Like a King

When we discovered that the child we were going to have in Paris last fall would be a girl—we already have a boy—everybody told us that we had been blessed with the choix du roi, the king’s choice. “Why, it’s the choix du roi!” the technician said as she looked at the sonogram, more or less in the tone of the host on Jeopardy! announcing the Daily Double. “It’s the choix du roi!” said the woman in the two-hour photo place on the rue du Bac when we told her. “A little girl coming after a little boy?” said my friend Pascal, the philosopher, with evident pleasure. “Why, then, it’s the choix du roi!”

Martha was delighted to be having a girl, however the king felt about it. She had always wanted a son and a daughter, and as she only now explained to me, one of the reasons she had been so eager to leave New York four years earlier, just after the birth of our son, was that all her friends there who had two children had two boys, and she was starting to believe that two boys were just one of the things that happened to women in New York, “like high-intensity step classes and vanilla Edensoy,” as she put it. Also, she said, she was worried about having to succumb to the New York social law that compels you nowadays to name your sons exclusively after the men your grandfather used to take a shvitz with. In our New York circle of under-tens we already had, in addition to the requisite Maxes, a Harry, a Joe, a Sam, an Otto, and a Charlie—the whole senior staff of Benny’s Market: Lowest Prices in Town. “Even if I had had another boy, at least in Paris I wouldn’t have had to call him Moe,” she explained.

I was pleased by the news too, of course, but a little mystified by the expression. To be brutally frank, what mystified me was why a king would choose to have any girls at all. If I were a king, I would want only boys, so that the succession would never be challenged by the sinister uncle with a mustache lurking behind my throne. Or only girls and an immortality pill. What puzzled me even more was the way the phrase, though you heard it on Parisian lips, had a slightly disconcerting air of peasants-in-the-spring ecstasy about it, the kind of thing (“C’est le choix du roi!”) you would expect to hear set to a Trenet tune and sung by the villagers in a Pagnol film when the baker’s daughter gives birth to little Lisette.

I soon sensed, though, that while people meant it, they also didn’t mean it, that it was a thing you said both as a joke and not as a joke. After four years in Paris I have come to realize that this is where the true cultural differences reside: not in those famous moments when you think that a joke was meant straight (“My goodness, the dessert grand-mère is not made by Grandmother!”), or you misunderstand something that was meant straight as a joke (“The tête de veau is actually the head of a calf!”), but in those moments when you are confronted with something that is meant both as a joke and seriously. This zone of kidding overlaid with not kidding is one that we know at home. When a New Yorker passes out cigars in the office after the birth of his child, for instance, he is both making a joke about passing out cigars—with unspoken but quickly grasped reference to all the episodes of Bewitched and I Love Lucy in which Darrin or Desi or some other fifties-ish father passed out cigars—and sincerely celebrating the birth of his child. (The proof of this doubleness is that the cigars he passes out will actually be good to smoke, while mockery would make do with a bad or unsmokable cigar. Nobody tried to eat Warhol’s soups.)

 

In Paris, the obstetricians all wear black. When your wife goes to be examined, the doctor who comes out into the waiting room is not a smart Jewish girl in a lab coat, as in New York, but a man with a day’s growth of beard, who is wearing black jeans and a black silk shirt, like a character in a David Mamet play about Hollywood producers.

I first became aware of this when we went to get the first of many sonograms of the new baby. The sonogramist we had been sent to performs in a nineteenth-century apartment in the Sixth Arrondissement, with wainscoting and ceiling moldings and windows that open like doors. A curtain was drawn across one half of the living room, and couples sat on two sofas in the other half, turning the pages of Elle (Elle is a weekly in France) and waiting to be called.

After about ten minutes the curtain parted, and the sonogram specialist came into the room. He had on black jeans and a black silk shirt, open at the front and plunging down toward his navel, sleeves rolled up to the elbows. A day-old growth of beard covered his face. He smiled at us and asked us to come in. We sat down in front of a handsome Louis XV desk—the sonogram equipment was over in the other corner of the office—and he asked us when the baby had been conceived. My wife gave him the likely date.

