On the advice of parents more experienced than myself, we had our son’s intelligence and personality tested so that when he enters kindergarten next August he will start school in the gifted kindgergarten class. I am told that if we were to let him start regular kindergarten and if the teacher were to observe that he seemed gifted, the school system would pay for the testing. However, if he were to be officially stamped gifted at that later time, he would not be admitted into the gifted program until first grade.  I was also assured by those same above mentioned men and women of experience that if he waited to begin the gifted program until first grade,  the opportunity for a happy and productive future for our son would already have passed. That window is evidently very small.

 So a few days before our appointment with the psychologist, I explained to our son that we were going to meet a nice woman who would talk to him about kindergarten. He told me unhesitatingly that he had no intention of going.  A man of his word, the morning of the test he restated his unflinching position. I managed to persuade him into the car for a grumpy ride. Fortunately, the lovely psychologist and her well-equipped toy room  helped alter his attitude  and he relaxed into a fun morning and good performance. 

 Now it is certified, and one of my worst nightmares has been realized: he is smarter than I am.

 But we already knew this. In fact, he told us so. The other day, my husband said something to him and he replied “I knew you were going to say that.” My husband asked how he knew and our son said,  pointing to his  noggin, “Super brain.”

We will only need to whip out the paperwork certifying his big brain if he attends public school. On the other hand, we also are facing another challenging issue. Both my husband and I grew up in  New York City and thus went to school with many fellow Jews. When the Christmas lights went up around town we knew enough other people just  like us to feel okay about being non-Christian.

Our son does not have another single Jewish child his age to play with on our block or anywhere in our neighborhood, as far as I can determine. He had been attending what we thought to be a fine pre-school until last December, when he came home one day and declared, “I want to be Christian.”

While all the neighborhood children were busy trimming their trees, he cried inconsolably at the news that tree-trimming would not be a featured entertainment at our house.

I immediately understood that it would be necessary to sell our son on Judiasm. So I began an arts-and-crafts project hitherto alien to me, the making and hanging of Chanukah decorations.

Based on personal experience, I can now report that if you want to start a religion,  all you need is colored paper, sparkles and glue. After several cut-out dreidls and Jewish stars, the boy was a convert.

By January he was a student at the local JCC preschool, also an excellent facility, but this one differing from the first school mostly in that its population is made up largely of Jewish children. Chanukah, Passover, Sukkot, Purim, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur quickly became  joyous focuses of his pride. My husband and I,  neither of whom have attended synagogue in many years,  sighed with relief.

Then our son went orthodox on us.

“We have to sleep in the sukkah,” my son informed me right before the start of Sukkot. Sukkot requires religious Jews to build huts in their backyards (or on their terraces?) commemorating the temporary dwellings that the fleeing Jews lived in during the forty post-Egypt years wandering the desert.

“Oh?” I said casually.

“Sleep and eat,” he informed me.

And thus phase two of Introductory Judaism has invaded our home.

When I grew up in New York I was surrounded by Jews. My parents had survived the Holocaust and most of their friends were Jewish. Many of our neighbors were Jewish, and many of the children at my school were Jewish. Every store in the area that displayed a Christmas tree also displayed a menorah. Some of them had only the menorah. There was no confusion, nor shame, about the fact that I was a Jew. We went to shul a few times a year. We had Rosh Hashanah dinners and Passover seders . But we were low-key Jews.  Cultural Jews. Jews who believed in the social and philosophical underpinnings of Judaism of the sort that led to Jewish leadership in the civil rights and feminism movements. We didn’t keep kosher, we drove the car and turned on the lights on the sabbath and holidays.  I never worshipped nor understood the need to worship god.  I felt he was as entitled to exist as I, but that he did not need to believe in me and that I did not need to believe in him.

So the question my husband and I now face is how to pass on this nonchalant variety of identified but not fanatical Judaism to our son.

Thus it was with alarm that we greeted news he recently had for us.

“Ha Shem made everything,” my son explained to me the other day, using the Hebrew word for god.

“Ha Shem?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. I was ready for a long discussion. I was prepared to debate the merits of his proclamation just as I’ve been prepared to explain how babies are born. But he always throws me off when it comes to the boiler plate  childhood  data base. He never asked how babies are born. He asked, “Was it hard to make me?”

When he put it that way, all the sage preparation flew out of my head. Which was better than the time he asked how babies get out of their mommies’ bellies. The question was easy but he asked it as we were about to board a flight for New York in a  crowded airport lounge within earshot of about forty adults, thirty-nine of whom I could hear snickering.

I hesitated, partly to consider the size of my audience and partly to be sure my reply would answer the exact question my son had posed and no other. While I was composing my reply, I heard a woman behind us say, “I can’t wait to hear this.”

I was as ready as one can be to  address the existence of god with my son.  But he was gone,  making engine noises and running out of the kitchen with several toy cars and trucks.  He had said all he wanted to about the almighty.

Nevertheless, I followed him, obsessed. “You know, not everyone agrees that there is such a thing as god,” I offered to a four-year-old. But he was on to the next matter, burying himself in pillows on the living room couch.

We thought a Jewish school might do what our shul-free, non-kosher home life could not - produce a small version of a proud, unashamed cultural Jew. That was the theory.  It seems that as a practical matter this may not be possible. It may be that he will either have to be Christian or a rabbi.

Esteem should be awarded only on evidence. I think Thorstein Veblen said that. Thorstein and I agree one hundred percent, but we comprise an increasingly shrinking minority. I mean, for the last thirty-five years or so every form of pop therapy – in complete misinterpretation of the works of J.D. Salinger, of Hermann Hesse, of all those popularizers of the thoughts of Buddha – has relentlessly instructed us that you can’t love anyone until you love yourself, that you’re not worthy of the love of others until you love yourself. People plop themselves into therapy, bury themselves in self-help books and blandly chant the jargon of the moment, all of it in proud announcement of a desire to forgive themselves, to embrace who they are, to love themselves. It is my experience that people who proclaim self-love not only don’t love themselves, but often have very good reason not to. Why embrace who you are if you are awful? Thus good old Thorstein. When you decide to love yourself based on no good reason, without having earned it, without having gone out into the world and accomplished something that merits one’s own admiration of oneself, then what the hell good is it? One of human nature’s greatest coping mechanisms is the ability to lie to oneself, which reminds me that my favorite New York Times front page headline of the decade is the one proclaiming that incompetent people don’t know they are incompetent. I extrapolate from this the obvious: that stupid people don’t know that they are stupid, talentless people think they are talented and monsters believe they are saints.

     The battle against self-love is what every decent philosophy, every effort to socialize man’s unruly nature – from the Ten Commandments to table manners – is all about. You don’t have to work at self-love. You’re born with it. Frankly the last person on earth I’d want to spend any time with is someone who loves himself. Loving yourself is not something that can be practiced at spare moments; it is a whole-time job. Unceasing vigilance is required. And what could be more horrifying, or boring, than that smug self-satisfaction of the self-loving?

On the other hand, the inevitable reward of behaving well is a flood of the esteem of those touched by good behavior. After years of bathing in the earned esteem of others, self-esteem naturally follows, but it follows, as Thorstein says, only on evidence.

     This is the story of a woman who spent many years longing for love. Her name is Ariane Viertel. Friends saw her unhappiness and advised her to get herself into therapy. But she would always laugh and say, “If you know a therapist who can introduce me to a great guy, I’ll go.” She knew what her problem was and it was simple. As a woman of thirty-eight, she’d accepted the statistic that she was, at that age, more likely to be hit by a truck than meet the love of her life, and so she had more or less given up on love. When the occasional wrong man presented himself she thought, why not? I’m not busy. Nothing else is coming along.

Mathematical logic dictates that in our lives we will encounter the wrong person many times more frequently than we will the right. Women in their early twenties know this. But, with the bravado of youth, a young woman will still date a good-looking lout, thinking she can turn him into a pillar of refinement. Or an amusing deceiver thinking she can convert him to monogamy. She accepts the challenge of a dense but handsome rich man, thinking she can explain Kant to him. By her thirties, of course, she learns to say no to anyone even remotely resembling such men. Still that doesn’t rule out all relationships. She figures Mr. Right has hooked up with someone else. Sex with Mr. Wrong is still sex, isn’t it?

