Emma Who Saved My Life (46 page)

“You're unzipping your fly, I just know you are, you bad bad boy!” Emma went on, with an eye to her stopwatch. “And what if Jim and Tammy see what you're doing? What Murray? Oh you are so bad! I have no choice but to get this over with as fast as possible … OH MURRAY, I scarce had imagined…”

Tammy:
How old are you? Nine?

Pale, freckled dumb-looking white boy:
Yeah.

Tammy:
Have you been going to our classes for young folks?

Boy:
Yeah.

Tammy:
This week is Crucifixion Week at Heritage Village and in the classes and presentations we've been concentrating on the crucifixion. Do you know who was crucified for you?

Boy:
No.

Tammy:
Jesus Christ, that's who! Do you know what crucifixion is?
(silence)
Well, I'll just sit right down here on the steps and tell you, how's about that?
(silence, distracted looks)
Give me your hand … yes, that one is fine. Now have you ever played in your daddy's basement with hammers and nails? You know how sharp nails are, don't you? Here, hold out your hand, honey—now can you imagine having a nail put right through your hand, just hammered into you till it came out the other side? No, I see you can't …

“Oh Murray, you're so bad!” Emma continued, looking up at the set. “Oh I know she's coming over here, Murray. My god, the ruin, the disgrace, they'll say you're a pervert, a sick degenerate, worthless slime, Murray…” Emma winked at me, as if to say that this was doing the trick. “Ah, here she comes, my god, she's in our aisle, she's going to talk to you, she's coming, she's coming, she's here … ah, but lookee here, Murray—what a mess you've made!” Emma gave me the thumbs-up sign.

Tammy:…
and it's important that you keep those contributions coming in or we won't be able to serve you as we have, and we just love doing the Lord's work, serving our television audience, and our audience is rising Jim, rising and reaching new people each and every broadcast …

“Bye Murray,” cooed Emma. “You're so bad but you know I love to meet with you, and you know I'll be there for you next time. The Carter-Reagan debates, right, right …
Au revoir
…” She gently set the phone down, then turned to me: “Let's haul ass, we'll never make it by noon.”

We ran three blocks north and slammed our money down for the L train, which on weekends is slightly more nonexistent than on weekdays. Silence, wait, anxiety, smells, time ticking away. Eventually the train creaked into the station taking us two more stops to the transfer to the 1-2-3 lines for the West Side. The two platforms were connected by one of New York's longest tunnels, over a block in length—Emma called it the “Rapeway,” and nothing could induce man or woman to make this deadly connection at night. The usual Saturday morning wino dregs, addicts, bums with nowhere to sleep, were there—dodge the urine here, skip lightly by the impossibly colored pool of vomit there … then finally, we stood waiting for the 1 train. And waiting. And waiting.

“It's 12:20 already. I'm calling to say we'll be late,” Emma offered.

Nah, Lisa knows us, don't be nervous. But we were nervous, and we couldn't stop ourselves.

We went past the doorman, into the elevator (which took forever), down the hall (“This hallway smells nice,” Emma said. “Hallways aren't supposed to smell nice”) and rang the doorbell. We could hear some vague partying noises inside, like bird-chirping sounds.

“Get ready for the performance of your career,” Emma said out of the side of her mouth.

The door opened and it was Lisa, thinner, paler, older than we had ever seen her, but beaming and happy: “Oh you're late, you're late, you're late!” A kiss on my cheek, then one on Emma's. “Emma you look so good, so so good.”

Emma shrugged: “I look like shit.”

Jim approaching from the right: “It's the Emma! And it's the Gil! Stars in our midst, stars in our midst.”

How you doin', Jim?

“Great, great. You know me. But now the piece de
ŕ
esistance … what we've been waiting for…”

Lisa lightly slapped our arms. “We told Phoenicia to wait to bring her out—we were waiting on you!”

To the oohs and the aahs of all the assembled guests, out came Phoenicia, this big kindly black woman, with Jim and Lisa's one-month-old daughter. “Heeeeere's BAY-BEEEEEE … woah woah woah,” Lisa looked like a grouper swimming through the crowd to intercept Baby: “… woah woah woah, here's Mah-mah, you know your mah-mah don't we, huh, don't we?” Lisa took Baby's hand and waved it hello to the guests who were still cooing over the piece de
ŕ
esistance.

