“I’ll bet I was the smallest, if not the readiest, Ray,” the snowshoer managed to say. Everyone laughed, Em and Molly included.

“I’ve told you, Kid—you know what I’m going to say,” the trail groomer said. “I’ll bet you your mom and the snowshoer last the longest—I’m betting they go the distance.” Everyone cheered—even Em let out a holler. But the way Molly kept looking at my mom, I knew something was amiss. The snowshoer sensed it, too.

“Is there a context we’re not getting, a married man who’s behaving badly—is this about the new Paul Goode business?” the little English teacher asked. She asked the question pensively, with a far-off look; I couldn’t tell if she was asking Molly or my mother.

“That’s all it should be about, the new Paul Goode business,” Molly answered Elliot. “Let it be, Ray—this is a good place to stop, to just let it be,” the trail groomer told my mom.

“Smarty-pants, Molly,” my mother said.

The French media had been rife with rumors about Paul Goode and his French co-star in the Argonne Forest war movie, Argonne—a World War I film that had finished shooting in the northeast of France; the movie was now in postproduction. A salacious story was going around, a scandal in the making. Some journalists were cynical about the truth of the story; it could be a marketing ploy. But the French journalists were taking the story seriously; a room-service waiter in a French hotel had captured Paul Goode and Juliette Leblanc on videotape.

Em sashayed around in a sexy way whenever Juliette Leblanc was mentioned. In my mom and Molly’s kitchen, Em put two tangerines in her bra to make her boobs bigger. We understood that Em was doing her Juliette Leblanc imitation; Juliette was an ooh-la-la, va-va-voom kind of girl. Argonne was a black-and-white film, in French with English subtitles—not up to Paul Goode’s kind of commercial expectations. Maybe the marketing mavens had had a hand in videotaping Paul Goode and Juliette Leblanc having breakfast in bed in their hotel; even with Paul Goode in it, a black-and-white movie with subtitles needed all the publicity it could get. Argonne would be in theaters in early 1990. “A film like that won’t be in Manchester for two or three years, if ever,” Molly said. In France, there was more interest in when the surreptitious videotape would be shown than there was in the theatrical release of Argonne. Paul Goode had finished shooting another new film, with his wife.