     Ariane was an attractive woman. Well past her dewy youth, she was nevertheless endowed through genetic good luck with skin through which a youthful glow radiated. It’s not that she seemed so much younger than her actual age but that whatever her age, that age still looked luminously appealing. She had long dark wavy hair that bounced around her jaw line. She had a smile that, once seen, encouraged those around her to please her in the hope of seeing it again. Her friends always thought she’d be the first in the crowd to be scooped up by some dashing romantic. Yet now, here she was, alone and feeling certain she’d never find love. “Children? Ha!” she’d say. “I’m resigned to childlessness and to relationships that while stupid are at least mercifully short.” And most sadly: “I expected nothing.” Her friends, most of them married or in relationships of varying degrees of happiness, tried to persuade her from her gloom. One day she responded tearfully to her best friend’s suggestion that she not give up hope. “Maybe I’m just out of luck, maybe no one could love me,” she said. Her friend suggested jokingly that perhaps Ariane ought to take the anti-Veblein approach and declare her self-love.

     But it was a silly suggestion. Ariane was at a low point, having just squirmed out of an affair with a married man. To cure her blues, she decided to throw new stupidity after old, so she took a trip to Cannes that she couldn’t afford. She hoped to write about the film festival and thereby retroactively earn her airfare.

     To sae money, she stayed with an elderly, untalented painter who informed her within moments of crossing the threshold that there were “political” reasons her work had never been celebrated.

     “They were against me, those Frenchmen,” she cried the day Ariane met her. “I was a foreigner, and too well educated for those idiots.”

     Madame’s grudge had the freshness of a recent wound, although no critic of importance had bothered to seriously dismiss her work in years. As far as Ariane could tell, it hadn’t been since the nineteen-forties that anyone in the art world had even been aware she was still painting her melancholy florals. Her specialty was the clinical depiction of moribund blossoms fading dramatically in their vases, a Georgia O’Keefe in reverse. With the indignation of the wronged, Madame nurtured her grievance to the point that it greeted a stranger at the door of the two-bedroom apartment. Ariane was appropriately discomforted by her outrage.

     Madame prepared tea when Ariane arrived and as it steeped they toured the living room-studio, an oblong space with ceiling-high book cases across one wall, and another wall of windows that would have opened onto a view of the sea had they not been shuttered. Every flat surface supported one of her paintings. Canvases were stacked on the floor and hung edge to edge on the walls. She had placed several sturdy easels around the room with two or three dingy works balanced on each. Still others lay on a large, round dining table in the corner. The table had to be cleared before Madame could set down the tea tray.

  The flat was dingy, too. Not that Madame wasn’t a dutiful housekeeper. Yet somehow nothing seemed clean. A gloomy brown haze filtered in through cracks in the shutters. The thrilling Mediterranean light never spread its splendor in that room. In the semi-darkness a ochre cast seemed to waft up off the heavy mahogany furniture. Even the dust was yellowish and dim, and Madame’s skin must have absorbed the tint as well. She was small, round-shouldered and frail-looking, and she smoked unfiltered Gauloises one after the other, no doubt the reason she spoke in a sandy, grating buzz. Bent and tiny as she was, Madame could still grip Ariane by the wrist with surprising force and haul her across the room face an “historically” significant painting of hers – something from one of her important periods. And she could still pound on a table while excoriating the apelike intelligence of an art critic who had written unfavorably of her work many decades earlier.

     “Un imbecile,” she spat. The parallel vertical  grooves above her brow would deepen in contempt as she named the boorish critic who had the nerve to pronounce on the work of his better. As she spoke, her anger translated into facial spasms. Her long, bony nose bobbed in rhythm with her denunciations. Her mouth contorted into an exhibition of spleen.

     Mostly she spoke English to Ariane, an educated English delivered proudly between inhalations of cigarette smoke. Her accent reminded Ariane a little of her parents’ Russian friends, part of a circle of Eastern European Jews who had survived the war. Madame had learned English and French in childhood from a tutor, and had spoken both with her mother. She was Russian-born, of noble blood, she said, chased from her country by the Bolsheviks.

     Ariane was a freelancer who specialized in what newspapers and magazines generously refer to as “culture” – film, popular music, books. She’d written a couple of books on design and architecture and had published two novels to no particular critical acclaim or attention. The festival came at a good moment for her. She hadn’t been able to persuade any reputable magazine to finance the trip, but in the end did manage to sell a few pieces – the usual interviews with actors and directors. She had to bear the costs herself, and renting Madame’s room kept the expenses low. She had no special yen for further exposure to the excesses of world cinema than she’d already experienced in many previous interviews with actors and directors. The reason for the trip was solely to escape the cliché-ridden affair she’d been having with the married man.

     Ariane paid Madame for her entire stay the first day and they never spoke of money again. With early payment Ariane hoped to allay the possibility of Madame’s natural anxiety about a stranger’s reliability. Ariane already viewed herself as an interloper in the woman’s home and wanted to be as little bother as possible. Madame was a noblewoman, self-described, down on her luck it was clear, and although pride had not prevented her from letting a room, her position seemed to obviate dwelling on the mercenary nature of the relationship. They just pretended that Ariane was a friend in for a visit. Ariane was sympathetic. Madame reminded Ariane of her mother, Franka. Ariane’s mother was much prettier, but Madame’s regal bearing and adamance were reminiscent of her mother’s strength and emotional power. Ariane had found Madame’s apartment through one of her mother’s friends. After surviving the concentration camp, her parents made their way to France and lived in Paris for two years. Their ties to the Russian, Lithuanian and Polish communities remained strong well after they settled in New York in 1947. Ariane heard stories of the war regularly throughout her childhood and the story of her parents’ wartime escape, buying off concentration camp guards with hidden gold pieces was family legend. Once they were out, an anti-Nazi German gave Ariane’s father a gun for protection, but it was also part of the legend that her father would have been far less capable of shooting anyone, even someone threatening their lives, than her mother. They joked about it, but Ariane always thought the joke masked a truth she already understood – that her mother was the strong one. Whenever Ariane faced a wrenching decision, one in which a clear-cut easy way out was one alternative, she always asked herself what her mother would do and, inevitably, her strength would guide Ariane to making the more difficult choice. Franka never cared what other people thought. She followed the dictates of her own well-developed sense of morality and if you disagreed, the hell with you. And the amazing thing was that she managed to do this with the utmost charm. Even when she condemned her friends for their laziness or selfishness, they didn’t seem to mind. She was still the center of her social circle. Franka’s approval meant everything to her friends. Her friends relished her attention and even if it came in the form of disapproving scrutiny, it was attention nevertheless and that was good enough for them.

Franka’s dearest friend, Manya, still lived in Paris and a friend of a friend knew Madame and so the match was made. The connection was distant enough so that Ariane thought she could enforce a polite boundary between herself and Madame. She did not want their face-saving game to harness her into social slavery. She wasn’t there to hold a lonely old woman’s hand. She was paying for the room and owed Madame only routine courtesy. She didn’t make noise when she came in late at night. She cleaned the tub after bathing. She never left crumbs in the kitchen. She was the model guest.

     But Madame was of a different mind and she fastened on to Ariane whenever she was around. So early every morning there was a knock at the door. “Are you ready for tea?” Madame would ask from the other side of the barrier.

     Every morning tea and a croissant. No matter what Ariane did, tea and a croissant. She didn’t want tea and she didn’t want a croissant.

     “Thank you very much,” Ariane would say through the closed door, “but I’m rushing out.” Ariane didn’t want Madame waking up early just to serve her breakfast. And she didn’t want to chat, which was exactly what the delivery of tea and a croissant presaged. Madame would knock again that special way that well-trained employees of good hotels knock; a sound brimming with discretion and the acceptance of strangers’ idiosyncrasies. Just in the way she tapped patiently at the door, Ariane sensed a worldly tolerance for the assumed perversity of strangers. Madame was willing to wait while Ariane stashed her heroin needles and pornographic literature under the mattress.

     But after the second knock, Madame would wait no more. She’d open the door as if she’d been invited and set the tray on the table. “May I get you anything else?” she would ask, hovering, waiting for an invitation to join in for a morning conclave. Ariane was usually at this point wearing only underwear, rushing to make the first critics’ screening of the day. The first time, she grabbed a towel on the bed and held it to her breasts, hoping the delivery would be swift and Madame’s departure immediate. But there was Madame, unflappable and unmoving, almost continually taking a deep breath, chronically winded from the cigarettes, ready to erupt with anecdote. And so it went day after day.

