Hell Is Other Parents

by Deborah Copaken Kogan

  “You sure you want to stay?” I said. The clouds were growing denser, darker. Rain, no doubt, was imminent.

  “Why, do we have to be somewhere else?” said my daughter. She glanced up from her journal, neck cocked, confused.

  “No,” I said. “Not at all.” The whole point of our journey, in fact, was to have nowhere we had to be, except with each other. “I just meant the bench is cold, and we didn’t get to see the inside of the château—” When we’d arrived, the line to get in had stretched all the way down the massive plaza and out to the street. “Trois heures d’attente,” we were told: a three-hour wait. Neither of us felt like wasting that much time in a queue: me because every hour that passes is one less in my bank; Sasha because she is coming of age in an era when everything worth knowing, seeing, or hearing is just a mouse click away. Before leaving New York, in preparation for our trip, we’d Net-flixed Sofia Coppola’s cinematic homage to the place, Marie Antoinette, so she got it: big castle, lots of mirrors, off with her head, on to the next.

  “I like it here, Mom. Stop stressing.”

  The two of us had chosen Paris for Sasha’s winter break because it was far from the rest of the family, reachable via our American Airlines points, and affordable, despite our nearly empty bank account and the lousy dollar-to-euro exchange rate, via my friend Marion’s pull-out couch. As an added bonus for Sasha, nearly every corner of the city held the promise of a Nutella crepe. As an added bonus for me, nearly every corner of the city contained the madeleine scent of a memory.

  “You’ve gone away four times with Jacob in the past year!” Sasha had said a few months earlier, when I’d arrived home from the Star Trek shoot and slipped into her darkened bedroom to discuss the text message she’d sent me earlier that day, a few hours after I’d received the call from the assistant principal’s office about her school yard brawl, which read, DO YOU HATE ME?

  NOT AT ALL! I’d texted back from LAX, just before takeoff. I LOVE U MORE THAN THE WHOLE UNIVERSE AND THEN SOME, but I could tell she was not in a good place. It wasn’t easy for her to have had the title of baby of the family—which she’d held, uncontested, for nine years—suddenly usurped at the same time that her big brother was becoming a movie star and her best friend was lost to spite and the early winds of adolescence were starting to blow. I’d also been absent often lately, either mentally—an unfortunate by-product of mixing the solitary pursuit of prose with parenting—or physically, because of Jacob’s films or the baby’s all-consuming needs.

  Lying on her bed, stroking her hair, talking quietly so as not to wake baby Leo, who now shared her small room, I tried explaining that when I traveled with Jacob, it was for his work, not a vacation, and someone else was always footing the bill. I also mentioned that there were plenty of opportunities and voyages offered to Jacob that I had turned down for the sake of my work and our family unity, like the role Jacob had been offered on Lost, or the time he was invited to be a guest on Jimmy Kimmel Live! On the other hand, time alone with a parent, regardless of the context, was a precious commodity, and there was no question she was getting gypped.

  On the cusp of my own adolescence, at my father’s insistence, I had accompanied him on one of his ten-day business trips to Japan. It would just be the two of us, he said, far away from my three sisters and my mother and my increasingly influential peers back in Maryland. I, like Sasha, had been at a crossroads, though in my case I’d been heading for trouble—marijuana had been inhaled, alcohol overconsumed, all the usual early signposts of storms brewing—and though my father couldn’t gauge the speed of the prevailing winds, he could definitely see the dust blowing.

  Dad was fairly busy during that trip, as he often was during those years, and mostly I wound up wandering the hallways of our hotel, sneaking my way into ikebana classes or hanging out in the camera shop, checking out the new Nikons, or watching couples argue, in a dozen different languages, over which shrine to visit or tea set to purchase, but at night Dad and I would meet for dinner, dipping thin slices of shabu-shabu into boiling water or grabbing a few skewers of yakitori on a street corner or sitting in cramped noodle shops, slurping away, and in these tiny interstices between here and there, I found the space to communicate I hadn’t even known I’d been lacking.

