The Last Chairlift

33. JUST SMALL ENOUGH

When I was teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the seventies, my students thought Century Review was the zenith of literary journals. It was first called New Century Review, and one of my students published a short story in it; this one short story seems to have marked her zenith as a fiction writer. I don’t believe she ever published other fiction. That literary journal had a similarly short life span, lasting only a decade. I don’t mean to sound irreverent about New Century Review, or just plain Century Review; some very good writers were published in it, my former student among them.

I was never published in that literary journal. I didn’t write poetry or essays or short stories; the fiction I submitted to Century Review was excerpted from novels in progress, which I’d edited to read like short stories. Or that was what I hoped. One of my rejections said, “This reads like an excerpt from something longer, or like something that should be longer.” This was indisputably true, but the rejection pissed me off.

Though that literary journal is long gone, I remain most grateful it existed. It was where I first read Emily MacPherson’s fiction. I was aware that Em had scripted Nora’s monologues for Two Dykes, One Who Talks; I knew that Em composed many of her pantomimes in writing. It hurt my feelings that I hadn’t known Em wrote fiction. I hadn’t even known her full name—just that she’d been an Emily, who was shortened to an Em.

I read almost to the end of Emily MacPherson’s first short story before I knew Em was the author. The histrionics of Em’s pantomime performances were absent from her third-person omniscient voice. A teenage girl is fitfully dreaming; she is sexually attracted to one of her girlfriends, but she doesn’t dare to make the first move, not knowing if her girlfriend is similarly attracted to her. She wakes from her erotic dream to discover her mother in her bedroom—her mom is sitting at the foot of her bed, sobbing.

“I’m an awful mother, I’m a worse wife, and if you have my genes, you’re doomed!” the poor girl’s mother tells her.

The next night is even better. This time, the teenage daughter is dreaming about her cloddish boyfriend. It’s okay when he touches her boobs, but she knows he wants her to touch him down there, and the poor girl wants no part of his penis. Upon my second reading, I saw this scene as an obvious precursor to Em’s penis pantomime—her depiction of an approaching penis as a one-eyed eel. Not upon my first reading, when the narrative detachment and restraint of Emily MacPherson’s fiction did not connect me to Em as an unbridled pantomimist—Em’s full-body slither, her mouth in the shape of the letter O, a sightless eye.

The second night, the poor girl wakes from her penis dream to find her father stripped to his boxer shorts, on all fours in her bedroom, where he is whipping himself with his belt—loud smacks, his back and shoulders reddened in the faint light.

“I’m a terrible father, an unconscionable husband, but your mother is worse!” the poor girl’s dad assures her, between lashes. “If we’ve made you like us, I’m so sorry!” her father wails, still whipping himself. The self-flagellation continues while the father confesses his homosexuality; he denounces his wife as a repeatedly unfaithful lesbian. The daughter silently listens and observes. The teenage girl is justly angry that her own coming out has been dimmed by the self-centered coming out of her parents. (Only then did I realize that Emily MacPherson was Em.)

The clear-headed teenage girl also makes an astounding aesthetic judgment. Her oafish father should castigate himself either verbally or physically—not both, not at the same time.

“Either act it out or put it in words, Daddy—not the two together,” the daughter tells her deplorable dad, who has barely managed to draw blood with his belt. If I hadn’t already figured it out, her artistic doctrine gave Emily MacPherson away; she’d put in writing a pantomimic aesthetic. Pantomime is the art of conveying a story by bodily movements only. Clearly this was what Em was doing—either pantomiming or writing, “not the two together.”

“A Family Comes Out” was the title of the first Emily MacPherson story I read. I asked my Iowa students to read it in our fiction workshop; some students, veteran readers of Century Review, had already done so. They duly noted Em’s sardonic humor. The better writers cited the unusual focus of the story’s physical details: how the bodily movements of the characters capture their haplessness, their sexual tension, their conflicted feelings of desire and regret. I did not point out the pantomimic rendering of the characters’ inner lives: how their bodies betray their sexual turmoil. Only three of my fiction workshop students were New Yorkers, and only one of them had been to (or even heard of) the Gallows Lounge—a kid who’d been an undergrad at NYU, and he’d never seen Two Dykes, One Who Talks onstage at the Gallows. I didn’t tell my Iowa students that Emily MacPherson had a parallel creative life as a pantomimist, or that Em (as a fiction writer) had virtually pantomimed the way her characters moved.

Emily MacPherson’s second short story in Century Review was written in a different narrative voice—there was a deadpan first-person narrator, the lesbian daughter, now a college girl, whose homosexual parents are divorcing. “A Couple of Latecomers Get Divorced” was the title, prompting a couple of my fiction workshop students to say they thought the two stories might be back-to-back chapters in a novel Emily MacPherson was writing; the different narrative voices notwithstanding, these were clearly the same characters from “A Family Comes Out.”

It hurt my feelings more to imagine that Em might have been writing a novel. It was bad enough that I hadn’t known she wrote fiction—short fiction, I’d assumed, upon reading only one of the short stories. Maybe Em hadn’t shown me her short stories because she knew they weren’t my thing—or so I’d rationalized. I had shown Em my novels, in manuscript; she was a close reader and gave me good notes. (Naturally, Nora was among my first readers, but Nora wasn’t a writer and never gave me notes; she just told me her thoughts.) Yet, surely, if Em was writing a novel, she would have shown me some pages, wouldn’t she? If only a first chapter, I was thinking. Did “A Family Comes Out” or “A Couple of Latecomers Get Divorced” work as a first chapter? I wondered.

