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.
She would never have been able to say this at university, but something about having a baby strapped to Ren’s chest made it feel possible. “How do you deal with being so handsome that people stop talking in the middle of their sentences when they see you?”
“That is notwhat just happened,” Ren said. Seeing her skeptical glance, he shrugged. “Okay, so…” He paused again.
“Go on.” Sarah felt brief delight at his discomposure.
“So I have girls’ eyes, right?” Ren began.
“You do?” Ren’s beauty wasn’t just about his eyes, but Sarah wasn’t going to say so.
“It’s the lashes. I get them from my father, and boys used to make fun of me in school. They said I looked like a girl, that I was gay, all that stuff. And I was no good at sports, which didn’t help. And I was named Rene, which sounded like a girl’s name to my English-speaking classmates.”
“Wait a minute. Is that why you went by Ren?”
He shrugged, hiding a smile. It was funny to find that out about him after all these years.
“Anyway, when I got into my later teens, it turned out that girls found my eyes attractive, and it felt like getting something back for all the teasing I got. But…it’s not real, right? I mean, I understand my looks catch people’s attention, but I always preferred people who didn’t notice them much at all.” Ren met her gaze warmly.
Did he mean her? She felt a little ashamed. She had definitely noticed his looks when they first met.
