The Last Chairlift

34. OUR MARINE

In her first letter to me, only one thing Em wrote wasn’t exactly true—when she said, “I just don’t dare to make up everything, like you do.” I don’t make up everything, but when I use things that actually happened, I always change something; I try to make what happens not exactly true. Maybe that’s what Em meant.

I’m making a very small point. In other respects, I wouldn’t quarrel with a word Em wrote in that letter. She’s a real writer. “Nothing has changed because you know who your father is, except you know where your writer gene comes from,” Em wrote; she also echoed what Molly had told me privately.

“We should keep this business about who your father is to ourselves, Kid,” was the way Molly put it.

To my knowledge, only Nora had looked into the legal side of it. Was it, or is it, a crime in Colorado for an eighteen-year-old woman to have sex with a fourteen-year-old boy? What mattered, Molly told me, was my mother’s job. Little Ray taught beginners how to ski; most of them were children. “Fourteen and younger, Kid,” was the way Molly put it. It was hard to miss her point. “I’m not saying what you writers do is immoral—stealing stuff that real people say, or do, seems fair to me,” the trail groomer told me. “But there’s people who would say what your mom did is definitely immoral—to have you in such a way that you would be all hers. If you see what I mean, Kid,” Molly said. “Legal or illegal, fourteen is underage.”

On the evidence of Paul Goode in The Kindergarten Man, I was not “all hers.” Was it a lie of omission—to keep what Molly called “this business” to ourselves? It was what Nora always said: everything was about sex and secrets. Everyone who knew Paul Goode was my father loved my mother; we were committed to protecting her.

The snowshoer, even as a woman, was too much of a gentleman of the old school to brag about my mom’s escapade to the little Barlows, who were congratulating themselves for being the first to recognize the noir genius of Paul Goode. Goode was forty-seven when The Kindergarten Man made him a movie star and a Hollywood celebrity—a little long in the tooth to be discovered. At my mom’s wedding, it had been Susan Barlow who said, “I know we’re going to be seeing more of him.”

But Elliot Barlow, as a man and as a woman, knew how to be discreet. Little Ray was very much more and somewhat less than a wife to the snowshoer, who would never tell tales out of school about her.

Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan, those old volunteers, were right about that Aspen local who was a ski guide at Camp Hale. Paul Goode was the little mountaineer they remembered—a Tenth Mountain Division man. My uncles were right about the exploits of the Eighty-fifth Mountain Infantry Division in Italy. Paul Goode would see his first combat in the battles for Mount Belvedere and Mount Gorgolesco; the little kindergarten man would be part of the Po Valley breakout and the Po River crossing, too. The Eighty-fifth would be in Verona in April 1945, a month before the Germans surrendered. Paul Goode would set sail from Naples to New York in August of that year, returning home to Aspen from New York. He was nineteen, a very young veteran of World War II. Everyone who remembered him as a kid said he’d been a darling boy. His mother was thirty-six—she’d been very young when she had him, only seventeen.

My uncles were also right about the little guy’s name. Paul Goode was born Paulino Juárez. Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan said Paulino didn’t look Mexican, but his mom was Mexican. Paulina Juárez named her son after herself. In interviews, when he was asked about his father, Paul Goode always said, “The Hotel Jerome has been a good father to me. The Jerome is my father.”

“You have to admit it, kiddo—your dad is pretty clear in interviews,” Nora said.

Paul Goode grew up at the Hotel Jerome, because his mother was a single mom and she worked there; she was a cleaning woman, a hotel maid. Although no one would speak of the boy’s father, Paul Goode’s mother had spoken only once but most succinctly about him. He’d been a guest at the Jerome. “He was a very nice, older gentleman—I’m sorry, but I don’t remember his name,” Paulina Juárez said; that was all she ever said about him.

“It strikes me that everyone behaved very well”—this was what Paul Goode said in interviews. The nice, older gentleman didn’t take advantage of the seventeen-year-old girl. The Hotel Jerome didn’t disclose the identity of the older gentleman, but no one accused the hotel of protecting their client at the expense of their innocent young maid. “Over the years, to my mother and to me, the Hotel Jerome has been a model of good behavior,” Paul Goode always said. The little kindergarten man wasn’t kidding when he called the Jerome “a good father.” Growing up, he had the run of the hotel. The Jerome cherished Paulina. The hotel did everything it could to accommodate the needs of the young, unwed mother; the Jerome was no less warm and welcoming to her illegitimate child. “The Jerome did more for my mom than maternity leave—let’s leave it at that,” Paul Goode tried to say, but his interviewers pressed him for more details. Had the hotel helped Paulina pay for childcare? “More than helped” was Paul Goode’s only comment. Later, if the boy got out of school when his mom was working, he came to the Jerome. “The hotel was my home, the other maids were all mothers to me—I had a very happy childhood,” Paul Goode said.

