Shutterbabe

by Deborah Copaken Kogan

  It’s not that I doubt the fact that Jacques had been outside the Ritz trying to snap a few pictures of the princess. The odd assignment like that has always been part and parcel of being an agency photographer, and never more so than during these lean years of dwindling magazine assignments and declining markets for still images of international news. Though it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when it happened, somehow the confluence of twenty-four-hour cable news plus the end of the Cold War plus an international fin de siècle obsession with celebrity have irreparably altered the professional landscape for the photojournalist. Before I got out of the business in 1992, I’d shoot a celebrity photo every now and then to help me finance my other, riskier ventures, sort of like a bridge loan between wars. Now, for the photojournalist, it’s come down to shoot Princess Di, or die.

  “You should put Jacques on Dateline,” Marion says, only half joking, “let him clear his name.” I explain to Marion that I’m happily still on maternity leave, but if she doesn’t mind, I’ll give her number to Neal, our executive producer, should he decide to fly a producer over to Paris to do the story. “No problem,” she says. “I’ll be glad to help.”

  I call Neal at home. He’s not there, so I leave a message on his answering machine, along with Marion’s number and a host of other contact names and numbers, all major players in the Parisian photojournalist scene. Then I leave him my phone number in Delaware, in case he has any further questions. The following morning, I get a call first from Jim, then from Heather, another senior producer at Dateline, both of whom tell me in no uncertain terms to book myself on the next plane to Paris.

  “But, but, but . . .” I try to say. But you can just use my name. But I was just trying to help from afar. But I don’t want to get involved. But I’m enjoying myself. But this is my family vacation. But I’m supposed to have another month and a half of maternity leave. But Paul took the week off from work. But Jacob and I are having a great time building sand castles. But I have those annoying Manhattan nursery school applications to consider. But, and I know it sounds blasphemous, I don’t really care about Princess Di. But I was looking forward to another week of Kodak moments. But Sasha will only be this young once.

  But I have no desire—none whatsoever—to go to Paris.

  And then, suddenly, it occurs to me, the biggest “but” of all, and a perfect excuse to boot: But I have not yet weaned Sasha. Four out of her five feedings a day still come directly from my breasts. She’s six months old, just like her brother when I weaned him, but she’s such a joy to feed—and I don’t know if I’ll have any more babies, any more chances for the kind of pure and intimate bonding breast-feeding affords—that I want to keep it going for just a little while longer.

  I call back Heather and tell her that I don’t want to go. That, in fact, I can’t go, on account of my breasts. Heather’s my friend as well as my superior, and she knows I’ve been asking my boss for a promotion so I can then try to work out a part-time schedule. “If I were you,” she says, “and you know I’m only looking out for your best interests, I would not refuse this assignment. It’ll look bad, and you’re right on the verge of that promotion.”

  I want to hate Heather, but I know she’s right. I feel like kicking myself for ever making that stupid phone call. What was I thinking? While agreeing to go to Paris may not get me promoted immediately, not going to Paris will mean it’ll be at least another year of sucking up before I can lobby NBC to cut back my hours. Which means another year of spending far less time with my children than I think they deserve. After discussing it with Paul, we decide that the long-term benefits for our children, if I cooperate with Dateline now, far outweigh the short-term misery of my daughter’s abrupt weaning.

  We leave Delaware and head back to New York that day. That evening, with my body overflowing with milk and regret, I board the plane to Paris.

  The trip back to my old stomping grounds turns out to be a professional success but a personal and physical nightmare. Paris shines as brightly as ever, but I am unable to appreciate her beauty. I cry a lot. I feel sort of weaselly begging my old colleagues to go on camera. The pace of the work is so arduous, I never get more than four hours of sleep a night, and sometimes I get none. My breasts explode all over the city, forcing me to dash into random toilettes publiques when the pressure becomes too painful, whereupon I must then lean over a sink and manually express them. As I watch the streams of mother’s milk hit the side of the basin and then slide down the drain, I picture my tiny daughter at home, wailing from the loss.

