Nipple Day—or so they called it as they sat there at the Stanhope Hotel Café, my father and Mr. K., two middle-aged men enjoying a springtime cappuccino sometime during the seventies. Mr. K. is my father's best friend: a tall, suave man with black hair and a purring bass voice. He and my father are an odd couple, my father short and rotund, with flat feet and a hustling, driven gait, while Mr. K. is feline, padding through the world with polish and a whiff of sexual menace. They drink their expensive cappuccinos, talking about love, work, and sex in intense, low voices. They eat cookies on a small glass plate; sometimes they pop them whole into their huge mouths, but other times they bite daintily, savoring them. My father won a Guggenheim early in his writing career, and Mr. K. calls himself an impresario, director of a promotional agency for musicians. They fancy themselves ironic, dry, New York City wits, artistic geniuses just waiting to make it big. And because they are charismatic and funny and creative, they imagine themselves to be charming with the women.When they are not eating cookies and talking about big ideas, they ogle females of all ages passing by on Fifth Avenue.They christen the first balmy day of spring each year Nipple Day, because that is when women shed their coats and parade on the avenue in their spring finery, their nipples perking through the fabric in a way that excites the two leering wolves that are my father and Mr. K.Nipple Day. Why do I even know about it? My father must have told me about Nipple Day at some point before he died, but I can't remember when.Did he ever wonder whether telling me about Nipple Day was an appropriate thing to do? But my father was not appropriate, and even if that word had circulated in the seventies and eighties in the same way it does now, I doubt he would have granted it any moral authority. My father was anti-appropriate. Irreverent, he dubbed himself, brandishing the term reverently, as if irreverence was his religion.I have considered the question of Nipple Day, and concluded that my father must have thought the whole idea was innocuous and funny—mischievous, perhaps, but not wrong. He never seemed to feel any shame about it, and I suspect I heard him mention it more than once.Of course it's gross to think of my dad reveling in the sight of women's taut nipples—but what makes me uncomfortable is that I'm glad he told me about Nipple Day. And this being not un-glad makes me more uncomfortable than what Nipple Day reveals about my father's fetishizing of women's nipples. Does my feeling grateful for any knowledge about my father sanction my father's lewd, objectifying eye? Does acknowledging that my father was the product of a different time partially absolve him? Or must I come to terms with loving my father, and also being disturbed by his actions and words about women—if one can be disturbed in retrospect. There is no word in English that means horrified by the recalled words and deeds of the beloved dead, but there should be. There is no word in English that means loving a dead person who lives in memory as an anachronism, but there should be.From the outset, then, I feel torn about writing this essay. A kind of heaviness, akin to shame, attaches to the idea of it. “Nipple Day,” as I have started calling the essay, disturbs me with its obscene, attention-grabbing title. Do I want my students to see it when they google my name in order to find my “ratemyprofessor” score?But I always come back to this about writing: If things happen and are part of my experience, they should be OK to write about. Nothing should be not OK to write about. How do I know that this is true, though? Doesn't my dead father deserve some privacy and respect for all he did for me? But then I ask myself whether, as a writer himself, my father would approve my project? Yes, I tell myself. And also, yes.Writing is a family occupation and obsession.My German–Jewish paternal great-grandfather, Alfred Schirokauer, was a prolific producer of historical novels with catchy titles like Alarm and Don Juan auf der Flucht. Alfred's son Robert, my grandfather, was a philosopher at the National University of Mexico, penning articles on Kant and axiology. When we visited him and my grandmother in Cuernavaca, we saw him only at breakfast and dinner; otherwise, he dwelled in a magnificent second-floor study stretching the length of the house and opening onto a terrace with a panoptic view of the city below. Here he wrote at a small blond wood desk that I now own, enjoying a chocolate candy occasionally when his energy flagged.Writers flourish on my mother's side, too: Her father was one of the journalists who discovered the famous eyeglasses that led to cracking the 1924 Leopold and Loeb murder case; her first cousin is an editor, novelist, and political blogger. My mother, an English professor, generated a gothic novel one summer under a pseudonym, writing all morning in the cottage at the bottom