“Was that at night or early the next day?” he asked. It took me a moment to realize that he was kidding, and then another moment to realize that he was not, and then still another moment—the crucial cultural gap moment—to realize that he was neither kidding nor not kidding. That is to say, he was kidding—he knew that it didn’t matter—but he was not kidding in the sense that he was genuinely interested, considered that it was part of his profession to view that precise moment of passion or lust with a special tenderness. The moment of conception, the sexual act, was, in his schema, not incidental information to be handled discreetly or pushed aside altogether, as American obstetricians do—all American “What to Expect” books begin with the test, not the act—but the prime moment, the hallowed moment, the first happy domino that, falling, caused all the other dominoes that had brought the three of us together to fall, and (his eyes implied) it was our special shared knowledge that that domino had not in fact fallen but had been nudged, deliberately, and by us. Then he asked Martha to get undressed. There was, to my surprise, no changing room or even a curtain, so she did, like that. (I was the only embarrassed person in the room.) The elaborate hospital rigmarole of American hygiene and American obstetrics—the white coats, the dressing rooms, the lab gowns—is dispensed with. They make no sense, since a pregnant woman is not only not sick but in a sense has doubled the sum of her health.

We looked at the baby on the sonar screen, as though she were a character in a Tom Clancy novel. “She’s pretty,” he said at last. Then we got a package of fifteen or so pictures of our daughter in embryo, full of allure, as the receptionist said. The pictures were stapled, in neat, ruffled rows, into a little wallet, with sans serif lowercase type, like an e. e. cummings poem.

“In New York the obstetricians all wear white, and they all have books out,” Martha said to me one afternoon. She had called up an obstetrician in New York that day, before her appointment with her French doctor. “She covered me with congratulations, and then she told me all these tests I ought to take. Week ten the CVS, then in week fourteen an early amnio, and then in weeks eighteen to twenty a targeted ultrasound to test for neural tube defects, and then I’m supposed to get genetic carrier blood tests for all these other things.”

“What did the French obstetrician say when you told her that?”

“She made that ‘oh’ face—you know, that lips-together, ‘How naïve can one be?’ face—said that it was far too dangerous to do the CVS, and then she prescribed a lot of drugs for pain. I’ve got antispasmodics, antinausea drugs, painkillers, and some other ones too. Then she told me I could drink red wine and absolutely not to eat any raw vegetables. She keeps asking me if I’ve had any salad. She says ‘salad’ the way the doctors in New York say ‘uninsured.’ ”

French doctors like to prescribe drugs as much as New York doctors like to publish books. I suppose that it fulfills a similar need for self-expression with a pen, without having to go to the trouble of having your photograph taken with a professional yet humane grin. You cannot go into a French doctor’s office for a cinder in your eye and emerge without a six-part prescription, made up of pills of different sizes to be taken at irregular intervals.

I wanted to meet Martha’s doctor, who would be delivering the baby while I “coached”—I am of the Phil Jackson school as a coach; you might not actually see me doing much, but I contribute a lot to the winning atmosphere—and so I accompanied her to the next appointment. We sat in the waiting room and read Elle some more. By now Martha was nervous. An American friend who lives in Normandy had gone into labor a few days before, only to find that all the anesthesiologists had gone out on strike that morning. She had delivered the baby, her second, without any epidural.

“I want to go to a place where the anesthesiologists are scabs,” Martha said. “Or nuns or something. I don’t want to go to a place where the man with the epidural is on a picket line.”

While we were in the waiting room, a man in black jeans and a black silk shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and with a Pat Riley hairstyle, peeked in and mischievously summoned one of the women in the waiting room.

“Who’s that?” I asked.

“The other obstetrician,” Martha said.

“Does he always dress like that?” I demanded.

“Oh, yes. He’s very nice. He examined me last time.”

Martha’s doctor was wearing black stretch slacks, a black tank top, and a handsome gold necklace. She was very exacting about appearances. “You have gained too much weight,” she said to Martha, who had in fact gained less than with her first pregnancy. “Start swimming, stop eating.” (Martha says that a friend who went for an appointment two months after the birth of her second baby was told by the same doctor, “You look terrible. And do something about your hair.”) We did another sonogram. “Look at her, she’s pretty,” the doctor said as we looked at the sonogram. “There’s her fille,” she said, pointing to the sex. Then she again counseled Martha to swim more and gave her a prescription for sleeping pills. We talked a bit about the approach of those hard, exhausting first weeks with a newborn. “Get a night nurse,” she advised. “Go out with your husband. Be happy again.”

