The Last Chairlift

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.

“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.

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.

“There are no monkeys in Canada, and no flying monkeys anywhere,” Em assured him, but Matthew had decided the third floor was off-limits for sleeping. So much for being drawn to attics. Before Matthew chose his bedroom, he wanted to know where Em and I would be sleeping. Thus Em and I were playing the game of imagining what the empty rooms were for. Matthew was in no hurry to determine the fate of the rooms in the house; prolonging the game was the fun of it. To divine the use of Em’s bare rooms was an ongoing mystery, and Em had other plans for Matthew and me in Toronto.

When you’re new to a city, the landmarks you latch on to may seem peculiar to the natives, but Em and I were hell-bent on keeping Matthew entertained. Em had done her Toronto tourism research for six-year-olds. The top attraction for Matthew was a Gothic Revival castle called Casa Loma. There were about a hundred rooms—copied from Austrian, English, Scottish, and Spanish castles. There were a couple of towers, scary passageways, secret panels. There was a stable made of mahogany and marble; Matthew didn’t like the underground tunnel you took to the stable, but he loved everything else about Casa Loma. There were opulent chandeliers in the dining rooms and the ballrooms; there was a white pipe organ. Matthew wished Em’s house had stained-glass windows. There were military uniforms, displayed under glass—Matthew wanted one of the uniforms. Matthew wanted the moose head he saw in the billiards room, too. Matthew wanted a canopy bed—a funny thing for a six-year-old to want, but Em explained Matthew’s reasoning. The canopy was protection; the flying monkeys came from above.

It was our first trip to Toronto together, but I knew this was only the beginning. Em hadn’t limited her research to six-year-olds. We stayed in a hotel in Yorkville; we could walk from there to Em’s house, or we could take the subway two stops north to Em’s street. Summerhill Station, on Yonge Street and Shaftesbury Avenue, was on the Yonge-University subway line. From Em’s street, we could take the subway one stop north—then the St. Clair streetcar to Spadina. It was an easy walk to Casa Loma from St. Clair and Spadina; Em had also explored some interesting but longer walks to Casa Loma.

Matthew and I loved the subway in Toronto. (Matthew’s mom was one of those New Yorkers who eschewed the subway.) One day, Em took us on the subway one stop south from Bloor-Yonge to Wellesley Station. She wanted us to walk around Wellesley and Church Streets—an LGBT neighborhood called the Gay Village, or just the Village. With every subway or streetcar we took, Em knew where to get on and when to get off. No walk was too far; with Em as our guide, we were never lost. “You’ve been busy here, not only with your mystery house,” I told her. I saw shades of her nonspeaking days—the way Em nodded her head, like it was going to fall off, not saying a word.

In the coming years, getting to know Toronto, I grew tired of Casa Loma—until Matthew was old enough to be tired of it, too. Parents of younger children had to leave their strollers on the first floor. I used to look longingly at the left-behind strollers, wishing I could stay on the first floor with a book I was reading, pretending to guard the strollers. I felt some sympathy for Sir Henry Pellatt, the soldier and financier who had commissioned Casa Loma. Pellatt lost his dream house to the taxman—the way another soldier and financier, Jerome B. Wheeler, lost his hotel for back taxes. Those long-ago big spenders had an air of fascination about them. In spite of the lost hours in Casa Loma, Em made Toronto magical for Matthew and me.

Schools were in session in Toronto over American Thanksgiving; it was late November, 1997. For Matthew and me, this was our third time in Toronto that year. Canadian Thanksgiving was in early October, Em had explained. For Matthew and me, it was the first time we saw those girls in their uniforms from the Bishop Strachan School, where Em had gone when she was a little girl—Matthew’s age, or a little younger.

Em remembered certain girls at Bishop Strachan, but she only dimly remembered herself as a little girl in a BSS uniform. When Em and Matthew and I arrived to see the school, it was the time of the afternoon when the day girls were going home; the little ones were leaving with a parent or a nanny, the big ones on their own. Matthew was mesmerized by these girls of all sizes, wearing identical clothes. Their short pleated skirts and their knee-highs were gray; they wore burgundy blazers or sweaters, matching the burgundy stripe on the sailor collar of their white middy blouses. The girls’ neckties had regimental stripes of gray and burgundy. Matthew stared at all the girls, but Em was fixated on the little girls; she still hoped to remember herself as one of them.

