must be tired,” and she agreed, she was, but she had no desire to sleep.
She told the nurse to bring Luke in—he wasn’t called that yet; he was known as the “Gold baby,” summoning an image of a statuette—but she was told that he was under the incubating lamps as a precaution, given his traumatic birth, and was supposed to remain there until 6:00 A.M. Did she want to be disturbed then or left alone until 10:00?
Surely she would be asleep by 6:00. She spoke with Eric. They settled on the name. He sounded dead. His voice was empty, bereft. He kept asking, “Are you all right? You sound fine,” sounding disappointed by her answers. She tried to explain. Her muscles hurt, she dared not move, touch, or even think about her vagina (when the nurse changed the bandage, a glimpse of the blood-soaked wad made Nina queasy), and Nina worried about Luke, replaying the doctor’s assurances, yet fussing over the fact that he had to be under an incubating lamp. Nevertheless, in spite of it all, she felt free, young, alive again. The mass was out of her stomach, she had had a boy (something about that was a relief, she couldn’t say what), and she knew, for the first time really, that it was going to be all right, that she had made it through, succeeded in the only things that really counted, the production of a child and the preservation of her life.
She tried to sleep; but the room was hot, and her sore body needed coolness. The air conditioning, Nina discovered, wasn’t working. She summoned a nurse, who impatiently said, “They’ll fix it in the morning. You should sleep.”
“I can’t! It’s too hot. That’s why I want the air conditioning fixed.” Nina let out a noise of nervous laughter, a habitual punctuation mark to any expression of anger.
“We’ll open the window,” the nurse said, moving to it.
“It doesn’t open,” Nina said.
The nurse worked at it anyway, pulling and groaning at the narrow metal handle. No one believes me about anything, Nina thought. I have no authority in my voice, that’s what it is. If it was deeper, they’d believe me.
“It doesn’t open,” the nurse said.
Nina’s snort of laughter pushed the words out: “That’s what I said.”
“Do you want a pill to sleep?”
“No! I want the air conditioning to work.”
“I’ll call maintenance, but they won’t get to it until the morning.”
“Fine,” she said, hard on the
n
, as though it weren’t.
The exchange had been unlike her. Not unlike how she wished to behave, but different from her usual suppression of any challenge, or demand of authority; knowing the hopelessness of requests, Nina generally didn’t bother to make them. But she had lived through hell, through a test of endurance and terror that now made disapproval from a nurse seem as trivial as it in fact always had been.
She lay in bed, hot, her skin chafed by coarse thin sheets, the bed too pliable, its height in the small room disturbing. She felt like a suitcase shoved onto the back shelf of a closet.
And her mind was awake—a lingering head cold decongested. She could breathe straight to the back of her skull, to places in her brain that had been dark and musty for months.
Luke, Luke, Luke, Luke, she recited, picturing boys, beautiful boys with hairless skin jumping into Walker Pond near her family’s summer home in Maine, their voices trilling in the rustling birches, dancing through the sun-splotched forest. She kept a hand on her deflated belly as if she could freeze it back into solidity, and saw herself slim again, dressed in a loose white blouse and worn jeans, walking hand in hand with an eager blue-eyed boy, her Luke, her creation, the living tissue of her pride and power.
She still hadn’t seen Luke. She wanted him.
What was she celebrating? Her ecstasy shuddered and crumbled like old plaster. She hadn’t held Luke to her breast, to welcome him to the world, soothing him for the squeezing horror of the birth canal. Luke’s first sensation had been cold steel, gloved hands, suction—Eric’s vague description of the scene allowed for endless nightmarish inventions.
Newborns don’t remember anything, she reminded herself.
But she didn’t believe that; she knew Luke’s body would remember, that inside him something would always flinch at the world, at a world not of warmth and love but of brutal technology and simple survival. What had she done to him? She wanted to hold him, to apologize for her clumsy work as an usher, hold him tight, press him with reassurance.
She decided to go to the nursery and demand to see him. She lifted the sheet off and swung her legs over. The pain was searing! Hot. The skin pulsed, outraged. It stung right through her, in two lines running up her torso, the movement of her legs pulling her apart, ripping her skin like paper.
She didn’t dare look. She must have torn the stitches; the blood would be flowing. “Nurse!” she tried to call out, but tears, tears of pain, exhaustion, and failure, drowned the cry. She pressed the call button. She shut her eyes against the pain that glowed below, radioactive with hurt.
The nurse appeared, impatience in her stance, a hand on a hip, her body only halfway in the room. Nina raised her face, slack from hurt and tears.
“You’re in pain?”
Nina stared at the nurse with hatred and enough rage to incinerate her.
“You’re due more painkiller,” the nurse said. “I’ll get it.”
“I want my baby,” she said, blubbering like a kid about a lost toy. “I want to see him.”
“Can’t now. He’s under the heating lamp. I’ll bring him in at six. Let me get you something for the pain.” She disappeared.
Nina breathed. In sharply, and out slowly. She inched off the bed, easing into the descent. The white support socks the hospital had given her to wear made her feet look frail. She watched them slowly slide across the big squares of white linoleum, crippled enough by her wound that the tall, wide door of her room seemed an impossible goal.
