Emma Who Saved My Life (11 page)

Lisa wasn't the only one desperate. Emma was staying at Mandy's, and three was a crowd where the new young lovers were concerned and in the last two days they had begun fighting about what Americans knew at home about the war, then over whose turn it was to do the dishes.

“I'm not going back to the DMZ tonight,” said Emma as we were driving around. “I know what. We're spending the night in Jersey. I have some real cool cousins there. Haven't seen 'em in a while but they are real cool—really, I promise.” However, a little drunk and in the dark with both of us tired Emma got lost and couldn't remember anyway whether it was Mayfair, Montclair, Montrose, Madison, Middleborough, Morristown, whatever M they lived in, and all the expressway exits looked like the one. So at 11:30, utterly used up, we pulled into the Admiral Halsey Rest Area on the New Jersey Turnpike to spend the night.

I pointed out that everything we owned was in the trunk and, as I climbed in the backseat, that we might get raped by motorcycle gangs.

“Nobody pays toll to come rob people, Gil. We're safe here,” Emma insisted, struggling to get comfortable in the front seat, dodging the handbrake.

We were quiet a minute.

“I was about to wreck the car I was so sleepy,” said Emma. Pause. “But I'm not sleepy now.”

If we were quiet we could get to sleep, I said.

Emma clinked change around in the front seat. “I got some more good news,” she said. “We don't have enough change for the toll tomorrow.”

Shouldn't have had that coffee and candy bar at the Quick Stop Restaurant. The Quick Stop was part of the Admiral Halsey Rest Area.

“I don't suppose these fluorescent lights ever go off, huh?” she asked. This began a series of comments at ten-minute intervals designed so she wouldn't be the only one awake …

“I'm not comfortable, Gil. I hate this. Is the backseat better?”

Later: “When I'm famous, I hope Indiana will name a rest area after me. Think they will? I'll insist on that. No cash awards, no plaques, no statues, no foundations or scholarships—I want a rest area. With a Quick Stop Restaurant. Restrooms where gay men can meet.”

Later: “We're under the flightpath for Newark Airport. Do you remember the plane landing on the Van Wyck Expressway? What if this is the night a plane mistakes the rest area lights for the runway lights? Something to think about.”

Later: “Did you fart?”

No I did not fart; it was New Jersey. The refineries and chemical firms and gasworks. We were dying from toxic fumes, I suggested. Good night, Emma.

“Yeah we gotta stop talking.”

Good night, Emma.

“By the way,” she added, repositioning herself once again in relation to the handbrake, “I think this qualifies as the Official Low Point in our New York Years, the
nadir.
”

And when I was drifting off, almost asleep …

“I don't understand how people fuck in cars. I can't even straighten out my legs … it's like that room in the Bastille, that Room of Little Ease where you couldn't stand, sit, straighten up. All across Nebraska and the Great Heartland tonight people are
doing it
in cars, defying all odds, all physical laws.”

I volunteered to show Emma how it was done.

“Ha, ha, make me laugh, in the Rest Stop. Halsey wouldn't approve.”

In a spirit of futility: Good night, Emma.

“Night.”

Sound of a plane passing over.

“Gil?”

Yes.

“I have to pee.”

I must have shut my eyes and hours passed but I wouldn't term what I had as
sleep.
It got light and trucks started noisily pulling out, planes landed every two minutes at Newark, and so we got up thinking it was nine or something, but it was five
A.M.
We spent the rest of our insufficient toll money on more coffee at the Quick Stop where Emma tried to flirt with a zitty teenage busboy, asking him how we got off the turnpike without paying toll. We surrendered to the inevitable and Emma got issued a ticket at the tollbooth and the license number and registration were taken down for the files.

“Kim Li is not going to be happy about this,” said Emma as we drove out of sight of the tollbooth. She tossed the ticket out the window, so I imagine by now Kim Li is really unhappy about it. “First the napalm, then parking tickets. A raw deal all around,” she added.

