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.