In the second story, the lesbian daughter decides to stop talking. She’s not crazy; it’s a wise and rational choice. The last person she speaks to is the psychiatrist at her college. The shrink defends the student’s decision to the college community—the student’s written work is faultless; she should be permitted not to speak. Her not talking is therapy for her breakdown, caused by her parents’ clumsy coming out and their self-indulgent divorce.

The students in my fiction workshop at Iowa praised the parents’ tell-all dialogue; the stuff they tell the daughter about their divorce totally justifies the daughter’s decision to stop speaking. “For the things I’ve done with other men, I should be castrated. Or maybe just a vasectomy,” the father tells his silent daughter.

“For the things I’ve done with other women—women you know, in some cases, mothers of your friends—with one of your contemporaries, I’m ashamed to say, I regret most of all that you’ll do these degrading things yourself. I’ve done this to you—I’ve made you like me!” the mother cries. “But your father has done worse things,” the mom quickly adds. “Women like you and me are unredeemable, but homosexual men do much worse things,” the lesbian mother assures her lesbian daughter.

Maybe Em hadn’t shown me her fiction because it was too autobiographical, I was thinking. Possibly, even Nora didn’t know that Em was writing fiction. Em herself had disparaged autobiographical fiction in a famously censored “The News in English” pantomime at the Gallows; someone had dimmed the stage lights to prevent the audience from seeing what Em was acting out. In the darkness, Nora had told the audience: “Em is saying that writing about your own pathetic life, and calling it fiction, is masturbatory.”

In the 1970s, autobiographical fiction wasn’t revered; the memoir hadn’t replaced the imagination, Mr. Barlow might have said. In my fiction workshop at Iowa, the students liked fables and myths and allegories. Social realism was okay, but fabulism was better, or there had to be a fabulist element enhancing or exaggerating the realism. My students had loved what they imagined were the fantastical extremes in Emily MacPherson’s stories.

I didn’t undermine my students’ enthusiasm for Em’s fiction. I didn’t tell them what I suspected about Emily MacPherson’s short stories—that they were diary entries from Em’s family life. As a young woman, she’d simply had a more fantastical life than my fiction workshop students could imagine. Em wasn’t prescient only about Ronald Reagan; she didn’t just intuit how manipulable the dumber-than-dogshit American people were. When Em stopped talking, she also stopped typing. In longhand, Em wrote quietly—like pantomiming. I knew Em thought about her writer genes; she said she had no idea where her writing came from. But Em knew where the hatred came from. I thought her writer genes had something to do with her seeing the hatred—not everyone sees it coming.

I wanted to write Em and commend her; she’d made constructive use of the hatred her parents had passed down to her. My young and talented fiction writers in Iowa were excited that Emily MacPherson had created a pair of homophobic homosexuals—parents who hated themselves, and expected their lesbian daughter to hate herself accordingly. Yet the daughter wasn’t just angry at her parents; she was determined to be proud of herself. In the eyes of my fiction workshop students, Emily MacPherson was writing fabulist fiction with a social conscience. The esteem my students felt for Em’s two stories was unreserved, but I didn’t know how Em felt about her fiction. Her stories were confident and poised; they reflected a restrained but focused anger. Emily MacPherson was the fictional lesbian daughter, the girl I’d met at my mother’s wedding, where the submissive demeanor of the dollish Em was belied by the reputation of her unruly and clamorous orgasms. This insightful fiction writer was the same young woman who’d mistaken Moby-Dick for porn.

On matters of morality and writing, I always trusted and consulted the snowshoer. As my mom foresaw, Mr. Barlow was like a father to me—he’d been a good one. Since her transitioning, Elliot had become a second mother to me—not only when she was wearing Little Ray’s clothes. I’d always shown the snowshoer my novels and screenplays—usually, my first drafts. I should have guessed that Emily MacPherson was showing her fiction to Mr. Barlow from the beginning; she’d heard from me that the little English teacher was a good reader. Em was always more at ease around Elliot than she was around other men; like Little Ray, maybe Em knew from the start that the snowshoer was meant to be a woman.

Em wasn’t writing novels—“not yet,” the snowshoer assured me. Em spent months writing and rewriting one short story. Many of the situations, and some of the characters, were the same—from story to story—but Em intended each story to stand by itself. “Em thinks her writing is smaller than yours—she thinks she’s not ready to write a novel,” Mr. Barlow explained. “She knows you write bigger than she does,” Elliot said.

I knew the snowshoer was obsessed with her own smallness. “I’m just not big enough—I don’t even weigh as much as the lightest weight class!” she was always saying. I knew Em had issues with feeling undersize next to Nora, and Em was small enough that Elliot could wear her clothes. I hadn’t known what Em thought of my writing, or that she felt inferior for her own, smaller output as a writer. I don’t think good fiction is a matter of size, but perhaps I failed to appreciate how the just not big enough thing was a big deal to Em. I certainly failed to appreciate what a big deal it was to Mr. Barlow.

