The Ginger Child

by Patrick Flanery

  During the month we spend in Austin, I finish work on a book and Andrew and I both do research in the archives. We swim most days, go to the gym, struggle to ignore our anxieties about guns.

  A childhood friend comes to visit with his wife and their young son and I find myself working throughout their visit to keep my envy in check. For the most part such affective self-policing is not overwhelming because of their gentle camaraderie and sympathy for our frustrations and the delightfulness of their son, who toddles and smiles and looks like both of them in endlessly surprising ways. But I am conscious of the effort, however minimal, and when I look at them I can’t help thinking, this is something I’m probably never going to have, even if that something is as specific as a biological connection to a child, a sense of having reproduced, of having copied myself with critical differences, of not being the final snapshot in the album of my family’s history.

  Alone, Andrew and I go to Houston for a weekend to visit the Menil Collection because I want to see the Cy Twombly Pavilion. I know that such a trip would not be as easy with a child, but it must still be possible. After all, our friends take their son everywhere. Museums are a part of his young life, as they were a part of my own life when I was a toddler. A toddler does not have to mean the end of culture. But then the encounter with Twombly’s work reminds me that he is also a model for the person I cannot be: the man who had a wife and a child, but also, in his final years, a male partner. I will not have a wife with whom I might have a child, as much as a certain fantasy version of my own life, the life I could imagine living if I were constituted differently, would be more radical, more bohemian, allowing for complex interpersonal attachments and relational constellations that might more quickly, more naturally, produce the child for whom I long.

  We accept an invitation from a colleague in Austin to accompany him to Hippie Hollow, Texas’s only official nude beach, in truth a rocky shoreline of boulders and cliff edges along an enormous reservoir. He shepherds us to its gay district, all the way at the end of the park, beyond which is the section where black beachgoers congregate, the queers and people of colour adrift at the margins, some quite literally, partying on boats, some dressed, many totally naked. While we remain in our swimming suits, I am astonished by what I witness: the revelry of a group of naked gay men of every possible body type, from early twenties to late seventies, overlooked at some distance by vast and hideous mansions on the surrounding hills.

  Far from converting me to the cult of what I take to be the gay group self, by which I mean the swirl of gay lives that migrate from one organized party to the next, drunk and drugged and unencumbered by children, I feel a deep sense of not belonging, sitting there on the rocks in my swimsuit with my very pale skin and untoned body. This might be one type of contemporary bohemia, but it is not one in which I feel at ease.

  The irony is that Gemma seems to want to fit us into this very version of gayness, as if her idea of what it means to be a man in a relationship with a man is the youth-idealizing pleasure-hunter who dances all night and makes camp jokes and dresses in drag at least once in what to her must remain their strange, unknowable lives.

  But this is not who I am, and not who Andrew is. We have never done drag. Or at least not in the way that most people mean. What we actually are will always be illegible, perhaps even invisible, to Gemma and people like her. What we are is also ridiculed by some gay men and lesbians, who see us as ‘homonormative’, as imitating oppressive heterosexual categories, as refusing to be as radically queer as we might be by embracing promiscuity or partying or simply by disrupting the whole heterosexual world order by being brash or rude or inappropriate in mixed company. Our own childhoods, the particular ways in which we were raised in Midwestern America and provincial South Africa in the 1980s, mean that we are destined to be conventional even in our manifest unconventionality.

  In September, while in South Africa, we happen into a gallery in Stellenbosch hosting a solo show by artist Kate Gottgens. We don’t know her work but the paintings speak to me with such aesthetic and emotional force that I spend more than an hour looking at them and then return again later in the week to spend another hour, mesmerized and strangely, deeply moved by the soft-edged arrangements of figures, often in outdoor settings, in the kinds of neighbourhoods and leading the same sorts of lives that Andrew and I knew as children.