of the garden in my grandparents’ home. She seemed to do this with little effort, to my twelve-year-old amazement.Surrounded on all sides by writers, I was most impressed by my father, whose dedication to his art seemed supersized, robust, mythic. All day, every day, he sat in his study—a New York City apartment room much smaller than his father's study in Mexico—writing and talking on the phone to agents, directors, and producers. Every morning, I woke to my father grinding the coffee before repairing to his study; throughout the day, he appeared sporadically in the kitchen to carve himself a sliver of Jarlsberg cheese delicately placed on a rusk before returning to his messy lair. After dinner, my father usually eschewed the pleasures of TV, dedicating himself to his desk for a few more hours. In the 1970s he supported our family of four by writing TV screenplays, but he yearned to be a famous playwright like Tom Stoppard. As the seventies yielded to the eighties, his luck in Hollywood ebbed, and by the nineties, when he divorced my mother and moved to England, he was in a state of insolvency, by turns embittered and still hopeful about his chances of success.It is bewildering to me that my father, so careful about words, often demonstrated the most cavalier obliviousness to their meaning when using them in speech.If I was facing something fearful on a given school day—say, a three-hour exam—my father would tell me, if rape is inevitable, you might as well relax and enjoy it.I never analyzed this adage. In fact, to my shame, I remember taking it as a piece of good advice. I thought, well, if something bad is going to happen and there's no way to avoid it, maybe it is wise to try to make the best of it.But I can analyze that statement now. It suggests that once a man commits himself to rape, it is nearly inescapable—for as Mary Wollstonecraft famously admitted, most men have physical power over most women. The statement concludes that this being the case, a woman should try to enjoy the experience of being overpowered and violated if it should come to that. Underlying this repulsive proposal is the premise that any male attention, even the most coercive and violent, is potentially pleasurable for women.Could my father, writer that he was, have been oblivious to the vile implications of this statement?Perhaps, though, he really was oblivious, buoyed up by the privilege of the patriarchy to be insensible to ideas so engrained in a culture as to masquerade as truths. That women would find the unsolicited attentions of men titillating was part of the culture even of the awakening seventies.Later in my life, embarking on a psychoanalysis with a Freudian analyst in Manhattan, I read Freud's Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria. Freud's diagnosis of Dora's hysteria rests partially on the fact that Dora reported that she was disgusted, not aroused, by her father's friend Herr K.’s unwanted attention. As the story goes, Dora is sent to consult with Freud because she is causing problems at home for her well-off family with her “hysterical” illnesses and threats of suicide. Dora tells Freud that her illnesses have to do with her father's friend, Herr K., who, on two separate occasions ambushed Dora, once when she was fourteen and again when she was sixteen. The first time, Herr K. engineered a situation in which he and Dora were alone, and then “clasped [Dora] to him and pressed a kiss upon her lips”; the second time, he “made love to her” by the side of a lake, suggesting they engage in a sexual relationship. When Dora tells her mother about Herr K.’s advances, and her mother reports this to Dora's father, neither parent believes Dora. However, Freud came to believe Dora's story against the word of her dominating father.Despite Freud's support of her story, he was sure that Dora had been sexually aroused at the age of fourteen when Herr K. abruptly kissed her. Although Dora told Freud that she experienced “a violent feeling of disgust,” Freud nevertheless insists that—really—she must have been aroused. As Freud envisions the scene, he imagines Herr K.’s lower body pressing against Dora, so that she feels “the pressure of his erect member against her body.” No matter that Dora has told Freud only that she “could still feel upon the upper part of her body the pressure of Herr K.’s embrace,” Freud assumes a role for Herr K.’s penis. Hence Freud's certainty that Dora felt excited. Dora's professed lack of arousal confirms her status as “hysterical” for Freud: “I should . . . consider a person hysterical in whom an occasion for sexual excitement elicited feelings that were . . . unpleasurable.” Perhaps filled with excitement himself, Freud cannot entertain the idea that Dora might not have been likewise stirred, and her inability to “relax and enjoy it” brands her as a hysteric.Unlike Dora's father, my father was not dominating. He never got angry at us. In the evenings, he liked to sit on the high wooden stool