Only Children (3 page)

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.

E
RIC 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.

Maintain steady pressure
. Eric replayed the phrase of their instructor to encourage himself while his arm muscles cramped from the unrelieved exertion. Maintain steady pressure, Eric thought, watching Rock Hudson’s leering eyes. Nina had selected
Pillow Talk
from the television schedule to distract them while they waited for the labor pains to be only five minutes apart. Then they could head for the hospital.

Nina moaned. In response, Eric pushed down on her back even harder. “Oh, that’s better,” she said, dismaying Eric, because he could never keep up this new level of effort. The blood in his arm seemed to have gelled, ready to burst through the skin.

“I’d better write the time down,” he said. He had noted the time on the video recorder’s digital clock, and he knew without checking the sheet that the pains were still eight minutes apart. They had been stuck at this interval for over an hour. Nina already seemed worn-out, her face drawn, her eyes scared, her voice enervated. She’s not going to make it, he thought. What did
that
mean? She couldn’t quit. But by the look of her, a few more hours of this seemed unimaginable. He wanted to get to the hospital. There the medical people could take over, deal with it if she couldn’t finish. “Eight minutes,” he said.

“I can’t believe it.” She sighed.

“Should we call the doctor and tell—”

“We’re not supposed to call until it’s five minutes!” Nina said furiously.

“But—just to tell her that they’re not getting any closer—”

“No!” She sounded as if she were training a dog. “I’m not going to keep bothering Ephron when she’s told me what to do.”

“You mean, no matter how painful it is, no matter how long it goes on—”

“If it gets too painful, I’ll call. God, Eric, don’t make this any harder than it already is.”

Is it me? he wondered. Or is she irritable from the pain? Everything he said grated on her. I’m supposed to be strong, he criticized himself. Supply patience and confidence—not worry.

Patience and confidence. That’s what it would take to be a father. What a colossal effort—to stand on the lonely hill of responsibility, the wind whipping his hair, and clench his jaw bravely for years and years. To conceal how frightened and inadequate he really was.

He wanted to run from the room screaming. Hail a cab to the airport, board a plane to Las Vegas, and spend the rest of his days playing, whoring, and sleeping. Every time he met Nina’s glazed eyes, they focused on him and came to life, burning with mute requests. For reassurance, for efficiency, for solace. And soon there would be another pair, needing even more things. Security, love (unstinting, uncritical, and absolute), and … money.

How could he—of all people—have entered into this enterprise without taking into account how much goddamn money was involved? If he had to cite one thing that was absent from his childhood, one gloomy cloud that darkened his parents’ windows, its dense atmosphere poisoning their lungs, lidding their eyes, that was the absence of money. Eric’s father, Barry, a floor manager in Gimbel’s shoe department, had tried one bold move to make money: he quit his steady paycheck, borrowed from relatives and friends, and opened a place of his own in Washington Heights. But it had failed, and although Barry was taken back by his old employers, there was debt, there was a cut in pay, there was gloom and shame and fear.

Eric had sworn to himself that he would grow up to be rich, that nothing would prevent him from shooting through the black mist into the sunny life of the wealthy. And yet he had committed to the birth of his child, his heir, without knowing if he could sustain his income, if he could swell it into a mountain of capital to elevate his son effortlessly—the sweat, the climb, the danger of falling … all eliminated by Eric’s brilliance.

What if it isn’t a son? Then Eric’s lack of a fortune would be even worse. After all, a daughter might inherit his features, and then it would take a trust fund of at least two million to attract a husband.

“What are you smiling about?” Nina asked, letting her body descend on the floor.

“I was hoping, if it’s a girl, that she doesn’t look like me. She’d need one hell of a dowry.”

“Oh, Bear.” Nina sighed, hurt by his cynicism. “If she looks like you, she’ll be beautiful. Six feet tall, beautiful skin.”

“Brown eyes?”

“She’ll have my eyes,” Nina said firmly, her blue eyes widening with conviction.

Eric laughed, pleased he had wrung this little admission of vanity. “Only a one-in-four-chance,” he warned, shaking his finger at her.

“It’ll come through.”

“Will you love this baby if it doesn’t?”

“What do you mean?” she protested.

“I don’t know. I just hope—for its sake—that it’s got blue eyes.”

“That’s not funny,” she said, turning from him to look balefully at the television. Her thick brown hair shifted off her back, fell across her shoulder, and exposed the pale white freckled skin of her neck.

“I was kidding, for chrissakes.”

