A Double Joy
GARTH ROBINSON
One night I made a dish out of baked leeks and parmesan for the small French boy, who cried and cried as if I were torturing him with thumbscrews.
It was early winter, the light outside like a low flame. Alexandre wept with his forehead flat against the table. Whenever he looked up, he would tell me in English, “It’s not so good, it’s not so good!” I became very angry with him. I told him to finish his plate of leeks or else I would not allow him to have a yogurt for dessert. I considered threatening to return to America and to never speak with him again.
Later that night, I stood outside in the courtyard drinking a glass of water. My severeness toward Alexandre made me feel sorry for myself, as if I was incapable of being the sort of person I sometimes hoped to be. I also worried, as I often did, that the nannying position was a kind of test posed by God, and as punishment for my cruelties I would turn infertile and never become a father myself.
The sky in winter was brown, and I could imagine that certain objects—stars, birds, little deranged satellites—had burned out. On the second floor, Alexandre’s window was dark. Most days, Alexandre and I loved each other very much. We played soccer in the grass beyond the courtyard, and he often asked me to brush my teeth alongside him. On one of my first days working for the family, I taught him to also brush his tongue, because this is the source of all bad breath.
Sometimes, I even suspected that Alexandre wished to install me in the place of his father, Charles. One morning I was standing in the kitchen speaking with Charles and his wife, Adeline. As we spoke, Alexandre walked between Charles and me, touching each of our arms in a very inquisitive way. Because Alexandre seemed to be playing some mysterious game, we ignored him. Then, he interrupted us to say, “Papa, Garth’s muscles are bigger than yours!” We all hushed Alexandre and pretended that, because he was a child, his words were superficial and incapable of affecting our feelings. A few days later, as Adeline put Alexandre to bed, Charles told me in detail about his job as an anesthesiologist and hinted several times that he wanted me to ask about his salary.
Alexandre seemed to behave this way, in part, because I had the freedom and time to do silly, amusing things with him. Also, these activities were expectations inherent to my position.
Each afternoon, I picked Alexandre up at the iron gates outside his school. I observed the other parents taking their children’s backpacks and slinging them over one shoulder, so I immediately began to do the same. Alexandre and I then walked home together, where I was responsible for organizing some sort of activity, preparing dinner, and readying him for bed.
Alexandre particularly enjoyed a game that we would play on the walk home. This game involved waiting until some passerby was ten or fifteen feet in front of us, walking in our direction. We would then stop suddenly, point at a random place in the sky, and yell, “Regardez!” The passerby—a worker in blue jeans, an old woman coming from the market—would then stop and look, perhaps expecting some enormous hawk or a jumbo jet. The joy of this game was in seeing the passerby turn to the sky for no reason at all. There was also a double joy in this for us: we had feigned the sight of something miraculous, and, by tricking a stranger into looking foolish, had in reality brought about a kind of small miracle.
I soon came to realize the advantages, for Charles and Adeline, of hiring a foreign au pair to look after their son. Because they both worked at the university hospital, they could arrive home late without any issue. They were also providing Alexandre with numerous chances to play games, invent made-up characters, and read children’s books in English, without needing to take part in these activities themselves. I understood the appeal of this distance; playing games with Alexandre could be very beautiful, as this was the way he learned the cruelties and softnesses of the world, but the games were also extraordinarily boring.
I began to imagine everything with a fine layer of golden fur, a layer that would slough off beneath adult hands but stayed soft and new in those of a child. Alexandre could play a game until it ceased to even resemble itself. When we played our game on the walk home, he would start to turn and point for every single person we passed. If we came into an empty street, he continued to leap around the sidewalk, pointing to various spots in the sky, laughing and working himself up.
In the fall, we had gone through a period where I asked Alexandre riddles in English. “What two things can you never have for breakfast? What animal can jump higher than any building? What gets wet while drying?” When Alexandre learned the answer, it was as if he had seen an impossible light. He would immediately search around for someone else to whom he could pose the riddle. “Papa, what gets wet while drying?” As Charles stood at the Nespresso machine, ostensibly in thought, Alexandre ran from end to end of the narrow kitchen, barefoot and giggling.
“Papa, it gets wet while it’s drying! It’s so easy, it’s so easy!”
Eventually, I exhausted all the riddles I knew. Alexandre began to come into my room in his pajamas many nights as I sat writing at my desk. He would hang his arm around my shoulder and ask in his kindest voice, “Garth, could you please tell me one more énigme?” So I simply asked him riddles he already knew the answer to, which was exactly what he wanted, and before I could finish the question he would dance up and down and yell, “It’s a towel!” These riddles became like songs he never tired of hearing.
I dealt with the boredom and repetition of the games by beating Alexandre in every activity we undertook together. I did not feel that I was being cruel, or even teaching him a lesson in some way; it was simply a method of making the afternoons less tedious. We played endless games of Monopoly, during which Alexandre accumulated exorbitant amounts of debt. I offered him friendly, merciless deals in return. “I’ll forgive the hundred dollars, Alexandre, but when you land on Kentucky Avenue from now on, you’ll have to pay me three times the rent.”