  “I don’t want to become one of those couples when I grow up,” I’d say, “always arguing,” which was both a way of broaching the strife between my mother and him and a means of opening up a completely new line of inquiry between the two of us. What was it, I wondered, that made a relationship work? Not all the couples I encountered in the hallways of that hotel were arguing over absurdities. Some of them actually looked happy. What was their secret?

  “There is no secret,” Dad said. “Every relationship has its own set of parameters.”

  This was unsatisfying. I wanted to understand the inner workings of love the way a plumber understands pipes, not the way an oncologist understands cancer.

  One morning in Japan—it must have been a weekend, as Dad wasn’t working—we decided to check out the annual April parade we’d been hearing about. “Spring for Tea Lady festival,” my father’s Japanese clients kept telling us, “very interesting,” and though we had no idea who the Tea Lady was or why she was being honored, by dint of the word spring we imagined cherry blossoms in her arms and marching bands by her side and little girls decked out in floral dresses, all bowing down to greet her. When we arrived at the appointed spot, however, not only was there not a single Tea Lady in sight, but most of the revelers were carrying giant penises.

  Those who weren’t carrying giant penises were either dressed up as penises—their heads sticking out of tiny holes cut in the phallic shafts, their shoulders supporting papier-mâché balls—or they were carrying penis banners or straddling penis-shaped floats, which looked exactly as you might imagine.

  For those of you who’ve never attended a penis parade with your father, it’s not nearly as embarrassing as you’d think. After the initial shock wore off (“Oh, it’s a spring fer-ti-li-ty festival! Not a Spring for Tea Lady festival…”) we bought ourselves two giant blow-up penises on wooden sticks from a vendor, inflated them via small valves hidden within each scrotum, and joined the parade. And as we marched, proudly flying our erections aloft, I was finally able to give voice to pent-up feelings of impotency. “It’s really hard being a girl,” I said. “The other girls can be mean, and the boys keep making fun of my flat chest, and the guys I like don’t like me back, and the ones who like me aren’t my type.”

  “Oh?” said my father. He was really getting into it now, waving his inflated penis back and forth to the beat of the drums. “You have a type?” In retrospect, it couldn’t have been easy for a father to have had this conversation with his adolescent daughter under any circumstances, let alone these.

  “Yeah,” I said. This was the era of Happy Days, when a girl could be forgiven for grouping all members of the opposite sex into two distinct categories: the Richie Cunninghams (nice boys with limited sex appeal) and the Fonzies (attractive and dangerous, if falsely so, though you still might not want to bring them home to meet Mom). At the time, I was seeing a boy named David, a Richie, but I had a secret crush on his best friend Jerry, a Fonzie. “I think I like the Fonzies,” I said.

  “The whatsies?” said Dad. We were both distracted by the toy the little boy in front of us was holding. Shaped like a gun, made out of wood, it had a naked male figure which, when you pulled the trigger, would suddenly thrust its freakishly large erection into the similarly hinged backside of a female figure.

  Is that how sex worked? You shoot, you score? David and I had only worked our way up to chaste kissing. “The Fonzies,” I repeated. “You know, like the guy on the TV show?” My attraction to the Fonz was so strong that years later, already married and a mother and the author of a book I was traveling the country to flog, I would meet Henry Winkler in the green room of a television talk show and find myself unable to form a coherent sentence.
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  “Oh, right. The one who goes, ‘Aaaaaaaayyyy,’” said my father, holding his thumbs out in a way that was both endearing and so awkward, even the most loyal daughter would have pretended not to know him. Plus let’s not forget he was holding an inflatable penis. “Sweetheart,” he said, after I explained what I meant, “I don’t think you can reduce people to such limited categories. I know you. Or at least I think I know you, and I bet the person you end up loving will have bits of both of those characters in them.”

  While Sasha continued writing in her journal, recording the present for her future self—a family affliction—I kept staring at the château and thinking about Eric, a former colleague, ex-lover, and consummate Fonzie who hailed from Versailles. I started wondering what part of this man’s having grown up in the shadow of such a building played a role, if any, in his adult personality. I’d heard he was on his third wife, now, or maybe his fourth.

