Emma Who Saved My Life (2 page)

I could get used to Cafe Life, I thought. This was the Cafe Prato and if the waitress noticed us we were going to have cappuccinos. Lisa went on talking about work and herself and her new easel and other stuff, while I thought about my luck. Lisa (two years older than I was, a graduate of SWIU), had left for the big city upon graduation, got a sublet for a year in the Village. June 1974 to June 1975. She'd had two roommates lined up but they had a big falling out and weren't speaking, so there was Lisa left holding the lease. I wrote her and said—I'm cringing again—how Southwestern Illinois was holding me back, how I should move to New York and take my chances, how I was better than any of my classmates, knew more than the directors, etc. And then surprise: Lisa writes back and says, DO IT, drop out, come move in with me and this girl I met named Emma. Would I mind living with two women? Me, a sexually frustrated college sophomore with a strong crush on Lisa, object to moving in with two women in New York City in a snazzy sublet in the Village? WOULD I MIND?

“Anyway, it's a Nixon Resignation party tonight at Susan's,” Lisa said, inhaling and exhaling her last cigarette seriously. “She was going to make us dress up like Watergate criminals or Pat Nixon or something, but I talked her out of that.”

I wanted to know more about Susan.

“No you don't,” Lisa said, smashing her cigarette out in the ashtray. “You don't know what a state of grace you are in right now. She's four hundred pounds and she wears these…” She shook her head. “No describing her. You have to meet her.”

The waitress passed by again, ignoring Lisa's exaggerated semaphore to get her attention. “Did you see that? They hate me here. I spend all my money here and they hate me.”

I ventured: Susan is sort of a friend?

“Oh god no. No one really likes her, we just like going to her loft parties. She's rich. I can't feel guilt about despising her and drinking her booze because she can afford it. Can't feel sorry for anybody rich for some reason.” Lisa looked sadly at the smoldering butt. Then she went inside the cafe.

I sat there alone a minute, reviewing the essential fact of the day: I was in New York. Ta-da.

“They're snotty
inside
this place as well,” said Lisa, returning with a pack of cigarettes. Before I could ask if Nixon had resigned: “There is obviously some confusion about what I said earlier.” She flung the cellophane wrapper off in a single gesture. “I was referring to
this
pack of cigarettes. I don't buy another pack until what's-his-name is sworn in. Actually,” she went on, as she lit up, “I'm really chain-smoking to celebrate your being here and rescuing your college chum from bankruptcy and eviction.” Then she sunk her sharp fingernails into my arm. “You ARE moving in, aren't you?”

Yes yes yes. No turning back now.

For Our Audience at Home: Yeah, Lisa knew I had a crush on her. She enjoyed it. No intention of letting me do anything about it, of course, but it certainly didn't bother her that I was going to be adoring and worshiping around the house each day. Give it time, I thought. I grow on people; I'm like an industrial solvent, I'll wear you down …

Lisa licked her lips and tossed her hair back characteristically. “What did your parents say when you told them you were moving in with me, a Modern Woman of the World?”

It wouldn't matter what they thought, I told her. They weren't happy about my dropping out and they were set against my moving here and I'm sure Mom didn't care much for my living with a Woman of the World, but HEY, what am I, a kid? I told Lisa I was on my own and I didn't care what my parents thought one way or the other.

Which wasn't entirely true. I moved out with $400 I had saved and Mom gave me another $400 and I never told anyone that she gave it to me, lest I seem less independent. They
really
hated the whole idea—for them New York was where you went to be killed while your neighbors looked on, land of drugs and garbage strikes and—you had to hear my mother pronounce this for what was probably the first time in her life—hoe-moe-sex-yoo-uhls, which would be chasing her son down Broadway and back, day and night. Hey man, like, they wanted me to finish my degree, and that wasn't my scene man; you know, get a haircut, get a job, a concept right up there with Peace With Honor—the Establishment, man. I shouldn't parody how I felt at the time. Sorry.

“I guess your parents think we're sleeping together or something,” said Lisa. (What was this—Parent's Day?) “They probably think I'm leading their little boy astray.”

Wasn't it obvious I was so astray already? We laughed together, ha ha ha. Sex with Gil. What an idea.

