6. Toronto Outdoor Art Fair, July 2012
Ren texted her a week after the arrival of his new baby.
The image he sent had clearly been taken by Paola: Ren sat in front of a large, curtained window looking thrilled and exhausted, his face unshaven, clutching a miniscule bundle that squinted up from an adorably fashionable blanket.
Their baby had been given a small, black cap for the occasion and squinted up like an ancient Italian man about to play bocce.
She wrote him back appropriately gushing replies and he asked her how her art show had gone.
Four sales! She wrote. Paid my rent for the month and got a fisheye lens.
Congratulations. Tell me you’re kidding about the fisheye, he replied.
Just trying to get you worked up. It was a regular wide-angle, she wrote back.
He responded kindly about her talent, but she felt sad.
They didn’t feel like friends anymore, and she realized in retrospect that maybe he had only been allowed to hang out with her when she had a boyfriend.
Once she didn’t, Paola had drawn a line in the sand.
Breaking things off with Liam had caused Sarah to lose her friendship with Ren as well.
Of course they picked the name Alejandro, Anya wrote when Sarah shared the name with Anya and Kristie in their group text. Couldn’t pick something with one or two syllables. Wouldn’t be Sophisticated and European.
It’s a badass name, Kristie texted. I bet Ren’s wife is impossibly hot and classy. Signed, Krishnakali.
LOLOL, Anya wrote. Everyone knows you are impossibly hot and classy, K.
Ren’s wife is definitely a hot, smart lawyer, Sarah replied. But she hates me for some reason. She looked at me like I’m either a threat to their marriage or boring as toast. Not sure which.
It’s because Ren was in love with you at uni, Kristie wrote back.
Ha ha ha ha ha, Sarah replied.
To her surprise, three weeks later, she heard from Ren again.
sarah, Ren wrote, home on paternity leave and lack of sleep is pushing me into deep moral crisis about the ethics of watching reality tv. how are you doing? hopefully another photo series in the works.
Sarah took a moment to enjoy the visual of an exhausted Ren breaking down and watching the Real Housewives of Anywhere before she texted back. Glad you’re having ethical crisis about reality tv. Fortunately the ethics of your field of journalism are above reproach.
stabbed through the heart when I was looking for support, he replied.
Sorry. I shouldn’t mock you when you’re sleep deprived. I’m working on photos but not yet a series. Maybe I will watch reality tv to get inspired.
a Sarah Drakenberg reality tv photo series sounds either horrifying or brilliant, he wrote back.
aiming for horrifying AND brilliant, she replied.
He responded quickly. Like your hummus-flavored cookie recipe from sophomore year.
For the months that followed, Ren and Sarah would text every three or four weeks, usually about local art shows or occasionally because one of them had read a book or seen a film that the other one might enjoy.
He would send photos of the baby occasionally, but only when she requested them.
She would send slightly ridiculous ideas for her next photo series.
Going on a Dorothy Lange kick, she wrote to Ren at one point. But feels exploitative to shoot poor people. Can I shoot people who only THINK they are poor, like college students without enough money to buy newest video games?
Shoot them looking longingly into the middle distance, Ren replied, clutching a crumpled Starbucks gift card.
She grinned. Is black and white allowed in this circumstance?
Ren texted back: You have my permission. Sepia-tone preferred, though. Gallery show should play fiddle music from the 1930s to set the tragic atmosphere.
A couple of weeks after that, Ren texted her again.
On a horror film kick. Let the Right One In was brilliant. Have you seen?
Sarah was at her desk when she got the message. Not yet. Are you watching horror movies when Jandro is awake or asleep?
Asleep. But maybe he’s subconsciously being trained to think that quiet screaming from the other room is normal, Ren replied.
And you were worried about being a good father.
A few weeks later, Sarah wrote to him.
I think I just saw your dad being interviewed on television about artificial intelligence and the nature of human consciousness.
Ren wrote back: that was him.
He looks so much like you.
Ren’s response took a long moment. Yes.
I think I understood about one word out of ten.
Ren wrote back: Then it was definitely my dad.
Sarah had noticed that all their exchanges ended carefully after four or five texts.
