Emma Who Saved My Life (34 page)

“Panama can no more run that canal,” said a man, “which we built, which we manage, oversee for security reasons, than they can run their own banana republic. The terms of our treaty were no worse, no more corrupt than other agreements of that period—”

“Which is to say pretty corrupt,” Emma interjected.

“I like Senator Hayakawa's remark,” said a woman with a nasal voice, “that we stole it fair and square.”

“Well, you
would
like it,” said Emma, “because it's the slick kind of obscurantist Republican doublespeak that appeals to conservatives and the American business community alike. Let's laugh away all our Latin American atrocities, all our South American imperialism, inept meddling from Teddy Roosevelt to the CIA and Allende—”

“Hold on hold on,” said the woman defensively. “Don't put words in my mouth—”

“You name the goon and we put him there—Somoza, Papa Doc and Pinochet and D'Aubisson—a real rogue's gallery, all best friends of the United States.”

The man broke in. “And you would rather have, I take it, Castro, or local versions of Castro, all over Latin America, from Tierra del Fuego to the Rio Grande one day? I'd rather have Battista, given what Cuba represents today.”

“You wouldn't rather have Battista,” said Emma, exuding distaste, “if you were a poor Cuban slave laborer, with a starving family on a bourgeois sugar plantation in 1958, and Cuba would
be
in our sphere of influence if hysterical Fascist generals hadn't drawn up that half-baked invasion and that half-brained John Kennedy hadn't agreed to it…”

Strangers were gathering. She'd done it now, defiled the name of America's patron saint, JFK, the Light still shone from his face through the '70s …

“What was that about Kennedy?” said a bearded man.

Emma don't do it … don't do it …

“I think he was the lousiest president in the twentieth century after Harding is what I think. For one thing, how can you make a historical judgment on two and a half years, and another thing, if you do, how can you overlook wiretapping Martin Luther King, trying to assassinate world leaders, Castro among them, a two-bit doomed-to-fail mission to Cuba, let us not forget ladies and gentleman the Vietnam War—
that
little costly number, though I suspect the economic boom justified it for most of the people in this room—”

Wooooo boy.

“—and let us not forget that during the Cuban Missile Crisis he put the nuclear missiles on alert, making him the first president since that war criminal Truman to consider firing the damn things.”

Connie approached scowling. She said coolly, “I want to thank you personally for bringing this acquaintance to my attention. How can I repay you?”

What could I say? Well, I began, she has a point about the CIA and American involvement in South—

“This is a cocktail party,” Connie continued in a level, deadly tone, “and not the UN, and maybe you and your Brooklyn crowd don't get asked to many of them, but they are generally civilized affairs where people mingle and are nice to one another—”

I know, I know, I know—no need to be sarcastic, Connie, I'll retrieve Emma at once.

“What
is
your problem?” Emma said icily as we moved to the foyer of Connie's apartment. “A little too loud for you?”

Yes and you know it.

“I embarrass you in front of all your young-banker friends?”

I don't give a damn about them, but I care about Connie—

“She's the phoniest piece of business here!”

Sssssh—damn you, Emma, keep your voice down—

“She must think she's Madame de Stäel, whirling about, playing Hostesse. These people are
losers
—her social circle is
nothing.
I don't doubt there are some interesting people on Wall Street but they're not here. Let's judge her by her own terms—”

We're not judging Connie one way or the other—

“No, let's judge her by her own standards. There's not an executive here, it's all middle management, assistant to the assistants. The big boys down there must know what she is, one more whiny little grasping Radcliffe nouveau-riche slut in a Brooks Brothers suit—hey, how do you bet she got her job at Schmolem Brothers? Huh?”

(I'll give Emma this: she could put together a string of insults where there was
nothing
left standing … what a pro.)

Emma, I said at this point, just LEAVE, go home, go away—

“I'm just hitting my stride, Gil—”

Keep your voice down. Let's move this to the hall.

(We moved it to the hall.)

“I bet this Connie number was on her knees in the
interview
—”

Emma, that's enough! I am FURIOUS with you!