Lisa and Gilbert, Their Early Years:

I met Lisa my first year at Southwestern Illinois. She was the resident advisor on the girl's hall in the same dorm, for our Sister Floor, and there was this Hayride Hoe-down Night and each guy was assigned a Pixie and we had to buy little gifts for—

NO, THIS IS TOO STUPID. Let's just say she was a junior, I was a freshman, and we liked each other a lot and I went and sat in her room a lot and ate her homemade cookies a lot and I was flattered that she didn't throw me out and thought I was mature enough to be seen with her, and I don't know what she got out of it, but you might just have to accept the fact I'm a Fun Guy and people sometimes like me. Anyway there was this fellow, Ted, and they were going out for—no, correct that: they were
breaking up
for years, longer than most marriages last. Nations rise and fall in the time it took for them to work out the fine details of breaking up.
Now
I see they were very immature, but back then that struck me as Real Life Drama because sex was involved which meant it was mature and important, which shows you how little
I
was involved with sex at the time.

Didn't take long, huh? Onto SEX, this author's almost-favorite topic. I'm warning you now—I like making lists, categorizing, analyzing, and I also warn you everytime I'm sure I've gotten it sorted out, I'm wrong. Nevertheless (and I'm not alone here) women in my early twenties fell into three distinct categories. We got room here, don't we?

1. The Only-Good-For-One-Thing Girl
who is only good for one thing, and it was the '70s and everyone was rushing around telling me this was unliberated and sleazy and dishonest, and there's more to life than losing your virginity which is what I spent my late teenage years trying to do. I lost it over and over again with girls like this. But what the sensitive young man of my era
should
desire, I knew, was

2. The You're-Like-A-Sister-To-Me Woman
who is like a sister to you. Now you should just never NEVER go to bed with a woman who is your friend but you feel
zilchola
for sexually because at that early stage in your sexual life it's going to mess with you in a big way. I don't think young guys these days feel compelled anymore to sleep with their wonderful female friends who don't happen to be lucky enough to look like
Vogue
models. But I did. I was the Sensitive Young Man of the New Age, struggling toward enlightenment, dealing with outmoded but latent sexism, trying to meet the New Woman on her own turf, pursuing a caring, nurturing relationship with someone I admired for her mind, someone as exciting to me as Mamie Eisenhower.

And this was where I got depressed. What I wanted to come along was a woman with whom the sex would be as stupendous as the intellectual companionship, and she had a name, the concept of her is legend, she's out there … the Quality Item.…

Someone should have lowered a sign saying: you think Early-Twenties Heterosexual Average Middle-Class American Male Problems are bad, just wait until the
Late
-Twenties Heterosexual Average Middle-Class American Male Problems strike, chiefly, getting ANYONE to sleep with you. It is never as easy as college EVER AGAIN. As a younger guy I was obsessed with why things weren't 100% perfect, why sex wasn't all they said it would be, whether I should trade in someone good for someone potentially perfect, what the other guys were thinking. God, you hit the early thirties and you … you just want someone to have a hamburger with, you know? You develop an affection for human frailty and women who look like human beings live in their bodies, and you find yourself wanting to hug the middle-aged woman on the bus or get to the plain-looking sixteen-year-old before her tenuous adolescent confidence is defeated, you stop thinking of
Playboy
Centerfolds, Ideal Women and pedestals and rectifying all that's imperfect and disillusioning in the world on the battleground of a relationship with some poor unsuspecting GIRL. But back to Lisa: Lisa was such a ticket, and I knew it from the moment I saw her. She was

3. The Quality Item
who is, to repeat, the first woman you meet in whom erotic beauty meets the class act, the girl with the brains, admirable, adorable in every way
plus
she is of an order of beauty, intelligence, worth, sense, taste, etc., that is usually—and here is the key, so listen up—OUT OF YOUR LEAGUE. The male ego's gotta make a beeline for this one and has to be loved back in return, or that's it for you, you've had it, you're nothing, you're condemned to a life of barfly ex-cheerleaders, one-night stands, misery. I know guys who spent a decade pursuing their Quality Item Fixation—no one (thank god) is as important as that first, hotly pursued Quality Item. After you get her and see whoopdiedoo, no big deal (or marry her and live happily ever after—it happens I guess), you don't run after women on pedestals anymore. Women, yes; pedestals, no.

