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 ŕesuḿe 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 a
nd 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.
You should always ignore it when you hear I have been lonely all my life because that’s crap, of course you haven’t, and it’s just a mood, a bad stretch of life and it will go away one of these days. But what staying power I have been lonely all my life has once it gets into your head. I left the pizza place and passed old people, old New York old people, this middle-aged gay guy … yes, I said, like them: I have been lonely all my life. Oh what nonsense. Go home and go to bed. But going home in the early evening meant passing our landlady Mrs. Dellafini, the widow, and I avoided her because she might talk to me and bore me, bore me about her cat, the cat who was her only friend … and I thought, see? There are a lot of us, and like Mrs. Dellafini I have been lonely all my life.
I went and sat in Father Demo Square and could not stop finding depressing things to think about. From out of the blue I thought: Emma will one day break her celibacy streak with someone. It’s bound to happen one day, isn’t it? She said so that time at the beach. And you, Gil, won’t be the guy she breaks it with. Okay. Fine. Right. I am going to go away and make my own life anyway. A theater life. Why, I bet Monica and Tim and Donna and the crew are at McKinley’s Bar on 44th right now. It’s their night to work and they’ll be there. I should go to them. No, I’m in a shit mood. Do you want to sit here and sink deeper into your shit mood? No, I’ll call McKinley’s and tell them I’m coming. I called McKinley’s and they were there and I told them I was coming.
I went down to the subway. Lots of lonely people on the subway, I noticed. Lonely lonely people. I have been lonely—
NO. STOP THINKING THAT.
And so I get to McKinley’s and as I go in I hear them scream and welcome me and usher me back to Our Regular Booth, and I regret this already. I do not like my friends.
“Gil, Gil, you’re just in time,” said Monica, waving me over to sit beside her. “I was just telling them this—you know the story…”
I knew all her stories. She told these stories we all had heard and stranger yet, these stories we were all there for the real-live source of, so when she embellished and exaggerated and turned her co-star’s flub or messed-up line into an onstage twenty-minute ordeal (which we all knew it wasn’t) why didn’t we all speak up and go: Monica, this is crap. Back to reality, please? No, we could not have done that any more than we could have said Tim, you’ll spend your whole life as a techie being taken for granted, and it’s not as if you’re that good, and maybe that explains why you’ll be a lifetime Venice Theater wash-up. And Donna, you’re so busy inventing what you think we want to hear about your make-believe social life that you don’t have time to consider that you don’t really have a social life, or a lover, or a chance of getting one anytime soon. And as for you Crandell—
NO. CUT THIS OUT.
“Gil? Earth to Gil?” Monica laughed her chipmunk laugh. “Earth to Gil?” Did she think that was clever? “Wake up, boy, are you listening?”
Yes Monica, yes Monica.
“And anyway, you know Fuskins, what an old turd he is, so there we are and he flubs the line, he says…”
I look at my friends whom I can’t stand tonight. Donna is laughing at Monica, bated breath, waiting to tell her own story, the story she is making up right now, watch her eyes, she’ll outdo Monica, just watch … Tim is bored. Why doesn’t he say he’s bored? This little circle is his whole life, isn’t it? God, I don’t want to be in that position. Or am I soon to be in that position? I have been lonely all my—
ORDER A DRINK NOW.
“Is something wrong, babe?” Monica was irritated because I usually back her up, set her up, push her stories through. Why do I do that? I don’t like her at all, and my not liking her at all is exacerbated by the fact that I slept with her and now I’m stuck being nice to her. Not that I wouldn’t sleep with her tonight. Maybe I should sleep with her tonight. Would she?
In this spot: an hour, two hours, two and a half hours of boring theater talk, recycled gossip, tales told for Time No. 78.
Tim had to be going. Donna too, with the usual show of her travails of riding to Harlem on the subway, men men men, animals, she’d be lucky to get to her apartment without getting raped, at least that’s what she was hoping for, ha ha ha … Why are you making light of rape, Donna—has it gotten to that? You wouldn’t like to be raped, you really shouldn’t talk like that and be even more pathetic than you are. There was this story they told about Deanne Potter in my high-school class: that Deanne Potter was this really fat and ugly girl (although her face was sort of pretty, you could see it attached to a thinner girl) and she had bad acne and an abusive mother, no father, and that she would go down to Scoville Park and sleep on park benches hoping to be raped by somebody … could that have been true? AND WHY THINK OF IT NOW? What was with me tonight?
It was me and Monica and Crandell now.
“Well,” said Crandell, nodding knowledgeably, squinting like a fireman assessing a burning building, “it’s down to the three of us. Yep, we stick together, you gotta give us that. I can see it, Gil will run the theater one day, Monica will get all the leading female roles, and I’ll get the male ones—we’ll run the place. If we can just hold out.” He nodded again, dramatically. “If we can make it, against the odds—show those bastards.”
What kind of two-bit scene are you playing here, Crandell? What is this soap opera? Why does it get that way with you at this level of drinking, at this time of night? (I’m thinking this, not saying it, of course.)
I will walk Monica home. Monica thinks this is strange, she can walk home by herself, but great, great, she’ll like the company. Away we go to the Upper West Side, up Ninth Avenue.
Talk, talk, talk.
“No Gil, we haven’t seen a lot of each other,” she said at some point. “We used to talk an awful lot, didn’t we?”
Not only talk, I say, nudging her with my elbow, heh-heh.
And then she laughs, a weren’t-we-once-foolhardy-and-young kind of laugh. She’s playing some kind of scene here too. But then, so am I.
“I was telling Paul the other day about you, about how you forgot that time to put out the ashtray for Garner Fuskins…”
Paul?
“… and how we were hiding you—here Gil, get under this, get under
that, in this closet, in that closet—do you remember? My god, I thought, we all thought, he was going to kill you…”
Paul?
“And then he found you and nearly throttled you and I thought, my god, he’s going to kill Gilbert, I have to help and I had this scene I was going to play, I was going to run up to him and pretend we had just gotten engaged and that someone had filled in for you even though your name was on the assignment sheet—”
PAUL? I finally ask.
“The guy I’m living with.”
And so back to Brooklyn, back to Brooklyn and the subway the other lonely people were on tonight, all the people who could say I have been lonely all my life, except I could say more than that, I could say I WILL be lonely all my life. If you can help it you should never get to I have been lonely all my life, and having decided that, you should NEVER let it slip even lower to I WILL be lonely all my life. Or else, you’ll be as depressed as me in 1977 and you wouldn’t want that.
“Where the hell have you been?” asked Lisa in a pinched whisper when I got back, the second I got in the door.
Out.
“You don’t know what I went through tonight here with Emma.”
I thought Lisa was on her usual Bob-date and Emma was out watching a movie or sulking or with Mandy. But no.
“We were at the hospital, that’s where. Emma thought she was having a heart attack, she couldn’t breathe and was gasping for air and I thought it would pass—”
Where was Emma now?
“In her bedroom sleeping, with twenty milligrams of Valium in her. She was passing out so I called an ambulance.”
How were we going to pay for an ambulance? Good god.
Emma Who Saved My Life Page 20
