Emma Who Saved My Life (64 page)

Bye-bye, Brooklyn.

“Is booze gonna make this worse or better?” said Emma, after I arrived at her empty apartment on Sunday afternoon.

Worse, I said, if we get drunk. But one drink would be good.

“I have the dregs of five bottles to finish up, that's why I ask,” she said, going over to a packing box on top of which five bottles stood. “How about a Kahlua and Cur
cao, hm?”

I think we can do without vomiting on our last day together.

“Could be symbolic,” she sang.

We drank a mixture of peppermint schnapps and Kahlua and a touch of Grand Marnier … in Emma's leftover skim milk. It took you ten years, I said to her, but it seems you finally mixed a halfway good-tasting drink.

“It's not bad at all,” she said between sips.

Do you remember that Bicentennial beach trip and all the—

“Aaiii!” she screamed, plugging her ears. “We agreed. No nostalgia, no looking back. Just the future, just progress and new directions. Today we're going to keep the level of conversation to Soviet work slogans, okay?”

Okay.

“I should tell you what I almost was going to do.”

This is your stay-in-New-York plan?

“Well part of it. I should tell you … no, let's save it, save it for wherever we're going.” She looked to the window and outside it was gray and overcast but not rainy. “What happened to the sun? It was nice earlier.”

City Island again, I suggested.

“Been there. We've never gone … shit, where's the subway map?” She got up to poke through a box full of odds and ends. “There's two subway lines we didn't do. The A line all the way out to Rockaway Park and that C extension thing.”

I liked the C. We'd never ridden on the C.

“They're both out on the same line really, out to Far Rockaway.”

Nope, never did go there, I said.

“Let's do that. That'll take the day. And I want to see the Atlantic. Later next week I'll see the Pacific and that will seem very strange.”

Maybe there's a poem in there somewhere.

“Yes,” said Emma facetiously, “to be included in my next collection, Emma's Ocean Poems.
Behold the sea / It is so green …
”

Sorry I said anything.

And out the door we went, Emma composing doggerel sea poems:

“
Let us go down to the sea in subways
—yes, we see here Gennaro reflecting modern technology in the form of the epic—
Let us go down on ships in the sea
 … no,
Let us go down on men in ships …
”

I should end this here and say we never got to Far Rockaway. I should be clever and literary and say the line was shut down and we had ridden all the trains in the New York City subway system but the C, and hence we never never got to Far Rockaway, and (swelling strings:) life was like that too, was it not? So often in this world you don't get to that place that sounds so beautiful, seems as if it would be paradise, solve all your problems … Emma and I never loved one another, she never (well so far) got to be a major poet, I never got to be a famous actor really, we never really got to Far Rockaway. Unfortunately, this is my life and we DID get to Far Rockaway. There's a lot to be said for never getting to Far Rockaway, I am here to tell you.

“Where the hell are we? This is taking forever.”

There are only local trains on Sunday, Em.

“It's been an hour and we're at Euclid Avenue. Where is it on the map?”

We found it. Two-thirds there.

“Now that is a name to conjure with.”

What?

“Far Rockaway. It took some poetic sensibility to decide to name the area known as Rockaway that was farthest out Far Rockaway. They usually do East Rockaway, or something boring like that.”

Yeah.

One A train went to somewhere called Lefferts Boulevard and the other A train went to Broad Channel where we would transfer to the elusive C. After Kennedy Airport and the stop for Aqueduct Racetrack the train (not under the ground now) goes up on stilts and crosses Jamaica Bay. Now this is a real Unvisited Attraction of New York—this rattling, wobbling, self-disintegrating train teetering on this rickety bridge for a mile over the expanse of Jamaica Bay. I've never seen an equal thrill on mass transportation (save for the railingless Williamsburgh Bridge crossing, but that's death-defying mass transit and this was sightseeing).

“We're all gonna die,” said Emma. “I'm surprised they haven't used this Jamaica Bay business in a disaster movie yet.”

There were sailboats out on this still, overcast day, drizzle now coming down. Everywhere was marshland and there were long-legged birds in clumps of grass, storks or something (I don't know birds), and the clattering train scattered a flock of ducks and they took off over the glassy bay, just for a few yards, and settled down again, causing ripples to spread out over the calm surface.

“The day is like wide water, without sound,” said Emma. “Except for the subway train, I mean.”

Something told me that wasn't an original line.

Emma smiled at me. “It is, in point of fact, mine, but it has been traditionally misattributed to Stevens for some time now.”

Then the train approached this island causeway and a station out in the middle of nowhere, Broad Channel. The conductor announced through static and mumble that this was the last stop, change here for the A and the C for Far Rockaway. We got out of the train and stood on the platform, looking at whom we had for company.

“Pretty run-down looking lot, huh?” said Emma, a bit chilled, sidling closer. “This
is
still New York, isn't it? This island. Ought to be New Jersey, some old fishing port on the shore that has gone to seed.”

There were two teenage boys who looked bored, an old woman who kept going to the edge of the platform to spit, a young fat girl who stared to the vanishing point of the train tracks wanting the next train to arrive before the boys had a chance to remind her she was fat, and old men, those salty beach-type of old men, ex-fishermen maybe, or perhaps tenants of the welfare hotels. There were a lot of faded hotels on these ex-resort beaches that the city used to house homeless and derelict people—it always seemed the old people got sent to the beach hotels. Coney Island was the most striking example. It was possible, I guess, to have spent one's youth living it up when these resorts were thriving, when these fishing villages were prosperous, and then to have been sent back there, old and penniless, to fade away with the landmarks of your era.