     At eight a.m., half-dressed and hurrying, Ariane was unprepared to nod at Madame’s litany of misfortunes. But once every few days she would relent and let her talk, and sometimes even went on to relate tales of her own adventures: an excursion with a vulgar producer to Cap D’Antibes, drinks with an egomaniacal actor at the crowded Majestic bar, a ride to the Nice airport to settle airline ticket mix-ups accompanied by a married director who confided guiltily about his Cannes affair with an aspiring actress.

     “That’s nothing,” Madame’s gesture would announce. And she would proceed to tell of the actors she knew when the Majestic was still the Majestic and Cap D’Antibes was still Cap D’Antibes.

     “Ach! Elegance? What does anyone know of elegance anymore?” Her nose would flatten and bend itself over her sneering upper lip. She would glance theatrically toward the ceiling, her exasperation deepening the grooves above her nose. Once, with hands on her bumpy hips, she nodded to a black-and-white photograph of three men in tuxedoes. On the left was Cary Grant, a suggestion of mischief in his face. In the middle stood Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., tanned and gleaming, and on the other side, also brilliantined and handsome, a man Ariane didn’t recognize.

     “My husband,” Madame said, tapping the figure’s torso familiarly. “That was elegance.” She coughed in her smoky rasp as if settling a long court case with the inarguable simplicity of truth.

     “What did your husband do?” Ariane asked her.

     “We came here during the war,” she said, ignoring the question. They had left Paris to get away from the Nazis.

     “That must have been a frightening time,” Ariane ventured.

     “Frightening? Why? Why should I be frightened of those pigs? Barbarians. Filthy barbarians they were.” She frowned and then smiled, at a memory, it seemed. Her long, Gauloises-stained teeth were bared for a moment. “Barbarians.” Leaving Paris had evidently been more of an aesthetic than a moral issue.

     “He was a painter,” she said of her husband. She seemed to drift away from the conservation, as if talking to herself. “I think he was good,” she continued, “but the war…” More than that Ariane was unable to pry from her confidence and because prying elicited only information she didn’t much want to hear – lectures on elegance and its present-day paucity, screeds on the blindness and complacency of the art establishment and tirades on the relative meaninglessness of today’s institutions and practices as compared to those of Madame’s heyday – Ariane decided to forgo the effort. Steering Madame toward any area in which her speechifying did not fall into a recitation of old material was impossible. To have a real talk with her – to draw out some spontaneous tidbit, some response that was not just a portion of rehearsed anger – would have required an investment of time and patience that Ariane lacked.

     To avoid these awkward breakfasts in the semi-nude, Ariane began leaving the apartment earlier each morning. Madame tried to keep up at first, appearing with a tray as early as seven-thirty. Finally, Ariane found that if she left the house at seven-fifteen, she could beat Madame. She would walk the ten minutes to town in the misty morning. Often it was raining. That May was Cannes’ wettest and coldest in fifteen years. Ariane would arrive at a cafe on the Croisette as the proprietor was unrolling the awning and pulling chairs off the table tops to set them on the ground. When it wasn’t raining she would sit outside with a café au lait and the Herald Tribune until meeting some other festival-goer on his way to the eight-thirty screening. They’d walk to the Palais together. Unless she had to change into something formal for a party at night, Ariane wouldn’t return to the apartment until after one in the morning. Unfortunately, she also found herself engaging in a meaningless dalliance with an English screenwriter, a married one, just to prove that she hadn’t lost her capacity for stupid relationships. With all the screenings, meals, looking for gossip at the Majestic and attending parties thrown by the studios, she could have stayed out much later, but she was trying to reserve her strength.

     In the end she collapsed anyway. The weather and the long hours and losing an umbrella all did her in. The morning after she’d been soaked in a rainstorm, she woke up to the sound of the alarm clock and discovered that she was unable to slide her legs out of the bed and make for the café. Her throat ached. Her head pulsed as if every artery were beating time to a ghastly polka. Her ears burned. For all the heat at her head, she was shaking with chills. As the fever overtook her it became increasingly clear that she would not negotiate her way out of the apartment that day, or even the bed.

     “Are you there, my dear?” Ariane heard Madame ask later that morning through the closed door. Ariane replied hoarsely. Madame pushed the door open far enough to lean her head through and see Ariane shivering in the bed, the covers pulled to her chin.

     “Pauvre petite,” she murmured as she laid her flat, dry palm over Ariane’s forehead. Ariane could smell the turpentine on her fingers.

     “You are heated,” she said and abruptly left the room. In five minutes she returned with aspirins and water and an ice pack. Madame supported Ariane while she swallowed the pills and then arranged the ice on her brow. Madame straightened the blankets and lifted herself onto the high bed – a tiny leap was required – and her short legs dangled. She took Ariane’s hand between hers, which were cool and smooth, and began to talk.

     “Influenza.” She shook her small head, the forehead grooves pressed in sympathy. “When I was your age people died of it regularly. But you’ll be fine, my dear.” She patted Ariane’s hand and looked into her worried eyes. “She has me at last,” Ariane thought to herself.

     Yet once Ariane resigned herself to the symptoms – headache and chills and high fever – she experienced a child’s comfort of the sickbed, at least the late twentieth century child, to whom influenza wasn’t a death warrant. Except for the fact that Ariane was spending her long-dreamed-of trip to Cannes confined to a small bedroom, and that she would not be able to pay for the trip if she couldn’t write about it, and that she couldn’t write about it if she didn’t get out and see movies and interview filmmakers, Ariane felt inexplicably serene.

     Madame had a doctor in and he ordered bed rest, fluids and some French remedies that tasted awful and made Ariane groggier than she already was. Madame stayed with her all day for each of the six days it took for the fever to break. She fed her aspirins and soup she’d cooked herself and read aloud from Zola. She moved an easel into the room so she could work and watch Ariane at the same time. Ariane was too weak to sit up and see the painting she was dabbing at.  Ariane imagined it was another variation on her gloomy floral obsession but she liked the sound of the bristles crushing oil paint into the rough cotton. As a courtesy, Madame opened the window to dilute the Gauloises fumes. During the day Ariane had been leaving the shutters wide open so the room, unlike Madame’s living room-studio, was always glowing with the light from outdoors. Ariane worried that the painting might be ruined by the unfamiliar suffusion.

     But Madame seemed undisturbed. In fact, she seemed uncharacteristically happy. The most apparent symptom of her happiness was a relentless flow of chatter, even more hearty than usual. Whatever came to mind, she was ready to hold forth on it. Ariane was too tired to offer even the “uh-huh” of polite encouragement. Without interruption, Madame managed a stunning display of verbal stamina throughout Ariane’s convalescence.

     One afternoon, when the light in the room was dimming, Madame seemed to become more comfortable as the atmosphere took on her studio’s shadowy tinge. Ariane thought Madame might say something unrehearsed now, if asked the right question.

     “You loved your husband?”

     “Which one?”

     “How many were there?” Ariane asked, startled at the reply.

     “Two.”

     “The one in the picture. With Cary Grant.”

     “Ah, the first,” she said and nodded. She lighted a cigarette and blew the smoke out through her nose. “A snob. But a perfect snob. Like everything else he did, he was good at that, too. Francois was dashing. He looked well in a dinner jacket. And he liked my fancy background. But he wished that I would keep my opinions to myself. He came from a family with titles, too. French. It meant nothing to me but he thought it his most fascinating characteristic. I preferred his humor. He could be very amusing. And he was at ease among society. The parties he dragged us to, the people, they reminded me of my mother’s set in Russia. Not that I missed the ostentation of the aristocracy, but it was familiar. I had pleasant memories of my parents, and Francois’ friends brought me back to a time when I felt secure. My parents gave me a sense that we had a place in the world, that there were obligations and rules, but that there was also dignity and privilege and other rewards. I suppose you could say I married my mother.”

