Manhood for Amateurs

Surefire Lines

My younger son asked me if I would teach him how to make a girl.

It was a fat curve, hung right out over the plate. But the boy was not yet five, and I knew that whatever I came back with would sail right over his head. So I decided to tell him the truth.

“I don’t really know how to make a girl,” I told him. “I’ve never been very good at it.”

“You need to use more circles,” suggested my older son. At the time he was a sophisticate of ten, but if my reply had been something like Start by putting on a Barry White record, it would have sailed over his head, too. “And make the circles, like, skinnier.”

The boys in our house spend a lot of time drawing men. Not the girls — the girls mostly draw girls, but if their theme requires it, they will draw a necessary boy, and they never seem to run into any difficulties, or rather, the problems they encounter have nothing to do with their gender or that of the figures they’re attempting to depict. The only trouble they have is the usual trouble with feet, noses, hands, poses, and proportions, the ones that dog anybody who tries to arrest and suggest the human form with a Flair pen or a No. 2 Ticonderoga. My older daughter is reasonably competent in drawing in the style of the Japanese comic books she loves, and apart from hairstyles and details of dress, there is not all that big a difference among the willowy and saucer-eyed youth who tend to populate those books, regardless of gender. My younger daughter is more into drawing hamsters, flowers, and disturbing hybrids thereof, so the question rarely arises. But for my sons and for me, it’s pretty much an unvarying repertoire of male superheroes, male cyborgs, and male costumed action heroes of one kind or another.

“Is a girl superhero the same as a boy superhero?” the little one persisted, his tone betraying a certain forlornness. He was looking back and forth from me to the blank place on his piece of paper where he had been planning to put a drawing of Sue Storm, to round out his portrait of the Fantastic Four. Generally, he neglects or avoids the need to portray females in his artwork, but when it comes to the Fantastic Four, once you’ve done the rocks, the flames, and the rubbery arms, you basically have no choice in the matter. “Only she has some boobs?”

“Kind of,” said the older brother, going a bit stony-eyed. His own inability to depict females, I imagined, was bitter knowledge that sometimes left him feeling forlorn, too. “Not exactly.”

There was no doubt, I wanted to explain, that boobs were a big part — literally — of the female superhero package. Almost every superwoman apart from explicitly adolescent characters such as the original Supergirl or the X-Men’s Kitty Pryde came equipped, as if by the nature of the job, with a superheroic rack. Furthermore, the usual way of a female superhero costume was to advertise the breasts of its wearer by means of décolletage, a cleavage cutout, a pair of metal Valkyrie cones, a bustier. In their unitards and tights, all comic book superheroes, male or female, are fundamentally tinted naked people, and this convenient fact has often tempted the (overwhelmingly male) anatomists of costumed heroes to let themselves get a tad carried away in carving the figureheads, as it were, of their dreamboats. Back in the early pre — Comics Code days, there had been a popular subgenre known as headlight comics, complete with its own genius, the mysterious African-American artist Matt Baker, whose lyrical mappings of Phantom Lady’s planetary system continue to this day to haunt the fantasy life of some gray-haired old boys of the fifties. Today’s female costumed characters tend to sport breasts so enormous that their ability simply to get up and walk, let alone kick telekinetic ass, would appear to be their most marvelous and improbable talent.

I remembered my childhood pencils-and-stapler comic book company with a couple of friends, one of whom, though not much of an artist, could do wonderful things with a bustier. His super-ladies never had faces (he couldn’t do faces), and sometimes they had no hands or feet (feet are crazy hard), but they always had a Fantastic Two. And, as far as we were concerned at the time, that was almost enough. Almost.

“It’s not just the boobs,” I told my little son, sketching a quick Sue Storm on my own sheet of drawing paper. “A lot of other things are different, too. The shoulders are narrower. The legs are, uh, longer. The, uh, the waist … the waist…”

We three looked at the snarl of lines I had made on the paper, at once tentative and overbold. We tried to see, with considerable charity on the boys’ part, how the lines might resemble a stirring and heroical woman.

