The Last Chairlift

41. STARTING SOMETHING

From the stage, Em and I saw how the snowshoer had persevered; her small, strong hands still had hold of the killer’s heels. The force of the second shot had blown Trowbridge backward; his head wound left a smear of blood on the wall of the lounge, where he slid sideways as he fell, dragging the little English teacher after him. The pretty Mr. Barlow’s hand strength has been accounted for; when she was dragged across the floor at the back of the lounge, she’d not given up her grip on the shooter. One newspaper report was syndicated to two hundred (or more) other papers—Elliot Barlow was called “the only hero.” She was sixty, she was four feet nine, yet she was the only one who confronted the Gallows Lounge killer—she went after him, on all fours. Eventually, when Emory Trowbridge’s diaries revealed that Elliot Barlow had been an intended victim, Mr. Barlow would be outed. In one entry, the brave trans woman would be called not an actual woman but a former wrestler, and Trowbridge wrote worse things about her in other entries. While some journalists didn’t hesitate to call the Gallows Lounge shooting a hate crime—in more than one instance, a singling out of sexual minorities—other journalists categorized the killing as part of a widespread societal misogyny. There would be some nonsense about a commando-minded murder-suicide—in which the killer targets a specific group, usually in a public space—but the biggest bullshit would be perpetrated by the Trowbridge family psychiatrist. The psychiatrist said that Emory’s primary motivation was suicide—specifically, a homicide-suicide strategy that entailed killing himself after killing others. The psychiatrist concluded that this was a sign of a serious personality disorder. It’s impossible to know what Nora would have said about this assessment, or how Em might have pantomimed the disorder.

There was no actual suicide letter—only the diary entries in Trowbridge’s notebooks. Criminal-justice officials decided that a public inquiry or extensive public discussion of the Gallows Lounge shooting would cause pain to the families and could lead to more violence against sexual minorities. Speaking as Nora’s most immediate family, Henrik had not expressed any pain; he was “estranged” from his cousin, the Republican congressman wanted everyone to know. Henrik had mentioned Nora’s “left-wing political radicalism” as the cause of his estrangement.

Emory Trowbridge’s father wanted everyone to know he was “estranged” from his son. “His mother is entirely to blame—Emory was a mama’s boy,” was all the divorced dad had to say.

Emory’s mom said she had worried that Emory would “hurt himself.” She believed Emory suffered from “attachment disorder—due to his being abandoned by his bad dad,” the mom said.

Notwithstanding the father’s estrangement and Emory’s sense of abandonment, Emory Trowbridge had been provided for by his parents; he’d been completely supported by his divorced mom and dad since the backup heavyweight’s time at Exeter. He spent four years at the academy, but Trowbridge didn’t graduate; he’d made so few friends among his fellow students, and was so unmemorable to his teachers, no one noticed the absence of his unsmiling face at commencement. He’d always been borderline antisocial, but in the spring term of his senior year, he’d stopped going to classes and he wouldn’t speak when spoken to; he was sent home for nonperformance and psychiatric evaluation. His teachers, the dean, the school psychiatrist, the faculty who had dorm duty in Emory Trowbridge’s dormitory—they knew that Emory left school before graduation. The rest of us never noticed his absence. How would we know that the backup heavyweight had just pretended to apply to college, or that his only job had been befriending cows?

Trowbridge had tried to enlist in the army, but he was rejected. Like me, he was reclassified 4-F. He’d not tried to enroll in another branch of the armed services. More surprising to the snowshoer and me was that Trowbridge had lived (for almost thirty years) in a trailer on a piece of land his parents purchased from a dairy farmer in Stratham—on the outskirts of Exeter. The dairy farmer said Trowbridge had been a good neighbor, on the grounds that he was considerate of the cows. Emory’s thoughtfulness on behalf of the cows was demonstrated when he constructed a firing range on his property. Not wanting to disturb the cows, Trowbridge had asked the dairy farmer first about where the gravel pit should go, and in which direction he should shoot.