     Madame sighed. “Of course, Francois knew that I was a painter before we married, and that I would continue to paint whether we married or not. He would have preferred being married to a woman with money but no vocation. But he made his compromise when he asked me to marry him anyway. He knew my friends were bohemian and poor and that I spent most of the time I wasn’t painting sitting in cafes smoking and telling everyone what I thought, on whatever subject.” She looked at Ariane and laughed. “Some things don’t change, eh?” she said with a winking self-awareness Ariane hadn’t suspected. Before she could digest this Madame continued.

     “I was the only woman in a circle of male painters. Now I see that they looked at me as an amusement. I think if I hadn’t been attractive, they would never have put up with my ravings.” The news that Madame had been attractive stopped Ariane for a moment. She lost track of the narrative as she tried to construct in her imagination the youthful and sexually alluring version of the old woman before her.  Madame was describing her failing marriage.

     “Francois thought my openness unbecoming and soon after we married he stopped coming along to the café. He had women. I buried my resentment in my work. I pretended it didn’t matter. He was French. C’est normal. Then the Germans came. I couldn’t stand seeing the Nazis in Paris. It poisoned the city for me. I couldn’t enjoy myself there anymore. Friends told me they were relocating to the south. I told Francois that I was going whether he joined me or not. He came along.

     “Cannes was not so fashionable then. Like everything else, it goes in cycles. We felt we’d be back in Paris soon. The war would be over and life would return to normal. So we made ourselves comfortable. I found the painters’ café quickly. Francois was busy establishing himself with the ‘important’ people. I was working and meeting other artists. We led our own lives. Then I met Kolya.”

     Madame got up to put out her cigarette, then lighted another. She brought the ashtray to the bed with her and climbed up again. She straightened her dress and sucked in a deep draught of smoke.

     “He was Russian-born, but he’d been living in Poland and had run away in thirty-nine. When the Nazis invaded. I think he might have been a significant painter. But, really, how is one to know such a thing, whether someone is a great painter?” She shrugged. “All the ones I knew of were dead. Monet. Renoir. Kolya was alive, very alive.” Ariane would have expected envy, but there was awe in Madame’s voice. Then she shook her head. “It’s probably just my bias. Perhaps he wasn’t talented at all. Perhaps all he had was energy. And life.

     “I do know that once I saw his work I lost all illusions about my own.” Madame was looking off into an imaginary horizon in the darkened room. Then she looked at Ariane. “I’m no painter,” she said tapping the cigarette over the ashtray. “When I saw Kolya’s dedication I realized I had just been – what’s that great American word? – doodling, filling up space, wasting paint. Compared to him, all of us were. Which didn’t endear him to the others at the café. It was as if his colors came directly through his fingers. No brush, no paints – it was something biological. As if the colors were his bodily fluids emptying straight onto the canvas. I posed for him sometimes and he would capture me I don’t know how. It wasn’t that he created a photographic likeness. It was that he measured the intensity of the flame that burned inside every subject and then reproduced that exact level of energy with paint. I could sit there smiling my best smile, wearing my most dishonestly cheerful face and he would paint me woeful and fretting, all my anxiety and nightmares about the Gestapo coming in the middle of the night written on my face. My inner frenzy was there, like in Munch’s ‘Scream,’ like in Schiele’s watercolors. Paranoia.

     “The paintings had an integrity, a loyalty to the subject’s true appearance that no society painter, no paid painter, could ever afford. These portraits were unmistakably me, me in a panic, me unable to hide my worries from him. Aubrey Beardsley with his finger in a live outlet. That was Kolya.”

     “Why were you worried?”

     “Why?” She was surprised at the question. “Kolya was Jewish, of course.”

     Neither Ariane nor Madame spoke for a minute.

     Ariane hesitated but she was too curious to stop herself. “And what happened to Francois?”

     “Francois never lost his temper, a gentleman to the last. Like most gentlemen, he was well behaved and correct, but only at the surface. He denounced me. He called me a traitor to my class. ‘I cannot protect you if you insist upon putting us in jeopardy this way,’ he warned me. ‘You’ll have to face this alone.’ I learned that he was at least a man of his word. He took most of our money and disappeared. I heard later that he’d returned to Paris. The Nazis didn’t bother him. They were, after all, the new aristocracy. They considered themselves brethren.

     “I did see Francois again. He came to Cannes. One day I walked into my café and the place was filled with German officers. I wanted to leave but friends saw me and waved me over. I sat down with them and heard a familiar voice.

     “ ‘You’re looking very well.’” It was Francois. He was dressed beautifully, as usual.

     “ ‘What are you doing here?’” I asked him. I was surprised he would show his face.

     “ ‘I’m here with friends,’” he told me.

     “ ‘You look well yourself,’” I said. “ ‘I see our money has treated you well.’”

     “ ‘I can’t complain. Do you need a little?’”

     “ ‘And subtract from the lifestyle to which you’ve become accustomed?’”

     “He laughed. ‘Cherie, you don’t mind, do you? I needed something to set up in Paris again. I knew you wouldn’t want me living on the street.’”

     “ ‘Inconceivable.’”

     “ ‘What happened to that painter of yours?’”

     “I hesitated, wondering about his motives, but then maybe out of defiance, or maybe it was trust, I said, ‘We’re married.’

     “ ‘Really? How marvelous.’ I remember he arched his eyebrow. ‘Happy, I hope.’

     “ ‘Quite.’

     “This silenced Francois. Then he brightened and said, ‘Why don’t you join us for a drink?’ He indicated the table of Nazis in the corner. ‘Let’s have a toast for old time’s sake.’

     “ ‘No, thank you.’

     “ ‘Please.’

     “ ‘Francois you really don’t want to have a drink with me. I might inadvertently say the wrong thing in the wrong company. You know how I talk when I drink. It’s a war, you know. I don’t have to remind you, of all people, that one has to think of oneself.’

     “ ‘True.’

     “ ‘Go back to your friends.’

     “Francois nodded. He took my hand as if he were going to kiss it. Then he realized, I think, that I wouldn’t be impressed with his superficial chivalry and he just shook it rather high in the air.

     “I watched him move through the crowd. He sat with the German officers and immediately began to talk and laugh.

     “A few minutes later Kolya walked in. I took him rather violently by the arm and led him out before he could take off his coat.

     “I didn’t tell Francois that I’d had a child. But he must have heard about it somehow because after the war, when he was in Cannes again visiting, he asked me about my daughter.

     “ ‘I just want to help,’ he said. ‘You must need money now. I did well during the war. Anything you need. Please. I’d like to help.’

     “ ‘You want to help Kolya’s daughter with the money the Nazis helped you earn?’ I threw him out of the house.”

     “But didn’t you need the money?” Ariane asked. Madame ignored her again.

     “Kolya had figured it all out. He thought I’d be all right but Sylvie, our child, was in danger, being half-Jewish. He arranged for a couple living on a farm to take her. Brave little Sylvie. After the war ended I couldn’t find them. The farm had been abandoned. They must have moved somewhere better, safer…” Madame looked away and shook her head. “I never found her.”

     “I’m sorry,” Ariane said.

     “Kolya once told me that the bad times would pass and everyone who remembered how to laugh would be fine again, whole again. ‘Think how lucky we are,’ he said. ‘I have you forever. Even if we’re separated tomorrow, we’d still have each other forever, the way we have Sylvie.’ He did many paintings of Sylvie from memory after we placed her with the farmer. I have them somewhere.”

     Ariane still wanted to hear about Kolya, and to lift Madame from her mood.

     “Francois sounded as if he were at least trying to do the right thing by you,” Ariane offered.

     “Francois was always polite, always correct. But correct isn’t necessarily right. He simply did his duty by explaining the facts. Then he was gone. Kolya wasn’t so smooth. He loved to argue. The way he shouted may have been what drew me to him. That’s how he knew he was alive, I think. He had to hear himself. He had to make noise. He was never nasty or mean. He just liked to get people’s blood boiling.”

     “Play devil’s advocate,” Ariane said.

     “Yes, exactly. It took me years to see that he just enjoyed the art of argument. He’d say anything to get a disagreement going, to get people to take sides. He was an instigator.”

     “And you liked a good argument yourself.”

     Madame laughed. “Yes, we got on well. We had a tiny place facing the water. He’d paint as long as the light was good, with shutters thrown open. The air smelled of the paint and linseed oil and the sea.” Her voice was barely audible. She took a deep breath, as if the aromas she described were filling her lungs at that moment. The room had gone completely dark. She turned to Ariane and smiled. “Pauvre petite, you must be exhausted.” She reached over to straighten the pillows and push the hair off Ariane’s perspiring forehead.

