The Last Chairlift

44. MEN WHO SHOULD BE CASTRATED

It was still the week between Christmas and New Year’s when my mom took me skiing. Young kids skied up to us. “Hi, Ray!” the kids said. She was, or she had been, their ski instructor; all the kids called her Ray.

“This is my son, Adam—he’s the writer,” my mother reminded the kids. They must hate me, I was thinking; they’d probably been forced to read my novels when they were too young. My mom didn’t even like my novels, I’d always thought.

Everyone who worked at Bromley spoke to her. She was just “Ray” to all of them—the other ski instructors, the patrollers, the lift operators. “This is my son, Adam—the writer,” my mom always said. My novels must have been a burden to all these ski instructors, patrollers, and lift operators, I was thinking, but that didn’t matter. I hadn’t known my mother was proud of me as a writer. At that moment, I would have followed her instructions—not only as a skier. I would have married the next ski instructor or patroller who skied up to us, or the next kid who was of age, if my mom had said, This is her, sweetie—this is the one I’ve been telling you about.

“This is our new Poma fixed-grip quad, sweetie,” was what my mother actually said, when we were riding the Blue Ribbon Quad to the top together. We’d started out on the old two-seater, the double chairlift everyone called “Number One.” That old chair had a center post, and it came up behind you pretty fast. If you weren’t ready for it, that Number One chair could knock you down; or, if you weren’t looking for it, the safety bar would come down and bonk you on the head. “You have to pay attention to that old Number One, sweetie,” my mom instructed. That was the lesson; the rest of the day, we were on the Blue Ribbon Quad. It was a better, faster chairlift than the old Number One two-seater, and many of the trails on that east side of Bromley were black-diamond runs.

My mother made me warm up on the blue runs; we probably took Upper Twister to Yodeler to the base of the Blue Ribbon chair. I just followed her. At the end of the day, my mom took me down a couple of black diamonds—certainly Stargazer to Lower Stargazer, and once or twice down Havoc. “You’re a better skier on blue runs, sweetie,” my mother told me. That was the lesson; on the steeper runs, I was struggling to keep my skis parallel, stemming my turns. I could have more fun on the blue runs; there was no shame in being an intermediate skier, my mother wanted me to learn. “Grace is a better skier than you are, and she always will be—just get over it, sweetie,” my mom told me.

Skiers are always talking about a last run, as if the last run they take is the one that’s going to kill them. My last run that first day was with Molly. The old ski patroller was almost seventy; she was waiting for us at the top of the Blue Ribbon Quad, as if she’d been expecting us. “I’ll take the kid from here, Ray,” the trail groomer told my mother.

“My one and only is a blue-run boy, Molly,” my mom cautioned her.

“The last run should be a good one, Kid,” the ski patroller said. She took me down black diamonds, definitely. We took Corkscrew to Pabst Panic or Pabst Peril; I can’t remember if there was a No Name Chute then. If the names of ski trails were better, I might remember them. The management of Bromley kept changing hands. Before he died, Fred Pabst, Jr., the beer guy, had named some trails for his family’s brewery and his Blue Ribbon beer.

Molly didn’t give me any tips about my skiing; the trail groomer wanted to warn me about hotshots. “If you’re skiing with people who ski better than you do, don’t let them push you into anything,” the ski patroller said. “Here’s the thing about hotshots, Kid—assholes are assholes, no matter how good they are at something.” For the rest of my life, it would be easier to remember Molly’s warning about hotshots than the names of ski trails.

There was a lot to like about my first day back on skis. I had upheld my status as an intermediate skier, and I had a good time. I couldn’t remember when I had last gone skiing, but I probably had hated it. Skiing with my mom and Molly, I knew I would get a little better, but not a lot. I would always be a blue-run guy. I didn’t have a problem with that. I was living in a ski town with a great bookstore; everybody I met already knew I was a writer, whether they’d read me or not. I was going to get a lot of writing done, I was thinking. I didn’t have a problem with that.

Nora had surmised the Barretts were likely to be Irish. I was so out of it, I’d not paid any attention to Grace’s last name. “I suppose the Barretts go back to the Norman invasion,” the snowshoer had said, but Nora hadn’t been worried about the Normans.

“We originally came from County Cork, but our branch of Barretts were from Norfolk County in East Anglia—we were from the East of England,” Grace’s father, Arthur Barrett, had told my mother.

“I was just wondering if Grace is Catholic, Ray,” Nora said.

“Goodness! Not that I’ve noticed,” my mom said.

It was Molly who found a way to ask Catherine, Grace’s mother, about the Catholicism. According to Catherine, those Barretts from England had let their Catholicism lapse a long time ago. The English Barretts were Anglicans. Catherine’s maiden name was Barnard; her family came from England, too. “Both the Barretts and the Barnards were Church of England people, same as Episcopalians here,” Catherine told the trail groomer.