Matthew really liked the uniforms; he was attracted to the uniformed girls, but intimidated by the big ones. Most boys would be. For Matthew and me, our third time in Toronto marked the first time Em’s house was sufficiently furnished for the three of us to stay there. The furniture was sparse, but the designation of the rooms was to Matthew’s liking—so far. Em gave Matthew a grown-up bedroom with his own bathroom on the second floor; the king-size bed served to compensate Matthew for the lack of a canopy. It was a big bed for a little boy, but Em assured Matthew it would always be his bedroom; when he was “all grown up,” she told him, perhaps all the rooms on the second floor would be his. I could see it was strange for Matthew to imagine himself all grown up. Those big girls in their school uniforms were the clearest images of all grown up in Matthew’s mind. Em was just thinking like a fiction writer; she knew how to construct a plot, even for her house.

For now, Em chose the kitchen on the second floor for her workspace. She used the kitchen table for her writing desk; in a desk chair, with casters, she could cruise the length of the table. She kept cold drinks in the fridge; she had a coffeemaker and boiled water for tea on the stove. “When your father and I are too old to climb stairs, this can be your kitchen—if you end up living in Canada,” Em told Matthew. “I’ll find a room to write in downstairs.”

My writing room and our bedroom were on the ground floor. When Matthew woke up in the morning, Em and I could hear him coming down the stairs to our bedroom. Our first time sleeping in the house on Shaftesbury Avenue, Matthew and I loved lying in bed and listening to the trains; we weren’t thinking about my being too old to climb stairs, or when Matthew would be old enough to decide for himself to try living in Canada. Em was the one who was good at imagining the future. In every family, even in a makeshift family, someone should be good at foreseeing the future.

Not only as a writer, I felt more at home in the past—the longer ago it was, the more sure I was about it. Em was a fiction writer who had done stand-up; she was good at reacting to the present. We can all see hatred when we’re confronted with it, when it’s in our faces, but Em was good at seeing what was coming; she could see the hatred and the backlash ahead. Em saw Ronald Reagan coming—at a time when no one was worried about Reagan, not even Nora.

The past has a certain finality; the past isn’t subject to change. Em had decided that the house she’d restored on Shaftesbury Avenue would be her last house, even before she’d moved in. She was blunt about it, from the beginning. “Listen, kiddo,” Em said. “When you start sleeping somewhere you know will be the last place you’ll get to make your home, that’s when the future has a certain finality, too.”

“Okay,” I said. Not only politically, I would always be Nora’s little cousin. Nora and Em went somewhere first; I got there later.

The fourth time Matthew and I were in Toronto that year, it was the week between Christmas and New Year’s—the first time we were riding on the subway by ourselves. There was no school that week in Toronto; Matthew was disappointed not to see girls in BSS uniforms. On the subway, we would look at various girls and try to imagine them in those school uniforms. “Not her,” Matthew was the first to say.

Em was too busy playing house to play with us. There were furniture sales that week, Em told us. Matthew and I were exploring on our own. We took the subway to St. Patrick Station and found our way to Kensington Market; we took the subway back to Summerhill Station from Queen’s Park. It was our tentative way of seeing the city. When Matthew and I were getting to know Toronto, the subway was our new best friend. We took the subway to Osgoode Station and walked around Queen Street West. We took the subway to St. Andrew Station and saw some big theaters on King Street West.

It was when we were taking the subway back to Summerhill from St. Andrew that we saw those two. They were horsing around, as usual, in the car next to ours, but they were headed our way. We’d just left Rosedale Station, where I thought they probably piggybacked onto the train, but Matthew said I was wrong—those two had been with us the whole way.

“They were fooling around in the station at St. Somebody,” Matthew said.

“At St. Andrew?” I asked him.

“That’s where those two piggybacked onto the train,” Matthew told me. The next station was Summerhill. Those two had piggybacked into our car, just before the subway stopped. They were out the door ahead of Matthew and me, racing each other up the long flight of stairs in Summerhill Station—the snowshoer waving to us, my mom blowing us kisses. Then they were gone again. “All those two do is fool around—they just goof off,” Matthew said, both fondly and with exasperation. I couldn’t speak. I was so happy to see them.

“Where they are isn’t a place, Kid,” Molly had told me.

