The Last Chairlift

48. FIVE YEARS, FOUR MOVIES

The end of January is the coldest time of the year on Bromley Mountain; those two had picked a perfect night to freeze to death. I wasn’t wrong to imagine the little English teacher would leave me something in writing, in addition to what my mom and the snowshoer had written in the snow—the scene those two so artfully composed in the chairlift at the top of Number Ten.

My mother and Mr. Barlow had been gone only a week when Grace said she saw no reason why all three of us couldn’t go to Aspen now; she kept our reservation for a suite at the Jerome.

“Tell Grace to go to Aspen by herself, but if she insists on taking Matthew, you should go with them,” Em said. Without generalizing about ghosts to Em, I suspected it was too soon for my mother’s ghost to show up—wherever Little Ray might make an appearance. Em hadn’t forgotten my mom’s heartfelt plea—to get her out of the Jerome, if she ended up there—but Em had made Matthew her priority. “Tell Grace to reserve a second room. Grace can do her Paul Goode business, you can do your ghost business. Matthew and I have our own room—no ghost gets near that boy if he’s with me,” Em said.

“It’s weird enough with Em already,” was Grace’s first response to Em’s idea about traveling with us. “Besides, it’s too late to book a second room at the Jerome.”

With my mom and Mr. Barlow gone, a pall was cast over our East Dorset house. We’d all asked Molly to stay with us, but the old patroller was keeping to herself in the Manchester house. It was Em’s theory that Molly was going through Little Ray’s things, as Em had gone through Nora’s. “What you should do, Longhand Man, is go back to your writing—that’s what the snowshoer would tell you to do,” Em said.

I hadn’t been at my desk—I’d not even looked at my writing notebooks during the first week my mother and Elliot Barlow were gone. As Molly had said, what was written in the snow was clear, but it was like the snowshoer to have more to say; it was like the little English teacher to let a literary quotation speak for her.

The notebook I’d most recently been writing in lay open on my desk. In the blank space below the last sentence I’d written, in the small but perfect penmanship of the experienced copy editor she’d become, Elliot Barlow had quoted Herman Melville—an excerpt near the beginning of a long sentence, one the snowshoer knew I would know. It was one of the passages my grandmother had repeated when she was reading Moby-Dick to me—a passage she’d later asked me to read to her. “Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried,” was all Mr. Barlow had written in my notebook; there’s more about “the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored.”

I showed Em what the snowshoer had written, not bringing up anything remote, wild, watery, or unshored. For a writer like Em—who was waiting for an upheaval of some kind before she finally read Moby-Dick—I thought “the region of the strange Untried” might be enough of an upheaval.

“I intend to read that novel someday,” was all Em said; she was not sufficiently upheaved to start reading Melville.

Like me, Em imagined that the snowshoer might leave her something in writing. The little English teacher, it turned out, had left more than a literary quotation for Em, who was contacted by a lawyer representing Elliot Barlow’s estate. Em was a beneficiary of the snowshoer’s will; Mr. Barlow had bequeathed her the late writing team’s apartment on East Sixty-fourth Street.

Grace declared that Em was “property rich”; she’d inherited real estate in midtown Toronto and on the Upper East Side of New York. “If your new novel isn’t the breakout book for you that I believe it will be, you can unload the house in Toronto—the snowshoer’s apartment is small, but people would kill to be given a closet on the Upper East Side,” Grace told Em in that sure-of-herself, New Yorker way. Grace had never been to Toronto, but she was confident that New York was superior to any other city in the world—and Em had been given a pied-à-terre on the Upper East Side.

To be fair, Grace wasn’t alone in believing Em would never move to Canada—as Em occasionally threatened to do. It seemed stubborn to me that Em refused to sell the house in Toronto, but she insisted she wanted a place to go if she ever left the United States. It had been a while since I’d seen Em do her seagull thing—her arms spread like a seagull’s motionless wings, which sometimes meant she was thinking about drifting back to Canada. Yet a drifting seagull was also Em’s way of pantomiming Ronald Reagan’s laissez-faire abstention from interfering with the AIDS epidemic—this was what Em’s seagull thing had meant to most of the regulars at the Gallows Lounge. To be fair, Grace was ever the champion of Em’s writing.

When my mom got sick and the snowshoer and Em left Manhattan to come to Vermont, Grace introduced Em to the booksellers at the Northshire. Grace saw to it that the bookstore had Em’s backlist in stock before she got to town. Grace had been telling the booksellers that Emily MacPherson’s new novel would be her breakout book.