“There's Dah-dah,” said Lisa, aiming Baby at Jim. “Recognize your dah-dah? Hmmm? Woah woah woah…”

Jim poked a wiggling finger into Baby's stomach: “Hatcha hatcha hatcha … whoa-ho-ho, Baby says don't do that! Baby says hey man, what are you doin' to me, huh old man? Ha ha ha, Baby says who are these people?”

“You know Mah-mah don'tya honey, my little honey honey honey?”

I look at Emma. Emma looks at me. Other guests before us slip in to see the baby. I look at Emma, and Emma looks at me, again. “I want to end my life,” she said distinctly.

“Heeeeeere comes Bay-bee-Bay-bee-Bay-bee…” said Lisa, lifting the baby over the heads of the throng, flying it towards us. I felt myself back away. Like, what if I dropped it? Be a different kind of party then, wouldn't it? Oh that Gil, he's such a downer at parties, like that time he dropped Lisa and Jim's baby …

Jim: “Baby comin' in for a landing,
rrrrrrrrrmmmmm
…”

“Oh I don't know,” said Emma, shying away from the incoming baby. “Oh Jim, I don't, I'm not good with, I…”

Emma held Baby. Emma had this sick look on her face. She drifted to me—no you don't Emma, no Baby Hot Potato here; YOU hold it. “It's alive,” said Emma to me quietly, “it's a living thing.”

“Baby says who's this? Baby says who's this cray-zee girl? Baby says where's Mah-mah? Huh where's Mah-mah?”

“Mah-mah's here, woah woah woah woah…”

“Hatcha hatcha hatcha—Baby says, cut it out, cut it out!”

Then Phoenicia, who was making me feel guilty with all her deference to these white people, took Baby in her arms and laid her to rest in her crib (“Time for Baby to lie down, yeahhh…”). Emma stood there with her arms cradled a moment longer as if Baby were still there, overcompensating for our drop-the-baby fears.

“Quiche and cocktails by the pantry,” said Jim, tapping us, all smiles, the proud father; and then he and Lisa meandered to the crib with their fellow employees.

Refreshments, I said.

This was a catered affair. There was a nice, clean gay boy behind the table: “Some quiche?”

Two Bloody Marys with quadruple shots, lots of tabasco, three slices of quiche, those little things in the bowl—

“That's Russian yogurt,” he said helpfully.

—a spoonful of peanuts there, those things on the crackers, those meatballs, tons of them.

“Want it all on one plate, do you?”

Emma smiled. “We can expand.”

We took our bounty to a corner, away from the throng. “The temptation to drop this pile of meatballs on the shag carpet…” she sighed.

Now Emma …

“Have you see
Andy Warhol's BAD,
where the woman throws her baby out of the skyscraper and it goes splat?”

Emma, really.

“Just thinking aloud, thinking aloud…”

We got drunk, very drunk. So did the other advertising people and marketing people and research people and corporate people and Lisa's old friends. No. Wait. We were the only old friends. Everyone else was Jim's old friends, or business contacts.

Lisa came over to our corner to tell us about Towelies. “Remember my work for Wipe-Away? Well, they were impressed and I'm getting to manage Towelies now—hey, I'll send you a case. It's a real challenge making paper towels interesting.”

“Well,” said Emma, taking another cocktail off a tray, “there are people like me, of course, who read everything they can get their hands on concerning paper towels, who find the topic naturally stimulating.”

Lisa laughed a bit unsurely. “Oh Emma, here, here”—she dragged Emma toward a round woman with a nasal voice—“this is Marge—Marge, Emma, Emma, Marge. Marge keeps me sane at work.” Emma watched Lisa walk away and was stuck with Marge, who talked to us about Bathroom Blues, a thing you hang on the side of your toilet bowl which turns the water blue.

“What do you do?” Marge asked at last. “Could I have met you before, Emma?”

Emma brightened. “Was it the Celibacy Support Group?”

“What? Ahahahaha…” She had an even more irritating laugh.

“What do I do?” Emma continued, tottering with her sixth Bloody Mary. “I'm in telecommunications. Phone service. Phone sales.”