“You should listen to Molly, kiddo,” Em said, when I told her I’d seen them on the subway. “Those two must be happy to see you—maybe they were waiting for you to be where you belong,” Em told me.

“I belong with you,” I told her. I was remembering what the former maid of honor told me on my mother’s wedding night.

“There’s more than one way to love people, Kid,” Molly had said.

As I lay in bed with Em—hearing the train go by, listening for Matthew’s footsteps on the stairs—Em was describing the book tours we would take together. We were both good at writing in hotels, Em said. She would go with me on my book tours; she would get a lot of writing done. I would go with her on her book tours. Em was most interested in the translation trips to Europe. We had many of the same European publishers; we were represented by the same international literary agency, in London. When Matthew was still little, we would take a babysitter on our translation trips, Em was saying. Later, when he was older, Matthew might want to bring a girlfriend with him—“or maybe a boyfriend,” Em whispered, because we could hear Matthew coming down the stairs to climb into bed with us.

For a moment—imagining our future together, dreaming about the years ahead—I’d forgotten that Matthew was only six. There would come a time, I was thinking, when I’d be lying in bed with Em, waiting for a six-year-old to climb into bed with us, but Matthew would be sleeping upstairs with a girlfriend—or maybe a boyfriend—or Matthew wouldn’t be sleeping upstairs.

Some days, when I’m lying in bed with Em, I’m in the singles’ line for the Loge Peak chairlift—about to be paired up with Clara Swift again. Some days, I’m seeing that tall hippie girl; she’s still kicking a chunk of frozen snow in circles on the sidewalk in front of the Jerome. She’s disinclined to show me her breasts; she just gives me the finger, again and again. How many times do I have to say it? Unrevised, real life is just a mess.

I keep saying it and saying it. They publish your novel, they make your screenplay—these books and movies go away. You take your bad reviews with the good ones, or you win an Oscar; whatever happens, it doesn’t stay. But an unmade movie never leaves you; an unmade movie doesn’t go away.

One of my novel-to-film adaptations, the one with the fourth director, finally moved forward; it had taken fourteen years. So one of my unmade movies went away. In 1998, we shot the film in New England. We showed it at a couple of film festivals in Europe—at Venice, and at Deauville. Toronto was the last festival where we screened it, before we opened in theaters in late 1999. In 2000, I lost at the Golden Globe Awards, but I won an Oscar. Em went with me to the Golden Globes. Em was so upset that I didn’t win, she refused to go with me to the Oscars. “Fuck the Hollywood Foreign Press!” Em said. This was all because of one journalist from the Hollywood Foreign Press who spoke to Em in the women’s room. She mistook Em for an actress who had once been famous. Em wouldn’t tell me who the has-been film star was. “An old bag,” was all Em said. I knew the entire Hollywood Foreign Press would be blamed. “I’m a jinx—I jinxed you,” Em said. “Take Molly to the Oscars—she’ll bring you better luck,” Em told me.

Molly had her doubts about going to Los Angeles in the ski season. It was late March, 2000. Molly was almost eighty. The old patroller was still working—albeit part-time, and mostly as a ski instructor. Molly and I were thinking that my mother was the one who should be going to the Oscars with me; we knew my mom had been the one who believed everyone looked like someone in the movies.

“I don’t see a lot of movies, Kid—and by the way, I don’t have the right clothes for the Oscars,” Molly said.

Em tried to explain that Armani was dressing me for the Oscars. “Armani will dress you, too,” Em told Molly.

“Nobody’s dressing me—I can still get my ski boots on and off, by myself,” the old patroller said. Armani would need more explaining.

We had a three-bedroom suite at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills. Molly and I flew to L.A. with Em and Matthew. He had just turned nine. Molly and I had given our measurements to Armani beforehand. We’d just checked into the hotel, when the three tailors from Armani came to our suite with Molly’s dress and my tuxedo. “We’re here for the fitting!” one of the tailors told Em, who’d heard the doorbell and let them in.

“Nobody’s fitting me,” the old ski patroller told the tailors.

“We do adjusting on the spot!” one of the tailors told Molly.

“Nobody’s adjusting me,” Molly told the tailor.

Nothing went wrong with our clothes at the Oscars, which were at the Shrine Auditorium that year—maybe the last year the Academy Awards were there; I can’t remember. I just remember being on the red carpet with Molly. I saw Paige what’s-her-name coming our way, with a cameraman in tow. “This woman is a ditz,” I warned Molly. In the press release, I’d said I was bringing my mother’s best friend to the Academy Awards. Molly hadn’t liked the sound of that.

