Hell Is Other Parents

by Deborah Copaken Kogan

  “Can we go skiing now?” said Jacob. As natural as my son is at acting, he’s the exact opposite on a pair of skis, and I’d promised to get him up on the mountain for a lesson.

  I looked at my watch. If we made it back to the condo in the next half hour, we would have time for lunch and one run down the slopes before we had to be back in Park City for the evening’s festivities. I decided that skiing would be the perfect antidote to Jacob’s passive ride through the Hollywood glitz machine that morning. “Excuse me!” I shouted, flagging down an empty yellow school bus. “Can you take us to Deer Valley?”

  “Hop on,” said the driver, laughing at our plight. He drove us up to Deer Valley, helped us find our condo, and wouldn’t let us pay. We walked a mile up to the slopes, rented skis and boots, bought new hats to replace the ones held hostage with Jacob’s homework, and snowplowed our way down a bunny trail called Success.

  Back at the condo, we met up with Celia Weston, who plays Jacob’s grandmother in the film. She wanted to buy Sundance T-shirts for her godchildren, and Jacob wanted to buy a sweatshirt and a deck of cards, so the three of us headed to the souvenir shop before the pre-premiere party. It would have taken us all of five minutes to do our shopping, but Celia kept getting stopped by well-wishers in the street wanting autographs and photos. “Maybe I should be a musician instead of an actor,” Jacob said. His father and I had recently taken him to a concert to see The Who and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. “They can walk down the street and no one bothers them.”

  “That’s not true,” I said. “Look at John Lennon.”

  “I bet Flea can walk down the street without anyone bothering him.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “See?”

  I furrowed my brow, perplexed at his change of heart, but understanding it as well. Children have passions they seize and drop all the time. When Jacob was three, he spent every single day doing jigsaw puzzles. Then one day, he simply stopped.

  When we finally arrived at the cocktail party, not only did Jacob not have to worry about anyone recognizing him, the bouncer at the door wouldn’t let him in. “Utah law,” he said. “No kids near alcohol.”

  “But he’s the star of the film,” said one of the film’s producers, standing on the other side of a velvet rope. “He’s the reason for the party.”

  “Too bad,” the bouncer said. “We’ll get shut down.”

  We finally convinced the bouncer to let us sneak Jacob into the VIP room, where we cordoned him off from the alcohol. When we left the party, the paparazzi were outside and greeted Jacob with flashing bulbs. We were told to wait for Dave Matthews, who wrote a song for the film, to show up, because the people from the Wall Street Journal Weekend Edition, who were hosting the party, needed a photograph of Jacob and Dave together against the backdrop that read THE WALL STREET JOURNAL WEEKEND EDITION. Dave Matthews was mobbed by fans. Jacob saw this and realized that, whether you’re a musician or an actor or an Olympic skier or a dancing goat, a certain degree of celebrity might come with the territory.

  When the lights in the theater dimmed, and I saw my son’s face projected on the screen, I sat between Jacob and my friend Julie, holding their hands and crying. Not only because it finally struck me that my child was, in fact, an actor, but because in the eight months that had passed since the first frame was shot, Jacob had already changed. The boy on that screen was no longer him but rather a version of him, frozen in time.

  “How did each of you get involved in doing the film?” a woman in the audience asked during the Q&A afterward. Sam Rockwell spoke of wanting to play the straight guy for once; Vera Farmiga discussed the research she’d done into postpartum depression; Benoit Debie, the film’s cinematographer, talked about making light and shadow a character in the film. Then it was Jacob’s turn. “Um, my agent gave me the script,” he said with a shrug, and the audience burst out laughing.

  After the screening, everyone met up at Dave Matthews’s place for another party, where Jacob promptly fell asleep on Vera Farmiga’s lap. I woke him up only when I saw Philip Seymour Hoffman enter the room, because Jacob was miffed that he’d missed meeting the actor before the screening. We walked over to where Hoffman stood, chatting with Sam Rockwell. Jacob held out his hand, as if he’d been working the room for decades, and told the actor how much he loved his work, a compliment that was graciously returned. “I only got to see part of Magnolia, though,” Jacob said. “My mom turned it off when it became inappropriate.”

