Emma Who Saved My Life (19 page)

“There are going to be fireworks tonight,” I heard Janet say, as I lay on a deck chair on the porch facing the sea. “Asbury Park and some in Sea Girt too and we'll be able to see them from here.”

Under the spell of Emma's Brooklyn Bombers, Multiple Orgasms and Spanish Flies (I'm sure she was making the same drink over and over, inventing names for it), I drifted in and out of afternoon sleep on the porch, letting fragments of conversations waft up from the beach …

Chris: “Then I was with Michael but John, who didn't know I was alive on the Planet Earth, starts getting interested after all this time—and I've always wanted him, Susan—you know my type…”

Mandy: “No that's the thing about the Chicago Cubs—I couldn't be faithful if they won the pennant, you know? They have to lose, they have to fuck it up right at the end and disappoint everyone because that's Chicago. One day they'll win something by accident and it's not going to be the same. And the White Sox—good god, don't talk to me about the White Sox…”

Tom: “Well no, Lisa, that's what's so interesting about what they call risk arbitrage—one day all of Wall Street is going to be virtually a casino, a place to stake a bet on futures and numbers and rises and falls—nothing to do with investment or corporate soundness. And this computer boom they're predicting is going to blow the lid off of trading as we know it…”

Emma from the kitchen: “Now it's obvious that Ronald Reagan is going to wrest this summer's convention from Jerry Ford, take the nomination, become president, and destroy the world, right? And I got to thinking. If Reagan had been a successful movie star, he'd be showing up on TV movies now and not headed to the White House one day. Originally he was going to be in
Casablanca,
then the part of Rick went to Bogart. If Reagan had been in
Casablanca
his career would have succeeded and he never would have turned to politics. Now here's the big Question for the late twentieth century: if you had a choice between having
Casablanca
—the greatest Hollywood-style film ever made—the way it is today OR keeping Reagan out of the White House and maybe saving the world from nuclear destruction … which would you choose to have? You laugh, Janet, but I stay up nights working on that one…”

For the next hour I was quasi asleep, drifting in and out of insensibility, waking up finally when I heard the sound of my own name, mentioned by Chris:

“But has anyone seen him onstage? Is he any good?” And rather than hear a chorus of YES, I heard Mandy go “Sssssshhhhhh! He's right out there in that chair.”

Well? No one
had
see me onstage. I hadn't
been
onstage yet, which I think is a pretty good excuse. What have I done this past year? If I seem slow in remembering, it's because it was so boring. Monica at the theater and I keep reading new play submissions. I kissed her at the Christmas party and began to maul her drunkenly and she said she had a boyfriend now and put me off. She didn't exactly push me away, though. There must have been about five good minutes of kissing in there before she remembered what's-his-name. I was stage manager twice, once for
Kitty Korner
in the fall (whewwww, did that ever bomb) and this spring I managed
Signora
which was fun because we had a good actress as this rich divorćee in Amalfi seducing her own son—

“But Mandy, a name is a political statement!” Susan was under the porch. “As a lesbian you have a duty to change your name to ‘ManDie.'”

Where was I? Oh yeah, my career. I'm everyone's favorite nice guy at the Venice. Gil do this, Gil do that. Stage managing is fun but it's not acting, is it? Well hell, there are no parts for me. I can't play Signora, now can I? This fall there's lots I could do. I'm going to audition for everything. And if the Venice doesn't cast me, I'll audition at other theaters, though they don't like for you to do that. Maybe I'll go to … (Contemplation of life/career/work sent me right back to sleep.)

An hour later:

“Wake up, sweetie pie,” Emma said in my ear, tapping my already red shoulder. “You're gonna burn, better come inside.”

I got up and felt half-drunk and queasy. It seemed about fourish. The light had begun that late-in-the-day slant. Janet and Mandy saw me stir and yelled from the beach to come down and play Frisbee. “Come on down!” yelled Tom. “We'll show these girls how to play a little Frisbee.” Maybe later, I yelled back. (Yeah, like an hour after my funeral.)

“I used to be good with people,” said Emma as I joined her in the kitchen.