“You should live with Em,” Grace kept telling me; she kept telling Em we should live together, too. “You two fiction writers are nomads—it doesn’t matter to you where you live,” Grace told us. “If you tried living together, you two might actually be happy for a change,” Grace said in that sure-of-herself, New Yorker way.

My soon-to-be-ex-wife had inserted herself as a matchmaker for Em and me. “If you and Em are together, that would be the best transition for Matthew—he knows and loves you both—and, at your age, it doesn’t really matter that you and Em don’t have sex, or if one day you manage to find a way to do it,” Grace told me. “Em is over sixty, you know, and you’re fifty-four,” Grace said. Grace was going on forty. She didn’t seem to be concerned about her own circumstances—I mean, regarding what would be the best transition for Matthew. While we agreed we would sell the East Dorset house, Grace was evasive about where she and Matthew would live—whether they would stay in Vermont or move to Manhattan. “You and Em might as well live in New York—you’ll probably end up there, eventually,” Grace said; she sounded more certain about what Em and I should do than she did about her and Matthew.

“I also have to think about Molly,” I reminded Grace.

“Molly is seventy-five, almost seventy-six,” was all Grace said about Molly, as if the old patroller were too old to bother about.

Em and I were worrying about Molly when we invited ourselves and Matthew to an early dinner at the Manchester house, one night when Grace was in New York. “I’ll bet Molly has surrounded herself with your mother’s clothes—she’s probably sleeping with your mom’s clothes. A week after Nora died, you can bet your ass I was sleeping with her clothes,” Em told me.

Molly told us to come ahead of dinner time—then I could help her with the cooking. When Em and Matthew and I arrived, we saw neat piles of Little Ray’s clothes on the futon in the TV room and on the bed in Molly and my mom’s bedroom. The piles were well organized—the pants with other pants, the long-sleeved jerseys and turtlenecks together, the blouses separated from the skirts and sweaters. If the old patroller had been sleeping with my mother’s clothes, she was over it. The clothes were for Em to try on. While Molly and I were in the kitchen, Matthew had fun dressing Em—or, as Matthew put it, “helping her” try on his grandmother’s clothes.

“I found a photograph of your mom—it was under some old ski pants she never wore,” Molly told me in the kitchen, where the photo was displayed in a bowl of apples on the counter, a safe distance from the stovetop and the chopping block.

In the black-and-white photo, I recognized the sweater and the matching ski hat, but the sweater was too tight on my mother, and the pom-pom on the ski hat was too feminine for the jock look my mom had most admired in her late teens and early twenties. In the shabbiness of the dark Victorian bedroom with the tall windows, I could discern what would become the restored Hotel Jerome. Molly hadn’t found the photo under the ski sweater my mom was wearing in Aspen in 1941—when Little Ray was eighteen, almost nineteen.

I’d seen the sweater before; it was too big for the shoulders of the small snow shoveler, and the pom-pom on the hat was too girlish for a boy, although my mother had told Molly and me that the boy who couldn’t take his eyes off her would have been a pretty girl.

“I’m guessing it was the ski sweater and the hat your mom gave to that boy who was a little smaller than she was—the one she didn’t say she slept with, not at first,” Molly reminded me. “You remember, don’t you, Kid?” the old patroller asked me.

“I remember,” I said.

“I’m just guessing, Kid, but if you showed Paul Goode this picture, he would remember Ray—and her sweater and hat,” Molly said.

In the black-and-white photo, my mother is the smallest and youngest of her fellow skiers crowded into one bedroom at the Jerome; a teammate must have snapped the picture. Little Ray is the only skier looking at the camera; she’s smiling, as if she were posing for a portrait in the chaos of her teammates’ disarray.

At eighteen, my mom’s calmness and the naturalness of her smile made Molly and me imagine that my mother had already made up her mind. “Aspen—March 1941,” Little Ray had written on the back of the pic.

“Look at her smile—she’s already met him, Kid,” the old patroller told me in the kitchen. We could hear Matthew shrieking, while Em tried on Little Ray’s clothes. Molly meant that my mom had spotted the kid who could be my father, she’d seen that boy who wasn’t yet shaving—the one who would give her what she wanted, her one and only, with no strings attached.