  In a month or so, when I’m back from Paris, a seven-month-old Sasha will maneuver her way into the underwear drawer at the bottom of my dresser and remove one of my old bras. She will fondle it, rub it against her cheek while sucking her thumb, and wear it with the arm strap around her neck like a necklace. Soon thereafter, it will become her security blanket.

  If that’s not a sign, then coincidence is a much trickier beast than I ever imagined.

  MY PROMOTION, the one I’d been waiting three years to get, the one I was counting on to catapult me into the world of part-time work and balanced parenthood, finally came through a few weeks after my Paris trip in the form of a company-wide e-mail from my boss. Unfortunately, the e-mail went out on the one day I’d decided to play hooky with my son (sign!). The circus was in town, and Jacob wanted to see the elephants and eat pink cotton candy, and I wasn’t able to come up with any logical reason to say no. Apparently, Neal was looking everywhere for me that afternoon to tell me and to offer his congratulations. As were all of my colleagues, who clogged my computer with messages like “Congratulations!!!!!!!!!!!! Where are you?” or “It’s about time. Where are you?” The next morning, sheepishly, I went into Neal’s office, apologized for being at the circus instead of at the office (“Ah, well, they’re not much different anyway,” he’d joked,) and then I blurted out everything that had been on my mind. The dumb stories. The lack of balance.

  Amazingly, though he himself was childless, he understood. He promised to keep me away from the really dumb stories. He promised to try to create a part-time producer position. He said that even though there was no precedent for such a position at Dateline, I could talk to the NBC brass to work out the logistics—hours, days, salary, duties, etc. He gave me a paternal hug, said he was glad I came to him with my problems.

  I was sent to meet with one of NBC’s vice presidents. Despite having two small kids of her own, she seemed slightly less sympathetic to my situation than Neal had been. It was a phenomenon I was starting to see more and more of in my fellow mothers. Whatever choice they had made for themselves, that was the choice all other mothers were supposed to follow. Friends were becoming enemies over the issue of whether to stay at home or work or do some hybrid of the two. It was subtle—one woman, the mother of teenagers, telling me, “Well, I stayed at home while my kids were little and they benefited enormously”—and sometimes less so, like the time just after Jacob was born when I was talking with a colleague at a wedding. When I admitted my ambivalence about returning to work, she glared at me and said, “That’s completely insane. You have to do something for yourself,” and then stalked away angrily. Even the playgrounds seemed segregated, with working mothers congregating with other working moms, stay-at-home mothers congregating with other stay-at-home moms, and part-time working mothers misunderstood by both.

  The NBC vice president and fellow mom did promise to work everything out. As I turned to leave her office, however, she made me promise not to tell the other women on staff about our negotiations, as if the desire to balance work with child rearing were a contagious disease that might spread and cripple the company. As if no one would notice a pattern to my weekly absences. I promised to keep quiet. Then I waited.

  A month passed. Then another. There seemed to be some problems with head count, the VP said. I left her messages. I wrote strongly worded memos, asking for the pa
rt-time work to begin immediately. The head count issue, whatever it was, would not go away. My daughter took her first steps in front of the baby-sitter. I wrote more memos, left more messages. After seven months of bureaucratic bungling, with my infant daughter no longer an infant, with my son about to start full-time nursery school, with my travel suddenly increasing, with my work no longer fulfilling, and with Paul now in a position, if barely, to support the household on his new Internet job salary, I finally gave up.

  Handing in my resignation to Neal, whom I now considered a friend, was hard. He’d been kind, tried as best he could to be helpful, and he seemed visibly upset at my departure. But with the human resources representative assigned to my case—a stranger, a cog in the entrenched bureaucratic wheel that had failed me—I was livid. At my official NBC exit interview, I said, “You guys better watch out.” Women were getting pregnant in record numbers at Dateline, I told her, and if the company could not adjust to this changing demographic by offering at least the possibility of part-time work to the women—and men!—who needed it, the show would have no one left to produce stories, to feed the hungry, five-night-a-week machine.

  Less than two years after I quit, as I sit here writing this, part-time producer positions at Dateline have become a reality. I could be kidding myself, but I like to believe that my angry resignation may have had something to do with it. At least I hope it did.

