Emma Who Saved My Life (25 page)

I got up and took the crony's arm—this is the most macho thing I ever did in my life, so listen up—and told him one more word and he was DEAD.

“If you're gonna be a pig, go do it somewhere else,” Lisa hissed audibly; others in the audience added yeahs and grunts of disapproval.

Emma got no further than that line again.

“You people like this shit?” said Trigger's drunk buddy, standing. “That's not poetry, that's not … that's just shit…”

Trigger tried to calm his friend down now, probably sensing his Coffeehouse career was at an end if this went on.

Joel got up and reprimanded the men, asked them to leave.

“That ain't poetry,” the crony went on, as Trigger tried to escort him, fumblingly, out the door. His friend knocked over his beer, the glass rolled off the table and broke on the sawdust floor. “Hey sister, write about something somebody cares about … 1951, Senator Joseph McCarthy came out of this great land and did a number on you people—”

Everyone groaned, some yelled shut up, get out.

“Not everybody was alive,” Emma said darkly from the stage, into the microphone, “in 1951.”

Trigger and his friend were now at the door. “And another thing, sister—that's a shitty poem, a shitty shitty shitty poem…” He said “shitty” as loudly as he could, doubling over and almost falling over. Trigger led him outside, ushering him back to his apartment, he said, for the rest of the whiskey. They finally left and all was quiet.

“I can't apologize enough,” said Joel. “Please Emma, go on and finish.”

But Emma was deep in thought rereading her poem.

“Emma?” Joel said, tapping her shoulder gently.

Emma looked up slowly. “This isn't a very good poem, is it?”

Mild laughter all about, thinking she was joking.

“No, it's not very good,” she said quietly. She then gathered her papers together, put them neatly into her notebook and began to leave the stage, shaking her head.

Lisa and I looked at each other, then Lisa put her head in her hands, staring at the floor.

Joel said, “Well, okay, uh sure, another time Emma. That was great, sorry about the ruckus. A big hand for Emma Gennaro.”

And there was enthusiastic sympathy applause.

“Why'd she freak out there?” Lisa said to me.

Well, we both knew how sensitive she was.

“But those guys are
nothing.
Drunken bums.”

I know that, she knows that, you know that—who could say why she bolted?

Emma must have left through a back door. So we got up as the next poet was reading her first poem (“… you put stars in my heart for safe-keeping/the light within, sister mine…”) and slipped out and looked around hoping to find Emma, and then after ten minutes went home. Emma wasn't home either.

“Boy that was a bad night,” she said when she came back home at 11 p.m., standing in the doorway.

Where had she gone? We had worried.

“I just walked around the Village, went to a movie. Thanks for coming down, guys.” Emma went to her bedroom and shut the door.

“Wanna come out and talk?” Lisa yelled.

No answer.

You were great, I yelled also. No one could foresee the drunks. She better not be taking the drunk assholes personally. Her stuff was great, everyone loved it, next week they want her back …

No answer still.

“Come on, Emma,” Lisa pursued, “the evening's young still; we can go out and get plastered.”

Emma's bedroom door opened slowly and she stood there looking pale and unhappy. “Look,” she said, “I don't care about the drunks, or the Coffeehouse. But it occurred to me up there reading that my poem wasn't very good, no one in the audience (except you two) woulda known a good poem if they heard it, and that the Coffeehouse was just a place for losers and poseurs and I couldn't sit up there another minute and go on with the charade.”

Sure sure, that made sense to us, we said.

“Now I gotta figure out if my being a poet is part of an even bigger charade,” she said. “And I think I'd better sleep on it. Good night.” And she went back inside, closing the door behind her.

And it was downhill from there.

Lisa and I were sitting around, equidistant from The Fan, the morning warming up to its usual inferno. I read the paper, she read her paperback, Emma was still asleep. Lisa turned on the radio and it was Elvis singing “Until It's Time for You to Go.”

“Whadya know? WNBC not playing the latest disco crap,” she said.

