Emma Who Saved My Life (22 page)

Emma smiled. “You're kidding.”

What do you expect? You run around telling him he's a Greek god—

“What do you
want?
A few hours ago you were begging me to go up and be nice to him. I told Lisa he was a Greek god. He's not a Greek god, Gil. Body's not bad but—”

You're going to sleep with him, aren't you?

Emma was laughing now. “What are you so worried about? Why Gil, you must be drunk—why are you so upset about…” And then she started laughing, and I felt she was laughing entirely at me, which she was. “Gil, you're not … you're
jealous,
aren't you?”

NO. ABSOLUTELY NOT.

“Yes you are. Or perhaps it won't bother you if I sleep with Tom?”

DO AND YOU'RE A DEAD WOMAN.

Emma was giggling now. “Gil, you are so drunk! This is a scream! If I think he's vile for Lisa, why would I accept him for myself?”

Elvis's eyebrows.

Emma was still laughing, shaking her head. “You're too much. I'm sure he doesn't want to anyway.”

I said: Look, I don't care if you have sex all the time and don't have it with me, but if you're not going to have sex at all and then have it with … with TOMS, then I object. I think I should be included.

Emma smiled at me as if I was a twelve-year-old and consequently I felt like a twelve-year-old. “Look,” she said in turn, “it's the thought that counts right? Actual sex means viscosities, and you know how I feel about viscosities—”

We know, we know.

“So accept the fact that in an ideal world we would sleep together. You can tell anyone you like we have already, if that's what you want.”

But I wanted more than that. Or did I? As I thought about this, a giant red firework burst to the north over Asbury Park—the display was beginning.

“I promise you,” Emma continued, “you wouldn't want to make love to me now. You'd hate every minute of it.”

Really? I said, if I made love to her now I might see fireworks. Gil, always with the jokes.

“Fireworks!” yelled Chris. “It's time! Everybody out on the porch!”

Tom ran out with a box of matches, fireworks of our own and a bunch of small American flags he got in town. Mandy and Chris and Janet absently waved them, cheering facetiously, but soon got caught up in the fireworks, giant red explosions, then giant violet-blue explosions, and then blindingly white explosions, accompanied by lots of gold frilly twinkly things fluttering down in between.

Everyone but Lisa was out on the porch and Chris suggested drunkenly we sing the National Anthem.

“The National Anthem sucks,” said Emma. “No one can sing it anyway. Let's do ‘God Bless America.'”

And it was so uncool to sing “God Bless America” in 1976 that suddenly it seemed that it might be cool to do it, and we sang it—archly at first, overdoing the vibrato, sending it up—but by the second rendition of the one and only verse, we were singing normally and it would have been hard to say whether we meant it or not.

Lisa stumbled out to join us. “Fireworks,” she said blearily.

“Come lean against me, hon,” Tom said and she went beside him and held his hand, teenage couple-style.

Mandy flitted about pouring more sludge into people's glasses. Janet had put two American flags down her low-cut swimsuit, a flag for each breast. Chris had a good tenor and led us in “God Bless America” again.

We stood on the balcony, craning our necks, occasionally looking beside us to see each other illuminated in greens, blues, infernal reds. Lisa dropped her glass and picked it up, stumbling. “This is my for-all-time favorite holiday ever,” she said.

“I want more,” said Emma quietly.

And to our surprise, there
were
more—from the other direction. Just as the Asbury Park fireworks ended at 11:30, the Sea Girt fireworks began and we jumped for joy as if we were in kindergarten. I was drunk. Emma was getting drunk. Everyone was drunk. In the lulls between firework displays, we sang, louder and sillier than before, waving our flags. The people in the beachhouse next door came out on their porch and raised their glasses to us and then
they
started singing; this middle-aged crew, leathery tanned women, doctors with a paunch, shirtless in ludicrous Bermuda shorts, waving a cocktail glass at us, rich drunk people our parents' age looking over at the young folks having a good time. Who could complain to the police about us? Young people singing “God Bless America” at the top of their lungs. And finally the last of the Sea Girt fireworks finished, in an identical blur of red, white and blue. And there we were, suddenly aware we were there saying nothing.