For twenty-eight years, Emory Trowbridge was considerate and kind only to cows. In exchange for his parents’ continuing support, Trowbridge agreed to come to New York on a regular basis to see the family psychiatrist. Over the years, in his frequent visits to the city, Trowbridge developed his obsessive dislike of the Gallows—his hatred of Two Dykes, One Who Talks, in particular. For how long, and how intently, had he been stalking Nora and Em? The press coverage of the Gallows Lounge shooting was unclear. As for what Trowbridge wrote in his diaries, there was no narrative progression; the entries were undated. What stood out were his diatribes against women and queers; Trowbridge believed that women and sexual weirdos were receiving preferential treatment. My mother and Molly were mentioned, among the dykes, and Elliot Barlow was referred to (interchangeably) as the lightweight in women’s clothes and the cross-dresser. The media cited the last-minute nature of Trowbridge’s written plans for the Gallows Lounge shooting. More forethought went into his memorizing the names of the cows, and his detailed observations of the milking process. And there was the small heavyweight’s careful account of his target practice in the gravel pit; according to the dairy farmer, the shooting was a regular occurrence. The dairy farmer insisted that his cows were not disturbed by the gunfire.

But why had Emory Trowbridge wanted to live in a trailer on the outskirts of Exeter for almost thirty years? Mr. Barlow, who was more observant than most, never recognized the natural 190-pounder among the spectators at the home wrestling matches, yet for more than a decade, Trowbridge didn’t miss a match. The backups in a wrestling lineup are often unnoticed, and Trowbridge was more unrecognizable than most. No one saw him when he was watching all those wrestling matches; no one knew when he stopped attending, or why he stopped.

Trowbridge’s hatred of Mr. Barlow began before the little English teacher’s transition to a woman. Elliot Barlow had been among the first on the faculty to advocate for coeducation at Exeter. The backup heavyweight with the long arms stopped attending the home wrestling matches after girls were admitted to the academy. Trowbridge wrote in a notebook that he couldn’t concentrate on the wrestling—“not with all the girls around.” Yet this unwelcome distraction, purportedly caused by coeducation at Exeter, didn’t stop Trowbridge from attending the girls’ soccer or field-hockey games in the fall; the girls’ basketball games, or their swimming and diving, in the winter; the girls’ softball games, or their track meets, in the spring. Wrestling was a winter sport, but Trowbridge became a steadfast spectator in all three seasons of athletics at Exeter; his hatred of seeing all the girls at his old school somehow compelled him to scrutinize them. Emory Trowbridge wrote derogatory things in his diaries about the girls he watched playing sports. Had Trowbridge been stalking the girl students at the academy, in the obsessive way he’d watched Nora and Em at the Gallows? What was written about Emory Trowbridge was largely speculative; his motives remained murky. Yet, in the media coverage of the Gallows Lounge shooting, there was more about Trowbridge than there was about Nora.

The New York Times was not Nora’s friend. The paper condemned the Gallows Lounge shooting and duly noted the “exceptional valor” of Elliot Barlow, but there was more than a whiff of reproach in the way the writer for the Times characterized Nora and Em’s “incendiary antics”—their “purposeful vulgarity.”

Elsewhere in New York, there was some love expressed for the Gallows; there was notably more love for Two Dykes, One Who Talks. Nora had been interviewed in Rolling Stone, where the Two Dykes were praised for their “political prescience.”

The Village Voice pointed out the noticeable lack of a security presence on that Friday night at the Gallows Lounge. When the shooting started, the bouncer went out on the sidewalk—ostensibly, to inform the security guard of the trouble inside. One of the bartenders had already called the cops. It was unexplained why the security guard stayed on the sidewalk. To prevent people from entering the club until the police arrived or the shooting stopped? That Friday night, a spokesperson for the Gallows couldn’t confirm if the guard had been armed. All the idiot management would say was that sometimes the security guard had a gun, sometimes not. “We know,” the writer for the Voice would write. Of the New York media covering popular culture, the Voice and Rolling Stone had been alone in paying tribute to Damaged Don when he was gunned down in a parking lot in Montana for singing “Goin’ Back to Great Falls” to a Reaganite.