     Madame slipped off the bed. “Time for more aspirin, I think. Maybe some soup and then sleep for you.” She left on her errand. The talk had distracted Ariane and she hadn’t noticed that the fever had risen. The headache, ever present, was now clanging in her skull. She was feeling dull-witted but conscious enough to realize that she’d lost her chance to ask what happened to Kolya. She feared the worst.

     Another few days passed before Ariane could get out of bed on her own. She had missed most of the festival. Her temperature dropped to normal finally, but she was still weak. Madame left her alone more often as her strength returned. Occasionally Ariane got up to wander around the apartment while Madame was on a marketing trip, and she’d summon the energy to make a cup of tea and trudge back to bed overcome with fatigue. As her head cleared it occurred to her that Madame’s absence from Ariane’s side might have had less to do with her returning health than with where in Madame’s story they’d left off. Madame, it seemed to Ariane, had deliberately avoided articulating his fate. The woman from whose chatter Ariane plotted to escape day after day now had Ariane entwined in the story of passion for a peculiarly wonderful man. A woman who seemed at first lost in a distant and irrelevant history had now forced Ariane to compare that vivid past with her own dead and silly present and Ariane longed to have lived Madame’s life rather than her own. She wanted to know about Kolya. She wanted to have known Kolya. “I want to have loved him and for him to have loved me,” she thought. “I want to have had his children, to have hidden him from the Nazis, maybe even to have lost him. I want to have loved him completely and to have known that even though we were separated, we would always have each other forever.”

     One afternoon while Madame was out shopping, Ariane shuffled into the living room to look for diversion. Her headache had gone and she thought she might be able to read one of the English books on Madame’s shelves. She was stopped by the photograph of Francois and Cary Grant and picked it up for closer examination. Ariane discovered that it had been resting against a large art book. Behind that was a cabinet and she opened the door. Inside were several small canvases, nudes. Ariane pulled one out carefully. The painting was dusty but she could make out that it was Madame. Madame as a slender young woman. She must have been in her thirties when it was painted, but she looked a girl, with small, high breasts and thin, forlorn arms. She sat in a chair, her legs crossed unself-consciously rather than seductively, as if she were wearing a blouse and skirt, sitting in a café and listening to a boring companion, rather than naked and posing for her lover. She held a cigarette and that hand rested on her thigh. The other was slung over the back of the chair. Her face was olive – suntanned and handsome. She gave the viewer only three-quarters of her face. In fact, she was looking away. But Kolya seemed to be able to see even the part of her face that she held back and took it into account. He added everything he knew about her to the painting; he had painted her inside-out. He had certainly caught what was ornery and contrary about her, what might have seemed irritating to the overly sensitive, to misunderstanders, to Francois perhaps. But to Kolya, she was obviously also fragile and dear. The years of dust couldn’t cover that. Even in the shuttered, darkened room just off the Mediterranean Sea, as a wave of exhaustion came over Ariane, she could see the colors and how true they were.

  Pessimism gets a bum rap. Optimism is nice, but the unchecked variety leads to bad government (“Mission accomplished!”); divorce (“Love conquers all.”); and dental problems (“One more little caramel won’t hurt you.”).  

  I am a child of Holocaust survivors, so pessimism comes naturally to me. You could call it an inherited trait. I still view my parents’ experiences in the Lithuanian ghetto with a child’s incomplete comprehension of horror, but I’m adult now and everywhere I look the irrational lives on. Why detest every Frenchman? Why trust Dick Cheney? Why did Hitler hate the Jews? Who knows. The irrationality is best summed up in a scene from the film “Ship of Fools.”

  A Jewish passenger politely listens to a hate-spewing German.    

  “The Jews are to blame for all society’s ills,” the German pronounces.  

  “Yes,” the Jew agrees. “The Jews and the bicycle riders.”  

  The German’s face goes blank.  

  “Why the bicycle riders?” he asks.  

  The Jew shrugs.

  “Why the Jews?”    

  So, I am never surprised by betrayal, by dishonesty, by selfishness, by greed, by corruption. As a pessimist, I expect the worst and I feel kind of sorry for anyone who doesn’t.  

  Pessimism prepared me perfectly for the election of George W. Bush in 2000. I believed that he was capable of stealing the election. I believed that he would bring his energy industry cronies to power and let them design self-serving policies. I believed that as a privileged frat boy he would care nothing for the poor, the disenfranchised and the weak. I believed that he would lie about his past (his military service), his intentions in Iraq (where does one begin?), that he would sanction dirty politics (the Swift Boaters, unethical Justice Department firings, sanctioning of torture, illegal wiretapping) and try to prove he was a better man than his father by sacrificing American lives to bring down his father’s bete noir Saddam Hussein.

    Before the 2004 election, a young Army veteran told me he would vote for the service-evading Bush to the military hero Kerry. He’d rather be led by a spoiled Old Boy than by an educated, intelligent man of the world. Since Leader of the Free World is a pretty tough job, I like to vote for some one I think has a good chance of being smarter than I. Clearly a number of people prefer to vote for someone they think they might enjoy having a beer with. I’m a pessimist so that doesn’t surprise me.  

  Abu Ghraib served as another reminder that even Americans can do terrible things during war, especially when ordered to by the top brass. The Valerie Plame case underscores the fallacy that bad guys get punished. Scooter Libby is bad, yes, but mostly a fall guy for Cheney, Karl Rove, Bush and the rest of the pack. Being responsible for outing a CIA agent seems more of an impeachable offense than engaging in extramarital oral sex. I know. Bill Clinton was impeached for lying. But let’s not forget that George Bush has been telling us that we’re making progress in Iraq for four years now. And everyone knows he makes it a practice to avoid testifying under oath.     

  A study on pessimism recently concluded that optimists generally do better in life because they have Many Little Things going for them. They have better relationships with friends and co-workers. Their family lives are more fulfilling. They live as if tomorrow will be better, and when it isn’t, they think the day after will be better. Apparently this does wonders for one’s cardio-vascular well being and inter-personal relations. Pessimists, on the other hand, have only One Big Thing going for them, the study determined: they’re usually right.  

  I am not a proselytizer. I have never felt the need to promote pessimism as a living philosophy, but today, with more George Bush ahead and people who do not believe in the separation of church and state looking for a candidate to back in 2008, I feel the time is ripe. Widespread pessimism would have saved us from Bush. Expecting the worst would have prepared Al Gore’s campaign for the illegal post-election Republican assault on the Florida vote counters and Florida Supreme Court, never mind the U.S. Supreme Court. When Bush was re-elected in 2004, I tied  to console myself in the likelihood that an administration as arrogant as his would be rife with scandal, embarrassment and revelations of fraud and corruption, and that if there were justice in the universe Bush would end up in prison. But then I remember that I’m a pessimist and as a rule I don’t really expect justice.     And now that Scooter Libby has been convicted and his 30-month sentence commuted to keep him from talking, and fired U.S. Attorneys have testified that they were pressured by ranking Republicans to harass innocent Democrats before election time, and the ethics-free Bush loyalist Alberto Gonzalez was forced to resign as Attorney General, and former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan is excoriating the Bush Administration for an economic policy he fostered, and thousands of troops are facing risk in Iraq and sub-par health care when they return, and the true nuclear threats – Iran and North Korea – are still there and still threatening us, and Bush has admitted that global warming might exist, and most of the world has lost faith in the fairness, goodness and probity of the United States, I feel bad. On the other hand, I do have that One Big Thing going for me. But there is no joy in it. 

  It looks like the U.S. automakers dodged another big fat legal bullet. On September 17, a federal court in San Francisco dismissed efforts by the state of California to sue the car companies for their role in global warming.  

   For years, Ford and General Motors chose to hawk gas-guzzling SUVs and trucks with names recalling the Wild West, continental expansion and the American spirit of adventure. Silverado, Mustang, Expedition, TrailBlazer, Bronco and Explorer catered to our nostalgia for simpler times, our need for clean, safe cars be damned.

