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It showed an infant and an adult swimming together underwater. It’s hard to believe that a six-month-old baby could be taught to hold its breath and flap its arms and propel itself along the bottom of a swimming pool. But there it was, in black and white. The ad, so far as I could make out, went on to explain the importance of acclimating babies to water before they learned to be afraid of it. To that end, it offered thirty-minute private sessions in a womb-temperature pool. Bébé l’Eau, the company was called.
    This struck me as a French twist on the business of preying on the insecurities of new parents. If you have a gift for frightening new parents, your fortune in this world is secure. New parents are not rational; they worry about all sorts of things that it makes no sense to worry about. For instance, I am at this moment worrying about when Quinn will learn to walk. I’d like to assume that our child will walk when she walks and that she’ll do it well enough to get around. But my wife will not let me. She believes our child will walk only if we worry about it. Still, when was the last time you saw a full-grown adult crawling around the streets on all fours?
    As I read the ad for Bébé l’Eau, it occurred to me that I never had any trouble learning how to swim. And I don’t recall, as an infant, anyone ever treating me to any thirty-minute private sessions in womb-temperature water. But Tabitha’s mind was already years ahead of mine. “What if she is afraid of water and never learns to swim?” she said. “What if she fell into a swimming pool?”
    After a lot of phone calls, she finally got through to the authorities at Bébé l’Eau. We needed to fill out some forms, they said, which they’d send along. This sounded ominous. It was. A week later, a thick envelope arrived in our mailbox. Among other things, it contained one form that needed to be signed by a French pediatrician to prove that Quinn had been vaccinated, and another by a French GP to show that we adults had no rare skin diseases. Even back home this would seem like more trouble than it was worth.
    But no: The life of our child was at stake. Tabitha became even more intent on gaining entry to Bébé l’Eau. If it required a great deal of effort, that was only because it was so desirable. She tried to persuade me that in addition to saving Quinn’s life, it would also be fun. A private session in a giant pool brimming with womb-temperature water. She conjured up a vision of the three of us swimming happily together, underwater, released from the ordinariness of our daily lives.
    It took two months of awkward phone calls in French and visits to the various doctors’ offices, but she finally compiled the required paperwork and sent it to Bébé l’Eau. A few days later the authorities at Bébé l’Eau called. We were in. A private session.
    On the appointed day, at the appointed hour (Sunday, crack of dawn), we climbed into a cab. Bébé l’Eau’s neighborhood was curiously down-market; the address itself was merely a door leading to a long alley damp with mildew. We walked the length of it and emerged in an empty room lined with hard wooden benches. Paint flaked from the walls, an empty desk was stacked high with unopened mail. We sat on the bench and waited. Exclusive, perhaps, but in the wrong sense of the word.
    After about ten minutes we heard, from a great distance, a splashing sound. It came from the end of yet another long corridor. We walked down it and found a closed door. It opened upon a scene. In a pool not much bigger than a large Jacuzzi frolicked a dozen scantily clad Frenchmen—two, I couldn’t help but notice, with bright red rashes on their backs—and a half dozen children, several with snot running down their faces. A Frenchman in a snorkel and mask and not much else floundered about, hollering instructions and waving