In New York, in other words, pregnancy is a medical condition that, after proper care by people in white coats and a brief hospital stay, can have a “positive outcome.” In Paris it is something that has happened because of sex, which, with help and counsel, can end with your being set free to go out and have more sex. In New York pregnancy is a ward in the house of medicine; in Paris it is a chapter in a sentimental education, a strange consequence of the pleasures of the body.

In America, we have managed to sexualize everything—cars, refrigerators, computers, Congress—except the natural consequences of sex. Though it is de rigueur for every pregnant supermodel to have her picture taken when she is full-bellied, it is always the same picture. She covers her breasts, she is swaddled below in some way, and she looks off into the middle distance, not dreamily, as she might when wearing lingerie, but slightly anxiously, as though she could not remember if she had left her husband’s electric guitar turned on. The subject, the hidden subject, is not the apotheosis of sexuality but its transcendence into maternal instinct: babe into mother by way of baby.

In France, though, a pregnant woman is alive, since she has demonstrated both her availability and her fecundity: We Have a Winner. Though Lamaze method childbirth began here, it remains cultish and sectarian. Most women nurse for three months, no more. (It shrinks your breasts and gives you an uncomfortable accessory.) And when the anesthesiologists are not striking, they are, as our baby-sitter says, fully busy. (Two French friends of ours talk about natural childbirth: “What is the English for accouchement sans douleur?” one asks. “A lie,” the other answers.)

The prohibition on uncooked vegetables, by the way, turns out to have a solid scientific basis. Toxoplasmosis—a mild parasitic infection that is devastating to unborn children—though it’s rare in America (it’s that thing you can get from cat litter), is common in France. Red wine is recommended, in turn, because it is high in iron and acts as an effective antispasmodic.

 

By law a French woman who is going to have a baby is guaranteed—not merely allowed but pretty much compelled—to stay four or five nights in a clinic or a hospital. In New York, when our son, Luke, was born—in the Klingenstein Pavilion of Mount Sinai Hospital—we had two days to have the baby, bond, and get out. French law is specific and protective about the rights of pregnant women. If you are a salaried employee, you get six weeks of prenatal leave and ten weeks of paid leave after the baby is born. For a third child, you get eight weeks off and eighteen more, and if you have three at once, you get, in all, forty-six weeks of paid leave. (The leave is paid, through a complicated formula, by your employer and the state.) The law is as finely tuned as a viola d’amore. There is even a beautiful added remarque, right there on the government document: “Les artistes du spectacle, les mannequins des maisons de couture,” and others who do work that is plainly incompatible with the state of pregnancy (i.e., a bigger belly) are assured of paid leave after the twenty-first week. In France, Cindy and Paulina and the rest would not just be having their pictures taken. They would already be on the dole.

The system, Martha’s doctor observed once during a visit, is “royal for the users, good for the doctors, and expensive for the society.” There are many rational arguments to be made about whether or not the outcomes justify the expenditures, and in any case, the level of care that the French have insisted on may be unsustainable. But the people who are being treated “royally” are ordinary people—everybody. For many, perhaps most, French people, life at the end of the century in the American imperium may look a bit like a typical transatlantic flight, with the airless, roomless, comfortless coach packed as tightly as possible, so that the maximum dollars can be squeezed out of every seat, with a few rich people up front. I am American enough to understand that this is, so to speak, one of the prices of mass travel—that there is no such thing as a free lunch, or clinic—and yet have become French enough to feel, stubbornly, that legroom and a little air should not be luxuries for the rich and that in a prosperous society all pregnant women should have three sonograms and four nights in a hospital, if they want to. It doesn’t seem particularly royal to have four nights in a clinic when you have a baby or aristocratically spoiled to think that a woman should keep her job and have some paid leave afterward, even sixteen weeks, if she happens to be a mannequin in an haute couture house. All human desires short of simple survival are luxurious, and a mother’s desire to have a slightly queenly experience of childbirth—a lying in rather than a pushing out and a going home—seems as well worth paying for as a tobacco subsidy or another tank.