It had been Nora’s opinion that lapsed Catholics were the best ones. My mother assured Nora that Grace had grown up going to the Episcopal church in Manchester. Grace and her parents had always skipped going to church on Sundays in the winter; they’d gone skiing instead. By the time Grace was in high school, the whole family had stopped going to church at all. “If you ask me, sweetie, Grace is a lapsed Episcopalian,” my mom told me.

“There is no such thing as a lapsed Episcopalian, Ray—Episcopalians are lapsed to begin with,” the little English teacher said.

“I just didn’t want you to go down the nonstop-procreation road, kiddo,” Nora told me. That bullet dodged, there was nothing holding me back from meeting Grace. Even Jasmine had stopped calling.

“Jasmine is old enough to have died, sweetie,” my mother reminded me.

I would wonder, later, why the difference in our ages had not held Grace back from meeting me. She was nearly fifteen years younger than I was; she was born the year my mom married Mr. Barlow, the year I started at Exeter. Grace was seventeen, in high school, when she began reading my novels—when I was already thirty-one. As the little English teacher would tell me, I was forgetting how the novels I’d read at Exeter had affected me; those nineteenth-century novels had made me want to be a writer. What if there’d been a contemporary novelist who affected me that way? There wasn’t, but I was overlooking how my novels led to Grace’s passion for reading other novels; Grace would tell me her interest in publishing began with her reading my novels.

We were married on June 9, 1990, a Saturday—scarcely six months after we met. Grace said she knew I knocked her up on the Wednesday before our wedding night—June 6, D-Day. About a month before we were married, the contractor had broken ground for the house we were building on that uphill piece of land in East Dorset; Grace and I already called it “our house,” long before the ground had thawed and they were able to start digging. We knew we would still be living in the spec house when our baby was born; our new house wouldn’t be ready to move into until June 1991.

Grace was good at making plans; editors need to be organized. As soon as she knew she was pregnant, she was setting up the amniocentesis. From Manchester, we would have to drive to Dartmouth-Hitchcock in New Hampshire for the procedure. This would be in mid-October, when the leaf peepers were cluttering up the roads in Vermont and New Hampshire. It would be a long, slow drive to Dartmouth-Hitchcock in foliage season, Grace forewarned me. When this trip was still four months away, Grace was factoring in the autumn foliage; she was well organized.

Grace would be thirty-five when she became a mother—old enough to make the amnio worth doing, her doctor told her. I don’t remember the leaf peepers or the foliage when Grace had the amnio. I couldn’t keep track of the plans Grace made; Molly had teased Grace and me about our determination to know the sex of our baby before it was born. Molly knew my mom had her own ideas about knowing the sex, and about the amnio.

“There wasn’t the amnesia option when I had you, sweetie—but I wouldn’t have wanted to know what sex you were, beforehand,” my mother told me.

“Amnio is short for amniocentesis, Ray—not amnesia,” Molly said.

“I know, smarty-pants—I was trying to be funny about it!” my mom said. She knew all about the reasoning behind amnio, she assured us—the sampling of amniotic fluid, to screen for abnormalities in the fetus. Little Ray just didn’t like the idea of the needle. “I don’t want anyone sticking a needle in my uterus, sweetie,” my mother said. I would remember that.

I didn’t notice, at first, how Grace overplayed the planning part of our lives. As a full-time fiction writer, I was happy to have someone come into my life and take charge of things. Until I met Grace, I’d never had as much time to write. Everyone said we were well matched. I felt free to concentrate on the fictional details; I entrusted the details of our real life to Grace.

Did I disregard the early signs of differences between us? I suppose I did—I wanted it to work out. “We all wanted it to work out, Kid,” Molly later said.

One day, Grace would tell me, the ultrasound picture, which she’d had framed, faded from sight; the image whitened, until there were no details. I could only imagine that the tiny penis on the fetus was the first detail to disappear. Notwithstanding what a tiny penis it was, its meaning had once been so clarifying for us. We were going to have a baby boy. At the time, one rift between Grace and me had been avoided—we hadn’t been able to agree on a girl’s name. From the Barrett side of her family, Grace was asking me about Deirdre, Elizabeth, or Beryl; from the Barnard side, Grace asked me about Mary, Kate, or Rebecca. For a girl’s name, I really wanted Nora or Rachel. There was no one alive who called my mother Rachel anymore; my mom was Ray to everyone.

Rachel was not a rescue ship in this instance. Grace had the highest esteem for Melville and Moby-Dick, but a girl who’d tormented Grace in school had been a Rachel—not a nice one—and I could sense Grace’s misgivings about Nora. I knew Nora could be a bully to younger, prettier women, but I didn’t know the particulars of Grace’s fleeting contact with Nora and Em. Grace had seen Two Dykes, One Who Talks onstage at the Gallows; she’d introduced herself to Nora and Em backstage, at my mom’s prompting. A ski-school student of Ray’s from Vermont, now a New Yorker—a Clara Swift look-alike, but a pretty girl in her own right; in my imagination, those two dykes might have given Grace more than a once-over; they might have looked her up and down, but I didn’t know what (if anything) actually happened.

