Emma Who Saved My Life (58 page)

“You realize,” said Martin, “that she's going to be even worse than ever tonight. Not a piece of scenery left unchewed. She'll be all over our lines, playing with the props.” Right you were, Martin.

Mother's Day
was written by Cecil Praed, who had conjured up Rosemary's last two vehicles (
A Dream of Cambridge,
about a
Corn is Green
-like schoolteacher coaching her poor student into Harvard against ignorant parents, etc.; and
So Many Pretty Flowers,
about an invalid wife fighting for her man against his philandering), and Cecil knew that you had to send the others of the cast out there and warm up the audience with lines like “You know Mother,” and “Mother is crazy, but we love her,” and “There's no stopping Mother when she gets something in her head” so the audience was well ready to see this LEGEND come out and whirl about the stage. And so it went, Martin and myself and Gertrude (Daughter No. 1) as we worked the crowd up for the Great Entrance. Finally, the cue—Martin: “Quiet, let's not let her know we know. I hear her in the drive…”

The door opened and in came Rosemary in an ensemble devised just for this evening, this zillion-dollar society-woman ball-gown (a little much for the role, but if you started picking at details on this play there'd be nothing left), and the place exploded into a prolonged ovation for Rosemary who made a slight eye-acknowledgment of the applause … no, no, she seemed to say, don't prolong this, don't make me break character, don't stand, oh you mustn't, but now that you are all right I will step out of character and yes absolve you with a recognition of your worship (yes, her face COULD say all that). So soon she is bowing a grand opera bow as the audience, tuxedo-and evening-gown-clad, is standing and cheering and honoring and adoring.

Every act started with this nonsense and then GOOD GOD the orgy of endless encores and curtain calls at the end of the play, the once-glamorous face registering: Oh me? Again? No you are too kind … And of course a speech was demanded as she stood there, fourth curtain call, holding a bouquet of roses, the stage strewn with flowers and petals.

“Thank you ever so much,” said her voice, trembling slightly in imitation of some long-lost, remembered genuine emotion. “I have always felt the Theater to be my first home—”

Martin to me backstage: “Ha, her first play here was 1978.”

“—and New York is and has always been where my heart belongs. It is my home now and always. And the Theater is where I meet with YOU my friends…” The hands extended to include everyone. “I feel such LOVE here, LOVE flowing out, LOVE flowing in, from the stage to you, from the audience to the stage, we are together in a LOVE of the MAGIC…” (A slight pause as if the word
magic
just occurred to her.) “… the MAGIC that is the Theater. Without LOVE there can be no MAGIC…”

This went on.

And then there was the party.

And during the party I watched Rosemary accept more kudos and scrapings-and-bowings and people were saying things to her like “Oh Miss Campbell, my husband's and my favorite film was
Monday's Child
and we've seen it fifty times and even saw it on our honeymoon,” and “Oh Miss Campbell you're my all-time favorite actress, could you please sign this,” and then the person held out one of those $75 glossy books of movie stills devoted to Rosemary Campbell, and “Oh Ms. Campbell I get tears in my eyes every time I see
Let Me Live Another Day
and your words at the end, when you say goodbye to your daughter, well when my own daughter this spring passed away I took her hand and I said the exact same things and—”

HOLD IT. I should go up and go: Oh Ms. Campbell, you old overrated bag, explain to me how these fellow human beings are debasing themselves before you like some goddess when 50,000 amateur-housewife-actresses in local little theater productions around the country have more sincerity, more talent at this point than you. What sociological phenomenon do you represent?

And this is THE TOP, this is success, this is ALL THE WAY HOME, this is presumably the fame and fortune I had always dreamed of. Now tell me, I wanted to demand of the entire party,
why
is this repelling me? Why is this whole sham of the theater seeming more like a medicine-show faith-healing act than anything else? All right, I tell myself, having another champagne, it's obvious you are having a Crisis of Confidence right here and it's best to keep it to yourself, Gil. In fact, only one person ever appreciated this kind of crisis or at least made you laugh about it and that was Emma.

And (back to Bellevue) when she asked me, “Must be a great feeling to be up on the Big Stage with the stars now, huh?” I should have attempted to go into some of that.

