Hell Is Other Parents

by Deborah Copaken Kogan

  Here we go, I thought.

  “Lucas,” she said.

  Luc bit his lips together to staunch a smile. Then he turned to me and raised his eyebrows.

  “C’est compliqué,” I said. It’s complicated.

  “It’s always complicated,” said Luc.

  A few months after Paul and I had moved in together, into a small, sloped-floor apartment on the rue St. Joseph, Paul suggested I invite Luc over for dinner. My husband’s never been the jealous type, and he believes, deeply, in the importance of a social life rich with connections to the past: he was a young orphan, after all, as well as an émigré. The idea that further pieces of his—our—past should be lost through pettiness or neglect is anathema to him, and I am grateful for this daily.

  That dinner was my last contact with Luc before Paul and I left Paris forever. He showed up with a bottle of red wine and a bouquet of flowers, which Paul, when he answered the door, tried to pry from him. Luc, however, had other plans: he smiled, handed over the bottle of wine, but held fast to the flowers. “C’est pas pour toi,” he said, waving his finger back and forth: They’re not for you. Then he came into the kitchen, where I was cooking, and handed the bouquet to its intended recipient.

  I sometimes think about those flowers, long since dead, ripped from the soil in the prime of their—our—bloom, like the relationship they were meant to mark and mourn. I don’t think either of us realized at the time how hard it would be, even years hence, to get over its abrupt, unsatisfying ending. There was no big blowup, no moment when I looked at Luc and heard Bono singing, no teary breakup, with both of us nodding our heads, realizing it was for the best. There was just another man who stepped in midstride and swept me off my feet, a man whom I would love ferociously, even when I was hating him, a man who would become the father of my three children and the locus, for better or worse, but mostly for better, of my life.

  “Is he a nice dog?” said Luc.

  I glanced over at the menu and noticed the name of the café: Le Bouquet du Nord, named thus, I realized, because we were sitting in the vicinity of the Gare du Nord—North Station—where Sasha and I would soon descend to begin our journey back home, but the words triggered an image of a bouquet of flowers lying on a cold bench in a scene not unlike the February vista at the gardens of Versailles. It was a sad scene, withered and bleak, but like Sasha said, you could still write about it. “Oui,” I said. “He’s a really nice dog.”

  I walk Lucas every morning at 5:45, to be back in time to help Paul deal with the baby, the lunch boxes, and the three children heading off to schools in three different directions. I used to think about Luc quite a bit during these walks, who unlike so many of my other ghosts can often feel as alive in my head as his namesake on my leash, but now that Lucas has transformed from metaphor into dog, I mostly think about random stuff, or nothing at all, and I’m happy just to have the half hour to wander. Back in the day, before I met Paul, I used to go for walks almost every morning, and getting out like that again feels a little bit like a homecoming.

  I’m still not a dog person—the first time I took Lucas to the vet, a woman in the waiting room began lecturing me on the exigencies of expressing my dog’s anal glands, and all I could think was, kill me now—but I understand better now the attraction: a dog’s love is uncomplicated. You walk in from a horrible day of work and act like a jerk, he loves you. You accidentally step on him, he loves you. You yell at him for shitting in your son’s room, he still loves you. I get it. Plus Sasha’s forced outside now every afternoon after school, no matter the weather, and she’s taken to the responsibility like a mother to a child. She feeds him when I feed Leo, bathes him when I bathe Leo, plays with him when I play with Leo. These days, her friend Ethan—a blue-eyed Fonzie with Richie Cunningham charm—accompanies her on her walks, and the two of them take turns holding the leash.

  Screwing in the Marital Bed

  We moved into our current apartment a few months after 9/11. No, we weren’t living close enough to Ground Zero to have been physically displaced, although we did see the towers collapse from our living room window. Nobody in my family died that day. Neither of our offices was destroyed. What happened was simply, prosaically this: Paul’s technology company had had a meeting planned downtown, near the World Trade Center, with representatives from an investment fund scheduled for September 12. During that meeting, he and his partners were to have received their second round of financing, to keep the business afloat. When that meeting didn’t happen, it was pushed off indefinitely. Indefinitely turned into too long. Paul’s company collapsed, just one of many random, un-newsworthy pieces of collateral damage from the September 11 attacks.

