“That’s what I like about America,” said Susan, taking a deep drag of her cigarette. “Lots of free entertainment.”
And the weekend was off and running. To draw out a chart of the complications would look like one of those flowcharts for a giant bureaucracy. Considering how much time we discussed who was sleeping with, wanted to sleep with, couldn’t sleep with, hated to sleep with whom, nobody really slept with anybody. What a lot of talk.
Final memory of the 4th: Lisa drunk, screaming out, completely happy, “Hey everybody raise their hands who likes living in the USA.”
Groans all around. Tom raises his though. Susan sneers, “Well, since Roe vs. Wade, the place is not the most backward of the planet’s peoples.” Emma—I was waiting for it, the inevitable savage comment—merely put her hand up. “Nyeh, I guess so. Compared to Russia and all. Hey guys, the evening’s young. Any of you people up for a moonlit walk on the beach?”
1977
YOU want to know what my major accomplishment was in 1977? I washed the dishes. Me and Lisa, every evening. Sometimes she’d do the suds and the washing, sometimes she did the drying and the putting away. A good place to talk, the sink.
“So you’re guaranteed three parts onstage this year, huh?” Lisa asked distractedly, swirling the dishes around.
That was what Dewey Dennis (that jerk) promised me. I’d made a big lunge for stardom during the fall and got in two crowd scenes. But no spoken lines yet. It doesn’t count as your debut until you say something. I auditioned for three other theaters’ spring seasons as well: Mama’s Home, about a terminally ill patient back to make peace with her family before she dies. There’s a role in it for a twenty-five-year-old rebellious son. I would have been perfect for that. There was also Folks These Days Got No Time For de Blues—did you catch it at the Tribeca Rep? There was a white Southern aristocratic son who had to throw an old black man off his land, and I’d have been great as the bastard son. How about Dalliances, British spinsterish librarian meets American grad student for summer term of discovery and revelation? We could fill out this book with plays I auditioned for.
“Well you can’t lose hope,” said Lisa, a little hollowly. “Look at my painting, for example. Am I in a gallery yet? Has the Whitney Biennial called? Leo Castelli? Maybe they called when I was out. Don’t know what you’re worried about. You got onstage in that Billy Can You Hear Me? thing…”
Which was about autistic adults. I was an extra. Not much dialogue, but my name in the program.
“We’ll hit the big time eventually.”
Emma these days was fond of pronouncing: “We’re all goddam NOWHERE. The abyss!” Typical of Emma, this was overstatement. Lisa wasn’t nowhere—she was drawing for another marketing agency—and I wasn’t nowhere either—I was working full time, on the books, in an off-Broadway theater. What it was was a holding pattern. It wasn’t success but it wasn’t failure—like the doldrums, no winds blew, no current moved, not a ship in sight. It is easier to be absolutely nowhere (“The philistines! The world’s against me!” someone like Emma can rage) than to be in the dreaded holding pattern. Because to get out of the holding pattern, you have to risk losing your place and having to go back to square one. Lisa tried to explain this to Emma one night and there was still fallout from that argument. Dishwashing continued:
“Emma’s crazy, I’m telling you,” said Lisa. “She needs an analyst or a psychiatrist or a good spanking, which I’m about ready to give her.”
Well, I said, it’s been a rough year for us all, and Emma’s in a high-strung period, lots of problems, and we ought to be sympathetic—
“NO. No. I’m through being sympathetic for her problems, which are without end, Gil, face it. Does she trouble herself over our needs? I’m depressed as shit lately too. We never sit down and go on and on and on about poor Lisa’s bad day, Lisa’s problems.”
Did Lisa want us to?
“No, not really. I just would like some mention, some token concern.”
Lisa, I am here. Talk to me.
She stopped washing dishes. “I can’t tell you this.”
What? Yes you can.
She stood there, thinking for a minute. “Well I’ll tell you this. I was feeling utterly rotten about a day or two ago—I mean, if there had been a bottle of sleeping pills we might have been in trouble.”