“What is a waist, anyway?” said the little one.

I started to feel forlorn myself. Over the years I have worked very hard to create in my fiction living, fiery female characters to match the life and fire of various real women I have known. I have endowed them as carefully and thoughtfully as I could with fragments of the histories and memories, with physical mannerisms, with traits of hair and complexion and even, occasionally, the recollected breasts of those living women. With each story, I have convinced myself as I told it that I was managing to portray a woman as strong and as fragile, as complicated and simple, as real, as the women who have been part of the story of my own life. It has not always been easy. I have struggled and written myself into corners and clichés, and resolutely shuffled paragraphs and memories. I have rewritten entire sections of a novel from a female character’s point of view, just to see if I could do it, and in writing The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, I spent months and months turning out some four hundred pages of close third-person narration about the sister of Sammy Clay, only to realize at some fatal point that (although quite flat-chested) she would never possess the marvelous, improbable power of getting up and walking around. This is a problem, I’m trying to say — I wanted to tell my boys — that I have been working on for a very long time. And yet each book that resulted has come under a certain amount of deserved criticism from female readers for being a boy’s book, guy lit, for never quite presenting a female character to match the novel’s men. A lot of this criticism tends to arise from the passionate female reader who is mother to the boys who were just then engaged in trying to learn something from my drawing of Sue Storm.

I looked at their faces, patiently waiting for me to come through for them. I had no idea why it should be so hard for me to depict women, whether with a pencil or a word processor. I find that I resent the difficulty on feminist grounds, for accepting it would seem to endorse the view that there is some mystic membrane separating male and female consciousness, some nebulous difference between men’s and women’s minds, when people are people and minds are minds and, if you want to get down to it, I don’t really know or understand what goes on inside anybody’s head apart from (in moments of grace) my own. I can’t stand — I feel in all honesty that I was raised by a strong-willed, working mother in the heyday of feminism not to be able to stand — the retrograde pseudo-sensitive air of balderdash that seems to underlie the idea of a woman’s heart being inaccessible to a man by virtue of their respective genders.

And yet there I sat, huddled down at the boys’ end of the kitchen table with my sons, drawing big hypertrophied dudes in capes while, at the other end, the girls mutated their hamster flowers and posed their effete saucer-eyed teenage hermaphroninjas. I admired the girls’ work vocally. But I knew that I didn’t fully understand their reasons for wanting to draw what they were drawing and not what we boys all wanted to draw. The inescapable corollary of this knowledge has often seemed to be that while I also vocally admire my daughters themselves, I don’t fully understand them, either. When one of them is feeling sad, or crushed, or furious, or anxious about a social situation in the classroom, I find myself unable to jolly or cajole or, worst of all, sympathize her out of it the way I can almost always manage to do with one of the boys. There is apparently an inherent callousness in me that fails to see the gravity or the angles in their gravest and most angular emotional situations or to understand the ins and outs of their complicated friendships. There is a mystery in those heads that I will never stop trying to solve, even if the very act of seeking solution, of viewing women in terms of mystery, damns me forever to defeat and ineptitude.

So I turned to my son’s drawing of the Fantastic Four to consider the blank spot on the far side of the Thing. And I gave up the art lesson for the day.

“I like your Invisible Woman,” I told him, tapping the paper with the snake-oil panache of Hans Christian Andersen’s tailor, hoping this line would not sail over his head. “Nice job.”

“Oh!” said the little one, and for an instant, just before he grinned, he looked heartbreakingly confused. “I get it. Do you get it, Dad?”

I told him that I did. So sue me.