I told her about my possibility of a role in the newest Venice production. In atonement for the Bunny Suit I did get noticed for being “a trouper” so maybe it wasn't so bad I was Papa Bunny. The new play was a family drama by a playwright who showed up to rehearsals every night and tried to align the actors' performances with His Conception, which was probably his real life. Lots of screaming and yelling, cursing, all kinds of novel cursing and torment, someone discovering their homosexuality—'70s off-Broadway theater in a nutshell.

“Do you get to play the fag son?” Lisa asked.

No, the intolerant football-hero brother. This and the high-school original musical made for the second football hero I played. Explain that one.

Then the radio announcer spoke, all somber:
Yes, until it's time for him to go. Too soon, Elvis, too soon. We'll be playing Elvis throughout today, in tribute to the King. Dead at forty-two, today in Memphis
 …

Oh shit.

“
No,
” said Lisa putting down her book. “
Elvis?
There's one you never thought would die. How did it happen?” she asked me, though she knew I knew only as much as she did.

The disc jockey later filled it in, a drug-induced heart failure apparently.

“The King of Rock 'n Roll,” Lisa said. “God I grew up on all those crummy Elvis movies, had a crush on him and everything.”

And then we looked at each other with the exact same thought: WHO IS GOING TO TELL EMMA? Lisa considered aloud:

“Oh we can't tell her. Let her go out and read it on a headline or something. I couldn't bear to watch it. Damn, and she was just recovering from the Coffeehouse debacle.”

You had to know that Emma was a
philosophical
Elvis fan, not a screaming polyester-clad middle-aged woman Elvis fan, or a trendy nostalgia Elvis fan, but someone who felt rock 'n roll had been in decline since the Beatles and maybe everything fresh or new or important the genre had to say had been said between 1955 and 1965 or so. Elvis wasn't just a pop hero, he was a symbol.

Emma, one time: “Look, it's like Tennessee Williams not writing like he did when he was younger, or Orson Welles not making a good film for the last twenty years—the second you stumble, reveal yourself to be human, BANG the vultures are all over you. Just like Elvis. ‘He's not what he was,' they say. Throw him on the American scrapheap, make him a laughing stock. Make the bastard
pay
for trying to add a little entertainment to our miserable lives. How dare he be human!”

The only time I ever saw Emma really flustered concerned Elvis.

“Elvis was a thief,” Susan once argued, a year earlier, at one of her parties. “I mean, I've read this everywhere. He stole it all from black people. Black people invented rock 'n roll.”

“That's somewhat true, of course, but Elvis—”

“Well he's fat and used up now,” Susan insisted, never knowing when to quit. “He's a wreck, doing Vegas, all bloated and I can't see how anyone can still like him…”

Emma was furious with her. “Elvis created a myth—the Rock 'n Roll Hero. And now he's got to live out the rest of his life in this persona, like John Wayne, like Mae West, like our damned dying-in-the-gutter poets, like Hemingway and Fitzgerald, like anyone who tries to do anything creative in America, you stick with your legend until it kills you. There's the irony—someone like Elvis isn't living out
his
American Dream anymore, he's living out
ours.
”

Do our dreams in America become public property? I wonder. Did I want to be an actor because of my love of the theater, the challenges of its art, the qualities it would demand of me? Or was it that, like Elvis and “rock 'n roll” and Emma and “poetry,” I was chasing words too—words with a lot of dolled-up cultural American myth attached to them, perhaps, but just words. Was I in New York for the right reason? What is artistic struggle all about? Why did God create Man? Why did the record company put “Don't Be Cruel” on the flip side of “Hound Dog” and make half as much money as they could have? We'll be coming back to some of these mysteries, so don't go away.

Yeah, Emma got good and depressed over Elvis. And everyone else who died that year—Bing Crosby, Groucho Marx, John Wayne, 1977 was a big year for death. Of course, for variety, there was Emma the Failure:

“I'll never be a poet. It's just not going to happen. If it was going to happen something would have happened by now. It's not the rest of the world against me—I could deal with that; it would be confirmation of talent. It's
me.
I can't write, and when I do write it's shit. Ever since the Coffeehouse—”

“Emma,” insisted Lisa, “
forget
the Coffeehouse, those stupid old drunks. You're gonna let them determine your fate?”