Wouldn’t the circumstances of a child born out of wedlock to a hotel maid have sparked some expression of reproof? Weren’t at least one or two of the hotel maids reproving of Paulina Juárez? Wouldn’t you think that one or more of them might have manifested some measure of reproval toward little Paulino? These were questions journalists asked Paul Goode. How could his young mother’s situation, and the circumstances of his birth, have led to a happy childhood? “Baloney!” my mom said, when Molly or I asked her about this line of questioning from Paul Goode’s interviewers. “He seemed like a very happy kid to me,” Little Ray maintained.

The snowshoer had said the writing was the most über-noir thing about The Wrong Car, and of course I knew how much Mr. Barlow disparaged her parents’ potboilers and their adoration of overkill noir. My writer gene must have been on my mind when I wrote the little English teacher, expressing my disbelief in Paul Goode’s happy childhood. “I couldn’t write a credible novel about people behaving in such an exemplary fashion,” I wrote the snowshoer. “How is it possible that everyone at the Hotel Jerome behaved admirably to a knocked-up maid and her kid?”

“Don’t be so cynical,” Elliot Barlow wrote me back. She believed my mother, who sacralized the Hotel Jerome—in the same way my mom had the hotel’s founder, Jerome B. Wheeler. To listen to Ray, you wouldn’t know the sainted Mr. Wheeler had lost the hotel to back taxes in 1909. You might get the idea that the ghost of Jerome B. Wheeler ran the Hotel Jerome.

I know my mother believed the Hotel Jerome was sacred, to the degree that she thought the staff and management were incapable of any wrongdoing, but even my mom knew the staff and management couldn’t control (or be blamed for) the behavior of the hotel guests.

“What about the Aspen locals—how did the townsfolk behave?” I wrote back to Mr. Barlow. If you were one of the people who loved her, and she loved you, the snowshoer liked being called Mr. Barlow, but not everyone was welcome to call her Mr. Barlow—not now. As a woman, notwithstanding her transitioning, she saw no reason to change her name; Elliot worked fine as a female name. She and I had recently been back in Exeter—sadly, for the occasion of Coach Dearborn’s memorial service. I wanted to go, and I knew the snowshoer wanted to be there, but I didn’t want her to go back to the academy alone. I wasn’t worried about how my wrestling teammates would treat her when they encountered Elliot Barlow as a woman; I wasn’t worried about those wrestlers from before or after my time at the academy, who would have known Coach Dearborn’s littlest wrestler and assistant coach. I’m not sure who I was worried about, exactly—I was worried inexactly. I didn’t know who could be abusive to Mr. Barlow as a woman: the faculty members who might not have known her when she was a man, those wrestlers who hadn’t been at Exeter when Elliot was a regular in that wrestling room? Both Mr. Barlow and I had been asked to speak at Coach Dearborn’s memorial service. I struggled not to imagine Coach Dearborn’s ghost, still smoking in the coaches’ locker room. I preferred to remember him doing single-leg lunges with my mom at her wedding. I also struggled not to think of him carrying Granddaddy’s body from the croquet court. “I’ll speak just ahead of you, so I can introduce you,” I said to the snowshoer. Naturally, I wanted to make it easier for Elliot—to let me say something about her transitioning from male to female, before all those good old boys got a look at her. Coeducation was still pretty new at Exeter; the snowshoer had resigned fairly recently.

“If you don’t mind, Adam, I’ll introduce myself—I’ll speak just ahead of you, so I can tell all these wrestlers to read your novels,” the little English teacher told me.

Of course I worried about how that would go over; in such an obdurately all-boys’ atmosphere, at a revered wrestling coach’s memorial service, Mr. Barlow’s introducing herself as a woman seemed like asking for trouble. Actually, I thought it went over pretty well—I somehow managed to remain calm during the lingering silence. “My name is Elliot Barlow,” Mr. Barlow began. “Some of you may remember me when I was a man.”