Molly had more to show me, not about my mother. The old patroller didn’t need me to come ahead of dinner time to help her with the cooking. Molly was roasting a chicken in the oven; the potatoes and onions and carrots were already in the oven, too. She’d prepared our dinner before we arrived; Molly knew Matthew would be entertained “helping” Em try on my mother’s clothes. The old ski patroller wanted to be alone with me in the kitchen. Perhaps ski patrollers are a family; they pay attention to what happens to other people on ski patrol. Or maybe Molly was unique among patrollers—she kept a close eye on the news, not only the news about bootpacking and running sleds.

“Those two patrollers were killed with your friend Monika—if you haven’t heard, Kid,” Molly said, showing me a news clipping. “Monika was driving—they make cars with hand controls for paraplegic drivers.”

The headline was objective and succinct.

HWY 82 CRASH KILLS THREE

They had hit a snowplow head-on. The three women were coming from Woody Creek in a winter storm. They were driving back to Aspen on Highway 82—nighttime driving, whiteout conditions. Monika had just passed the Aspen/Pitkin County Airport when her car strayed into the oncoming lane. The driver of the snowplow wasn’t seriously injured. The state police said the three women weren’t wearing seat belts. Monika was described as “the Austrian downhill racer and an Aspen resident”; Nan and Beth, longtime ski patrollers at Aspen Highlands, were referred to as “Aspen natives.” It was a local newspaper; the three friends were treated respectfully. “Perhaps alcohol was a factor”—this was as much as the reporter ventured to say about the women’s well-known drinking habits. There was a photo of the crumpled car; in the one of Monika Behr with Nan and Beth, the three friends were younger than they were when I met them.

The sports television networks would not be kind to Monika Behr. With hindsight, the seeds of Monika’s reckless driving could be seen in her crash on the women’s downhill course at Cortina—the ceaseless replay of her career-ending, slow-motion fall. The video footage of Monika’s lifeless-looking body being airlifted from the piste would be perceived as a harbinger of her dead body being taken from the wreck in the whiteout on Highway 82.

“When I die,” Monika had told me, “I want to lie in the sheets at the Hotel Jerome—I won’t care if the sheets are clean.”

“I wonder if there are rules for ghosts,” I’d written in the Loge Peak screenplay.

I was remembering what Monika Behr had said about children. “Personally, I hate children,” Monika told me, at her gym in Aspen.

“You mean as skiers,” I replied, because we’d been talking about the skiing at Buttermilk.

Monika Behr had made herself clear. “I mean in general,” she said. The gym rats in The Last Run were laughing; they knew Monika wasn’t kidding.

Molly knew about my bad behavior in Aspen at the Hotel Jerome. I’d not shown her my Loge Peak screenplay; Molly wasn’t much of a reader. The old patroller knew I’d connected with Clara Swift in the breakfast room at the Jerome; this made Molly look prescient. “You couldn’t get me to go there for breakfast,” she’d always said.

Meanwhile, Matthew was having a better time than Em, who didn’t enjoy trying on my mother’s clothes. Molly might have been ready to get rid of them, but Em wasn’t comfortable wearing them. I knew Em had been dreading going back to New York, to the apartment she’d inherited from the snowshoer. Em remembered her life with Nora’s clothes, after Nora was gone. In New York, Em knew, the little English teacher’s clothes awaited her.

Between the photo of my mom in the ski sweater and hat she gave to Paul Goode, and the news about Monika Behr’s fatal car crash, I was in an Aspen frame of mind. I could tell Em wasn’t feeling much better. Among my mother’s clothes, Em found some winter items to take with her. We drove Matthew home and put him to bed. When Em and I were going to bed, I showed her the snapshot of my mom in the tight sweater and the ski hat with the pom-pom; I also showed her the news clipping about Monika Behr.

One day, I would think of Monika Behr as my most unmarriageable girlfriend—ever. But, at the time, I hadn’t met her ghost. I was just guessing that Monika Behr would be a bad ghost.

“At the time, I couldn’t imagine what would ever bring me back to Aspen and the Hotel Jerome,” I’d written five years before I knew I was heading back.

That was the last voice-over I’d written in my unfinished Loge Peak screenplay. “How’d you know that? That’s creepy,” Em told me, when we were lying in the dark.

“It just sounded good in voice-over,” I said.

“That’s a writing answer—I wasn’t asking you about your screenplay,” Em told me. She meant I must have known I might be going back to Aspen and the Hotel Jerome.

“I don’t know how I knew,” I told Em.

“Even creepier,” Em said.

As for even creepier—in the first two weeks of February, before we went to Aspen, Grace was watching Paul Goode movies on our bedroom TV. The VHS cassettes were stacked on her night table. Grace made a point of replaying Paul Goode films only at night, when she was going to bed.