When I wrote Em, from Iowa, I told her how much my students had loved her stories. I told her the things I admired about her pantomimes in prose. Of course I didn’t say she’d hurt my feelings by not telling me she wrote fiction. I just said, sincerely, how happy I was that someone I knew and loved was also a fiction writer. I wasn’t, as Nora would later accuse me, “trying to start something with Em.” We were two writers who liked each other, and Em and I had discovered that we liked each other’s writing. Why wouldn’t we write each other? But Nora knew my having a relationship with Em, in writing, would be very intimate. At first, I thought Em’s letters to me seemed so intimate only because Em didn’t talk. I was overlooking that Em wasn’t part of a community of writers; when I wrote to her, I became her only writer friend.

Em’s friends were people she met when she was with Nora. “If you don’t talk, you don’t make friends when you’re alone,” Em wrote me. She knew her output as a fiction writer was small and restrained; Em knew she held herself back. She was embarrassed by her reliance on autobiographical material, although she’d “exaggerated like crazy,” she wrote me. “I just don’t dare to make up everything, like you do.” Em was very self-deprecating about her fiction, and her letters to me were an outpouring of soul-searching. She still spoke to me only occasionally and very little—short utterances of one or two words, always when Nora was around—but in Em’s letters I was reminded of the intensity of her pantomimes, and of the time she bit me. In my mind’s eye, I can still see Em’s teeth marks on my knee—indicating where she would have shot me, to keep me out of Vietnam.

My first letter from Em began with her telling me that she’d seen The Kindergarten Man a few times—after seeing it first in 1973, with Nora and me. “And I’m not counting when I saw it in Vermont, with Molly and your mother,” Em wrote. She was right to discount that screening; Nora and Em and I weren’t watching the movie. It was like the time in 1971, when we took Molly and my mom to see The Wrong Car in New York; all of us watched my mother watching Paul Goode, even Molly. We’d been disappointed by my mother’s notable lack of a response to the little actor onscreen. Em’s gestures were hard to read; she’d seemed ambivalent about my resemblance to Paul Goode. From Em’s gestures, she wasn’t convinced that my smile was the getaway driver’s smile. Molly and the snowshoer had seemed uncertain, too.

But, in her first letter to me, Em pointed out that we rarely get to see the little getaway driver move in The Wrong Car. All Paul Goode does is drive, or drink a beer, or light a cigarette and take a drag. As for physical activity, we get to see the little getaway driver and the gun moll undressing on a bed; we have glimpses of the bare-assed little driver getting out of the bed and going back to the bed. “That’s about it, for seeing Paul Goode move,” Em wrote me.

Leave it to Em, a pantomimist, to analyze the movement of a getaway driver in a gangster movie. In The Wrong Car, Paul Goode moved so little, Em said she couldn’t learn much about him. Em wrote that she didn’t think my mom was pretending not to recognize Paul Goode as “that boy she’d seduced in Aspen.” Em wrote that she believed my mother really didn’t recognize Paul Goode as that kid who wasn’t shaving, the fourteen-year-old snow shoveler who couldn’t take his eyes off her—that boy (Little Ray had said) who would have been a pretty girl.

Paul Goode was forty-six when he made The Kindergarten Man; he is uncannily credible as a young man in his twenties (even credible, at moments, as a teenager). As a screenwriter, Paul Goode is less credible—the story of The Kindergarten Man is implausible. Two men, or a man and a woman, have been targeting kindergarten classrooms with children from wealthy families. The hostage-takers—twice there were two men, two other times there was a man with a woman—do their homework. Simultaneous to their taking over a kindergarten classroom, and holding the children for ransom, the most well-to-do parents have already been notified of the terms; the frightened parents come to the kindergarten and pay the ransom before the police know the children and their teacher have been taken hostage. Somehow—this is never explained—the two men, or the man and the woman, always get away. And this isn’t the implausible part.

The police get a tip concerning the next kindergarten to be targeted. Someone has spotted a suspicious-looking couple—actually, two suspicious-looking couples. The same man has been seen scouting a kindergarten in an affluent suburb of Chicago; he is with either a woman or an effeminate-looking man. The implausible part is the plan the police come up with. They want to plant an undercover cop in the kindergarten. The police pay a visit to the kindergarten teacher in her classroom after school; the last few kids have been picked up by their parents when three cops come into the classroom, looking like cops.

The kindergarten teacher is played by Clara Swift—her first film role. It would later emerge that Paul Goode had picked her for the part. “I saw how you were looking at her—I felt the same way about her!” Em wrote me. I was thirty-two, Em was Nora’s age, thirty-eight. We’d had the hots for women onscreen, but we’d not fallen in love with someone in a movie before; it seemed we both fell in love with Clara Swift, and we had the hots for her. “This must have been more awkward for you,” Em wrote, “because you surely knew that Clara Swift looked like your mother—or didn’t you?”

Well, no, I certainly didn’t think Clara Swift looked like my mom—not then, not at first. Em had written that Clara Swift, who was twenty-six when she played the teacher in The Kindergarten Man, looked like Little Ray must have looked at that age—or at a younger age.

My mother was thirty-four when Em met her for the first time, at that lightning-struck wedding on Front Street. Clara Swift looked younger onscreen than she was; in The Kindergarten Man, she looked like a college girl and could have been nineteen or twenty. This begged the question: Did Paul Goode pick Clara Swift for the part because she reminded him of the pretty slalom skier who was not yet nineteen when he met her at the Hotel Jerome?

