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ON THE RARE
days I do my fair share of the parenting, the mood in Paris changes. This is true especially on the mornings I agree to escort Quinn to her twice-weekly Gymboree class. In the few minutes between the morning feeding and my racing out the door, baby in arms, in a long and often futile search for a taxicab, a single unspoken sentence echoes off our kitchen walls. The sentence is: “Now you will get a taste of what
my
life is like.”

The truth is that parenting, in small doses, isn't as bad as all that. At the Gymboree office, I am once again treated as a charming oddity: the wonderful father who has taken the morning off from work to spend it with his baby daughter. About a third of the other adults are nannies; the rest are actual mothers. All of them find the notion of a man free in the middle of the day amusingly lovable, which is what, of course, I strive to be. From this and other evidence, I deduce that the French male has cut an even harsher deal with his spouse than the American one has. The American deal—or at any rate the American deal currently fashionable in my socioeconomic bracket—is that unless you can prove you are out making money, you had better at least pretend to be caring for your child. You might think that the French male, so conspicuous in his disdain for commerce, would be left holding the Gymboree bag more often. Alas, never, except on weekends, when he is unable to pretend that he is in his office.

A pleasant woman with a big smile has already plastered name tags onto the chests of the nine other babies in the class. All nine sit patiently on the floor, staring at each other's name tags like salesmen at a conference. Quinn wants no part of their act; when I put her down to sign us in, she hunches up into her peculiar crawling stance (straight-legged, knees off the ground, only palms of hands and bottoms of feet touching floor) and bolts for the room with the toys. By the time I catch up, she's halfway up a rubber staircase with a purple Wiffle ball in her mouth. She is deterred from her ascent only by the familiar Gymboree call to arms:
Bonjour, mes petits amis!

The woman in charge of Gymboree has the manner of a Chief Mouseketeer, and even looks a bit like Annette Funicello. She prances into the room carrying a giant rag doll named Gymbo (pronounced JEEM-BO) and greets the babies in her falsetto singsong. (“
Bonjour, Quinn!
”) My great fear is that Quinn will do her usual worst, and swat either Gymbo or Ms. Gymbo upside the head, thus wrecking the Gymboree atmosphere, which is thick with at least the pretense of goodwill. But today, for whatever reason, she behaves and even seems to enjoy the rituals that open the Gymboree games. At the start of each class, each mother and pseudo-mother is required to grab her child beneath its armpits and drag it, behind Gymbo, in a goose-stepping parade around the gym. At the parade's conclusion, the parent is meant to squeal, “Wewewewewewewe,” and hurl her baby into a pile with the other babies at the center of the room, at the feet of Ms. Gymbo.

Gymboree, I am told, is an American company. But it could not have found more fertile soil abroad in which to plant itself, importing, as it does, the love of order into a chaotic marketplace. Like Bébé l'Eau, it appears to be a carefully crafted, scientifically based institute for infant development. Just beneath the science, however, is an infant rendition of
Lord of the Flies
. Today, for example, Ms. Gymbo has strung from the various ladders, slides, tunnels, barrels, and seesaws that fill the room (and that the babies fight with each other to control) brightly colored sacks stuffed with pungent spices. In French too rapid for me to follow, she explains how important it is for infants to associate odors with places. I want to ask why; but after a minute or two she's lost me, and it takes all my mental energy to figure out what I'm supposed to do next with Quinn. What I'm supposed to do next, apparently, is to lead her by the nose around the room and persuade her to take big whiffs of the various sacks. But Quinn, who has yet to read Proust, has no interest in olfactory associations. Her eyes remain fixed on the purple Wiffle ball, which has rolled off, odor-lessly, into a corner.

This creates the usual problem of disguising my child's lack of interest in personal development. If Ms. Gymbo notices that Quinn's father is neglecting his duties, she will come over and speak to me sweetly in her rapid falsetto French, to the vast amusement of the French mothers. Thus Quinn and I cut a deal: I allow her to race up ladders and down ramps after her purple Wiffle ball and ignore the spice bags until Ms. Gymbo turns her attention to us, whereupon I grab the nearest sack and thrust it against her nose, with the insistence of a bank robber chloroforming a security guard. However, Quinn reneges on the deal, shrieks, and cries real tears. “
Très bien!
” says Ms. Gymbo, and, to my relief, moves on. When she's gone I stick my own nose into the offending sack. It smells, distinctly and pungently, of dog shit. What kind of experiment is this? I want to ask but of course don't. Has Ms. Gymbo stuffed dog shit into one of the sacks as, perhaps, the control?

