The New Yorker, January 31, 2000 P. 40
PARIS JOURNAL about the writer’s wife’s pregnancy in Paris... The writer and his wife already have a boy, so news that their next child would be a girl introduces the phrase “choix du roi” or “king’s choice” to define the circumstance... Tells about a visit to the obstetrician, who dresses in black and appears to writer to be like a character in a David Mamet play about Hollywood producers...Writer describes the immodest examination... 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... They decide on the Clinique Belvedere, a clinic which appears pastoral... medical but not quite hospital...like the sanitarium where they pack off Nicole in “Tender Is the Night.” Mentions an anesthesiologist's strike which causes Martha some anxiety... Writer tells about his practice runs in securing a taxi and performing a U-turn, which, when the time comes, results in their speeding in the wrong direction... 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. Writer ...feel[s] 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.
