Pierre was now earning his living as a paparazzi photographer, after having made his professional mark shooting wolves and falcons in the wild. “I also recently got divorced,” he continued, “so I had to move to the suburbs, and I have the two kids with me right now, but if you wanted to take the train out to see us—it’s really no big hassle, you just go to the Gare du Nord, get on the train heading in the direction of”—he named an outlying suburb I’d never heard of—“for about an hour, then get off at the station and call me, I’ll come pick you up. But you’ll have to time it so that you get in after twelve-thirty, because I live half an hour away from the station, then I’d have to take you back to the station no later than two to be back in my house by three.”
I calculated the dizzying barrage of transport modes and numbers: an hour on the train, an hour back and forth to his house in a car, then another hour on a train back to Paris, all for the opportunity of spending an hour, at the most, with a man who was apparently so beaten down by life he feared breaking his own head. If three hours was too long to wait for a tour of the inside of Versailles, why would anyone wait three hours for a tour of the inside of Pierre’s head? “I’ll call you back,” I said. But I never did.
The dead were rapidly piling up.
Our last morning in Paris, as I was packing our bags to leave, I received a call from Luc. He’d e-mailed a photo of his infant daughter a couple of months earlier—the first contact we’d had in years—and I’d written back that I would be in Paris from this date to that, which turned out to be the exact dates he’d be away with his family.
His plane, however, would be landing in Paris the night before mine departed, so we’d made a tentative plan to try to connect the morning of my flight. Though I hadn’t seen or spoken to Luc since his gallery opening in New York five years earlier, I’d recently been thinking about him more than usual.
It had all started a couple of months before Leo was born, when we told the kids they could name the baby. “Lucas,” said Sasha. “I want to call the baby Lucas.”
“Anything but that,” I said. “I had a boyfriend named Luc.”
“So?”
“So it would remind me of him.”
“I never get anything I want,” said Sasha.
By “anything” she was actually referring to the dog Paul and I had promised to get her when she turned nine, which was the arbitrary age we’d chosen when she was four, thinking it was eons away, which it wasn’t, and that she’d forget, which she didn’t. We’d simply needed a way to staunch the onslaught of notes and stories she produced, daily, detailing her desires for canine companionship. One of them, “Maisy’s Invisible Dog,” was about a leprechaun, much like the gnomes I saw in Leeds, with the power to grant Maisy’s one wish, which was—surprise, surprise—to have a dog. “Your parents don’t want you to have a dog,” the leprechaun says. “And as a good leprechaun, I don’t want to make them angry at you.” Underneath this dialogue Sasha had drawn an illustration of a little girl, much like herself, sobbing.
It was sometime after she’d written this story, which was around the same time she found a purple leash and used it to lead her playdates around the apartment, that we’d promised her a canine companion when she turned nine, but the day of her ninth birthday, I was hugely pregnant. A few months earlier, I’d told her that a puppy on top of an infant would definitely push me over the edge, after which she’d gone into her room, like Maisy and the rest of her dog-deprived characters in literature and in life, and sobbed. For months. As a consolation, I told her she and Jacob could name the new baby.
Now, once again, I was going back on my word.
“Who cares if you once had a boyfriend named Luc?” she said. “You don’t love him anymore.”
“But I did love him. Once.” I chastised myself for disappointing her again. Lucas was a beautiful name for a baby, a concession I wouldn’t have to walk or groom or take to the vet. But of course Lucas—Luc—wasn’t just a name. It—he—was the synecdoche for the other life I could have chosen.
Luc and I were actually dating when I met my husband. The overlap was such that the night of my first date with Paul, which wasn’t even supposed to have been a date, Luc called and left a message thanking me for the previous evening’s ten-dresse and asking when I might be free again. I don’t think either of us, at the time, could have ever predicted the answer would be never.
Luc was not the first man I’d ever dated who could not be classified as either a Fonzie or a Richie, but he was, up until that point, the most beloved. He covered wars for a living, like me at the time, but he was also soft-spoken and kind, a voracious reader of classical literature and poetry, a gentleman in the old-fashioned sense of the word. He was opinionated and driven, an ardent rationalist who nevertheless lapsed, on occasion, into disarming sentimentality: one day, after I happened to mention that I wanted to try shooting large-format photographs, an antique Mamiya 330 appeared at my doorstep, with a note from Luc folded up inside the viewfinder.
Love came easily to us, as it so often doesn’t, but the situation wasn’t without its complications. Luc’s former lover—not a girlfriend, exactly—had just given birth to his child. We both traveled for work, often leaving Paris and each other for months at a time. Luc had a stormy core, the kind that feels the dimming of each day as a physiological assault and the inadvertent stroke of a cheek as rapture: that is to say, he and I were almost exactly alike, and he and Paul couldn’t have been more different.
I’ve had nearly two decades to rationalize the choice of one partner over the other, one life over the other, and human nature being what it is, I’ve done an excellent job of it. Paul’s an optimist: I love living with an optimist! Paul came unencumbered by other children: thank goodness for that! Paul’s emotionally steady, reliable: he’s the yin to my yang. Paul’s work keeps him safe and near to me, and loving him, I chose the same: a man who remains present day to day instead of dodging bombs for months on end around the globe.