  Gottgens also paints children, and the care of children, in arresting ways. In the show there is a work called Monster Love depicting a hideously screaming white baby in the arms of a half-obscured black nanny, another titled Swimming Pool in which a boy climbs from a pool that seems already drained of its water, a haunting one called Cornered in which a masked child holds up another at plastic gunpoint, a Girl with Dahlias whose red flowers are of such bloody vividness and viscosity they could be a trinity of organs ripped from her body. There are many pictures of mothers and children poised on the edge of crisis or disaster, even when there is no obvious threat.

  Among all of these, I am drawn to one painting in particular, Interior: Monkeyboy, which stays with me over the coming months. It depicts a red-headed boy wearing a tail and standing in a mid-century modern living room. Red stripes flow along his bare arms and body, as if he has been caught in the light of a sunset – or even, I begin to imagine, as if he has painted himself, made himself into a work of art housed within a work of art.

  On returning to London, I write a story about the painting, rather than a story that treats the painting as its illustration, although it does that as well. This story, and Gottgens’s art, becomes a strange landmark in the middle of our own adoption story, a landmark and a portent.

  When ‘Interior: Monkeyboy’ is published the following year, a colleague writes to say that it seems as though the story is my attempt to exorcise all of my anxieties about adoption, or at least to rehearse them.

  Perhaps that is true, although it is not what I thought I was doing. I thought, naïvely, that I was writing about the transformative power of art.

  ‘INTERIOR: MONKEYBOY’

  I find him in front of the painting. Though you can’t tell much about the boy in the picture he must be about the same age as the boy standing there on the carpet in the living room, the boy who is now, I remind myself, my son.

  ‘What is it?’ the real boy, my son, asks me.

  ‘A painting.’

  ‘What’s a painting?’

  ‘A work of art.’

  ‘What’s a work of art?’

  ‘Something made by an artist.’

  He stares at the painting. I cannot bring myself to say his name, the name that I did not choose, and so instead I call him by the name I would give him if he were mine to name, that is to say, I call him Will in my mind and almost nothing to his face except you, or worse still, I address him indirectly, making statements that fail to acknowledge him as the implied subject.

  Will looks from the painting to me, his eyes bugging out.

  ‘Someone made that?’

  ‘Yes, the artist made it.’

  ‘But how did he make it?’

  ‘She.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The artist is a woman,’ I say.

  ‘Oh.’ As his eyes flick back to the painting he puts his index finger in his ear, like sliding a key into a lock, then takes it out again. ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Kate.’

  Will turns from the boy in the painting to glance around the room in the flat he has been getting to know over the course of the past couple of days, before looking back at the painting once more. ‘How did she make it?’

  ‘With oil paint and a brush and a canvas and varnish and turpentine, I suppose.’

  ‘What’s turpatine?’

  ‘Turpentine’s a chemical. Made from pine trees.’

  ‘The painting is made from trees?’

  ‘In a way, yes. Part of it is. And there’s a stretcher behind the canvas, and the stretcher is made of wood.’

  ‘And the
cavas?’

  ‘The canvas. It’s made of cotton.’

  ‘Like a shirt?’

  ‘Yes, like a shirt, but both the shirt and the canvas come from a plant.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Have you ever made a piece of art?’

  Will glares at me as if I’m stupid, his features drooping in an arrangement he must have learned from a teacher, perhaps older children, or even the man and woman who called themselves his parents before Edward and I began calling ourselves his parents a few days ago. ‘Not like that.’

  ‘At school? Have you never painted?’

  He makes a show of thinking, cocks his head.

  ‘Once or twice, I guess.’

  ‘We’ll get out the materials this weekend. You can try your hand at making art. I bet you’ll like painting.’

  ‘I like dancing,’ he says, still studying the image of the boy standing in a living room, the painted child’s head three quarters turned towards the viewer, as if gazing not at his real-world observers but at someone else in the house where he stands, someone just outside the frame of the painting. It is difficult to tell what the boy in the painting feels, what his mood might be, although the hands on his slim hips suggest determination, even wilfulness.

