Emma Who Saved My Life

by Wilton Barnhardt

  2. The You’re-Like-A-Sister-To-Me Woman who is like a sister to you. Now you should just never NEVER go to bed with a woman who is your friend but you feel zilchola for sexually because at that early stage in your sexual life it’s going to mess with you in a big way. I don’t think young guys these days feel compelled anymore to sleep with their wonderful female friends who don’t happen to be lucky enough to look like Vogue models. But I did. I was the Sensitive Young Man of the New Age, struggling toward enlightenment, dealing with outmoded but latent sexism, trying to meet the New Woman on her own turf, pursuing a caring, nurturing relationship with someone I admired for her mind, someone as exciting to me as Mamie Eisenhower.

  And this was where I got depressed. What I wanted to come along was a woman with whom the sex would be as stupendous as the intellectual companionship, and she had a name, the concept of her is legend, she’s out there … the Quality Item.…

  Someone should have lowered a sign saying: you think Early-Twenties Heterosexual Average Middle-Class American Male Problems are bad, just wait until the Late-Twenties Heterosexual Average Middle-Class American Male Problems strike, chiefly, getting ANYONE to sleep with you. It is never as easy as college EVER AGAIN. As a younger guy I was obsessed with why things weren’t 100% perfect, why sex wasn’t all they said it would be, whether I should trade in someone good for someone potentially perfect, what the other guys were thinking. God, you hit the early thirties and you … you just want someone to have a hamburger with, you know? You develop an affection for human frailty and women who look like human beings live in their bodies, and you find yourself wanting to hug the middle-aged woman on the bus or get to the plain-looking sixteen-year-old before her tenuous adolescent confidence is defeated, you stop thinking of Playboy Centerfolds, Ideal Women and pedestals and rectifying all that’s imperfect and disillusioning in the world on the battleground of a relationship with some poor unsuspecting GIRL. But back to Lisa: Lisa was such a ticket, and I knew it from the moment I saw her. She was

  3. The Quality Item who is, to repeat, the first woman you meet in whom erotic beauty meets the class act, the girl with the brains, admirable, adorable in every way plus she is of an order of beauty, intelligence, worth, sense, taste, etc., that is usually—and here is the key, so listen up—OUT OF YOUR LEAGUE. The male ego’s gotta make a beeline for this one and has to be loved back in return, or that’s it for you, you’ve had it, you’re nothing, you’re condemned to a life of barfly ex-cheerleaders, one-night stands, misery. I know guys who spent a decade pursuing their Quality Item Fixation—no one (thank god) is as important as that first, hotly pursued Quality Item. After you get her and see whoopdiedoo, no big deal (or marry her and live happily ever after—it happens I guess), you don’t run after women on pedestals anymore. Women, yes; pedestals, no.

  And so there I was that day in the Village, just two hours off the bus, my suitcase a block away in her Carmine Street sublet, I was sitting at an open-air cafe as the light grew longer and more orange, the evening turned a touch cooler, and there was Lisa (who was just soooo New York to me, even though she’d been there three months), adventurous and rebellious (she had moved to New York City, like me, over the objections of her parents) and talented and trying to make it as a painter, doing commercial art jobs and temporary work by day, and she was in the Village (which was a distillation of all that was wild and exciting in New York) and I wanted to make my life the equal of hers, I wanted to be an actor working in New York, an actor of some success and note, and I would do it so perhaps there would come a time, somewhere in the future, that the Quality Item would look up at me from across our shared breakfast table and say: yes, it is you, isn’t it? YOU’RE THE ONE AFTER ALL, GIL. You are MY Quality Item.

  “A man showed me his penis on the bus yesterday,” Lisa said, staring out blankly into the square.

  Yeah?

  “This town’s a toilet bowl, Gil,” she said lazily, almost stifling a yawn. “Mayor Beame says it’s the Big Apple but it’s just as often the Big Toilet Bowl. I was reading today some expert saying the city was going to have to declare bankruptcy soon. If that happens it’ll sink even deeper in its craziness. But Emma says you have to learn to love the squalor,” she added, taking a deep drag on the second cigarette in the Nixon pack. She laughed a private laugh, thinking again about Emma, soon to be the third person in our sublet. “You’re gonna love Emma,” she said. “You won’t know what hit you.”