 

In preparation for our own four-night stay we had first to search for the right clinic. Friends recommended two: the Clinique Sainte-Isabelle, in the leafy suburb of Neuilly, and the Clinique Belvedere, in Boulogne-Billancourt. We went to tour them. Both clinics had a pastoral, flower-bed, medical but not quite hospital feel, like the sanitarium to which they pack off Nicole in Tender Is the Night. I liked the Belvedere best. The rooms there had a nice faded white and pale blue look, like the room in Madeline where she goes to have her appendix taken out and sees the crack in the ceiling that has a habit of sometimes looking like a rabbit. The cracks in the ceiling at the Belvedere were expressive too, and for a premium you could have a room with French doors leading out onto the garden. (The ordinary rooms were less grand, though they mostly had garden views too.) But what I really liked about the place were the clippings in the formal salon—the waiting room—downstairs, which was filled with dusty silk roses and blue and gold Louis XVI furniture. The clippings chronicled the birth of minor nobility in the halls of the Belvedere. A Bonapartist pretender had been born there, I remember, and also I think a prince of Yugoslavia. I liked the kingly company, particularly since it was such cheesy kingly company.

Martha, though, as we toured the clinics, kept asking gentle, pointed questions about labor relations with the anesthesiologists. Now, the anesthesiologists here—were they unionized? Did they have enough vacation time? Would the clinic manager say that they were happy with their working conditions? How long had it been since they signed a contract? Were there any, well, radicals among them, the kind of ex-Trotskyite soixante-huitards who might suddenly call for mass action by the workers? Eventually, we settled on the Clinique Sainte-Isabelle, which seemed to be the sensible, primly bourgeois choice of all our friends and which had a couple of full-time anesthesiologists on call, neither of whom looked like a sansculotte.

Everything was going along fine, in fact, until our meeting with the sage-femme, the wise woman, or, in American, the midwife. She was in yet another of the suburban clinics, an odd Jacques Tati modern place. This meeting was brisk, and it concentrated on two essential points: breathing and lying. The breathing bit we had heard about before—you are supposed to breathe from the diaphragm—but she emphasized that it was just as important, for a happy birth, to remember never to tell a taxi driver that you are in labor. Whatever you do, she said, don’t say that you’re in labor, or might be in labor, because no taxi driver in Paris will take a pregnant woman to her clinic, for fear of her having the baby in his car. (You can’t call an ambulance because an ambulance won’t go over the city line, and our clinic was out in Neuilly.)

Then how were we going to get to the clinic? Martha asked. (We don’t have a car.) It’s no problem, I interrupted, we’ll simply walk over to the taxi stand. (You can’t call a taxi, because there is a stand right across the street from our apartment.)

“I won’t be able to stroll across the street and stand in line if I’m in labor,” she objected. “I’ll wait in the courtyard. Just get him to do the demi-tour.”

At these words my heart was stricken. Demi-tour means literally a U-turn, but in Paris it is also a half-metaphysical possibility that exists on the boulevard Saint-Germain just across the street from our apartment building. The boulevard itself runs one-way, from east to west. There is, however, a narrow lane carved out on it, for buses and taxis, that runs the other way, toward the place de la Concorde and the quai d’Orsay and, eventually, if you turn right over a bridge, toward Neuilly and the clinic too. Leading off this lane, at a single light about a hundred feet from our building, there is a small, discreet curved arrow marked on the asphalt. This arrow means that a taxicab—and only a taxicab—can make a U-turn there and go the other way, with the rest of the traffic. In principle, I could get a cab going against the traffic, have him do the demi-tour, pick up my pregnant wife, and then go back against the traffic. The trouble is that, though I have sometimes succeeded in persuading taxi drivers, when we arrive from the airport, to make the demi-tour, I have just as often failed. “It’s impossible,” the cabbie will tell you, when you ask him to do it.

“No, there is an arrow printed on the pavement that advertises the possibility of this maneuver,” I will say. (When I’m under stress, my French becomes very abstract.)

“I’ve been driving a taxi for twenty years, and it doesn’t exist,” the cabbie will say. Then you either give up or get hot under the collar, and neither approach helps.

If I asked a Paris cabdriver to attempt the demi-tour at, say, five in the morning, to pick up a very pregnant-looking woman, he would know that the only reason was that she was in labor, and to the insult of being instructed would come the injury of being asked to ruin his cab.

For the next few weeks I became obsessed by the logic and strategies of the demi-tour. What if I couldn’t pull it off? The only thing to do was to rehearse, just as we had done in New York in the Lamaze class. So I began walking over to the taxi station at all hours of the day and night, getting in a cab, asking the driver to make the demi-tour, and then going, well, someplace or other. Then I walked home. Sometimes the driver made the demi-tour, and sometimes he didn’t. I was determined to keep practicing, until it felt as natural as breathing.