When was that?

“No, I used to be able to talk and make conversation and get on with my fellow man…” Emma was distracted by the mess she had made of the kitchen. “I tried talking to everyone today. I bored them, they bored me. I tried my Panties Theory out on Janet to no avail.”

Panties theory?

“You know, that little girls' panties are the key emblem of twentieth-century literature?
Ulysses
and
Finnegans Wake
by Joyce, Caddy's drawers in Faulkner's
The Sound and the Fury,
Nabokov's
Lolita
—all of them, panties-obsessed. It's clearly impossible to write a novel without using little girls' panties.”

Moby-Dick?

Emma put her hand on her hip. “Gil, I think it's perfectly obvious that Melville is implying that the whale is wearing a pair of little girls' panties. Ahab doesn't want to kill the whale, he just wants it to rise out of the water in order to
see
its panties.”

And Janet didn't go for the theory?

“Intellectual discussions went out in the '60s, Gil. There's only you and there's only me. You never look at me strangely when I talk about panties. What do you want to drink?”

Nothing ever again.

“I have new thoughts on all subjects,” said Emma, again presiding over the disaster area/kitchen that looked like an explosion of ice crumbs, peels, fruit bits, empty booze bottles and multicolored liquids had occurred there. “And I've reached a revolutionary conclusion.”

Yes? I said, yawning.

“Tom can't help being boring and average and rich and tan. And in his limited Republican WASP little way he is sort of sweet. It's Lisa that's the problem. I now hate Lisa.”

No you don't. (I poured myself a glass of straight orange juice.)

“I've been watching everything from my kitchen window here,” said Emma. “Susan went in the water. Tidal waves along the Eastern Seaboard, sea levels are rising around the world. She went swimming and Russian trawlers started following her; long-haired activists in rowboats interposed themselves between the two: ‘Don't kill this one! Put those harpoons away!'”

So you've been sitting here all afternoon thinking up these rotten jokes, huh?

“Nothing else to do. That's why I woke you up. I'd gone two hours without savaging anyone and I couldn't take it anymore. And I've been contemplating my life. Looking at Lisa and Tom, seeing them close and affectionate and intimate … and it just came to me, it was borne in on me that I will NEVER live a life like that, there will never be anybody for whom
I'm
like that. I am one human being incapable of walking hand in hand with someone on a beach. Now why is that?”

I wish I knew, Emma.

“Well work on it and when you figure it out—why normal life violates and repels me—let me know, willya?”

Emma got bored with the blender as people took her making fresh rounds of drinks for granted. She deserted her post and Lisa took over. Lisa was going to make a red, white, and blue drink. She'd seen it done somewhere. Coconut liqueur on the bottom since it was thickest, grenadine syrup and vodka next because it was second-thickest, and blue curaçao on top. It all fell in on itself and made a purple sludge and it tasted awful but Lisa kept making them, trying the red, white, and blue in different orders, arrangements, and proportions. This became known as the Purple Sludge and, once acquiring the taste, we found ourselves begging Lisa to make them all weekend long.

Tom went to get steaks. Later it came out Susan was a vegetarian, Chris was sort-of, Mandy and Janet didn't want steak, I wasn't hungry as I was full of potato chips which I ate mindlessly in the kitchen with Emma. But Tom bought these steaks. And they had to be cooked on the barbecue and Tom and Lisa shooed everyone away from the barbecue—not that anyone volunteered to help in the first place—and played Suburban Couple On The Patio and between them they made four trips to the store for 1) paper towels, paper salad bowls, plastic cutlery (which wasn't a huge success because we couldn't cut Tom's well-done steaks with plastic knives), 2) beer, because everyone was sick of candy tropical blender drinks and Purple Sludge, 3) some more beer because it wasn't enough and we drank it all waiting for these steaks to get done, 4) fixings for potato salad, a three-bean salad and a pudding dessert, all of which Lisa was inspired to get when the steaks were nearly done so the meal could be put off another twenty minutes. (“Potato salad and pudding,” sneered Emma to me privately. “Already she's thinking like a school cafeteria dietitian. Watch her make us eat everything on our plate.”)

