51. “O CANADA”
Mr. Barlow was right, as usual—the little English teacher had predicted that a book about Two Dykes, One Who Talks would appeal to the reading audience. Readers who’d never been to the comedy club had heard about the Gallows Lounge shooting. And before the Gallows went bankrupt—before the comedy club’s holdings were taken and disposed of, for the benefit of creditors—Grace had the foresight to buy the film archives of Nora and Em’s onstage performances. It was Grace who had the idea of licensing the rights to these crudely filmed performances to Em’s foreign publishers.
Grace was right, too—the novel would be a breakout book for Emily MacPherson, a literary bestseller. Come Hang Yourself was translated into more than thirty languages; those cheaply made films of Nora and Em onstage were used for publicity purposes worldwide. The management at the Gallows had been born cheap, Nora said; the film archives of the onstage performances were barely better than home movies, shot by student interns. Em could remember when the management complained about the upgrade from the eight- to the sixteen-millimeter format—eight millimeter was the standard format for home movies, and the cheapest. All the footage was in black and white; the camera was handheld and the sound erratic. The management at the Gallows told the performers that their work was being filmed to preserve the history of their onstage artistry, or some such crap, but Nora said it sounded like a lawyer’s idea. In case the comedy club got sued, there would be a crude record that the offense was the performer’s fault—as no one knew better than Nora, who was always ad-libbing.
Until Come Hang Yourself was published, Em had never seen so much of herself onstage. Nora had viewed only one of their earliest performances at the Gallows—this was way back in 1973. “Amateurville,” Nora labeled the cinematography. Nora and Em were thirty-eight. This was the skit about Em at the dinner party with Simone. Nora called Simone a slut, because Simone had sucked the sleeve of Em’s blouse at a previous dinner party. This time, Simone hooked pinky fingers with Em under the dinner table. Em stabbed Simone’s arm with a salad fork.
In the film archives that Grace’s New York office licensed to Em’s foreign publishers, Grace had edited out the dinner-party conversation about Bat Pussy—the porn film that was a parody of porn films. Nora and Em—in their jeans and T-shirts, jock-walking around onstage—were sexy and tough in their lesbian-looking way. The cinematography was amateurish, but Em’s pantomime and Nora’s deadpan monologue about the blouse-sucking, pinky-hooking Simone was a record of a rare relationship. It was Nora and Em’s relationship that readers of Come Hang Yourself would remember best. Those film clips—those glimpses of Nora and Em when they were hot—would break Em’s heart all over again. And despite their clumsy camerawork, those student interns never neglected to get a shot of the hangman’s noose above the bar and the COME HANG YOURSELF sign.
The first public readings or onstage interviews would be difficult for Em. They would screen a film clip from the Gallows to the audience before she came onstage. Where she was waiting, offstage, Em could often hear Nora’s deadpan voice; sometimes, she could hear Nora clearly enough to know which pantomime she’d been performing. “I’ve had enough of the damn déjà vu, kiddo,” Em would say to me. I was usually backstage with her. I went to Em’s readings; I was her onstage interviewer when that was the format the venue chose.
A black-and-white still from the archive footage made an atmospheric book jacket for Come Hang Yourself. The hangman’s noose is in focus in the foreground of the frame, but the empty barstools are out of focus, and the lights from the stage are a blur in the background. At the Gallows, there was usually no one at the bar when Nora and Em were onstage. I told Grace that the book jacket was a nice touch, but some of the women who came to Em’s public readings or her onstage interviews were disturbing. They were younger women, for the most part in their thirties or forties. They were women who identified with Nora and Em. These women were deluded to think they could replace Nora, Em assured me, but the Nora look-alikes were scary, and the ones with a hangman’s noose around their necks were worse. When Come Hang Yourself was published, Em was in her early sixties and I in my mid-fifties. These women who imagined they might substitute for Nora were younger than we were.
The New York book launch for Come Hang Yourself was in the Barnes & Noble with the escalators on East Seventeenth Street in Union Square. I loved that bookstore; I’d read there a few times. The authors’ readings were on one of the upper floors. From where you faced the audience, you could see people riding up the escalator—as if someone in the seated crowd had imagined them. The divine souls on the escalator were looking right at you; they appeared to be ascending to heaven, leaving you behind. I was explaining this optical illusion to Grace, while the booksellers kept Em out of sight in a back room. I told Grace I wanted to forewarn Em about the “levitating apparitions” on the escalator.
“You and your apparitions,” Grace said. I shouldn’t have shown Grace my Aspen screenplay—both the Loge Peak beginning and the Not a Ghost ending. Either Loge Peak or Not a Ghost was a good title, but I knew no one would make the movie—no matter what I called it. It wasn’t just too long. “The first-person voice-over is passé—Jules et Jim was third-person voice-over, you know. And The Little Mermaid is Disney—the rights to Jodi Benson’s singing ‘Part of Your World’ would cost you a fortune,” Grace told me.
I’d overlooked the expense of clips from “Part of Your World”—I’d been thinking how Toby Goode would feel, seeing his dead mom hum that song to a cowboy ghost. I didn’t say this to Grace. I’d told her that I knew my Aspen screenplay would never be made. Eliminating my passé voice-over wouldn’t fix it. To begin with, everyone would know who the Paul Goode and Clara Swift characters were, no matter what names I gave them. When I’d shown my Aspen screenplay to Em, she said: “Not only should Matthew never read this—he should never know this. The same goes for your half brother, Toby Goode,” Em told me.
“I know,” I said. Matthew was only six. I was thinking I didn’t have to hide or destroy my Aspen screenplay, whatever I decided to call it—not just yet. Matthew wasn’t reading screenplays.
At six, Matthew was fixated on Em’s house in Toronto—he had no interest in unmade movies. “I wish I could see the house with the rooms that don’t know what they are—the poor rooms!” Matthew kept saying. Em had succeeded in making Matthew interested in her mystery house before he’d seen it. There’d even been talk of a sightseeing trip to Toronto at the end of the school year. I was the one thinking about unmade movies.
“There are more unmade movies than anyone knows,” my father had said, in the same way he had said I had my mother’s hands: “Ray was always wringing her hands.”
At the Union Square Barnes & Noble, with the audience for Em’s book launch ascending on the escalator, I tried to change the subject with Grace—the apparitions word wasn’t a wise choice with her. “The way people just appear on that escalator—the first time you read here, it can be a little unnerving,” I was saying, when a wild-eyed woman with a hangman’s noose around her neck came up the escalator.