Emma Who Saved My Life (26 page)

“How long have you been doing this?”

A two-sentence version of my life story prepared for such questions.

“You're just twenty-three? Oh goodness, a child. I'm—well, never you mind, we'll talk age another time.” But she couldn't have been any older than twenty-nine, thirty—no way. “So Mr. Twenty-three, you got your whole career ahead of you. Glad I met you now! After you get a Tony you won't remember your lowly fans who made you what you are.”

Could we get this woman packaged and sold in economysize buy-one-get-another-free containers? I'll buy stock in the company.

“Here's my card.” She gave me a sleek business card. The investment firm was Golam Brothers, Cohn & Schwartz … which I'd heard of. She was one slick number, wasn't she? Couldn't get over how well she dressed (later I asked her, throwing tact aside; Brooks Brothers suits at $800 apiece, silk blouses, $150 shoes, her briefcase was $500 and Italian … around the house it was T-shirt and jeans, but at work you had to dress the part—they were judging you, the bastards, by your clothes, and she didn't slave six years at Harvard to have these New York Jews look down their nose at her, nosirree. Oh, that wasn't anti-Semitic, as she was a Boston Jew. Or rather, it was acceptable anti-Semitism, coming from a Jew … I think.

She was blond and blue-eyed, a solid compact figure, more attractive than she was beautiful. (“I got these New York Jew-boys running after me night and day, Gil,” she would one day tell me. “The Blond Jewish Girl—great to take home to mother. You get the blond shiksa and keep kosher at the same time—let's talk Most Popular Girl in the Office, right? I turn 'em all down. Some of these poor mama's boys, thirty-year-old virgins I swear. Except for circle jerks up at some Catskill Jewish summer camp over some pair of tits in a porno magazine, they've had nil for a sexlife—and they feel guilty about THAT.” How did she do it? Seem so elegant, so world-wise and at the same time talk absolute
filth?
I loved it.) Her address on the business card was P.O. Box something-or-other, on the Upper East Side. (“It's important to have an Upper East Side address,” she said over lunch the first time we went out, “because they look at addresses on Wall Street. Guess where I live? Jersey. Won't
do
to have Jersey as an address for Wall Street purposes. I've got the psychology, the mental game of working the Street down to an art form and I ought to write a how-to book. After I'm up the ladder, of course. Be glad you're not in that crazy phoney world downtown, Gil.” Phoney compared to the theater? She couldn't have meant that. I've never met anyone who loved that wheeling-and-dealing, cat-and-mouse, buy-and-sell-their-own-mothers kind of world more.

“Gotta go,” she said, pressing my hand. “I know nothing about the theater and now I want to know more. Don't suppose…” She hesitated, looking up vulnerably at me, widening the eyes, biting the lip charmingly. “… Don't suppose you'd consider having lunch with me one day. My treat. Someplace nice. On the company, so don't feel guilty—you should see what I can do with an expense report.”

I'd love it. I gave her my phone number.

“Don't lose my card now,” she said, turning, smiling. “I just had these printed up. I'm giving them out to people
on the street,
for christ's sakes. I just love handing out my card. You should see me on a commuter flight to Boston—I'm slinging those cards out like a blackjack dealer, up and down the aisles. Connie can WORK a plane, believe me.” Another clasp of my hand. “I'm looking forward to lunch. Don't forget me now. Seeya, kid.” And out she went, with her patient escort in tow. Was Mr. Escort one of the thirty-year-old virgins she had following her around? Never saw him again (or for that matter many of Connie's male friends I met, and there was a reason for that but let's not get ahead of the story).

Lisa was happy about Connie for me, Emma was not.

“Great,” Emma said. “Dissension in the ranks. What is the appeal for you guys about slimy capitalist con-artists on Wall Street? All those people should be prosecuted for peacetime crimes. They have nothing better to do than finance apartheid, war after war, Republican after Republican, and they never pay taxes. Usury. Money-lending. Read Ezra Pound.”

Pound was a Nazi-sympathizing Fascist who should have been shot for treason, said Lisa impatiently.

