An Italian filmmaker—not an amateur—made a feature-length documentary about the Disastri Festival. The title of the film, Disastri, was both deadpan and tongue-in-cheek. The festival performers—mostly pantomimists, but including Nora—had signed releases. At a festival for pantomimists, most of the performers didn’t speak onstage; there’s no need to dub a pantomimist’s performance. What made Two Dykes, One Who Talks a comedy act was the juxtaposition of Em’s pantomime with Nora’s monologue. It was also what made Em and Nora original at a pantomime festival. When Nora signed the release, she didn’t know what a big deal dubbing is in Italy. Some of the same families have been in the dubbing business since the 1930s, and dubbing is an art form; they take pains to make the Italian translation match the lip movements of the onscreen speaker. I remembered watching High Noon, dubbed into German—a different movie on Austrian television. Gary Cooper’s lips were out of sync with the German.
Em wrote that she’d never seen dubbing done better than the way Nora was dubbed into Italian, but Nora had hated it. Her lips were perfectly in sync with the Italian. The voice actor, who was a big deal in the dubbing world, sounded exactly like Nora. But Nora didn’t like it because the voice actor was a guy. There was nothing homophobic intended—both the filmmaker and the voice actor were sincerely trying to match Nora’s voice. “The dubbing wasn’t dykey,” Em had written. “He just sounded like Nora, if Nora spoke Italian.”
Nora said she sounded like Anthony Quinn in Fellini’s La Strada; Quinn played Zampanò, the circus strongman, who is cruel and abusive to Giulietta Masina. Until I read Come Hang Yourself, I hadn’t known that onstage at the Disastri Festival, Nora and Em had reprised their Sturm und Drang about other girlfriends. When we were alone once, I’d innocently asked them if lesbians stayed friends with their former girlfriends. At the time, I didn’t know that Em had never had a girlfriend before Nora. And Em seemed to shrug off the question—she just did a sexy little dance. Em’s shrug and dance rubbed Nora the wrong way.
“What do you mean—you don’t know?” Nora had asked Em (in Barolo, Anthony Quinn had asked Em in Italian). “If you left me, and I saw you with another girlfriend, I would tear off her tits and dance on her dead pudenda!” Nora told Em, who started to cry. Both in Barolo and when this was unrehearsed—when I was their only audience—Em kept doing her little dance, but she went on crying. “If I left Em, and she saw me with another girlfriend, Em would just cry,” Nora had told me and the audience at the Disastri Festival, but I would remember how Em was dancing. It was not exactly a dance on anyone’s dead pudenda; it was more tender and complicated than that.
Nora and Em didn’t do their dead-pudenda dance at the Gallows; it wasn’t funny enough for a comedy club. What Em read aloud to the audience, that night in Union Square, was that she never considered having another girlfriend. There’d been no one before Nora—there would be no one after her. The idea of another girlfriend always made Em cry. There was nothing evasive or ambiguous about her crying, or about her little dance—not to Em. That night at Barnes & Noble, the excerpt Em read wasn’t only meant for those scary women in the front row; it was meant for me, too. I knew how the excerpt ended, of course—before I heard Em end it that night in Union Square. “It still makes me cry that Nora didn’t know she was my one-and-only girlfriend, but Nora never believed me when I told her I would rather be with a penis than be with another girlfriend,” Em read aloud. “It’s pretty clear I’m not inclined to penises, isn’t it?” was the way Em ended it.
There was a Q and A after the reading. I suppose it was inevitable that one of the Nora look-alikes or a woman in a hangman’s noose would ask Em about me. “What is your relationship with Nora’s little cousin?” a dead ringer for Nora asked Em that night in Union Square.
“It’s pretty clear he’s not a girlfriend, isn’t it?” was the way Em always answered that question. She would be asked about me a lot.
“You’re still stuck on me?” Em kept asking. “I’m just checking, kiddo—I would still rather be with a penis,” she assured me.
Em would one day put what she meant about being with a penis another way. “Nora was my collision course—I’m done with collision courses, kiddo,” she said.
That night in Union Square, after the Q and A, the booksellers set up two tables for the book signing. Grace sat with Em at the table where Em was signing copies of Come Hang Yourself. Grace gave herself the job of asking Em’s readers to write out their names so Em could spell them correctly, but I knew Grace was poised to intervene if one of the Nora types or hang-yourself women wanted Em to autograph her bra, or something.
Emmanuelle sat with me at my signing table. I was signing copies of my backlist titles, mostly paperbacks, for a smaller lineup of readers. It turned out that Emmanuelle and I were done before Em. That was when I asked Emmanuelle if she knew which chapter of Moby-Dick my grandmother was reading when she died. “When I found her, she’d closed the book on her thumb—her thumb was a bookmark,” Emmanuelle said.
I should have known my grandmother had been reading “The Blacksmith,” the gloomy Chapter 112, because Nana knew nothing as comforting on the subject of death as the line she loved in that dark chapter—that bit about “Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried.” It was a line my grandmother had repeated when she was reading Moby-Dick to me—one she’d often asked Emmanuelle and me to read to her. It was the line Elliot Barlow had left for me in my writing notebook, before she trekked up Bromley Mountain to die with Little Ray.
Melancholy had always comforted my grandmother; I remembered how she’d left her door open, although this was frowned upon at River Bend. But I couldn’t think of anything to say to Emmanuelle—a young wife and mother, who kept glancing at her wristwatch. She must have been thinking of her husband, at home with the kids. Emmanuelle wasn’t thinking about death; she would have taken no comfort from that bit about “the region of the strange Untried.” Emmanuelle, who had a life of her own, thought of other things; not everyone wants to think about death. And Em and I had our writing to think about, and—above all—there was Matthew to make happy, and to entertain.
When we took him to Toronto to see Em’s mystery house, Matthew loved playing the game of imagining what the empty rooms were for. Em and I knew Matthew’s nightmares about the upstairs family had been dispelled when he immediately said the long, narrow attic on the third floor should be his room—a boy after my own heart. I wondered if there was a gene for being drawn to attics.
Em’s home was a tall, skinny, red-brick townhouse in a string of similar row houses. There was an attic window under the apex of the steeply pointed roof; in a side alley, I saw a fire escape from the third floor. It was a neighborhood of neat, traditional houses that were well maintained—even the trees were cared for. Shaftesbury was a short street that ran parallel to the train tracks. As Em had pointed out to Matthew and me, the Summerhill subway station was at one end of the street.
Matthew hadn’t hesitated to choose the third floor for himself, but he soon changed his mind. There was no bathroom in the attic, and Matthew didn’t like the look of the fire escape—an iron ladder. “Someone could climb the ladder and get in—a monkey could do it,” Matthew said. Like many children his age, he’d seen The Wizard of Oz and had nightmares about the flying monkeys.