  Hoffman laughed and turned toward me. “Is this your mother?” he said, looking me straight in the eye.

  “Yeah, I’m the mother,” I said, my defenses high after the day’s worth of condescension. I was also preoccupied with the milk building up in my breasts, which I desperately needed to pump.

  “That must have been some path you had to pull him down,” Hoffman said, and something about the word pull made me snap.

  “I didn’t pull him,” I said. “I never wanted him to be an actor!”

  He looked at me as if I were insane. “No, I meant—that was a difficult role he had to play, and it must have been hard for you, as a parent, to help him get to that place of coldness.” Here he was, the first stranger of the day to treat the stage mother with respect and empathy, and I had to go and bite his head off.

  “Oh,” I said. I mumbled an awkward apology.

  In the last scene of Gypsy, Rosalind Russell is dancing on an empty stage, in an empty theater, acting out her vaudeville star fantasy, when Natalie Wood appears from the wings, clapping. “You’d really have been something, Mother,” she says, “if you had someone to push you, like I did.” Then, in a final act of grace and humility, she invites her embarrassment of a mother to accompany her to the party after the show. I remembered that scene as Philip Seymour Hoffman and Sam Rockwell walked away toward the bar, and I stood there with my son at his own after-party. I thought about how I might have responded to the conversational door Hoffman had opened.

  Yes, Mr. Hoffman, I should have said, that was some path I had to pull him down, but once he was there, he was there all alone. That was his performance tonight. And I’m proud of him.

  A Sign of Love

  On a frigid Sunday night this past February, just after I’d put the baby to bed, the intercom buzzed.

  “Did you order food?” I asked Paul, who was hunched over his laptop in our dining room.

  “Nope.”

  I looked to Jacob and Sasha, but neither was expecting anybody.

  “Probably just the wrong apartment,” I said. The intercom buzzed again, longer this time. I went to the kitchen and pressed the button. “Hello?”

  A voice—scratchy, male—asked, “Are you on the fifteenth floor?”

  “Yes…”

  “Do some of your windows face east?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “This is going to sound strange, but…” His name was Andrew. He was studying design. He had a girlfriend in the building facing ours, also on a high floor. She was Japanese, but her name was formed using the Chinese character for love, which was the same sound in Japanese. Or so he said. “And I made this neon sign of the Chinese character for love that I want to put in your window late Tuesday night,” he explained, “so when she wakes up on Valentine’s Day, she’ll see it. Can I come up and check out your windows?”

  His story seemed too elaborate to be false. If he really wanted to rob us, a simple, “Flowers!” would have sufficed. Not that I was expecting any, but still.

  “Who was that?” Paul asked.

  “Some guy who wants to put a neon sign of love in our window.”

  “Huh?”

  “His girlfriend lives in the building across from ours. Her name means ‘love.’ Or is Love. In Chinese. Or something like that.”

  “I hope you told him no.”

  “Actually I buzzed him up.”

  “What?”

  Even my kids looked at me askance.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll gi
ve him the once-over through the peephole.”

  “That’s what Sharon Tate said.”

  “Oh, come on! Where’s your sense of romance?”

  “Where’s your sense of…sense?”

  My husband had a point. But I’ve always had a soft spot for the grand romantic gesture: the man who hires a skywriter to propose or who sinks to one knee in the middle of a crowded stadium. Such acts riddle the plots of romantic comedies but rarely pierce the skin of real life, and the idea of one happening in our apartment—where the biggest romantic gesture either my husband or I could muster lately was to let the other one skip doing the dishes—was too tempting to resist.

  The doorbell rang. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the hair on the backs of all of our necks stood on end. I went to the door, slid open the peephole. In the hallway, distorted by the fish-eye lens, was (if I would later have to describe him to the police, I thought) a twenty-to-thirty-year-old male, Caucasian, tall, medium build, with a tangle of dirty-blond hair.