It was 6:30 and we were up with the commuters, actually preceding them a little. We went to Brooklyn (via the free Brooklyn Bridge) and Emma with her new money-machine bankcard volunteered to pay for breakfast. We parked the car in Brooklyn Heights, the richest neighborhood in Brooklyn, where all the writers lived (Emma said), and we walked around waiting for something to open, heading south past the Arab section, then back around to the city hall and down an urban warehouse-filled street until we came to a wonderful diner with a chrome façade, a real workin' man's diner, Sal's, a place of breakfast specials and taxi drivers finished with the night shift, plump waitresses in tight polyester uniforms you could see the bra straps through, big cantilevered Brooklyn waitress bras, women who got all the orders right, knew how the boys wanted their eggs, attended with unconscious precision to the refilling of the coffee cup.

“To hell with Manhattan,” said Emma, savoring the working-class pre–7
A.M.
coffee. “Let's live in Brooklyn.”

We turned to the Brooklyn real estate pages in the
Times,
out came the Official Red Crayon, and we circled away. Emma's eyes wandered to the Queens listings. “Far Rockaway. One block from beach, two bedroom, back yard. One fifty per month,” she read. “Where is that? Far Rockaway.”

The waitress coming by to refill our coffee answered, “Oh you don't wanna live out there dearie. Furtherest point on the New York subway system—George!” she yelled, looking over her shoulder, “your mother's in Rockaway Park—how long's it take by subway?”

George, a cab driver, said two and a half hours unless you got an express during rush hours. But still, two hours, easy to the City.

“But the name is nice,” Emma said, musing.

“There's Rockaway Beach,” said the waitress, topping off my coffee, “then Rockaway, then Far Rockaway because it's the furtherest away. Furtherest stop on the New York subway system. It's out on the island across from Jamaica Bay. You got milk in there, honey?” she asked, looking at the milk tin. There wasn't and she went to get more.

“You looking for a place?” said the cook behind the counter.

“Yes,” said Emma, playing the situation artfully, “but here in Brooklyn. My mother was born here, and we had to move to California 'cause my Dad worked in the press office for the Brooklyn Dodgers…”

THAT WAS GENIUS. We had no fewer than five numbers when we left Sal's (“You tell my sister, I sent you, her brother Harold,” said a bus driver from South Brooklyn) and we went to work.

South Brooklyn, south of the Heights but north of almost everything else in Brooklyn, is almost as nice as the Heights but not quite. We made our way to Harold the Bus Driver's sister's place along tree-lined streets. This place
was the one.

It had four rooms and a cramped bathroom—a living room, a kitchen, two bedrooms, and Mrs. Dellafini said Lisa could use the basement for painting as nothing was down there but the heater and the fuse box and a utility closet (and rats and mice, Lisa would later report), and Mrs. Dellafini also said she'd rather have two than three but since we were nice (Emma gave the Brooklyn-roots routine again, plus told her I was her brother) that would be all right but the rent had to go up $40 a month to $240 (which sounded steep to us then) and Mrs. Dellafini said she was a widow and her husband died in the first-floor apartment where she still lives (and where we kids were to come if we had a problem) and she lived with him for thirty-five years and she had some good times and some bad times but she saw him through and she loved him very much but he was dead and Life Went On and she was taking a pottery class now.

My memory's pretty good, huh? No, I didn't keep a journal—I kept someone else's journals, Emma's. She'd kill me if she knew (well, she wants to kill me anyway, but we'll get around to that). I didn't steal them. Emma kept throwing them out, cursing her poetic/writing talents, so once in the trashcan, I figured they were public domain.

Periodically Emma declared herself utterly unreadable and worthless, a Major No-Talent, or—and this was a favorite term for others—“Multi-Untalented,” and that her writing was garbage—there was no hope for her, she'd scream. These fits of self-disgust (where her own bad passages were read loudly until Lisa or I smirked or betrayed the slightest sign of not liking something) ended in Emma opening the window facing the street and announcing to the neighborhood at large: “Here Brooklyn! Here's some more trash for your street!” And she would hurl her latest work to the wastecans below, page by page.

“Emma, stop!” Lisa would yell, wrestling Emma to a sofa, debilitating her by tickling until they both were laughing. “You'll get arrested for littering. You'll publish one day!”