Cosmodemonic

Twenty-odd years and nine books after receiving my MFA in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine — and seventy years after the founding of the original MFA program, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop — I still get questions about writing programs, as if my having come through one were a fluky detour like doing a hitch in a Goofy suit at Disneyland, and the institution itself a compound of rumor and scam. Journalists, critics, would-be students, regular people — they all have their doubts. Do writing workshops have any real value? Are they helpful to young writers? Do they perhaps unwittingly impose standards of style and subject matter on their graduates? And sometimes with a prosecutorial wink: Can anybody really be taught how to write? I have answers for these people. Put briefly: Yes; yes; I don’t believe so but maybe; and yes. I wrote my first novel at Irvine, and one of my teachers there sent it to his agent, who found a publisher for the book. I’m kind of a poster boy for the more tangible benefits that a good writing program can bestow. And I have written elsewhere about the help and hard reading I received from my teachers and fellow students at UCI. But the most important thing that happened to me as a graduate student in creative writing had little directly to do with writing or publishing or agents or subject matter or style. When I started the program in 1985, I was a little shit; by the time I left Irvine, I was not just a published novelist, I was something that had begun, inwardly, to resemble a man.

This is not going to be an argument for some universal advantage conferred by the institution of the writing program; I am sure that graduate fiction workshops regularly turn out little shits by the dozens. I’m just going to try to figure out what might have happened to me while I was there.

Henry Miller, I think I should begin, was my great literary hero from the age of sixteen to about nineteen, and on the assumption that you haven’t recently dipped into Tropic of Cancer or Tropic of Capricorn or Black Spring or the three volumes that make up The Rosy Crucifixion, I will summarize the work — and undersell it — according to my purpose here: It’s basically one long novel about the exaltation and despair, in New York and Paris, of a little shit named Henry Miller. The Henry Miller presented in the fiction is a drunk, a cad, a loser, an angry, misogynistic fuckup with delusions of grandeur, oceanic ambition, lamentable habits of personal grooming, and the profound detestation of money and the material world that only the born cadger can maintain. “‘All I ask of life,’” as the narrator of Tropic of Cancer approvingly quotes his friend the novelist Van Norden, “‘is a bunch of books, a bunch of dreams, and a bunch of cunt.’” For a few crucial years that was my own secret little-shit motto — or so, at least, I told myself. I curated a personal pantheon of shit-heels — of musicians, actors, painters, writers, and directors from Charles Mingus to Pablo Picasso to Marlon Brando to Jean-Luc Godard — whose work or biography seemed replete with examples of the kind of giddily antisocial, why-the-fuck-not? mock-Napoleonic self-involvement and hound-doggishness I thought I admired. The Miller hero — my hero — does what he wants, when he wants to, whether it makes any sense or not, even when doing so may hurt or bring sorrow to another. He is not merely contradictory like the rest of us but stubbornly, programmatically so. He is both a clown — a cuckold, capable of lacerating self-mockery — and a pompous bastard, self-important and “big-souled.” He has the capacity for soaring transports of fellow feeling and the most petty acts of impotent revenge. Most of all, he treats the people around him — friends, enemies, lovers — with a cheerful, even lyric, contempt. They are the matter of his work, the furnishings of his dreams and nightmares, the objects of his fixations, the characters in the tawdry circus-cum-back-alley-opera of his life. If they are women, they are his cunts.

It’s this last element, so crucial to the work of Henry Miller, that gives away the game. When I was twenty years old, the following statement would have at once outraged me and made sense to me: You know nothing about women. It’s just a sappy and worthless generalization to me now, empty of meaning. But at the time I thought women was a category, a field, like post-Parker jazz or the varieties of marijuana, that you could study and master and “know something about.” If you are a callow young man at twenty — and I think the man of twenty pretty much defines the term — then your callowness consists almost entirely in this type of belief, that life is made up of mastering the particulars, memorizing the lineups, accumulating the trivia and lore, in knowing how to trace the career of drummer Aynsley Dunbar or get a girl to go to bed with you and your best friend, as an expression of your existential freedom and complete disregard for the fact that she is a person, and she likes you or him, and you’re actually kind of breaking her heart.