“Don’s only friends are my friends,” I remember Nora saying, with Em nodding her head off. “Just wait. When someone shoots me, the Voice and Rolling Stone will be my only friends, too,” Nora said, with Em shaking her head and punching her. It was just talk—just Nora being Nora—but I remember that Em was in tears.

After the Gallows Lounge shooting, what was scary to me was that Em didn’t cry at all. Of course we expected that Em, being Em, wouldn’t speak, but Em didn’t emote, and we knew she was an emoter. Em didn’t show a single emotion—no acting out, not one gesture. Em was expressionless; she barely breathed. The snowshoer and I never left her alone, except when she went to the bathroom.

It was a weekend in December, in the ski season. The Gallows Lounge shooting had happened on a Friday night; my mother and Molly couldn’t come to New York till the following Monday, but Molly gave me an earful on the phone. “Get Em, and all her stuff, out of the apartment she shared with Nora—leave the guns, Kid. Your mom and I will take the guns, and Nora’s things, back to Vermont,” Molly told me. I explained to Molly that I’d already moved most of my clothes from the snowshoer’s apartment to Vermont, and everyone agreed that Em should move in with Mr. Barlow. I’d left only some socks and underpants in a chest of drawers—in the smaller of the snowshoer’s two bedrooms. I told Molly that I’d wrapped the .357 Magnum in a pair of underpants I didn’t like; the bullets were in a pair of socks. “We’ll take that gun and the bullets back to Vermont, too—even your ugly underpants, Kid. That’ll be Em’s chest of drawers now,” Molly said. I got the picture. Em would sleep with Elliot, or with me; we wouldn’t let her sleep alone, just go to the bathroom by herself.

That was when my mother got on the phone; she must have been listening to Molly’s part of our conversation. Little Ray wanted to remind me what happened when she’d asked Nora to be a bridesmaid. “I better not leave Em alone,” Nora had said. “She gets a little strange in a crowd when she’s not with me.”

“Don’t leave Em alone, sweetie—especially not in a crowd,” my mom told me.

“He knows, Ray!” I could hear Molly calling from somewhere in the Vermont house, where two handguns and a twelve-gauge shotgun were destined to be returned to the arsenal.

On the weekend of the Gallows Lounge shooting, the snowshoer and I were not expecting to expose Em to a crowd. We’d already declined to be interviewed about the shooting. Mr. Barlow would forever be identified as the only hero; as Nora’s cousin, I was usually referred to as the novelist or the bestselling author. Naturally, we would protect Em from interviewers. As Em would one day act out for me, pantomimists are always misquoted.

For two nights, when Em would lie down in bed with me or Mr. Barlow, she lay back on the pillow, as straight and unmoving as a cadaver in a coffin. All day Saturday, Elliot and I were transporting Em’s belongings from her Hell’s Kitchen apartment to the snowshoer’s pied-à-terre on East Sixty-fourth Street. Em went with us; she seemed to understand that we were moving her out. She packed her own clothes; she carried things to and from the car. Em had more books than clothes; there were more pages of her writing in progress than I’d expected. She wanted all the photos—the photos of Nora, too—but Em wouldn’t touch or look at Nora’s clothes. No one mentioned Nora’s double-barreled twelve-gauge or Em’s long-barreled .357 Magnum. Em never touched or looked at the guns. The little English teacher told her that Molly and Ray would take care of everything we left behind. Em didn’t nod or shake her head; watching her closely, we noticed she was biting her lower lip. That Saturday night, when we’d moved Em’s clothes into the smaller bedroom of Mr. Barlow’s apartment, I told Em that this bedroom would be all hers once I went back to Vermont. When Em crossed her index fingers, giving me the X sign, I thought she meant she didn’t want me to go. I was relieved to see a reaction from her, any reaction at all. I was also moved to tears by the thought that Em might miss me, but when I tried to hug her, she pushed me away. Em stomped off to Elliot’s little living room. There was a worktable; it served as a desk, where we’d told Em to put her writing materials. I’d written on that worktable; I liked writing there.