In my worst moments with my husband, however, I think back to that choice and project its opposite. In the months leading up to the Iraq War, Paul and I fought mercilessly. I took the position that Bush was lying and the world was going to hell in a handbasket; Paul insisted that time and history would prove me wrong: the Middle East would be a better place. When Luc and I met for lunch in New York a month before the war began, I found it a relief to discuss the situation with someone familiar with battlefields, who understood within the marrow of his bones that you don’t enter into conflict lightly or without verifiable cause. And when an assignment to cover the first days of the war suddenly materialized in my e-mail in-box, I was tempted—more than I’d ever been since leaving both Luc and combat journalism behind—to type y-e-s and hit REPLY.
I’ve also clocked enough hours on earth now to understand that the existence of a love child, while not totally inconsequential, should not have been the sticking point it was. That love child, in fact, has by all accounts grown into a lovely young woman, a newly accepted candidate for a degree at Science Po, the elite of the elite French universities, and Luc was as present in her life as shared custody would allow, while Paul, during the first six years of our parenthood, reenacted his own father’s abandonment with the emotional version thereof, staying at his office every night until well after his children and I had gone to bed.
One night, in the thorny thick of that dark marital abyss, I was in Baltimore, Maryland, giving a reading at a bookstore, when a stranger emerged from the crowd to show me a clipping from that morning’s paper. “I don’t know why,” said this elderly man, handing me a review of Luc’s latest book of photographs, “but I thought you’d like to see this. You two remind me of each other. Your take on the world is similar.” I was able to choke back the tears at that odd public moment, but back in my hotel room that night, I bawled.
Paul and I have since spent enough time under the care of highly qualified professionals, both together and apart, to under
stand the root causes of our various frictions and to work, daily, to sand them down. Our marriage became once again, for lack of a better term, a happy one, like those I once aspired to back when I first started wondering about such things with my father in Tokyo. And when it slips now and then into unhappiness, as all marriages can and do, I try to remind myself that a marriage is more than just two people sharing a bathroom, more than a choice made way back when. It is a family, a history, a stew requiring constant stirring. And naming my child after an old flame would scorch the dish.
As a compromise, I let Sasha give us the l from Lucas, which we combined with the o from Nico, her brother’s choice for his new sibling’s name, thereby creating the Solomonesque Leo, which, say what you will, is better than Nucas.
The issue of the dog, however, was not so easily resolved. When Leo turned one, and Sasha started in on her canine campaign once again, I broached the subject with my husband. “We did promise her a dog,” I said. “I feel bad.”
“Don’t feel bad!” said my optimist. “She’s almost eleven. She’ll be into boys soon enough. We just have to bide our time.”
“She’s already into boys,” I said. “And she still asks for a dog every day.”
“She doesn’t need a dog,” said Paul. “She has Leo.”
“You need to stop telling her that,” I said. “It makes it worse.”
That fall, one by one, Sasha started dropping all of her after-school activities. Guitar went out the window first, followed by piano, then Rollerblading. Instead, every day she’d come home from school and go straight to her room, where she’d either scribble in her journal or write a new story or create increasingly bigger, more frantic signs stressing her desire for a dog, which she’d post on our front door, lest we miss them when we came home from work. “I understand you want a dog,” I whispered to her one night as I was putting her to bed. “But isn’t there anything else that would make you just as happy?”
“No,” she said. “I just want a dog.” And then the tears started to fall. Hard. “It’s so unfair,” she said. “You do everything for Jacob and his acting. Dogs are my only passion, and I can’t live it!”
“I think we’re really going to have to get her a dog,” I said to Paul later that night as we lay in bed.
“No dog!” said Paul. “End of story. We have no money, time, or space for a dog. Plus who’s going to take care of it?”
“Sasha and I will,” I said. “You don’t even have to be involved. It’ll be our project.”
Let me just state for the record that, despite my proposal, I didn’t want a dog either. I’d never owned a dog, I didn’t understand dog people, I had no desire to waste hours of my life picking up poop with a plastic bag. Dogs smelled! They had to be walked! You couldn’t just leave them at home and go away for the weekend! Plus let’s not forget that though we no longer had an infant, we now had a toddler.
And yet something about Sasha’s lament—dogs are my only passion, and I can’t live it—struck me in that primal, maternal place. I started having dreams about dogs, and those dreams would turn into nightmares where I’d try to reach for my daughter’s hand, and she’d slip under some current or into the mist or beneath the surface, beyond my grasp. In one of these dreams, Sasha was an old woman, homeless and destitute, and she came to find me, her face lined and furious. “You lied to me!” she yelled. “You promised me a dog, and you broke your promise, and now look at me! Just look at me!”
Paul and I began having arguments about getting a dog, and those arguments started making our happy marriage less so. “She’s fine!” he kept saying. “No dog.”
“She’s not fine,” I’d snap.
“I barely see you enough as it is!” he finally countered. I found this oddly touching, that my husband didn’t want to feel deprived of my company after nearly two decades of cohabitation. Wasn’t he sick of me already? Most days I could barely stand myself.