   Year after year, the car companies lobbied the federal government to postpone mandated lower emissions, better gas mileage and improved safety. They claimed that the costly retooling required to produce efficient cars would reduce dividends to shareholders and ultimately undermine American markets. That’s not good for America, they cried, and when big corporations are not happy, and markets are not happy, rich contributors to campaigns are not happy, which means that senators, congressmen and presidents, who depend on contributions, don’t get elected to new terms. Hence the reluctance to act by our brave representatives in Washington.                                          

   The federal judge Martin J. Jenkins’s logic in dismissing the suit? He believes the issue is too complex for the courts. He believes that congressmen, senators and presidents ought to do something about this terrible problem. Hmmm.  

   Now the whole federal government, every last branch of it, is joining the car companies in what they do best: putting off the future.    

   The future has stubbornly arrived nevertheless. So, in the face of global warming and financial reversals, officers from Ford and General Motors reported plans not too long ago to address these setbacks with a series of dramatic measures, including cutting pension and health plans, downsizing the workforce, closing factories and designing new, more energy-efficient (and expensive) models in the effort to compete with Japanese and European manufacturers.   

   You may wonder what’s their hurry. But all I can think is tsk tsk, how short-sighted of The Big Two. Under this program, employee moral will plunge. And consumers will rebel as domestic cars inch their way up into the import price range. Who would buy a Buick for what a BMW might cost?  

   Wouldn’t it be more cost-effective and less disruptive to pour all available resources into just making up new names for their cars?    

   Instead of striving for what has eluded them for so long – making better, more fuel-efficient cars and streamlining operations – GM and Ford should immediately set their respective marketing gurus to correcting the most easily altered aspect of their recent failures: public perception. The effort should be designed to appeal to a post-midterm election reality-based cohort of shoppers eager to do business with what they perceive to be honest and well-intended car companies.  

   The re-namings could begin with cars and trucks known for getting fewest miles-per-gallon, failing crash tests, tipping over during normal maneuvers and tending to kill the passengers and drivers of smaller cars when involved with them in low-speed crashes.  

   Imagine the television commercial introducing (with deep-voiced authority) the new 2008 Apology from Ford, as well as the Cadillac Calamity, the Lincoln Lemon, the Mercury Malady, the Chevrolet Peril, the Buick Drain and the Ford Travesty. Other names can debut with the 2009 model year, including the Flub, the Bogus and the Fizzle.  

   Such startling candor, unprecedented in American commercial enterprise, will jump-start the American automobile industry, with salutary trickle-down reverberations for the steel, glass, plastic and advertising sectors as well. Let The Big Two automakers do their duty to their country by putting on an honest face. Perhaps actual honesty and good intentions will follow, but if the bottom line improves, no one in his right mind will expect it.

I don’t know why I am listed in Who’s Who in America. The editors there have every reason to wonder themselves. Thirteen years ago I assumed I was first included because they may have thought I was an up-and-coming young writer and Who’s Who wanted to be in at the ground level of my ascendancy. Perhaps my rise had been detected by the experienced professionals at the Marquis publishing group using some proprietary mathematical formula based on volume of published words, divided by something or other, under which I scarcely qualified. Or maybe it had to do with my feather-headed willingness to immediately send off a check for a substantial amount to secure my copy of the 1994 edition that might, perhaps, showcase my name.

   Early on, my skepticism was triggered regarding the good sense of the Who’s Who marketing department. Every year they’d ask me yet again if I wished to buy the latest edition, having forgotten that I’d already purchased my Who’s Who back when they first offered it at the special, low-low, 30-percent-off, two hundred-something dollar-honoree-only price. (Non-honorees can now pay $749 for this year’s “Classic” edition and $790 for the leather-bound.)

  Did they fear I’d lost track of the 4,141-page, two-volume doorstop? Or had they mistaken me for a reference library? A more worrisome thought: Do other honorees update every year?   

  Who’s Who publishes seventeen books, including Who’s Who in American Women, Who’s Who in the World, Who’s Who in the East, Who’s Who in the West and Who’s Who in American Engineering. A year or two into my run, other Whos got in touch inviting me to be similarly honored. I was honored, yes, but following Groucho’s logic, it occurred to me that I might possibly do better than to sign up with an organization eager to embrace the likes of me. I said yes to Who’s Who in American Women and Who’s Who in the World against my better judgment. But that’s as far as I was willing to go. You will not see me in Who’s Who in American Anything Else. And I will not be purchasing any more books, either.  When I want to see my name, I will make a trip to the local library. I do not have reinforced shelving and two hundred something bucks a pop is above my means. Perhaps I should send a note and remind them: I’m in for writing, not investment banking. 

When Who’s Who originally found me I was an obscure film critic writing for The San Francisco Examiner, an afternoon paper in a town that reads its newspaper in the morning hours of the day. Chances were good that if you knew me for my incisive criticism at that time, you were probably one of my editors.  (They were required to read me – it was in their job description.) How did Who know about me? Perhaps they’d gotten hold of some of my recent bookstore receipts and figured I was a good prospect for buying another book I didn’t need.

 When I was first invited, I sent back the Who’s Who’s form immediately and impatiently awaited judgment. I had earlier been a veteran news mangler and night rewrite man at The Chicago Sun-Times, a former feature writer at a small daily in Connecticut and a journalism school graduate. My most significant achievement at the time had been publication of a short story in the kind of magazine well stocked in beauty shops. It was a good bet that anyone who read it had recently had a haircut. I was the author of two novels taking up space in my desk drawer and several unproduced screenplays. In short, I felt as if I ought to have been further down the road of life. Then Who came along, patted me on the back and said, “You’re good enough. Good enough to be a Who.” I said, “Why, yes, I’m sure you must be right.”

   Some time after I was first listed, I had a screenplay produced. And then a novel published. Over the years, as requests to update my listing arrived in the mail I was eager to dash off descriptions of my latest accomplishments, telegraph style, and send them in. Who’s Who had stood by me and whispered encouragement while I had toiled in the shadows. With each addition to my bio I was justifying Who’s faith in me. I was living up to the Who mantle.  

  That’s what I had always thought. But recently, while cleaning the maple syrup off my four-year-old son’s hands, I counted how many years it had been since I’d had anything new to add to my bio. (Six.) And a new paradigm occurred to me and it is this: There are three tiers of Who-ness. Nobel Prize winners (you know their names), high-profile entrepreneurs (Bill Gates), politicos (Hillary Clinton), influential writers and artists (Joan Didion, Philip Roth, Art Spiegelman) and big name entertainers and sports icons (Tom Cruise and Roger Federer) are all shoe-ins and belong in the First Tier. Shaquille O’Neill does not have to update and return his listing every year. He will be included with or without his expressed cooperation. He has to be or Who’s Who has no credibility as an institutional reference staple.    The Second Tier includes many highly accomplished people who are not as well known outside of their fields. If you need to learn the birthplace of a living scientist, educator, publisher, character actor, business person or urban planner, you will probably find the information in a Who’s Who. 

   Then there is the Third Tier and that’s me. It is flattering to be asked your mother’s maiden name in the name of historical documentation. Who would not succumb to such a blandishment? I suspect that Second and Third Tier candidates account for a healthy portion of the sales of Who’s Whos to private individuals.  In a slow sales year, you, too, may find an invitation in your mailbox to be a Who.  

  Why am I still in? I suppose once you’ve done something, anything – even written a critically ignored novel and a critically abhorred movie – they hesitate to expunge you.  Space probably never becomes an issue as long as people like John Kenneth Galbraith reliably keep dying. He freed up enough space singlehandedly to accommodate four or five Third Tier entries. 

  In any case, the letters keep coming all through the year asking me to update my profile and resubmit it for consideration to be included again, and with them come the perquisites of the privileged. Generous discounts remain perpetually on offer. Had I ordered the 60^th Anniversary Who’s Who in America, I could have received a free 60^th Anniversary Certificate of Recognition with my purchase. And the Collection Catalogue offers deals on clocks, trophies, etched glass, plaques and key chains bearing my name and my position of honor. I have manage to maintain my resolve and resist. So far.   

   Like galbraith, when Who’s Who honorees die they are deleted from the world of the unforgiving present tense. If you are no longer an “is,” you are no longer in.  Some time in what I hope will be the distant future, I expect an invitation from the Marquis company’s most ghoulish venture, Who Was Who in America. On behalf of the self who will not be able to speak up and seize immortality, I hereby submit my bio for consideration. If elected, I will serve. And, if this will have any influence on the selection committee, let me add that I’m springing for the leather-bound.

