“Well, since he’s saying hello to you, why don’t you change his diaper?” Diane snapped, and offered the squirming, chuckling Byron to Peter.
Peter stepped back, alarmed, shying away from Byron like a timid man confronted by a wild animal. “I just got in.”
“So did I,” Diane answered.
“I’ll change his diaper,” Francine said.
“No.” Diane sneered at both of them. “I was just kidding.” She marched out of the hallway to Byron’s room. The baby’s quarters were the smallest in the apartment, twelve feet by six feet, designed three generations ago to be used by a maid. Byron really ought to be in the second bedroom, she thought for the millionth time. Peter had insisted on keeping that space to himself for use as a study. Peter’s study, she repeated to herself contemptuously. I’m the one who has the real work and I get a small desk in our bedroom.
Byron had moaned while she carried him away from Francine and Peter and, as she laid him on the changing table, continued to grumble with complaints.
“Let’s find you something nice to sleep in,” she said.
Byron averted his face, turned to the wall, and groped it with his left hand, cooing at the shadows.
“Bye!” Francine called into the room. “Good-bye, Diane. Bye, bye, Byron!”
Byron swiveled his head and bounced his legs. “Hoo! Hoo! Hoo!” he went on and on, an owl high on speed.
“Good-bye, Francine,” Diane said, and lifted the excited Byron by his feet, sliding a fresh diaper under his pink bottom, leaving it open and unfastened for the moment to let him air — the best protection, she had read, against diaper rash. She bent down to open the drawer with his outfits and found herself at a level with his body, staring directly at Byron’s genitals.
His pencil stub of a penis was rigid, pointed at the ceiling, framed by his tightly packed testicles. The hairless arrangement was white and pure, unlike the muddy, overgrown garden of semen-bearing men. And yet this prepubescent creature was erect. Usually, his penis was soft, the head hiding like a turtle, melted into the pillows of his balls. Not now. It was straight up, divining to the heavens, while he thrust his legs out, his arms also rigid, the fat hands, with dimples for knuckles, grabbing for things out of reach — the edge of the diaper, the blue box of wipes, the pink bottle of powder. He seemed fierce with desire and strength, comical in such a small body, but impressive also for the same reason.
She told herself the erection was caused by the cool air, a physical reaction to temperature, not a sexual statement. But she was frozen in position, her mouth only inches from his little flag of sex. I’m here, I’m here, it seemed to say. I’m also this, his wide brown eyes and pursed lips insisted. I have a cock, I have a cock, the tough little body proclaimed. Absurd but frightening, too. Does it begin that early?
Who is this erection for? she wondered. Me or Francine?
She shuddered at herself. And then quickly fastened Byron’s diaper. She closed him up so hard she got an image of the stiff penis snapping off, an icicle yanked from the eaves.
Wanting to obliterate these pictures, she searched for the softest and bluest of his stretchies. Her favorite, a deep navy blue outfit with red feet and a bear stitched on the chest, was getting tight on Byron. She had to bend his thick thigh forcefully to get his second leg in, and even then, when Byron stretched full out, the material was pulled taut at his groin — the puffy front of his diaper gave him the look of a sumo wrestler wrapped in a loincloth.
Byron whined impatiently while she closed the snaps and picked him up. She hugged him close. She put a hand on the back of his bobbing head and tried to urge him into the crook of her neck, to snuggle him, to feel the quiet warmth, to caress what he had once been: tiny, adoring, senseless.
But his strong neck pushed against the hand. His feet kicked at her belly, thumping her like a drum. A hand reached for her mouth, pushing open her lips. The fingers grabbed her teeth, the nail digging into her gums like grappling hooks, and his toes poked her ribs, feeling for a foothold — she was the mountain he wanted to assault and conquer, the height he would use as springboard to leap off into the world.
“Diane!” Peter called from the living room. “Diane!”
Byron kicked harder at the sound of his father’s voice, excited, his legs bicycling as if to power her forward. Diane carried him out. “Yes?” she said on seeing Peter.
“What are we doing for dinner?” he asked. Peter had a glass of ice water in his right hand and a copy of the Times in his left. He had taken off his blue blazer and looked resplendent, although plump, in his pink Brooks Brothers shirt. Peter’s body had begun to show the effects of his sedentary life. A belly had formed, a soft wave ready to splash over the brown leather belt, and his cheeks had settled, thickening his jaw, giving his face a placid appearance of self-satisfaction. His reddish blond hair seemed to grow reluctantly at his forehead; there was no longer enough of a mane to sweep across his brow and a portion stuck out, waving for help.
“I don’t know,” she answered, keeping the irritation she felt out of her tone.
“Do you want to go out? To I1 Cantinori?”
“With him?” she said, ducking away from another of Byron’s swipes at her mouth.
“We can’t take Byron there. Can’t we get a sitter?”
“I haven’t seen Byron all day, I’d like to be with him. No, it’s too big a deal. Let’s order pizza or something.”
Peter frowned. He pursed his lips. Then he looked down at the Times and seemed to become absorbed in an article.
“Hello!” she called.
“The theater’s dying,” he said. He looked up at her. “I was hoping for a romantic evening. Dinner. You know.”
He meant, she knew, that they had made love only once since Byron’s birth. Peter had brought up the subject recently and she had told him that after a day at the office and four hours of caring for Byron she felt tired, and certainly not sexy. Presumably Peter hoped a meal out, just the two of them, would put her in the mood. She hated to think about making love. Before the baby, they had often made love after evenings out, sometimes briskly, even perfunctorily, but that was all right. Planning was not. She hadn’t enjoyed the wait, the pleasantly nervous anticipation, of dating; to experience delayed gratification with a husband of eight years struck Diane as ludicrous.
“Peter, if you’re horny, why don’t you just say so?”
He smiled and blinked at her wonderingly. “Well, well. And they say romance is dead.”
“I don’t have time for romance. Let’s have pizza. We can still go to bed.”
Peter smiled and sat on the couch. “Will you order it?”
“Sure,” she said, and handed over Byron, who arched and yearned in his father’s direction anyway. She looked up the phone number and dialed, going through the schedule: pizza arrive fifteen minutes, half hour to consume, one-hour play with Byron, then bath for Byron, and bedtime rocking, forty-five minutes, sex with Peter an hour (make that half an hour), shower (to avoid rushing in the morning), and then to work on the brief. “I’d like a pie with sausage and mushroom, please.” Should be able to get to rewriting the draft by nine-thirty, ten at the latest. Six hours should do it. I’d even get three hours’ sleep.
She finished giving the order and hung up. She looked at Byron, held aloft, jumping up and down on Peter’s thighs. She didn’t feel up to a long-winded sexual exchange: necking, massage, genital foreplay, lengthy screwing — the four-course meal that Peter would want.