April 15, 2007
Modern Love
La Vie en Rose, the Takeout Version
By DEBORAH COPAKEN KOGAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/fashion/...amp;oref=slogin
ON a frigid Sunday night this February, just after I had put the baby to bed, the intercom buzzed.
“Did you order food?” I asked my husband, Paul, who was hunched over his computer in our dining room.
“Nope.”
I looked to our older kids, Jacob, 11, and Sasha, 9; neither was expecting anybody.
“Probably just the wrong apartment,” I said. It buzzed again, longer this time. I went to the kitchen and pressed the button. “Hello?”
A voice — scratchy, male — asked, “Are you on the 15th 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 said; 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.”
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,” I said. “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 said. “I’ll give 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. The idea of one happening in our apartment — where the biggest romantic gesture my husband or I could muster lately was to let the other one skip doing the dishes — was too tempting.
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 fisheye lens, was (if I would later have to describe him to the police, I thought) a 20- to 30-year-old male, Caucasian, tall, medium build, with a tangle of dirty blond hair.
I opened the door.
“Hi,” he said. “Thanks so much.”
“You’re welcome.” He looked harmless enough, but I engaged him in innocuous banter to see if he breathed fire. Then I took a leap of faith — not wholly unlike the one I took 17 years earlier when I let my husband into my life — and ushered him inside.
He 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?”
Later, 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 could do it, but heartache and the Securitate loomed too large.
Then Ceausescu 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, 17 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 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 asked.
“Just wait,” he said. “It’ll get to you, too.” Then he waltzed me into our bedroom.
Around 3 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, 11 and 9 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, 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? Did she actually see 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 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 lunchboxes 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 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.
.......................end of part one...........
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