Grace was a fiction editor who became a publisher; she admired Emily MacPherson’s writing. Backstage at the Gallows, Grace thought it was strange that Em wouldn’t speak to her; Grace assumed that Em’s not speaking was part of her pantomime act. My mother and Molly had to explain later: Em didn’t talk. At first, Grace only said that Em’s not speaking hurt her career as a fiction writer. Later, when Grace was pregnant, she said: “When our child is learning to talk, it will be confusing to be around a nonspeaking adult—Em’s not talking will seem unfriendly, or just weird, to a child.” I let it go, although I knew what Grace was thinking. Em’s not talking seemed unfriendly, or just weird, to Grace. I not only could sense Grace’s misgivings about Nora; Grace’s misgivings about Em were there from the start.

It didn’t matter to me or Grace whether we had a boy or a girl. We just knew the naming business would be easier with a boy; for a boy’s name, we both wanted Matthew. I was remembering Matthew Zimmermann, whereas Grace’s father, Arthur Barrett, had lost a beloved brother in a different war—another Matthew, another soldier. Yet our knowing we would have a boy gave rise to an awkward moment. For the second time, Grace asked me to confirm that Elliot Barlow truly was my stepfather; Grace wanted me to reassure her that the snowshoer wasn’t my actual father.

Like the first time she’d asked me, Grace didn’t seem curious to know more about my biological father. Grace seemed content with my mom’s dismissive version. “He was just some kid” was good enough for Grace.

“I assume they were both kids—I suppose he was a skier, too,” Grace said, shortly after we met. She wasn’t fishing.

“He was a skier, too,” I repeated.

“I was only wondering if Mr. Barlow might be your actual father,” Grace had said that first time. She was definitely fishing.

“No, my dad was just some kid—they were both kids,” I’d assured her, that first time. I let it go both times, although I knew what Grace was thinking. She’d been thinking genetically. Grace had met the snowshoer—as a man, and as a woman.

“Elliot Barlow is wonderful—I adore him!” Grace had exclaimed to me.

“You adore her,” I’d quietly said. Even people who meant well slipped up with the pronouns. And it didn’t help that those of us closest to the snowshoer still referred to her as Mr. Barlow. I don’t know why—it’s just one of those things families do.

Yet I did know what Grace was thinking, twice, and I let it go. If we were going to have a baby boy, Grace wanted to be sure that our Matthew wouldn’t change his mind about being a boy. I’m not saying there’s no forgiving Grace for having such thoughts, but I don’t forgive myself for letting it go.

That week between Christmas and New Year’s, the final days of the 1980s, I went skiing with my mother and Molly two more times. Both days, my mom never mentioned Grace, and my last run was reserved for the night groomer. My mother always led me down the mountain; I turned where she turned, if nowhere near as perfectly. Molly made me go first; she told me which trail or trails to take, but she wanted to see if I knew how to follow the fall line, or if I even knew where the fall line was. Molly skied behind me; she was so close to me, I could hear her edges and her every word.

On Havoc, a black diamond, there was some constructive criticism. “Your inside edges are your best friends, Kid,” I could hear the trail groomer (and her edges) telling me. The next day, Molly told me to take Pushover, a blue run—the longest, slowest run down the east side of the mountain from the top of the Blue Ribbon Quad. I should have known the night groomer had more to tell me than there would be time to say on a black-diamond run. “I’ll bet you think you don’t have any plans for New Year’s Eve,” the old ski patroller started.

“I don’t have any plans for New Year’s Eve,” I asserted. Behind me, there was only the sound of the patroller’s precise edging. “Do I, Molly?” I asked her.

My bigger dining-room table was the reason we were having the party in the spec house, the trail groomer told me. “I’ll do the cooking, Kid, but your mom wants the Barretts to see where you’re living, and she wants to show Grace some of your furniture,” Molly said. Grace and her parents were coming for dinner.

“I see,” I said. It was easier, on Pushover, to stay on top of my inside edges, and Molly made efficient use of our longer, slower run down the mountain. There was more to explain about my mother’s plans for New Year’s Eve. I assumed Little Ray wanted to be sure the guest bedrooms and bathrooms were presentable. “My recent guests were pretty tidy,” I told the night groomer.

“Your mom has a full-scale sweep in mind, Kid—no trace of a female visitor left lying around,” the ski patroller said. The sweep word was patroller lingo. Was my mother on a hunt for traces of Em’s bedroom visits—a pair of panties or a bra she’d left behind? What other vestiges of Em might my mom be imagining?

“Nora was the one who wasn’t neat,” I reminded Molly.

“I know, Kid,” the trail groomer told me.

Come New Year’s Eve, even my fridge was clean; it was practically empty, except for beer. I’d finally finished the leftover lamb chili. I’d not been grocery shopping since Em and the snowshoer went back to New York. Even with the skiers in town, I could always find a seat at the bar when I went out to dinner alone in Manchester—or I ate at my mother’s with her and Molly.