“Let's go to Rockaway Park first, and save Far Rockaway for last,” said Emma as the C creaked into the station.

These elevated trains out on the sandy banks across Jamaica Bay were really in rotten shape; the mist and the salt rusted everything and the train squealed and made unbearable noises as rust met rust, wheels didn't turn smoothly, and the stations were the least modernized as it was a lost cause to keep them nice. The stations were graffitied halfheartedly, the signs announcing the stops were torn down or so erased in spray paint as not to exist, perhaps a comment from the young people who had to grow up there. The train came to its terminus at Rockaway Park, and we got out to walk to the beach.

“Ah the Atlantic,” said Emma, sighing. “The sun sets in the Pacific, you know. Imagine a sunset over something like this every day if I want to see it. Just drive out to the rocky cliffs and sit back and look.”

Ha, Palo Alto isn't exactly on the shore.

“Yeah but I could get to the shore in a car faster in California than I can get to the Atlantic by subway here. The mountains too, Gil. Yosemite and redwoods right in my backyard.”

Yosemite is in your backyard the way Washington D.C. is in
our
backyard, Emma. California is not the size of Brooklyn.

“I want to drive places. It's un-American to be confined to buses and subways. I want freeways, freeways I can speed on. I want convertibles. New York is the goddam L train, California is wind in my hair, the top down, sunshine. Look at this shit.”

I didn't know which shit she referred to, the boarded-up beach shops, the trash-strewn strip of sand, residue of oil spills toward the shoreline, the reeking public toilet under the veranda you viewed the beach from.

“The weather. This drizzle. It doesn't drizzle in Palo Alto.”

Oh it does too, come off it.

Emma looked out to the horizon, vague though it was. “No, there's only sunshine in the Golden West, I won't hear otherwise. Let's go inside somewhere.”

We got a bagel at this bakery (I had heard the best bagels in New York City—no paltry claim—were in this bakery along the main drag of Rockaway Park and IT IS TRUE), and then we found a diner place and had a wonderful, life-restoring cup of coffee, a big round mug you could warm your hands with. There are no bagels out west, I warned; the Cult of the Diner is East Coast.

“Yeah but the Cult of the Truck Stop, which I like even better, is Western. Would you stop sticking up for this place? I'm trying to leave New York and not be homesick as hell and nostalgic—and I
love
New York as you well know—and you're not helping me. You should pile on abuse.”

I'd stay if you stayed, I said. Maybe not realizing it until I said it myself.

Emma didn't say anything for a moment. Then, “Don't tempt me.”

I could be talked back into staying, and I bet you could too. In fact, I bet if—

“NO,” she interrupted firmly. “I'm all packed. I'm going to school. True, I'm going to be sitting in some West Coast pretentious poetry seminar with some twenty-one-year-old simp criticizing my poetry, some pretentious professor telling me to restructure every poem I write—”

You hate school, you hated Purdue—

“But I'd love California,” she said, looking out the diner window at the drizzle and the gray sky and the evening, which was coming early tonight. “This looks like a gray miserable October day. They don't have October in California, Gil. I wanna go where they don't have October.” Then she got up to pay the bill, through with our discussion. And we were off for the final destination, Far Rockaway. Emma forgot her handbag in the booth and I went to run get it—god, what did she have in there, a brick?

“Maybe I do have a brick in there,” she said, taking her bag from me. “You're always knocking my hobbies—masonry is a productive hobby for fun and profit, amusing for the whole family.”

Back on the rust-train, back to Broad Channel, and then onto
the
most rundown, shoddiest, worst-kept-up subway line in New York City to Far Rockaway. Once again it was all elevated and salt-corroded and the train squealed and whined over the rooftops of this seaside slum.

“Gee,” said Emma, peering through the salt-sprayed windows of the train, “I somehow expected a little more out of a place called Far Rockaway.”

There was a playground beneath us, muddy and cold-looking, only a few scattered children standing around, as if in gangs. There was a strip of stores and shopfronts down below a moment later and some of the windows in the top stories were busted out, deserted. All the buildings were Sad America, leftover '50s boom-buildings without grace or style, like old family sedans of the period, ugly now from trying to be too futuristic then—we have rejected their future.

We got off at the final station.

“Well we did it, didn't we?”

What, Emma?

“We rode 'em all. Every subway. I feel a sense of regret of not getting to the 8 line before they shut it down, but we can't help tracks taken out of service.”

Yeah, but who are we going to brag about this to? We're the only people who'd care about this.

“Nah,” said Emma, “anyone who'd like you or anyone who'd like me would think this was cool.”

We walked from the station into what could most qualify as the downtown area. A few stores were open on Sunday, most not; a lonely-looking lunch counter was open and empty, the old waitress sitting in a booth looking at the door. There was something called the Beachcomber Hotel, with a Vacancies sign in the window (“They could probably put the word
vacancy
on the permanent sign,” Emma said). Old people were the only people on the street, walking a dog, or each other, at an old-people pace.

Emma and I went to a municipal park, the name of which was on a vandalized sign we couldn't read. We wandered toward it, looking out to the sea, calm, indistinct, churning up a small wave of dirty brown sand every few seconds.

“Gee, a real
garden spot,
” said Emma, looking chilly.

Yep.

“Getting cold now. The ocean looks cold, doesn't it?”

Yeah.

And then: That deadly this-is-it pause, pre-goodbye.

“I tell you what,” she said quietly. “You just keep looking out at the sea and I'll go and get on the next train back to town. You stay for another twenty minutes and look at the sea and when you turn around I'll be gone. Simple and painless.”