  I opened the door.

  “Hi,” he said. “Thanks so much for letting me up.”

  “You’re welcome.” He looked harmless enough, but I engaged him in a bit of innocuous banter to see if he breathed fire. Then I took a blind leap of faith—not wholly unlike the one I’d taken seventeen years earlier when I let my husband into my life—and ushered him into our apartment.

  Andrew headed for our dining room window. “Perfect,” he said. “That’s her apartment, right there. So, on Tuesday night can I come back with my sign?”

  I said he could. But what I really wanted to know was, which window was Love’s?

  “That one,” said Andrew, pointing vaguely.

  I strained my eyes to see. In one window sat a chubby man at his computer. In another, an older couple was puttering around in their bathrobes. Where was Love?

  Later that night, as Paul and I were brushing our teeth, I saw in the mirror that he was staring at me the way he hadn’t in years. After I spat, I said, “What’s up with you tonight?”

  “I was just remembering the tree I bought you.”

  The week after Paul and I had met in Paris, where we were living, I had to leave for Bucharest for five weeks to cover the aftermath of the Romanian revolution. I liked him, and I must have mentioned something about wanting a plant for my apartment, but at that point in my life I’d pretty much given up on falling in love, much as the Romanians had pretty much given up on being able to speak freely: nice concept, clearly others in the world were able to do it, but heartache and the Securi-tate loomed too large.

  Then Ceauşescu was shot, the iron curtain slipped off its rod, and I returned from Bucharest to find an enormous tree in my apartment. One thing led to another, and here we were, seventeen years and three children later, brushing our teeth.

  Except it was more complicated than that, as love always is. There were those incidents early on that nearly nipped our tree in the bud; the period in the middle, when shards of wedding china flew like shrapnel; the present moment, when the possibilities for romance were muted by both logistics and the vicissitudes of fortune. (A weekend alone back in Paris? Sure! But who will watch the kids and which one should we starve to be able to afford it?)

  The night before Valentine’s Day, I came home late to an apartment glowing warm and rosy from within. Filling our window, Andrew’s sign looked not unlike a human heart surrounded with the kind of radiating lines cartoonists use to indicate movement.

  Paul was seated at his usual spot in our dining room, hunched over his computer, but when I walked in, which normally elicits a grunt and a halfhearted wave, he spun around and smiled. “Isn’t it beautiful?” he said. He rose from his chair, cranked up the iPod, and actually pulled me toward him.

  “Since when do you listen to Sinatra?” I said.

  “Just wait,” he said. “It’ll get to you too.” Then he waltzed me into our bedroom.

  Around 3:00 A.M., the baby started moaning in his crib. I stumbled out of bed and felt his forehead. “Oh no,” I said. “Leo’s hot.”

  Paul offered to fetch some cold water, but feeling unusually generous, I said I’d get it myself. I carried Leo down the hallway into that surprising pink glow.

  Upon seeing the sign, he said, “Oohf,” which is as big a compliment as they come, and he instantly calmed down. Leo was not exactly planned, and sometimes I find the task of caring for him, eleven and nine years after his siblings, exhausting. But that night I looked at his glowing cheeks and thought, My God, how I love this beautiful baby!

  Then I carried him to the kitchen and realized he was not actually glowing from the neon, but rather from a frightening-looking rash. The next day he’d be diagnosed with fifth disease (a viral illness also known as “slapped cheek,” because of the way the rash breaks out across the cheeks), but that night, I nursed him to sleep in the glow of Love’s light, and he spared us more wails until morning.

  When dawn broke, I wandered into the still-pink dining room to feed Leo his cereal. I stared out at the falling snowflakes and across the way to Love’s apartment building. Was she awake yet? Had she actually seen the sign the night before, or had Andrew figured out some clever way to shut out the world until daybreak?

  As I spooned oatmeal into Leo’s mouth, I imagined the two of them waking and staring out at the pink neon sign. “Oh my God,” Love would say. “I can’t believe you did that.”