Nora had called me Longhand Man, but Em wrote in longhand, too. I watched Em leaf through the pages of her writing on the worktable. I was wrong about the meaning of the X sign Em gave me; I’d wrongly assumed her writing in progress was strictly fiction. When Em came back to the bedroom that would be all hers, the pages she gave me were from a long letter she had begun writing me before the shooting. Em had been giving me the X sign for my mom’s matchmaking activities in Vermont; Em was crossing her fingers to the Grace idea, and where it came from.

“Grace looks like a young Clara Swift, and I know how Clara Swift affects you—she gets to me that way, too, you know,” Em wrote me. By a young Clara Swift, Em meant that Grace was now in her early thirties—about the same age Clara Swift was in ’77, when she gave birth to Paul Goode’s child. (That kid was almost a teenager now, and Clara Swift was in her forties—if not the hottie Em and I once imagined she was, still very much a hottie.) Em was hell-bent on making more comparisons between Grace and a young Clara Swift, some of which were (I thought) more literary than actual. I could imagine that I might be smitten with Grace because I was already smitten with a movie star, and Grace looked like her. But it struck me as far-fetched that women in their thirties—especially, women who marry much older men—want to get pregnant and have a baby almost immediately. Clara Swift was thirty-one when she had Paul Goode’s baby; Paul Goode would be in his sixties when that kid was a teenager. If I met and married Grace, and we had a baby, bang-bang, I would be a virtual geezer (in my sixties) when our kid was a teenager. “You know your mom has an agenda. Trust me, at her age, Grace will have her own agenda,” Em wrote me. This much of her long letter to me was all about the arranged marriage and subsequent fatherhood I would be facing, upon my moving to Vermont. Em had further decided that she wanted the snowshoer to read this much of her letter.

The rest of her letter, Em made clear, was for my eyes only. All I said to Em, loudly enough for Elliot to hear, was: “You also wrote me that my mom must have looked like Clara Swift.”

“When Ray was younger—yes, she did,” the snowshoer said. How many women can look like Clara Swift? I was wondering. Not my mother, not at any age, I was thinking. “Ray is your mom, Adam—you’re not supposed to see her as an attractive woman, in the way other men do,” the little English teacher told me, with Em nodding her head off. Elliot Barlow had always been able to read my mind, I was thinking, when the snowshoer suddenly sighed. Mr. Barlow had finished reading as much of Em’s letter to me as Em had wanted Elliot to read. Poor Elliot—she knew all about my mother’s penchant for agendas. Little Ray had married the snowshoer, thereby giving me a stepfather who would get me through Exeter, and through much more. Hadn’t that arranged marriage also worked for the snowshoer—not to mention for my mom and Molly? “Ray is a good mother—she’s just doing what she believes would be best for Adam,” the snowshoer discreetly said, handing the selected pages of Em’s letter back to Em.

The way Em began to dance with me brought me back to the first time I had danced with her, at my mom’s wedding—when Em tried to make me look at her eyes, not at her breasts. The way Em tilted my head, so that I was staring at her breasts, and then she lifted my face to her eyes, made her pantomime of our wedding dance completely clear. “I remember the dancing,” I told Em, but she kept making her point: I’d been too young to know better; I was only fourteen. I didn’t know you weren’t supposed to stare at a girl’s boobs when you were dancing with her. The snowshoer and I understood Em’s pantomime; it was unnecessary for Em to count out fourteen on her fingers, but she did. We thought we saw where Em was going with her pantomime—namely, it was okay for a mother to be proactive in arranging her kid’s future when the kid is only fourteen. But I was going to be forty-eight in a little more than a week. My mom shouldn’t be arranging my marriage, or my procreative future—not now. That’s where Elliot and I believed Em’s pantomime was headed.

We were surprised when Em enacted full-on childbirth; we weren’t sure whose birth it was, but Mr. Barlow figured it out. “Yes, we know—Grace was born the year Ray and I got married, which makes Grace fifteen years younger than Adam,” the snowshoer said, but Em didn’t stop giving birth for long. There was more finger-counting, to indicate the passage of time; then Em was back at it, giving birth again. Elliot and I had watched Em give birth before; in her pantomimes, childbirth was often symbolic. Not this time. You wouldn’t want to watch anyone you love go through this childbirth; it would be hard to watch a total stranger give birth in such an agonizing way. It was instantly clear to the snowshoer and me that we were witnessing Em’s pantomime of Grace giving birth to my baby—not a good idea, in Em’s opinion. I was hoping it would be easier to read the rest of Em’s letter, but I should have known there was a reason why this part of her letter was for my eyes only.