  Meanwhile, my daughter, Sasha, though still alarmingly tiny, has turned into a feisty, pouty, strong, opinionated, flirtatious, fearless and devilish young girl, whose favorite pastime is sticking her fingers inside the mouths of large dogs. She refuses to wear dresses, she prefers upside down to right side up, and when anyone dares to compliment her beauty, she responds with an adamant, clenched-fisted, foot-pounding, “I’m not pretty! I’m handsome!” One day, when I picked her up from preschool and found her wearing a plastic crown, I made sure to tell her that she made a very handsome princess. Little two-year-old Sasha scowled at me, already a mortified teenager. “Mommy! I’m not a princess,” she said, her hands on her hips and her chin jutting out for added emphasis. “I’m a king!”

  She also claims to have a penis. Far be it from me to burst that bubble.

  BETHANY BEACH, DELAWARE, 1999

  While Paul is convinced that Sasha is a crotchety, fifty-year-old grande dame stuck in the body of a toddler, my parents are convinced that she’s their revenge. “Just wait until she runs off to Afghanistan,” they say. “Then you’ll see.” I’m convinced that as long as she does not run there with a camera-toting, bandanna-wearing, skull-clobbering guy like Pascal, she’ll be just fine, thank you very much. Especially because I’m hoping that by the time she actually makes it there, the land mines will have been cleared and the Afghanis will have stopped trying to shoot one another.

  My son, on the other hand, is deathly afraid of dogs. (His first sentence? “’Fraid of doggies.”) Jacob’s more of a sensitive soul—a poet, a dreamer. At the age of two, he threw a penny in a fountain and said, wistfully, “I wish to smell a rainbow.” He’s prone to spontaneous outbursts of both affection and existential angst, incredulous that good can exist side by side with evil. He has fallen in love with one of his classmates, a little girl named Grey who looks enough like him that they are often mistaken for twins. They’ve decided to get married. They say they will have three children, two boys and a girl, whom they will name John, Steve and Natasha. On the morning it suddenly occurred to Jacob that everyone in the world has to die—he was three and a half, riding the bus to his preschool with me—he stared out the window and cried for a long time. Then, still sniffling, he made me promise that he and Grey would die on the exact same day, so they wouldn’t have to live without each other.

  You kind of have to wonder why it took my son less than four years to own one of the truths I had to spend more than two decades figuring out. Just ask him. He’ll tell you. The secret to a happy life is love.

  When he’s old enough, when tiny Sasha’s old enough, I’ll jump on my soapbox and tell them a few more. Simple truths, like the quest is as important, if not more important, than the goal. Like hearts have a surprising resilience. Like war is bad. Like some things in life are inexplicable, and many others are ambiguous. Like not everyone can be saved. Like sex can be either beautiful or ugly but never both simultaneously. Like reading and traveling teach us more than we can ever learn in school. Like girls have it tougher than boys, still, and that owing to such things as body mass and the mechanics of rape, perhaps always will. Like babies should be born only to people who are ready for such a colossal responsibility. Like parenthood—a parenthood sown of planning and love—is by far and away the most profound experience life holds.

  IT IS THE SPRING OF 1999, the height of the conflict in Serbia and Kosovo. Jacob, who is not yet four, has grown disturbed after watching a 60 Minutes segment about the war, which apparently had a parental warning about its explicit contents at the top that we stupidly missed. His drawings, one of which he named his “Guernica,” have begun to feature evil creatures named Milosevic, burning houses, corpses and guns. He’s started having vivid nightmares in which bad guys burn down our apartment and make him go live in a tent. He finds his way, with increasing frequency, into our bed, shaking and in need of affection.

  One night, while Paul and I are tucking him in, he asks, “Why do bad guys fight wars?”

  The two of us look at each other, caught off guard as usual, and struggle for an answer he’ll understand. We offer many. Because they don’t know how to communicate. Because they seek power or revenge. Because they’re angry. Because they lack love. Because they don’t understand one another. Because they fear anyone different from themselves. Because they’re stupid. Because they don’t know how to share.

  Jacob isn’t buying any of it. “But why do they have to kill each other? Killing’s not nice.”