And so there I was that day in the Village, just two hours off the bus, my suitcase a block away in her Carmine Street sublet, I was sitting at an open-air cafe as the light grew longer and more orange, the evening turned a touch cooler, and there was Lisa (who was just soooo New York to me, even though she'd been there three months), adventurous and rebellious (she had moved to New York City, like me, over the objections of her parents) and talented and trying to make it as a painter, doing commercial art jobs and temporary work by day, and she was in the Village (which was a distillation of all that was wild and exciting in New York) and I wanted to make my life the equal of hers, I wanted to be an actor working in New York, an actor of some success and note, and I would do it so perhaps there would come a time, somewhere in the future, that the Quality Item would look up at me from across our shared breakfast table and say: yes, it is you, isn't it? YOU'RE THE ONE AFTER ALL, GIL. You are MY Quality Item.

“A man showed me his penis on the bus yesterday,” Lisa said, staring out blankly into the square.

Yeah?

“This town's a toilet bowl, Gil,” she said lazily, almost stifling a yawn. “Mayor Beame says it's the Big Apple but it's just as often the Big Toilet Bowl. I was reading today some expert saying the city was going to have to declare bankruptcy soon. If that happens it'll sink even deeper in its craziness. But Emma says you have to learn to love the squalor,” she added, taking a deep drag on the second cigarette in the Nixon pack. She laughed a private laugh, thinking again about Emma, soon to be the third person in our sublet. “You're gonna love Emma,” she said. “You won't know what hit you.”

There was a flurry of pigeons in the square across the street from us as this old baglady tossed up a dirty hotdog bun, watching it fall, waiting for all the pigeons to swoop around it; then shooing them away, retrieving what was left of the bun, throwing it into the air again, repeating the process with a cackle.

“That's the Pigeon Lady,” said Lisa, familiar already with the locals. “She goes around in the gutters and in the trash cans hunting for bread crumbs for her babies, her pigeons in Father Demo Square.” The woman cackled again, scuffling amid the fluttering pigeons. “And look,” Lisa said, nudging me, “there's a weird one.”

This old, grizzled man, like so many of the old downtown bums, a scarecrow-man, tattered clothes, gray with unwashed years of soot and street-sleeping, would go up behind someone and lecture them, yell at them, use impassioned gestures, like a Southern senator, except no sound ever came out—it was just a mute pantomime. If anyone turned around, he mouthed “Sorry” meekly and backed away, only to begin haranguing again. We watched him do this until the man reading a paperback got up and left, irritated.

“Yet I don't feel that sorry for him,” said Lisa, musing. “It's hard to feel sorry for someone whose delusions are … I dunno, authoritarian. What gets you is someone like Dolly.”

Eventually I saw Dolly. Dolly was the Queen of the Pathetic, one of the regulars on Carmine Street. She was this obese black woman who searched the trash cans of New York City for tattered dresses—
thin
women's dresses, little girl clothes, baby clothes even—and she would parade around, holding her find up, press it to her chest, smooth it out, and stop you as you walked by: “You like my dress, my pretty dress? I'm gonna wear this dress. It's good on me, my new dress, it looks so good on me. You like my dress?” And so forth. After a month you got used to the sounds under your window, six in the morning, “My name is Dolly and this is my pretty new dress. You like my new dress?”

Lisa sent up a hand for the waitress again, who turned as Lisa mouthed “Check.” “No tip for you, baby,” said Lisa under her breath. “I learned a lesson the other day,” she went on. “I was on the subway and there was this kid, twenty-one or so I guess, but he looked like a sad twelve-year-old. And as the subway got going under the river to Queens where I was looking for a studio to paint in, he got up and, looking weak and sickly, gave this speech: ‘I'm Tim and, like, I'm a heroin addict and, like, it happened in Vietnam and I'm sorry about it but I gotta ask you people for money 'cause, well, like, I gotta eat and, you know, get some stuff. I don't wanna commit no crimes or nuthin'…' Gil, I tell you, my guilty white bourgeois heart went out to this kid and I dug deep and gave him a dollar and I looked around me, and all these cold bastard New Yorkers weren't even looking or listening, pretending he wasn't there. When they looked they looked at
me
as if I was the weird one for giving him money.”