The honesty of our relationship moved me. I could demonstrate my own selfishness as we played Monopoly, and Alexandre could weep freely after throwing the plastic hotels and tiny metal figurines across the room. In the winter, when I became angry with him after cooking the leeks and cheese, I apologized truthfully the next day, and we watched videos of large wildcats on my phone to make things better. Another afternoon, Alexandre threw an enormous tantrum as I took him to a dentist’s appointment. He came out of the treatment room with a sheet of crinkly paper towel still stuck into his collar, took my hand, and asked politely if we could go home now.
When anyone in America asked about my life as an au pair, I answered that an eight-year-old boy was my best friend in the entire republic of France.
And this was true, yet I recognized in myself the impulse to be not only a friend, a babysitter, or even a kind of older brother to Alexandre, but a parent. This was an instinct that I knew to be presumptuous and absurd. But Charles and Adeline sometimes made decisions that I saw as narrow-minded and even regressive, and I worried helplessly that this would constrict Alexandre’s heart.
Once, Alexandre came home from school with his fingernails painted pink. I told him how much I liked them, that they were the color of a rare bird of paradise. Adeline arrived home first that evening and, after seeing Alexandre’s fingernails, treated him as if he had unwittingly done something very shameful. It reminded me of the time when, as a child, I had overheard an offensive joke and repeated it to my mother. Adeline brought Alexandre into the small bathroom attached to her and Charles’ bedroom and scrubbed off the pink lacquer.
Later that night, I heard Charles go into Alexandre’s room and close the door. The next day, Alexandre told me that his father had not liked his pink nails. “Papa says there are boy things and girl things. And he says we should always have differences between boys and girls, or else the world will not make any sense.”
For several days, I considered speaking with Charles and expressing my disagreement. I imagined a very righteous moment, in which Charles and I argued loudly and nearly came to blows. And in the end, my explanation of the confinements of gender roles would prove so forthright and correct that it could not, in any honest way, be disputed.
Days went by. I didn’t speak with either Charles or Adeline about the nails, aware that—like a second son—I lived in their home and had no real authority. Also, I feared Charles’ potential anger, which made me worry that, one day, if my own son were pushed face-down into the dirt by a bully, I would do nothing about it.
I instead committed myself to showing Alexandre my appreciation for garish, fanciful colors. This response felt stubborn and weak, yet I secretly hoped that it would somehow undermine his parents’ admonitions. One morning Alexandre and I sat together at the long wooden dining table, drawing on blank sheets of paper taken from Charles’ printer. Through the window, we could hear the woman who ran the boulangerie beating her broom against a wall. I drew a picture of a neon green boy with eight pink tentacles coming out of his waist. I wrote “Alexandropus” at the bottom. Alexandre laughed and laughed and drew a picture of me being eaten by a duck.
When we had finished our drawings, Alexandre asked if we could send them to my parents in America. “Of course,” I told him. On the back of the drawings we wrote notes to my parents. I described the bread at the boulangerie and told them that I missed them. Although he had never met them, Alexandre also told my parents that he missed them, and then wrote, “How are you doing? I hope that you are good. Do you have a cat? I hope that you have one cat.” At the end, he signed, “Love, Alexandre.” I imagined my parents receiving the letter, a missive written by a grandson from another world.
It was, by now, the very start of spring, and Alexandre and I went outside to play soccer in the yard. A single tree grew in the corner, and its new leaves were unfurling like little rolled-up maps. As always, I played goalie, and I saved every single goal that Alexandre kicked in my direction. Growing frustrated, Alexandre outsmarted me by taking the ball and punting it over the high stone wall into the next yard. When I scolded him, Alexandre said that he did it by accident.
So I climbed into the tree, sat on the wall, and inched over until I was level with a picnic table in the neighboring yard. From here, I could see that no one lived in the bottom apartment, that the yard was dirt with old furniture and bits of plastic scattered around. I dropped onto the picnic table, found the soccer ball, and kicked it back over. I returned the way I came and, as I jumped down from the tree, Alexandre watched me and laughed. His face was admiring and also very sly. “You’re like a monkey!” he said, and then kicked the ball back over the stone wall.
Without thinking, I turned and went up the tree, along the wall, and back into the dirt yard, where I retrieved the ball. Overhead, the sky ached and seemed to glow bluer. I stood on the picnic table and pulled myself onto the wall. As I lay on the top and slid towards the tree, the grit and stonedust rough against my belly, I watched Alexandre roll around in the grass and laugh. Feeling ridiculous, feeling that Alexandre would certainly kick the ball again once I returned to the yard, I began laughing too. I thought to myself, “One day I will be a father and love my children in a hundred different ways, and this will feel like a happy and faraway dream.” And of course, this is the true power of dreams, as a kind of barometer measuring one’s capacity to feel. In a dream you might fall in helpless love with a stranger, or your submarine might lose power and leave you with the terror of an entire ocean, or, as the sun reverses direction and bluebirds speak instead of sing and the Eiffel Tower loosens its foundations and takes off for the moon, you might feel the wonder of knowing, at last, that this world is not all there will be.
