Emma Who Saved My Life (15 page)

“Is there anything worse than mime? I mean, that's NOT entertainment, if you ask me. Marceau has done it all anyway, and a little of it goes a long way, a long long way. There's this mime at Rockefeller Center where I'm temping that waits for people to walk by and then he follows them, imitates their walk behind them, so close that when they turn around, he darts around so they don't know he's back there. And the lunchtime crowds laugh and laugh at these poor victims. And one day…”

I was swimming through the crowd: Emma don't tell this story, God please, don't let her do it …

“And one day,” she said laughing, “this guy who must have been on a break from a construction crew turns around and belts this mime who is making fun of his lumbering walk. The mime goes
down,
lemme tellya, and the guy says ‘You little faggot. Why don't you get a job like normal people, huh?' I thought I was going to die laughing…”

I arrived too late. Robbie turned away without a comment; I told Emma he was a mime.

“Oh,” she said, downing her drink in one, “sorry about that. I'm batting a thousand tonight. I told what's-his-name there that Tennessee Williams is unbearably swank sometimes—”

He's directing
Streetcar
in the fall, I mentioned.

“And I told what's-her-name that Americans massacre Ibsen, Shaw, and Chekhov by trying to play it for laughs.”

Yes, well, that's what the reviewer said about her in
The Three Sisters,
and she must have thought you were rubbing it in, maybe.

“I told that guy there my theory on how homosexuals have made too much of the theater effete and precious, and how
A Chorus Line
is a bunch of gay neurotics performing for another bunch of gay neurotics …

You haven't even
seen
it yet, Emma.

“Don't worry, I never mention your name—your career is safe,” she said. “And that's Monica, huh?” We both turned to look at Monica, who was dressed shabbily that night. “I don't suppose I have to worry about anybody falling in love with
her.
”

I've toyed with the idea, I said.

“Oh c'mon Gil,” she said, folding her arms. “I at least have to approve. No actresses.” She studied her a moment. “Nice behind, that must be it. That's all it comes down to for men, right? The woman has a great behind, no wonder you love her.”

I don't love her, she's just—

“Can we go?” Emma asked, distressed about something. “You're right, you're right, I don't fit in here; you said I wouldn't like it and you're right.” She punched me playfully in the arm. “How about Sal's, huh? Don't you want some grease? The Grease Plate Special? Grease cut in strips and deep-fried in more grease?”

And so we slipped away, unnoticed, a little drunk, a little nauseated from cheap off-Broadway cocktail-party snacks, and we made for the 42nd Street subway station. Soon we were bound for Brooklyn where our Manhattan lives seemed a little larger and the world outside of it very much quieter and slower, and soon there was Sal's, open all night, a blue fluorescent glow, Edward Hopperish, on a now dark commercial street of warehouses. On the subway Emma pulled out her spiral notebook and began scribbling. I said let me see, she said no. We moved automatically to our booth at Sal's; on that hot night the cold Formica tabletop felt good on our arms, and the waitress brought us a small pitcher of lukewarm water.

Emma after a moment, a scribble or two, tore off a sheet of paper and handed it to me. “That theater party clinched it for me,” she said. “Ten words, listed there, are now officially banned from usage. All people caught using them will be taken summarily into custody, suspension of habeas corpus if necessary. This is Emma's Great Reformation—no … Emma's New Order, I like that better.”

EMMA'S BANNED WORDS

1. vision

2. craft

3. work

Work, I asked?

“Yes, as in ‘I have my work,' or ‘I enjoyed watching his work in that production.' Actors are just jerking around up there, it's not work, you know that.”

4. medium

5. art

“Art” is a pretty useful word though, I pointed out.

“It's just banned from possessive uses: as in ‘my art' or ‘the key to the actor's art, his craft…' Like that.”

6. stagecraft

Yeah, I admitted, that
did
have to go.

7. demand

8. piece

Emma demonstrated in a high, hollow actress's voice: “Well I felt acutely burdened by the
demands
of that role, it was a difficult
piece,
a hard
piece
of work, it took all that I had to give, all my art, my
craft
…”

9. joy

“Actors should never discuss their joy in the role, the joy of their craft—I tell you Gil, there was much JOY at the party tonight.”

10. love

“As in ‘I felt this support, this approval coming from the audience that could only be described … yes, as Love…' As in ‘What I Did for Love.' As in ‘The only way to describe what goes on between the actor and his audience is … love…'”

I laughed. I've heard people talk that way all my life.

“Of course I will expand the list for all the professions. Like in writing, there's nothing worse to my ears than the word
text
—god, I hate that. And in the music industry when they talk about
product,
as in someone's shitty disco record was ‘good product.' Hate that too.” Coffee was brought to the table. “Emma's New Order,” she repeated, pointing a prophetic finger. “I promise you, the world is in for a rough time if I come to power. Heads will roll.”

I ordered the breakfast special which I could (and can) eat at any hour of the day; Emma went for a chocolate shake and a plate of french fries which she doused in steak sauce.

“I'm not writing, Gil,” she said, munching. “I make fun of your theater life because I'm jealous: you have an artistic life. Lisa's got her painting. If I'm not going to have sex, I damn sure have to be writing, don't you see? Something has to justify my existence.”

I could take care of the sex end of the problem, I said.

“No you couldn't,” she said smiling, “it would take ten analysts ten years to make headway. Want some fries?”

Not all gooped up, no.

“This is even better when you stir mayonnaise up in the steak sauce. I do that in the apartment when no one is around to comment on it. Sometimes I have fries with Thousand Island dressing. Do you still love me?”

After those admissions, how could I?