By the time Nora and Em and I were watching The Kindergarten Man (again) in Bennington, Vermont, with Molly and my mother—it was their first time—we knew that if Paul Goode was my father, he’d been only as old as I was at my mom’s wedding. Paul Goode would have been fourteen, almost fifteen, when they met—if they ever met—at the Jerome. Molly never said that Clara Swift, who was twenty-six but passed for a nineteen-year-old, “looked like” Little Ray, but my mother was in her late twenties or early thirties when she and Molly met. All Molly would say was: “I’ve just seen pictures of Ray when she was younger, Kid—when, I suppose, she might have looked a little like Clara Swift.”

“More than a little,” Nora had argued, with Em nodding her head off. We were all more than a little distracted by Clara Swift—not just by her looks, but also by her impressive performance. The teacher steals the movie, at least until Paul Goode’s first appearance.

I have to give Paul Goode credit for the three plainclothesmen in the kindergarten classroom—a noir stooge show. The detective in charge (Nora called him the “head dick”) is an unamused, melancholic man given to mournful sighs. The two plainclothes cops assisting the head dick are Laurel and Hardy look-alikes, transporting Nora and me back to our favorite childhood comedians. Not Em; she couldn’t watch Laurel and Hardy, because she thought Stan Laurel looked abused. The skinny, nervous-looking cop is a fidgeter; his sudden, impatient movements keep causing his gun to fall out of his shoulder holster. The fat, hearty-looking cop is too big and exuberant for a kindergarten classroom. The teacher opens fire first; she tells the detectives they’re idiots to come to her classroom looking like cops.

“But we are cops!” the fat one says cheerfully. Unwisely, he attempts to sit in one of the kindergartners’ undersize chairs—the kind that’s connected to a tiny desk.

“If my kindergarten is under surveillance by that couple who take children hostage, surely they now know the cops are here,” the teacher tells them.

“That couple has moved on—it’s the parents of the kids in your class who are under the surveillance of that couple now,” the head dick says. He sighs, seeing that the fat cop is stuck in the child-size chair, his knees wedged under the attached desk.

“Jeez, Ralph—those chairs are for little kids,” the fidgety cop says, bumping into a globe of the world the size of a beach ball, knocking it off its stand. The skinny cop bends over, lunging to grab the falling globe as his gun falls out of his shoulder holster. The thud the dropped gun makes on the classroom floor causes the teacher to cover her ears with both hands; the three detectives cringe in anticipation of the stray gunshot.

“Mind your weapon, William,” the head dick says, sighing.

Ralph, the fat cop, abruptly stands, but he’s not getting away from the kindergartner’s assembled desk and chair that easily. His heavy thighs are trapped under the desk; the attached chair, rising with Ralph as he stands, bends the big detective forward. Somehow, Ralph appears to be unsteadily standing in a seated position.

“You can’t possibly…” the teacher has started to say to him when Ralph suddenly grunts and straightens up, the chair and desk splintering apart. The splintering sound seems to surprise William, the skinny cop, who has managed to holster his gun and return the world to its precarious stand. Or, maybe, it is Ralph’s impromptu grunt—in the act of destroying the kindergartner’s chair and desk—that startles William, who lurches off-balance into the blackboard. “I will not have a cop with a weapon in my classroom, not with the kids,” the teacher is saying, as William, struggling to regain his balance, clings to the little shelf under the blackboard, breaking it. An explosion of chalk dust erupts from the blackboard area of the kindergarten classroom, caused by William’s making face-first contact with the blackboard and his falling among the blackboard erasers, which were knocked off the broken shelf. Ralph, squatting to survey the irreparable damage done to the desk and chair, splits the seat of his pants. William, flailing on his back in a cloud of chalk dust, reacts to the unfamiliar ripping sound by drawing his gun, the barrel pointing every which way, as the teacher takes cover behind her desk.

“We have the perfect kindergarten man—he has infiltrated schools before; he fits right in,” the head dick is telling the teacher. She has stepped away from her desk, bravely into the line of fire, now that William has once more holstered his gun.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” the teacher tells the head dick. “You’ve got a cop who can pass for a kindergartner? Don’t tell me the little guy will be armed.”

“Our kindergarten man is not as small as a kindergartner, but he’s small enough,” the head dick tells the teacher. “Where is he, anyway?” the head dick asks his underlings.

“He’s checking out the boys’ room—he’s attaching the fixtures for his weapons inside one of the toilet stalls, or something like that,” William says in a voice like a duck in pain; he is pinching his nose, now bleeding profusely.

“That’s our little kindergarten man—no detail is too small for him!” Ralph declares admiringly.

“And he’s a master of disguises,” William says, in his pained-duck way, still bleeding.

“Disguises,” the teacher repeats, rolling her eyes in disbelief. It’s as clear to us as it is to her that the three cops in the classroom couldn’t disguise themselves if they tried. “Weapons in the boys’ room? Are you crazy? What weapons?” the teacher asks the head dick.