in the dark corner of our kitchen while my mother cooked, half talking to her, half perusing the New York Times. If we came into the kitchen while he was sitting there, he took a focused interest in whatever we said to him. I remember him looking through our new textbooks at the beginning of each school year, thumbing the pages without wanting to be anywhere else but sitting on his stool examining our books. He would discuss them with us, glorying in their newness and promise of knowledge. A palpable love of learning emanated from him like an aroma, and he would proclaim himself envious of us.He liked to take me to the tiny bookstore on Madison Avenue when I was young. The bookstore was the size of a very large room in a New York City apartment; it was crammed, stuffed, bursting with shelves of books up to the ceiling, which one reached by climbing tantalizing ladders. I stood there in the middle of the store, holding my father's hand, and hatching a terrible thought: I could see that a time might come when my father and I would have read all the books in the store. What will we do then, I asked my father?My father explained that people wrote new books all the time so that there were always new reading experiences to be enjoyed, and the little bookstore contained only a fraction of all the books that had been written. The next day, we went to the local public library so that I could gape at the big rooms and all the stacks filled with books.Later, when my second-grade teacher read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory out loud to us during rest time and I came home raving about it, my father bought me my very own hardcover copy. I marveled at the crisp, white paper cover on which was a design of a broken chocolate bar embellished with the florescent colors so typical of the sixties. It had never occurred to me that I could own and read the novel myself. At the same time, I felt that my new book was too perfect to besmirch by handling. To solve this problem, my father tenderly wrapped the book in plastic so that I could read it without worrying about greasing and staining its cover.He seemed perfect to me then, my father, so good and all-knowing and kind. He had discerned exactly how to fix my problem: just the type of man I wanted to marry someday.Throughout my childhood and adolescence, Mr. K. appeared in the foyer of our apartment once a week at 4 p.m. for his coffee date with my father; there he waited, seeming to purr softly to himself, while my father put on his jacket to go out. Mr. K. was also on the beach in Springs, Long Island, during the summer, standing alongside my father at our cookouts, discussing great ideas while attending to the burgers and hot dogs. Although it was somehow understood in our family that my father's friendship with Mr. K. was like the legendary relationship between Keats and Shelley—close, confessional, and imbued with the spark of genius—my father and Mr. K. wafted in and out of the scenes of my childhood without depositing a trace of dialogue in my memory. I can't recall Mr. K. actually speaking to me, but this is not improbable; it was the seventies, the era when children ran free and unsupervised by their parents, when something big had to happen for their parents’ lives to intersect with their children's much at all.When Mr. K. offered me a job in his public relations office the first summer after I graduated from college, I accepted gladly. It was May 1984 and I was graduating in a few days with an English major and no prospect of a job. Mr. K. represented musicians, and I was to join his enterprise as an “associate”—an august title, especially compared with those I had previously enjoyed, such as “dishwasher” and “waitress.”I joined two other “associates” in Mr. K.’s office, both fresh out of college, too. Wes and Lewis were Columbia graduates, smart and witty. Every morning, Mr. K. gave us each a list of tasks on a piece of yellow legal pad paper, then left us pretty much alone to fulfill them. We wrote letters, ran errands, answered the phones, copied promotional materials and stuffed folders, met and interviewed clients at upscale cafes, then wrote up the interviews.It was fun to be trusted with so much responsibility, but as the only woman in the office that summer, I had to endure Mr. K.’s relentless stream of “help.” Each morning when I arrived, Mr. K. called me into his office to outline the day's tasks. Before beginning his recitation, he scrutinized me and offered fashion tips. I should cinch my dress with a tight belt. I should wear small heels. I should sweep up my hair. My legs were good, so I should wear shorter skirts. I began peering anxiously at my body in shop windows as I walked down Madison Avenue to work. I noted the shape of my legs, the curve of my stomach, and the swell of my hips. Would my figure be judged attractively attired that morning by Mr. K.? I had started looking at myself through his eyes.By this time, Mr. K. was no longer