In the five years since Clara Swift had jumped from the Loge Peak chairlift at Aspen Highlands, four Paul Goode movies would be released in theaters. Ocean Avenue was in postproduction and Every Other Weekend was in preproduction when Clara Swift jumped to her death. At the time, Paul Goode also had a deal to make Forgetting Nebraska; he’d already written it. Then there was Rim Shot, which had recently been released.

The closet and the chest of drawers in the guest bedroom I’d adopted weren’t big enough for my winter clothes—even though the clothes Em had brought from New York and the winter items she’d taken of my mother’s were in another guest bedroom. I kept going back to Grace’s and my bedroom to get more clothes; I tried to do this when Grace was away, or at least when she was awake. It was disconcerting to see her sound asleep with a Paul Goode movie going ahead on the TV screen. This was why I watched once more the small but disturbing scene from Ocean Avenue—the flashback near the end of the film, when the doomed couple reconcile their marriage, which leads to their killing each other. They were a couple careening out of control, a relationship like a runaway sled on a mountain.

There’s a long shot of the Santa Monica Pier, looking south along the beach, which is crowded in the late afternoon. We’re in Paul Goode’s point of view as we come closer to the former bombshell redhead, now a little the worse for wear; she’s sitting on the sand with her knees hugged to her chest, facing out to sea. Paul Goode comes into frame and sits behind her; he scuttles toward her on the sand, like a crab. The redhead knows he’s there; she reluctantly reaches for him, behind her. He moves closer to her, until they’re like two people on a sled—clinging to each other, as the imaginary sled picks up speed and the music rises. The scene gave me the chills; my father must have been sixty-five, old enough to be the wrecked redhead’s father.

“What do you want?” Grace suddenly said, either to me or to someone she was dreaming about; she was sound asleep. I went back to the guest bedroom, where I got into bed with Em. I told her what had happened. Em knew the flashback scene in Ocean Avenue.

“You’ll get another shot at a normal life—my life with the snowshoer was normal, compared to this,” Em said, hugging me.

“Every creature wants a normal life—even an octopus!” Little Ray had said.

That night of the flashback in Ocean Avenue, I told Em I was worried about Molly—alone in the Manchester house with all those guns. “Molly won’t shoot herself—she wouldn’t leave a mess for one of us to deal with,” Em assured me.

That February, one night when Grace was awake, we watched the end of Every Other Weekend together. I had an armload of clothes and was leaving when Grace told me to stay.

“You must see the ending—worst scene ever,” Grace said.

“I’ve already seen it,” I reminded her.

“You should see it again—every writer can’t see this scene enough,” Grace told me.

From a partially open door, the tired-looking blonde stares at the car parked in the driveway. A love song is fading in as Paul Goode gets out of the driver’s side of the car; he opens the back door for a little girl. Paul kneels down in the driveway and kisses the little girl goodbye; she is fighting back tears as he helps her put on her backpack. Paul walks the child halfway to the open door. The blonde doesn’t come outside. The little girl runs inside the house without looking back at her father. The woman never looks at Paul; she just closes the door after her daughter. It takes Paul Goode a couple of seconds to compose himself; the love song is fading out as he gets back in the car.

“That’ll be us,” Grace told me.

“That won’t be us—we’ve agreed to joint custody,” I reminded her.

“That’ll be us—that’s how we’ll feel,” Grace said.

Grace never used to watch the terrible Paige what’s-her-name, the movie journalist for the Hollywood gossip show, but Grace was watching her every night now. My father’s love life was of interest to Paige, and to Grace. And Toby Goode was nineteen now, a boy prone to get into trouble; Paige took an interest in Toby’s troubles, too.

There was the night Grace was riveted to an awards show at a film festival in Europe; it wasn’t one I’d heard of. God knows why Paige was there, but so was Paul Goode. He was with a girl in a dress that had a décolletage for miles; you could get lost in that cleavage. My father must have been seventy, or he soon would be. The girl with her boobs spilling out of the dress was young enough to be his granddaughter.

“It’s Paul Goode,” Paige whispered to camera. “Get a load of the nymph that’s with him!”

My father had a tight-lipped smile when Paige called out to him. “Paul! Talk to me, Paul!” Paige was calling, but my father and the nymph made their way along the red carpet—not pausing for Paige, or the photographers, or the TV cameras.