  Marion kept me abreast of his life. Marion is a friend from the days when I knew Eric. She had been Eric’s lover too, though neither of us had known, at the time, that we’d been rivals. Eric had insisted I not tell her about us, for reasons he said he couldn’t explain, and I’d obliged. I was twenty-two at the time; he was pushing forty.

  But my relationship with Eric ultimately fizzled, not for any infidelities I either knew or didn’t know about, but because Eric, like Louis XIV, was a rabid narcissist. Never have I met anyone who enjoyed his own reflection as much as Eric. If he could have rented out the Hall of Mirrors for his own place of residence, assuming it had a bidet and didn’t cost too much, he would have. Instead, he sought out his chiseled features and cerulean eyes in bathroom mirrors and in the plate-glass windows of La Cloche des Halles, the French wine bar where he, Marion, and I would often drink our Sunday brunch, and in the tiny rearview mirror on his Kawasaki motorcycle, where he would check to make sure the white scarf he’d tied around his neck lay just so before gunning the engine—vroom, vroom, l’état c’est moi!—loud enough for all of France to hear.

  On the other hand, he was entertaining, witty, and wry, and though we’d exchanged one-line holiday greetings every December, I hadn’t actually seen or spoken to him in person since just after Sasha’s birth, eleven years earlier, when Paul and I had taken him out to dinner during one of his rare visits to New York. “Do you realize he didn’t ask you a single question about yourself or the new baby?” Paul said afterward, laughing, but I gave Eric a wide berth because he’d just divorced wife number two. Or maybe three. And though he’d spent the entire meal regaling us with tragicomic tales of the rupture, I got the sense he’d only scratched the surface of the story. His wife had taken the two boys back to America. The son from his previous marriage—over whom he’d lost a custody battle—was away at college. Underneath all the comical anecdotes and asides sat a bucket of regret both too large to imagine and too small to contain its volume. I’d been meaning to check up on him for years, but life and inertia had kept me mute.

  I asked Sasha if she wouldn’t mind if I called an old friend. “Sure,” she said, barely looking up from her work.

  “Allô?” I heard as Eric picked up the phone.

  “Eric?” I said. “C’est Déborah. Je suis à Versailles avec ma fille, et—” Deborah. I’m in Versailles with my daughter and—

  He cut me off. “Déborah! C’est pas vrai!” The rest of his monologue—by no means was this a conversation—went, in French, something like this: “Say it isn’t so! You’re in Versailles? How wonderful. You know this is where I grew up, right? This is where I took my first photographs, right there in the gardens of the château with my little Brownie camera, can you believe it? And these photos I took there, you know, I’ve been looking at them lately, because I’m putting together a retrospective of my work. Forty years I’ve been working as a photographer, can you imagine? Forty years! Oh, but the business has changed. You can’t believe how much it’s changed. There are no more assignments, you can’t make a living, it’s really just shit. And I mean shit. But you know what? The images in my portfolio are actually pretty strong, especially the ones of Pinochet, and remember that story you and I did together, about that crazy woman in Leeds…?”

  How could I forget? She’d had over a thousand hand-painted gnomes in her front yard. I was Eric’s assistant as well as his lover during that assignment, setting up Balcars and marking the rolls of film with a Sharpie and gliding through the gnomes with the smoke machine. We also shot a woman who slept in a coffin and a man who liked to dress up as Robin Hood. British eccentrics, the assignment had been, and it was like shooting fish—no, monkeys—in a barrel. The subject matter had us giggling frequently that weekend, or maybe we were just giddy with newfound affection. We listened to The Joshua Tree, the only cassette we had in the car, incessantly, and made love in an abandoned church, and though we only argued once—I said Pinochet was a monster, Eric said if only I knew the great man like he did I wouldn’t be such a naysayer—by Sunday night I realized Bono was channeling my thoughts: I still hadn’t found what I was looking for.