Misogyny comes naturally to a young man in his late teens; it is a function of the powerful homosocial impulses that flower along Fraternity Row, that drove the mod movements of the mid-sixties and the late seventies, that lie at the heart of every rock band formed by men of that age. Because I was bright and a would-be artiste, my own misogyny wore a beret, as it were, and quoted Nietzsche. But it was just — and I don’t mean to excuse it with that adverb — garden-variety late-teenage, homosocial misogyny as practiced by young men all over the world. It certainly didn’t constitute any kind of philosophical program or postmodern structure of morality. It was a phase, a plankton bloom in the brain, a developmental stage, albeit one that found ample reinforcement, if not glorification, in culture both popular and highbrow, in the Rolling Stones’s “Stupid Girl” and Woody Allen’s best movies, in Jorge Luis Borges, in William Shakespeare.

I don’t know how much of this Millerite misogyny was reflected in my writing at the time — a fair amount, I suppose. You can see clear traces of it in The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. And I don’t know if I would have emerged from this stage on my own in time. People have argued more or less persuasively that our culture (okay, our entire civilization) is founded on misogyny, or that in its current state it represents a collective case of arrested adolescent development, and I guess even a man who outgrows the little shit never leaves him entirely behind. But when I showed up at Irvine to start my first year as the youngest member of the MFA fiction workshop, I was not ready for what I found there: a roomful of grown-ups, over half of them women. Some of these women were married; one of them had a grown child. Without taking themselves half as seriously as I did, they were all twice as serious about what they were doing. They were better read, more disciplined, more widely traveled, and far less impressed with me than I was. If they were feminists — and I am sure that each of them was — they were practiced and experienced feminists, versed in theory and tested if not hardened by the real world. And most of these women, even those who were not much older than I was, were finished — long since finished — with the charms, real or imagined, of little shits.

I want to stress that what followed was not just some rude awakening or shakedown cruise where I tried to get these women to sleep with me and one by one they shot me down. Okay, so there was some of that, but the fact of the matter is that I had been on a losing streak with women for a long time — at least it felt like a long time — and had already begun to see reflected, in the eyes of some of the girls I had gotten nowhere with, a certain weariness with, or distrust of, or even distaste for, my displays of Miller-esque big-souled callowness. What happened at Irvine was that I found myself for three hours once a week in a room where my traditional enterprise — the great Van Norden dream — was entirely and thrillingly beside the point. We had work to do, and we were lucky enough to have been granted a couple of years of freedom and time to do it. The people in the workshop, but especially the women, and especially the women who were in the full middle of their lives, knew — they could testify to — how rare and marvelous such a gift was. They had left real jobs, made real sacrifices, to come to Irvine. They had mortgages and health problems, troubled marriages, debts, and obligations. And so I was obliged, or at least I felt I was, to rise to the standard they set: in their writing, for the treatment of human emotion and relationships; in their lives, for seizing this chance to learn and share and get immersed in the work; and in the workshop itself, women and men, for undertaking that collective work with respect, with charity, with tolerance, and above all — most frightening to me at the time — with no patience for the pretense and callowness and trite antisocial pose of some little shit. In the end, I think that’s the only cure for the little shit: regular exposure to the healing rays of healthy disillusion, in particular the hard-earned skepticism of grown women. Call it the Yoko Ono effect.

We are accustomed to repeating the cliché, and to believing, that “our most precious resource is our children.” But we have plenty of children to go around, God knows, and as with Doritos, we can always make more. The true scarcity we face is of practicing adults, of people who know how marginal, how fragile, how finite their lives and their stories and their ambitions really are but who find value in this knowledge, even a sense of strange comfort, because they know their condition is universal, is shared. You bring your little story to the workshop, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t; and then you’re gone, and it’s time for somebody else to have the floor.

