Wendy screamed, backing away, her hands protecting the top of her skull. “Jesus! Are you crazy! That hurt.”
Eric opened the door violently. He looked agitated. “What was that! Is he all right?”
Wendy walked through the open door, and then glanced back, her look resentful. “You’re not very motherly. I don’t think. Maybe you don’t like people needing you.”
“You’re crazy,” Nina said without energy, merely stating a fact.
“What’s going on?” Eric pleaded.
“Maybe that’s why he cries all the time,” Wendy said, her face made small by vindictiveness, the eyes, nose, and mouth coming together in a blur of squints, twitches, and frowns. “He knows you don’t mean it.”
Nina instinctively turned Luke away from Wendy and her accusation. She wanted to cry, although she couldn’t bring the sorrow to precipitation. The unhappiness floated inside her chest like a heavy, heavy cloud — the dark swollen cloud of her lifelong failure to please or impress anyone.
THE CONCRETE and insulation manufacturers filed for financial reorganization under Chapter 11, claiming that the outstanding lawsuits, if decided against them, would be an economic catastrophe and that since no insurance could be obtained to protect them, they had to go “out of the insulation business” because every day they continued manufacturing exposed them to more litigation. This shifted the issue from their culpability to their liability (what they would pay on all debt included future debt such as negligence judgments), even though their guilt was still not settled. The maneuver was Stoppard’s invention, but Diane was essential in finding a precedent to allow the bankruptcy filing to begin before a judgment was in existence. Threatened with the possibility of winning their suits, but having no one to pay them, the ex-employees agreed to settle en masse for a quarter of what Stoppard and Diane had thought a court would be likely to award. She knew making partner at Wilson, Pickering had become a certainty. Stoppard would sponsor her wholeheartedly and he was the firm’s brightest star.
Peter said, when she bragged of her achievement, that it was a swindle, no better than, after you’ve blinded a man, robbing him of his beggar’s cup of coins. Of course, that had been her reaction when she had been brought onto the case. But it was true that the company would have been destroyed by the ex-employees’ suit. Thousands would have been thrown out of work, work that was now safe anyway, or at least met federal safety standards. The villain, the owner who had buried the warnings of the medical data, was dead. The law would be punishing his grandson, who had watched his inheritance halved by a rapid decline of orders and an even faster increase in insurance payments, along with wage raises, legal fees, and general Wall Street dismay. Most of the lawsuits were not from the victims, but from their heirs. Was it justice to punish today for yesterday’s sins? Stoppard had asked the court. And the victims did get some money. Anyway, someone else would have contributed the legal know-how she had. The end result would have been the same.
They took Byron to the park the weekend of her triumph. She had persuaded Peter to spend Sunday afternoon with them. Although Byron had first walked only a week ago, he was already competent, striding pigeon-toed, his full melon belly forward, a miniature sumo wrestler, his mouth open, exclaiming at the pleasures of his mobility. “Ahhh! Ahhh! Ohhh? Da!” He pointed to the trees and yelled: “Zat!” He grabbed the black iron bars of the playground gate and shook it. Byron teetered from the recoil and then tried to get a footing on a low rung, intending to climb it.
“Just like you,” Peter said. “He has no sense of boundaries. No responsibility.”
She didn’t know what he meant. She didn’t think Peter knew either, except that he resented Byron’s joy, Byron’s vigor. She looked at the other parents, all fascinated by her son, some with smiles, others with worry. They were in the small park at Washington Square, full of immobile babies, and only a few toddlers under two. The other one-year-olds were still crawling, or able to walk only a few steps before they wobbled and then crashed with a whoosh on the puffed bottoms of their diapers. They cried at every obstacle, at every frustration.
Not her Byron.
He stood at the edge of the sandbox, arms out at his sides in an attitude of command, erect on his chubby legs, still and steady, the Captain of Babyland.
The other parents were forever having to pick up their children, encourage them to try again, to dig in the sand, to leave their side, to engage life.
Not Diane.
She could sit on the bench beside Peter. She had to get up only to stop Byron from walking off with the pails and shovels of two-year-olds, who, despite their size and age advantage, lost tugs-of-war with Byron. Byron had mastered the technique. He closed his fat fingers tight around the plastic treasures, held his balance, and yanked hard. His calm will to win gave him extra strength; the two-year-olds, made anxious by the possibility of defeat, already half looking for a parent to help them, had their attention divided and their power diluted.
“I’m sorry,” Diane would say to the scrunched, embarrassed, irritated face of the bawling two-year-old’s parent. “Give it back, Byron.”
“Ohh!” he’d say, and loosen his grip at Diane’s request, unperturbed by the loss of red shovel or yellow pail, ready for another conquest, a good grab of sand, a stamping, hopeless chase of the pigeons, another assault on the gate. Byron took defeat and victory as one.
Diane could breathe deeply and smell her satisfaction. She had the best baby in the park. She was a success.
PETER SLEPT with rachel again. and again. and again. for the past month they had had a regular date each week, going to the theater and retiring afterward to her apartment of convertible furniture.
Their lovemaking was sad. Done silently, quickly, the copulation seemed mostly to be an excuse to hold each other. He felt hopeless about life and the world. The foundation had cut its arts funding to a third of what it had been two years before. He saw Diane alone for a mere hour a day during the week and little more on the weekends. And during those few hours, she yawned, undressed, bathed, complained, and wanted nothing from him but casual chatter and a brotherly kiss.
He knew, he knew, he knew — he knew all the psychological clichés. He’d lost his mother again, he felt competitive with Byron, and on and on. The problem was that they were true. His son grows up while he grows down. Byron moves into the future, Peter into the past.
He called Gary. He hadn’t spoken to or seen Gary, the best friend of his childhood, for a decade. “Peter!” Gary exclaimed, and began to babble, asking questions and giving information before he even heard the answers.
They met for lunch. The ghost of Gary’s slightly goofy, pale, boyish face hovered in fat and manly features. Gary wasn’t married, although he lived with a woman.
“I can’t believe,” Gary said, “of the two of us, you’re the one with a wife and kid. ”
“Why?” Peter asked, worried, possibly even offended.
“I don’t know. I just thought you’d think it was bourgeois or something. I really expected you to be an actor.”
“’Cause of high school?”
“Yeah. You loved it! And you were good.”
Peter couldn’t concentrate on the conversation. He was lurking behind pleasantries, hidden in ambush with his real question. “Whatever happened to Larry?” he asked casually when the check came.
Gary answered with suspicious rapidity, as if he’d been waiting to. “He doesn’t talk to us anymore. Broke off completely with my mother five years ago.”
“How come?”
“You know we put him up for a year, when he was — when you knew him. He was a mess. Mom kept him together. And, I don’t know, I guess when he got to be a success again, he must have decided we were beneath him. He’s become rich, you know.”