  There was a flurry of pigeons in the square across the street from us as this old baglady tossed up a dirty hotdog bun, watching it fall, waiting for all the pigeons to swoop around it; then shooing them away, retrieving what was left of the bun, throwing it into the air again, repeating the process with a cackle.

  “That’s the Pigeon Lady,” said Lisa, familiar already with the locals. “She goes around in the gutters and in the trash cans hunting for bread crumbs for her babies, her pigeons in Father Demo Square.” The woman cackled again, scuffling amid the fluttering pigeons. “And look,” Lisa said, nudging me, “there’s a weird one.”

  This old, grizzled man, like so many of the old downtown bums, a scarecrow-man, tattered clothes, gray with unwashed years of soot and street-sleeping, would go up behind someone and lecture them, yell at them, use impassioned gestures, like a Southern senator, except no sound ever came out—it was just a mute pantomime. If anyone turned around, he mouthed “Sorry” meekly and backed away, only to begin haranguing again. We watched him do this until the man reading a paperback got up and left, irritated.

  “Yet I don’t feel that sorry for him,” said Lisa, musing. “It’s hard to feel sorry for someone whose delusions are … I dunno, authoritarian. What gets you is someone like Dolly.”

  Eventually I saw Dolly. Dolly was the Queen of the Pathetic, one of the regulars on Carmine Street. She was this obese black woman who searched the trash cans of New York City for tattered dresses—thin women’s dresses, little girl clothes, baby clothes even—and she would parade around, holding her find up, press it to her chest, smooth it out, and stop you as you walked by: “You like my dress, my pretty dress? I’m gonna wear this dress. It’s good on me, my new dress, it looks so good on me. You like my dress?” And so forth. After a month you got used to the sounds under your window, six in the morning, “My name is Dolly and this is my pretty new dress. You like my new dress?”

  Lisa sent up a hand for the waitress again, who turned as Lisa mouthed “Check.” “No tip for you, baby,” said Lisa under her breath. “I learned a lesson the other day,” she went on. “I was on the subway and there was this kid, twenty-one or so I guess, but he looked like a sad twelve-year-old. And as the subway got going under the river to Queens where I was looking for a studio to paint in, he got up and, looking weak and sickly, gave this speech: ‘I’m Tim and, like, I’m a heroin addict and, like, it happened in Vietnam and I’m sorry about it but I gotta ask you people for money ’cause, well, like, I gotta eat and, you know, get some stuff. I don’t wanna commit no crimes or nuthin’…’ Gil, I tell you, my guilty white bourgeois heart went out to this kid and I dug deep and gave him a dollar and I looked around me, and all these cold bastard New Yorkers weren’t even looking or listening, pretending he wasn’t there. When they looked they looked at me as if I was the weird one for giving him money.”

  Well it’s a jungle out there.

  “Yeah right,” she said, rolling her eyes, “and that kid was a con, because last week I saw him again doing a routine about being thrown out of retarded school and his mother being sick and in intensive care and how he can’t take care of his mama. I mean, if you didn’t know, this stuff would break your heart. This one woman across from me just coughed up a handful of coins. I was thinking, hm, first week in town, huh?”

  Strange city.

  “This town,” she said lighting cigarette number three, “particularly the crime, the streetcrud harassing you, the panhandlers and the goddam hippie leftovers—it gets to you, as you trudge back fr
om your $2.50 an hour job, you know? If you stay here long enough, you wanna form a vigilante squad, you want Dirty Harry to come clean the streets. You’re ready for a Goldwater comeback.”

  Now now.

  “Three months ago I was a McGovern Liberal. I would have given my body to Eugene McCarthy. Now I sound like my mother back in Milwaukee, for christ’s sakes.”

  Speaking of family, how was her brother?

  “Don’t ask,” she said. “he’s still doing his Love Generation routine in San Francisco. It’s just like Washington Square, over a block or two. We’ll walk through it on the way to see Emma. I mean, hey, that stuff’s nice, beads and sitar music and people selling earrings made out of tinfoil, but come on, you can’t keep living that way. Aren’t you glad we had our older brothers and sisters to do all that dumb shit so we didn’t have to?”