I tried not to notice my mom’s sweep of the upstairs of the spec house, before our company came for dinner. My mother gave Grace and her mom a house tour, but Arthur Barrett chose to have a beer in the kitchen with Molly and me. Arthur asked me a couple of leading questions; they were questions I’d been asked before, ostensibly about my writing, but Molly and I both knew that Mr. Barrett was asking as a dad whose daughter might be interested in a much older man. They were fatherly questions, the ski patroller and I decided.

“In your novels, things that are already bad escalate into worse things—don’t they?” Arthur Barrett asked. “You take things to extremes, to political extremes, to violent extremes, to sexual extremes—don’t you?” Grace’s father asked. “Is this just because you have what my daughter calls a ‘disaster-prone imagination,’ or do you believe this is how we actually live—that we are who we truly are when we go to these extremes?”

“I just have a disaster-prone imagination,” I assured him.

“You know, Arthur, I’ve known Adam since he was a teenager, and he’s never tried to make disasters happen—not that I remember,” Molly told him.

“I asked you not to ask him those questions, Daddy—everyone asks him those questions!” we could hear Grace yelling from the dining room. The likeness to Clara Swift was all the more confounding, because Grace was cheerful and open—not the wary woman in a crisis I was used to seeing onscreen. Her physical resemblance to Clara Swift was unnerving, chiefly because Grace wasn’t a character of Paul Goode’s doom-laden creation—Grace wasn’t a steely but brittle woman, facing a calamity of a noir kind. I really liked her.

Before we’d sat down to dinner, Arthur Barrett announced: “On New Year’s Eve, I like to be home and in my pajamas before the ball drops on TV.” Grace ignored him, but Catherine Barrett promised her husband he would be home in time to put his pajamas on. It didn’t bode well for a rollicking late night. Undaunted, Grace regaled us with the story of her onetime attempt to see the ball drop in Times Square.

“It was all because of a visiting author,” Grace began, but she was discreet; if you were her author, you could count on her discretion. Grace never told us the author’s name. He was European; she was publishing him in translation. It was his first time in New York, and he’d arrived ahead of schedule—on New Year’s Eve day. He’d called her home number; he had no plans and sounded forlorn. Grace changed her New Year’s Eve plans. On such short notice, the only place she could take him to dinner was the restaurant in his hotel—he was staying at the Plaza. He had insisted on staying there, though that hotel was usually too expensive for publishers. “It would not be where we would choose to put most of our authors,” Grace explained discreetly. The only table Grace could get was a late seating.

“He hit on her, after dinner—he tried to take her to his hotel room!” Arthur Barrett blurted out. “Are all authors so badly behaved?” Grace’s father asked me.

“Absolutely yes. Don’t give the story away, Daddy,” Grace scolded him. “This author also hit on our pregnant publicist, on my editorial assistant, and on several of the journalists who interviewed him,” Grace explained. “In lieu of going to his hotel room, I asked him if he’d ever seen the ball drop in Times Square. It was only an hour till midnight. I knew there would be a mob, and we’d never get close enough to see the ball, but I imagined we would get closer than we did,” Grace said. She’d walked with the European author along West Fifty-ninth Street, but when they turned down Seventh Avenue, they couldn’t get below West Fifty-sixth before the crowd and the police blocked their way. When the ball dropped, they could barely hear “Auld Lange Syne”; they saw some fireworks from a distance, but that was all they could see.

“It’s better to watch the ball drop on TV,” Grace said.

“That writer is one of those men who should be castrated,” Arthur Barrett told us, but he was looking at me.

“We’ll get you home in time to put your pajamas on,” Catherine Barrett repeated to him, like a prayer.

I told a story about trying to see the ball drop—a misadventure with Em and Nora, one frigid New Year’s Eve in Hell’s Kitchen. Em was determined to leave early—to get as close as we could to Forty-second Street or Forty-third. “You’ll be cold, you’ll have to pee, some yahoos will try to feel you up,” Nora had warned her, but Em pantomimed that she would go crazy watching the ball drop on the TV in their rat’s-ass apartment in Hell’s Kitchen.

The crowd was already shoulder to shoulder on Seventh Avenue when the yahoos came out of the Forty-ninth Street subway—four guys, big and sloppy, noisy and rude. It was clear they knew Nora and Em were a couple; they were closing in on Em, and making remarks about Nora, from the beginning. In the crowd, inching ahead, we came to a standstill before Forty-eighth Street; we couldn’t get away from the yahoos. They were the type of guys who would ignore me, or pretend I wasn’t there, until the fight started.

“I wonder if the cute one has ever been with a guy,” one of the yahoos said, looking at Em.

“What’s your name, cute one?” another yahoo asked Em, who was cringing between Nora and me.

“You gotta put a bag over the other one’s head—you can’t come lookin’ at her,” the third yahoo said, looking at Nora.

“I would bite your face off through the bag—I would crush your nuts with my knees,” Nora told him.

The fourth yahoo reached around me and put his hand on Em’s ass. Em’s pantomime was obvious to Nora and me, not so obvious if you didn’t know Em. She was cold, she had to pee, she wanted to watch the ball drop on TV—with her head in Nora’s lap. Nora never wanted to be anywhere near Times Square on New Year’s Eve in the first place, but I knew Nora would be disinclined to leave because of a bunch of yahoos.