We still hadn’t got to the bottom of the whole choix du roi thing. Martha had decided to give in to the obstetrician’s insistence that she start swimming, and one day, with Luke, we got into a cab to go to the pool. The taxi driver was wearing a short-sleeved shirt, and had gray hair and a lot of metal teeth. Suddenly he chuckled and said, of Luke, “Why, he speaks so well. Tell me, is it a little sister or a brother?” A sister, we said, and I grimaced and tightened inside as I prepared myself for the response, which, of course, came on cue. “Ah,” he said, slapping the steering wheel. “C’est le choix du roi!”

I was so fed up that I said, “Please explain it to me.” It was an ironic, rhetorical question. But he didn’t miss a beat.

“I will be happy to explain it,” he said, and he actually pulled over to the curb, near the Hôtel de Crillon, so that he could speak in peace. “In Latin countries we have what we call Salic law, which means that only your son can inherit the throne. You Anglo-Saxons, you don’t follow Salic law.” I let the Anglo-Saxon thing go by. “For your Anglo-Saxon royal families, it doesn’t matter if the king has a nana or a mec.” A nana is a doll, and a mec is a guy. “But you see, a French king, under Salic law, had to consolidate his hold on the throne by having a boy. And he had to have a girl, so that she could be offered in marriage to another king, and in this way the royal possessions would be expanded, since the daughter’s son would be a king too. He,” he said, gesturing toward Luke in the backseat, “is your strong piece, to be kept in reserve, while she”—he gestured toward Martha’s belly—“is your pawn to build your empire. That’s why it’s the king’s choice: first a boy to hold the throne, then a girl to get another. Tendresse has nothing to do with it. That is why it is the choix du roi.

“It is very odd,” he went on expansively, “because in the Hundred Years’ War the king of England, as duc de Guyenne, a title he had inherited from his grandfather, was subject to Salic law too. The story of how this worked itself out in the making of the two monarchies is a passionately interesting piece of history. I recommend the series Les Rois Maudits [the damned or cursed kings], which is a fascinating study of this history, particularly of the acts of John the Good and what he did as an act of policy to accommodate the Salic principle. The books are by Maurice Druon, of the Académie Française, and I heartily recommend them. Passionately interesting.”

We sat in stunned silence.

“Ask him does he do demi-tours,” said Martha.

 

“You’re wearing stripes?” she asked. I had put on a striped shirt a few minutes before, in the excitement, but I quickly changed it. I put on a suit and tie, in fact—a nice maroon cotton number—thinking that though my New York child had been born with me watching in jeans and a collarless shirt, my French kid ought to see a dad who had a touch more finish.

The drama had begun a few hours earlier, in the middle of the night, and now it was five o’clock and we were on our way to the clinic. At five-thirty, with a baby-sitter for Luke and a suitcase in hand, we were out on the boulevard. I walked to the curb, held my breath, saw that there were cabs at the taxi stand, and, head down, told Martha to wait where she was while I started across the street, preparing to ask a taxi driver to make the demi-tour, my moment come at last.

Far down the boulevard, a single cab with a firelight light appeared. Martha stepped out into the street, just as though it were five-thirty in the evening on Sixth Avenue, got her right hand up in that weird New York Nazi taxi salute, and cried, “Taxi!” The guy came skidding to a stop. She got in, and I followed.

“Twenty-four boulevard du Château in Neuilly,” I commanded, my voice pitched a little too high (as it also tends to get in French). “Just cross the street and make the demi-tour,” I added fairly casually, and docilely, at five-thirty in the morning, he swung the cab over to the taxi lane, on other side of the street, and did a full U-turn. He flew along the boulevard. I took the hand of my queen.

“You’ve got him going the wrong way,” she whispered.

He was too. I waited a few blocks and then told him that I had made a mistake, could he turn around and go the other way? He shrugged and did.

When we got to the clinic, it was shut tight, no lights on at all. The advantages of a big hospital up on Madison Avenue became a little clearer. No one was answering the door, a thing I doubt happens much at Mount Sinai. We banged and cried out, “Allô! Is anybody there?” Finally, an incredibly weary-looking sage-femme—not our own—wearing sweater and slippers, sighed, let us in, hooked Martha up to an IV, and asked to see our papers. She shuffled through them.

“Where is your blood test for the dossier?” she asked at last.

“The doctor has it,” I said. “She’ll be here soon.”

“That the doctor has it is of no consequence,” the nurse said. “If your wife wishes to have an epidural, she must have that paper.”

