I took my daughter to see the Château de Versailles in late February. Green tarps covered the statues. The fountains were dry. Gray clouds hovered over the palace grounds like penumbral ghosts.
“Huh,” I said, tightening my scarf against the cold. “It’s kind of depressing this time of year, isn’t it?” The two of us lingered at the top of the château’s grand staircase, unsure if the descent to the wide expanse of withered flora below was even worth it. Twenty years earlier, I’d nearly tripped skipping down those same stairs, when the gardens were in bloom, and I’d just graduated college, and life spread before me like the vista itself, stretching out toward an infinite horizon.
Sasha shrugged. “It’s okay,” she said. “I can still write about it.” She took her journal out of her knapsack, grabbed my hand, and led me down the stairs toward a marble bench where we sat, side by side, facing the château. While Sasha rummaged around for a pencil, I tried to imagine what it would have been like to have been living in that palace, wandering those hallways, married to the kind of man, like Louis XIV, who could have conceived of such a monument to himself.
“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.
“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 knowing 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.”
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 understand 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.
Meanwhile, 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?”
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.