French Gymboree ends, as it began, with a slightly frightening group ritual. The babies are once again heaped together at the center of the room, where the bigger ones torture the smaller ones to tears. Then Ms. Gymbo blows bubbles over them. The babies all love this, and for a brief moment something like harmony reigns. But at precisely that moment, Ms. Gymbo puts away her bubbles and drags out her multicolored parachute. Anyone looking for evidence that babies have minds of their own need only observe one Gymboree parachute ritual. When they are piled up on the parachute and dragged around the room by us mothers as we sing some incomprehensible French song, they become, as one, solemn. And when their mothers help Ms. Gymbo make a tent of the parachute, and make to drop it onto their heads, all hell breaks loose. You've never seen a baby crawl until you have seen it trying to escape a Gymboree parachute descending upon its little head. Within seconds babies are here, there, and everywhere except where they are meant to be. The chute hits nothing but bare ground, and the class ends, as always, in chaos.

The twenty minutes in the taxi home are spent in tears and recuperation. But by the time we arrive, we are able to smile and preserve the conceit that a father likes nothing better than to spend a morning with his child.

AT SOME POINT
in the last few decades, the American male sat down at the negotiating table with the American female and—let us be frank—got fleeced. The agreement he signed foisted all sorts of new paternal responsibilities on him and gave him nothing of what he might have expected in return. Not the greater love of his wife, who now was encouraged to view him as an unreliable employee. Not the special love from his child, who, no matter how many times he fed and changed and wiped and walked her, would always prefer her mother in a pinch. Not even the admiration of the body politic, who pushed him into signing the deal. Women may smile at a man pushing a baby stroller, but it is with the gentle condescension of a high officer of an army toward a village that surrendered without a fight. Men just look away in shame. And so the American father now finds himself in roughly the same position as Gorbachev after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Having shocked the world by doing the decent thing and ceding power without bloodshed for the sake of principle, he is viewed mainly with disdain. The world looks at him schlepping and fetching and sagging and moaning beneath his new burdens and thinks:
OH…YOU…POOR…BASTARD
.

But I digress.

I came home one night, relieved the babysitter, and found that Quinn had three bright red spots on her forehead and, for the first time in her life, a fever. The domestic policy handbook clearly states that when anything goes seriously wrong with our child, I am to holler for her mother and then take my place at her elbow and await further instructions. As I say, the American father of a baby is really just a second-string mother. But the first string was nowhere to be found. For the first time our child badly needed help that, it appeared, only I could provide. On the heels of that realization followed another: After a year of watching Quinn claw toward her mother whenever she became upset, I now could prove my own qualifications for the job.

A single phone call to a miraculous service called SOS Médicins fetched up a nattily clad French doctor to our doorstep inside five minutes. He arrived in a little white truck with a cross on the side that looked a bit like an old World War I ambulance. He was easily the most reassuring doctor I have ever met; there was not a hint of self-doubt about the man. Treating a sick baby is more like treating a sick dog than a sick person, as the baby can't tell you where it hurts. To our new French doctor this proved no obstacle at all. He marched into the house, spotted Quinn giggling on the couch, smiled knowingly, and said, “
Varicelle
.”

Chicken pox. Having diagnosed the disease from a distance of fifteen feet, he then examined the howling patient for another three minutes. On top of the chicken pox, he found ear and throat infections, plus the fever I already knew about, plus a couple of unrelated, smaller defects. He was so efficient at finding diseases that I thought he would find she had the plague or something, but his work was so quick and self-assured that it was impossible to question any of it. Afterward, he sat down at our kitchen table and wrote out two long pages of prescriptions, all of them illegible, and said that he was certain she'd feel better once she'd taken a few of them. From start to finish, his visit took about fifteen minutes and cost less than forty bucks.
Vive la France!

I trundled the prescriptions together with Quinn across the street to the pharmacy—everything in Paris you might want to buy always seems to be just across the street—and came away with a huge plastic sack of cures. Then, with a truly fantastic display of heretofore unrevealed parental competence, I actually persuaded my child to swallow several of them.

All this was perfectly thrilling, and not simply because there is an obvious pleasure in curing one's child. Power was in the air. It was a rare fatherhood Al Haig moment: I was in charge here.