  Later, after dinner, I find Will standing in the same place, staring at the painting, then at our living room, as though trying to make sense of some implied relation between the image on the wall and the space surrounding the image. At dinner he refused to eat mushrooms and threw one across the kitchen, leaving a grey-brown streak of roasted portobello trickling down the wall. He threw his fork and knife across the tiled floor and pushed himself back in the chair, kicking the legs of the table, his arms crossed over his chest. Textbook tantrum. We have had training, my husband and I, we know how to respond to such provocations. Instead of time outs, as with a ‘normal’ child, Will earns ‘time ins’: time spent with us attending to him in a way that feels like a performance of parenting rather than parenting itself. It is still easier than in the excruciating workshops in which we took turns playing a child with an attachment disorder and the parent who would work to strengthen those tenuous bonds.

  Edward and I put him to bed in the room we prepared over the past six months with no sense of who might one day sleep inside it, boy or girl, younger or older. Will is older than we first wanted, but the introductory meetings went well, and the file revealed nothing apart from neglect and deprivation, as if neglect and deprivation were minor considerations. In fact they were, compared to the scores of children whose mothers drank and drugged their way through pregnancy, or children physically and sexually abused, born months prematurely, or who happened to be unlucky inheritors of a chromosomal disorder or some other disease, carrying with them a large degree of uncertainty about their long-term development, or kids who suffered from global developmental delay, insecure attachment disorders, and so forth. Enough to make any sane person despair, and yet we had chosen to take this route rather than any other. Altruism, Edward said, it’s about altruism. Or naked self-sacrifice, I countered. This had not been my original impulse, not what I imagined when I first thought about how, in the absence of biological ability, we might have a child, but in Britain, unlike America, there are scarcely any babies available to adopt from birth. If only I had forced Edward to move to my country rather than staying in his, where there are comparatively so few children available to adopt, and where surrogacy is all but impossible.

  On paper, Will is ‘normal’, just neglected. He looks reasonably like us, or at least like Edward, and perhaps like me, too, if you were to glimpse us passing through shadow across the street, in the distance, our heads turned three quarters to face the horizon.

  We made a room for him that is ungendered, appropriate for no particular age of child, pale grey walls that are soothing in this city’s watery light, a bright red rug on the parquet floor, a white-framed single bed bought at the last minute, when we were certain we needed something larger than a crib.

  ‘Do you like your room?’ I asked Will when he arrived. That was Tuesday.

  ‘It’s bigger than my last one.’ He sat down on the white bedspread, ran the palms of his hands against the cotton, almost, I thought, like a poor person experiencing luxury for the first time. High thread count, Egyptian. As if that were important for a child, for the waif who is in the process of becoming my son. He was afraid of getting it dirty, he told me, and I said he shouldn’t worry about that. Things get dirty. But I knew we had made a mistake, created a room too adult for a boy like him. It was a space for the ideal boy, for the boy we might have had if we had been able to produce him ourselves or adopt him from birth, lullabying him beneath a miniature reproduction of an Alexander Calder mobile. For Will there would need to be different bedding, sheets with superheroes or cartoon characters, bedspreads crisscrossed by cars or motorcycles, assuming he was that kind of boy.

  ‘We can change it if you don’t like it.’

  ‘You mean for a diff-er-ent room?’ He spoke those syllables with halting correctness, as if the word had been hammered into his teeth and tongue. Such crooked teeth. We would be paying for substantial dental work in another few years.

  ‘No, this will still be your room. But we can paint it another colour, or change the rug. And maybe you want to put up some pictures.’

  ‘Pictures?’

  ‘Posters, photographs. We can look for things to decorate it. It can be a hunt.’

  ‘A treasure hunt?’

  ‘Yes, a treasure hunt.’

