Emma Who Saved My Life (54 page)

Janet shrugged, and ran the spoon around her coffee cup again. “Lots of people pop pills all their life, all the time. What's a pill or two in this city?” But she looked as unconvinced as I did—we weren't talking about most people, we were talking about Emma. So I ran the issue by a disinterested third party …

“Gil, darlin', lovechild,” began Valene, “are we talkin' 'bout your woman here? Is this your woman?”

No, Valene, she isn't my woman.

“If she IS your woman, you tell her to get her shit straightened out or you're gonna move in with Valene—you tell her that.”

She's not my woman, honest.

“You were talkin' 'bout her last week too. And you're livin' with her, right?” Her gaze was inscrutable.

Yes, but we're only good friends.

“Uhhh-hmmmm,” she said unpersuaded. “Look, it's just a few pills and the doctor tole her she could take 'em.” Valene dragged the table-wiping cloth over the table, a wide arc to catch the ketchup stains and water circles.

I said I was still worried about my friend.

Valene wiped at a cigarette burn on the Formica top as if she could wipe it away. “Well Gilberto, she's got herself a problem and you've got yourself a problem, and your problem's
her.
”

Tell me something I don't know, Valene.

Two dramatic scenes come to mind … (it was about the only theater I was involved in that summer, come to think of it).

Dramatic Episode Number One:

Gilbert (to be played by an immensely handsome late-twenties leading-man type) standing with a bottle of barbiturates in the bathroom; Emma (to be played by a tired-looking, peevish late-twenties … uh, who am I kidding? She never looked better than when she was mad, all that Italian-American passion) standing in the doorway to the bathroom.

“Gilbert Freeman,” says Emma, “I warn you—as god is my witness you are a DEAD MAN if you put those pills in the toilet. I expected better than TV-movie drama from you.”

What clic
ed TV drama did she mean—my dumping pills in the john or her becoming bright-girl-turned-addict?

“Now you will do just as I say,” she said taking a slow step toward me, like a policeman dealing with a gunman, “… you will give me that bottle and we will cease fighting and I'll go make Chinese tea and we'll calmly discuss this and stop calling each other names. Let's not do anything I'm going to regret…”

I give the bottle a shake to show I mean business—a pill falls into the water.

“You owe me five dollars, bastard—”

Wanna go for fifty?

“I didn't mean to call you bastard, I'm sorry,” she said, taking another step—a desperate woman: “What are your terms?”

One, tell your doctor of your dependence, that is if he isn't the unfeeling quack who gets these things for you; two, go to the barbiturate rehabilitation workshop Janet told you to go to; three, make a promise—even a feeble one—to cut this shit out, as barbiturate addiction is rougher to shake than heroin and I cut out the article that gave me that information, which you crumpled up and hurled into the trashcan—you will fish it out and smooth it down and read every word of it.

“That's it? No perverse sexual acts?”

Four: Well now that you mention it, maybe you would be less tense if you stopped pursuing celibacy at all costs, go get a boyfriend, have some sex, exchange some affection—

“Gee, it was sounding all right up to that point.”

Which brings us to the point behind all this, which is that I care about you, Emma, and you know I'm not being an asshole or a prude—you are hurting yourself.

“My life is my business, Gil. Look, let's make that pot of tea and talk about this calmly, lucidly … give me the bottle.”

And I gave her the bottle back because I knew if I dumped them in the john and flushed them she would hit me or slap me and I really HATE being slapped. And it wouldn't change anything anyway, so I gave in and gave her back the bottle and we had tea, and she made many promises.

Dramatic Episode Number Two:

Gilbert (see if we can get that same incredibly handsome young man we got for the last Dramatic Episode), his bags are packed, a check is written out for the next month's rent which he puts into the hand of Emma (etc.) who doesn't understand.