“Oh really? That's going places they say.”

“Up, up, up—getting bigger every minute.”

“Like whadya do exactly?”

“I work in Onanistics.”

“Oh. Yeah I've heard of that. Exciting work.”

“It's a coming industry.”

Emma darling, time to go home.

We went to the door, or stumbled toward it. Suddenly, Lisa had us blocked. “Oh you're not going are you? You know Emma, there's a guy at Simon & Schuster coming later to watch the baseball game on Jim's big-screen … I mean, you ought to stay, you'd get along so well and you never know how it might turn out.”

“What do I care about a baseball game?”

Lisa laughed. It was a new laugh, a New Lisa laugh—she hadn't laughed this way a year or two ago. “Oh silly you! No, a publishing job. Don't you want to get out of the East Village and all that? Honey, you could edit. And make contacts, contacts for publishing a book of poems or a novel…”

“Contacts,” Emma repeatedly flavorlessly.

“And I thought,” added Lisa charmingly, “that we could, you know, talk over old times. I wanted to talk old times.”

Old, old times. Just having “old times” implies a larger looming sadness somewhere. I told Lisa we had to run.

“Yeah,” said Emma, “gotta go. I do my phone sales all afternoon on Saturday while people are home, you know.”

Yeah gotta go, another time, blah blah blah.

Jim joined Lisa at the door. “Come back and see the two of us—”

Lisa squealed: “I caught you, Jim! The THREE of us!”

Jim slapped his forehead like on a commercial. “Can you believe it! Did you just hear me? Don't tell Baby!”

Bye-bye.

Emma didn't say anything until we got to the elevator, and then she said we oughta keep drinking, drink all afternoon long, call Janet and tell her to warm up the blender. Which is what we did. Going home the long way by the liquor store (put it on Emma's credit card), the junkfood store on 14th Street, getting some of that pretentious foreign ice cream that was big then, some homemade cookies, Pretzel Stix.

“Now you see,” said Emma, scooping the goodies into her arms, “that's what Jim and Lisa have given their lives over to. Deciding to spell words like S-T-I-X. Stix, Pretzel Stix. God, I hate CRAP.”

She put the Pretzel Stix back on the shelf, having said that.

On that principle, I pointed out, we had to put the Cheez Crunchies back too, but Emma conceded that we had to bring home
something
to junk-out on.

“Well that was an exercise in bullshit, huh?” Emma said, mouth full of cookies, as we walked back to her place. “Ugh, have some cookies—I'm getting nauzed already.”

Cookiezha. Thanks. I don't want children, by the way.

“Holding the kid wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be,” Emma said, tossing two remaining cookies in the pack in the gutter.

Hey, you just littered.

“Jesus, Gil, New York is the one place you can litter in the world and not feel guilty.” She reached into the shopping bag, fished out the Cheez Crunchies, opened them, began eating. “Janet's seriously making the moves on me these days.”

Really?

“Yeah, she's determined there's a lesbian in me somewhere.”

I shrug. What's it to me? Why not give it a try, I tell her.

“You're supposed to be jealous and say you'll slap me around if I do that.”

No, I got it: I take pictures of Janet slapping
you
around—we can make a film. It's a short step from phone sex, porn films, you know.

Emma and I arrived at her place, and she cursed everything and everybody as she tried to locate her keys in one of four pockets, juggling the shopping bag all the while. “Anyway, Janet's acting weird lately. Hurt that I don't sleep with her, except she's not hurt she's just bored and between girlfriends. So can you stay over tonight? Hang out a while?”

Can't, I said. I was going to see Betsy.

“I'm tired of behaving about her,” Emma groaned. “Betsy is a blah.”

Well, soon enough Emma got to check out Betsy in person. I invited Betsy to the opening of the Soho Center's
Chambers
production. As no one understood a damn thing about this show, it was a critical success—Slut Doll's sound effects were praised everywhere, and we even got a few punkers curious enough to attend and pay admission in the show's four-week run. Monica from the Venice showed up to the opening-night festivities too. There they were: THREE women in my life in one room. No catfights though. Just once,
once
I'd like to see two women go to it roller-derby-like, tearing out each other's hair, bashing each other with chairs, overturn the punch table—
Gil's mine, all mine!