  “You’re right, sweetie,” Paul says. “It’s not.” He kisses his son and throws me a fake smile. “Honey, he’s all yours.” Then he says, “Sorry, Jakey, Mommy’s much more of an expert on wars and bad guys than I am. Ask her to tell you about some of the things she’s seen.”

  “Gee, thanks,” I say. I fake-smile back.

  Paul climbs down from the top bunk, turns on the Pooh night-light and kisses his already slumbering daughter beneath us. Then, after asking whether I want pasta or couscous—“Pasta,” I say, “definitely pasta”—he turns off the overhead light and closes the door gently behind him.

  I stare down at my son, who’s snuggled under the covers in his new cowboy pajamas, smelling of soap. His anxious eyes probe mine. “Mommy, what did you see?” He’s clutching Rock, the pink and green batik elephant he picked out himself, his sole talisman against evil, a little too tightly. I crawl under the covers beside him and wedge my shoulder beneath his head. I let my hand wander under his pajama top. Find his heart. It’s beating those swift, tiny miracle beats, the ones that always catch me by surprise and make me think about oxygen, God and the thirteen billion years that came before us. What did I see? I didn’t expect to have to deal with this question so soon. I start rubbing quiet circles across Jacob’s downy, bulbous stomach, searching my head for the right words.

  “Well, you see, Jacob, it’s like this . . .” I sigh. Hoping to make sense of it all. Not sure I ever will.

  Then I open my mouth to begin.

  IN MEMORIAM

  WILLIAM ALFRED

  OVIDIU BOGDAN

  ANDY DANIK

  JOE GALL

  GAD GROSS

  JACQUES HAILLOT

  SERGE MAJAROW

  FOR SASHA

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  MORE GRATITUDE than I could ever fit in this small space goes to Tad Friend, a friend indeed, who lovingly edited this book in its larval stages and did not laugh at my ineptitude.

  I am also grateful to
both John Burnham Schwartz and Phyllida Burlingame—who were privy to many of these stories as they were either happening or shared forthwith, over tiny cups of espresso at Café de Flore—for their unique insight, wisdom, marginalia and enthusiasm, as well as to David Handelman, for performing expert, last-minute microsurgery on this manuscript when my eyes were too tired and tearful to see.

  If it were in my power to do so, I’d bestow a lifetime supply of good karma and chocolate bunnies upon Courtney Hodell, for helping me find my way into the arms of Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, agent/mom/superhero. Without Jennifer, these pages would have gathered dust in a drawer. I am also grateful to Mollie Doyle, for originally acquiring the book, and to Ann Godoff, for her behind-the-scenes foster-parenting. As for my editor, Kate Niedzwiecki, who polishes prose with the same ease with which most of us tie our shoes, I am deeply indebted to her for providing this orphan with such a loving, stable home.

  Thanks are also due to Jennifer Steinhauer, Robin Pogrebin, Edward Klaris, Abby Pogrebin, David Shapiro, Stephen Dubner, Ellen Binder, Larissa MacFarquhar, Rebecca Posner, Julie Dressner,

  Sara Mosle, Porter Gifford, Anna Forrester, Josh Berger, Joe Flanigan, Brooke Williams, Betsy Cohen, Geraldine Moriba-Meadows, Courtney Rogmans, Sandy Rubenstein, Kammi Reiss, Helen Thorpe, Monique El-Faizy, Kathy Ryan, Elizabeth Beier, Michael Hirschorn, Susan Lehman, George Kogan, Todd and Tammy Yellin and my sisters, Jennifer, Julie and Laura Copaken, for their own thoughts, interest and/or shrewd pencil marks along the way, as well as to Richard Murphy, Lisa Schiffren, Scott Satin, Gilles Peress, Marion Mertens, Pierre Luton, Julian Borger, Doru Iordache, Mauzi Kalousek, Jim Nachtwey, Luc Delahaye, Oliver Phillips, Alex Webb, Neal Shapiro, Dominique Saint-Louis and Jim Gerety, for jogging my memory and helping me sort out names and facts. Evan Shapiro, bless his clever soul, wins the grand prize for coming up with the book’s title during morning drop-off at our kids’ preschool.