“I told you to talk Em out of that title,” Grace said. I just watched the escalator. I knew the fangirls would keep coming, not only the Nora look-alikes but the women wearing the nooses. I tried to change the subject again, by asking Grace how she’d managed to edit out the Bat Pussy part. “One student intern deserves another,” was the way Grace explained it. She said some film students at NYU had done the editing. Grace also instructed them to edit out the night of the Santas—when the tall Santa had shot Nora, after he’d taken aim at Em. Em would never forget that Trowbridge intended to kill her first; she didn’t need to see it.
That night in Union Square, I slipped away from Grace, who was preoccupied with the film clip from the Gallows—she’d selected it, of course. The projectionist was already screening it for the early arrivals in the audience. This was how I got a glimpse of what Em’s public appearances would be like. You could count on Em’s fangirls to get there ahead of time. The Nora look-alikes and those women with the nooses wanted front-row seats.
In black and white, from more than twenty years ago, I was watching and hearing Nora ask Em where she’d been last night. More than twenty years later, Em still looked contrite and fearful. “You got home so late, I was asleep. You hit your head on my knee, getting into bed,” Nora was saying—when I snuck off to the back room where the booksellers were hiding Em. I wanted to let Em know about the fangirls, but she’d had sufficient forewarning in her mail. Em said the hang-yourself women were new to her, but many of the Nora types who’d written Em had enclosed photos. These women—including a bunch of the early arrivals that night in Union Square—had managed to read Come Hang Yourself in galleys. Grace said she’d sent out an unprecedented number of advance galleys for this largely unknown author.
Not unknown for much longer, I was thinking, when Em and I were facing those scary women in the front row. We were waiting for the audience to settle down, but the latecomers couldn’t find a seat in the crowd. That was when I saw Emmanuelle, ascending to heaven on the escalator. “I saw her first,” Em whispered to me, covering her microphone with her hand. I covered my mike accordingly, whispering to Em that Emmanuelle must have finished reading Moby-Dick. I whispered that her showing up at Em’s reading, not one of mine, must mean that Emmanuelle was what Em called a real reader. “She definitely has staying power, kiddo,” Em whispered back, still covering her mike with her hand.
Two of the hang-yourself women had been saving a seat for someone in the front row; their nooses were a forbidding deterrent in the chair between them. “No one wants to sit on a hangman’s noose, or next to a woman wearing one,” Em would tell me later. At the time, Em simply asked the hang-yourself women to put their nooses around their necks and give the empty seat to Emmanuelle. I’d beckoned to Emmanuelle to join us. She seemed mildly surprised to see me. On second thought, perhaps the only thing that surprised Emmanuelle was to see me with Em.
An attractive woman in her thirties, Emmanuelle was married with children. She’d meant to come with her husband, Emmanuelle told Em and me, but their babysitter got sick; it was only fair that her husband stayed home with the kids, because Emmanuelle had finished reading Come Hang Yourself and he hadn’t. Em and I just nodded, but we couldn’t look at each other—we were dying to ask Emmanuelle if she’d read the entire novel, in order. We were both thinking that Emmanuelle had turned out to be a book nerd—an Emily MacPherson reader, not a stalker. We’d not imagined that Emmanuelle might be ordinary, neither a Nora type nor a hang-yourself woman—not even, as the “Police Report” had cited, “an outrage to public decency.”
It’s hard to explain why it meant so much to Em and me, but Emmanuelle seemed to have turned out okay. I was relieved to see the principled young woman I’d once imagined her to be—before I learned she was a high school student who’d been charged for mooning and flashing her titties on the Swasey Parkway. Maybe Emmanuelle had just been bored to death, growing up in Exeter. “Nora hated growing up in Exeter,” Em reminded me, after she’d met Emmanuelle. That night in Union Square, it was Emmanuelle’s normality that meant the world to Em and me. Don’t forget, Em and I were trying to imagine the rest of our lives together as being normal—or as normal as we could make it.
Em had stopped wearing Nora’s SILENCE=DEATH T-shirt to bed. I took this as a positive sign. It was an oversize nightshirt on Em—her boobs were lost in the pink triangle. “Please put it with your T-shirts, but don’t wear it unless I ask you to,” Em said.
She’d also stopped singing “Goin’ Back to Great Falls” in her sleep, another positive sign, and even Grace approved of Em’s and my onstage routine for Come Hang Yourself. Em and I tried to have a conversation—one that would set up her reading.
“When I first met Emily MacPherson, she was my cousin Nora’s girlfriend,” I told the audience. “You were always Nora’s girlfriend, and nobody else’s,” I said to Em. She’d written out the nobody else’s part for me. Em wanted to make sure I started with that. The first few times I said it, I had some difficulty looking at those scary women who were always in the front row, but I would get used to them.
“I met Adam Brewster at his mom’s wedding, when he was only fourteen—I don’t think he’d started shaving,” Em told the audience. “You didn’t know how to dance with a girl—you just stared at my boobs,” Em said to me.
“I think I was shaving once or twice a week,” I told her, trying not to stare at her boobs.
“He still stares at my boobs, but I’m getting used to him,” Em told the audience.
“Why did you want to be a writer—what made you start writing?” I asked her.
“When I stopped speaking, all the words didn’t just disappear—I had to do something with them. The writing and the pantomime started together,” Em said. She told a story about being a pantomime student—later, a pantomime teacher—in what Em called “workshops” in Italy. Until I read Come Hang Yourself, I hadn’t understood that these workshops were part of a festival for pantomimists in Barolo—where the wine comes from.
The Disastri Festival was short-lived. Disastri means disasters in Italian, Em explained. She said Barolo looked like an expensive town; the pantomime festival was a financial disastro. “Maybe only pantomimists are interested in pantomime,” Em told the audience.
Em and I agreed that Disastri was an appropriate name for a pantomimists’ festival, or for a writers’ festival—both pantomime and fiction writing are good at disasters. “Especially the kind of disasters you can see coming—fiction writers and pantomimists have to know how to set up disasters,” Em told the audience. That was my cue to ask her to read from Come Hang Yourself. I knew the excerpt Em was going to read.
I refrained from making a Moby-Dick joke. I didn’t say, “Call her Ishmael,” or make a similarly smart-assed remark about Em’s reading voice sounding like a sailor’s on a doomed ship. I didn’t think the Nora types in the audience—not to mention those women with the nooses—were likely to be Melville readers.
There were two chairs behind the two lecterns, also facing the audience and the escalator, reserved for Grace and me. While Em was reading from Come Hang Yourself, we kept an eye on the escalator, on the lookout for a woman with a noose—the one who was late. A front-row seat had been saved for her, but Emmanuelle was sitting there. Whoever the missing woman was, she never showed up. A woman wearing a hangman’s noose could get in trouble around Union Square, I was thinking, while Em read the part about Nora’s onstage monologue in Barolo being dubbed into Italian.