  “I love you,” he’d say, to which she would answer, disrobing, “I love you too.”

  Yes, she had to be at work, and he had to be at school, but there were no children needing oatmeal spooned or gym shorts laundered or lunch boxes filled. I pictured their young skin, unmarred by stretch marks or wrinkles, his fingers reaching, their thighs entwined.

  “That was nice last night,” Paul said, kissing the top of my head.

  Jacob and Sasha came into the dining room, shouting, “Wow!” and “Cool!” when they spotted the sign. Moments later, Sasha said, “Jacob, you made such nice Valentine’s Day cards. Your friends will love them.”

  “Thanks!” he replied.

  Had my family been replaced by aliens? Leo, though wracked with a viral rash and high temperature, was cooing and gulping down lukewarm mush. My older children were trading kindnesses. My husband had kissed me on the forehead. It was as if, via the amorous couplings across the way, Paul and I were reaping the benefits of an extramarital affair—a rise in ardor, a distraction from reality, a reawakening of what it means to be alive—without the guilt and lies.

  We had long ago relegated Valentine’s Day to the dustbin of the ridiculous, but that night Paul showed up with roses and wine. We lighted candles and abandoned screens, friends, and responsibilities to gather in the dining room for a languorous family dinner and several rounds of Boggle. We tucked the kids into bed early and found our way to each other for the second night in a row.

  The privations of city life, the constant visual, physical, and psychological barrage of the other—other parents, other people, living in tiny boxes on top of one another, puttering around in their half-closed bathrobes for all to see—can so often be draining, but this other, this complete and utter stranger had walked into our apartment and ushered Love into our lives. Suddenly, our city of eight million felt intimate, cozy.

  When Andrew showed up as promised on Friday morning to dismantle his sign, we waited for him to tell us about the happy moment he’d shared with Love. But as we ate our breakfast, he silently went about his task. Finally, unable to take the suspense, my daughter said, “So what happened? Did your girlfriend like the sign?”

  “I’m not sure.” He pulled the plug, and the pink glow vanished. “She never said anything.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. How could Love not (at the very least!) have acknowledged her sign and all the planning and forethought that had gone into it?

  “Well,” Andrew said, “I’d made us a reservation at Roth’s Steakhouse, and I waited over an hour for her to come
, but she never showed up.”

  “Where was she?” I imagined Love being held up at work or stuck in a subway car. She couldn’t possibly have stood up her boyfriend on Valentine’s Day.

  “I don’t know. She just…never came.”

  “But she saw the sign later, right?”

  Leo was screaming now, a big wad of mucous extruding from his nostril. When I reached for a tissue to wipe it, I knocked over a glass of orange juice, which spilled onto the table and floor.

  “I assume so.” Andrew shrugged, and in that shrug I saw the death of hope. After packing the sign back up into its Bubble Wrap and cardboard box, he muttered, “Thanks again,” and slipped out our door.

  My older son looked as if he were about to cry. My daughter sat down at the piano to play something doleful. Leo was apoplectic, rubbing the contents of his rheumy eyes and nose all over his rash-covered cheeks before vomiting on the tray of his high chair, where my arm happened to be resting. My husband walked into the kitchen, took one look at this gorgeous tableau, and picked a fight over whose turn it was to clear the dishes.

  I reconsidered Andrew’s story. Had he completely deluded himself into thinking Love was his? Or was he a stalker, and we’d aided and abetted his harassment? Or what if Love was actually a figment of his imagination, which even the brightest, pinkest, most realistically human heart–shaped sign of affection could never rouse from the realm of fantasy?

  It was something to think about while I mopped up the mess.

  La Vie en Explose

  One recent spring morning, I awoke with a stomachache. It was pretty bad, as these things go—it had roused me several times during the night—but I had a piece running in the following Sunday’s New York Times, and the editor needed his edit, so I ignored it. I took a shower, got dressed to go down to my writing studio in Midtown, made breakfast for the big kids, then ten and eleven, and packed a lunch for the baby, who was not yet one.