I was only beginning to discern the difference between those things I should have seen coming and those things I couldn’t possibly have anticipated. Watching the snowshoer sob in Em’s lap, I was no more ready to understand myself as a work in progress than I would have believed Paul Goode had a future as an actor—not to mention as a writer.

If you’d told me that the little getaway driver had a future, and that I was in it, I would have laughed. I would have sounded like an echo of what the moll says in the last not-a-getaway scene in The Wrong Car—that moment when the broad gets out of the car. “I ain’t ridin’ with him,” she tells the three gangsters squeezed into the backseat of the death car. If you’d told me that Paul Goode would be a big deal in my future, I would have said I wasn’t taking a ride with him.

27. SEXUAL POLITICS, A FIRE, JEALOUSY

When did everything become political? In America, I didn’t notice when or where the politics started—I just woke up one morning, and everything was political. In America, I wasn’t paying attention when those things that divided us were just beginning.

I graduated from Exeter in 1961. That year, on the night of October 5, I was in Pittsburgh. It was a Thursday night, before the ski season, and my mother and Molly were in Exeter; the two ski jocks were staying with the snowshoer, but the three of them were having dinner with Nana in the Front Street house.

Since my graduation from the academy, my mom had stopped pretending that she lived with Elliot Barlow. Little Ray lived in Manchester, Vermont, with Molly—not only in the ski season—but Ray visited Mr. Barlow in Exeter frequently. In the winter months, the snowshoer often drove to Manchester, where he stayed with my mother and Molly. If my mom had married the little English teacher under publicly false pretenses, those two lovebirds were not pretending to love each other—they truly did love each other. As Molly had told me, “There’s more than one way to love people, Kid.”

“Since when are women a sexual minority, or are we just treated that way? For fuck’s sake, we’re half the population!” I had grown up hearing my mother say—to someone on the radio, or on TV, or even in the room—but for many years I’d not been paying attention to the context. I’d heard her say this without really understanding.

Then, one time—I was an academy student, we were at Nana’s dining-room table, the snowshoer was there—Aunt Abigail said something, and the context was perfectly clear.

“Honestly, Ray, you sound like Nora, or like someone Nora’s age,” Aunt Abigail said.