“Best friend sounds like old girlfriend to me, Kid—it’s nobody’s business to go there,” the old patroller had said. “And I’m not your stepmother—everyone thinks stepmothers are evil,” Molly said. Paige what’s-her-name was such a moron, I was hoping she wouldn’t remember Molly was my mom’s best friend—if Paige had even read the press release.

“You brought your mother’s best friend—more of the nominees should do that!” Paige what’s-her-name exclaimed. “Is that a writer’s thing?” Paige asked me, or maybe she asked Molly. It was hard to tell if Paige was speaking to you, because her eyes always roamed around—looking for someone more important to talk to.

“I’m more like his second mom,” the old patroller told the idiot.

“His second mom!” Paige cried. She was one of those interviewers who breathlessly repeated what you said when she didn’t know what else to say.

“I’m not a writer’s thing,” Molly told Paige, but Paige had spotted a movie star on the red carpet; Hollywood’s what’s-her-name and her cameraman were moving on. Paige knew people didn’t watch the Academy Awards to see the writers. “If I had to spend more time around that woman, I might break her femur—or her tibia, or something,” the old ski patroller said.

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.

When Matthew was alone, he played with Oscar—as if the naked gold man were an immovable kind of action figure. Oscar wasn’t a posable soldier or superhero—Oscar had no jointed limbs—but what mattered most to Matthew was that Oscar had no uncertainty about his name. “Your name is Oscar,” Em and I heard Matthew tell the statuette. There was no mention of Manolo.

As for Em’s protest plans at St. Patrick’s, I not only said I would go with her—I volunteered to carry the more inflammatory of the protest signs. If I was the one holding FUCK THE DEMOCRATS, maybe the cops or the Secret Service would arrest me first. Maybe a woman in a SILENCE=DEATH T-shirt—even if she’d brought a GOOD RIDDANCE sign to Cardinal O’Connor’s funeral—would be perceived as less of a threat to our fragile democracy. And while Em was putting on her shorts and her running shoes, I reread to her the snowshoer’s repetitious notebook entries on the subject of the First Amendment—knowing Em was as sick of hearing about the First Amendment as I was.

I recited the clause Mr. Barlow had loved best: “ ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion’ ”—that was the clause the Catholic Church ignored. The First Amendment’s protection of “the free exercise” of religion was not in jeopardy, the snowshoer always said. Our freedom of religion was assured. What was at risk, in America, was our freedom from religion, I was saying—when Em kicked off her running shoes, which I had just watched her put on.

“I know,” Em said. I wanted to spare her the pointlessness of her protesting at St. Patrick’s, and she knew it. I followed her into the bedroom, where she took off and kicked away her shorts. Before she got in bed, she took off Nora’s T-shirt. She didn’t have to tell me to put it back in the drawer. “I’ve had enough of the damn déjà vu, kiddo,” Em was saying.

“I know,” I said, sitting beside her on the bed. “I’m still stuck on you, you know,” I told Em.

“And I’m still of the opinion that I would rather be with a penis—with your penis, anyway,” Em replied. “It’s a good thing you don’t have an Oscar, if you know what I mean,” she added.

“I know what you mean,” I said, holding her hand.

When Em fell asleep, I went into the kitchen and decided what to do with the protest signs. I would regret getting rid of FUCK THE DEMOCRATS. Our fellow Democrats would do something to disappoint us again. I had sufficient common sense to keep the GOOD RIDDANCE sign, although I put it on a high shelf—above one of the kitchen cabinets, where Em would need a stepladder to reach it. Maybe that’ll make her think twice about it, I was thinking. But I didn’t doubt that someone would surely die—someone who had it coming. I didn’t doubt that Em would find another deserving candidate for the GOOD RIDDANCE sign.