  The waitress slung the check on the table: “Have a nice day.”

  “Well I wasn’t planning on it,” said Lisa, “but if you insist.”

  It was great then, that afternoon—I hadn’t one ounce of an idea of the sheer grind of living in New York, day to day. Walking around Washington Square, with Lisa narrating, seeing the colony of activists, artists, jewelry-makers, guitarists, people selling beads and African batiked cloths, pottery, their knitting, the pamphleteers, people waving petitions, Jews for Jesus, brochures about federally funded abortions and harassment of homosexuals by police; someone pinned a flower on me asking for a donation to the Temple of Universal Love, whatever that was; there were the better-dressed hippies sidling up and offering one-word drug pitches (“Snow? Hash? Weed? Pills? Horse?”), the teenage juggler with a hat full of coins in front of him because he was very good, the buskers harmonizing only half as good as Peter, Paul and Mary on the song they were attempting, the ill-nourished runaway who was beyond persuasion, circles under his eyes, pallid, on something, “Can you give me some money, man, huh, can you?” Lisa put a quarter into his hands, thinking perhaps of her brother in San Francisco (who got messed up really bad on drugs), and he pocketed the money without acknowledgment and stumbled through the crowd, intent on the next handout. Washington Square in 1974, the last hurrah of the dying ’60s. Even more mysterious than how the Love Generation came about in the U S of A, God’s Country, was how completely it was to disappear without a trace by the mid-’70s. Yeah, I know, a lot of the “idealism” was self-serving and self-indulgent, but you look around now at every smart, talented person rushing to get in the door of the nearest investment bank and you can’t help but think back on August evenings as late as 1974 when there was something beyond the color and the music, a spirit (I know, yucky word, but what else do you call it?) that the United States might have done well to hang on to a little longer. This seems a long time ago.

  “Playtime’s over,” said Lisa, pulling at my sleeve, “we’ll come back and mess around later. Let’s get something to eat.”

  I followed Lisa as we approached the eastern edge of the Village, where things began to look even seedier, the shops untrendy; the posters and signs turned more ethnic (Ukrainian and Italian, with misspelled English translations underneath), the people a little more worn-looking either from having to work grueling daily jobs, or from being unemployed.

  “We’re headed toward Baldo’s Pizza, if I can remember where it is. That’s where Emma works.”

  In a pizza place?

  “Yeah,” said Lisa, “because poetry-writing doesn’t bring in too much. Gotta support your habit.”

  Was Emma any good?

  Lisa slowed the pace a bit. “Yeah I think so. Then I don’t know anything about poetry. Or theater for that matter—so you’re safe too from critical opinion.”

  Did Emma know about art?

  “Good god, Emma knows about everything. More than me about art, more than you about theater. She’s scary. Sometimes I have second thoughts about asking her to move in as our third—I’m going to feel so stupid.”

  Tell me again, I said, how you met Emma.

  “I put all that in a letter to you —what were you doing with my letters?”

  Lisa NEVER wrote ANYTHING TO ANYBODY—pay no attention to her.

  “How I met Emma?” Lisa paused and decided which rundown, dangerous-looking street to take. “I met her at a Susan-party. She’s staying with Susan—poor girl—until she moves in with us. Emma wanted to meet you first before she moved in, though, so make a good impression … we’ve passed this porno bookshop thing before haven’t we?”

  We found it after fifty wrong turns: BALDO’S PIZZA, in flashing pink neon. Inside there was a waiting area with green and white and red patterned floortiles, Italian flags, several posters of a national soccer team on the walls, postcards from awful places, and one-dollar bills glued to the cash register under a sheet of faded yellow tape. There was a sample pizza out on display that looked like some modern art conceptual-thing, all dried out, the tomato and cheese a surreal red and yellow, all sort of glazed over in grease.

  “You think it looks bad,” said a woman behind the counter, “you oughta taste it.”

  And that was Emma Gennaro.