She was over forty-five, but she was a knockout as a woman—pretty and small. Most of the mourners in Phillips Church didn’t recognize Elliot Barlow, but many of them recognized Little Ray. My mother was in her fifties, but she was also pretty and small. “I used to be Mr. Barlow, when I taught English and coached wrestling here, but you can still call me Elliot—I think Elliot works for a man or a woman,” the pretty snowshoer said. “I talked to Coach Dearborn about it, and he gave me his approval. Coach Dearborn’s approval was always good enough for me,” the little English teacher said, her voice suddenly sounding strained.

There were two loud wolf whistles. My mom, who was crying, started laughing—ending the sepulchral silence. “Thank you, Martin—thank you, Johan,” Elliot Barlow told my uncles, who were also laughing. Those two old Norwegians didn’t have many years left—before the curve they saw coming, before that turn in the road. The pretty snowshoer’s confidence in herself came back; she seemed uplifted by my uncles’ crude appraisal of her womanliness. Thereby enlivened as a woman, the little English teacher exhorted the mostly male congregation in Phillips Church to read my novels. “Adam Brewster isn’t just a wrestler,” Elliot Barlow told them. Even the wrestlers laughed. Thus I was warmly introduced.

Later, at a cocktail party at the Exeter Inn, almost everyone was nice to the snowshoer; my teammates, also Matthew Zimmermann’s teammates, were friendly to Mr. Barlow, who used to be Zim’s principal workout partner. Of course, they were Exeter men; Exeter would expect them to be reserved. Maybe their homophobia was reserved.

When we were on our way back to New York together, Elliot and I talked about the physical standoffishness of some of our fellow wrestlers. “The guys hugged me more when I was a guy,” the snowshoer said; she sounded a little melancholic about it. The standoffishness was strictly physical—not necessarily cold or unfriendly, we kept saying. Yet we both knew that wrestlers were not inclined to physical standoffishness with one another. “Maybe some of the guys were just being respectful of me as a woman,” Mr. Barlow said. I tried to agree with her; I could see she was feeling a little let down, an almost physical disappointment.

My mom had made up for any lack of physical contact Elliot may have been missing. Whenever those familiar-looking faculty wives were approaching us, my mother was all over Elliot; my mom rode piggyback on Elliot, her arms around Elliot’s chest, her legs locked at Elliot’s waist. It was not lost on Molly that the rehearsal dinner for my mom’s wedding had been at this same Exeter Inn, where an emotionally shattered waitress was brought to her knees by the aria of Em’s orgasm ecstasies—and was later struck in her lower abdomen by a chocolate cupcake with cranberry frosting, a sidearm shot from Henrik’s lacrosse stick. It seemed suitable to Molly that my mom would mount the snowshoer in public at the Exeter Inn, of all places. “Ray wants everyone to know they’re still married,” Molly told me.

“If my mom starts humping the snowshoer, maybe we should jump in and break it up,” I said to the ski patroller.

“You’re the wrestler, Kid—I’ll let you jump in and break it up,” the trail groomer said.

The faculty wives who approached us were warm to Elliot as a woman, but some of those ladies were less warm to Little Ray. A few of the faculty wives had read my novels, or at least one of my novels; there was only one wife who told me she was disappointed that I hadn’t written more about “Exeter people.” As for the younger Exeter people, there were some current students who spoke to me about my writing, but the ones who’d actually read my novels were relatively new girls at the school. If there were fiction readers among my former wrestling teammates—all of us were in our thirties—not one of them told me that he’d read my novels. Three or four of the guys mentioned that their mothers or their wives had read something I’d written.

Business as usual, I thought, when I noticed a long-armed guy who’d been keeping his distance. You know how it is when you know you know someone, but you don’t remember who he is. With wrestlers, you remember the guys around your own weight class. The snowshoer didn’t remember the sullen fellow’s name, but she knew more than I did.

“He was never a happy-go-lucky guy, and he wasn’t a starter—he was a backup heavyweight, a small heavyweight, but he was too big to make one-seventy-seven,” Mr. Barlow reminded me. I remembered the guy then; he was still a small heavyweight—he’d kept himself lean and mean. When I was at Exeter, there was no weight class between 177 pounds and heavyweight—a sizable gap. If the lower weight class was too light for you, and you just weren’t big enough to compete as a heavyweight, you were out of luck—in a no-man’s-land. It was understandable that the snowshoer felt empathy for the guy. Elliot herself was in a similar kind of limbo—she’d always been too small for the lightest weight class. “Perhaps he was in the military—maybe he fit in there better than here,” the snowshoer whispered to me. The backup heavyweight had a haircut that would have fit in better in the military than it did at Exeter, a buzz cut of the sort he might have had in boot camp. I decided to speak to him—if only to see if I could engage him in conversation. That turned out to be a bad idea.