The police were all around; Nora waved to one of the cops, who made his way to her through the crowd. The first yahoo who’d spoken came to his own conclusions about Em’s pantomime. “I wonder if the cute one is retarded, or if she’s a mute or somethin’,” the yahoo said.

“There’s somethin’ wrong with her, all right, but she’s still the cute one,” the second yahoo said; he was the one who had asked Em her name.

“How can I help you girls?” the policeman asked Nora.

“These guys are harassing us—that one put his hand on her ass,” Nora told the cop, pointing to Em and the yahoo who touched her.

“Where are you girls from?” the policeman asked Em, who just froze.

“She doesn’t speak,” I told him.

“She’s retarded, or somethin’!” the first yahoo was shouting.

“We’re from here—we live in the neighborhood,” Nora said to the policeman.

“Are you with these girls?” the cop asked me.

“Yes,” I said.

“You should take them home,” the cop told me; he was picking his way through the crowd, back to his fellow policemen, when Nora called after him.

“You’re not helping us! We’re not the problem—they’re the problem!” Nora called to him, pointing to the yahoos.

“Just go home!” the cop called back to Nora, not bothering to turn and look at her.

“Just go home!” the yahoos chanted, emboldened by the feeble police response.

We weren’t going to get close enough to see the ball drop, anyway. “We should go,” I said to Nora, with Em nodding her head off, but I knew Nora.

“Where are you from—are you from out of town, or somewhere worse?” Nora asked the yahoos.

I knew how Nora felt about the walkouts at the Gallows; she always said the walkouts were from out of town. I hadn’t known there was somewhere worse to be from. Clearly, the yahoos were confused.

“What’s worse than from out of town?” the stupidest yahoo asked Nora; he was also the biggest. He was the one who had suggested putting a bag over Nora’s head.

“From New Jersey,” Nora told him. I don’t know how Nora knew where the yahoos were from, or if she was just winging it, but that’s when things got out of hand. A fiercely patriotic passion for the Garden State was ignited in the yahoos. The biggest guy—“the bag yahoo,” as Nora would later refer to him—was purposely standing too close to Nora. He was the right height for her to head-butt him, I was thinking, when the yahoo who’d put his hand on Em’s ass reached around me again. This time, he groped Em under her parka; from the way Em flinched and yelped, he must have pinched one of her breasts. I knew what Nora was going to do, but I was the one standing closest to the groper. I took his hand and put him in one of Coach Dearborn’s wristlocks. The boob-pincher was a screamer, which brought our policeman back to us; this time, two cops came with him.

I knew Nora would head-butt the biggest guy. She butted him in the lips and the nose. When the bag yahoo tried to shield his face with his hands, Nora grabbed him by the balls; she held on until the cops came. “Like I said, they’re the problem,” Nora told our policeman.

“Where are you boys from?” our cop asked the yahoos.

The two yahoos who could speak spoke in unison. “Jersey,” the yahoos said.

“You should go back to Jersey,” our policeman told them.

The boob-pincher was holding his arm in a funny way. “Yeah, but…” he started to say.

“Just go back to Jersey!” one of the other cops said sharply to him.

The bag yahoo was curled in a fetal position on the Seventh Avenue sidewalk; his mouth was bleeding, but he wasn’t talking because of his balls. We went west on Forty-ninth Street, heading uptown on Eighth Avenue. “Just go back to Jersey!” Nora was singing to herself. We would be back in that rat’s-ass apartment in Hell’s Kitchen in time to watch the ball drop on TV. Em was curled up on the couch, with her head in Nora’s lap; I had the other end of the couch to myself.

“You know I loved Nora, but she made a lot of people angry, sweetie,” my mother said now. This led to mention of the Gallows Lounge shooting.

“I read that you tried to attract the shooter’s attention. Did you really want him to shoot you?” Arthur Barrett asked me.

“Em was onstage, and she was an easy target—that’s all I knew,” I told Grace’s father.

“My dear Elliot went after the shooter—she went right at him!” my mom declared.

“The snowshoer was the only hero—I just tried to distract the shooter,” I said.

Grace was discreet in the way she changed the subject from the shooting. “Some of my authors would never move to Vermont—they’re more interested in their public appearances as writers than they are in writing,” Grace began. She wasn’t singling out her authors who lived in New York; writers’ festivals were proliferating everywhere. We both knew authors who spent more time talking about writing than doing it. Grace asked me about screenwriting; at the time, I’d written a couple of adaptations and an original screenplay, but none of my movie scripts had been made.

I asked Grace about her driving from New York to Vermont almost every weekend; she must like to drive, I ventured to say. She loved to drive, she told me, but she also liked listening to audiobooks in the car. She listened to novels other publishers were publishing, and to those classic novels she’d read and loved in school. Our talk about writing put Arthur Barrett to sleep during dinner, but he awoke with a start in time for dessert. Mr. Barrett’s mind must have been back on Seventh Avenue, with the yahoos from New Jersey, because this was the earlier conversation he seemed to be addressing.