quite the charmer he had been during the days of my childhood. He was getting pouchy around the eyes, lips, and chin, and he suffered from chronic halitosis. I dreaded having to answer his personal phone in his office, because the receiver smelled strongly of his bad breath.It surprises me now that I didn't feel more anger about Mr. K.’s interventions into my sartorial choices—and I don't think I granted him a pass because I had known him throughout my childhood, either. I did not have the vocabulary to interpret what was happening to me as sexual harassment. Despite my college education, I did not yet know the term “objectifying gaze.” I saw Mr. K.’s attentions as nothing more than what often occurred: interest and attraction on the part of straight men that, as I grew older, beamed in my direction.And I was used to hearing men comment on women's bodies. My father had always done it: One of our female friends had “thick ankles,” according to him; another had “pancake breasts”; yet another was “dowdy.” I had ignored the threat in these terms by distancing my father's remarks: They referred to other women, not to me. Now I had become one of these other women—and, since I did not want to be classified as frumpish, I tried to please Mr. K.One night toward the end of the summer, walking home up Lexington Avenue from a new café in Mr. K.’s neighborhood after meeting friends, I encountered Mr. K. walking his Doberman. It was after midnight and the streets were hushed and dark, smelling of garbage, as they do in New York City in the dankest pocket of summer. Mr. K. emerged from the darkness, swooped toward me without a greeting, pulled me toward him, and plunged his fat tongue deeply into my mouth. I was too shocked to pull away. When he finally withdrew, he whispered, we never met.As I walked home, my mind struggled to grasp the ungraspable fact that Mr. K. had thought it OK to grab me on the street and kiss me, his best friend's daughter, a woman he had known since she was a baby, a woman who was now his employee. My shock was so complete that I did not feel physically disgusted until much later.I remember unlocking the front door to our family's apartment, entering the dark foyer. Emerging from the back bedroom, my mother floated into the living room. She must have greeted me; I must have greeted her. I wanted to keep quiet, but I could not. I told my mother what had happened, struggling to convey how indelibly the experience had shaken me.Oh, he's tried that with me, too, my mother said, breezily—although she was, in general, a serious person. She described how Mr. K. had kissed her at a party, behind a closed door. He had told her that she was beautiful. My mother recollected the incident happily; she seemed slightly disappointed that the same thing had happened to me, as if it negated her own claim to attractiveness.We won't tell Dad, she assured me.Unlike Dora, I didn't make a fuss. I finished at Mr. K.’s office, thankful to have only a week left, and flew off to my next postcollege gig in Berlin to work for a German family as a nanny. Mr. K.’s kiss stayed with me, though; even now, in middle age, my mouth remembers the gross slab of his thick tongue.The mid eighties were the end of my father's glory years. He had enjoyed a heyday period during the late seventies when he wrote a number of TV specials, often traveling from New York City to Los Angeles to do business with TV executives in Beverly Hills. Earning lots of money, he relished the luxury of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. During this time, according to my mother, he embarked upon a series of infidelities, which he confessed to my mother when he left their marriage in the early 1990s.I knew nothing of my father's affairs on New Year's Eve 1989, as our family gathered in a dark restaurant near the volcano Popocatepetl in Mexico, where my father's mother still lived. But the family mood was slightly off that night; usually convivial and talkative, we were muted. Nothing specific, just something a bit desultory, like the restaurant itself.Before dessert, my father asked us if he could make a toast, but, as the toast began, I saw it was more prediction than tribute. My father loved predictions, often asking us to make them for him: Would he sell his new screenplay? Would he have a successful year? But on this night, the last of the eighties, my father played the soothsayer. “I see a big change coming for our family,” he announced, portentously. “Nineteen-ninety will be a year of personal tragedy.” I'm sure at this point a strange quiver passed over my face. My father's prediction spoke to an inchoate sense of coming disaster of which I hadn't been aware until that moment. Now it crystallized in me as dread, congealing in my chest.Within the year, my parents’ marriage had collapsed. My father, deeply involved with a graduate student at New York University, had known on New Year's Eve 1989 that he would change our lives. By New Year's Eve 1990, my