Fatherhood

The Wolf Raises a Daughter

When a seducer of women tries to teach his daughter about the facts of life, he discovers that some situations require more than just sweet talk

By: Jay McInerney, Photographs by: Tim Flach
[ Updated: Jul 14, 2008 - 5:12:34 PM ]

Recently, my 11-year-old daughter logged on to Google and punched in my name. Among the many hits, she found a gossip item that had appeared in New York magazine a few years back and which detailed a somewhat sordid episode from my past. The article told how I'd been dating two women at the same time without telling either about the other; how each had discovered the other's existence through a misdirected e-mail; and how they had met up to compare notes and eventually set up a sting.

They got together one night, and each called me in quick succession and elicited pledges of my undying love while the other listened on the extension. I was at a friend's house after a dinner party, and I'd had a surfeit of excellent Bordeaux. I was buzzed and feeling amorous.

I was hoping to locate one or the other and get lucky. I told one that I didn't love the other, and vice versa. The next day they confronted me. And there really wasn't anything I could say in my own defense. I was mortified -- even before the story hit the press.

Fortunately, my daughter was so pleased with the sight of my name in boldface that she told me about it before she'd read beyond the first paragraph of the story.

I dodged a bullet that day by gingerly steering her toward some more innocuous links, but Maisie and I are headed for an anxiety-inducing chapter in our relationship -- at least for one of us. Soon it will become harder and harder for me to compartmentalize my dual roles as a lover of women and as a loving father.

While the lover of women may keep himself warm on a cold winter night by remembering a bygone conquest, the father would be horrified if someone were to perpetrate such an act on his child. A tale involving mink-lined handcuffs is racy. If the fur-loving dominatrix is your own flesh and blood, it's sordid. Forget Madonna-Whore; I am on the cusp of a whole new psychosis. Call it the Priapic Pater Complex.

Sitting here in my study in New York City and looking at pictures of Maisie, who is in music class 100 miles away, I wonder what I would have done differently in the years before she was born had I known that one day I'd find myself the father of a girl on the brink of adolescence.