I had noticed.
“So there I am on the subway, right?” Lisa mechanically washed a dish, over and over. “And there I am…” And she paused again. “And I just started crying, tears rolling down my face. And I tried to straighten up but then I sort of saw myself crying on a subway and being miserable, and that made me cry more. So I turned away and got up and walked to another car with less people and damn if I didn’t start bawling again. I was hopeless.”
What was it?
She turned from me to look in the dishwater. “Oh I don’t know—things. Haven’t you just ever felt like crying?”
Lately, every other day.
“Well the next thing I know, this woman, this old motherly Jewish woman sits down beside me and touches my shoulder. And I say it’s all right, and I apologized, but she was one of these good souls, you know? One of those Real People, and she said, honey, get off at Rockefeller Center next stop and I’ll get you a coffee—what you need dearie is a coffee. I mean this woman was … was so good.”
Yeah.
“Which made me cry even more, that here I was, nothing really wrong with my life, bawling my eyes out and that some other human being had come to my rescue on the goddam subway and that made me even more pathetic to myself. So the tears went on and on. I can’t believe I’m telling you this.”
I took the dish from her, the one she had been washing forever, and began drying it repeatedly. The cleanest dish in the world.
“And so she bought me a coffee at this cookie stand and she made me take a sip and told me a nice girl like you, life will get better, I was young, I was pretty, my life was ahead of me, nothing could be too bad. I felt so ashamed for all this attention, so I told her…” She lifted a sudsy hand to her brow, a gesture of disbelief. “… so I told her I had just had an abortion.”
You told her that?
“I had to justify why I was carrying on so. She told me now now, dearie, you young people’s lives move too fast, but it was over now and I’d be all right. I just sat there and let this woman mother me for a half hour and then I insisted she go on her way—I cannot tell you how embarrassed I was. I mean, I needed the cry, needed the attention—I don’t really regret it, I just…”
Yeah, I know.
“Please put that silly dish in the cupboard,” she said, and we moved to new subjects.
We were all so unhappy that year. You know what it was? I have a friend who says every three to four years you re-examine why you are in New York, and all you can see are the bad points and these New York Crises are cyclical. Every three to four years you question your sanity, your being there. I think we were simultaneously re-examining ourselves, wondering why we were putting up with that awful city. And god was it hot. That was the hottest summer there ever was—check the almanac and see—and I remember seeing the Coca-Cola sign in Times Square read 109 degrees. Crazy. And the city got proportionately crazier with each rising degree.
“It is hot in ways it has never been hot before,” said Emma, adjusting the giant thirty-inch windowsill-sized fan to blow exclusively on herself. “I bow down before The Fan, I will serve it as my master,” she said, offering up her arms for the breeze.
“Your time is almost up,” Lisa said, looking with a dead seriousness at the watch.
“But can’t we share it, Lisa? Friends like us, you and I together, Emma who loves you—”
“You’ll die first. I want my ten minutes of unalloyed Fan and I will not be deprived.”
Fan-politics and who got The Fan and for how long and ways and means of dividing and alloting time before The Fan continued through June until Emma returned home with a revelatio
n.
“Guess what, gang,” Emma said, expecting us to snap to attention. “We’re going on a little trip outside.”
Riiight, I said.
“Oh you’re gonna be sorry when I tell you the wonders mine eyes have seen,” Emma went on like a TV evangelist. “I’ve just seen the prototype of the new subway car—a clean, new shiny chrome subway car on the F line.”
Lisa: “Go throw yourself under it.”
“Ah, these fools, ye of little faith, the lukewarm I shall spew out—”
“I am anything but lukewarm, Emma. I’m boiling, I am fricasseed, I am on a spit.”
“All right,” said Emma, making for the door. “I will go ride the F train by myself … the air-conditioned F train.”