“It’s all the way back home,” I protested, but of course, nothing doing. It looked as though Martha’s epidural, having escaped French syndicalism, was about to be done in by French bureaucracy. Having lived in France long enough to know there was no choice, I found another taxi, rushed all the way home, ran upstairs, tore open the filing cabinet, found the paper, and then took a taxi back, setting some kind of land speed record for trips from central Paris to Neuilly. The sage-femme slipped the paper into the dossier, yawned, put the dossier down on a radiator, and nobody ever looked at it or referred to it again.

The labor got complicated, for various reasons—basically the baby at the last moment decided to turn sideways—and Martha’s doctor, acting with the quiet sureness that is the other side of Parisian insouciance, did an emergency cesarean. It turned out that behind a small, quaint-looking white door down in the basement there was a bloc—a warren of blindingly white-lit, state-of-the-art operating and recovery rooms. They hadn’t shown it to us when we toured the clinic, of course. It seemed very French, the nuclear power plant hidden in the bocage.

The baby came out mad, yelling at the top of her lungs. In New York the nurses had snatched the baby and taken him off to be washed behind a big glass nursery window and then had dressed him in prison garb, the same white nightshirt and cap that the hundred other babies in the nursery had on. (The next day there was also an elaborate maximum security procedure of reading off the bracelet numbers of mother and child whenever either one wanted to nurse.) Here, after the sage-femme and I had given her a bath, and the sage-femme had taped her umbilical remnant, the sage-femme turned to me.

“Where are her clothes?” she asked. I said I didn’t know, upstairs in the suitcase, I guessed, and she said, “You’d better get them,” so I ran up, and came back down to the bloc with the white onesie and a lovely white-and-pink-trimmed baby-style cat suit, which her mother had bought at Bonpoint a few days before. All by myself I carefully dressed the five-minute-old squalling newborn and took her back to her mother, in the recovery room. A day later I would walk the six blocks to the mairie, the city hall, of Neuilly-sur-Seine and register her birth. The New York birth certificate had been a fill-in-the-blanks, choose-one-box business, which we had filled in on our way out of the hospital. The French birth certificate was like the first paragraph of a nineteenth-century novel, with the baby’s parents’ names, their occupations, the years of their births and of their emigration, their residence, and her number, baby number 2365 born in Neuilly in 1999. (It’s got a big hospital too.) After that, of course, would come the weeks of exhaustion and 3:00 A.M. feedings, which are remarkably alike from place to place.

But just then, looking at the sleeping mom and the tiny newborn in her arms, I had a genuine moment of what I can only call revelation, religious vision. When people talk about what it is to have a baby, they usually talk about starting over, a clean slate, endless possibility, a new beginning, but I saw that that is not it at all. A birth is not a rebirth. It’s a weighty event. A baby is an absolute object of nature and an absolute subject of civilization, screaming in her new Bonpoint jumper. Life is nothing but an unchanging sea of nature, the same endless and undifferentiating human wave of lust and pain, and is still subject to a set of tiny cultural articulations and antinomies and dualities and distinctions and hair-splittings so fine that they produce, in the end, this single American baby lying in a French nursery in her own fine new clothes, sipping her sugar bottle. In a telescopic universe, we choose to see microscopically, and the blessing is that what we see is not an illusion but what is really there: a singularity in the cosmos, another baby born in a Paris suburb. The universe is kidding, and the universe is not kidding. The world is a meaningless place, and we are weird, replicating mammals on its surface, yet the whole purpose of the universe since it began was, in a way, to produce this baby, who is the tiny end point of a funnel that goes back to the beginning of time, a singularity that history was pointing toward from the start. That history didn’t know it was pointing toward Olivia—and, of course, toward Salome over in the other corner of the nursery and little François just arrived, not to mention Max and Otto and possibly even Moe, just now checking in at Mount Sinai—doesn’t change the fact that it was. We didn’t know we were pointing to her either, until she got here. The universe doesn’t need a purpose if life goes on. You sink back and hear the nurse cooing in French to the mother and child (“Ah, calme-toi, ma biche, ma biche,” she says. “Be calm, my doe, my doe,” but which one is she talking to?) and feel as completely useless as any other male animal after a birth and, at the same time, somehow serenely powerful, beyond care or criticism, since you have taken part in the only really majestic choice we get to make in life, which is to continue it.