At one time there was a pair of hooks on the back of the bathroom door from which one could hang a couple of towels, but people used the towels as vines, webbing, and rope for games of Tarzan, Spider-Man, and Look! I’m a Dead Guy That Hung Themself, and now, to serve four children, there remained one wall-mounted towel rack with only two bars. This situation encouraged the general tendency among the children to leave their soggy bath towels in Noguchi-like arrangements on the floor. The parents allocated resources for a pilot program of nag-based maintenance, targeted yelling, and regular exercises in stumbling over damp bath towels in dark bedrooms, but when emotional funding at last ran out, it became apparent that someone would have to put up a second towel rack. Responsibility for this task logically fell to the person who knew, kind of, how to use an electric drill.

You should have seen me. I had my cordless Makita in its blue high-impact plastic case. I had a ratcheting screwdriver, a nice Sears Craftsman hammer, a mechanical pencil with a good eraser, and (that most beautifully named of all tools) a spirit level. I sat down on the tile floor of the bathroom with the new chrome towel rack from Restoration Hardware and its gnomic instruction sheet, and I ran the fingers of one hand across the designated stretch of beadboard while sagely stroking my whiskers with the fingers of the other. I strongly suspect that I may well have looked as if I knew what I was doing.

I managed to sustain the appearance of competence over nearly the entire course of the next three hours, except for the painful minute that followed my dropping one of the metal towel bars onto my right thumb, behind whose nail, like a ghost on an old television screen, a grayish-blue blotch immediately made manifest. But from the moment I began to trace with my pencil the prospective outline of one of the faceplates against the beadboard until the moment when, holding my breath, I insinuated two ominously heavy towels into the works of the now-mounted towel rack, I was expecting, at every instant, disaster: molly bolts sliding with a creak of splintering wood from their holes, nickel-plated towel bars clanging against the floor.

I knew how to use my tools, more or less. I understood the rudimentary physics of tension and load that were supposed to hold the rack together and keep it fixed to the wall. And yet on both the deepest and the most practical levels, I had no reason to believe, no evidence from prior experience of myself, physics, or life itself, that I knew how or would be able to pull off the job. In fact, I had encountered a certain amount of tragedy in my dealings with molly bolts over the years.

“You’re going to put that up?” my wife had asked me when I brought the rack home from the store. She didn’t sound dubious so much as surprised, as if I were also proposing to weave a new set of bath towels from cotton I had grown and harvested myself.

“Duh,” I said coolly. “No biggie.”

This is an essential element of the business of being a man: to flood everyone around you in a great radiant arc of bullshit, one whose source and object of greatest intensity is yourself. To behave as if you have everything firmly under control even when you have just sailed your boat over the falls. “To keep your head,” wrote Rudyard Kipling in his classic poem “If,” which articulated the code of high-Victorian masculinity in whose fragmentary shadow American men still come of age, “when all about you are losing theirs”; but in reality, the trick of being a man is to give the appearance of keeping your head when, deep inside, the truest part of you is crying out, Oh, shit!

Perhaps in the end there is little difference between keeping one’s head and appearing to do so; perhaps the effort required to feign unconcern and control over a situation itself imparts a measure of control. If so, then the essence of traditional male virtue lies in imposture, in an ongoing act of dissimulation—fronting—which hardly conforms to the classic Kipling model of square-dealing candor.

I have no doubt that the male impulse to downplay his own lack of fitness for a job, to refuse to acknowledge his inadequacy, insufficiency, or lack of preparation, has been and continues to be responsible for a large share of the world’s woes, in the form of the accidents, errors, and calamities that result from specific or overarching acts of faking it, a grim encyclopedia of which the G. W. Bush administration readily affords. There is also the more subtle damage that is done repeatedly to boys who grow up learning from their fathers and the men around them the tragic lesson that failure is not a human constant but a kind of aberration of gender, a flaw in a man, to be concealed.