There’s someone standing on crutches in the classroom’s open doorway; at first glance, he could be a boy, a young teenager, but he’s a small man wearing a kindergartner’s clothes. His shorts, his sneakers, his T-shirt with a goofy cartoon character—these surely contribute to his preternaturally youthful appearance. Maybe his hairless legs have been shaved, but the extreme smoothness of his face makes him look like he hasn’t started shaving. “I have a handgun with the requisite ammunition, and a silencer—that’s it for weapons,” the little kindergarten man tells the teacher. “My crutches come apart, they disassemble very quickly—everything I need is concealed in the crutches,” he explains to her. His voice is more adult-sounding and commanding than he looks, and he moves effortlessly toward her on the crutches. When he is standing in front of her, he hands her the crutches. They would have been face-to-face, but Paul Goode is noticeably shorter than Clara Swift, who is in no way a big woman. The kindergarten man’s eyes are level with the teacher’s collarbones when he says: “Every morning, when I’m standing at my chair and desk, I’ll hand you my crutches. Only you should touch them—you don’t let the kids touch them, of course.”

“Of course,” the teacher repeats, as if spellbound by him. We, the audience, and Clara Swift are astonished by the kindergarten man’s lithe and athletic agility; freed of his crutches, which he clearly doesn’t need, the little jock shows off his grace and precision of movement. First of all, in the movie theater—in Bennington, Vermont—the single-leg lunges and the squats got my mother’s attention, and Molly’s, but there was something else revealing in the kindergarten man’s movements. For a man in his mid-forties, Paul Goode still knew how to move like a kid. The kindergarten man moves like a teenage boy. He lunges and squats his way around the kindergarten classroom, familiarizing himself with the layout of the space—an activities area, where the artwork is done, and the cozy spot for quiet time, where the kids can nap—but he comes quickly back to the little chairs and their adjoining desks.

There’s a backstory the kindergarten man needs to tell the teacher; there’s a reason for everything, not only the crutches. It’ll be the teacher’s job to tell the parents of her kindergarten kids—it’s important that the parents know the story of the new kid in class. How, when he was in kindergarten, he was almost asphyxiated in a restaurant fire that killed his parents; how the lack of oxygen and excess of carbon dioxide caused the kindergarten man’s brain damage. “The smoke inhalation affected my speech and the use of my legs. I kept growing, a little—my growth was affected, too—but my mental development was halted or interrupted,” the kindergarten man tells the teacher.

“Is that even possible?” she asks him. “It doesn’t sound very likely—there’s not enough medical language,” the teacher tells him.

“No medical language. There are two doctors among your kindergartners’ parents—layman language is safer,” he tells her.

“There are three doctors among my kids’ parents,” the teacher corrects him.

“Only two live at home—the third doctor has asked for a divorce; his wife kicked him out,” the kindergarten man informs her. He was in a kind of coma after the restaurant fire—for twenty years, we’re supposed to believe! An older sister has been looking after him. When he comes out of the kind of coma, the sister sends him back to kindergarten, where she believes his mental development stopped. His condition, he explains to the teacher, will require him to raise his hand and ask to go to the boys’ room—a lot. One of the kindergartners (another boy, of course) will have to go with him.

“I survived the restaurant fire in a men’s room, where my dad took me. He broke a faucet in a sink, so the water ran and ran. He told me to stay in the men’s room—then he went to help my mom. I never saw them again. I can’t be alone in a public washroom,” the kindergarten man tells the teacher—leaving us to imagine the flooded men’s room in the burning restaurant, the water starting to steam, the smoke becoming difficult to distinguish from the steam, the little boy all alone but staying, as his father had instructed him.

It unfolds that the couple in question, the hostage-takers, are a man and a woman; this time, the woman isn’t pretending to be an effeminate-looking man. “It would be better if you stepped outside the classroom,” the woman quietly tells the teacher. “There’s been an accident,” she more quietly says. “The father of one of your kindergartners, the doctor who’s getting divorced—something’s happened to him,” she whispers.

The kindergarten man has prepared the teacher for this tactic; the hostage-takers always try to separate the teacher and the kindergartners. Not this time. “I stay with the kids, no matter what—just say what you have to say,” the teacher tells the woman, who takes a handgun out of her purse. She doesn’t point it at anyone, but she holds the gun in such a way that everyone can see it. Everyone can see the handgun the man is holding, too; he stands in the open doorway to the classroom, holding the gun against his chest, as if he were pledging allegiance to the flag.

“Listen to me, kids,” the woman with the gun says to the quiet kindergartners. “No one will be hurt if you listen to me and do what I say. We are waiting for a few of your parents to come here—they have something to give us.”

When the kindergarten man raises his hand, the teacher sounds exasperated with him. “Do you have to, really?” the teacher asks him.

“I really have to,” he answers her, in a preternaturally high voice. “And I can’t go alone,” the little kindergarten man reminds her. Every boy in the class has raised his hand, volunteering to be the kid who accompanies the kindergarten man to the boys’ room.

“Tommy, please go with him,” the teacher tells a wide-eyed boy, whose belief in extraterrestrials and supernatural beings makes him a smart choice—a perfect witness to the kindergarten man’s miraculous transformation.

“You come back in five minutes, both of you,” the woman with the gun tells Tommy and the new boy on crutches.

“He sometimes takes longer,” Tommy tells the woman, who points to the gunman in the doorway.

“Five minutes is all you get, crip, or he’ll come get you,” the woman with the gun tells the kindergarten man.

A little girl has raised her hand. “What is it, Henrietta?” the teacher asks her.

“Crip is not a very nice word,” Henrietta says. The kindergarten man appears to stiffen on his crutches, but he keeps going—past the man with the gun, through the doorway, out of the classroom. Tommy, on the lookout for supernormal occurrences, follows closely behind.

