Emma Who Saved My Life (23 page)

“You have two more trains, Emma,” said Lisa calmly, “until the slaughter begins.”

Three trains later it arrived … the stylish pink glowing F logo coming into focus through the darkness. Once inside the new train we had a Subway High—it was cool, ice-cool, no, even COLD in fact, it was like airport lounge and Holiday Inn motel-room cold, dry and crisp and restoring, resuscitating. We sat and watched Brooklyner after Brooklyner stumble in, first noticing the cleanliness, then the look would transform, there would be a glow in the eyes; it was cold, wonderfully beautifully cold; there was a look of peace …

And so this got to be a common procedure on weekends through that miserable summer. The train to Coney Island was fun and elevated over Brooklyn so you got to see things, and at Coney, which on occasion had a breeze and lots of greasy junk-food and plenty of interest, we would get out … but only sometimes. Riding the air-conditioned A train we would get out at Hoyt-Schermerhorn and run across the platform for another prototype train to come back and take us away again. In that interim we'd get all hot again and we'd debate if Hoyt-Schermerhorn was the coolest station to wait at, and after that we debated how Brooklyners pronounced Hoyt-Schermerhorn. We could have ridden, and did a few times, to Flushing which was the other end of the line, but that took us to Manhattan which meant it would get crowded with hot people, and plus it was all underground which made it dull—we wanted to be above Brooklyn, looking down into streets and neighborhoods and softball games and this vast cemetery that the train passes over and into streets called Avenue X (Emma suggested a best-seller: “He went to college and now he's back to improve his old Brooklyn neighborhood; his first stop the blackboard jungle, the public school in the toughest part of Brooklyn—Avenue X … he fights them, they fight back, but soon they come to love him…”). We listened to Brooklyners talk and we heard one girl get on with her friend and they were talking about boys and she said he was never any good and his family wasn't any good but one should expect that because he lives on Avenue V and nothing good ever came from Avenue V, and we had to wonder how so much information could be compressed into “Avenue V” and how that could be so different from “Avenue W.”

“Creative, weren't they, these street-namers,” Emma said. “Numbers and letters. And when it gets too high in the numbers, they start over again with avenues or boulevards, so you can have 23rd Street, 23rd Road, 23rd Avenue, 23rd Boulevard. They go out of their way to make you anonymous in New York—they've got it down to a psychology.”

One of these times we got off in Coney Island, which is a bit of a downer all by itself, a faded resort that had its height in the 1890s, now a collection of burnt-down roller coasters, towers and scaffoldings and amusement park machinery standing deserted and overgrown, a ghost town of a past generation's good times, now squalid (which is part of its cult charm, I guess) and dirty; the barkers are old and used up and the fortune tellers are toothless crones (Emma figured that they weren't very good fortune tellers or they never would have allowed themselves to stay in this profitless, touristless wasteland), all the paint is peeling, the painted clowns and balloons are rusty, tattered streamers, abandoned bathhouses and ballrooms, all turn-of-the-century baroque, once gilded and once very very fine.

“We could do the disco bump cars,” said Lisa. “It's air conditioned in there.”

Naaahhhh.

“How about the New York Aquarium?” Lisa tried again.

“I feel sorry for the whales,” Emma said, kicking the trash beneath her on the sidewalk. “All those dirty yucky fish in dirty water, dead things floating about. Don't have the money anyway.”

Ferris wheel?

“Last time I went up in that I had a serious mortality crisis,” Emma said. “Ditto for the Cyclone.”

It was hot and I suggested we head back to the subway station and catch another F train.

“This place usually does it for me,” Emma said, looking around, “but today it's depressing the shit out of me.”

Lisa and I felt the same thing.

“This is a Despair Park, not an amusement park,” Emma said, knowing it wasn't a funny joke. We stopped before a boarded-up hotel. “That makes me sad,” Emma continued. “Honeymoon Hotel. Look how nice it must have been. I bet if you got in there you'd find some fine furnishings, ceilings, railings.”

Lisa added, “Think how much
life
was lived here, how many girls got pregnant under the Boardwalk and had to marry their children's daddy, and how many servicemen came here for a last weekend before going off and…” She shrugged.