“I know you were a heavyweight, but I’m sorry I don’t know your name,” I said to him, holding out my hand. He didn’t shake it.

“I hope you haven’t written anything about Lieutenant Matthew Zimmermann. I hope you never do write about the lieutenant, unless you get everything right,” the backup heavyweight said, not telling me his name.

Well, what would you have thought? Was I crazy to imagine this angry soldier might have been in Vietnam? From what he said, I imagined the guy could have been a soldier in Zimmer’s unit. I thought the unfriendly fellow was being protective of Zim, as a comrade in arms had a right to be, but the angry soldier hadn’t known Zim in the war—he’d barely known Zim at Exeter. “I didn’t hang out with the lightweights,” he told me. I realized what he meant about my getting everything “right,” if I ever wrote about Lieutenant Matthew Zimmermann. It was the Vietnam War I was supposed to get “right,” or I shouldn’t write about it at all.

I tried to tell the guy how Zim and I had talked about the policy of the war, how Zim had loathed the secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, how Zimmer thought of McNamara as the architect of the military tactics and the political strategy of a war that went awry—a war that had been “misbegotten from the get-go,” I’d heard Zim say.

But the backup heavyweight was a hawk; there was no getting through to him. American involvement in the war in Vietnam had ended. Nixon had become the first president to resign from office. The fall of Saigon had already happened, but the small heavyweight with the long arms insisted that the Vietnam War had been a “just war”; it was a “war against communist aggression,” he kept saying. We could have won it, he declared; “we should have obliterated the communists,” he said. He kept glancing at Elliot Barlow, and then looking away from her—as if he purposely meant not to see her. My mother had her arms around the snowshoer, but she kept smiling at me and the heavyweight without a name. I was afraid she’d overheard the Zimmermann or Zimmer words; I didn’t want my mom to join our conversation thinking we were reminiscing about her beloved Zim. “And your mom still has the big girlfriend, I see,” the small heavyweight said, glancing quickly at Molly, then quickly away. “I’m a New Yorker, I’ve seen some shows at the Gallows—Two Twats, or whatever those lickers call themselves,” the tall, lean guy went on. “I’ve seen what your dyke cousin calls ‘The News in English,’ I know her leftist politics,” the asshole said. At the time, I was taken aback by his right-wing rhetoric and his homophobic, sexist slurs, but Ronald Reagan was coming. The Christian Right was coming. Was the certitude of the undersize heavyweight a harbinger of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority? They were coming, too.

At a loss for words, I inquired of the heavyweight without a name if he’d perhaps known Zim at Yale. “Did you go to Yale?” I suddenly asked the guy, which made no sense at all—even to me. I just had to say something.

“I was in the Marine Corps,” he answered me coldly. He made it sound as if his being a marine precluded a college education, or made the matter of where he’d gone to university superfluous. “Yalies!” he suddenly said, with scorn—the way he’d said lightweights.

At that cocktail party, I don’t doubt there were some former Exeter wrestlers who’d gone to Yale, but they weren’t the only ones who turned their heads when they heard the word Yalies. Suddenly my mother was beside us. She took hold of the heavyweight’s wrist with one hand; she had taken hold of my wrist with her other hand, the way a wrestler would take control of your hands. The heavyweight had flinched, recoiling from her touch. My mom wasn’t used to anyone resisting her hands-on approach to conversation; when she was eager to talk to you, she stood close to you and held your wrists. The tall, lean guy tried to free his wrist from her grip, but my mom wouldn’t let him go. Her winter life, all the ski-poling, had given her a good grip—her hands were small but strong, like the snowshoer’s. “Were you two talking about Zim—didn’t I hear that dear boy’s name? I know I heard the word Yalies,” my mom said in her breathless way. I saw she was standing on her toes. Little Ray was making an effort to bring her smiling, uplifted face closer to the small heavyweight’s scowling visage. It was the long-armed guy’s turn to be struck speechless.

“He didn’t really know Zim, not at Yale, not even at Exeter—they weren’t in the war together,” I tried to tell my mother.