“A few personality defects, I'll admit,” Emma said.

When Connie called to “finalize” our lunch date, Emma answered, put the phone down rudely, came into my room and said, “It's the Jewess.”

Racism doesn't become you, Emma.

“I'm not anti-Semitic, Gil. I'm anti-Connie. I'd make fun of whomever you'd go out with, traitor that you are. Loyalty to Emma
one inch
deep. Go ahead: Send me over the edge, commit me to Bellevue. Let me say just two words to you before you sleep with her and I want you to think about it when you press your naked bodies against one another, when you feel the heat of another human being against your
burning
erogenous zones…”

Yes?

“Premature ejaculation.”

Emma didn't want to meet Connie, see Connie, hear about Connie, take phone messages for Connie. Fortunately for Emma (not so for me), Connie and I had two lunches and then she seemed to drop out of sight, no explanation … me, affairless, as usual. Whatever she thought she liked maybe she didn't like, or maybe something she wanted wasn't there—take your pick of depressing theories I was contemplating.

I guess I'm not the type of guy a real woman wants, I told Lisa, while we were washing dishes. (You're thinking: Is that all you two did, wash dishes all summer? It was our only time to talk, the clattering and banging of pots covering our intrigues. Emma couldn't be trusted to do dishes—coffee cups reminded her of T. S. Eliot lines, the kitchen knife was a viable means of suicide, it was an exercise—like, she said, her life—in futility. They would just get dirty again.) I think I must appear too immature or something, I went on. Too wimpy. Monica always kept asking, ‘Are you gay? Are you sure you're not gay?' Maybe I am gay—

Lisa put down a pot with a clang: “I
hate
this kind of talk, Gil,” she said rather passionately. “Just because Emma's a sinking ship doesn't mean we have to follow her down. She's got us all spooked. If you're gay, you're gay, but not because Emma keeps telling you you're sexually inadequate with women. She makes me feel like some kind of slut because I date
one or two
guys a year—this is ridiculous. Her craziness is rubbing off on us. And that's why I'm moving out when the lease is up.”

Oh no. Really?

“Really. It's not fun anymore, it's not productive, I am not going to be responsible for someone who needs to be in the hands of an analyst; I'm tired of feeling guilty for having fun in front of Emma.”

But move out? Well, you said that last year, Lisa, when you were going out with, um …

“Yeah, what's-his-name. But this is different and I've made up my mind.” Then she turned to me, putting a sudsy hand on my arm. “This has nothing to do with
you,
Gil, and no matter what we're going to keep getting together and doing things and remain friends always. C'mon, you don't think things are a barrel of laughs around here anymore, do you?”

No, but …

“I'm going to move in with Bob.”

I thought you two didn't get along so well.

“Well enough. He makes a good salary too, he lives better than we do. I want to stay at home and paint sometimes, not scrap for money every day. Besides I want to try him out and see if we could be married.”

MARRIED?

“Yes,” she said, looking into the suds absently. “For kids. I would like to have a kid. And if art doesn't work out and I have to work at marketing companies or advertising agencies or whatever, I would want to have the kid about now, raise him for a while and then join the workforce rather than interrupt any progress I might make, go through a maternity-leave hassle, lose my place in the company.”

Lisa was just twenty-five. All of this seemed remarkably mature and cold and deliberate.

“I'm twenty-five going on the-rest-of-my-life,” she answered, “and I'm tired of not having any stability. My life's just bumbling from spot to spot at the moment.”

These are reasons for marrying, I said, but not good ones. Did she love Bob?

“What? Do you expect TV-movie, romance-novel love? I was madly in love with Joey Feingold in high school—I bet if I saw him today I'd still go ga-ga, get weak in the knees. But we don't marry Joey Feingold. That's schoolgirl stuff, swept away, knight in shining armor, it's crap, late Victorian crap that grew up alongside the cult of the virgin bride, a bill of goods, Gil. My feminist seminars taught me one thing, not to expect a man to answer all your problems, be everything to you. I'm looking for security, comfort, companionship…”

And as she went on I stopped listening. There was the fact: we as a threesome were through. And another fact: Lisa and I as a twosome were through. Married people NEVER did right by their friends (make that: DO right, I've still never seen evidence to the contrary; the only couples a single can deal with are couples you met already encoupled). And Emma and I were through too. We couldn't make it without a stable third like Lisa who balanced our asininities with sense and practicality. Yes, the Apartment's Point of No Return.