But I said: Yeah, what a relief. Sure is great, and about time too.

“Get me the old battle-axe's autograph, okay? Although she didn't deserve an Oscar for
Pillar of Fire
—shoulda gone to Bette Davis that year. Don't tell her I said that. Just get the autograph. Now tell me about Sophie.”

Sophie? Who told you—

“Never you mind my sources.”

Oh yes of course: Janet ran into us at Rodrigo's—

“You little
yuppie
you, Rodrigo's. Workin' the West Side now, huh? Coming up in the world. They must be paying you better.”

Yep Emma, they
were
paying me better.

My new apartment was in a fine old brownstone on 96th Street in a not-quite-yet-regentrified old neighborhood; the occasional drug deal, wino asleep on the stoop, mugging here and break-in there, marred what was clearly destined for Yuppie Renewal. How gauche of lower Harlem not to take the hint and leave … For a long time it was less my apartment than Allyn Farrington's
ex
-apartment. He had picked the gray tasteful carpet to go with the light blue pastel wall paint, the faint pink foyer, the mauve bedroom, all with matching curtains, shades, which complemented the sofa. As it was a furnished apartment, he had to leave all his decorations behind.

“And I'm leaving you that plant,” he lamented. “You are good with plants, aren't you?”

Great, I lied. (I could make the Congo wither and die …)

“Oooohhh,” he dithered, “it's one of my favorites too.”

Why don't you take it?

“Oh I just can't…”

Allyn (yes, he spelled it that way) was another actor in the stables at Gardiner & Gardiner, my new agents (two sisters, known in the business as Jerry and Janie). Kind, decent, caring people, a real concern for their clients—I had been meeting the wrong people, that was for sure. I should have come to these two my first week in New York. Matthew (the guy who was thrown out of Odessa's before me, during the Anus-lips Scandals) had gone over to Gardiner & Gardiner. I called him up, begged him for an ent
ŕ
ee, Jerry took a liking to me. Here I am a working actor on Broadway. I had to say it out loud to myself half a dozen times each night before I'd believe it: ON BROADWAY. Gil is on Broadway. You know Gil Freeman, back in high school? Did you hear he was in some Broadway play this month? Excuse me cab driver, could you take me to the Summerscale Theater on Broadway, my makeup call is 7:30 … Every other sentence out of my mouth contained the word Broadway—I was bragging, yes, but also I had to keep saying it in order to believe it. If I kept saying it often enough I might even convince myself how happy it's made me. Richer, more famous, nice apartment, less happy. Figure that one out.

Oh yeah, back to the apartment. It was Allyn's: thirty-three years old, thinning hair, dressed like an eternal frat boy, had the uniform gay mustache. I had always dismissed him as a pretentious, irritating, prissy homosexual. “Can you belieeeeeeve,” he said, when Jerry and Janie took their younger actors out on a business lunch, “that they would put
this
tablecloth with
these
napkins? Pleeeease.” But I had misjudged him. He was in reality a pretentious, irritating, prissy homosexual with a soon-to-be-free West Side rent-controlled apartment. Actually, having stared at those mauve walls for two years, I have decided his taste wasn't that great—he just had opinions.

“I can't belieeeeeeve I'm moving,” Allyn exhaled as he took down a framed sketch of a near-naked dancer, silver, thin frame, navy blue backing to match the light blue walls. “I said I'd never move in with anyone again and here I am doing it. Looks like I'll be decorating all over again, as well—Jason's place is…” He couldn't find the correct word of revulsion to finish.

Anyway, that was my apartment. I put up show posters (ones I was in), I put up my prints I'd bought from the Metropolitan, my poster of Brando as Stanley Kowalski next to my poster of Gielgud as Hamlet—all my artifacts and souvenirs. Never felt like my home, though. I should have repainted it or ripped up the carpet or trashed it somehow to make it more like what I was used to. Emma had never seen the place.