Then Tabitha walked into the house.

“What's going on?”

I told her everything that had happened, and as I did, tears welled in her eyes. Mistaking their meaning, I could not have been more pleased with myself. I assumed she was
moved
by my performance. At this difficult moment in our child's life, when she would naturally look to her mother for comfort, her mother was away and unreachable. Plucked from the end of the bench and sent into the game with just seconds on the clock, I'd been told to take the final shot. I'd hit nothing but net.

I waited for what I was certain would be a curtain call. Instead, there was only silence. I could see from her face that she wasn't merely upset; she was irritated. She walked over to the sink and banged around some dirty dishes. With whom was she irritated? I wondered, neglecting the important truth, corollary to the rule about the fool at the poker table, that if you don't know who your wife is pissed off at, it's you.

“Why are you so upset?” I asked. “The worst is over—it's all taken care of.”

“I just wish I had been…here.”

“But why?”

“If I was here I could have asked the questions.”

All of a sudden, my questions weren't good enough. How would she know? She banged the dishes around a bit more, and then said, “Did you ask the doctor
why
he was sure all these medicines were the right ones?”

“Uh, no.” Of course I hadn't. He was the doctor.

“Did you ask him why, if it is chicken pox, she's had these red spots before?”

“She has?”

“Did you ask why they are only on her face?”

Upon review of the videotape, my three-point shot was nullified, the team went down in defeat, and I was sent back to the end of the bench. I was unable to answer even one of the questions that a genuinely caring parent would have thought to ask. “The doctor said that the spots would spread to the rest of her body by tomorrow,” I said, answering one that hadn't been asked.

“I think we ought to call another doctor,” she said, then swept her child up in her arms and took her away to whatever place mothers take their children when they don't want their husbands to follow. Once they'd left, I quickly, and for the first time, read the instructions on the medicine. The first two bottles I selected said, chillingly, “
NOT FOR CHILDREN UNDER 6 YEARS OF AGE
.” The bottle I believed to contain a chicken pox ointment proved, on close inspection, to be a sore-throat spray. The gunk I'd been told to apply to the pox itself was not a spray, as the forty-dollar home-delivery French doctor had told me it would be, but a strangely dry powder that was impossible to apply to anything, unless you happened to have Krazy Glue. Left alone with her father, our child stood no chance of survival.

The next day came, and the red spots refused to spread, and the fever subsided. The day after that, the fever had gone altogether, and the spots had faded to nothing. To me this was a very good sign: Quinn was cured. No, I had cured Quinn. The doctor had said that there were rare light cases of chicken pox in which the spots didn't spread: Here was one. To my wife it was a sign that the doctor had queered the diagnosis and that our child must be ailing from some other, heretofore undiagnosed disease. “I want to take her to the hospital,” she said.

The language of parenthood is encoded. When a mother says to a father, “I want to take her to the hospital,” she is really saying “WE are ALL going to the hospital, and if you whisper even a word of complaint, you will have proved yourself for all time a man incapable of love.” Maternal concern is one of those forces of nature not worth fighting.

Off we went to find a taxi, and then to find a hospital. Once we did so, we were seated in a small waiting room jammed with toys in which Quinn showed little interest, clinging, as she was, to her mother. Twenty minutes later, we were greeted by another nattily clad doctor, who was, if anything, even more self-assured than the first. He took one look at Quinn, laughed loudly, and said, “Not chicken pox.”

Tabitha looked pleased. “Then what are these?” I asked, pointing to the faded spots on Quinn's forehead.

“Insect bites,” he said.

I handed him the spray and asked why the doctor had instructed me to apply it to chicken pox.

“I don't know. This is sore-throat spray. Who told you your daughter had chicken pox?”

I gave him the whole story and handed him the two pages of prescriptions, which, as it happened, had the name of the doctor who had written them on top. This provoked only more laughter. “Dr. D___,” he said, “he doesn't know anything about children's medicine.”

“You
know
him?”

“He's my golfing partner.” He was still laughing; this was the best joke he'd heard all day.

“Is he a good golfer?”

“Very! He spends very little time working as a doctor.”

On the way home in the car, the family spirits could not have been higher. Quinn was cured—or as good as cured—and well, nestling up against her mother. I was back on the end of the bench. And there, with my incompetence in dealing with matters critical to my child's survival fully exposed, I was once again well loved. Some sort of natural order had been restored.