“Listen, kids,” says the woman with the gun, “wherever you are—even in kindergarten—there’s always a goody-goody giving you shit about the language that you use.”

“Five minutes, crip,” says the gunman, without bothering to look at the two on their way to the boys’ room.

“The shit word isn’t very nice, either,” says Henrietta indignantly.

“That’s enough, Henrietta,” the teacher tells the little girl, who is staring at the woman with the gun, who stares back at her.

In the boys’ room, a supernatural being emerges before Tommy’s enrapt eyes. Tommy has unzipped his fly but stands sideways to the urinal, his attention seized by the no-longer-disabled kindergarten man, who holds his crutches overhead, executing single-leg lunges and squats—back and forth along the row of child-high urinals. “He can walk—it’s a miracle!” the kindergarten man keeps repeating softly. Tommy has to notice how the new boy’s voice has changed; he has a lower voice, like a man’s.

“Are you a grown-up now?” Tommy asks him.

“He can walk—it’s a miracle!” the kindergarten man softly says again. “Let me hear you say that, Tommy. ‘He can walk—it’s a miracle!’ Can you say that quietly—almost like you’re whispering?”

“He can walk—it’s a miracle!” Tommy whispers.

“Just a little louder, Tommy,” the kindergarten man tells him; he lunges and squats his way inside one of the toilet stalls, closing the door.

“He can walk—it’s a miracle!” Tommy is repeating, as instructed—a little louder. He keeps on saying this as he turns to face a urinal, finally peeing.

“That’s good, Tommy—just keep saying that,” the kindergarten man encourages the boy. Over his shoulder, Tommy can see a crutch tip—it briefly appears above the toilet stall, followed by the armpit pad of the other crutch. The mechanical sounds of the crutches being dismantled make Tommy keep turning his head, to look over his shoulder at the closed door to the toilet stall. One time, when Tommy looks anxiously over his shoulder, the boy sees Paul Goode lying on the floor, peering at him from under the door to the stall. The kindergarten man holds a handgun against his chest, a silencer on the barrel. The index finger of Paul Goode’s other hand is held to his lips. A still of this shot becomes the creepy poster for The Kindergarten Man. Tommy has not stopped saying what he’s been told to say; his marching orders are perfectly clear to him, and he flushes the urinal, washes his hands, and leaves the boys’ room with newfound purpose.

There is an overhead shot of the closed toilet stall. The disassembled crutches are hung on hooks on the inside of the stall door. Attached to the side walls of the stall are other “fixtures” of a more complicated kind. What look like stirrups hold the kindergarten man’s small feet; what resembles a child’s car seat is mounted on the opposing wall, but the seat can swivel. Almost level with the toilet seat, the little kindergarten man is suspended—just above the gap under the stall door. If you look under the door for him, he’ll see you first. If you go into an adjacent stall and stand on the toilet seat, to look over the wall to find him, he’s got you covered.

Meanwhile, back in the classroom, the gunman is looking at his watch when Tommy walks past him in the doorway; Tommy is babbling incoherently, or he is speaking too quietly (or too insanely) for anyone to understand him.

“What?” Henrietta shrieks.

“Please speak up, Tommy,” the teacher tells him.

“It’s been five minutes,” the gunman says.

“Where’s the crip, dickhead?” the gun-toting woman asks Tommy.

“He can walk—it’s a miracle!” Tommy tells her, loudly and clearly enough for everyone to hear him. “He can walk—it’s a miracle!” the boy can’t stop reciting.

“The dickhead word…” Henrietta has only started to say, but the gun-toting woman cuts the goody-goody off.

“Go get the crip,” she sharply says to the gunman, who’s not in the doorway—he’s already on his way to the boys’ room.

“He can walk—it’s a miracle!” Henrietta is now screaming; other children are echoing Tommy’s incessant refrain.

“Tell them to shut up,” the woman with the gun tells the teacher.

“I think I won’t—I don’t want them to hear the shots,” the teacher says.

“There’s gonna be just one shot, if there’s any shooting, and I want to hear it,” the gun-toting woman says. “Tell the kids to shut up.”

The teacher taps her desk with a ruler, and the kindergartners stop chanting; only Tommy mumbles, “It’s a miracle,” before he can stop. “I think we should sing it, like a song,” the teacher tells the kids. “Like this,” she says, before she starts singing. It is Clara Swift’s scene; they still show the film clip.

We know from the astonished faces of the kindergartners that the kids have never heard their teacher sing before. In the audience, we aren’t expecting Clara Swift to sing beautifully; every time I see and hear this scene, the purity of her voice is a shock.

“You try singing ‘He can walk—it’s a miracle!’ beautifully. It’s impossible,” Em wrote me. (Naturally, it was impossible for me to imagine how Em would sound if she sang at all.)

In the boys’ room, the gunman is disconcerted by the chorus of children’s voices singing the miracle song back in the classroom. He is also perturbed by the toilet stall with the locked door. From a circumspect distance, he has peered under the stall door, but there’s nothing to see—no crutch tips, no small feet in sneakers. The gunman steps up to the closed door, giving it a hard slap. “I know you’re in there, crip—time’s up,” the gunman says. He tucks his gun under his belt and the waistband of his trousers.

As a writer, I’m distracted by what Henrietta would say about my language. The first time I saw The Kindergarten Man, it occurred to me that Paul Goode (as a writer) thinks the woman with the gun is right about Henrietta—there’s always a goody-goody giving you shit about the language that you use. Every writer knows this is true.