“That's what
I
like about America,” said Susan, taking a deep drag of her cigarette. “Lots of free entertainment.”

And the weekend was off and running. To draw out a chart of the complications would look like one of those flowcharts for a giant bureaucracy. Considering how much time we discussed who was sleeping with, wanted to sleep with, couldn't sleep with, hated to sleep with whom, nobody really
slept with anybody.
What a lot of talk.

Final memory of the 4th: Lisa drunk, screaming out, completely happy, “Hey everybody raise their hands who likes living in the USA.”

Groans all around. Tom raises his though. Susan sneers, “Well, since
Roe
vs.
Wade,
the place is not the most backward of the planet's peoples.” Emma—I was waiting for it, the inevitable savage comment—merely put her hand up. “Nyeh, I guess so. Compared to Russia and all. Hey guys, the evening's young. Any of you people up for a moonlit walk on the beach?”

1977

YOU want to know what my major accomplishment was in 1977? I washed the dishes. Me and Lisa, every evening. Sometimes she'd do the suds and the washing, sometimes she did the drying and the putting away. A good place to talk, the sink.

“So you're guaranteed three parts onstage this year, huh?” Lisa asked distractedly, swirling the dishes around.

That was what Dewey Dennis (that jerk) promised me. I'd made a big lunge for stardom during the fall and got in two crowd scenes. But no spoken lines yet. It doesn't count as your debut until you say something. I auditioned for three other theaters' spring seasons as well:
Mama's Home,
about a terminally ill patient back to make peace with her family before she dies. There's a role in it for a twenty-five-year-old rebellious son. I would have been perfect for that. There was also
Folks These Days Got No Time For de Blues
—did you catch it at the Tribeca Rep? There was a white Southern aristocratic son who had to throw an old black man off his land, and I'd have been great as the bastard son. How about
Dalliances,
British spinsterish librarian meets American grad student for summer term of discovery and revelation? We could fill out this book with plays I auditioned for.

“Well you can't lose hope,” said Lisa, a little hollowly. “Look at my painting, for example. Am I in a gallery yet? Has the Whitney Biennial called? Leo Castelli? Maybe they called when I was out. Don't know what you're worried about. You got onstage in that
Billy Can You Hear Me?
thing…”

Which was about autistic adults. I was an extra. Not much dialogue, but my name in the program.

“We'll hit the big time eventually.”

Emma these days was fond of pronouncing: “We're all goddam NOWHERE. The abyss!” Typical of Emma, this was overstatement. Lisa wasn't nowhere—she was drawing for another marketing agency—and I wasn't nowhere either—I was working full time, on the books, in an off-Broadway theater. What it was was a
holding pattern.
It wasn't success but it wasn't failure—like the doldrums, no winds blew, no current moved, not a ship in sight. It is easier to be absolutely nowhere (“The philistines! The world's against me!” someone like Emma can rage) than to be in the dreaded holding pattern. Because to get out of the holding pattern, you have to risk losing your place and having to go back to square one. Lisa tried to explain this to Emma one night and there was still fallout from that argument. Dishwashing continued:

“Emma's crazy, I'm telling you,” said Lisa. “She needs an analyst or a psychiatrist or a good spanking, which I'm about ready to give her.”

Well, I said, it's been a rough year for us all, and Emma's in a high-strung period, lots of problems, and we ought to be sympathetic—

“NO. No. I'm through being sympathetic for
her
problems, which are without end, Gil, face it. Does she trouble herself over our needs? I'm depressed as shit lately too. We never sit down and go on and on and on about poor
Lisa's
bad day, Lisa's problems.”

Did Lisa want us to?

“No, not really. I just would like some mention, some
token
concern.”

Lisa, I am here. Talk to me.

She stopped washing dishes. “I can't tell you this.”

What? Yes you can.

She stood there, thinking for a minute. “Well I'll tell you this. I was feeling utterly rotten about a day or two ago—I mean, if there had been a bottle of sleeping pills we might have been in trouble.”

I had noticed.