  She was covered in flour (one got the impression more flour lingered in the air than ever went into the pizza at Baldo’s), but I could still make out that she was about an inch taller than me—a tall girl, lean, angular, with long straight brown hair that got tossed back angrily a lot, or in disgust—a trademark gesture. I’m not good at describing people. Just think of a pretty Italian-American girl who is not an immediate knockout—not Sophia Loren—but in five minutes or so, after getting used to her, she’s quite striking, made very striking by her hand gestures and expressions that seem to take up all the space in the room. Give her ten minutes and you’d be convinced she was a beauty, but now that I think back I’m not so sure anymore—the photos could go either way. I’m not much help, am I?

  Gee, I haven’t described Lisa either. Let’s see … Lisa was the pretty girl in high school who was popular and Class Secretary, looked like she belonged in an Ivy League college recruitment catalogue, the girl in the stylish outfit—yes, she wore outfits—sitting by the river that reflected willows and rowers and swans; and she looked like the kind of girl who might be the only cool member in her sorority but dropped out of it once it got too cliquish and stupid but she might not mind your knowing that she got into it in the first place. You could see her as a woman in business, but you could take her camping too—she wasn’t conservative-looking, really, just clean and bright and dressed tastefully, just not her own tastes. Even when she had a punk phase (that’s later on) she looked stylish, nothing too outrageous or jarring. It doesn’t seem like someone who would want to be an artist, does it? She should own a bookstore or something.

  “What is this, the UN?” yelled a big man with hairy shoulders who stormed out of the back room in a U-necked t-shirt, he too covered in flour. “I pay you Emma to talk or to dish out pizza?”

  “Yeah, you pay me next to nothing to dish out the worst pizza in town,” she said, waving a finger at him provocatively.

  “Whadya mean woise pizza?”

  “I mean when I wanna pizza I go down the street for some; that’s what I mean by the woise pizza.”

  When she wanted to, Emma could really lay on the Italian-American routine, the singing insults, the exaggerations and drama, the gestures. She was a quarter Italian and she told me the family history a few times, full of hard work and immigration and American Dream and bootstraps and fingers being worked to the bone. Gennaro is Neapolitan, but in the late 1800s her family moved north so they could make something of themselves, married Milanese, then took on America, Ellis Island and all that, settled in New Jersey, then Indianapolis as of the last generation, her hometown. Catholic guilt? “Nah,” she’d say, “I wish I had been brought up stricter—I’d have an excuse for being so screwed up. I went to a suburban Catholic church, never confessed anything, went to mass at Easter and Christmas.” Any longings for the Old Country? “What old coun
try?” she’d ask. “New Jersey? I wish I had had a richer ethnic upbringing—it’d give me an excuse for being so screwed up. My folks tried hard not to be Italian—I can’t speak Italian worth beans. Some people here in New York get fish on Fridays and Grandma telling folk tales and Grandpa drinking grappa after mass, and all that, but nyehh, I had Indianapolis and shopping malls, Girl Scouts, all kinds of Americana and crap.” Difficult childhood in conservative Indianapolis? “Not really. It’s a nice place, a nice boring place. I was too boring back there to mind it. But I’m interesting now. Sorta wished I had grown up in Little Italy, the mean streets with all the passion and drama.” We looked at each other and simultaneously said: “It’d give me an excuse for being so screwed up.”

  “Do me a favor,” Emma was saying, “and fire me—do me a big fat goddam favor and fire me, get me outa this place, willya do that for me? You think I like seeing people come in here all the time, DYING for a pizza, hungry, starved for pizza, and take a pathetic look at this garbage and whisper, gee, let’s go someplace else, it doesn’t look very good here? Hey, and don’t walk away while I’ma talkin’ to you!”

  Baldo came back from the kitchen: “You’re talkin’ to me?”

  “Yeah I’ma talkin’ to you.”

  Baldo locked Emma in a big embrace, a cloud of flour flying up from the apron: “You gonna apologize ’bout my pizza, ey?”

  “Hands off, hands off—you mess me up like you mess up your pizza…” Both were laughing at this point. “You gotta meet my roommates,” she said, fighting him off. “This is Lisa, this is Gilbert.”

  Baldo tipped his silly Italian pizza-chef’s hat to Lisa. “Her I seen before here. Pretty face, I remember that. You—” He meant me. “—You I don’t know. You livin’ with these two? You are? A baby like you? Gonna be nothin’ left of you, sonny boy. This one’ll kill you—” He recommenced his tickling attack on Emma who was now armed with a garlic shaker.