If I go in there, he’ll manipulate me out of it. I don’t have the strength to fight him.
“Forget it. What’s done is done. I’m going for a walk.” He rushed out, ran from Joe’s plea—“Eric!”—and from Sammy’s insult—“You’re an asshole!”
“Tell us, Mr. Gold,” they will ask me. “Tell us, Mr. Gold,” they will honor me. “What was it like to go against the crowd? When everyone was sure, when no one had the courage, how did you feel?”
I am strong. I stand alone. I am strong. Nothing was given to me in this world; my father let me go into the world without weapons, with nothing to make me equal to the rest. I stand alone now — Eric Gold, the Wizard of Wall Street, brave and lonely and brilliant.
DIANE DECIDED to stay in Philadelphia with her mother throughout the recuperation. She believed that Lily’s health and her own life were inextricable. She offered to take Byron down to Philadelphia during the nursing of Lily, but to her surprise, Peter said no.
“He’s started at nursery school, we have the IQ test next week. He can’t miss them. We’ll visit on the weekends.”
Peter’s self-assurance amazed her. And she felt relieved not to have to put on a show for Byron. Whenever Diane was away from Lily’s sight, she had a tendency to burst into tears. It infuriated her because she didn’t feel like crying. There was no gentle lull of self-pity beneath the weeping. It happened at the images: Lily broken on the wheel of modern medicine; the angry stitching down her chest, a zipper branded on her skin; Lily’s pale, dead face; her eyes, weak and scared, pleading for everything to be all right. Diane hated the reversal of nature: her mother, the great force she had resisted, surrendered to, run from, railed against, prayed to, was a scared kid now, utterly at Diane’s mercy. There were no more criticisms of Diane’s dress, or Diane’s values, or Diane’s eating habits, or Diane’s marriage, or anything else — just gratitude, and a pathetic conviction that Diane’s reassurances were guarantees.
Lily’s doctors told Diane they didn’t want to discuss Lily’s condition unless Diane was present. Without Diane, there were hysterics, accusations, and misunderstandings. The doctors talked to Diane while Lily listened. She lay smashed on the bed, an oxygen mask over her month, her eyes on Diane, trusting when Diane approved, nervous when Diane, by asking further questions, seemed not to be satisfied.
“She’s doing well,” the internist would say.
“You’re doing well,” Diane would say to Lily as if the doctor had spoken in a language unknown to Lily.
Lily would nod at Diane with a ridiculous and sad faith.
Back at her mother’s kitchen table, Diane cried every time she thought of Lily.
And Diane hated herself for her tears, hated the discovery that she needed her mother’s madness, her mother’s irritations, her mother’s crummy values. They were gravity; without them, Diane clutched at the spinning earth, holding on by her fingernails. She had to save this woman, she couldn’t let her go. It meant nothing to Diane, made no sense, that of course, someday Lily must die. It was gibberish. Lily was the world, the never-satisfied world, and she could not die.
Every day Diane woke up with iron in her belly — long, hot rods stuck through her stomach. She had to press in with her fingers to break them; they cracked and she’d belch their metal out.
But new rods were stuck through Diane the minute she relented; they reappeared instantly, burning and sizzling inside her. Only when Diane got into her mother’s car, a decrepit and wheezing vehicle, to drive to the hospital did the metal in her stomach dissolve and leave her free to feel happiness. She loved driving. It reminded her of the last two years of high school and her college days. She bought a dozen tape cassettes of sixties music and played them loud. They filled the vacuum of the car with memories and exploded her present, sent her back to the happy past: young and intense, full of energy and hope. No death, no failure, no compromise.
But the drive was short. In the parking lot, Diane was overwhelmed with guilt that she had had such a good time in the car. She sang back to the music, laughed at the snapshots of her past — lovers, arguments, ancient happiness.
Your mother is very ill, she scolded. Today the drive seemed to end even more quickly, the joy of it over so fast. Diane darkened her face as she stepped into the hospital, ready to heap mounds of phony confidence over her terror and hopelessness about Lily’s condition. She had hours of vigil ahead, sitting beside her split-open mother. Lily, exhausted and on painkillers, would sleep on and off, always clutching Diane’s hand, as if it had life to spare. The linen, the hospital noises, Lily’s fear never changed. It was boring. Very scary and very boring.
Diane tried to remember New York. Her real life, she would have said a few weeks ago. But Peter and Byron, their apartment, her old job, her friends — they had no tidal force to draw her to them. It seemed life had always been this way: Lily and Diane, fighting nature.
Peter and Byron didn’t need Diane, anyway. According to Peter, this time Byron had taken the IQ test without any problem. He had gone to the prenursery school with typical enthusiasm and come home babbling about the activities.
Last night Diane had had a twenty-minute conversation with Byron over the phone; he rattled off the things they did in school and concluded, “You know, Mommy, I think I’m going to like growing up.”
“Oh,” Diane said, and held herself back from laughing. “How come?”
“Well, Daddy said I go to school for eighteen years while I grow up. I think I’m really going to like that.”
Peter got on afterward and sounded like a competent parent of many year’ experience It was bizarre.
Maybe I was the problem. Me. With my ceaseless demands, my endless criticism.
Whom did I do all that work for? Nobody needed it. Nobody wanted it.
“We miss you,” Peter said last night at the end of her conversation with Byron. But he didn’t sound sincere. The facts didn’t bear him out.
My mother needs me, she answered herself walking into the cardiac care unit. Do I take her back to New York? Insist to Peter we move into a larger apartment with a room for Mom?
That frail, scared, greedy, foolish woman. Diane loved her.
Diane set her face into a strong look of confidence and walked into the room.
The bed was empty.
“Ma?” she called out.
And she was hovering outside the window, looking at the Diane in the doorway: dressed in nice clothes, her hair brushed, her face made up, carrying the newspapers, and a take-out container of coffee.
“Ma?” this nice person called out.
Diane rushed to herself, smashed through the window, across the linoleum floor, rushed up into her own body, became herself, and began to scream: “Where is my mother? Where is my mother?”
Two nurses, both of them familiar faces, ran in and began to talk, to her and at each other. A mistake had been made, they were trying to say, Diane was supposed to have been called.
They didn’t have to finish their explanations. Diane had forgotten to worry about this, about a sudden event during her absence. Diane had forgotten to be vigilant; she could have talked them into letting her sleep at the hospital, she could have — but she didn’t and so, of course, Lily was dead.
WHEN NINA told Tad’s secretary she’d call Eric back, Nina remembered the smell of Luke’s hair. She had bent down to kiss Luke as she left him at the play group, but he was being called by David, by Katy, by Josh, by Rachel—“Hello Luke!” “Luke! Look at my new shoes!” “Luke! come play with me!”—and Nina’s lips managed to catch only the top of Luke’s head as he moved toward his friends. Hours later, at work, she could still feel the fur in her nose, the smell of baked life from his scalp, fresh and warm: soft hair, hard skull.