Molly and I were sitting in the sixth row of the front orchestra. All the nominees had aisle seats—so we didn’t have to climb over people, or push past their knees, if we won. Molly and I looked closely at the older actresses who had once been famous, but we didn’t see one who resembled Em. “There’s no old bag who looks like Em, because Em isn’t an old bag and she doesn’t look like anybody else,” Molly told me.
“Fuck the Hollywood Foreign Press!” I said, knowing this was what Em would say.
At the after-parties, Molly and I took turns carrying Oscar around, holding his lower legs. That was when the penis jokes started. I’d read that Oscar was supposed to be a knight, holding a sword. “Oscar looks like a naked gold man, holding his imaginary penis—he’s holding what he wishes was his penis, Kid,” Molly said.
We thought the Oscar statuette might have been modeled on a penis. I’d read that the Oscar weighed eight or nine pounds, and it was thirteen or fourteen inches tall. “A big penis,” I told Molly.
“The statuette looks like a big dick to me—not that I would know, Kid,” the old patroller said. We couldn’t wait to hear what Em thought about the Oscar—not that Em knew a lot about penises, comparatively.
There was a predawn light in the sky when our limo drove us back to Beverly Hills. We knew Em and Matthew had watched the Oscars in our suite; they’d called room service and had their dinner in front of the TV. There was a chocolate Oscar on the TV console. Someone had eaten Oscar’s head. Molly and I guessed that the Four Seasons gave chocolate Oscars to the hotel guests with children. Even with a head, the chocolate Oscar had been only five or six inches tall. I didn’t doubt that Matthew must have eaten the head. “If you’d lost, Kid, Em would have bitten off Oscar’s ass, or something,” Molly said. I didn’t doubt this, either.
I went to bed, careful not to wake Em. Matthew woke us in the morning, when we heard him asking Molly where the Oscar was—the real one. “It’s by the TV, next to the chocolate one,” Em and I heard Molly respond.
I don’t remember how old Matthew was when he stopped climbing into bed with Em and me in the morning. Maybe seven? I just remember how much I missed it when he stopped. “Oscar doesn’t have any clothes on,” Em and I heard Matthew say in the living room.
“Tell me about it,” the old patroller said.
“Bring me Oscar—I want to see him!” Em called to Matthew.
We were in bed when Matthew brought Oscar to us. “He’s really heavy, and I have to pee, but I’ll be back for him,” Matthew told us. Em was looking over Oscar, very closely. We could hear Matthew peeing in the bathroom, because he’d left the door open. I don’t remember how old Matthew was when he learned to close the door. “Oscar has a cute ass, but his head looks like a penis,” Em whispered to me. The likeness to a penis was inescapable.
The rest of our time in L.A., and on our flight back east, Matthew was the one who carried Oscar everywhere—in a white athletic sock. “The cock in a sock,” Em called it—just not around Matthew. It was one of Molly’s athletic socks; the sock was long enough, but it wasn’t wide enough to fit around the base of the pedestal.
A little more than a month after I won an Academy Award, Cardinal John O’Connor died in the archbishop’s residence in New York. He would be interred in the crypt beneath the main altar of St. Patrick’s. A bunch of political bigwigs—from both sides of the aisle, as they’re always saying—showed up for the funeral on a hot and humid afternoon in May. Em was up early that Monday morning, rummaging around in my T-shirt drawer in the East Sixty-fourth Street apartment. “Holy crap,” I heard her saying to herself, or to no one in particular. I could only faintly hear what sounded like a news channel, on the TV in the kitchen. There must have been something on TV about the cardinal’s funeral, because Em was riled up about the dignitaries attending O’Connor’s service in St. Patrick’s. Em was stomping around, naked, before she put on Nora’s SILENCE=DEATH T-shirt. “Don’t wear it unless I ask you to,” Em had said when she’d told me to put it with my T-shirts.
“What’s going on—what’s wrong?” I asked her.
“Fuck the Democrats who go to O’Connor’s funeral!” Em was raving.
It made sense to Em that Republican politicians would attend Cardinal O’Connor’s funeral, and they would be there, in St. Patrick’s—former president George H. W. Bush, Texas governor George W. Bush, New York governor George Pataki, and New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Of course they showed up, but what were the Democrats doing there? Em kept asking. Em was incensed at President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton. The Clintons supported abortion rights and gay rights. Why did they go? Em was asking. I hoped she would put on a few more clothes, if she was planning to go to St. Patrick’s. I didn’t understand why Em was removing the shirt cardboards from my dress shirts back from the dry cleaner’s.
And why would Vice President Al Gore and his wife, Tipper, go? Em was asking. Or two former New York City mayors, Ed Koch and David Dinkins, both Democrats? Cardinal O’Connor had opposed legislation prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation—legislation supported by the three mayors at the cardinal’s funeral, including Mayor Giuliani. “I get why Giuliani is going—he’s a Catholic and he’s a Republican!” Em wailed. I realized what Em intended to do with the shirt cardboards she’d put on the kitchen table. With a black Sharpie, Em was making protest signs.
GOOD RIDDANCE
That sign would suffice, I was thinking. I imagined Em in Nora’s SILENCE=DEATH T-shirt, carrying the GOOD RIDDANCE sign among the thousands of mourners lined up behind the police barricades on Fifth Avenue—listening to the service on the loudspeakers, while the invited dignitaries paying their respects to Cardinal O’Connor were inside the cathedral.
FUCK THE DEMOCRATS
This sign was unwise. With the political bigwigs expected in St. Patrick’s, there would be an army of Secret Service agents around—and all the cops.
Stick to GOOD RIDDANCE, I was thinking—in the context of O’Connor’s funeral, the GOOD RIDDANCE message was the only one that made sense. “I wish you wouldn’t do this,” I was saying to Em, when Grace called to tell me I should keep Em away from St. Patrick’s—or I should go to the cathedral with Em, if I couldn’t keep her away. “That’s my plan,” I told Grace, hanging up the phone.
I was fed up with Grace’s interfering in our lives, but you shouldn’t complain if your ex-wife is on your side, and even Em agreed that Grace’s interference with the Oscar in our lives had been a good idea. As a means of toting Oscar around, Grace had replaced Molly’s athletic sock with a drawstring dust bag for shoes. Typical of Grace, it was not just any shoe bag; it was a Manolo Blahnik bag, for a pair of high-end heels.
“Cold water, air-dry, and it won’t shrink,” Grace said—her washing instructions for the designer shoe bag.
Molly was relieved Matthew wasn’t carrying Oscar in her sock. “The sock can slip off, Kid—if Matthew drops the big dick on his foot, it’ll break a toe, or something,” the old patroller said.
Matthew thought the shoe bag was a better idea than the sock. All of Oscar fit in the Manolo Blahnik bag, even the pedestal; it was much easier for Matthew to take the naked gold man everywhere. When Matthew was staying with his mother—or with Molly, or with Em and me—the Oscar stayed with Matthew. He’d been asked to bring the Oscar to his school, so that all the kids could see an actual Oscar. Matthew might have wished that Manolo Blahnik’s name was not so prominent on the shoe bag. A smart-assed kid in Matthew’s class had teased him. “That’s not an Oscar—his name is Manolo. You just have a stupid Manolo,” the kid teased Matthew.