“So there I am on the subway, right?” Lisa mechanically washed a dish, over and over. “And there I am…” And she paused again. “And I just started crying, tears rolling down my face. And I tried to straighten up but then I sort of saw myself crying on a subway and being miserable, and that made me cry more. So I turned away and got up and walked to another car with less people and damn if I didn't start bawling again. I was hopeless.”

What was it?

She turned from me to look in the dishwater. “Oh I don't know—things. Haven't you just ever felt like crying?”

Lately, every other day.

“Well the next thing I know, this woman, this old motherly Jewish woman sits down beside me and touches my shoulder. And I say it's all right, and I apologized, but she was one of these good souls, you know? One of those Real People, and she said, honey, get off at Rockefeller Center next stop and I'll get you a coffee—what you need dearie is a coffee. I mean this woman was … was so good.”

Yeah.

“Which made me cry even more, that here I was, nothing really wrong with my life, bawling my eyes out and that some other human being had come to my rescue on the goddam subway and that made me even more pathetic to myself. So the tears went on and on. I can't believe I'm telling you this.”

I took the dish from her, the one she had been washing forever, and began drying it repeatedly. The cleanest dish in the world.

“And so she bought me a coffee at this cookie stand and she made me take a sip and told me a nice girl like you, life will get better, I was young, I was pretty, my life was ahead of me, nothing could be too bad. I felt so ashamed for all this attention, so I told her…” She lifted a sudsy hand to her brow, a gesture of disbelief. “… so I told her I had just had an abortion.”

You told her that?

“I had to justify why I was carrying on so. She told me now now, dearie, you young people's lives move too fast, but it was over now and I'd be all right. I just sat there and let this woman mother me for a half hour and then I
insisted
she go on her way—I cannot tell you how embarrassed I was. I mean, I needed the cry, needed the attention—I don't really regret it, I just…”

Yeah, I know.

“Please put that silly dish in the cupboard,” she said, and we moved to new subjects.

We were all so unhappy that year. You know what it was? I have a friend who says every three to four years you re-examine why you are in New York, and all you can see are the bad points and these New York Crises are cyclical. Every three to four years you question your sanity, your being there. I think we were simultaneously re-examining ourselves, wondering why we were putting up with that awful city. And god was it hot. That was the hottest summer there ever was—check the almanac and see—and I remember seeing the Coca-Cola sign in Times Square read 109 degrees. Crazy. And the city got proportionately crazier with each rising degree.

“It is hot in ways it has never been hot before,” said Emma, adjusting the giant thirty-inch windowsill-sized fan to blow exclusively on herself. “I bow down before The Fan, I will serve it as my master,” she said, offering up her arms for the breeze.

“Your time is almost up,” Lisa said, looking with a dead seriousness at the watch.

“But can't we share it, Lisa? Friends like us, you and I together, Emma who loves you—”

“You'll die first. I want my ten minutes of unalloyed Fan and I will not be deprived.”

Fan-politics and who got The Fan and for how long and ways and means of dividing and alloting time before The Fan continued through June until Emma returned home with a revelation.

“Guess what, gang,” Emma said, expecting us to snap to attention. “We're going on a little trip outside.”

Riiight, I said.

“Oh you're gonna be sorry when I tell you the wonders mine eyes have seen,” Emma went on like a TV evangelist. “I've just seen the prototype of the new subway car—a clean, new shiny chrome subway car on the F line.”

Lisa: “Go throw yourself under it.”

“Ah, these fools, ye of little faith, the lukewarm I shall spew out—”

“I am anything but lukewarm, Emma. I'm boiling, I am fricasseed, I am on a spit.”

“All right,” said Emma, making for the door. “I will go ride the F train by myself … the
air-conditioned
F train.”

Now we'd have stolen pensioners' checks and sold drugs to children to get cool at that point, so we followed her zombie-like to the Carroll Street station and waited for this alleged F train to pass back through. Many trains passed by, none of them shining F prototypes, all of them dirty and hot and disgusting. The metal columns and steel beams of the subway platform were hot to the touch. The air was its usual mixture of vermin, urine, the smoke from burning trash lying against the third rail. Tension was high.