  “It is truly fascinating going through my old archives…,” Eric was now saying, droning on in this vein for nearly forty-five minutes, at one point veering down an odd and convoluted byway concerning his current living arrangements in the countryside with his latest paramour, a cellist, the details of which he made me swear I would never reveal to Marion for reasons, once again, he couldn’t explain. Plus ça change, I thought, trying to end the call. This was not how I’d imagined my trip to Paris with Sasha, the two of us walking around Versailles, not talking to each other, a phone stuck—as it too often is back in New York—to my ear. I actually had to put the phone on mute, after rolling my eyes and turning my hand into a puppeteer’s to mimic his prolixity, so that Sasha and I could discuss our plans for lunch. At this point she’d finished her journal entry; it had started to rain, our stomachs were growling, and we’d walked all the way from the château to the RER train station half a mile away. Finally, since politesse wasn’t working, I shouted, “Eric! I was just calling to say hello, because I’m in Versailles with my daughter, and we’re heading back into Paris right now, and—”

  “Wait,” he said, cutting me off again. “You have a daughter?”

  After a long beat, during which I paused to ponder how, after the twelve annual holiday cards this man had received from me, bearing photographs first of my son, then of my son and my daughter, then many years later of my son, my daughter, and their new baby brother, he could have missed this essential fact of my life: my children. The essential facts of his were far more complicated, yet I knew them. “Oui,” I said. “J’ai une fille.” A few seconds later, we said our good-byes.

  “Who was that?” said Sasha.

  “Just an old…” I was about to say friend, but this was inaccurate. Eric and I, much like the wooden carvings on that Japanese boy’s toy, were two random figures who once fucked in a church. And a few times in beds. And once, when we were too lit up to climb the five flights to my apartment, in a darkened stairwell. He was nearly sixty now. This number, when I calculated it, astounded me. With any luck, he’d live another decade or two or possibly three, but this would have no bearing on my life. He was already dead to me. And had been for years.

  “Just an old what?” said Sasha.

  “An old man,” I said. “Just an old man.”

  As the week wore on, Sasha and I became the ultimate fla-neurs, exploring Paris on foot, adjusting ourselves to circumstance and paths as they presented themselves, talking about everything and nothing in equal measure. We’d wind up most afternoons in the Luxembourg gardens—she’d run, I’d read—but aside from Colin, the boy from California with whom she’d climbed the roped replica of the Eiffel Tower one afternoon, Sasha had no one to play with. “It’s not as much fun playing by yourself,” she said.

  “My friend Pierre has a daughter your age. Should I call him?” I said, remembering the year I spent, off and on, with Pierre, both k
nowing we were woefully mismatched, but each willing to put up with the other’s flaws for the sake of shared play.

  Pierre, who not only looked like Fonzie but also dressed like him, was the most chaotic person I ever dated. More accurately, he was bordélique, a French term with no real English equivalent derived from the word bordel, meaning “brothel,” as in “Quel bordel!” or “What a mess!” He’d lose motorcycle keys and wallets. He’d forget to show up for an appointment or arrive on the wrong day. He left half-empty bottles and baguette crumbs and overflowing ashtrays and damp towels and unmade beds in his wake. He’d make excuses that sounded fake—“I found this kitten in a courtyard, and I couldn’t just leave him there…”—which turned out to be true. I was, by far, the least sexy woman he’d ever been with—I know this because he showed me naked photos of his exes—plus I didn’t believe in astrology, which was a deal breaker. But needs were needs, each of us figured, and we met them together quite regularly and amicably until we were both replaced, equally amicably, by others. I’d written a chapter about Pierre in my first book, so we’d been in touch over that, plus he’d come to New York a few times over the years to stay on our couch, once getting my brand-new bicycle stolen off the streets of Times Square within the first twenty-four hours of his arrival, because he’d neglected to lock it up.

  With Sasha’s blessing, I called Pierre to ask if he and his daughter were free to meet us in the playground after work. “Well,” said Pierre, being Pierre, “I pulled a muscle in June”—it was now February—“so I’m on disability, which means I can only leave the house between twelve and three. I feel fine—I mean, don’t worry about me—but if I get caught outside my home I’ll have to go back to”—he named a French tabloid magazine whose masthead he now graced as a staff photographer—“and I’m really just enjoying sitting here playing guitar, because otherwise I’d lose my head.” The exact expression he used (“Sinon, je me casse la tête”) translates literally as “If not, I break my own head.”