Now we’d have stolen pensioners’ checks and sold drugs to children to get cool at that point, so we followed her zombie-like to the Carroll Street station and waited for this alleged F train to pass back through. Many trains passed by, none of them shining F prototypes, all of them dirty and hot and disgusting. The metal columns and steel beams of the subway platform were hot to the touch. The air was its usual mixture of vermin, urine, the smoke from burning trash lying against the third rail. Tension was high.
“You have two more trains, Emma,” said Lisa calmly, “until the slaughter begins.”
Three trains later it arrived … the stylish pink glowing F logo coming into focus through the darkness. Once inside the new train we had a Subway High—it was cool, ice-cool, no, even COLD in fact, it was like airport lounge and Holiday Inn motel-room cold, dry and crisp and restoring, resuscitating. We sat and watched Brooklyner after Brooklyner stumble in, first noticing the cleanliness, then the look would transform, there would be a glow in the eyes; it was cold, wonderfully beautifully cold; there was a look of peace …
And so this got to be a common procedure on weekends through that miserable summer. The train to Coney Island was fun and elevated over Brooklyn so you got to see things, and at Coney, which on occasion had a breeze and lots of greasy junk-food and plenty of interest, we would get out … but only sometimes. Riding the air-conditioned A train we would get out at Hoyt-Schermerhorn and run across the platform for another prototype train to come back and take us away again. In that interim we’d get all hot again and we’d debate if Hoyt-Schermerhorn was the coolest station to wait at, and after that we debated how Brooklyners pronounced Hoyt-Schermerhorn. We could have ridden, and did a few times, to Flushing which was the other end of the line, but that took us to Manhattan which meant it would get crowded with hot people, and plus it was all underground which made it dull—we wanted to be above Brooklyn, looking down into streets and neighborhoods and softball games and this vast cemetery that the train passes over and into streets called Avenue X (Emma suggested a best-seller: “He went to college and now he’s back to improve his old Brooklyn neighborhood; his first stop the blackboard jungle, the public school in the toughest part of Brooklyn—Avenue X … he fights them, they fight back, but soon they come to love him…”). We listened to Brooklyners talk and we heard one girl get on with her friend and they were talking about boys and she said he was never any good and his family wasn’t any good but one should expect that because he lives on Avenue V and nothing good ever came from Avenue V, and we had to wonder how so much information could be compressed into “Avenue V” and how that could be so different from “Avenue W.”
“Creative, weren’t they, these street-namers,” Emma said. “Numbers and letters. And when it gets too high in the numbers, they start over again with avenues or boulevards, so you can have 23rd Street, 23rd Road, 23rd Avenue, 23rd Boulevard. They go out of their way to make you anonymous in New York—they’ve got it down to a psychology.”
One of these times we got off in Coney Island, which is a bit of a downer all by itself, a faded resort that had its height in the 1890s, now a collection of burnt-down roller coasters, towers and scaffoldings and amusement park machinery standing deserted and overgrown, a ghost town of a past generation’s good times, now squalid (which is part of its cult charm, I guess) and dirty; the barkers are old and used up and the fortune tellers are toothless crones (Emma figured that they weren’t very good fortune tellers or they never would have allowed themselves to stay in this profitless, touristless wasteland), all the paint is peeling, the painted clowns and balloons are rusty, tattered streamers, abandoned bathhouses and ballrooms, all turn-of-the-century baroque, once gilded and once very very fine.
“We could do the disco bump cars,” said Lisa. “It’s air conditioned in there.”
Naaahhhh.
“How about the New York Aquarium?” Lisa tried again.
“I feel sorry for the whales,” Emma said, kicking the trash beneath her on the sidewalk. “All those dirty yucky fish in dirty water, dead things floating about. Don’t have the money anyway.”
Ferris wheel?
“Last time I went up in that I had a serious mortality crisis,” Emma said. “Ditto for the Cyclone.”
It was hot and I suggested we head back to the subway station and catch another F train.