  With only my freelance writer’s income for the foreseeable future, we could no longer afford our rent. So while Paul looked for a new job, I jumped on the lecture circuit, begged magazine editors for extra work, and started shooting holiday card and author photos to fill in the gaps. We downsized from an airy three-bedroom in a new, doorman building to a down-at-the-heels two-bedroom with a closet-size maid’s room off the kitchen. We only planned on staying a year or two, until Paul found work, which he did soon enough, but the cost of New York City real estate kept ballooning stratospherically, including in Brooklyn, where we were hoping one day to buy instead of rent. Seven years later, here we are, stuck in the same “temporary” rental.

  We are lucky. There are worse places to be stuck. Yet something about the circumstances of the move—how it had felt forced upon us rather than chosen—created a sense of limbo from which we have been slow to emerge.

  It took us five years to build a loft bed in the five-by-seven-foot maid’s room, for example, to give Jacob a place to sleep and dress apart from his sister. Paul and I rolled up our sleeves and turned the Ikea Allen wrenches ourselves; the kids painted the wood white. Why pay someone to construct a permanent loft when we’d be gone soon enough? Our kitchen table, which had fit adequately in the old apartment, was too big for our new one, making it impossible to reach Jacob’s room without turning sideways and breathing in. We only just replaced the table this year, seven years after moving in, with a flimsy forty-nine-dollars going-out-of-business drop-leaf I happened to spot on my way home from work. There were other things too, silly little things we kept putting off in our mental state of impermanence: broken locks, un-Spackled holes, on/off light switches that kept getting stuck or suddenly toggled to the undesired position.

  Then there was our marital bed. Like many pieces of our furniture, adopted from here and there, the antique-style metal bed frame was a hand-me-down from a friend. This particular friend is an interior designer who’d moved on to minimalist modern just before she and her husband, Paul’s ex-partner in the doomed start-up, reacted to the blowup of the company by selling off their apartment in the city and their country house in the Hamptons to downsize to a five-story brownstone.

  I know little about design or its lexicon, but I will describe the bed thus: it’s made of a brushed metal, manufactured to look old, and the headboard and footboard look like spindly ladders turned on their sides, with small finials sticking out from each corner. This was apparently the height of shabby-chic bedding fashion back in the mid-1990s and then not so much. When our friend offered it to us, I was grateful. We’d been sleeping on cheaply made particleboard for years, and it was falling apart: the mattress kept slipping through the support slats, especially when the kids jumped on it or during sex or when I was pregnant with Sasha and had to roll over in the middle of the night. The new bed, however, was well made and solid. We slept, jumped, and frolicked on it with nary a quiver of instability.

  Then the Twin Towers fell, and the movers arrived to dismantle our bed, and some of the screws were lost in transit. The burly guy who’d reassembled it in our new, smaller home told us he’d jury-rigged it with the few nuts and bolts remaining, but sooner or later we would need to go to the hardware store and purchase more fasteners, whose standard size he then specified and I
forgot.

  For the first year after our move, the bed didn’t wiggle much, and we assumed we’d be disassembling it and moving soon enough, so we did nothing. The second year it wiggled a bit more, but again we did nothing. The years passed. The bed got so wiggly, its small finials started making craters in the wall. Not to mention the squeaking, which we were certain our elderly neighbors downstairs could hear, since we hear most of what goes on above us. The final straw came one night when the motion of the bed, in medias res, flipped on the bedside light, whose on/off switch was broken in such a way that it flipped on randomly at the slightest provocation. This provided a good chuckle but interrupted the mood, and with two adolescents who stay up late and a toddler who gets up at dawn, such moods—and the chance to follow them through to their logical conclusion—are rare.

  “That’s it,” I said. “We have to screw in this bed.”

  “I thought that’s what we were trying to do,” said Paul.

  “You know what I mean. We have to take the whole thing apart and put it back together.” From the look on my husband’s face, I may as well have said, “You will die here.”

  “It’s fine,” he said. He switched off the light, with some struggle, and tried to pick up where we had left off. A few minutes later, the rock of the bed flipped the light back on again.

  “It’s time,” I said, sitting up. “It’s time to fix stuff around here. To stop pretending this is not really our home.”

