“Yes,” Peter lied.
“You’re still so hard.”
Peter pulled out. The base of his penis ached. It looked red and angry. Byron still wailed. Diane got into the robe and rushed to her son’s room.
Peter listened to Diane make soothing sounds at Byron. “Yes, baby. You go back to sleep. Mommy and Daddy are okay.”
Peter held his thick old hairy prick, hard and unfeeling, in his hand. I’m lifeless. He rubbed himself and it was like touching something that didn’t belong to him.
He got out of bed and dressed again in his clothes. Only the wet feel of his penis reminded him that he had had sex. He returned to his study and began his memo on why they should fund the Uptown Theater’s workshop of its next musical.
“Do you like it when I touch you there?” Larry had asked, and little Peter couldn’t answer. His small throat had closed. He couldn’t speak, couldn’t defend himself. “Do you like it when I touch you there?” Larry had asked.
Peter put the paper aside. Why am I thinking of this now? He hadn’t worried over his friend Gary’s cousin Larry for a decade, hadn’t worried about the minor incident (it was minor, he reminded himself) of sexual abuse.
Peter decided it was his nerves, the strangeness of sleeping with Diane after such a momentous event, even though this wasn’t their first postbaby intercourse, but the second. It’ll pass, he told himself.
What can I do about it now anyway?
Do you like it when I touch you there? Larry had asked the choked and mute child Peter.
No, I don’t, the man Peter answered.
6
IN MID-JULY, Eric and Nina gave up any attempt to live normally while caring for Luke. Their son’s restlessness, the constant discomfort in his belly allowed them no relaxation, even during the brief times they slept. In the back of their minds, irritating and corrosive, was the worry that Luke would never be right, never easy.
Eric and Nina had conceived in hope, convinced that the creation of their child would give life meaning and beauty. By the fifth week after Luke’s birth, the treasured mutual joy of Nina’s pregnancy, the keen anticipation of birth had become a grim struggle with Luke’s unhappy nature. Nina had given up internal hope that day in Grace Church. She was now addicted to Eric’s repeated assertions that if they held on, Luke would be all right. In thrall to Eric’s assurance that their self-sacrifice would eventually heal Luke, Nina turned off her ego and became an automaton, feeding, cleaning, rocking, her mind a blank, a bulb burning bright, in a race to complete its task before the final blowout.
“Tell me he’s going to get better,” she’d say each night.
“It’s colic. It’ll go away.”
“My mother says we should let him cry,” Nina once said in a monotone.
“If we hold him, he’ll be all right,” Eric had answered. And then heard himself say, “If we let him suffer, he’ll expect nothing from the world.” The words floated up from Eric’s soul; they weren’t a creation of his brain.
“Why did this happen to us?” she sometimes asked.
“I don’t know,” he always answered.
By the sixth week, Eric feared even their stubborn will to continue to love Luke would collapse and they would crash, their marriage and their belief in life shattered.
They interviewed a few nannies, but knew, in their hearts, that no one would hold Luke for hours on end the way they did. But they did hire a cleaning woman to come twice a week and Eric knew (he had hoped otherwise) that eventually full-time child care would be necessary. Eric put all actual and potential expenses into his computer at work and looked at the last four-week take of commissions and trading in his own account. The gap between expense and income had widened. A year of this trend and they would be bankrupt.
One night, at the end of the sixth week, after Eric got the Snugli off (it had become Luke’s second skin) and succeeded in laying Luke down without startling him awake, Eric found Nina at the kitchen table, in the dark, weeping uncontrollably. It was three-forty in the morning. That day, Eric discovered he had neglected to take a four-thousand-dollar profit in options a week ago, because as the result of fatigue, he had forgotten he owned them. By the time he remembered, it was too late, the price had retreated. Eric watched Nina; she cried without pause. He was terrified by her emotional condition. Eric decided he couldn’t leave Luke alone with her. Anyway, he had become inept, even dangerous at trading.
The next morning, Eric went into Joe’s office before the market opened, and asked Joe for a leave until September and a loan to cover his expenses.
Joe had the Journal open on his desk, his bifocals at the end of his nose. Joe closed the paper when Eric finished his plea. He looked at Eric over the flat rims. “Have you considered that your son’s colic might be in your mind? Babies cry, you know. Maybe you’re being overprotective.”
“I don’t think so,” Eric said. He was used to fighting this point of view. His mother, Nina’s mother, the nannies Nina had talked to in the park, a couple of the child-care books, their pediatrician, all of them (when other suggestions had faded) had made the case that Luke’s fussing was made worse by their comforting. But Eric knew about experts — the stock market was littered with the torn scraps of their proud ideas. Consistency, riding out the run of luck against you, was the only thing that ever worked. Bulls get rich and Bears get rich and Pigs get nothing. “I’ve read that the only thing they know for sure is some babies are born with an incomplete formation of the digestive tract,” Eric told Joe, the speech tediously familiar. “In three months, they’re all right. If Luke isn’t better in another six weeks, we’ll act differently. But until then, he’s blameless. I mean, Joe, Luke can barely hold his head up. How the hell could he know to manipulate us?”
“They know!” Joe said, wagging a finger and smiling at his own wisdom. “They know how to get their hooks into their parents. They learn in the womb.”
Although Eric thought Joe’s brand of wit, with its pompous elaboration, unfunny, Eric nevertheless usually flattered Joe with a laugh. But this time, Eric stared at him. “I don’t think so, Joe. It’s just bad luck. Sure, I could blame it on Luke and run away from the responsibility. You wouldn’t do that. And you wouldn’t respect me if I did. Nina can’t handle this alone. I want to ride it out with her for the next six weeks. All these years I’ve never taken Fridays off to go to the Hamptons — I must have saved up six weeks’ worth.”
“That’s not our arrangement, Eric. You know that. I’m not your boss. This is a partnership—”
“Not exactly, Joe. Come on, be fair. You hold the seat on the exchange. I service your clients and your name is on the checks when I score for mine.”
“Neither are you a broker working for me. You get seventy-five percent commission on your clients. I give you ideas and clients and a steady income — a piece of my management free to boot. And as to not taking off Fridays, when have I taken them?”
“I know,” Eric said, bowing his head, dismayed. He had told himself not to make that point about Fridays. He rubbed his forehead and closed his eyes. He was so tired he could pass out right there — let it all go, the work, the money, the years of staying on Joe’s good side, the marriage (his once smoothly functioning, content marriage), and even Luke. Eric could just let go — fall onto the carpet and be carried off.
“This is really Nina’s responsibility,” Joe said. “I know it’s none of my business, but despite women’s lib and all that, it’s unfair of her to expect you to earn money for the family and also take on caring for your son. What you do here”—he tapped the desk with his fingers—“that is caring for her and your baby.”