Another night, Grace was no less transfixed by the breathless reporting of Paige from a comedy club in West Hollywood, where the underage Toby Goode had been busted by a bouncer for having a fake ID. Toby was with what Paige called “an older woman”—she was not that much older, as it turned out. Toby’s date was over twenty-one; at least she was old enough to drink. “Like father, like son,” Paige crowed.

“She doesn’t have children,” Grace said. The poor kid—the scum journalists should leave Paul Goode’s kid alone, I was thinking. I didn’t want to know what Grace was thinking. Imagining, as I knew she was, a Paul Goode memoir—maybe she was thinking the more dysfunction in the family, the better.

I saw Otto and Billy one night, albeit briefly. The two bodyguards made an appearance on Paige’s Hollywood gossip show. The paparazzi were blocking the entrance to a Santa Monica restaurant as the limo pulled to the curb. Otto got out of the driver’s seat; Billy held the back door open for Paul and Toby. It was night, but father and son were wearing dark glasses. Otto was clearing a path through the paparazzi. “Here come the bad boys now, and I don’t mean the bodyguards,” Paige was chirping, when Billy spotted the TV camera; his hand covered the lens—then blackness.

“Are those two thugs always with him?” Grace asked me.

“It seems so,” I said.

When you write screenplays that don’t get made, you lose your sense of humor about the bad movies that do get made—like Forgetting Nebraska. Grace slept through the end of that movie—good judgment on her part. Masochist that I am, I always watch the end.

The camera crosses the open porch of a run-down farmhouse in the prairies. Through a screen door, we see the supper dishes being cleared from a kitchen table. Two small children come out the screen door, climbing on the porch rail. In the distance, something catches the children’s attention. One of them just stares, but the older of the two runs back inside, bringing an elderly man back out. The old man stares into the distance, then sits down in a chair on the porch; he collapses into the chair as the music fades in. Off a blacktop road, a straight line through farmland, a dusty car turns in to the dirt road leading to the farmhouse.

An elderly woman comes out the screen door, sitting down in a chair next to the old man. The kids sit on the porch rail, waiting. Last, a stunning brunette comes out the screen door and down the porch steps. (She was supposed to be Clara Swift, but that didn’t work out.) The brunette looks more worn out than the wrecked redhead in Ocean Avenue—as if living with Paul Goode, or merely missing him, takes a toll. The brunette is wringing out a wet dishcloth before she realizes what everyone is watching—the approaching car. As if an unseen hand has pushed her, she sits down hard on the porch steps. She wipes her hands on her apron and gives a passing thought to her hair, then she doesn’t bother. She sits there as if she’s given up on her appearance, and on everything else. The old woman gets out of the chair. She urges the old man to get up, too; she pushes him back through the screen door, into the kitchen. Then the old lady gets the kids to go inside—they complain, drag their feet. The worn-out brunette is left alone on the porch steps as the music rises.

As the car stops, we see the faces of the soldiers inside; they are trying not to gawk at the stunning but worn-out brunette. Only one of them gets out of the car; he takes a duffel bag from the trunk. Paul Goode is the returning soldier. The worn-out brunette just sits on the steps, wringing the dishcloth in her hands; she stares at the ground, not at the soldier. (Is that because Paul Goode went to the war as a young man in his twenties, and—after two tours of duty in Vietnam—he came home looking like a guy pushing seventy?)

Paul Goode nods goodbye to his younger-looking buddies; they know better than to hang around. As the car leaves, Paul sits down beside the brunette on the porch steps. He puts his hand in her lap, palm up, not looking at her. Maybe he thinks she’s too worn out, but she looks thirty or forty years younger than he does. The brunette drops the dishcloth and takes his hand in both of hers. Her head falls on his shoulder. The old faces and the faces of the children are at the screen door, watching them. Grace slept on; the TV in our bedroom faded to black; the end credits to Forgetting Nebraska rolled.

Now a new Paul Goode movie would be playing in Aspen, when I checked into the Jerome with Grace and Matthew. It was wishful thinking to hope that Rim Shot was a gay porn film, or that Paul Goode was belatedly coming out—no such luck. Rim Shot, of course, is a basketball movie. It’s more credible to think Paul Goode could be gay than it is to imagine he was ever big enough to play basketball. It’s ridiculous to imagine my father could coach basketball—even a high school girls’ team. The concept of a little squirt like Paul Goode as a basketball coach is condescending to high school girls—not to mention demeaning to disabled high school girls. (This was my first impression of Rim Shot, when I’d seen only the trailer.)