“Castration is the only answer—those men from New Jersey should be castrated,” Arthur Barrett said. “Castration really works, you know,” he assured us.

“We know it works, Daddy,” Grace told him.

Thank goodness Catherine Barrett’s refrain was ready when we needed it. “We’ll get you home in time to put your pajamas on,” Mrs. Barrett promised her husband, who was wolfing down his dessert.

Molly had sautéed some salmon steaks with tomatoes and black olives, and she’d baked an apple pie. There was no drinking to speak of. Catherine kept telling us she was the driver; she didn’t drink at all. The rest of us weren’t knocking back the beer. After his second helping of pie, Arthur was antsy to leave; his pajamas and the ball drop beckoned him home, although the Barretts lived close by and it was nowhere near midnight. When my mom and Molly went out, the night groomer never had more than two beers; Molly was always the driver. “I’ll drive you home, Grace, when Ray and I go home—if you want to stay and watch the ball drop with us,” the trail groomer told her.

The lead-up to the ball drop was already on TV, after the elder Barretts went home and Grace was helping us clean up in the kitchen. Grace and I rinsed the dishes and loaded the dishwasher, while my mother and Molly wiped down the dining-room table and put away the leftovers. That was when Grace made two observations about Em and me, as writers. “I know you and Emily MacPherson are friends, and your writing has certain similarities—you both write about dysfunctional families, and you both like semicolons,” Grace said.

I told Grace how I hadn’t known Emily MacPherson was writing fiction until my students and I started reading her at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Em had never told me, I explained to Grace. “But you and Em must write to each other now, don’t you? Writers who are friends write to each other, don’t they?” Grace asked me. As an editor, Grace understood fiction, and she knew fiction writers.

“Em is writing a third-person omniscient novel right now,” I started to say, but I already knew I couldn’t bullshit Grace. I didn’t try to convince Grace that writing a novel in the third person precluded Em from writing me in the first person. “Em needs to feel a sense of detachment from herself in order to write about the Gallows Lounge shooting. I think Em needs to live in the third person for a while—maybe writing letters is too personal right now. We seem to have stopped writing letters to each other, for now,” I told Grace. My mom and Molly kept quiet.

“Em seems eccentric, even for a fiction writer,” Grace said.

“Em is eccentric—isn’t she, sweetie?” my mother called from the dining room. I looked at Molly, who was putting the leftover salmon and apple pie in the fridge. The old ski patroller just stared back at me, as if my inside edges were in need of attention.

“Em is eccentric,” I repeated. I hated myself for saying this. I felt like I was betraying Em. I really missed writing her, and receiving her letters. She’d written me not that long ago, but I’d put off answering her, and now we were no longer writing to each other.

“You used to talk all the time about going to Aspen and the Hotel Jerome. If you’re still interested in going there, you better do it before you have a wife and kid,” Em had written to me. “You would have a lot of explaining to do, if you went there with a wife and kid, wouldn’t you?” Em had asked me.

While the night groomer was finding the channel for the ball drop on the TV in the living room, my mom was doing her jock walk in the kitchen, where she was watching Grace and me at the sink. At that moment, we must have struck my mother as a model of domesticity—I was washing the pots and pans, Grace drying them. We were standing hip to hip at the sink, almost touching; the way we’d been talking about the writing business, anyone would have thought we knew each other. I stole a look at her in profile; she seemed flawless. It felt completely natural to be standing this close to her. Em was right: I would have a lot of explaining to do if I went to Aspen and the Hotel Jerome with a wife and kid. That’s a trip I should take alone, I was thinking—as soon as there was a window of opportunity.

The relaxed way Grace spoke to me made me think we were already living together. “If you feel like having half a beer, I’ll split one with you,” Grace said. My hands were wet; hers were dry.

“Sure—the beer is in the fridge,” I told her. That was why she saw the grocery list. I’d not written anything on the list since the snowshoer and Em had gone back to New York. I saw Grace pause at the door to the fridge; she was reading the grocery list. At a glance, I could see it was a longer list than I remembered writing—ever.

“This is an eccentric grocery list,” Grace said. Uh-oh, I was thinking—my mom’s sweep of the upstairs had not found every trace of Em. Only Em would write a grocery list as long as the one Grace began reading to us, just as Molly came back in the kitchen. Given Grace’s familiarity with Emily MacPherson’s writing, Grace knew who’d made such an unusual contribution to my grocery list—and Em wasn’t writing to me in the third person. Of course I remembered the recent context of what Em was now saying on a shopping list; Grace read aloud Em’s pantomime, the one Mr. Barlow and I had struggled to understand. Poor Em had given up and gone to bed. Maybe mime wasn’t the best theatrical technique for conveying an interior monologue. What Em meant was perfectly clear on the grocery list, and Grace Barrett was a good reader; Grace was easy to understand.