“She's gonna dump you like yesterday's devalued pork futures, Freeman, and you're gonna have to come crawling back to me—”

You are the most selfish person I have ever met. I don't think you're my friend—I think you just pretend to be my friend; I don't think you know anything about friendship—

“Bullshit Gil, it is because I am your friend I am saying come away from these stupid shallow phoney—”

My life is not going to be lived like your life, Gennaro! It is going to be FUN, it is going to have ALL kinds of people in it, I'm not going to condemn everything that moves, and I don't want to be neurotic and work up a virtual CULT of my problems like you do—

“Well I
got
some problems, okay? That's
me,
that's the way I am—I'm doing real well to be as good as I am given how messed up my life is—”

WHY is it messed up? It's not messed up, except for what you do to drag yourself down: you're smart, you're talented, you're pretty—

“I'm not pretty.”

I'm tired of it Emma. You don't need friends, you need a cassette tape—get Jasmine to make you one, over and over it can play back to you: Yes, Emma you are smart, yes, Emma you are pretty, yes Emma—

“I'm mad at you too, Gil,” she said, and I saw her eyes fighting Emma-when-criticized tears, and her cheeks redden. “I thought you and Lisa were going to go the distance with me and both of you are becoming bourgeois bores—she is not going to be a painter and…”

And I'm not going to be an actor, is that it?

“You tell me! How many times have you auditioned in the last six months. You're still nowheresville in the goddam Venice Theater after they've thrown you out the door—oh of course, how could I be so foolish? I know what you're doing! You're putting your dick in somebody—that's reeeeeeal important, that's a life's work! There's a committed artist for you—”

Connie cleared her throat. She was now in the hallway too, standing in the door.

“Emma. Emma Gennaro,” Connie said, walking slowly toward us. “Gee that name's familiar. Weren't you on the bombing raid over Hiroshima in '45?”

“It's a pleasure to bomb at your party, Con.”

“Well sweetie, it's the last one you'll have the pleasure of trying to ruin. Why don't you just move along home now so I can have Gil back? There are some people dying to meet him back inside.”

“Really Con? What happens when they find out Gil has no liquid assets to invest?”

Connie managed an annoyed smile. “Coming Gil?”

Emma poked my arm: “Or would you rather go to Sal's?”

No, I said quietly, I don't want to go to Sal's, goodbye.

Emma just stared at me, mercilessly.

I'll call you sometime, I said.

“Don't bother,” said Emma, turning. And as she walked away in a shaken voice she said: “Don't bother calling me ever again.”

Connie and I watched her disappear. Connie turned to me, not a hint of curiosity about what had transpired. “Dramatic girl, Gil. Be glad you're done with that.”

We went back to the party. Class act, that Connie. She knew she had triumphed so she didn't rub anything in, prove sarcastic, remind or recriminate over Emma, she never mentioned her again, that is, the rest of that evening, which was the next to last time I ever saw her. We had one more very bitter lunch after that, but that concerned something else.

“Connie's unforgettable,” said Saul, sitting beside me on the sofa. It was late in the party, down to fifteen or so, everyone had broken off into quiet conversation, dark corners (Connie had lit candles all around, put some soft jazz on, the kind of jazz that has never been listened to, only talked to or screwed to) and we sat there going through Saul's pack of Gauloises which were just about to kill me.

I said, In her way, Con is a health freak as I began coughing. Instant lung cancer, those cigs.

“Yes, that's a relatively new development. The jogs around the reservoir in Central Park, the vitamin program, the sauna and workout room at Golam Brothers.” Saul laughed darkly. “You met her almost a year ago, huh?”

Yeah. After that play where I was the football hero. She said I looked good in the football uniform. We had lunch a time or two and then she dropped out of sight and then I called her up and … well, here we are.

“She had a bad year last year,” Saul said, studying me. “She probably told you about it.”

Well no. Bad year? Thought Connie never had a bad year.

Saul looked intensely at me. “She told you, didn't she?”

