In a minor act of rebellion, he turned to the CD player situated on the bookcase behind him and hit Play. The mournful sound of John Coltrane’s saxophone slipped into the air. It wasn’t loud—he never played music loud—but for a moment he felt himself tense, awaiting the sound of a protesting voice. When it didn’t come, he allowed himself to settle into the music.

That was better. He felt more normal, more himself. He wasn’t sure which of his selves had greeted Carol and Caddie, but he was embarrassed by him. He’d been too effusive, overeager to please, to be liked. And Caddie hadn’t liked him. He knew that. Nor had she liked the house, or her room. He knew that, too, although he was not embarrassed about that. He liked his house. If Caddie didn’t, it was only because she was too used to Carol’s extravagances—the big house and expensive car, the designer clothes and vacations in Aspen and Hawaii. He’d heard about these things from time to time, usually while treating Caddie to dinner at some restaurant overlooked by the Zagat guide.

He was annoyed again, this time because his daughter’s disapproval was causing him to defend his home. He didn’t like answering to anyone other than himself, especially someone who was essentially an unwelcome guest. He shocked himself with the admission. He’d been trying hard to believe that he wanted Caddie there. But he didn’t. He wanted to be alone.

This, he felt, was the irony of parenthood, the simultaneous satisfaction found in furthering your line coupled with the inevitable resentment of having time taken away from pursuing those things that made you an individual. Of course there were parents who willingly devoted their entire lives to their children, but he’d always suspected them of mental illness, of using their young as an excuse for not fulfilling their own dreams.

He related much more to those creatures that, having fertilized their eggs, left the rest to chance. True, the mother trout never experienced the moment when her fingerling, after much toil, graduated high school. But then she rarely, if at all, had to endure the misery of being thought a bad parent. Not, he thought, that most animal parents had much to do other than care for their offspring. While the she-bear might spend two years at a time raising a cub, he doubted that she much resented the reduced opportunities for escaping uninterrupted into the pages of a Jane Austen novel.

Now you’re being ridiculous, he chided himself. You can’t compare trout to humans. Which brought him, he realized wearily, back to where he’d started. Humans weren’t animals, at least not in an equivalent sense. His skills as a father could hardly be judged alongside those of a bull elephant or a tomcat. (Particularly, he thought, when such a comparison would result unfavorably for him.) But this also meant that he could hardly excuse his uneasy relationship with fatherhood by pointing to the laissez-faire approach of most male animals that, with some notable exceptions, limited their involvement with their progeny to the act that produced them.