“In his interviews, even now, Paul Goode comes across as more believable and sympathetic than he ever does in his writing or his acting,” Em had written. “I wonder if you might like him, if you met him; I wonder if you might think he was a good guy in real life. Maybe, if you met him, he wouldn’t be the disappointment he is to you—as a writer. Perhaps, if you knew him, he would come off better than the one-note sarcastic little shit you think he is—as an actor,” Em wrote.

“I’ve never seen a grocery list with a semicolon,” Grace said, “and her handwriting is almost too precise to be handwritten. Does Emily MacPherson write in longhand?” Grace asked me.

“Em writes in longhand,” I told her.

“You write in longhand, too, sweetie,” my mom said; she was trying to change the subject. But Grace Barrett was an editor; she knew the subject on the grocery list was Paul Goode, not writing in longhand.

“Your mother told me you write in longhand, but I never knew you didn’t like Paul Goode!” Grace exclaimed, taking a beer from the fridge.

“I’m not crazy about his writing or his acting,” I said, trying to keep it simple.

“The heck with his writing or his acting—Paul Goode was the first man I imagined losing my virginity to,” Grace told us. She’d been sixteen when she saw The Wrong Car for the first time. Her driver’s license was brand new when she drove to Bennington to see the movie; maybe there was a noir film festival at the college. Grace thought it was a funny story; she seemed disconcerted that we weren’t laughing. I’d seen The Wrong Car in 1960—when Grace was a four-year-old. She’d still been in high school when she saw The Kindergarten Man, she told us—“when Paul Goode was a little younger than you are now,” Grace said to me. Our silence made her tentative.

“I’ve told you, sweetie—I don’t think about Paul Goode at all,” my mom suddenly blurted out.

I just looked at Molly, expecting the old ski patroller to say (as I’d heard her say before), “That’s a good place to leave it, Ray—right there.” But this time, Molly didn’t speak up.

We must have been waiting for my mother to say more of the same old Paul Goode business. How I wish she had—I wish she’d told Grace everything. Molly and I were just waiting for it all to come out, but it didn’t. My mom managed to stop herself from saying more; someone else had to say it.

“Well, I’m embarrassed about it now, but actually losing my virginity was not that big a deal—not compared to how I imagined losing it to Paul Goode,” Grace felt compelled to say, since the three of us looked so stricken. “You all look like you would rather go back to the castration conversation,” Grace told us. At least we laughed; an air of gloom had lifted.

“I don’t think about Paul Goode, but I generally don’t think about men,” Molly reminded us; I knew she was just being funny, so we would keep laughing.

“Smarty-pants, Molly,” my mother said. I looked at Grace; she was over her embarrassment. She’d forgotten we were going to share a beer; she was already drinking it, out of the bottle. I felt like having a whole beer myself. That was when I should have told her, when all of us were laughing. It would never get easier to tell Grace the story, I knew, but I got sidetracked by where to begin.

You’ve just met a woman you really like, but you need to tell her that the first man she imagined losing her virginity to is your father. She is now only a few years older than your father was when she first saw him; Paul Goode was thirty when he made The Wrong Car. He was forty-six when he made The Kindergarten Man—he was only two years younger than you are now. And, just to put the age thing into perspective, you have to tell her that your dad was only fourteen when he lost his virginity to your mom. I knew this detail might not be the best beginning. At fourteen, Paul Goode was a far cry from the getaway driver Grace had imagined losing her virginity to; that fourteen-year-old was too young to be driving. But, while I was wondering where to begin, Grace had moved on.

“Well, I’m glad my virginity story is over—I was beginning to feel like that woman with the baby carriage and the shotgun in The Wrong Car. You know what happened to her, don’t you?” Grace asked me.

It would not be a surprise to me to learn that the woman with the baby carriage wasn’t a ghost. And if my mother had interjected, about Paul Goode, He was just a boy who couldn’t take his eyes off me—well, that would have been okay with me. He would have been a pretty girl, I wished she’d said, again—she didn’t. My mom wasn’t saying a word.

Maybe I could begin the story with the ghosts, I was thinking—remembering how that woman with the baby carriage never did anything but show up. Yet all I said to Grace was: “No, I don’t know what happened to the woman with the baby carriage.”

“She threatened to commit suicide after a restraining order was issued against her—prohibiting her from approaching or contacting Paul Goode,” Grace said. I learned that the woman with the baby carriage never had a romantic relationship with Paul Goode—they weren’t even lovers in the film. The woman had stalked Paul Goode; she’d sought to have a relationship with him, she spied on every woman who ever knew him. “Career-wise, she might as well have committed suicide,” Grace said. That was when I wished I was in Aspen, at the Hotel Jerome—waiting for the ball to drop, among the ghosts. I said nothing to Grace about the ghosts, or about my father. I just watched my mother, never knowing what she might do or say.

Little Ray glared at the grocery list on the fridge door before she took out two beers, giving one to me. The solemnness that had greeted Grace’s virginity story gripped us again; there was nothing lighthearted about the suicide threat of that woman with the baby carriage. I knew the night groomer’s good intentions when she decided to dispel our gloom with a little levity. Molly’s mischief lifted our New Year’s Eve out of the doldrums, just before the ball drop in Times Square.