Told me? Told me what? I thought: no, she's not got some fatal cancer or something, I hope. Am I the last love of her life? Has she got six months to live?

Saul, after my silence, looked up to the ceiling. “No, she didn't tell you. That's a shame too, I thought she might have started dealing with that. I see not.”

My mind was full to capacity. What is it? I asked. She's not ill, is she?

Saul turned solemn, but not too solemn. “Well yes.”

Tell me.

He cleared his throat, a half smile, a shake of his head. “No, nothing serious, just inconvenient, and you shouldn't be alarmed because you may not have got it, and there's no reason necessarily that you will get it like I did. I mean herpes, genital herpes, is only passed when the sores are extant and otherwise you might never know…”

Connie was watching us while embroiled in another conversation, looking over at us, smiling when I caught her eye, not confident, wondering what we were talking about. As for me, I just sat there (Saul got up to get me a drink), thinking absolutely nothing—experiencing a true mental void. And when the thought-machine began to crank up again all it could think was:

Oh my. Oh my. Oh no.

MIDDLE

I'm interrupting this narrative for a progress report … Mother is six months pregnant, and Gil the Father spent yesterday driving out from Chicago to his childhood home in Oak Park, dragging a crib down from our attic, accidentally scraping paint off the living room walls at my mother's and breaking off a leg of said crib. T minus three months and counting.

I'm currently still stuffed from this meal I went to last night. I'm at this big family do, the Mandlikovs, with Sophie (you'll meet her in a bit). God, when Russian-Americans get together to eat they do it unto the death—the kind of food from Eastern Europe that makes cement in the stomach, cheeses meeting cabbages meeting minced meats meeting creams. I crawl to the sofa to fall asleep while the family has its reunion around me, and as I fall asleep I hear Sophie's half-brother Steve going on about New York:

“… It's a cesspool. What did you say, John? Ha ha, I think a nuclear bomb is the only answer.”

I turn over and tune him out. (That guy gets on my nerves …)

Later on, he's at it again:

“I don't know why anyone would live anywhere else but Chicago. L.A. is a mess with the crime and the gangs, and New York saw its day in the '50s…”

Uh, no. There's that certain breed of Chicagoan that just can't accept the fact Chicago
might
not be Paradise on Earth.

“We've certainly got the art of New York—”

(Geez, not even close.)

“—we have a finer symphony orchestra. And theater. Now we have a theater scene that, though not as big, certainly matches in quality the dying New York theater scene, now in its death throes. There's not a playwright in the country that wouldn't rather open here—”

I get into it: That's just not right, Steve. New York is still the theater capital of America. Look I was in New York theater for ten years there—there's no comparison.

Steve blanches. “But I read an article in the
Tribune
…”

I duck out of this one. I go back to the dining room to pick at leftovers. The women are all in one room, some are sewing, some are trading recipes, these matriarchs comparing their children's futures. There's this little crepe thing filled with cottage cheese and spices—don't know what it's called—and I'm running one of these decadently through a pile of sour cream—

“Mr. Freeman?”

I turn and it's someone's kid, but I've forgotten who.

“I'm Steve Mandlikov, and I was wondering if you'd talk to me a minute.” Out goes his hand. Firm handshake that seemed to commit him to liking you. Good-looking boy, healthy and fresh and clean the way Midwestern teenage guys can be. Hey waita minute, this is Steve the Asshole's kid, Steve, Jr.

“You see, I'm thinking about being an actor. And Aunt Sophie said I should talk to you because you were in New York, in the theater. Were you really on Broadway?”

Yeah. (Oh boy. I see myself here—a vision of Gil, twenty years back.) Let's sit down and talk about it.

“You heard of Forensics?”

Carving up dead people?

“No, like speech and debate tournaments? Well, I won the dramatic monologue state championship this year for Illinois…” He paused because people are usually impressed at that point. “And I'm going to the national tournament in Seattle. So I'm not a no-talent if you were thinking hey this kid's probably a … a no-talent.”