But she got there. From its half-open position Nina could see the nursery only ten feet away. The halls were empty, asleep. The nursery (divided into two sections, with a nurses’ station in between) had the shades drawn over the windows. Nina saw a different nurse walk across the station into one of the nursery rooms. Nina shuffled herself toward the open door of the station, moving faster, although her pelvis felt cut in two, tearing more with each step, and as she approached, Nina heard exhausted wailing: groaning squawks, high-pitched, easily recognizable as a deserted baby, abandoned, alone. She knew immediately it was her son.
Nina moved into the nurses’ station. The nurse was inspecting some charts in the quiet nursery. Nina shuffled to the other nursery, filled by the agonized cries, and looked in.
That was Nina’s first look at her son: Luke baked under a big lamp, a chicken warming on a delicatessen counter, nude, his thin arms and legs clawing blindly for help, his face distorted, so that his toothless, open, agonized mouth seemed huge.
Her mind closed against the cruelty and horror of the sight. She felt panic. She moved into the room—echoing with her son’s cries of outrage (what monster could ignore them?)—but hesitated to grab him. She had no doubt the baby was Luke. It was the technological setup that intimidated her. What if removing him from the lamp was dangerous?
“Miss! You’re not allowed in here!”
The nurse had spotted her.
“He’s crying!” Nina pleaded.
“You’re not allowed in here,” the nurse insisted, and took Nina’s arm.
Nina looked down at the nurse’s hand and saw two circles of bright blood on the white floor. They came from her—leaked from her wounded heart.
The nurse followed her eyes. “You shouldn’t be out of bed, Mrs. Gold. You might tear your stitches.”
Nina looked at her gown and saw a dull ooze of red at the groin. Who is Mrs. Gold? she thought as the world swayed away from her and she fell after it—into the nurse’s arms.
D
IANE STUDIED
herself in the standing Victorian mirror beside her dresser. She was framed by its dark wood, like a portrait. Her apparel was inappropriately modern, however, dressed as she was, in L. L. Bean slacks and a green polo shirt that emphasized her enriched breasts. The pants belonged to Peter, an old pair she had borrowed earlier in the pregnancy. Diane’s body was now going in reverse, a much more reassuring process, and she followed the loss of weight, the tightening of skin, with minute fascination and satisfaction.
She heard Mrs. Murphy’s voice, lilting, singsong—phony— talking at Byron outside in the hall. Diane walked there and she found Byron cradled by Mrs. Murphy’s meaty arms against her puffed, upholstered bosom. “Oh, the eyes are getting heavy now. You’ll be sleeping soon.”
“I’m going to take him for a walk.”
Mrs. Murphy stood in her tracks and tilted her head. “Now?”
“I have to mail some letters, I—” Why am I explaining to her? she thought. “Here.” She broke off, holding her arms out. “I’ll take him.”
“It’s windy today.”
“He’ll be fine. He’ll be in the carriage.” Diane gathered Byron gingerly. Mrs. Murphy had swaddled Byron in a thin cotton blanket and one arm shot out as Diane took him. Diane kissed the tiny wrinkled fingers, sucking on the soft buttery skin for a moment. Byron’s big bald head flopped against Diane’s chest, and immediately his mouth opened, jawing at the cotton of her shirt.
“He might be getting hungry,” Mrs. Murphy said. “He’s due for a feeding.”
“In a half hour. I’ll be back by then.” Diane hated this, loathed accounting for her every move and decision. It was just like being with her mother. Lily always demanded constant justifications for every action, laying the groundwork for a cross-examination that would devastate the opposition’s rationale.
Mrs. Murphy held out her arms. “He needs to be changed. I’ll get him ready.”
“No, thank you,” Diane said, and walked past her into the nursery. Behind her, she heard Mrs. Murphy make a noise. Diane ignored her, found the white cap in the carriage, and put it on Byron. Byron opened his large gray-blue eyes wide, staring fixedly at some point in between him and her, observing the approach of an astonishing spectacle. Diane put him on his back, tucking in the thin blanket on the sides of the mattress, and raised the hood. Byron started at that; his eyes blinked twice, and then he again fell into a profound stare. Diane covered his exposed lower half with a heavy plaid blanket, deferring whether to protect him totally until she got outdoors. It was mid-June, after all, and although not hot, already muggy; the slivers of sky she could see from Byron’s window were yellow with haze.
“Here we go,” she said to Byron—still, frozen Byron, gaping at the world. Maneuvering the bulky carriage out his door required care, so Diane’s vision was concentrated on clearing the sides. Diane didn’t see Mrs. Murphy standing in her way, a matronly blockade, arms folded, eyes narrowed in disapproval. She only felt the motion stop.
“You can’t take a newborn out like that, ma’am,” she heard Mrs. Murphy say, without her pleasant lilt, without the insinuation of command. Her authority rang clear, undiffused.
“Excuse me, Mrs. Murphy. I didn’t see you.”
“That’s all right. Let me dress him for you.”
Mrs. Murphy hadn’t moved from her position. “No!” Diane said, and gently butted her with the carriage.
“I’m here till the end of the week, my dear,” Mrs. Murphy said, her hand on the hood to prevent a repetition. “Then you can do things your way. I’ve taken care of hundreds of infants. I think I know what I’m doing.”