Lisa was furiously working in the kitchen, doing five things at once. I offered help.

“No, no, I'm fine Gil,” she said, dumping a ton of mayonnaise into the potato salad. “I know Emma has been trashing me out all day and don't pretend she hasn't.”

I pretended she hadn't.

“I mean, I expect that out of Emma, to complain and make fun of everything and she can get away with it as long as she's funny and makes fun of herself as well. Be Entertaining—that's all we ever ask of her, right? But sometimes…”

Sometimes what?

“Sometimes it's not unreasonable to expect her to behave and not act terribly to everyone.” She took a quick look at me. “This is obviously falling on deaf ears. You think everything she does is perfect.”

Not true, I said, although at that time it was virtually true.

“Well all I'm saying is that it's not doing any of us any good to wallow in our neuroses and be Fashionable New York Neurotics and become complete bitches, okay? There comes a time to grow up, too.”

Oh no. Lisa no. Don't talk
growing up.
We were doing such a good job of not growing up—don't be like that … My heart sank when she said that. Not that she didn't have a point.

“She's out of control,” Lisa went on, washing some of the dusty plates in the beachhouse so there would be something to eat on. “She's getting worse every day. Pretentious, she's more pretentious. For someone who hates sex, is screwed up by it, hates anyone else to have it, she certainly is setting a world record for talking about it. Every other word out of her mouth is
penis
or
clitoris
these days, or
come.
Would you like a Diet Cola, Emma? ‘Oh yes, I'd
come
for one.' Did you like that movie, Emma? ‘Oh I loved it—I
came
all the way through it. It gave me a
wide-on.
' A wide-on? Think about that. The woman is obsessed.”

That's just Emma, I said.

“Emma on overdrive. Hyper-Emma, Super-Emma. And you're getting weirder just like her.”

I wasn't weirder, I protested.

“Why is she trying to ruin the weekend? Break Tom and me up?”

She's not, I lied.

“Not born yesterday Gil honey. I know what's happening. Here”—she threw me a limp rag—“dry some dishes.”

I dried some dishes. Then I said that Emma was not trying to break them up, she was worried that Lisa was going to move out for Tom and leave us and it was because Emma was jealous and possessive of Lisa that she acted odd. But how seriously could you take Emma's schemings?

“I'm just DATING this guy for christ's sake! Three lousy weeks, it is not love, it is not Ozzie and Harriet here. Geeeeeez. Normal people let their friends date other people and don't go insane at the idea that they're going to find some happiness when they're not around. What? I can't have a life out of that apartment?”

Well …

“I mean, I'm tired of psychoses and oh-my-miserable-sexlife and oh-I'm-so-frigid and all this CULT of our own neuroses—I've got to get out every once in a while, okay? This weekend is a disaster.”

Everyone was having fun, I assured her.

“Everyone but meeeeee,” she sang.

Dinnertime.

We all sat down to eat Tom's steaks. Conversation was meaningless and occasionally fun with Emma playing her usual trick of listening overly carefully to what everyone said.

Tom: “There's nothing worse than a bad cut of beef.”

Emma: “Well, nuclear war…”

Susan informed us how meat was bad for us, how barbaric it was to eat it, how proud she was to be a vegetarian. (“That must be why she wants to sleep with Chris,” Janet whispered to me.) Tom commented a number of times about how good the steaks were. Lisa said the best steaks she ever had were in the West because meat was even better in the West, Texas and all, and even the roadside interstate Mr. T-Bone and Steak House and Jiffy Sizzlin' chain steakhouse steaks were better than the best thing you could get in New York as a rule.

“What really interests me,” Emma said, enjoying herself, “is steak sauce. Which brands people like best—you'd be surprised how people disagree.”

Tom nodded and told how his father and mother would nearly come to blows over steak sauce, and Emma continued to draw him out on the subject of steak sauce, and Emma mentioned how she put steak sauce on everything and how many many things you could put steak sauce on, steak sauce steak sauce steak sauce. Lisa sat there with her arms crossed, glaring at Emma.