“Dying,” Emma said, finishing her thought.

“Will we be more depressed if we get drunk?” Lisa asked.

The Sands Bar and Grill. A beach motif—fishtanks, a starfish or two above the liquor shelf, a fishing net which had fallen in a heap atop a high cabinet. Old men smoked and looked into their drinks in the corner, the barman was indifferent to our being there, figuring one look and we'd turn around and go.

“This place is gonna cheer me up loads,” Emma said, selecting a table.

Lisa got the barman's attention and ordered three Jack Daniel's.

“We're going to get not a little drunk, I see,” Emma said when Lisa arrived at the table with the booze.

A worn-looking woman emerged from behind a curtain of aquamarine beads, noticing there were people in her bar for a change. She went to the till and got some coins, went to the jukebox and put some quarters in, making some selections. A big band number, before our time, came on, something sad with a saxophone, almost upbeat enough for one of those stately slowdances.

“Wasn't that sweet?” Lisa said, watching the woman then go behind the bar and straighten up, run the rag along the bar.

“She expected more out of life,” Emma suggested as we drank. “Here she is in the Sands Bar and Grill, spiffing it up for the only customers this month.”

“Well she might be happy, you never know,” Lisa said.

But we
did
know: the woman was miserable.

“Can only afford one more after this, you guys,” Lisa said, and I said much the same. “Gotta get back to town,” Lisa added.

“Another date with Bob?” Emma asked. She was resigned to Lisa's dating by this time.

“Well I said I'd call.”

“There are phones here in Coney Island.”

Stand him up, I suggest. Stay with us this evening.

“Okay,” she said, not needing much convincing. “It's been crummy between us anyhow. I'm about done with him.”

“Well at least someone's there willing to…” Emma grappled for words. “To … do normal things for you, touch you, molest your body.”

“Our sexlife sucks, if that's any consolation to you,” Lisa said, after a sip.

“I like to hear that. Makes me believe I'm not missing anything.”

More drinking, more silence.

“I'm still poor,” Lisa reminded us.

Emma said she had money as she just had cashed her temp-work check and she said if necessary she'd spend it all on getting us drunk. “Easy to live this way,” she added, with only the minorest inflection of exaggerated drama, “when you're not going to live very much longer.”

“Oh not that again. Cut that out,” Lisa said.

I told Emma she was too young to die.

“It's never too young to die,” she said. “The headaches aren't going away, in fact, they're getting worse. Every time I bend down, every time I run to catch the train, every little bit of stress and BANG my head is in a vice. Look, I'm being calm about this. Not hysterical, considering I have an inoperable brain tumor.”

I insisted Emma did not have an inoperable brain tumor.

“Maybe an operable one? One of those operations where you don't come back with any identity, have to learn the alphabet over again, talk baby talk for five years. That's gonna go down well in the apartment, I can just see it.”

Lisa shook her head. “I'm not changing diapers, I just wanted you to note that right now.”

“Go ahead, laugh, laugh, it's not your chronic headaches.”

I suggested some possibilities: sinus infection, migraines, stress, eyestrain, overwork, overworry …

“Brain cancer, brain tumors, a number of mental illnesses.”

“Have it your way,” said Lisa, waving Emma aside. “I'm not going to humor you. Go see a doctor.”

“On what money? On that nonexistent medical plan we temporary workers get? On the US's nonexistent national health insurance? Spend money that I could be drinking with? Oh I guess I could go to a ghetto hospital. Between the gunshot victims and rape victims and stabbing victims they might fit in a CAT scan. I'm just going to die quietly, in my room. Young poet dead at twenty-four, one year before Keats, just like Keats, except I didn't write any poetry—a minor difference.”

Round three. Emma bought.

Something by Peggy Lee played on the jukebox, something even sadder and more lost to another era than the others.

“This is ridiculous,” said Lisa, slapping the table. “If we came into a bar like this in Carroll Gardens, full of oldies on the jukebox, a bar all to ourselves, on some day when we weren't in a mood to get depressed, we would run around saying what a FIND it was, what a cool bar it was, a little piece of yesterday. So let's stop pretending this bar is the end of the world.”

