6. Toronto Outdoor Art Fair, July 2012 #2
“He’s a budding journalist,” Sarah said. “Wants to know what’s going on. Shall we introduce him to some high culture?” Sarah gestured to a booth where someone was selling cutesy landscapes of wide-eyed deer and rabbits.
“Jandro and I do nothing but high culture,” Ren said with a smile, “also known as watching fish tanks in the pet store.”
“So how have you been doing with fatherhood?” she asked as they threaded through the crowds together.
“I love it. Not getting much sleep, but…he’s a good one. Good-natured. Easily distracted, but so am I. I’ve scaled back on work to keep an eye on him. I’m mostly freelancing these days.”
“What language are you speaking with him?” she asked. “You grew up with French, right?”
Ren nodded. “We’re planning on raising him with French from me and Spanish from Paola and then letting him pick up English in daycare. He’ll probably hate us for a while, but it seems worthwhile in the end.”
“He’s your son, so he’ll probably be reading Camus novels by kindergarten.”
“Please, Sarah,” Ren drawled. “Camus is preschool. He’ll be reading Proust.”
“The proper age for Remembrance of Things Past.”
“Remembrance of Things Yesterday.” Ren grinned. “They say he’ll learn to speak later because he’ll have to sort out all the languages. But there are worse things.”
“And are you getting any help? Childcare, grandparents? I know Anya had trouble when her daughter Ilona was born because her whole family are up north.”
He looked away. “Paola’s parents recently moved back to the States, and mine are in Montreal, so it’s just me right now.”
“Your parents don’t make it down much?”
He shook his head. “My mother is against having children on principle. Did I tell you that? You would appreciate this, Sarah. My mother wrote an article in a feminist magazine about how no women should have kids, ever. She argued that the only births should be accidental because no woman was ever truly happier after having a child. And she published it when I was sixteen.”
Sarah felt startled by the story. She knew she was supposed to be amused, but there was something in Ren’s tone that made her wonder if he felt as casual about it as he was pretending to. “How did you find out about that? She didn’t show it to you…”
“No, but they interviewed her for a Montreal newspaper about it and it got back to me through a classmate. So that was fun,” he said.
“That sounds hurtful.”
“No, I mean, I got it,” he said, shrugging.
“She and my dad both came from really repressive backgrounds in terms of sexuality and gender and all of that, so they went the other way. My mom’s parents were Christian refugees, my dad’s mother is a conservative Muslim.
When my parents met at the Sorbonne, I think they decided to become the exact opposite of everything their parents had been.
So they doubled down on sexual freedom, personal freedom, stuff like that. The more progressive, the better.”
“Like how Ayn Rand was raised in Soviet Russia so she fought for people’s right to be selfish?”
“Did you just compare my radical feminist mother to Ayn Rand?”
Sarah laughed. “I’m sorry. I was extrapolating. Unfairly.”
“No, you’re right in a way. My parents are classic left-wing academics, and they took some extreme positions. Which is fine, you know, but at sixteen, that wasn’t my favorite thing to hear. I felt like I ruined her life.”
They were silent for a moment. Ren was unconsciously moving Jandro’s hands up and down, keeping the baby in motion.
“But yeah, it means…most people’s parents get excited when there’s a grandchild.
But my mother…she’s fine with Jandro. She’s not unexcited.
But she’s a little skeptical. She doesn’t understand why I’m doing this when I could be working on my journalism career.
Why would I want to stay at home with a baby? ”
Sarah considered Ren’s choice to mostly stay at home in light of his own parents’ attitudes about children. “Well, he’s beautiful, so I’m glad you and Paola had him.”
Ren grinned. “Yeah. He looks more like Paola than me, which is good.”
She wondered if he subconsciously attributed everything good about his son to his wife. That might be chivalry, but it might be a self-doubt that Sarah had never noticed in him before.
They stopped and looked at the work of artists and painters from all over Canada.
Some of the pieces were blandly pretty but others were wildly creative and new.
On impulse, Sarah spent one hundred dollars on a tiny painting that was done in the style of the Mughal Empire, all detail work and dotted gold, but instead of depicting medieval warriors on horseback, it represented a group of tattooed young hipsters reclining on motorbikes and staring at their cell phones.
Ren bought a photo print of the Northern Lights reflected in a lake in Iceland and carefully placed it in his backpack between some spare diapers.
“Travel goals,” he said as he carefully tucked it away.
“That’s a beautiful baby,” a passing woman said with a smile as Sarah rocked Jandro in her arms while Ren rearranged his bag.
“Oh, he’s not mine,” Sarah replied, startled. “It’s his baby.”
The woman turned her gaze to Ren as he stood up. “That’s a beautiful…” The woman trailed off, caught in Ren’s eyes like she was hypnotized. “You have a beautiful baby,” she said in a rush, then turned abruptly and walked away, blushing.
“Oh my God.” Sarah was laughing. “How do you deal with that?”
“Deal with what?” Ren asked, adjusting Jandro back into place in his carrier.