  My husband, frustrated, tried to turn off the light. One of the kids had spilled apple juice into the wheeled mechanism, jamming it into the on position. If you fiddled with it, you could turn it off, but not if you were frustrated. “Fine,” he said, standing up. “We’ll fix the bed.” Then he went into the bathroom to take a cold shower. By the time he reemerged, I’d taken apart the light switch with a screwdriver, cleaned off the sticky gunk with a baby wipe, and reassembled it. This felt like a start.

  The next morning, Paul rolled out of bed, rubbed his eyes, slipped on a pair of jeans, and sighed. “I’ll go get the wrench,” he said.

  “You’ll need a flat-headed screwdriver as well,” I reminded him. My great-grandfather was a carpenter in Kiev until the Cossacks ransacked his home and threw his infant son, my grandfather Albert, against a wall. After that he became a carpenter in Kansas City with a semidisabled son. Even one-armed, however, Grandpa Albert could still hammer in a decent nail, and I’m a proud recipient of those genes. My husband’s great-great-grandfather was the chief rabbi of Warsaw. This comes in handy at funerals and Seders, but otherwise not so much.

  Paul returned with the wrong tools—pliers instead of a wrench, a Phillips-head screwdriver instead of a slotted one—and we pulled off the comforter, then the sheets, and maneuvered the mattress up against the wall. The dust ruffle came off next, which seemed a misnomer. Dust was everywhere, completely coating the three dozen or so framed photographs I’d been storing under our bed since my last exhibit, lifetimes ago. I ran my finger along the surface of one, revealing the crushed skull of a man killed in the Soviet coup. Next to it was a photo of Afghani mujahideen shooting off an R.P.G. on a snowy mountaintop near Kabul. Neither photo had ever been published in America. American editors have never liked to mix oozing brains with their readers’ Cheerios, and Afghanistan, back in the late 1980s, was seen as a distant war, fought between a struggling superpower and a bunch of guys in their pajamas, therefore insignificant. Yet here they were, these ragtag progenitors of the Taliban, gathering dust under a shaky bed I was now taking apart due, in some small and odd measure, to the fallout from that war.

  The day the towers fell, I was just as shocked as everyone but not nearly as surprised. Even in those first few hours of chaos and destruction, as I made my way around the city on foot and on bicycle, reclaiming my children from their schools and searching for my husband, whom for one disquieting hour I feared had gone down to the technology breakfast conference at the Windows on the World, the act itself seemed an insane though logical outgrowth of everything I’d witnessed a decade earlier as a photojournalist. Besides, with a grandfather maimed by hate and relatives-in-law murdered by Nazis, I’m perhaps primed to be less than surprised when the hand of history reaches down to slap us.

  “I’ll go get the DustBuster,” I said, figuring I’d use the task as an excuse to exchange the wrong tools for the right ones. One might consider such a maneuver deceptive, but in the context of a decades-long partnership, I say a little benign deception goes a long way. Why point out that Paul had brought the wrong tools into the bedroom when I could easily replace them with the right ones?

  We’ve been sharing a bed since a couple of months after we met, when we knew nothing of love save for the giddy way it made us feel. That first year, while I was off covering one conflict or another, Paul created a minor one at home, having shared our futon with someone else and, wracked with guilt, admitting it. “It meant nothing,” he’d said, but at the moment he said it, it hadn’t felt like nothing. Not that I begrudged him the infidelity: I’d been gone for several, long months, and we barely knew each other, and he, like me, had just turned twenty-four. Plus I’m a realist. Stuff happens. That’s life. You move on and try to do better. What angered me was the revelation of the secret, the mental image of an interloper defiling our bed. By mentioning the nothing, he had turned it into something.

  As the years progressed and our dedication to sharing a bed until death do us part solidified, we rewrote the ground rules. We do not have an open marriage, nor do we have a closed one, figuring that by officially leaving the door slightly ajar, we’ll feel little need to step through it. That’s not to say neither of us has ever been tempted in the past nor that we won’t be tempted in the future, but rather that temptation is built into the equation, forgiven before it even blossoms, with the caveat that the marital bed remains sacrosanct. My parents understood this kind of logic when they decided not to give me a curfew as a teenager: with rare exception, I hardly ever came home after midnight.

