Only Children Read Free Page B

ma’am,” he said. She looked at his face. He was young, no sign of a beard on his clear skin. That, and his attitude toward her, made her feel ancient or, worse, finished as a sexually desirable woman. Not merely for now, in the full state of pregnancy, but forever.
    Peter doesn’t look at me anymore, she thought to herself as they got under way. She stared at her husband’s profile, intent on the view ahead, and tried to remember the last time they had sustained eye contact. Whenever Peter glanced at her, his eyes immediately trailed down to her belly and then, guiltily, away from her altogether, as though he had been caught staring at a cripple. Diane hadn’t expected Peter to remain sexually interested once she began to show, but to avoid even looking at her suggested a deep loathing and disgust. And right now he wasn’t solicitous or tender. On the brink of this fateful event, just when she imagined Peter would hold her hand or put a reassuring arm around her shoulder, instead he sat a foot away, his body held rigidly, as though he feared she might touch him.
    She did. She reached for Peter’s hand, resting on the leather next to his leg, and covered it, her fingers arching over his knuckles—a crab climbing a rock. To her surprise, he turned his palm up and grasped her firmly. Peter’s cold hand squeezed desperately as though he were drifting toward a waterfall and she were a rope to the safety of shore. But the rest of him remained aloof. He’s scared, not disgusted, she thought with relief.
    Peter hated hospitals. He had had an appendectomy in the middle of his sophomore year at Harvard, and all his dealings with doctors, nurses, orderlies, admissions and billing bureaucrats had been infuriating. Throughout Peter’s life he had had great success dealing with institutions—indeed, he worked for a large organization—but hospitals were the exception. Because one was ill, there was no way to bargain successfully with the medical establishment. Going into a hospital was to be stripped of all civil rights, Peter often said, and having lost battle after battle in the past, he was now shy of the simplest encounter. He fully expected them not to have Diane’s operation scheduled, to have no idea of who she or her doctor was, in short, to find everything in a mess. This pessimism wasn’t alleviated by the precautions he had taken—namely, getting to know the chief of medicine at New York Hospital through his boss at the Stillman Foundation as well as using the top obstetrician (Dr. Stein) despite the fact that Diane didn’t like Stein’s manner. One of the good things about the Caesarean was that it guaranteed the presence of this hotshot. Stein’s associate might have ended up doing the procedure if Diane went into labor at an inopportune time, which, in the case of Dr. Stein, seemed to be any hours after six at night and before nine in the morning on weekdays. Weekends were totally out of the question. Peter didn’t say so to Diane, but he suspected Dr. Stein ordered the Caesarean because Peter, using his cultivated acquaintance with the chief of medicine as a lever, kept tilting Stein toward an agreement that he would be on call outside his normal hours.
    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