“You can't move out, Gil. You've just been here three months. You know you can't find a place in the fall … it's, uh, impossible. You're crazy … now just sit down and I'll make some tea—”

NO GODDAM TEA. My terms or I'm leaving leaving leaving.

“I've already told my doctor,” she said weakly.

He's the scuzbag who got you in this mess, so to hell with him. Stop going to him. He's getting some kind of kickback from Downers Inc. or whoever makes that shit. His East Side office is a front for society-women Barbie dolls.

“I'm not going to beg you to stay.”

(Now that was a bad time to call my bluff. A simple: ‘Gil, don't leave me like this' would have sufficed and melted me and kept me by her side, changed everything, maybe even the Course Of History.) So I leave. I'll come back for my other things, I say, when Emma is at work. So she lets me go.

I drag my bag to the PATH station and go to Jersey. Janet asks how it went, and I say here I am at your house so how do you think it went? Then we worried that Emma might do something rash.

“Call her, Gil,” said Janet, “give her another chance.”

No, it wouldn't do any good—wait, YOU call her.

So Janet calls Emma: “Em, hey, it's Janet…” Janet flashes a so-far-so-good look to me. “Sound sorta down. Hm? Oh really? What'd y'all fight about?” Pause. “Well you know how I feel about that too. He's probably got a point, kid. No he's not here. Emma, I promise you”—Janet crosses her fingers, wincing—“he's not here. Yeah, I'll take a message.” Janet looks at me as Emma gives her a message.

She told me to drop dead?

“No,” Janet said after putting down the receiver. “She said for you to move back. She gives in.”

And so I go back with my suitcase onto the subway and three stops later I'm back home. Why did I have to pack the world's heaviest suitcase for dramatic-exit purposes? I get there and Emma's left me a note on the table:
Sorry. We'll talk tomorrow. Love, Emma.
And I call for her but there's no sound. I check her room and she's in there asleep, out cold—a momentary panic, did she … no, it's all right, she stirs and rolls over, smiling at me. I ask if she's all right and she nods.

“Yuh, I'b tok wib du tomorrow…” She's doped up and can't speak without slurring.

I close the door and turn off her desk light and then go over to the bed and lift her off her blanket and put her blanket on top of her and tuck her in and then I go to the door but turn back to her bedside, kneel down, look at Emma at her most defenseless, and as she can do little about it, I kiss her on the forehead.

Good night, Emma.

Things looked up from there. Briefly.

Janet made her go to this clinic for a consultation. She dropped the quack doctor-dispenser. She kept up the group therapy and joined an A.A.-style discussion group.

“I sort out my sex life on Tuesdays with the group, and then I sort out my drug life on Fridays with this other group. How long,” she'd joke, “until I get a problem for each day of the week?
Ha ha ha,
just kidding—these are the jokes, folks. C'mon lighten up. Get that look off your face. Gil, my man, you should see some of the people at this clinic for the downer addicts.” Emma came in and sat on my bed to give me her nightly progress report. “They vary all the participants. Each group gets a few low-level users who caught their habit in time”—Emma waves her hand to signify herself—“and there are some speed freaks who got hooked on downers trying to come down from going up so high, and we've got some East Side middle-aged executives' wives types. Some can't think or move right, some talk like there's mush in their mouth, one woman has a paralyzed arm—yuccch. Lot of shitty lives out there, Gil.”

Yeah well be glad you've kept the shit at a minimum.

“My new goal in life,” she said.

And she patted my leg, got up, went to bed, the New Emma, and I sat there, feeling, of all things, a little sad … no, I REALLY can't confess this. Well, all right: I think I didn't mind it so terribly much as I might have that Emma was in trouble. Now that is just
terrible,
I know, but I thought I might be needed, I thought I might be called upon to help in some way. Yes, it's crummy even once in a while to think something like that about a friend, but it's also crummy never to feel necessary to someone, just along for the laughs, a place filler.