“This place usually does it for me,” Emma said, looking around, “but today it’s depressing the shit out of me.”
Lisa and I felt the same thing.
“This is a Despair Park, not an amusement park,” Emma said, knowing it wasn’t a funny joke. We stopped before a boarded-up hotel. “That makes me sad,” Emma continued. “Honeymoon Hotel. Look how nice it must have been. I bet if you got in there you’d find some fine furnishings, ceilings, railings.”
Lisa added, “Think how much life was lived here, how many girls got pregnant under the Boardwalk and had to marry their children’s daddy, and how many servicemen came here for a last weekend before going off and…” She shrugged.
“Dying,” Emma said, finishing her thought.
“Will we be more depressed if we get drunk?” Lisa asked.
The Sands Bar and Grill. A beach motif—fishtanks, a starfish or two above the liquor shelf, a fishing net which had fallen in a heap atop a high cabinet. Old men smoked and looked into their drinks in the corner, the barman was indifferent to our being there, figuring one look and we’d turn around and go.
“This place is gonna cheer me up loads,” Emma said, selecting a table.
Lisa got the barman’s attention and ordered three Jack Daniel’s.
“We’re going to get not a little drunk, I see,” Emma said when Lisa arrived at the table with the booze.
A worn-looking woman emerged from behind a curtain of aquamarine beads, noticing there were people in her bar for a change. She went to the till and got some coins, went to the jukebox and put some quarters in, making some selections. A big band number, before our time, came on, something sad with a saxophone, almost upbeat enough for one of those stately slowdances.
“Wasn’t that sweet?” Lisa said, watching the woman then go behind the bar and straighten up, run the rag along the bar.
“She expected more out of life,” Emma suggested as we drank. “Here she is in the Sands Bar and Grill, spiffing it up for the only customers this month.”
“Well she might be happy, you never know,” Lisa said.
But we did know: the woman was miserable.
“Can only afford one more after this, you guys,” Lisa said, and I said much the same. “Gotta get back to town,” Lisa added.
“Another date with Bob?” Emma asked. She was resigned to Lisa’s dating by this time.
“Well I said I’d call.”
“There are phones here in Coney Island.”
Stand him up, I suggest. Stay with us this evening.
“Okay,” she said, not needing much convincing. “It’s been crummy between us anyhow. I’m about done with him.”
“Well at least someone’s there willing to…” Emma grappled for words. “To … do normal things for you, touch you, molest your body.”
“Our sexlife sucks, if that’s any consolation to you,” Lisa said, after
a sip.
“I like to hear that. Makes me believe I’m not missing anything.”
More drinking, more silence.
“I’m still poor,” Lisa reminded us.
Emma said she had money as she just had cashed her temp-work check and she said if necessary she’d spend it all on getting us drunk. “Easy to live this way,” she added, with only the minorest inflection of exaggerated drama, “when you’re not going to live very much longer.”
“Oh not that again. Cut that out,” Lisa said.
I told Emma she was too young to die.
“It’s never too young to die,” she said. “The headaches aren’t going away, in fact, they’re getting worse. Every time I bend down, every time I run to catch the train, every little bit of stress and BANG my head is in a vice. Look, I’m being calm about this. Not hysterical, considering I have an inoperable brain tumor.”
I insisted Emma did not have an inoperable brain tumor.
“Maybe an operable one? One of those operations where you don’t come back with any identity, have to learn the alphabet over again, talk baby talk for five years. That’s gonna go down well in the apartment, I can just see it.”
Lisa shook her head. “I’m not changing diapers, I just wanted you to note that right now.”
“Go ahead, laugh, laugh, it’s not your chronic headaches.”
I suggested some possibilities: sinus infection, migraines, stress, eyestrain, overwork, overworry …
“Brain cancer, brain tumors, a number of mental illnesses.”
“Have it your way,” said Lisa, waving Emma aside. “I’m not going to humor you. Go see a doctor.”
Emma Who Saved My Life Page 17