   I used to be a writer. For more than twenty years, I negotiated the stress of deadlines, difficult bosses and office politics with good manners and restraint. I took myself to be accomplished, self-possessed and a pillar of composure under pressure.

  I didn’t know what pressure is.

  Now I stay home looking after our four-year-old. When asked if I work, I say, “Harder than I ever have in my life.” I haven’t slept since I was seven months pregnant. I cry at the drop of a sippy cup. At times I have lost my temper. Often I have lost my train of thought. My equilibrium? Out the window. How do I doubt my ability? Let me count the ways: as a parent, as a wife, as a human being.

  When my son was four-and-a-half months old and I was well into my forties, I dropped him on his head.

I immediately considered suicide. How could I live having caused him such pain? Who knows what damage I’d done? How could I go on, knowing that as his guardian and protector I couldn’t manage the simple act of keeping him in my arms? Would a younger woman have held on tighter?

   He turned out to be fine. I actually caught him just as he hit, softening the blow. (The reflexes were still good.) He was left with a small bump on the head, minimal tears and perhaps a few questions about the competence of the person in charge.

   I took solace in the knowledge that my husband had also been dropped on his head as a baby. I now think of this as the secret to his considerable charm. At least that’s what I plan to tell our son when he finds out what happened.

  But I was shaken. And this is why. After the birth of a child, your life is given over to the child’s care. You pour all your love into your baby and most other obligations and concerns fall away. In return for this sacrifice there is the joy of baby gurgles and smiles and kisses and snuggles and first steps and first words. He ate “strambled eggs” for breakfast. He wore “jHe wore”enamas” to bed and a “bathing soup” to the beach. Yes, the reward-to-work ratio is great, but if a formerly capable person can’t even hold her baby reliably in her arms, what magnitude of mistakes lie ahead? Drowning the kid in the bath? I tell you I was shaken.

  And I was tired. Exhaustion weakens your natural defenses, obliterates your good judgment and atomizes your patience. You are a disaster waiting to happen. And you don’t look so good, either.

  Not that I get a look at myself that often. Until my son was nearly three, I rarely had that kind of time. Leisurely self-examination is not possible with a baby in the house. When I say leisurely self-examination, I am taking literary license, because what I really mean is that there is no time for showering, tooth-brushing, tweezing or any of the other multi-step processes that distinguish man from the apes.

  People with nannies may not know what the rest of us are painfully aware of: that brushing one’s teeth, for example, is a complex and surprisingly time-consuming procedure, and that the needs of a small child will halt the progress between any two of the many steps required, and often derail the effort entirely. Does your three-year-old appear at the door of your bathroom covered with applesauce just after you have removed the cap from the toothpaste tube but before you have applied the toothpaste to the toothbrush? You’re too smart for that, right? So you keep the little one with you in the bathroom. But he is no fool, either. In two-and-a-half seconds he will drop your hairbrush in the toilet and then climb in after it just as you’ve applied shaving cream to one of your calves. (Note: Give up on leg-shaving. A. There are too many steps. B. Unlike the health problems that result from neglected dental hygiene, there is absolutely no reported risk associated with hairy legs.) 

    In the past, I could never understand how a man who shaves regularly, spending long minutes a day in front of the mirror lathering, scraping and inspecting his face, could leave the house with hairs hanging out of his nose. Wouldn’t one have to push them aside to make way for the razor?

  Today I have only sympathy for such distracted souls. When my son was three, I caught a reflection of myself in the microwave door and discovered on my own face an eyebrow hair that was four inches long. Four inches! The hope that I was the first known example of overnight super-accelerated hair production flashed through my mind and then vanished when I began breathing again. And with the oxygen came reality. I understood that a hair of mine had been rudely surging into the environment for a good sixteen weeks or so and I had failed to take note. On finding the hair, I reviewed the people I’d met during the previous four-month period and cringed. No one had said anything. Not one word. For all I remember (and memory is another casualty of raising a small child) some of them have dropped out of my circle forever, gossiping amongst themselves about my messy downward spiral.

  If I did have time to look in the mirror, I wouldn’t be able to see straight anyway. Some nights my son wakes twenty or thirty times before dawn. The first few times I fall back asleep. But after the tenth cry of “Mommy,” or “I want to eat a snake,” as he exclaimed recently, I find myself wide awake and staring at the glow of the digital clock. Not so long ago I must have dozed for a while because I suddenly sat up in bed atwitter remembering a dream that a thick, black seven-inch hair had erupted from my nose and was descending past the border of my lower lip. I frantically searched for scissors. As if to clarify the fact that this was a High Alert anxiety dream, the only tool I could find was a pair of giant gardening shears, the kind with the two-foot long handles. Carefully, oh so carefully, I inserted the large blades into the offending nostril, my left, I think, and with some effort, clipped the hair at its root. It sounded like a dry twig snapping. If I were a therapist I might diagnose this as the sound of a psyche cracking.

  You, too, may have heard that sound at places where mothers and children gather, at playgrounds, at schools, on front lawns, in backyards, at pools and gymnastics classes.  It is especially loud where the mothers are older, well-educated, career-oriented women who delayed marrying and having children. Supposedly, the happy tradeoff goes like this: in exchange for decrepitude and low energy, older parents offer children patience, calmness, wisdom and the benefit of our practical experience in the world and the workplace. My practical experience largely revolved around dealing with a series of promotion-obsessed newspaper editors. I learned to ignore their posturings most of the time and fight them when attacked. This is not a good way to raise children.

  You can ignore a self-absorbed middle manager. Children cannot be ignored unless you don’t mind cleaning poopie off the kitchen floor. You can silence a lazy colleague by cheerfully taking on the extra work he refused. But shaming a child of three will profit neither the child nor the parent unless you don’t mind the pitter-patter of vengeful little feet coming to get you.

  You think you’ve learned how things work after years of college, graduate school and real world experience. It turns out that where children are concerned you know nothing at all. In fact, for some privileged women the work experience may rob them of the one thing a mother must know: How to nurture. I’ve heard that some women conquer their workplaces using traditional mothering techniques – warmth and empathy – to cement important alliances. I’ve heard about them but I’ve never met one.

  In the old days, middle class and upper middle class young women went from the protection of their families straight into early marriage, pregnancy and child rearing. They brought with them child-like warmth and an ambition only to be good mothers and wives. Were they frustrated, bored and depressed when left alone with unreasonable screaming babies? Yes! But as Betty Friedan chronicled, they had known no other adult life and were unaware that frustration, boredom and depression were appropriate responses to their situation. They suffered in silence and did their best to impersonate loving mothers. Many of us were raised by women like that. And they did a surprisingly good job.

  But forty-year-old mid-level executives do not suffer in silence. I hear older mothers in the playground talk to their children as if the kids were slow-witted trainees from the marketing department.

  “I just told you six times to stop banging on the table,” I heard one woman say to a child who wasn’t old enough to understand the concept of “six.”

  Another one’s hesitant child needed Mommy’s hand to guide her on the scary monkey bars.

  “Mommy, help me,” she pleaded. 

  “I’ll show you once and then you have to do it yourself,” she told the kid firmly. I’m certain the mother thought she’d made a generous offer. But the child needed kisses and giggles and the courage to overcome her fears, not a lesson in the survival of the fittest.

  My son loves cars. Since he was two he has been naming the makes and models of every car we pass on the road. The interest has broadened into engines (“Look, a V6!”), reading the names of the roads we drive on, proposing alternate routes, describing traffic patterns, and now reading license plates and discussing the states they come from. We take a quick trip to the store and my son turns it into a graduate course in urban planning. But one day, after he asked, “How do you spell Cadillac?” for the forty-eighth time in a row, spelling it for the forty-eighth time seemed more than I could manage. Perhaps the girl on the monkey bars had been whining at her mother all day before I encountered them and the mother was actually handling her exasperation beautifully. I’ve had days like that, when my son has hit me, thrown things at me, run away, broken something I cherished, and I have uttered thoughtless, dispiriting reprimands that, upon seeing his face collapse in hurt and humiliation, I immediately wished I could retract. So I told my son, “I’ve run out of letters, sweetie. That happens sometimes. I can spell Cadillac one more time and that’s all for now.”

