“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.

35. AT THE WHALE SHIP

At that interminable cocktail party at the Exeter Inn, both the compassionate Mr. Barlow and our constrained marine were spared further tests of their tolerance or their toughness. The exuberant singing of Uncle Johan heralded his and Uncle Martin’s arrival. “Bier, Bier—das Bier ist hier!” Johan sang. Each of my uncles’ big hands held two freshly opened beer bottles. The four of us—Molly and my mom, and the snowshoer and I—took a bottle each, which left my uncles with two beers apiece. The retired Norwegians, who’d made the trip to Exeter from up north, did their best to force a beer on our retreating marine, but I’d already noticed that the natural 190-pounder didn’t drink. Besides, in accepting their beers, Mr. Barlow had relinquished her highly esteemed hand control and my mother had given up her strong grip on the bear hug. The tall, lean heavyweight had seized the moment to slip away.