In the boys’ room, with its kindergartner-size urinals, the gunman looks huge; he also appears to be very fit. When he hooks his fingers over the top of the toilet-stall door, he does an effortless pull-up. This is such a snap for him, he looks like he could do twenty more. One quick pull-up and his head is above the stall door, where he gawks down. The kindergarten man has an easy shot, from point-blank range. The silencer does its job. There is an audible pop, but it doesn’t sound like a gunshot—more like a disappointing champagne cork, muffled in a towel. The gunman falls faceup on the floor. His dead, unseeing eyes are bigger than the bullet hole between them. The bullet hole has only begun to bleed when the kindergarten man comes out of the toilet stall, being careful not to step in the spreading pool of blood from the back of the dead gunman’s skull. “Time’s up,” Paul Goode tells him, quietly.

From the classroom’s open doorway, we are looking at the frightened teacher, who is looking back at us—at camera. The woman with the gun stands in profile to us and the doorway; she is facing the children with her pistol pointed at (almost touching) the teacher’s temple. “If I pull the trigger, the kids’ faces are gonna be spattered with your blood—from the exit wound,” the gun-toting woman tells the teacher.

There is another angle, on the kids’ faces, when Henrietta shouts: “Stop! Stop singing!” Seeing that the teacher is afraid has made the children afraid, too; they stop singing.

Cut back to the angle from the doorway, on the teacher looking at camera, and on the woman with the gun—her face is still in profile to us, when something changes in the teacher’s eyes. The teacher sees something, and the woman with the gun turns to face us—to look where the teacher is looking. In the silent classroom, the pop and the hole between the gun-toting woman’s eyes are instantaneous; because the woman with the gun has turned her head, her body is spun sideways by the force of the bullet, her gun slips from her slack fingers, and her knees splay apart as she falls. She lies facedown, her hair and the back of her head already sodden with blood, which is now pooling around her face on the floor.

From the doorway, it takes the kindergarten man two single-leg lunges to enter the foreground of the frame and the classroom, where he squats beside the body of the dead woman. “It’s been five minutes—I’m back,” he tells her. For good measure, the kindergarten man speaks in the preternaturally high voice we last heard when he said he had to go to the boys’ room.

There’s a quick close-up of the much-abused globe on the teacher’s desk; it is spattered with blood from the exit wound. The kindergarten man’s voice-over is lower—he speaks in his more resonant, more grown-up voice. We hear the adult kindergarten man say: “It’s been a tough day for the world—for this world, anyway.” (Deadpan noir doesn’t worry about overkill.)

When the camera pulls back, we see that Paul Goode is saying this to the shaken teacher, who has been spattered with a little blood; after all, she was standing at the periphery of the exit wound. With a white handkerchief, Paul Goode removes a spot of blood from the teacher’s cheek. The two bloodstains on her white blouse, on one shoulder and one breast, are not removable with the handkerchief, which Paul Goode puts in his pocket. Where to put his gun is more awkward. The long barrel of the silencer makes the gun appear bigger than it is—too big for the kindergarten man to put in the pocket of his shorts, and to stick it under the waistband of his shorts would look ridiculous or dangerous. To take the gun and the silencer apart might make the children anxious. “Give that thing to me,” the teacher tells him, putting the weapon on her desk, beside the bloodied world.

When Tommy starts babbling, the kindergarten man is eye-level with the teacher’s breasts. “He can walk—it’s a miracle!” Tommy mindlessly repeats.

“Actually, Tommy, I could always walk—it’s not a miracle,” the kindergarten man tells the boy. “There was no restaurant fire, I’m not disabled—I’m not a kid, I’m a cop,” Paul Goode tells the kids.

“He’s not a kid, he’s a cop!” Henrietta shouts. It’s sometimes hard to tell with Henrietta; there’s a sameness to the sound of her voice in ecstasy and in protest. Yet the way the children follow Henrietta’s lead leaves no room for doubt. The chorus of the kids’ voices is ecstatic, even triumphant. The kindergartners are thrilled that Paul Goode is a cop. Only Tommy isn’t lending his jubilant voice to the chorus; Tommy wanted the transformation he witnessed and believed in the boys’ room to exist. When Tommy’s lips begin to move, the unspoken words he is mouthing to himself are not in sync with the words the other kindergartners are so joyfully saying.

As for the actual kindergarten man, he is trying to make himself heard over the din of the children’s chorus. Paul Goode is standing unnaturally close to Clara Swift, his face almost touching her breasts; she tilts her head down to him, her ear now near his mouth. “I’m wondering if you would go out with me, if I’m not too small for you—I hear that all the time, that I’m just not big enough,” the little kindergarten man tells the teacher.

When she turns her head, still bending over him, her lips are almost touching his ear. “You’re not too small for me—you’re just small enough,” the teacher tells him, quietly but clearly.

A close shot of Tommy, his lips stubbornly out of sync with the “He’s a cop!” crap. As the kids’ chanting fades out, the purity of Clara Swift’s singing fades in—until Tommy’s lips are perfectly in sync with her voice, singing Tommy’s song. The first time you see The Kindergarten Man, you think that’s the end of the movie—it could be. It should be.