“We should tell you two virginity stories, Grace—Adam played a part in losing two virginities,” the trail groomer told the woman I would marry in June. “Didn’t you, Kid?” Molly asked me. I knew the lost virginities Molly meant—mine and Maud’s—and my mom was shrieking with laughter. Grace knew this wasn’t to be taken seriously.

“You lost your virginity twice?” Grace asked me; she was already laughing. I was grateful to the night groomer for making Grace feel happy. We watched the stupid ball drop on the TV in the living room, while my mother and Molly did most of the storytelling.

My first time, my penis bender with Caroline, prompted my mother to whisper to me twice, as she had at the time—“You shouldn’t have sex with a girl on crutches” and “You don’t have sex with someone who’s just had surgery”—but the old ski patroller, with her emergency medical training, provided Grace with the more comprehensive details of my penis injury. It was not a permanently bent penis that needed a surgery, Molly assured Grace, as the ski patroller had once assured me.

My mom took over telling Grace about my next time, when it was Maud’s turn to lose her virginity. I had to interrupt my mother when she got confused about the two Helens, as she’d been confused before; the Helen who was thrown out of school, the girl Maud wanted to lose her virginity to, didn’t die. She wasn’t the same Helen as the one who dies in Jane Eyre, I explained; she was just a girl Maud didn’t get to sleep with. “You don’t have sex with a girl who thinks she may like girls,” my mom told me, again, before she gave Grace the details of Maud’s contradictory behavior—the way Maud wrapped her long legs around me as she clubbed me with her cast.

“Maud was in a cast?” Grace asked; my mother had overlooked Maud’s broken arm and the cast, but she’d not forgotten Maud’s Yes!-No! cries. Molly mentioned the bloodstains she’d painted over on Maud’s cast, while my mom was putting the antiseptic on my face and ears.

“The Yes!-No! cries went on and on—it was not the next time I hoped you would have, Kid, after your penis bender,” the old ski patroller told me.

Grace would tell me later that she made up her mind about me that New Year’s Eve. “The way your mother and Molly teased you, and the way you went along with it—that’s what made me trust your good nature,” Grace would say. “You were all so good-natured,” she said.

I didn’t doubt Molly’s good nature, or—most of the time—my mom’s. My good nature wasn’t that reliable. Grace may have misjudged the way I was happy to take a teasing from Molly and my mother. With everyone having such a good time, it was possible for me to do what writers do—we’re always imagining a future story; we’re already writing it. That New Year’s Eve, I drifted away. I was no more present at the loss of my virginity, or Maud’s, than I was at the ball drop in Times Square. I was already in Aspen—alone, at the Hotel Jerome. I saw myself there; it was a movie I was already writing. I was not yet plotting when a window of opportunity might come—the plotting, and the window, came later.

Expecting a baby when she would be thirty-five, Grace was careful and deliberate about her pregnancy. She was mindful of the discrepancies among the airlines, concerning when it was still safe to fly. Many airlines let you fly up to nine months; that sounded unsafe to Grace. Some international flights only took you up to seven. Grace asked her obstetrician, who was also a skier. No skiing, no flying, no altitude—not after the seventh month, her doctor said. I knew when I would go to Aspen and the Hotel Jerome—when Grace was starting her eighth month, my window of opportunity. I wasn’t thinking about meeting Paul Goode, or wondering if I might like him. I didn’t want to tell him he had a son, or get to know him, but we all want to know where we come from. I wanted to see the Hotel Jerome; I wanted to know more about the ghosts.

In December 1990, a couple of weeks before Christmas, Grace was six months pregnant; she was still working in New York, and driving almost every weekend to Vermont. Grace had seen the new Paul Goode movie, The Other Man, in New York. I hadn’t seen it. The Other Man wouldn’t be playing in Manchester anytime soon, but this didn’t prevent people in Vermont from talking about it. Paul Goode’s wife, Clara Swift, plays his unfaithful wife in The Other Man. In light of my father’s scandalous affair with Juliette Leblanc, his co-star in Argonne, this was the talk of the town. No matter, my thoughts were in Aspen, where I knew I would be going. February 1991 would be Grace’s eighth month. It hadn’t occurred to me that The Other Man might be playing in Aspen long before it came to Manchester, Vermont. I wasn’t interested in seeing more of Paul Goode. I just wanted to see the Hotel Jerome, and know more about the ghosts.

When you see ghosts, they’re just there—they just show up. I don’t know why, but either you see ghosts or you don’t. You can see ghosts better in a movie than you can in a book. If you’ve ever been in an accident, or seen one close up, you will relive it again and again. When you relive an accident, it’s always happening in the present—as if for the first time. Screenplays are written in the present tense, as if what you see is happening for the first time. That’s why what happened to me in Aspen is a movie; it’s always happening, again and again, for the first time. I will always see it as a movie.