If you ever went to the Gallows—even if you went there only once—you would remember the hangman’s noose above the bar, where a sign said, COME HANG YOURSELF.
I remembered the night when I ran into Prue, the Tongue Kisser and her husband at the Gallows. Prue was happy to show her husband where she’d once had an all-noir act. This was during the AIDS years. Prue must have been forty. Her husband was appalled by Two Dykes, One Who Talks—then Damaged Don did a dirge onstage, and the tongue kisser’s husband looked at the hangman’s noose above the bar in a welcoming way. In the AIDS years, the Damaged Man wasn’t funny at all, and the dickless management at the Gallows considered taking down the noose above the bar, or at least removing that sign. In my years of going to the Gallows, the tongue kisser’s husband was one of the few who looked noir enough to hang himself on the spur of the moment from the noose above the bar.
When I got to East Sixty-fourth Street, Em was raging around the apartment in her pajamas; she was in the kind of rage that made me think an old injury had come back to hurt her. “Was it something in Nora’s box?” I asked her. Nora had hurt Em’s feelings before, but this wound had nothing to do with Nora’s writing or Bonkers Nathanson. An old magazine had been hiding in Nora’s box.
It was a familiar-looking issue of Vogue—August 1, 1970. On a dog-eared page, I recognized Vonnegut’s Bennington speech. I’d since read it many times in Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons—a collection of Kurt’s short works, mostly essays and reviews and speeches. I’m sure Elliot Barlow had all of Vonnegut’s books. I know I did; I thought Em did, too. I saw no harm in Nora’s saving that old issue of Vogue—I knew Nora had loved that speech.
“Nora was getting off on the photograph—she wasn’t saving the speech!” Em wailed. On the page facing Kurt’s speech was a black-and-white photograph of the eighteen-year-old Isabella Rossellini. At that age, with those eyes and that mouth, Isabella was Nora’s type. “I know what Nora was doing with this magazine!” Em cried.
After all these years, to be jealous of a girl in a magazine—even if she was a girl Nora might have been masturbating over—amazed me. I tried not to be jealous of how much Em had loved Nora, but it made my heart ache. The photo was a full page—a close-up of Isabella Rossellini’s face and throat, with her dark hair falling over her shoulders. Twenty-five years before, I might have masturbated over such a pretty face in a magazine, but it wouldn’t have helped Em to know my thoughts. All I could do was hug her while she raged. If there were more mystery boxes, we would open them together—we would pack up the snowshoer’s stuff together, too.
That night, when I was lying in bed with Em, it occurred to me that it had been about a month since my mother had climbed into bed with me. “Shh! Don’t say anything—just listen, sweetie,” my mom had whispered. She’d giggled like a little girl and said I was the love of her life. Those were her last words to me. Then my mother was gone; she had plans to keep, after midnight. It was a mile, straight up Twister, to the top of Bromley. Little Ray and the snowshoer had some serious climbing to do. I knew I would hear my mom whispering to me, and giggling like a little girl, for the rest of my life.
That was the same night Em had asked me if I was still stuck on her. I couldn’t speak, but we both knew I was. “Well, now is not the time,” Em had said, “but we’ll have to consider what we can do about that.”
My first night at the snowshoer’s since the apartment had become Em’s, I sensed it was still not the time for us to consider what we could do about my being stuck on her. We were lying in bed, holding hands. Em was telling me I couldn’t let Grace edit the way we separated and divorced, or allow her to edit where and when I was going to be with Matthew. I just listened. Em had more experience rejecting Grace’s edits than I did. Even knowing she wasn’t Em’s editor didn’t stop Grace from trying to edit Em.
I didn’t know that Em had been talking to Molly about what would be best for Matthew. Molly knew Grace was looking for a larger apartment in New York. Grace wasn’t planning to be a divorced woman living in Vermont. Her parents had a house in Manchester; one day, it would be Grace’s house. Grace and Matthew would come to Vermont—for weekends or school vacations, and to ski—but Matthew would be going to school in Manhattan, Molly pointed out. The old patroller was paying particular attention to the new skiers at Bromley; she kept an eye out for potential buyers of a second home.
“With all those bedrooms, it’ll have to be a whole family of skiers or a sports team,” Molly told Em.
“Matthew’s going to be a New Yorker, you know,” Em said to me in bed, squeezing my hand. “If we’re living here, it’ll be easy for him to stay with us—Matthew is used to us being together.”
“Okay,” I said. I was afraid of saying the wrong thing, or sounding too excited about the prospect of my living with Em.
It was no big deal to me how the Gallows pulled the plug on the Two Dykes’ skit about things to do with a penis. What I couldn’t forget was Em’s pantomime—how she would put an imaginary penis between her boobs or between her thighs, but nowhere else.
More recently, Em implied there were other things she could imagine doing with a penis—just not in her vagina. When Em was a kid, she had a feeling—“not as strong as a conviction,” was the way she’d put it—that she didn’t want a penis in her vagina. Was it wishful thinking, on my part, to imagine Em might not be adamant about what to do with a penis? She didn’t sound unwavering. “A penis is just a funny clitoris,” I’d heard Em say to Molly when they were washing dishes.
Em would be sixty-one in the coming year; I would be fifty-five. Because she was six years older, maybe Em could read my mind. “Molly and I have been talking about penises,” Em told me. It was not a conversation I could imagine lasting very long. “A clitoris is smaller than a penis, but a clitoris has almost eight thousand nerve endings—twice as many as a penis, kiddo,” Em said. I guess it was a longer conversation than I’d imagined. “A clitoris gets a hard-on, you know,” Em told me.
“Okay,” I said. I didn’t know what to say. It was Molly who told me a penis doesn’t have any muscles. Everyone knows a penis doesn’t have a brain. Em had stopped holding my hand.
“Well, now is not the time,” Em said again, “but I’m working on things to do with your funny clitoris.”
“Okay,” I said. There are these moments when you see the course of your life unfolding, and you feel powerless to alter it.
“And we’ll have to talk about your writing,” Em said.
“Okay,” I said. You see the road ahead, and you know you’ll follow it—your future feels as unalterable as your childhood, and you know how childhood works. You go along with it.
“You write about sex, you know—you describe having sex, in detail,” Em told me. “But whatever we decide to do with your penis, you won’t write about what we do—you won’t describe how we have sex, okay?” she asked.
“Okay,” I said. You are never over your childhood, not until you are under the train—unter dem Zug.
In the morning, I was still asleep when the phone rang. I woke up hearing Em talking—not knowing, at first, she was talking on the phone. “She shit in bed, you know—nothing peaceful about it,” Em was saying. “Her pussy was a subway station—it never slept,” Em said. “Do you have the wrong Jasmine?” Em asked the nurse at the home for assisted living, who was still apparently calling all of Jasmine’s contacts. “We called her Rush Hour Pussy—if she didn’t shit in bed when she died, you have another Jasmine. I’m sorry, but we don’t know her,” Em told the nurse. I was lying in bed with my whatchamacallit, looking forward to many mornings of waking up with Emily MacPherson.