Boyland

We were lying on the beach, reading our novels, surrounded by other parents reading their novels, all of us vaguely aware of our children’s whereabouts and happy with that vagueness. The paramount amenity at this resort on the Kona Coast of Hawaii’s Big Island, with its two modest swimming pools, its picturesquely turbid lagoon, its unremarkable dive shack stocked with snorkel gear and surf and boogie boards, its half-dozen sea kayaks, its quaint old badminton lawn and shuffleboard court — no TV, no phones, no arcade, no Eurofascist Club Med mass eurythmics, no swim-up bar, no waterslides, tightrope, parasailing, or Jet Skis — was a careful allowance for parental carelessness. Our little ones were nearby, audible, in sight if you looked up from your book but not underfoot, digging in the sand or eating it, flirting on sandpiper legs with the edges of the surf.

But the big ones — we had no idea. They were off together somewhere. Gangs of boys, gangs of girls, mixed groups and shifting constellations of duos and triads, solitary wanderers haunting the fringes, our children spent their days largely out of our sight, monitored deftly but loosely by the parental collective, reporting only for meals or to put on a rash guard, dwelling for one magic week in a near-simulacrum of the kind of world, populated, legislated, enchanted, and tormented by kids, in which we ourselves had spent our entire childhoods. The price in dollars for this brief taste of the freedom we otherwise routinely denied the children broke my heart almost as much as the alacrity with which they took to it. At some point my oldest daughter showed up to get more sunscreen or dump her goggles, and to tell us that some boys out at the farthest extreme of the lagoon had been amusing themselves by catching fish and then ripping them apart at the gills.

My wife was properly horrified and disgusted by this report, as I was; she was also shocked and outraged, reactions I did not share.

“What’s not to believe?” I said. “Boys. Animals. Cruelty.” I remarked that in the filing cabinet of my childhood, that was the label on one very long drawer.

“You go tell those boys, the next time you see them doing anything like that, honey,” my wife told our daughter, “you tell them hurting animals is how psychopaths get their start. Serial killers.”

“Yes,” I said. “Particularly if you’re trying to inspire more violence to fish.”

“They would love that,” agreed our older son, who had materialized from some corner of the resort, salt-streaked, muddy, shock-headed, and semi-lapsed himself into a state of happy nine-year-old barbarity. “They think serial killers are awesome.”

“You would never do anything like that, would you?” my wife asked him. “You would never hurt animals.”

Our son shook his head, looking offended by the question. He might have been lying, but my knowledge of his belief system, composed of equal parts off-kilter Far Side animal-centrism and a dark Captain Nemoesque contempt for humanity, inclined me to think he was telling the truth. Gigantic fish pulling the limbs from cruel little boys, that might be something you could get him to sign on for.

“Did you ever do stuff like that?” my wife asked me. “Hurt things and kill things when you were a boy?”

I had been anticipating this question, or rather, I had already begun to put it to myself, with an initial certainty that the answer must be no, since no such incident, with its attendant vibration of shame or remorse, came to mind. But now I gave it some proper thought, because I felt that those boys — nice enough kids, it had seemed to me, not sullen or loutish — had called into question not only the great lost freedom of childhood that I have spent so much time lamenting and evoking but, in my own absence of outrage or surprise at the incident, the morality, indeed the sanity, of my gender itself.

I riffled through the deck of my memories of idle afternoons long ago, hours spent in the woods behind our house, in the far reaches of a schoolyard deserted on a Sunday, along the streams and in the basements of Columbia, Maryland. As I shuffled memories, I stopped a moment at every spot of darkness and searched it for the presence of violence to animals. I came up with neighborhood dogs that I had feared or been bitten by — even today I could draw you a map of how to avoid them. A hamster my brother and I had surprised in the act of devouring its young. Something horrible that I came upon one day behind a veterinarian’s office, blind and bloody and unborn. Suicidal zebrafish that had leaped to their deaths behind the credenza in our living room on which their aquarium sat; it was nothing but popeye and ick and bedraggled floaters that came to mind when I thought about that tank. Birds that smashed against our back windows. Our miniature schnauzer gamely dragging himself across the floor, hind legs crushed by the car that had run him over. A dead bat cobwebbed like a dried leaf in a gauzy window curtain. The little red gifts left scattered around by neighborhood cats: half-eaten mice, gnawed moles, the heads of sparrows. It occurred to me that for all my liberty to wander as a child, without animals I would have known nothing of carnage or violent death. This seemed somehow like a strangely mixed blessing.