Men’s refusal to stop and ask for directions, a foundational cliché of women’s criticism, analysis, and stand-up mockery of male behavior, is a perfect example of this tendency to put up a front, in that it views as aberrant a condition—being lost—that is ineluctable, a given of human existence. We are born lost and spend vast stretches of our lives on wrong turns and backtracking. In this respect, male fronting resembles a number of other behaviors typically ascribed to men and masculinity, in that it proceeds by denying essential human conditions or responses—say public displays of mutual affection, grief, or triumph—marking them as feminine, infantile, socially unacceptable.

I learned to pretend that I know what I am doing from my own father, an extremely intelligent and well-informed man whose intermittent bouts with mistakenness and inaccuracy visibly cost him bitter pain and embarrassment, and shocked the hell out of me when I was a child. By fiat and consensus, fathers are always right, so that when facts or events inevitably conspire to prove them wrong, they and their sons alike totter on the brink of an abyss. I have never forgotten the day—I can’t have been older than five—when I watched in silent horror as my father, imperturbable and confident and disdaining the instruction sheet, assembled an entire barbecue grill with its key pieces upside down and backward. I remember my mounting anxiety about whether I should point out his mistake to him, and most clearly of all I remember the sharp and mocking look my mother gave him when at last I betrayed him.

When I became a father, I made a promise to myself not to pretend to knowledge I did not possess, not to claim authority I plainly lacked, not to hide my doubts and uncertainties, my setbacks and regrets, from my children. And so I have tried to share them over the years as I have been fired from screenwriting jobs or proved wrong or led to look a fool. I have made a point (until the recent advent of GPS) to stop and ask for directions. But sometimes I waver in my resolve. My sense of myself as a father, my sense of fathers, is so deeply caught up with some kind of primal longing (which I think we all share) for inerrancy, for the word of God, for a rock and a redeemer, a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, for the needle that always always finds true north in a storm.

And maybe that longing in one’s wife and children runs beyond the understanding of even the most painfully self-conscious of fathers. One recent winter my family and I found ourselves stuck in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in the middle of a snowstorm. All flights out were canceled. There was a flight home from Idaho Falls, a drive of two hours through a high mountain pass, or three hours by an easier route that skirted the mountains. Either way, there would be snow, ice, unknown chances. If we wanted, we could wait for an airline-chartered bus that might eventually depart for Idaho Falls, getting us home to Oakland no one could say when. Or we could sit tight, wait it out, and hope to get home sometime tomorrow or the next day.

I didn’t give it a moment’s thought. We had rented a big strong four-by-four. It had the tires and the muscle for the roads up there. I liked the way I felt behind its wheel, competent and unperturbed by weather. The fact that I had not driven in a blizzard in twenty years barely entered the conscious register of my thoughts.

“Let’s drive,” I told my wife. “I’ll go the long way around.”

She looked at me with a strange expression, then said okay; later, after we had made it safely and without incident up and down through ice and rain and snowfall that was at times blinding, my wife told me that she initially thought I was dangerously insane when I proposed driving to Idaho Falls through a blizzard. But then she had heard something in my voice that reassured her; she’d seen something in my eyes. I looked as if I knew what I was doing. And though I gripped the wheel with bloodless hands and prayed wildly to the gods of the interstate trucker whom I carefully tailed all the way to Idaho, in the backseat the kids calmly watched their iPod videos, and my wife studied the map and gossiped with me, and none of them knew or suspected for a moment—for I never betrayed, by word or deed, my secret—that I was in way over my head. I was the father and the husband; they were safe with me. We made it to the airport right on time to catch the next flight home.

“I knew you could do it,” my wife said, and I thought about saying, “Well, that makes one of us.” But I held my tongue and nodded with a Kiplingesque modesty, because the truth was that in the absence of any evidence or experience or reason to think so, I had known that I could do it, too. I had no choice, do you see, but to know that.

By the way, the towels are still hanging from the rack in the bathroom. And I fully expect, at any moment, in the dead of night, to hear a telltale clatter on the tiles.