In 1980, when Nana died, Emmanuelle might have been as young as sixteen—she couldn’t have been older than eighteen, I was thinking, when Em interrupted her reading in the car. “You’re thinking about Emmanuelle, aren’t you?” Em asked me.

“You could probably go to jail for sleeping with Emmanuelle—Moby-Dick is not an excuse, sweetie,” my mom had told me.

“I don’t think Emmanuelle is that young, Ray—I don’t think it’s illegal to sleep with her,” Molly had said.

I told Em I wasn’t thinking about Emmanuelle “in that way.” I just wanted to ask Emmanuelle which part of the Pequod’s voyage had been the last part for my grandmother; I wanted to know what Nana was rereading to herself when she died. I knew Em would have said it was okay, if I’d been thinking about Emmanuelle in that way.

We’d talked about this. “We’re too old to sleep with young women anymore, but it’s okay to think about them—in that way—and it’s okay to look at them,” Em had told me.

“Okay,” I’d said.

Once, when Em saw me looking at a young woman—in that way—she said, “I saw her first.” This had since become what we said when we caught each other just looking. In truth, we didn’t look at other women a lot.

It was a long winter, with a late spring, in 1997. There were uncounted hours of reading Moby-Dick in the car. Em had just finished Chapter 111, “The Pacific,” when she woke me one night—crying out in her sleep, as Captain Ahab cries out in his, “ ‘The White Whale spouts thick blood!’ ” When I woke her up, and she’d calmed down, there was another matter on her mind. “You know, kiddo—she would be in her thirties now,” Em said.

“Who would be?” I asked her.

“Emmanuelle—she’s thirty-three, maybe thirty-five,” Em told me.

“I know,” I said.

“I’m just thinking out loud, kiddo. If Emmanuelle finished reading Moby-Dick to herself, she’s a real reader. Emmanuelle will show up at one of your readings,” Em said. I repeated that I wasn’t thinking about Emmanuelle in that way, but Em said it didn’t matter what I thought about her. “If Emmanuelle kept reading Moby-Dick, she has staying power—she’ll show up one day,” Em said.

I was learning that Em as Ishmael made herself clear. But Em was still learning about six-year-olds. Matthew took what you said literally. Em had told us she was playing house in Toronto. Matthew pressed her for more details. To a six-year-old, playing house sounds like fun. But where was Toronto, and how did you play house? Matthew wanted to know. Em’s explanation of playing house to Matthew was a revelation to me. She sounded like Em as Ishmael, or maybe she was Em as a fiction writer—or both.