Along with my not having an Oscar for a penis, it was another good thing that Em was depressed for a few days following the funeral. She wouldn’t watch TV; she didn’t read the newspapers. By the time Em heard the news about Cardinal Bernard Law, she was over her inclination to protest. Cardinal Law was the archbishop of Boston; he delivered the homily at O’Connor’s funeral. To be fair, many of the mourners in St. Patrick’s didn’t know how bad Cardinal Bernard Law would turn out to be. Law got a standing ovation for praising O’Connor’s “constant reminder that the church must always be unambiguously pro-life.” The TV cameras in the cathedral had focused on the Clintons and the Gores, who at first remained seated. They eventually stood, reluctantly—or so it was reported. In more than one account I read, the Clintons had refrained from applause, but I was worried Em would have a shit fit because our fellow Democrats had not stayed sitting down. Yet there were no cries to bring back the FUCK THE DEMOCRATS sign—not then.

It would be a couple of years before the scandal of child molestation by Catholic priests implicated the archbishop of Boston. For years, Cardinal Bernard Law had transferred abusive priests to other parishes; he never told the parishioners or informed the police. He’d protected the priests, not their victims. Cardinal Law was vilified in Boston. At the end of 2002, the discredited archbishop flew to Rome, where the pope accepted his resignation. In 2003, Cardinal Law was taken to task by the Massachusetts attorney general. Over sixty years, a thousand children had been abused by more than two hundred priests in the Boston archdiocese. Cardinal Law had known about it; the former archbishop of Boston had suppressed any publicity about it.

The Vatican did more for Cardinal Law than kick him upstairs. In 2004, Cardinal Bernard Law would be appointed as high priest of the Basilica of St. Mary Major—one of Rome’s most prestigious churches. Law would serve on the Vatican committee in charge of advising the pope on the assignments of bishops, notwithstanding that the former archbishop of Boston had been disgraced for covering up the child abuse of priests. His disgrace didn’t matter to the Vatican, where Cardinal Law was rewarded for his staunch defense of church orthodoxy.

What would Nora have said? “Holy crap,” was all Em said about it. Holy crap, I thought.

By 2004, Em and I were spending more time in Toronto—we were learning to be more like Canadians. Or we were learning to let go of the things we couldn’t change; we just did our best with those things we could do something about. At least this was what Em said we were doing. It did seem to me that we were trying to be more like Canadians, because we both liked Canada—and we liked being in Toronto—but it also seemed to me that Em and I were demonstrating we were the little English teacher’s students. Mr. Barlow had been more than our copy editor. As writers, Em and I were the snowshoer’s disciples. More and more, the writing was the only thing that mattered—besides Matthew.

When you get older, you find out how good (or not) your teachers were. Elliot Barlow had taught Em and me to care about the writing, not only about our writing. Melville had listened to Schiller: “Keep true to the dreams of thy youth” was good advice for a writer. As fiction writers, Em and I had our own gods to listen to, but the snowshoer gave us a manageable rule: what applies to fiction is relevant to other writing. You have to be truthful to time and place; you can’t leave out anything important. Lies of omission count as lies, right?

In June 2004, Em and I knew Ronald Reagan had died—it was a while before we got around to reading his obituary in The New York Times. Em and I were in no hurry to read about him. Reagan had been secluded from the public since 1994, when it was learned he had Alzheimer’s. His death didn’t mean much to Em and me; we’d never liked him. By the time Reagan died, he was long dead and gone to us. We’d hated him enough when he was president. We didn’t run to get the stepladder when we heard he died. The GOOD RIDDANCE sign stayed put, but there was no forgiving Reagan’s willful silence about the AIDS epidemic. “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” he’d said. How easily he abdicated his responsibility.

Reagan’s aw-shucks, nice-guy demeanor had belied his moral absenteeism. A lot of Americans didn’t care about the gay men who died of AIDS. Like Ronald Reagan, those Americans who didn’t care about those gay men already seemed dead to Em and me.

Reagan’s obituary in The New York Times made Em miss the Gallows Lounge; she said his death deserved a political comedy club. The obit was laden with Reagan’s backstory; Em and I took turns reading it aloud to each other. Em began, but she got bogged down in Reagan’s radio career. It made Em cry to imagine we might have had a president who cared about the AIDS victims, if Reagan had stayed in the broadcasting business. It was my turn to read, Em said. She’d gagged on a phrase in one of the opening paragraphs—a line about Reagan’s promising America “a return to greatness.” Nora said Americans were obsessed with their own greatness. Many American politicians ended their speeches by telling us how great we were—the ideologues always assured us we could be great again.