“I don’t feel like joking right now,” Nina answered in a faint voice. “Ugh,” she groaned, a hand reaching for her back.

Wearily, Eric planted his fist there and pressed. Hard. Pushing, pushing, pushing. Hoping he could get the little bugger to come out already. To end the fantasy and begin the reality.

“E
LEVATE THE BLADDER
,” she heard Stein say. Peter winced. He tried to mask his reaction, but a flicker of queasy disgust peeped through-Diane felt weird about their poking around her insides like shoppers at a sale counter, but only intellectually. She couldn’t picture—even to scare herself—what they were doing. And this abstracted relationship to the birth of her son was a relief. She had worried she wouldn’t be up to natural childbirth, that like some scared kid on the first day of battle, she’d panic and flee, only to be dragged, crying, back to the front—humiliation following cowardice.

Instead, this seemed almost queenly. Her husband, the doctors, and the nurses attendant on her various parts, the heavy painful lower half of her body whisked away to a numbed dimension.

“Here he is!” Stein said. She strained her neck and caught a glimpse (above the tented blue sheet rising from her chest) of a slimy bald head. “Clip. All right.”

The baby cried. Not the bloodcurdling scream she expected, but a feeble squeak of protest, a kitten startled from sleep.

Stein, his eyes warmer, bigger, and kinder than she had ever seen them, approached with her son. Stein’s hand, covered by a transparent rubber glove, encompassed the whole of baby’s skull; the fingertips spread beyond, petals open, cradling the blossom within.

“Let’s say hello to Mama and then we’ll check you out,” Stein said to the creature—it was too much of a miniature, too strangely animate, too wet to be called anything else—and then laid it in between her swollen breasts. One of the nurses—also beaming with tranquil joy—raised Diane’s head so she could look at the face.

“Hello,” said a voice at her side. She was surprised to find it belonged to Peter; she had almost forgotten he was there. Peter leaned in, his hand covering baby’s tiny, furiously clenched fist. By comparison, Peter’s hand looked gigantic and terrible.

“Easy,” she said involuntarily.

“I’m barely touching him,” Peter complained.

She looked at the face. It was unreal—the skin translucent (hardly protecting the blue-green veins beneath), fine hairs everywhere, the lips full, brilliantly red against their pale surroundings. Baby’s legs and arms cringed and yearned, as if finding the open air harsh— a mute appeal for cushions and warmth.

“Hello, Byron,” Peter said to the baby, using the name he had urged over her plaintive objections. Too pretentious, too odd (the potential nickname—By?—sounded like a description of sexual confusion), and besides, Diane had never read Byron. (Wasn’t he a sexist pig?) But Peter had, especially in adolescence, and he made no attempt to pretend it was simply a love for the name itself. “It’ll guarantee one thing,” Peter said. “He’ll be sure to read Byron at least once—so we won’t have a complete illiterate for a son.”

Diane looked at her creation. That was no Byron. The brilliant whitish yellow umbilical cord, as thick as a trunk phone line into a busy office, extended from his red and swollen belly. The biggest thing about him were his testicles (maybe he
was
like Byron), but that was caused by birth or something—they had explained at the classes. The legs were retracted up almost to the stomach, a frog turned upside down, feet feeling desperately for a comforting surface.

“All right, let’s give him over to Dr. Kelso,” Stein said, and a young baby-faced pediatrician picked up Byron with a confidence that both impressed and irritated Diane.

“Welcome to the world,” Dr. Kelso said, and carried him off.

N
INA HATED
the furniture. The dark, dreary wood of the living-room shelves, the fat, rumpled couch, the dull red rug, the thick, oafish horizontal blinds (smudged by futile attempts to clean off New York’s air)—they all seemed responsible for the pain and mistake of this birth. Her back ached with bruising hurt, like nothing she had ever felt before. The base of her torso felt sore and dented, as though someone had been striking her with a mallet over and over and over—trying to halve her. Whenever Eric removed his fist, the pain intensified, stabbing so insistently her breakage seemed only moments away.

“Oh! Oh! Press! Press!” she cried. She reached back to the wound, almost fearful, however, that her hand would find nothing where once there had been her body—her strong, young, always reliable flesh.

“Okay, okay,” he said, and his strong fist shored her up, lifting her above the surging pain, just high enough for her to breathe and survive.

“Oh, God! Oh!”

“Breathe! Do your breathing!”

Nina huffed and puffed irregularly, skimming insecurely on the pain, buffeted out of her attempts to get a steady rhythm by the erratic stabs of hurt.