Sometimes she ended the text exchange, sometimes Ren did, but it felt like they were carefully setting the boundaries of their friendship, making sure that if Paola read the texts, she would have nothing to worry about.
They never got personal in their messages; it was all gentle teasing about which character from Breaking Bad Ren related to the most, or how Sarah could possibly enjoy books by both Jonathan Franzen and Nicholas Sparks.
She didn’t mind. It was better than not having him in her life at all. In fact, her commitment to the ‘single life’ in her art had coincided with a rapid development of her life as a single person in general.
Winnie, her roommate, was actually pleasant to live with most of the time, even if she seemed to be in the wrong profession.
They would get together on Friday nights and watch romantic movies together, which had proven to be almost as much fun as watching action films with Paul.
Winnie would bring home a bottle of wine, Sarah would make cookies and popcorn, and they would pause the movie at key moments to critique the unhealthy relationships on screen or to sigh about a particularly beautiful actor.
Anya was also fully back in Sarah’s life: she was finally starting to emerge from the shock of new parenthood now that her baby was old enough to go to daycare.
She’d gotten a job doing marketing at a downtown Toronto children’s theater, and once every week or two, she had time to emerge from her maternal existence to meet up and say snarky things over coffee or brunch.
Equally fun was the fact that their old roommate Kristie had moved back to Canada from Los Angeles and now lived in Toronto, too; she had spent a few years working as a costume assistant on feature films and wanted to launch her career as a costume designer in the Toronto film and theater scene.
Within two weeks of her return, Kristie was once again throwing elaborate parties, now held in a massive, edgy loft space that she shared with four roommates in a renovated factory building.
Kristie had streaked her black hair with a single line of silver and had adopted a faint Southern California lilt, in which her pitch would shift octaves within a sentence to make an important point.
Sarah found that she was less lonely as a single person than she’d been when dating Liam, which felt like an important lesson.
Paul, by contrast, seemed to be growing more pessimistic about his acting career.
She secretly wished he would follow Kristie’s path to Los Angeles, which had many more acting opportunities than Toronto.
Instead, he talked vaguely about his upcoming wedding plans and grumbled about how he should have gone into comedy writing, but it was ‘too late’ for that.
It didn’t help that Trish’s career was going comparatively better, at least in terms of booking modeling jobs for outdoor clothing catalogues. Sarah worried for him.
One day in early July, nine months after her Single Life gallery opening, Ren finally texted Sarah about having an in-person meet-up.
toronto outdoor art fair? he wrote. meet me sunday? i will have jandro.
She agreed at once.
The art fair was an annual event in the city in which visual artists gathered to sell their work in dozens of booths in a central outdoor plaza.
Sarah had briefly considered renting a booth herself, but hadn’t been able to justify the expense of getting a tent and table and making dozens of prints in the hopes of selling a few of her weird photographs.
It was an ideal outing for meeting up with Ren, though.
The weather was hot and still as she stood near the middle of the city square, right near the letter T in a giant three-dimensional Toronto sign near a reflecting pool.
She was wearing a bright sundress with yellow flowers on it and carrying her photography gear in her backpack in preparation for taking some headshots later that day.
She spotted Ren a few minutes after the hour, walking towards her in a black t-shirt and dark blue jeans, wearing an alert baby strapped to the center of his chest like a bomb.
Little Jandro was looking directly towards her and Sarah laughed at the infant’s expression: bewildered, curious, his legs flung out both ways.
“Hold on!” she said. “Stop right there.”
She pulled out her camera as Ren stopped in place against the backdrop of milling people. He threw out both hands in a helpless gesture as she took a photo of him and the baby.
“What did you see?” he asked when he approached.
She swung the camera around to show him the LCD screen image of him and Jandro, echoing each other, their arms flung out wide.
“It was your son’s expression,” she explained with a grin. “Like he was having an existential crisis about his place in the universe.”
Ren grinned. “I think that’s what babies do all the time.”
“I’m going to do a photo series about existential babies,” Sarah announced. Ren smiled at her affectionately. “I’ll show them in various settings, puzzling over the state of humanity.”
“I’d love to see it.” He looked down at his son. “Yeah, he’s supposed to face towards me in this carrier, but he insists on facing out.”