Another song came on, something called “Moonglow,” Emma informed us, a classic slowdance number. One of the old men got up and lumbered toward our table. Unemployed, his face said, a drinking man, once a worker with leathery hands, a creased lived-in face, gentle to women, you could tell, and with men the kind who would have been in a few fights. “Wouldya like to dance with me, sister?” he said to Lisa, then turning the next second to Emma.

“Yes,” said Emma, surprising us. “But just one dance.”

This was maybe the strangest thing—among an encyclopedia of strange things—I have ever seen Emma do. Both Lisa and I, after a quick perplexed exchange of looks, watched Emma and the man dance together slowly, the man rocking a bit, Emma following unsurely, standing at a full step back from him.

“I didn't know Emma could dance,” said Lisa simply.

See? Just when you thought you had her pegged, Emma would surprise you. I'd heard her before watch some horrible old out-of-date song-and-dance man on a variety show and say “Oh I feel so sorry for that man, what a bomb his act was … but one time that brought the house down. He still says the jokes with dignity…” And she'd offer to give herself to this man, just like she'd do for the hotdogmobile man. Outside her temp office was a man who sold hotdogs in a little funny car which had a dome and the body was the shape of a hotdog. Emma would come home despondent over the hotdog man condemned to live in the hotdogmobile, with a recording of tinkly whiny music he had to listen to all day. “God, and I'm so sick of the hotdogs he makes…” Well, don't buy them then. “You gotta buy 'em, no one else does,” she'd say for herself. “It's so sad. I come up and he goes, ‘Ooooh here's the pretty little miss, and she can have her hotdog annnnyway she wants it, yessirree.'” And then there was a guy with one leg who vended windup dancing poodles at Rockefeller Center, spread out on a flattened cardboard box. Emma would imitate him: “‘Get your poodles, pretty poodles, look at 'em dance, the dancin' poodles, arf arf, look at 'em, dancin' poodles…'” Degradation. I don't think Emma felt she had anything in common with youth. She could be moved by the sadness of old men, old mislived lives, goodhearted failures, something to do with her father maybe. I'm not going to keep speculating, instead I'll focus on that memory of Emma and the old fisherman—I have a sense he was a fisherman—shuffling to this dusky saxophone music, Emma's face soft and kind in the blue light from the jukebox and the aquariums, attempting a brief gesture of beauty amid the full ashtrays and the stale smell of spilt beer.

The music ended. Emma bowed her head a little, the old man nodded to her, a thank you.

“He said I reminded him of his wife,” Emma said, a bit red in the face, now that she was back with us. She scooted beside Lisa under the table and finished off the drink she'd left behind.

Lisa patted Emma's knee, smiling. “Dead? Divorced?”

“Didn't ask.”

We all sighed, listening to the next number play on the jukebox. “That was sweet, Em,” Lisa added.

Then we heard the patter of rain outside, first scattered, then clattering down furiously, a summer thunderstorm.

Maybe it'll cool down, I said.

Suddenly the other old man was up, the first old man trying to restrain him, bring him back to the table. The second old man wanted a dance too. He was very drunk, toothless, crude, wore clothes he must have slept in, lived in for months.

“No thank you,” said Lisa uneasily.

“Whatsa mattuh, uh? You don't like me?
She
danced with
him.
You can't dance with me, sugar pie? Huh sugar pie? Heheheheheheh…”

Let's go, I said.

“Hold it hold it,” the man said, tottering, “I adn't had my dance with the girlie yet. Want my dance with the girlie. C'mon…” He put his hand on Lisa's arm too firmly; she shook him away.

“Barney!” called the woman behind the bar, coming to intervene. “I'll dance with you, Barney, dance with me,” she said. “Here. Here. C'mon, take my hand—”

“I wanna dance with the girlie—”

“No no, here I am. I'm dancing. You're not dancing with me. Ah, therrre we go…”

We got up and left, stood under the awning for a moment, charted a course for the subway stop, ran through the rain and rode home, where we didn't want to be, where it was still hot, where we were wet and sticky from dirty city rain, where we were half-sobered from a half-drunk and felt mildly sick and restless, where we still were depressed.