father had fled to England with his girlfriend and established a new life there, after thirty years of marriage to my mother.When I first imagined writing this essay, I did not immediately think of including the scene in the restaurant near Popocatepetl. It was Freud's case study of Dora that brought it back to mind. In one of her sessions, Dora tells Freud about a large family gathering. Someone toasts her father and wishes him “the best of health for many years to come,” whereupon Dora glances at her father's “tired” face, notes “a strange quiver,” and wonders how long he will live.Although the two scenes differ in many ways—Dora's father had syphilis and feared for his health and life—there is an associative similarity that gnaws at me. Dora's father, like mine, is a philanderer, engaging in extramarital sex with Herr K.’s wife. But it is not only that Dora's father and mine are of the same ilk; the scene at Dora's family table also conjures the way we as family members read each other. Without knowing it, I had been reading my father throughout the end of the eighties. Around the same time that my father was cheating on my mother, I involved myself in a series of romantic love triangles, creating a pattern in which I became involved with one man and then indulged in clandestine betrayal sex with another. I played out this scenario at least three times. I could not know then that I was communicating some knowledge about my father to myself. But as soon as my father confessed his secret life to my mother and left New York City, my own compulsion to construct triangles with men stopped.It seems I have transposed my experience with Mr. K. onto the Dora case. Am I, then, Dora? Was my acting out of my father's extramarital betrayals my own form of hysteria? When I studied Freud's Dora more fully in grad school, I was convinced that Freud was wrong about Dora. Based on my own experience with Mr. K., I could not agree with Freud that Dora's hysteria was the result of her repressed experience of arousal to Herr K. I knew this as a fundamental truth, but wondered how I could prove it. For instance, how could I know for sure that I was not unconsciously excited by Mr. K.’s kiss? Yet I did know, I told myself. I did.Toward the end of writing the first draft of this essay, I searched out my journal from the time of Mr. K.’s kiss to read the account of that night. Withdrawing old notebooks from my desk drawer, I wondered whether I might have read the entry back when I first began “Nipple Day.” It seemed likely that I had. But, no harm in checking, so I shuffled through the journal's pages and found—this: I walked up Lexington [Ave]. My dismay when I actually saw Mr. K. walk out with his dog was . . . half joy. There was no way to avoid it. We recognized each other from afar. So I ran across the street and into his waiting arms.He kissed me on the lips, more insistently than W. [my boyfriend at the time] ever does! But it took me aback. It was a very strong kiss. We acted as if we were in love. We made the gestures that lovers make. I felt his soft skin and he buried his head in my hair. I felt my arms become more womanly around his neck. God help me.We talked more easily than we ever had before. But . . . several times he kissed me, always on the mouth, with parted lips. It scared me to death.Yet, I was “on.” I radiated.His words were horrible. He said: “we never met” as we parted and he sparkled kisses at me with his puma hands!I felt so shaken.Who is this young woman, who barrels into my anxious exploration of my father's sexism as an insouciant wrecking ball? Who is this other me, entirely forgotten by the older me, who “made the gestures that lovers make” with Mr. K.? This other woman, who “radiated” for Mr. K., who “felt his soft skin” and put her arms around his neck? There is no mention of Mr. K.’s bad breath in this account; there is no fat tongue. This younger me plays the romantic lead, reveling in her “womanly arms.” She writes floridly, relishing herself in the role of alluring heroine. My younger self mocks my current self's desire to create an ideologically consistent voice; she subverts my outraged critique of my father's and Mr. K.’s objectifying chauvinism, suggesting, to my shame, that she participates in it willingly.But other phrases hint of the younger self's more distressing experience: “There was no way to avoid it”; “it took me aback”; “God help me”; “It scared me to death”; “His words were horrible”; “I felt so shaken.” This writer's self is fractured, torn between her excitement at being the object of Mr. K.’s desire, her spontaneous reciprocation of that desire, and her simultaneous terror of the transgressive encounter.This writer is me, though I choke to acknowledge it, needing to write about her in the third person so as to distance myself from her. Yet I must attend to that younger me—I must listen, even if my story makes me ashamed and uncomfortable.Some instinct leads me back to the small