“I mean, so many neurotic women are writing novels now,” she went on, “I could name you half a dozen. All they do is write about how frigid and screwed-up they are and the critics are even tolerating this junk, awarding this self-indulgent trash all the great prizes. I mean I should be writing—this is my era. Self-involved, neuro. I'm hopeless. Writer's block.”

Maybe if you had sex again it would help, I said.

“Nah, forget the sex. It's a distraction. Besides, I've passed my one-year mark now. I'm going for the record.”

I sloshed around my buttered toast in the runny egg and Emma pointed out that some sensibilities would rate that an equal atrocity with the Thousand Island fries.

“So I was thinking and I thought of something,” she said.

Yes?

“I'm going to write a pulp novel, one of those soft-core romance deals. I was thumbing through
Publishers Weekly
—you should see the advances those women are getting on those things. And
anyone
could write one.” She corrected that: “No, anyone who had read a lot in the genre could write one. Their roots are in good novels, the Bron
ẗ
es, Jane Austen, magazine serials of the past. It's the new boom in publishing. See? There are two whole bandwagons I could be on. They'll ask one day why, why Emma, couldn't you turn a buck in the '70s which were designed specifically around your literary talents?” At the bottom of all this, she seemed truly distraught.

“
Love Once Was Here,
” she said in a minute.

Beg your pardon …

“
Love Once Was Here.
No, not quite. I'm working on my title. Here it is, here it is:
What We Had Was Love.
Oh god, that's swank. That's the one. I see the TV rights being negotiated already for this baby.” She nudged me and I looked up from my egg. “Help me write it. I mean by asking about it, checking up on me, giving me lectures, telling me how I'll be nothing, forgotten, be as an unmarked grave, men shall walk over me and not realize … where is that quote from?”

I said sure, I'd help lend moral support.

“I'm coming up on twenty-three, and do you know what that means?”

What.

“Two years left.”

Emma never told any of us her birthday—to this day I do not know, though I gathered it was in the fall sometime. She refused to acknowledge it, celebrate it, deal with it, for contemplation of aging gave her Death Obsession or a Mortality Crisis (concepts utilized enough that they became abbreviated DO and MC around the apartment). At twenty-three she had two years left until twenty-five, and twenty-five was the age Keats was when he died. There was a fragment of a poem in her journal, now that I think about it …

COUNTDOWN TO KEATS

Immortality or bust—

I've got a year and a few months before his mark,

when I consider how my light, etc.

Laforgue's still a year beyond (minor, thank god)

Shelley almost four, Byron way down the road.

I have my nightingales too, you know,

but frankly I'm not measuring up.

Some drawbacks, John: Grecian things do not

move us in this age,

but then again, no TB and that's a plus.

You, John, are the first to confront the mediocre,

the gauge of true gift,

the one who puts the poets in their place,

and I had hoped to improve my song

within your span.

… which I took to mean that she was using Keats's checkout time as her own gauge for success; this poem, as the others, was crossed out with an expletive written on top of it. With each passing death-date of a great writer, she said, it was one more nail in her coffin. I remember her distinctly, looking down at her plate, nothing to say in defense against her own accusations, trailing a french fry around a plate of steak sauce and grease.

Keats didn't have to temp every afternoon and work at Baldo's, I pointed out.

“That's a point,” she said, now smiling again, smiling for the rest of that evening, making plans for the New Order, smiling (it seems at a distance) for the rest of the summer, which may well have been the summer I was waiting for all my life—you say the word summer and I think of that one. Gee, it seems horribly fragile to look back at it: you're aware that if you moved this straw or said those words or did any number of things someone eventually got around to, that you could have ended it all much sooner. I can't quite retrieve the young man with all that faith—where did he get that energy? Didn't he know the odds against being an actor—or Emma being a poet, or Lisa being a painter? How did he have so much faith in the world? No, it wasn't all stupidity and it wasn't all innocence and youth. I think New York was in there too, egging us on.

1976

“‘IT is the Bicentennial of This Great Land,'” Emma read, as we sat around two weeks before July 4th. “‘And the tall ships will sail up the Hudson River as an unmatched spectacle, thousands will take the oath of citizenship on Ellis Island, Lady Liberty will herself be aglow, and in the evening the city promises the world's biggest fireworks display.'” With that she put down the
Daily News
which had listed a rundown of events. “All this means people from all over This Great Land will arrive here, particularly from the Heartland of This Great Land—”

“This land is your land, this land is my land,” Lisa sang.

“—and that means there is only one place
this
girl can be while all the hoopla is going on: out of town. The
News
says some
six
million people will line the harbor, three million down the block at the Promenade. Do I wanna be around while three million people cut through our front yard to see this shuck?”

But I wanted to see the tall ships.

Emma raised a finger. “You won't be able to see anything. The
News
said people are camping out already to get a space. Think of it, six million people, pushing, shoving and sweating…”

Okay, so the city will be a circus.

(Emma's New Order had grown in magnitude—her notebook was full of violations and regulations concerning what had to be destroyed; a one-person bad-taste gestapo. The Bicentennial was going to be an orgy of objectionable American behavior:

“Has-been celebrities trying to revive their careers by telling the world what America means to them. Street-performers and buskers—”

“Heeyyy Mister Tambourine Man,” Lisa broke in, imitating our Carmine Street friend.

“—and folkies singing self-righteous, outdated protest songs and MIMES—good God, it'll be a field day for mimes, Mime City, Mime-o-rama, they'll be pulling on ropes, running up against invisible walls. And crafts. Little statue of liberties and red-white-and-blue kitsch, all kinds of Americana.” She paused, noticing that she hadn't moved us. “I hate junk like this. You're expected to go out and have Fun
en masse,
merely because everyone else has turned out too.”

So, got any better ideas?

Emma raised an eyebrow. “Welllll … Lisa. Darling. If you must go out with … this
person,
this boyfriend—”