I read aloud for a long time; it seemed to me I was reading forever, but I only got as far as the Republican National Convention in Detroit, where Reagan was first nominated for president. I told Em it was her turn to read when she was swearing over Reagan’s acceptance speech. It was 1980, when Reagan exhorted us to “recapture our destiny.” Nora would have said that destiny was just a bullshit synonym for greatness. At that point, we weren’t even halfway through the undying obit. Em was getting angry, all over again; she was shouting her way through Reagan’s opposition to government financing of abortions for poor women, and his pushing for a constitutional amendment to prohibit abortion. There was more heavy breathing when Em read about Reagan’s call for “a return of God to the classroom”—this meant bringing back prayer in schools. And Reagan was against limitations on buying and owning guns. As tedious as it was to read Reagan’s obituary, Em and I were reminded of the reasons we’d disliked him; we thought the Times had left no stone unturned. The four short paragraphs about the botched assassination attempt were enough; after all, not much had come of it. We tolerated how much there was about “Reaganomics,” considering it was just another name for the standard Republican policy of lowering taxes on the rich. Em didn’t make it past the start of President Reagan’s second term, when the Gipper said the nation was “poised for greatness.” I knew Em—she’d had it with America’s greatness. I knew I would be the reader for all the rest. I was dreading the Iran-Contra scandal, and the back and forth with Gorbachev; I had to get through Reagan’s speech at the Brandenburg Gate, the Berlin Wall business. Em made more coffee and tea; we needed caffeine to make it to the end of the obit.

There was spontaneous cheering only once, when I read what Tip O’Neill said about Reagan—“he was an actor reading lines,” the former Speaker of the House had said. O’Neill was a Democrat from Massachusetts. Tip O’Neill also said “it was sinful that Ronald Reagan ever became president”—prompting a moment of sadness between Em and me, because Tip O’Neill had died a decade before.

Near the end of Reagan’s obituary, The New York Times quoted a college professor who said “the Reagan presidency was lacking in moral leadership, an essential quality for greatness.” The obit ended strangely. Reagan just talked about himself; a journalist had asked him how he thought history would remember him, an uninspired question.

“That’s it—that’s all there is?” Em asked me.

“That’s it,” I said.

“What about AIDS—did you skip the AIDS part?” Em asked. I’d skipped nothing; maybe Em had missed the AIDS part, when it was her turn to read. We’d blown most of the morning, reading the ceaseless minutiae of that obituary to each other; now we had to reread the whole thing. “How could we have missed the AIDS part?” Em kept asking me. But we hadn’t missed it. For those of us who knew the writing mattered, The New York Times had left out the AIDS part. There was no mention of it in Reagan’s obit.

“Holy crap,” I could hear Em saying. She was in the bedroom, rummaging around—more shirt cardboards were coming. The GOOD RIDDANCE sign would stay put—GOOD RIDDANCE wasn’t good enough. This was a writing matter.

“I don’t give a shit that the Gipper is gone! Do you?” Em was screaming in the bedroom. I just guessed this meant the writing was the only thing that mattered.

I thought Em’s first protest sign missed the mark; out of context, it might have been misunderstood.

WHAT ABOUT AIDS,

YOU ASSHOLES?

In Times Square, if we were carrying that sign on the sidewalk, no one would know which assholes we meant. You may remember that The New York Times used to be in an eighteen-story, neo-Gothic building on West Forty-third Street—dark and gloomy.

FUCK ALL THE NEWS

THAT’S FIT TO PRINT

Well, okay—that one was more clear. But I didn’t see us getting that one past the revolving glass doors at 229 West Forty-third Street—that one was strictly a sidewalk sign. I went into the bedroom to put on my running shoes. I was feeling fatalistic about protesting. Either the writing mattered or it didn’t. You have to be truthful to time and place; you can’t leave out anything important. Lies of omission count as lies, I was thinking, when I heard Em tearing up the shirt cardboards in the kitchen. “Holy crap,” she was saying softly—just in resignation. “More damn déjà vu, kiddo,” she said sadly, when I found her at the kitchen table with her head on her arms. The pointlessness of our protesting The New York Times in Times Square was apparent. It’s not easy to hold lies of omission accountable.

That was when Em started singing in her sleep again—only humming, at first, just the tune. I didn’t recognize “O Canada”; I just knew it wasn’t “Goin’ Back to Great Falls.” The lyrics would come later. When Em was just humming in her sleep, I didn’t realize she was still learning the lyrics. I didn’t know the significance of the song.