(“She wanted Kyle. Nothing would have stopped that. She was in love with him. That mattered more to her than what I wanted. She’s just an ordinary person.”
(“Does that bother you? To find out your mother is ordinary?”
(“Yes. I believed she was extraordinary.”
(“And now you know she’s not.”
(“How banal, eh?”
(“No,” Kotkin said softly. “No.”
(“And Larry. Him too. He was just an ordinary person.”
(“Do you forgive him?” Kotkin whispered.
(“No. I don’t forgive anyone.”)
“Remember that?” Diane said, gesturing to the parents who had forced their child into the stroller and were hurrying away from the scene of their cruelty. Their child’s cries went with them. “Remember that phase? Byron never wanted to leave. Never wanted to stop playing.”
“He still doesn’t,” Peter said. “He’s just more polite now.”
“Mmmm,” Diane said. “You’re right.”
“If Luke doesn’t come, I’ll take him up to Gail’s.”
Diane looked her surprise. She squeezed his hand. “I’ll go with you.”
“Okay.”
She gave him another squeeze and returned to watching Byron. “He’s a good boy,” she said. “He’s survived us.”
Peter nodded. He sat and watched. He was an audience again; he was satisfied.
(“You know, Kotkin. I’m going to tell you something I thought I’d never say.”
(He waited for her to ask. She didn’t.
(“I’m a happy man.”
(“I’m glad,” Kotkin said.)
Indeed, I am a happy man.
WELL, IF I show Byron I brought my microscope, he won’t like it. He’ll tell me it’s boring. I know it’s not boring. But I don’t want to argue.
We can play a game. We can play Ghostbusters on the slides.
I wish he was interested in nature things. That tree has something on it. Daddy says it’s a fungus. But he must be wrong. The fungus is too big for the tree to still be alive.
If I made the universe, I wouldn’t make it with a big bang. I would let it start that way. Very compressed. Lots of it, jammed together. But I wouldn’t release in a bang. It could spread out, like when a pebble hits the water, spread out slow — what’s the word? — gradually. That means slow but regular. That’s how I would make the universe. I’ll tell Byron.
No. He’ll argue. He thinks the universe is the sky anyway. That’s all right.
“Mommy!”
“Yes, Luke?”
“I don’t want my microscope.”
“Okay. Give it to me.”
“Well, we should go back and leave it home.”
“What!” Daddy laughed.
“I’ll just put it away. Give it to me,” Mommy said.
Can I tell her? “Okay,” Luke said. “But put it so no one can see it.”
“You mean so Byron can’t see it,” Mommy said. “You know why he doesn’t like it? It’s because he doesn’t know—”
“I know that!” She didn’t like Byron. He was okay. He could play good games if you talked to him the right way. You had to slip into him, make him think what you want is what he wants. “Anyway, I can find things and look at them at home. Byron will be interested when we’re home. I told you I want the play date to be at my house, right?”
“Yes. If that’s okay with Byron’s parents.”
They won’t say no. Byron will want to come with me. There are fewer rules at my house. No cleaning up at the end. Byron hates to clean up. Me too. What’s the point? You only mess it up again the next day.
Look at that squirrel.
“Luke! Luke!”
There’s Byron.
“I’m Slimer, Luke! I’m gonna slime those bad boys!” Byron pointed to some boys Luke knew from other times in the park.
Well, I’ll play Ghostbusters for a while. Then I’ll change the game to the tree with fungus. If I tell Byron the fungus is a ghost and we have to get it off the tree, then I can do some experiments.
If you spread out gradually, you can have the whole universe— without even a bang.
GOOD! LUKE didn’t bring his boring microscope.
There’s nothing as blue as Luke’s eyes. Like the blue in that painting Mommy and Daddy like. Not a real blue.
“We’re going to slime them?” Luke asked.
“We’re gonna have a long play date, right Luke? I told my mommy and daddy that we had to have a long play date.”
“Well — okay, but I want to go back to my place.”
Good. “That’s good, see? We can make chemicals in the bathroom.”
“No, I don’t want to do that, Byron. Those aren’t real chemicals. That’s just soap and water.”
“Okay.” Can’t argue. Luke will play with those stupid boys if I argue. When we get to his house, I’ll do it anyway. “We’ll always be friends, right, Luke?”
“Well.” Luke put out his hand and looked at the sky. Even the sky was not as blue as his eyes. “If we know each other.”
“But we’ll try to always know each other, right?”
Luke put his eyes on Byron; they got dark. “Okay. But we can’t fight all the time about what to play.”
“But sometimes I don’t want to play what you play.”
“When that happens, we’ll play different things. Then, when we want to play something together, we’ll do it. Okay?”
“But it gets boring waiting.”
“Well.” Luke lowered his head. His black hair showed the white underneath. How does the dark show the light? “That’s the only way I know how to be friends.”
“Okay,” Byron said.
It’s too hard to fight everybody.
“We’ll do what you want, Luke.”
EERIC, LUKE, and Barry left the apartment to go to the park. It was early Sunday morning. The day before had been Luke’s fifth birthday. They carried with them Luke’s present from Nina and Eric. It was a bike, a two-wheeler, to replace his tricycle. Eric had prayed that Luke would ask Nina to teach him how to ride. Luke was still fearful of new physical adventures, a kind of instinctive cowardice that disturbed Eric and reminded him of his own indecisiveness. But Luke declined Nina’s tutorial offer and insisted that Daddy teach him. By chance, Eric’s parents had asked if they could come downtown for breakfast that morning, and Eric seized on this opportunity to invite his own father along, in the hope that if there were problems, Barry might be a help. After all, Barry had taught Eric how to ride. Of course, Eric was older when he had learned. Eight years old — it had taken Barry that long to afford a bike.
By now Eric understood that Luke was unusually smart. The response of the schools to the results of the IQ test made that clear. Despite Eric’s lack of connections, despite the horrendous surplus of applications, despite all the warnings that in order to get into a superior private school, a child had to be specially tutored from age zero, despite all that, Luke was accepted everywhere. Three schools called to urge Nina and Eric to select them. Their experience was so different from other parents that only one conclusion was possible.
Eric wanted to shout the news, to brag at every social function. He wanted every parent to know what they had been told at the nursery school by Luke’s teacher, a woman who had taught four-year-olds for thirty years. She said that Luke was the brightest child she had ever had. But Nina clamped down on Eric. Just say Luke is bright. That’s enough.
With the limitless choice of schools offered, they had a difficult time making their selection: they spent three weeks revisiting each school; they had meetings with headmasters and headmistresses eager to win them. Even Hunter was eager to get Luke. Eric wanted to pick Hunter, but Nina vetoed that. She thought the kids at Hunter were too grim, made into little adults, urged to acquire knowledge in order to gain applause. Luke loved learning; he wanted to know everything because he loved understanding. Nina wanted to preserve Luke’s unselfconscious love of knowledge. Eric could see that, so he went along with Nina, and they placed him in one of the better but not the hottest of New York private schools. “He’ll get bored,” Eric protested. “We’ll tell him what he needs to know,” she answered. By now, Eric had to read books on evolution, on biology, on the current developments in physics in order to keep up with Luke’s curiosity, his memory, and his ability to detect contradictions in the books they read to him. Luke worked with Nina on her designs, he listened with Eric to the business shows, Luke gobbled up all the scraps of information the world scattered about him, and then he played with his friends — there were so many of them — without displaying any of it. In kindergarten, Luke managed to keep his teachers in the dark for months, but by the end of the term, at the parent-teacher conference, Luke’s teacher said, “You have a remarkably intelligent child. Do you know that?” she asked, quite curious, apparently unsure.