  I often wonder what the world would look like, in fact, if monogamy were less fetishized. There’d be no veiled women, for one, no need to mutilate clitorises or stone adulteresses. Fathers wouldn’t escort their daughters to purity balls, asking them to take vows of chastity before marriage, and the shul down the street would not separate me from my husband nor judge me for choosing not to wear a doily on my married head. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that those who are the least tolerant, the most likely to demonize others, are also those who are often the least accepting—publicly, that is—of the vagaries of human sexuality.

  “Here,” I said, handing my husband the correct screwdriver. “You unscrew the bolt. I’ll hold the nut.”

  I hadn’t meant for this to be funny, but it was taken thus. “Just so long as we stick to our proper gender roles,” said Paul, laughing. This is something I love about my husband: he can turn just about anything—even pain—into an excuse for laughter. In my limited experience, a marriage needs a little bit more than this in order to survive, but not much more.

  While Paul was off procuring new nuts and bolts at the hardware store, I got to work with the DustBuster and a bottle of Windex, excavating my under-the-bed past. In an unlabeled box of prints, I found a photo of Jacob, age six, playing LEGO with Afghani children.

  Two months after 9/11, in early November, I’d taken him on a magazine assignment to Peshawar, Pakistan. Jacob’s class had been raising money for Afghani refugees, and some of the parents had complained that this was the equivalent of raising money for the enemy. Wanting to show solidarity with the teacher, whose project I supported—we are nothing, I believe, if not citizens of the world—I pitched a story about delivering the money, along with toys and food and school supplies, to the refugee children ourselves, and Amy Gross, who was then editor of Oprah Winfrey’s magazine, agreed to fund the journey.

  Jacob and I spent ten days in Peshawar, traveling from camp to camp, from school to school, handing out stuff�
�fruit leathers, pencils, energy bars, notebooks, soccer balls, checks—to those who needed them. The day of the LEGO photo, Ja-cob had spent nearly an hour trying to mime to the refugee kids that LEGO construction is cooperative, not every man for himself, after each child had taken a single piece of LEGO and held fast to it. “We build together,” he kept saying, bringing his hands together as a visual aid, but this proved as difficult a concept for the children to grasp as for their adult counterparts.

  The day Kabul fell, we met Danny Pearl in the lobby of our hotel. He was one of the only other journalists not rushing across the Afghani border to cover the ground war. He was also the only male I could find at the time to check on my son, who’d been holed up in the men’s room for twenty minutes. “He’s fine,” Danny told me. “He’s whistling to himself and doing his thing. He says he’ll be out soon.” When I asked Danny why he wasn’t heading off to Kabul, like everyone else, he told me his wife was three months pregnant, that it wouldn’t be prudent. He was in Pakistan reporting on a different angle, more of an investigative piece, he said, though he didn’t elaborate. He and my son joked around when Jacob emerged from the bathroom, and I could tell by the way the two interacted—Danny treating Jacob as an equal while tailoring his dialogue to the comprehension of a six-year-old—that the man would be a good father.

  That February, the day Danny was beheaded, I sobbed more than one would consider appropriate for the short number of hours I knew him. I cried for him and for his wife and for his unborn child, but also for all the families ripped apart by conflict and hate. As thorny as family life can sometimes be, it is also the only raft I know, and now that nice man with his easy laugh and his effortless way with a six-year-old would not get to experience any of it, good or bad.

  Paul and I moved a few weeks later, dragging our kids and our debt and our hand-me-down bed with its missing screws, grateful to be alive, our family intact. September 11 had plummeted us into financial ruin, yes, but it had also given me back my husband. He’d had an epiphany, hoofing his way home with all the other dust-covered ghosts, realizing what he’d been missing all those years by working late while I was reading bedtime stories to his children and falling asleep in the marital bed alone. He started coming home early, cooking dinner, sharing a snuggle with his kids and a glass of wine with his wife. Our new apartment was small, but its windows faced north, away from the wreckage, and it has been a fine place, despite its limitations, to raise our children. In fact, I thought, wiping the dust off the last frame, if I had to name my favorite home, it would be this one, the one that was supposed to house our family only for a year or two, while we found our post-9/11 footing.