So there was plenty to think about that summer and lots of time to think, as it turned out. I liked night shift for that purpose. When you work night shift you can at any time fall dead asleep—the body has decades of training in sleeping at night and suddenly you reverse all that, but the body remembers, and even with eight hours of good sleep during the day, if you put your head down, shut your eyes for even a minute, you're GONE. The only recourse is coffee and lots of it. Around 2:30
A.M.
it thinned out in midtown Manhattan and Valene and I would get to rest, get to sit down and rub our feet for a while. We would pray to the Restaurant God not to send us any more customers—after you sit down for twenty minutes you're
shot
waiting tables, you might as well go home and go to bed, further movement is out of the question. Valene and I would look antagonistically at each other as a customer would come in:

“He's yours babe. He's got your name all over him.”

No Valene, he's yours. Wait. If he sits at a table with a ketchup bottle, he's yours.

“It's a deal…” Valene started smiling as he headed toward a ketchupless table, and he almost sat down, but no … “Hell, don't go there, old man, no—don't do it … oh,
damn
you, damn you…” Valene groaningly, with superhuman effort, got to her feet to take the order.

And I could get back to my new hobby, staring out into the night, that vague reflection of myself in the window; out there was the New York Night, inside I was warm in the fluorescent-white glow and touch of red from the neon
MEALS TO GO
• 24
HOURS
sign. If I had a quarter I'd put a song on the jukebox, sometimes just to get Valene dancing, sometimes just to make her mad (“Don't put on that new-wavey-punk shit thing,” Valene warned). Outside the traffic would whiz by, or in a nicer memory, it was raining outside and you'd hear the slish of cabs and passing cars, young people outside running about, snatches of conversation, a predictable burst of noise as the last movies would let out, the midnight strip shows, the bars closing. Some drunks and some bums came in, some streetpeople, and Mr. Jackson would show them to the door or give them a cup of coffee if they were a nice bum, it all depended.

Around 4
A.M.
Phelia came in, an older black woman—she had this wild pair of cat-eye glasses—a friend of Mrs. Jackson's, a neighbor up in Harlem. Phelia cleaned floors in Rockefeller Center and this was her “lunch hour,” and she'd always decline everything on the menu, everything on special for just a little toast and coffee. Mrs. Jackson and Moze, who took his break now while Mr. Jackson loaded the dishwasher, sat and gossiped with her every night over coffee, not at a New York pace, but a slow middle-of-the-night, hard-day-at-work pace. Lots of pauses between the comments, everything good repeated and repeated, nodded to, considered.

“A man,” said Mrs. Jackson, winding up, “a man will go elsewhere in his marriage.” Pause. “He will go elsewhere, and I know what I'm talking about, he will go elsewhere,” she takes a breath and raises a knowing eyebrow, “for a little
sweetness.
”

“Yez, he will,” says Moze, nodding.

“That's right,” said Phelia.

“If he ain't getting the proper sweetness at home,” Mrs. Jackson went on, “he's gonna get it elsewhere. He will go elsewhere for a little sweetness.”

“Yes he will,” said Phelia, setting down her coffee cup.

No one says much and more cabs and cars pass by rattling the windows, an occasional honk.

“I'm not talkin' 'bout loving,” said Mrs. Jackson.

“I know you're not,” said Phelia, pursing her lips. “You're talkin' 'bout sweetness.”

“I'm talkin' 'bout sweetness,” said Mrs. Jackson.

“Like with Mavis and her man,” said Phelia.

“That's
'zactly
what I'm talkin' 'bout. Mavis and her man. That's what I'm talkin' 'bout right there. Now she come to me all teary-eyed, all messed up and cryin', she come in here at three in the mornin', sat in that booth right there—oooh Evelyn, oooh Evelyn, woe is me she says, he's goin' back to her again, I jus' know it. Evelyn, she tells me, I gave him my best lovin'. That man want for
nothin'.
She's tellin' me all this. Now Mavis could give Bernard the lovin'.”