And with this in mind, I threw myself on the company of my theater friends. I would hang out with them, my co-workers, my fellow artistes, I would make my lot in life at my place beside them … I had a core crowd, of course, developed by this time at the Venice—people dropped in and out of it, but it was down to this handful: Julie (Mama Bunny) who was sweet but real offendable and sensitive so you had to watch what you said around her. She had a boyfriend so we didn't see her much socially. There was Monica (who actually had become a real Ack-tress, fairly insufferable after two large roles placed her far and away ahead of her contemporaries, her
ŕ
esu
ḿ
e gaining respectability by the season, and she fell into wild-and-crazy theater stories and could be real tiresome), Tim (a techie-for-life, intelligent-looking with glasses, soft-spoken, sweet but a bit of a bore), Donna (an overweight black woman full of talent and noise and life who either cheered us up or wore us out, was always “on,” one of those dynamic theater-types no one ever gets to know really), Crandell (handsome actor who got more roles than me and then had gotten old somehow, fell out of favor, too limited perhaps, a little too cardboard, so when he was drunk he was bitter, but otherwise a nice guy). These were my friends.

Emma got quieter. Slept most of the day. Watched TV incessantly while she was up. Lisa avoided the apartment like the plague, out every night with Bob.

“She's moving out for Bob,” Emma said, staring at the TV one night when I walked nearby. “She told me.”

I know. I guess we'll all end up going our separate ways.

I had thought Emma would beg me to stay with her, not desert her, I expected it. But she didn't. She just kept watching the TV.

Nobody loved me—that was damn obvious. Connie should have, but she didn't. Lisa should have, Emma—of all people—should have but no one thought of these things. It would have been hard to say on some nights who was worse off, me or Emma. Emma was born to be depressed, I was not. I was a generally happy person who was very unhappy. Each night as I lay awake, looking at the ceiling, every breath would become a sigh, it would creep over me again, my loneliness, my meaning nothing to anybody. I would be so loyal to someone, so good to them, I would make them laugh all the time and forgive them anything and as for sex, if they wanted sex, if they'd just have it with me, I would make sure they didn't get
out of bed
all day, I would RUIN them for other people, I would show them what passion was put on this earth for, and all this was just centimeters below the surface, it was just waiting there to be released and I did not comprehend WHY it should be no one wanted to take this from me, to make even a token pass over these qualities.

And so I'd sit there in the apartment and could not watch TV or talk to Emma or listen to the radio or read because all these things were awful, and there was the newspaper but I always read the newspaper at the theater and I found myself reading things over again until I threw the paper aside, so I thought, well, go get something to eat, go take a walk, go breathe air, move, do something, go into town, it's a nice night, so I went to the Village and poked around, made my way to Baldo's for a slice of pizza. I ordered and got a slice and I saw my reflection in the glass window and there I was eating a slice of pizza and I saw myself chewing automatically like a cow or some subhuman something and I thought: why bother putting food in your mouth and living another day? Which was odd, as I don't think things like that, I am a happy American person. And as I ate the crusts I looked back to the window and decided I had a double chin now and I was getting older, not on death's doorstep, but older, and looking it for once, and there I was chewing bland flavorless pizza looking fat and washed out in the fluorescent light of Baldo's window reflection and I was all alone while everyone else in the world was out on a date or laughing or dancing or having fun or experiencing love in some form somewhere—wait, focus on the thought: making love somewhere, in each other's arms, touching, another human being's face and lips just THAT far away before you kissed them, and this wasn't some special occasion but what some people, MOST people did every night, and there I was fat and older chewing on a pizza all alone, and instead of a simple
I am very lonely,
which would have sufficed, the mind burst through some kind of previously untried barrier and it told me:
I have been lonely all my life.