There wasn't a New Gil, but there was a New Gil Lifestyle:

I hear Emma's in Bellevue. I call a cab. I don't have to take the subway everywhere anymore. I step outside into the front hall. I see my
New York Times,
my
New Yorker,
lots of junk mail. The junk mail is a result of the magazine subscriptions, which are a result of having a bit more money. I get into the cab. I tell him to take me to Bellevue but by way of Broadway Florists at 79th Street. I go in and point to the standard $25 bouquet. Will that be cash? No, I will use my credit card, which I now have. The card I used to take Sophie to Rodrigo's for a $120 splurge. At which time I wore my new suit, managed the time by looking at my new watch. I know MBAs were starting out in the city with first salaries of $40,000 and my new pocket money was small change, but everything's proportional remember. For the first time I had to let the government take my taxes out of my paycheck—in fact, like a lot of actors, I was thinking of going to a tax lawyer who knew all the loopholes about self-employment expense write-offs.

“So Sophie, huh? Not another Betsy, I hope,”

Sophie, I said, is a very—

“Sweet girl? Good lay?”

—sophisticated and intelligent woman who was valedictorian in my high-school class—

“Tits? Big tits there? Bazongas? Honeydew melons? You can tell me. Never known a Sophie with pert breasts.”

She stayed in Chicago and went to the university there and got a bachelor's in sociology—

“A bullshit major.”

—and stayed for a master's, and now she works at Northwestern conducting social research—

“Bourgeois paper-pushing academic ivory-tower worthless work, it sounds like. Probably puts out for the professors…”

—social research about social norms in the ghettos in the South Side of Chicago; she thinks ghetto culture, though horrible, is in some ways more valid than suburban white culture—

“Oooh yuck, a liberal do-gooder, self-righteous, I bet. I hate people devoting their lives to Good Works—she probably works with handicapped children on weekends, works charity telethons, vegetarian, right? Into animal rights.”

Are you quite done? It's nice to see you back in form, Emma. Savaging my love interests.

“The Girl Next Door, after all these years. The Girl Back Home. So, when you moving back? You can live in Oak Park, maybe get your parents to rent your old bedroom to you. It'll be as if you never left the Great Midwest.”

It's not a full-fledged affair yet, so save your ammunition. She ran into my mother in a supermarket and they talked and Sophie then asked about me because she had a conference in New York and she wanted to look me up—

“My blood chills at the prospect of the woman you love going to … ugh,
conferences.
How is she in bed—that's the important thing.”

Emma, you never change. And whether that's the good or bad thing about you, I'll probably never be sure.

And there was a pause and we had come close to an odd and hard-to-deal-with subject: our relationship. I could walk out of there and not see her anymore. I could start back up again and be a loyal friend, be supportive and do my Dina imitation and get used as before. I could do what I want—hey Betsy, hear that? If you didn't know any better, you'd think I was becoming more SELF-ACTUAL.

“What's going on in the outside world? Have I missed anything? Nuclear war?”

Reagan's working on it. We're in El Salvador and Nicaragua pretty heavy. Recently the administration, in cutting back money for school lunches, declared they still met health guidelines because ketchup could be counted as a vegetable.

Emma laughed. “Oh I hate being in here when I hear stuff like that. America never lets me down in that regard.”

It's three; I'm going to have to go soon …

“You're fine until Lucrezia Borgia comes back, so settle down, kick your shoes off.”

Why don't you tell me the story now? How you got in here in the first place.

Emma sighed, looked to the Christmas lights serenely. Maybe she had rehearsed this, maybe not. “It's sort of funny in retrospect. If it weren't my life, I'd laugh about it. In fact, it
is
my life and the other day I
did
laugh about it.”

(I wasn't going to say anything for a while.)

“Anyway,” she sighed, “you know how depressed I was last year before you moved out in a huff—”

You can't blame me, I began—

“No, no, of course not, not that I wanted you to go, or thought you should go…”

I am quiet again.

“Anyway, there's my dad with lung cancer from smoking all his life and I'm sorry he's dying but I still don't want to go back and play sappy TV-movie reconciliation, you know? I guess it's expected of me, to go back and pretend we never hated everything about each other and spent our lives criticizing each other—I'm supposed to fall down and say how much I really have always loved him and that I'll always be Daddy's little girl and
yuck,
none of that's true.”