bookstore on Madison Avenue, as if there I will find a clue how to proceed with these dual selves. Once again, I scan the tall shelves, crammed with books, the movable wooden ladders on their rods, like something out of Harry Potter. My memory of the bookstore is sheathed in such a nostalgic haze that I no longer firmly believe in it, memory having tricked me so completely lately. Yet there we stand, my father and I, hand in hand. I feel his plump, freckled hand, the slight hardness of his gold wedding ring, his tight grip. He is explaining something to me in a gentle tone, perhaps pulling out a book to show me. And I feel nothing but goodwill toward him. Planted there in the middle of that trove of books, he is not the coiner of Nipple Day or the best friend of Mr. K. He is my father, who seems to know everything, including, often, how to conjure my wishes into reality.Not long after this, I remember telling my father that he shouldn't worry about being lonely if my mother died, because I would marry him. I was sitting on his lap one morning at our kitchen table after breakfast when I announced this revelation. It seemed urgent at that moment to reassure him that he would not have to be sad when my mother died, because I had thought of the perfect solution. An awkward silence followed my declaration. I saw my mother and father glance at each other with a hint of uneasy humor. Then my father told me that he appreciated my offer, but that it wasn't possible for me to marry him, even if my mother died. An uncanny feeling, almost tangible, filled the kitchen, as I struggled to read the signals. Something was off. I had said something both wrong and funny. Inappropriate might have been the right word, had I known it then. None of it made sense to me. Why couldn't I marry my father when my mother died? The plan had seemed brilliant.Could Freud have been both right and wrong at the same time? Could Dora have been attracted to Herr K., as she might once have been to her father, and not known it? Could Dora have also been repulsed and terrified by Herr K.?Yes. And—also—yes.I flew to England six times in 2006, the last year of my father's life. Although he enjoyed fifteen good years with the NYU grad student who became his second wife, my father was living in a drafty cottage in an English village, out of work, penniless, and in constant pain from spinal stenosis by the time he was sixty-seven. His decline and death happened over nine months, when my daughter was six and I was teaching full-time, but each trip to visit my father seemed—was—necessary: the trip to stay with him when my stepmother needed to attend to her own parents for a week; the trip after my father had a massive heart attack and was in a hospital in St. Johns Wood in London; all the trips later that year to visit my depressed and bedridden father; and then to attend him when he was dying of congenital heart failure at the Isabel Hospice in Welwyn Garden City in Hertfordshire. I racked up a credit card bill difficult to pay off, but it was worth it. All the time on airplanes and sitting with my father was liminal time, distilled and piquant as a fairy tale.One night in January 2006, before his heart attack but after his spinal stenosis had nearly paralyzed him, my father and I drove to the pharmacy in Wareside village. Earlier that week, before I had arrived, my father was alone in his small cottage and fell while retrieving the mail. His eye was still bruised and swollen, and he needed some arnica. The woman at the pharmacy welcomed us into the store ebulliently, exclaiming over my father's bruised eye—Oh my love, what happened? A vestige of my father's old twinkle returned at the woman's typically English endearment; you should see the other guy! he quipped. The kind-hearted pharmacist spoke with my father a long time, repeating details and paying him attention. As we exited the shop with the package of arnica, I felt that we were leaving the brightly lit sanctuary of a good witch, who cloaked my father in a temporary respite of warmth and acknowledgement. Outside, in the damp and chill English January, he became an orphan again, stranded in his invalidism and penury, clutching his medicine in hope.Mr. K. did not come to my father's memorial service in February 2007. His absence was notable, if only because he had been such a presence in my father's New York City life. Instead, he sent a note of remembrance. I can't remember a word of it.As far as I know, my father never found out about Mr. K.’s kissing me. Had he discovered this fact, I am not sure how he would have reacted. I fear he might have laughed, or at least chuckled. He might have shaken his head in something like wonder and admiration. He might have said, “What a scoundrel!” and then gone on with whatever he was doing. I fear he might have had all of these reactions at the same time.Writing this essay has been an exercise in discomfort and love—an unresolved splitting of myself. What to do with the