But there’s a quick cut to Clara Swift in the shower, beautifully singing her unlikely one line. She is startled to see something, or someone, through the glass door; she stops singing, momentarily covering her breasts. Then she laughs. “You keep doing that—you just appear!” she says, to camera. The shower door opens, and the naked kindergarten man steps under the shower with her.

“I don’t like to interrupt you when you’re singing Tommy’s song,” Paul Goode tells her. She has started to shampoo his hair, the lather getting on his face and on her breasts; he closes his eyes.

“Well, you did interrupt me—I don’t mind,” she says.

“You know what I like,” he tells her shyly.

“What you like,” she says, as if she has no idea what he means—she’s teasing him.

“Go on—say it,” the kindergarten man tells her. She has rinsed the lather out of his hair. When he opens his eyes and looks up at her, she pulls his face to her breasts and he closes his eyes again. “You’re not too small for me—you’re just small enough,” she tells him earnestly, for what sounds like the hundredth time.

Fade to black. The kindergartners’ voices, singing Tommy’s song, play over the end credits. Both Em and I thought it was a cheesy ending—overkill noir with a schmaltzy sex scene, tacked on to reach the romance audience. The shower scene seemed to belong in a different film. One critic called the shower scene “almost European,” but what did that mean?

Our critical opinion of Paul Goode, as an actor or a screenwriter, was not on our minds that night in Bennington, Vermont, when Nora and Em and I saw The Kindergarten Man with Molly and my mother. All we wanted to know was the same old thing: Did Little Ray think Paul Goode was my father? Was he the boy who couldn’t take his eyes off her, just some kid who wasn’t shaving? “He was small,” she’d whispered to me once. “He would have been a pretty girl. What he meant to me, Adam, was that you would be all mine. That’s what ‘no strings attached’ means, sweetie,” my mother had said.

That night in Bennington was the first time Molly and my mom had seen The Kindergarten Man. After the movie, Molly was the first one to say anything. As usual, Molly was the driver—she and Ray were up front, I was with Nora and Em in the backseat. “Those looked like your single-leg lunges and your squats to me, Ray—like the little guy had paid pretty close attention,” Molly said. “How come you didn’t show him the wall sits, too?” Molly asked my mother.

“He was more interested in the sex, Molly—not that the sex took a lot of time. We spent more time on the lunges and the squats than the sex, but we didn’t do any wall sits,” my mom told Molly. “Like I told you, he was just some kid—we only did it once—but everyone said he was a good little skier, and I wanted to see what kind of balance he had. He could really hold the lunges, he really stuck the squats—you can’t tell what kind of athlete someone is from wall sits,” my mother went on and on to Molly.

“No, you can’t—that’s true, Ray,” Molly said. We drove some distance with no one saying anything. “I hate this road at night, deer everywhere,” Molly told us.

“Just to be clear, Ray—you’re saying Paul Goode is the guy, right?” Nora asked her.

“Dear Nora, when I see him pretending to be a kid—when he’s hanging out with other kids, and moving like he’s a kid—he sure moves like the kid I remember,” my mom answered. “But, like I said, we spent more time doing the lunges and the squats than we spent fucking. He was a kid, it was his first time, and you know me—I’m not going to spend more time than necessary with a penis, not even a small one,” my mother told Nora.

“I think that’s clear, Ray—I think you’ve covered it,” Molly said.

“Holy shit—your dad is a movie star, kiddo,” Nora told me. Em was sitting between us in the backseat; she was holding my hand, but she gave Nora a punch in the upper arm with the fist of her other hand. “And a screenwriter—okay, okay,” Nora told Em.

From the matter-of-fact way my mom had reacted to recognizing the kid who got her pregnant with me, I believed that the sex had truly been no big deal to her. Knowing the kind of concentration my mother put into her single-leg lunges and her squats, I didn’t doubt that her having sex with Paul Goode must have been anticlimactic for her, if not for him. But, from the backseat of the dark car, I couldn’t see my mom’s face—only the back of her head and her hunched shoulders, as she repeatedly hit her forehead with the heel of her hand.

“What’s wrong, Ray—what’s the matter?” Nora and Em and I heard Molly ask her.

“He stole what I said—he took what I told him, and just gave it to the kindergarten teacher!” my mother said. She was really angry, almost in tears about it. “He was very insecure about being younger than me, and smaller than me—the kid kept asking me if he was big enough!” my mom cried. “I told him he wasn’t too small for me, I said he was just small enough, because I’d been hoping he had a small penis!” my mother cried. “Of course, he would never have understood that I chose him because I hoped he would be small.”

“It seems as if he understood you eventually, Ray,” Molly said softly.

“But that was my line, those were my words—what I told him,” my mother protested, her voice breaking. “Is that what you writers do, sweetie—you steal stuff that real people say?” my mom asked me. I could feel Em nodding her head against my shoulder; she was squeezing my hand harder.

“That’s definitely what Em does, Ray,” Nora told her.

“I do it sometimes,” I said to my mother.

“Well, if you ask me, I think that’s immoral,” my mom said. I didn’t know what to say. Em couldn’t squeeze my hand harder. “And what about those little urinals?” my mother asked. “I don’t think they had pint-size urinals for boys in kindergarten—the little urinals didn’t show up till elementary school.” Now no one knew what to say. Em’s hand was limp in mine. “In kindergarten—if you ask me, sweetie—you little boys just peed in the toilet,” my mom said.

If you ask me, we don’t know what’s anticlimactic, and what isn’t, until we get to the end of it.