  Edward closes our bedroom door. We are getting used to sleeping with the door shut after years of thinking about privacy only when guests came to stay. The first night I found myself locking it and Edward shook his head, as if to say, without saying it, that we can’t let him think we don’t trust him. He’s only a child after all. Yes, but a child we don’t know, I wanted to say, tried to say with my eyes and a lift of the shoulders, a hunching forward with my arms, the slight exasperated turn of my hands to face palms to the ceiling, a child with experiences about which we may never know anything for certain, who might get it into his messed up little head that the two men who now insist on being regarded as his parents are really no better than devils that ought to be slaughtered in their sleep. Edward rolled his eyes, as if to say, again without saying it, too many horror films, too much paranoia, this is not The Omen, or whatever film it is that features the psychopathic boy who kills his mother. This is just a child who needs love. We must trust him.

  ‘Do you think he’s sleeping well?’ Edward asks. ‘He seems tired.’

  ‘Some children have trouble sleeping in a new bed. I read it in one of those pamphlets.’

  ‘Might be cumulative fatigue. We don’t know what it’s been like for him before now.’

  ‘The foster parents seemed all right.’

  ‘I thought they were creepy. They called him the LO. What does that even mean?’

  ‘The Little One.’

  Edward groans and rolls his eyes. ‘How dreadful.’

  ‘They all use that expression. I didn’t think she was so bad. She told me that Will—’ I stop myself. It’s the first time I’ve used my name for the boy out loud. Edward’s eyebrows lace together. No, not lace – spasm, flinch. I’m confusing my husband, upsetting him. ‘I mean… Romeo. I don’t know what I was thinking. The foster mother, she told me we should watch him. Like a pair of hawks.’

  ‘You see, creepy. She was just trying to scare you,’ he says, getting into bed and drawing close to me, breathing into my ear. I feel him harden against my leg.

  When I sleep, I dream of Will standing on our bed, flicking a whip against our faces. He draws blood.

  *

  This morning Will is up before us, and there he is again, standing in front of the painting I brought back from my last buying trip to Cape Town, discovered in a gallery in the Winelands. Contemporary artist, South African, she paints from found photographs. This piece, like many of her recen
t works, is slightly blurred, the contours of the living room in which the child stands suggested rather than clearly delineated. When I look at the painting, I feel as if I have fallen into a stranger’s memory, with no sense of the outcome or the parameters of its lost narrative. Was the boy in the original photograph wearing a monkey costume, or did the artist add the tail? Why should this painting hold my new child’s gaze? There are other paintings and etchings, lithographs and woodcuts, but it’s this canvas, of a boy in a living room, a mid-century modern interior, a palette of reds and browns and greys with a prominent slash of white – a vase on the coffee table in the foreground of the painting – that draws him.

  ‘Have you washed already?’

  He shakes his head, gives me that ‘are you stupid?’ glare, and with his hands indicates his clothes, day clothes, going to school clothes, a new uniform we bought for his new school. Only his feet are bare. He rises on his tiptoes and kicks his right leg out to the side. Dance or karate?

  ‘Have you had breakfast?’

  Twitching his head, he turns back to the painting.

  ‘Come, I’ll eat with you. Edward – I mean Dad—’

  ‘Papa.’

  ‘Papa?’

  ‘I’m calling him Papa.’

  I note to myself: he has called me nothing, not even my name, since arriving on Tuesday. ‘Okay. Papa will take you to school this morning. I have a meeting.’

  ‘But I want you to take me to school.’

  ‘I can’t, Wi—’ Terrible. I catch myself. ‘I have a meeting today, on the other side of town. I wouldn’t make it in time.’ It is meant to be the last meeting of the life I am curtailing as of three days ago, the last time I will consult with one of my company’s clients, the last time for nearly half a year when I will engage the professional portion of my mind. What, I wonder at night, if the professional is all that is left, and there is no personal share remaining, no individual behind the career? I am the one taking adoption leave, not Edward. I am the one who will be the ‘primary carer’, as the social worker put it in her horribly nasal drone, which was an improvement over her ungrammatical emails. This meeting is the last commitment from my old life, at least for the next four months. ‘How will you make time for a little one in your busy lives?’ she asked us during the approval process. ‘As any other parents would,’ I said, ‘we will adapt.’