Emma shrugged, “No, I guess not…”

“You're the next Virginia Woolf,” Lisa said absently.

“Who went mad and killed herself,” Emma reminded.

Uh, Emily Dickinson, I said, knowing Emma loved Emily Dickinson.

“Who went unpublished, virtually, in her lifetime.”

(We knew better than to mention Sylvia Plath.)

“Emma don't be like this, keep the faith,” Lisa pursued. “You'll be … I don't know, the modern George Eliot.”

“She was ugly,” Emma muttered, retreating to her bedroom.

And then the San Gennaro festival. A chance for Emma to make her annual extended joke of her blood liquefying. That year she didn't want to go.

“Nawwww,” she said, refusing to leave her bed. “There'll be young attractive Italian-Americans fondling and kissing each other, and being young and happy, and BLECCCH.”

“All right then,” tried Lisa, “let's go somewhere else for your holy day, somewhere out of this lousy apartment. The Adirondacks, go hiking, walk on trails, bask in nature. Waterfalls. Animal life.”

“No, I hate nature,” Emma said, utterly sincere. “I love New York—it's all pavement and concrete and steel and asphalt and there's no nature, no life forms. Trees. I hate trees. They remind me of life going on, the cycle, death—natural things: disease, cancer, tumors. I don't want to be reminded of biology.”

And the headaches got worse too. We would hear Emma groaning from the bedroom; we'd knock discreetly after a while. She'd be doubled up on the bed, looking drawn, miserable. See a doctor, see a doctor, we'd
beg.
No, no, just let her die …

Lisa retreated from Apartment Life. She and Bob went out a lot, got back late. Lisa would come in at 1 a.m. and Emma's light was still on so she would visit and Emma would prop herself up in the bed (which she hadn't left all day) and smile weakly, part Camille, part
Song of Bernadette,
the brave invalid, and they'd talk for a while.

“She's gotten benedictory, Gil,” Lisa would tell me. “It's as if she's issuing her last words. ‘Be happy with Bob. Maybe you two should settle down…' I mean, Emma, sending me forth into a man's arms. She
is
sick.”

There was also Connie. Behind Emma's back, previously, Monica and I had had a little drunk after-the-party affair that lasted precisely and exactly four dates before we mutually intervened, both of us having satisfied our curiosity and gotten sex out of our systems for a while, and I had told
no one
about it. A year earlier I might have flaunted it to make Emma and Lisa jealous and get reactions out of them and induce commentary and feel very sexual and someone-who-has-affairs-all-the-time-ish but the current mood made me more practical. I just did it, enjoyed it, and quit doing it when I quit enjoying it and there was barely a ripple in the surface of my social life, even Monica and I parted friends. But Connie. Connie was another matter.

I got the part of the football-hero brother, with a whopping total of two scenes, 46 lines, and a dinner scene where I sat there and ate through twenty minutes of other people's dialogue (macaroni and cheese Tues., Thurs., and Sun.; hamburger casserole Wed., Fri., and Sat.). And one night this woman, dressed oh-so-sharply, came backstage with her escort (I assumed a boyfriend) and her name was Connie.

“I don't know anyone in the cast,” she whispered to me amid other backstage conversation, out-of-town relatives of the star generating kudos, the parts they really really liked, etc. “In fact I've never been backstage anywhere before.” She extended her hand. “Connie Mohr. And you're Gilbert Freeman?”

Had we met before?

She winked. “Your name's in the program, sweetheart. I wanted to come back and say I liked you.” She pretend-punched me in the shoulder. “Real macho. Like every football jock I ever met.”

Hey thanks. My first FAN.

“Ha, you have lots of fans, I bet,” she said. “Not everyone has enough gall to barge backstage and ingratiate themselves. That's what I'm doing. Ingratiating myself.”

She introduced her escort, who worked on Wall Street with her in the bond-trading department, he was looking for a future in commodity trading, Chicago branch, blah, blah, blah. She didn't seem to be very proprietary about him, she didn't seem even to care he was there. Nah, I thought, they can't be together because she was—could it be?—flirting with
me.