“I guess I killed innocent bugs,” I said. I was thinking of the cicada summer of 1970, when just walking down the street, you couldn’t help crushing dozens of the stupid things under the soles of your PF Flyers. We fed them to the local dog that would eat them. We braked our bicycles on patches of them, smearing grisly stripes across the sidewalk. We hit them with baseball bats and golf clubs. We burned them with the lenses of magnifying glasses. Now that I thought about it, I had set fire to plenty of grasshoppers that way, too, watching their outraged legs wriggle as a smoking hole dazzled like a gem embedded in their abdomens. “Maybe a lot of bugs. And I knew boys who would do worse.”

There were the boys who used to get together sometimes to fit out fish and frogs with firecrackers and lob those living grenades; there were the boys who went after sparrows and robins with BB guns, wounding far more than they mercifully killed. And laughing as the flustered bird lurched away.

“So you’re saying that kind of thing is normal,” my wife said. “Your attitude is just ‘Boys will be boys.’”

“I’m not saying it’s normal or acceptable. Yes, I do think boys will be boys. I guess I’d just never try to argue that’s a good thing.”

Boys will be boys, and men will be men, and killing fields are killing fields, and Rwanda is Rwanda, and Mountain Meadows is Mountain Meadows, and you gang us up and look the other way and some kind of bad activity might very well occur to us. Or it might not. One thing I never learned in all my years of meandering unsupervised through the world of boys was how to predict what they might do, singly or in groups, what startling kindness or humdrum cruelty they might choose to engage in. But I supposed it never hurt to have somebody around — maybe a bigmouthed bossy girl — to tell them they were a bunch of psycho losers.

I looked at my son, who was getting even less of an opportunity to contemplate this mystery than I had gotten, and then at my wife, who was waiting for me to answer for our crimes. I nodded and turned to my daughter.

“Next time,” I told her, “you just go ahead and get in there and tell those boys whatever you want.”

A Textbook Father

Some boys were playing in the hallway: eleven, twelve years old, pushing one another around in a wheeled desk chair. Shirttails untucked, yelling, taunting, acting like idiots. Taking turns being the fortunate fool in the chair who goes careening down the linoleum and crashes into the wall and falls out and gets hurt and fakes like he’s okay. They were loud, unruly, locked in to the clatter of the wheels, the delighted scream of the idiot at the moment of impact, the collective enterprise of wasting time with a hint of violence. They were, I believe, happy.

Then my daughter entered the scene, passing from one doorway to another across and down the hall. She was twelve then, going on thirteen, tall, leggy, not exactly graceful — no dancer — but with a distinct air of confidence in her gait, of knowing where she was going and how to get there. I’m not sure she even noticed the boys and their chair, perhaps because the instant she entered the hallway, they all fell completely silent and stood there gaping at her, motionless, sagging like the fingers of an empty glove. They weren’t having fun anymore. She had kicked their power cord right out of the wall just by walking past.

Nobody ogled or leered at her. There was no Tex Avery business with extruded eyeballs or the unspooled flapping window shades of their tongues. Nothing unseemly or overtly sexual at all, just a bunch of boys standing around blinking as this girl sauntered by. And yet the moment, which I happened to catch sight of through a doorway, made me really uncomfortable. For a while everything about my daughter’s entrance into puberty, her emerging new self and the concomitant interest of boys in her, discomfited me. And the part of it that made me squirm the most was how depressingly trite my discomfort was.