Emma through pained laughter: “If I published
that
I
would
be arrested for littering…” I'd run down to the street and collect the pages. We'd chalk this behavior up to Emma's creative process.

In the midst of all this, she produced a “Brooklyn Journal” which, before she'd written a word in it, was going to be the century's only rival to Thomas Wolfe, and after she'd filled half of it, was declared “toiletworthy,” and was flushed page by page down the toilet until the water pressure and Emma's interest in her dramatic gesture gave out. And so I have it now, that and a number of other excommunicated papers, odds and ends. They were thrown away, I think now, because they were sincere and sometimes awkward and always sentimental—everything Emma fought so hard not to be in conversation, in life, in front of us. I've kept something called “Brooklyn Serenade.” Here's a piece of it:

… To live in Brooklyn, even as an interloper, a refugee from the outrageous rents of the City, is to be born there; it holds you like the unwelcome grip of a Great Aunt who doesn't speak English very well, it adopts you, it converts you to its pace, its poverty, its tremendous dreams hand in hand with meager expectations. You find yourself defending it at the Soho loft party, speaking of its virtues to someone without a place to live in the fall, you find yourself regularly at your window staring unthinkingly, accepting what plays before you. If you watch for it, observe carefully, you may see something flash, something catch the light momentarily, something beautiful have a brief life in the rude and filthy streets: innocence (the girl in the Catholic-school skirt twirling her hair, watching the boys play ball), faith (the mother storming from the house to retrieve her daughter out playing in her confirmation dress), hope (the adolescent boy standing on a crate, using a stick for a microphone, being Elvis, English his second language), and love, disguised and disfigured by explosive family fights heard up and down the block, borne in the faces of banished daughters, sons who said no to fathers, wives who went away but now are back, husbands trudging home from a second job.

And when the sun begins to lower, behind that wall of haze over Jersey and Manhattan, and when it spills into the brick and brownstone canyons of Brooklyn, all tired and dirty with the industry of Jersey, the exhaust of Manhattan, and when—at the same time—you emerge from the hot, crowded subway and come up for air in what has become your neighborhood, and you stand there amidst the quiet bustle, its obliviousness to the sordid goings-on across the river, it is enough to stir in you an affection for this naked and therefore most ashamed part of America, and you too will share a sense of loss for a way of life fading as it thrives, fading in that second-hand light, around you a sepia photograph brought to life, warm and inclusive and as sentimental as an immigrant's memory of home.

About a week after she wrote it and liked it, Emma decided it was trash, written by someone, she said, who stayed up too late a little drunk, some twenty-two-year-old at three a.m.

Those
are
the circumstances, I reminded her.

“It's not supposed to read like that,” she whined. “It's supposed to read like George Eliot already. I refuse to
grow
as a writer—it'll come out perfect right at the start or to hell with it. ‘Brooklyn
Serenade
'—MY GOD!”

Okay, maybe calling it a “serenade” wasn't so hot. I'm laughing a bit, because to read all this stuff, some of the short-story fragments, some of the poems, you'd have thought we were living in the heart of Hasidic Williamsburgh, the lone English-speakers amid a world of immigrants fresh from Ellis Island, women dressed in black trudging to mass, Poles over here, Lithuanians over there. Carroll Gardens wasn't
that
exciting. Emma, just like me, you had a bit of the theater in you, you old fake.

I picture her writing. We had this tree-lined street and our own tree in front of our window, a big turn-of-the-century ten-foot window with a window seat, sort of a Victorian projected window box, and this tree displayed autumn for a precious single week that fall and we mourned its passing, until we saw snow on the branches that December, which was to be only upstaged by the yellow-green buds that came the next spring, our own little Reminder of Nature, virtually in our living room. Emma no doubt sensed the clothesline Ellis Island Brooklyn out there somewhere, sitting in her window seat, her and the tree, gray Sunday afternoons, chain-drinking tea, pad in hand. Like this unfinished poem—

I AM THE IMMIGRANT

They arrive on jetplanes now.

No babushkas, no more lives in a single suitcase.