“That awful war—poor Zim!” my mom cried. “You should have let me shoot him, sweetie—Zim would be alive if you’d let me shoot him, you know,” she told me. “Molly says she could have shot him out the kitchen window, when Zim was doing lunges in the driveway, but I wouldn’t have taken a chance with a deer slug in the twenty-gauge at that range—I would have shot him when he was asleep, just under the patella,” my mom was saying, when the appalled way the unnamed heavyweight was looking at her finally registered. “Just his knee—I wouldn’t have killed him, I could have saved him!” my mother cried. She let go of my wrist, taking hold of the heavyweight’s other wrist with her free hand. “Zim would be alive today—he would have been here, with us, if I’d shot him!” my mom insisted. “You can have a good life with a bad knee—you can still get laid with a limp, you know, and have children, and make friends,” she told the seemingly paralyzed heavyweight, as she’d told Molly and me. I knew she was about to burst into tears—what usually happened when she talked or just thought about Zim. Then Molly was there, with her big hands on my mother’s shoulders.

“Let it go, Ray,” the night groomer said softly. “I wouldn’t fuck up that shot from the kitchen window—I use that twenty-gauge more than you do,” Molly reminded her.

This was true; Molly was the deer hunter in their family, she shot a deer every hunting season. She had a friend on the ski patrol who butchered it for her; Molly gave the patroller as many steaks or chops as he wanted, keeping the rest for herself and Ray. My mom had gone deer hunting with Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan. She was a good deerstalker, my uncles told her, and she clearly liked walking around in the woods with a gun; those two Norwegians loved her company, but they never understood why she missed every shot. Molly and I and the snowshoer knew why.

My mother purposely missed the deer, but she made a point of telling us how she always hit what she was aiming at. Both Molly and my mom liked that twenty-gauge—a lever-action, single-shot shotgun. Most deer hunters wouldn’t have chosen it; they would have wanted a rifle or a twelve-gauge, and more than one shot. But Molly swore by it. “My first shot is buckshot—that’ll knock a deer down,” the trail groomer had told me. “That little twenty-gauge is a cinch to reload. My second shot is a deer slug, the kill shot,” Molly said. Molly also liked how easy a gun it was for my mom to handle. “No safety is safer than having a safety,” the ski patroller liked to say about that single-shot twenty-gauge. “You have to cock it to shoot it—if it’s not cocked, it won’t fire. It’s a hard gun to shoot yourself with, accidentally,” Molly always said.

In the context of that cocktail party at the Exeter Inn, Lieutenant Matthew Zimmermann’s proposed salvation from a hero’s death in the Vietnam War must have been confounding to the adamant marine. Two lesbians—two dykes, two lickers—had told him they were prepared to shoot Matthew Zimmermann to save him from Vietnam. I decided to keep talking, before the undersize heavyweight thought of something to say. I quickly told the outraged but nonspeaking marine that my mother or Molly would have shot me, if I hadn’t been 4-F. I showed the small heavyweight my palms; the scars from the flexor-tendon surgeries were very visible. “Wrestling injuries to my fingers and hands—extensor tendons, too,” I was explaining to him, when my mom suddenly let go of the guy’s wrists. In her excitement to show him her hands, she almost hit him in the face.

“Look at my hands!” Little Ray cried. “Adam has my little hands, so I didn’t have to shoot him!” Molly was already hugging her when my mother started to sob. “You should have let me shoot Zim—both of you are to blame,” my mom blubbered to Molly and me.

“We know, Ray,” the night groomer was consoling her, when the snowshoer just showed up—Elliot Barlow suddenly took hold of the small heavyweight’s wrists. In the Exeter wrestling room, Mr. Barlow had been the hand-control man. With all the chin-ups and the ski-poling, the little English teacher had more hand strength than most middleweights.

“You’re a natural one-ninety-pounder, you know,” the pretty snowshoer told the undersize heavyweight. “I always wondered if you found your proper weight class in college—if you wrestled in college.” (In the marine’s most likely wrestling years, after he’d been a backup heavyweight at Exeter, there was a weight class for 191 pounds—later, for 190 pounds—in college.)

“I didn’t wrestle after Exeter,” the natural 190-pounder told the beautiful Elliot Barlow. “I was in the Marine Corps,” he repeated—this time, more proudly.

“Oh, you poor thing—I’m so sorry!” my mother wailed. She came toward him to give him a hug; the marine made an effort to turn away from her, but she hugged him from behind, locking her little hands around his waist, her face pressed against his broad back. “Are you okay now, are you all right?” my mom asked our marine.