Then our afternoon sitter pulled me aside to say that Sasha was now coming home from school and going immediately to bed, though she was getting the requisite amount of sleep every night recommended by her pediatrician. When I’d arrive home from picking up Leo at day care, she was often lethargic, uninterested in food, light, or conversation.
One Saturday, when Leo was eighteen months old, Sasha asked, once again, if she could visit the puppies at Pets on Lex. Paul and I, both to assuage our guilt and to get our daughter out of the apartment, had started taking turns making such pilgrimages, so much so that Sasha was now known there by name. The people who work at Pets on Lex, like the Upper East Side neighbors they serve, can be quite prickly. Signs are posted everywhere saying DO NOT TOUCH THE PUPPIES!, and those who disobey are swiftly barked out of the store. But every once in a while, seeing Sasha standing there, sighing, they’d take a couple of puppies out of their cages and let my daughter play with them in a fenced-off area in the back of the store.
I’m not projecting some innate kindness on their part—I’m sure their tactics had everything to do with the repeat nature (read “potential customer behavior”) of her visits—but there was one employee who seemed to understand both puppies and Sasha better than most, and the two of them would spend hours talking dog. This man, whose name I didn’t know, was there that Saturday morning, and he freed two Ha-vanese puppies for Sasha to play with. “This is my favorite breed,” he said. “I have two of them at home.”
A half hour later, I was on the phone with my husband, and his bark was louder than all the puppies in the store combined. “Don’t you dare bring home a dog!” he said.
“You don’t understand,” I said. How could he? He hadn’t seen the way the puppy had crawled into my daughter’s arms and licked her face before laying his head on her shoulder, or the way both dog and girl started crying when it came time to part. He hadn’t felt the pathos in that pet store, my moment of clarity. “The puppy picked Sasha,” I said. It was the only way to describe what had happened.
“No dog!” said Paul, followed by threats of divorce.
I had a crisis of conscience right then, thinking back on all the compromises I’d ever made, both for the sake of our marriage—leaving Paris, wars, lovers, my independent self—and for the sake of our children—all that time, energy, youth, freedom, and income lost. I weighed each choice in my head: bring home the dog, and make my daughter happy but my husband miserable; leave the dog behind and make my husband happy but my daughter miserable. I thought about what the addition of a nine-week-old puppy in our modest apartment would mean for me: the extra work, the investment of time and money, the housebreaking that might never succeed. I thought about what it would mean for my relationship to my daughter, to have once made a promise and broken it. Would she blame me forever? How about her baby brother? Would she blame him for being born? How would such a loss of trust and latent anger play out over the years? What about my husband? Wouldn’t a unilateral decision, made by me without his consent, create the same types of feelings of mistrust and anger in him?
And then I made a choice. I’m not saying it was the right choice, but it was the one that felt right at the time, like choosing Paul over Luc way back when. Plus I’d just received the check for my first novel, and while I really wanted to put it toward a new dining room table, the one we bought for fifty dollars back in 1992, when we moved back to the States, was still perfectly serviceable. “We’ll take the dog,” I told the man.
The look of surprise and glee on my daughter’s face was not worth every compromise I’ve ever made, but it came close. “Really?” she said, tears filling her eyes. “Are you serious?”
“I’m serious,” I said. “He’s yours.”
We hugged. I won’t even try to describe it. It was the best hug of my life, and I would draw on it, daily, over the next two weeks, while my husband hissed and huffed and retreated into his angry, sulking corner—he had a right, after all—until finally the dog was just part of our bordel, with Sasha and me as his pimps.
Me
anwhile, the pet store employee gathered together the puppy’s paperwork and asked if we wanted to inscribe a metal tag for him. When I said yes, he turned to Sasha. “So what name are we going to put on that tag, huh? I bet you have a name all picked out.”
She thought about it for several seconds. Every one of her stories contained dogs with different names. There was Max and Scruffy and Shadow and Skippety and…“Lucas,” she said. “I want to call him Lucas.”
Great, I thought. Not only was I betraying my husband with a unilateral decision, I was betraying him with a unilateral decision named Lucas. I nearly objected, but then I kept my mouth shut. This was my daughter’s project, her baby. She could name it—him—whatever she liked.
“That’s so funny,” said the pet store employee. “That’s my name!”
I gasped. Audibly. Of course it is, I thought, wondering how on earth we were going to train darling Lucas not to piss in every corner of the apartment.
“Tu as un chien?” said Luc. You got a dog? Sasha had just dropped this little bomb into our conversation, apropos of nothing. The dog was still very new in her life. She couldn’t help herself. Or maybe she was just bored of reading her book while Luc and I tried, in vain, to catch up on two decades of temps perdu in a language unfamiliar to her. Or maybe she simply didn’t like the wistful way her mother and this stranger were staring into each other’s wizened eyes. “He smelled like smoke,” she would say afterward, her sole assessment, when I asked her what she thought of him. The three of us were sitting at a café near Marion’s apartment. Luc and I were drinking espressos. Sasha’s lips were covered in hot chocolate. Luc turned to her and spoke in English. “What is the dog’s name?”
Hell Is Other Parents Page 13