At a glance, I could see the new part had been hastily written—with more urgency, it became apparent. Em had written the new part after the Gallows Lounge shooting. What she wrote was an awakening—the writing-out of a childbirth of the symbolic kind. “Nora was half right when she accused you of trying to start something with me—you may not have been trying to, but you’ve already started something,” Em wrote. Trowbridge had wanted to shoot Em first; he’d taken aim at her first. But when Em was covered with Nora’s blood, standing onstage, as still as a statue, I didn’t know Em had seen me looking at her. I just saw how Em was begging Trowbridge to shoot her—please kill me, too, her eyes, her hands, her whole body had been pleading. I just knew it would have killed me, if he shot Em—this was how I’d been looking at her; that was the look Em had seen.

“I saw how you were looking at me. You can’t look at me like this—you can’t love me that way! How could it ever work?” Em wrote. “I saw you doing those jumping jacks, I heard you calling ‘Fuck you!’ to him—you were trying to get him to shoot you instead of me. Are you crazy? Maybe you should let your mother marry you off to a skier who works in publishing, but you won’t stay married to anybody if you keep looking at me like this. You’re still the boy I danced with at your mom’s wedding. When are you going to grow up? You can’t love me that way,” Em wrote. There was no Love, Em.

While I’d been reading, I could hear Em taking a bath. When I’d finished the new pages, I could tell that she had gone to bed. She was starting out the night in the snowshoer’s bedroom, not with me—that was clear. I certainly understood what was private about the new pages of Em’s letter, but I showed the pages to Elliot Barlow. “Am I crazy, or is Em crazy?” I asked Mr. Barlow, handing her the pages. My good stepfather had always been my first reader; now the little English teacher was my copy editor, too. Here I was, in my late forties, still seeking her advice. According to Em, I still wasn’t a grown-up.

I saw Elliot frown when she was reading the pages; she sighed when she gave them back to me. “This is between you and Em. Of course you’re crazy—you’re both crazy,” the snowshoer said. The little English teacher revealed she had more to say when she began to pace, as if a classroom of students sat in front of her, and behind her was a blackboard where she’d already written something of importance—something she was poised to say. “I didn’t see you, Adam, or your jumping jacks—I was on all fours, you’ll recall; I wasn’t looking in the direction of the stage. But I certainly heard you taunting Trowbridge. ‘You were never in the Marine Corps—you never did anything!’ I heard you tell him. You certainly sounded like you wanted him to shoot you, Adam,” Mr. Barlow said.

“I just knew it would have killed me if he shot Em,” I told the little English teacher.

“The way you looked at her must have made this clear to Em,” the snowshoer said.

“If she were only halfway interested, I would ask Em to marry me!” I blurted out.

“I believe Em knows this, Adam—I think this is the problem,” Mr. Barlow said.

“I don’t know how I look when I’m looking at Em—I can’t see myself when I’m seeing her,” I said to the snowshoer.

“I’ve seen you when you’re imagining, Adam—mostly, when you’re writing,” the little English teacher told me. “I know how you look when you look at Em—like you’re writing the end of the story. You’re imagining that you and Em are a couple, that you’re already together—this is how you look at her,” the snowshoer said.

I understood why Em had told me I couldn’t look at her like this. How would it ever work, for me to love her that way? I must be crazy, I was thinking. I’d seen Em’s penis pantomime; I knew how she felt about penises. I felt so out of it. I might as well marry a skier who works in publishing, I thought. And Em had just lost the love of her life. How could I look at Em like this? How could I even dream of loving her that way? I went to bed feeling so ashamed. You have to be careful what you show or act out to a pantomimist. You better not pantomime those things you can’t take back.