The backup heavyweight could hear that her concern for him was genuine—he had to feel that her hug was heartfelt. “Yes, ma’am,” the marine answered her—both politely and stoically. Wrestlers know who has the hand control, and who doesn’t. Mr. Barlow had the tall guy’s wrists locked up; my mother had him in a bear hug from behind. Our marine would have had to start a fight to break free of them. He didn’t. I could see his hatred for all of us, but I also saw his restraint. In his mind, he was held fast by two queers, and I knew he didn’t like Molly or me any better. I watched him restrain himself.

“We’re glad you’re okay—we’re happy you’re all right,” I said to him, sincerely.

“We’re an anti-war family—we’re happy when a soldier comes safely home,” the pretty snowshoer said.

“I didn’t come home, I never liked home—the Marine Corps was my home,” the soldier said bitterly, but without anger. He was doing all he could to hold back his anger. My mom didn’t realize how angry the marine was; she just hugged him harder.

“As Ishmael says, ‘a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.’ I’m guessing the Marine Corps was your whale-ship,” the little English teacher told the proud marine, who somehow managed to look more appalled. It was apparent that the heavyweight hadn’t read Herman Melville; from the stricken look on his face, the marine must have imagined a “whale-ship” was a sexual expression peculiar to gay men, or to lesbian or transgender women. Molly tried to allay our marine’s fears.

“It’s good to have something you’re proud of—I’m guessing the Marine Corps was good for you,” the snowcat operator said.

“Yes, ma’am,” the 190-pounder replied—with gratitude, and looking slightly relieved.

“The ‘whale-ship’ is from Moby-Dick—it’s the last line of Chapter Twenty-four, ‘The Advocate’ chapter,” Mr. Barlow gently explained to our marine. “I just meant that the Marine Corps must have been of special importance to you,” the pretty snowshoer said. “Maybe more of a learning experience than any college could have been?”

“Yes… ma’am,” the marine managed to say. He was struggling to be nice, to the degree that it was painful to look at him.

When we were on our way back to New York together, Elliot and I speculated on what sexual horrors a whale-ship might have conjured up for our restrained but homophobic marine. I liked the little English teacher’s theory the best of all our speculations.

“Our guy is a right-wing homophobe who goes to the Gallows expressly to see performers he despises, and to look with loathing at most of the audience, who are enjoying the shows,” Mr. Barlow began. At first, I didn’t see where the snowshoer was going with this. I thought I understood the homo-hating guys Elliot was thinking of—those sexually intolerant types who haunted gay bars or lesbian hangouts, just to make trouble—but those guys were usually in groups. When they laughed at the drag queens, they laughed like a gang. Our angry marine was a loner. The Marine Corps may have been his home, but he wasn’t a man who made many friends.

Mr. Barlow agreed. Our marine was a solitary type, and he tried to hold his hatred back. In his heart, our marine was a gay basher, but he wouldn’t have gone out with a bunch of guys for the express purpose of abusing gays or lesbians. “Our marine might have thought the ‘Whale Ship’ was a more clandestine club than the Gallows,” the snowshoer said. “Not the kind of gay bar or lesbian hangout that advertises itself, or a place like the Gallows, which is known to be politically subversive. Our marine was imagining much worse for the Whale Ship—a secret society, an openly perverse place,” the little English teacher told me.

“Like what? What happens at the Whale Ship?” I asked Elliot. I was a little frustrated with her. I thought what she was saying was full of generalizations; she’d said nothing specific.

“At the Whale Ship, you have to show your penis or your vagina just to get in the door. And you better have a good one, or you won’t get in!” the pretty snowshoer cried. We laughed and laughed. It was just a joke, I thought. At the Whale Ship, the price of admission was an aesthetic exam—you had to pass a weird kind of perfection test, just to be admitted. Our marine, little Mr. Barlow speculated, may have imagined that the Whale Ship wouldn’t admit him, because the undersize heavyweight wasn’t perfect enough.

As Em pointed out in her first letter to me, there was “something improbable” about the Whale Ship—“even as an imaginary sex club,” Em wrote.

Em and I were on the same page regarding the pretty snowshoer’s speculations. Elliot Barlow wasn’t joking about what went on at the Whale Ship. The little English teacher used to worry that she just wasn’t big enough. Bigness really mattered to Mr. Barlow, when he’d been a man. “Something still matters to the snowshoer,” Em wrote me. I knew what Em meant, and she’d said it as exactly as I could have. Even as a woman, the pretty snowshoer believed she just wasn’t something enough. Passing a something test at the Whale Ship was not what our marine might have imagined; an imaginary test was Elliot Barlow’s obsession, which Em and I knew was no joke.