  Some things cannot be explained so easily. Recently an old friend died. My son was fond of her and when we explained what had happened, he repeated, “She died.”

  “Yes,” we said. He looked off into the distance. I imagined he was contemplating life’s mysteries.

  “When is she coming back?” he asked.

  Mortality is always on our minds. As my husband and I watch our son grow, we wonder how will he handle the inevitable loss of us. Of course, life is full of risk. Any parent of a small child could get hit by a bus. Young people get cancer, too.

  But these are rationalizations, which statisticians will dismiss as folly. My husband is a decade older than I. The actuarial tables predict for both of us an exit relatively early in our son’s life, and that leaves us brooding. How young will he be when we go? How can we make him strong and independent so he can withstand the sorrow that lies before him?

  I sat on the floor and said to our son, “She’s not coming back, sweetheart. When you die, you don’t come back.”

  I thought of the joy of meeting my husband ten years ago and knowing that he was the one for whom I’d waited all my life. And I thought of the six sublime years we spent together before our son arrived. Did I rob my husband of more years like that by asking him to have a child with me? He was already a father. I was the one who had never been a parent.

  “You don’t come back,” I said to our son. I felt a quick stab of pain, imagining my husband’s death.  

  My son was still thinking. I hesitated to tell him any more than he may have wanted to know, so I waited. And in those seconds, I drifted away and saw loss inexorably ahead of us, all around us. When I blinked away those troubling thoughts, he looked sad. I leaned over to hug him and tell him that we were sad, too. Then he said: “So who will get her car?”

  I must learn to read his face a bit more accurately, I thought. 

  “I don’t know.” I said. “There is a lot I don’t know.”

   And that, it seemed to me, was the lesson of the day. Clumsily, I strive to turn the unruly world into a place my son will view as clear and rational and amenable to strategies of the workplace, and ultimately the only thing that is really clear is that clumsiness opens the gate to a larger truth we all must accept and embrace: Sometimes you just don’t know the answer. Perhaps my son is starting to see this.

  He is also starting to fathom other people’s pain. The books tell you that children develop full blown empathy at around the age of four and right on schedule, my son is doing his part. When I spill the orange juice or burn the toast or drop the sugar all over the floor and tears of frustration burn my eyes, my son interrupts the self-pity. “It’s okay, Mommy,” he often says at such times. I take it as a universal offer of comfort from someone who seems to sense my need for reassurance. It’s as if he can see that I don’t know what I’m doing. When he says, “It’s okay, Mommy,” I think there really might be a chance that it is okay.

  I could say, “And that’s why I’m still here, plugging away,” but with children, there is no alternative. Whether my son were a good-hearted soul or the devil incarnate, I would still be trying to feed him and clothe him and teach him how to live in the world. Parents don’t really have a choice. You might as well love what you are doing.

  And most of the time I do. The trick is to survive the times you don’t. We recently endured a prolonged case of bedtime mutiny. Instead of bath, story, kisses and tucking in, for several weeks my son refused to undress, then began hitting us and running out of his room screaming. One night, my husband and I were catching our breath after such a bout.

  “He’s The Punisher,” my husband said. “He’s killing us.”

  “He never gives us a break,” I said.

  My husband shook his head. “We deserve better.”

  I thought about this and reviewed the evidence.

  “Apparently not,” I said.

  “Deserve” is a concept best left out of it, I think.

It is only the exceedingly long-term, grinding nature of the child-rearing project that persuades us that we are entitled to anything, like sleep or peace or obedience. By Year Three, you are wondering what you’ve done to merit such sustained and unremitting torture. You wonder this in a way that wouldn’t have occurred to you during the first six months of your child’s life.

  When our son was five months old, he was teething, and like all babies, often cranky. Daytime sleep had become unreliable. On one occasion, after a few hours of active wakefulness, he had slipped into pre-sleep irritability. He was spasmodically thrusting his fist into his mouth to relieve the teething pain. I gathered him up and placed him in his stroller (which we then kept in the living room!) hoping to rock him into a nap. I expected him to drop off without resistance. But as the rocking proceeded, his agitation rose and he began to cry. This was not a whimper, but rather a full-blown, my-intestines-are-twisting-into-a-Windsor-knot, breathless, ear piercing, strangled wailing. I held a pacifier in his mouth to calm him. He usually could sense the pacifier even when he was crying and close his hysterical mouth around it to drift into sleep. But this time he cried around it. So I took it out and lifted him into my arms, holding him to my chest and letting him rest his head on my shoulder.

  He continued to cry.

  I put him back in the stroller and rocked him some more.

  He continued to cry.

  I put a chilled teething donut on his gums.

  He continued to cry.

  After a half hour of fretting over his pain and watching his face go red and wrinkled, I lifted him out again and carried him downstairs to the kitchen with the intention of heating a bottle, resorting to formula as knockout agent.

  I wasn’t yet desperate. Desperate comes at four in the morning when you’ve been walking the child for two hours and nothing seems to abate the intensity of the screaming. I wasn’t desperate, but I did want to help him find respite, and the crying, I admit, was grating on what was left of my nerves. By now my husband and I had endured five months of sleep deprivation. We were weary from walking him through his fussiness. The teething added a good hour-and-a-half each evening of screaming to our menu and we’d just about had it. So as my son shrieked in my left ear, I walked down the stairs to the kitchen toward the bottle of formula to which I was attributing magical powers. My ear was hurting from the sound, and my neck was beginning to hurt, too. And then I heard something above the din. I couldn’t quite make it out at first. After a few seconds, it became clear that what I heard was laughter. And the laughter, it turned out, was coming from me. This was no forced social laugh, but more like an uncontrollable expression of resigned bemusement. The descent to the kitchen slowed as my laughter mounted, and it so thoroughly drowned out my son’s loud unhappiness that I didn’t realize until I got to the bottom step that the crying had ceased. 

  Even at that age, my son was already a great laugher. I’m sure he recognized what he heard and was probably plenty puzzled. I could feel him pull his head up off my shoulder. He turned to me. I turned to him. I was helplessly in hysterics, my face two inches from his. His look said, “What the hell?” But my laughter continued. And then, as if the whole teething business had just been an elaborate practical joke that he was finally admitting, he started to laugh, too.

  At that early stage of his life it would never have crossed my mind to think that listening to hours of screaming was too much to bear, that I deserved better. I expected to be tired. I expected teething and crying and spitting up. Also, my near-obliviousness to the strain was surely partially attributable to the high concentration of postpartum hormones pulsing through my system. If dealers sold baggies full of oxytocin on the street corner the world would be a better place.

  But today, three-and-a-half years later, when my son hits me, I feel betrayed, unfairly treated and outraged. Because the honeymoon is over, I must constantly remind myself of how it felt to be high on hormones and to try to reproduce that mood of acceptance at will. I look for moments when the love I feel for him fills me and I linger over them, hoping they can sustain me through the trying times.

  These days when my son wakes in the morning I take deep breaths of the warm fragrance he gives off, like bread just out of the oven. When he’s so uncharacteristically pliant, I cover him with kisses of gratitude.

  “Good morning, knees,” I say as I kiss them. “Good morning, elbows. Good morning, chin. Good morning, ears. Who has Daddy’s Museum Quality ears?” Sometimes I see him smile, and I move on. “Good morning, belly,” I say and I stick my face right in there. Once I get him laughing he stretches like a tired puppy, then stumbles out of bed and shuffles to the bathroom.  

  The other morning, after this routine, my son, now fully awake, threw his arms around me, held my face in his hands and smashed his mouth on mine for a big passionate kiss. I hadn’t yet had time to attempt even a single tooth-brushing step, which he quickly figured out.

  “You smell yucky,” he said.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  Worried he’d hurt my feelings, he patted my hand. “It’s okay, Mommy,” he said. “I still love you.”

  “And I love you,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “You do? That’s good.”

  “Mommys and Daddys are supposed to love their children.”

  “They are? Who told you that?”

  “I already knowded that myself.”

  As a rule, I disapprove of saying, “We must be doing something right.” It’s smug. It’s self-congratulatory. And it tempts the fates. But I’ve found over the last few years that it feels kind of good, every now and then, to think it secretly to yourself.