I am not a prude. I like sex; I respect sex; I have enjoyed sex, not without interruptions, losing streaks, and dry spells, for almost thirty years. I don’t care to give sex any more credit than it deserves, nor do I necessarily prefer it at any given moment of the day to drugs, rock and roll, watching The Wire, or the sight of a paper packet filled with well-salted pommes frites still hissing with oil from the fryer. I like the dirtiness of sex, the smell of it, the measured violence and tenderness. I like thinking about sex. I don’t begrudge sex or its indisputable pleasures to anyone in any variation that consenting partners can safely attempt or devise — not even to my children, when the time comes and they are of age, well informed, and emotionally ready. My wife and I vaccinated our daughter early against the human papilloma virus, a gesture that encompassed or presaged or at least sought to face up to the nature and the dangers of her eventual life as a sexual being. I believe that sexual freedom is good for all women, including my daughters, and good therefore also for the men who may one day be their partners; that sexual hypocrisy and repression are inherently evil; and that the protective ministrations and censoriousness of fathers are at best harmful to daughters and at worst the mark of the same kind of deep human ickiness that brought us the story of Lot and his daughters. And yet there I was, scowling at those boys in the hallway, feeling an obscure and altogether clichéd urge to go after them with a large mallet, because I didn’t like them looking at my daughter that way — or any way at all.

Was that the kind of father I had turned out to be? Standing on the front porch with my shotgun under one arm, cartoonishly interrogating my daughters’ cartoonish dates as they sat with a boxed cartoon corsage covering their cartoon boners? Fumbling with a show of jocular pedantry or saggy would-be hipness through every “little chat” with her about menarche or masturbation?

How embarrassing! and above all, in my lamentable sense of embarrassment over the whole business! when the first box of junior-size tampons made its appearance in the house — a bit prematurely, as it turned out — and in spite of my having been raised by a frank 1970s-style mother who saw to it that I understood clearly the laws and equipment of menstruation, and my having lived intimately with women and their periods since I was not quite eighteen years old, I suffered the tritest fatherly panic imaginable.

“Do these fucking things come with instruction books?” I cried to my wife. “Oh my God, what if you die the day before she gets her period?”

“Relax,” my wife said, putting her arm around my shoulder and adopting a textbook condescending-yet-patient wife cartoon tone. “It’s very simple.”

I have no idea what she said after that, because I was too busy pretending to pretend that I understood. I am sure it is very simple indeed, though there is still and I suppose there will always be a fundamental mystery inherent in the word applicator that I will never fully grasp. But brassieres — I’m sorry. Cup size, wires, padding, straps, clasps, the little flowers between the cups: You need a degree, a spec sheet. You need breasts. I don’t know what you need to truly understand brassieres, and what’s more, I don’t want to know. I’m sorry. Go ask your mother.

There you have it: the most flagrant cliché imaginable. As I utter it, I might as well reach for a trout lure, a socket wrench, the switch on my model train transformer. This may be the fundamental truth of parenthood: No matter how enlightened or well prepared you are by theory, principle, and the imperative not to repeat the mistakes of your own parents, you are no better a father or mother than the set of your own limitations permits you to be. And that set is your heritage, the pinched and helpless legacy of all the limited mothers and fathers whose fumblings, evasions, and shortcomings led, by some dubious accidental magic, to the production of you. It turns out there are only nine different ways of being a father, and eight of them are distinguishable from one another only by trained experts from Switzerland, and the ninth is exactly like the others, only more so. Sooner or later, you will discover which kind of father you are, and at that moment you will, with perfect horror, recognize the type. You are the kind of father who fakes it, who yells, who measures his children with greatest accuracy only against one another, who evades the uncomfortable and glosses over the painful and pads the historic records of his sorrows and accomplishments alike. You are the kind who teases and deceives and toys with his children and subjects them to displays of rich and manifold sarcasm when — as is always the case — sarcasm is the last thing they need. You are the kind of father who pretends knowledge he doesn’t possess, and imposes information with implacable gratuitousness, and teaches lessons at the moment when none can be absorbed, and is right, and has always been right, and always will be right until the end of time, and never more than immediately after he has been wrong. And when your daughter’s body begins to betray her, and her sky flickers in the distance with the heat lightning of sex, you clear your throat and stroke your chin whiskers and tell her to go ask her mother. You can’t help it — you’re a walking cliché.