“It’s great fun. I have nothing better to do than wallow in my problems for an hour each week. When I do it with them I don’t end up doing it with you and Lisa. It’s a financial arrangement. I’m paying to dump all this shit on strangers so my friends won’t get it.”
But if you know all that, realize what you do is shit, then why not—
“Listen, stop being logical.”
I change the subject again. What time do you wanna meet for Connie’s party?
“I want to make sure my tattoo’s dry in time for it. Shall we say, six o’clock, 86th Street subway station, under Gimbels, corner of Lexington.”
I stared at her, looked in her eyes. Emma, I said, you will behave yourself, right?
“Me? Make trouble?”
Yes and you know what I mean. I care about Connie a lot and this is the first decent relationship—
“What about our relationship? Isn’t it decent?”
Too decent, I said; rated G for general audiences.
“I never thought a little sex could turn your head so.”
Well, it’s been very little lately.
Emma pointed a fry at me to make her point. “Ha, I knew it. The passion has died. She’s looking for new stud material.”
If she is and I get dumped, I guess you’ll be happy, I said. You’d rather see me miserable and alone, isn’t that right?
Emma looked taken aback, and decided to ease up: “All right, all right.”
D day. I have never wanted less to go to a party.
Emma was, predictably, acting up. “Yeah well maybe this was a bad idea. I can’t even stand this neighborhood…” We were walking from the subway to Connie’s East Side apartment. “I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to like Connie. Are you going to act all coupley, Gil? Stand in corners with her? Say ‘I dunno, what do you think darling?’”
You know I’m not like that, Emma.
“I don’t like the thought of you two together, to be honest.”
Emma, please.
“I might drop things on her carpet on purpose.”
I pause walking. Emma stops too. I tell her to go ahead and right here, two hundred yards from the apartment, get it ALL out of her system. Everything nasty she had to say.
“You mean it?”
I started her off: Connie is a selfish, New Right, capitalist Wall Street type, self-absorbed—
“Callous, materialistic pretentious Ivy League cow, who’s not as good-looking as she thinks she is.”
Since you’ve never met her, Emma, I think you’ll find her every bit as good-looking as she thinks she is.
“She’s not even a little bit ugly?”
We walked in silence for a while.
“My analyst is talking about a masturbation therapy.”
Good, as I didn’t want to talk about it.
“He thinks I should experiment more, get in touch with my Sexual Self, play with myself more.”
Fine. Can we not talk about it one hundred yards from Connie’s door?
“Aren’t you interested?”
Enraptured. But let’s see if we can not talk about your playing with yourself at this particular party.
“I was thinking of discussing with the party their masturbation lives. Bet a lot of them do it in the office, lunch breaks, coffee breaks, under the desk. While looking at the Standards & Poors. ‘Oh god, oh god, IBM is up three-and-a-quarter, oh oh oh—”
Would you cut it out? We rode up the elevator to the 17th floor. The door opened; we could hear the party.
“Then again. I haven’t touched myself for years. I mean most celibates in the support group jerk off two and three times a day, there’s a lot of pent-up frustration. Me? Never touch myself. I disgust myself. Imagine, pawing for a half hour at your vagina every day till biology reduces you to an animal state—”
ENOUGH. Please, Emma.
“You know, I think one night back in Brooklyn I heard you doing it. No, really, the bed was going eeh-uh eeh-uh—”
Emma for god’s sake.
We rang the bell, Connie opened it. “So, Gil,” she said kissing my cheek, then stepping back so Emma and I could behold her glory, and her Vogue-cover looks. “This must be Emma.”
“Good guess.”
And in we went.
“I hate everyone here,” Emma whispered to me, after two minutes.
I made an exasperated sigh, telling her that I had TOLD HER she wouldn’t like it.
“Wonder what the average salary is here?”
I left her at the refreshment table, not concerned for the moment with Emma’s socialist critique.
I met Doug in Municipals. Did I know that federal tax-free investment in nuclear power was the ticket? Washington State and its five-plant Great Northwest complex—that was the place to put my money. Minimum investment $10,000—think of it, tax-free. Yeah, well next $10,000 that comes my way, buddy …
I met Sylvia in corporate research. Aren’t people boring who talk business, she said, and I agreed. She hated to talk business—that’s the way it was at work, all day long, business business business. But she did like to gossip. Like that man there, who did A, B and C, and that woman there, who only went to Rutgers and doesn’t know beans about market expansion, but she did this-and-that and so-and-so, and made a play for the man who doesn’t know she’s alive, him right there …
I met Maury. What about them Yankees? Mark his words, it was gonna be the Yanks in the pennant race, Boston’s gonna fade. He had box seats, sometime we ought to go together—box seats. Five hundred a season for box seats, writes it off on the company but don’t tell anyone, our little secret. What did I think of the Orioles?
Emma drifted back over, a plate full of cocktail food. “There is not an interesting person at this party. Susan’s parties are better than this, at least there’s something to ridicule. These people are bores, Gil.”
Be more open-minded, Emma. Why, I have met many fascinating people here—you’re too close-minded.
“You’re a lost cause, Gil,” she said, munching. “I’ll give your bitch-girlfriend one thing, she can cook. This goose-liver mousse is the word made flesh, God on a piece of toast. You eat like this all the time?”
Yes, actually. I was going to mingle some more.
“Suit yourself.”
Connie approached. “How’s it goin’, kid?”
Fine, her party was a smash, many compliments all around. People, of course, wondered what I was doing here.
“Let ’em wonder. It unnerves them to think I might have a life outside of Golam Brothers, Cohn & Schwartz, because they don’t. How’s Emma doing?”
She’s a big girl, she could take care of herself.
Connie arched an eyebrow. “One wonders.”
I drifted toward the refreshment table and got stuck in a conversation with Saul, who I assumed worked at Golam Brothers.
“Christ, no,” he said immediately. “I’m just … I’m just a friend of Connie’s. An old friend.”
Suddenly, I knew all. He was an old boyfriend. Wait, Connie didn’t have boyfriends—she had lovers. An old lover.
“How long have you known the Con?” he asked. “You’re not Golam Brothers either, I take it.”
I rehashed a polished version of Connie and myself.
“Sounds like the Con,” he said, laughing slightly.
All smiles: what sounded like the Con?
“Her sexual credo, variety is the spice of life. Next month it’ll be an artist, next month a politician, I think she’s got a checklist.”
I was getting brave, what the hell. I asked if he was a checkmark, and if so, what category.
“Yes. Writer. Journalist mainly, for the Worker’s Guardian.”
But that’s uh—
“A communist weekly. I was Connie’s token Marxist.”
He looked like a Marxist; baggy clothes, small intellectual’s round glasses, beard, dark thinning hair, about thirty.
“I’m sorry, I’ve had a
little to drink. I’m not offending you or telling you anything you didn’t know, am I?”
NO no no.
“She does use ’em and toss ’em aside, that girl. She’s something else.”
I knew, as one knows all World Truths That Are Irrefutable, that I was not long for this romance, that she was slumming, that this was my brief shining moment. I also felt momentarily displaced, and then a trifle lonely (lonely in the future tense, soon I would be back on my own again), and then sort of smug and happy that I was going to escape some day free and clear, no theatrics, no little-girl dramas, no adolescent “I thought we were going to have true love forever” scenes, that HEY, YOU ARE NOW IN THE MODERN WORLD and this is how adults behave. Affairs, brief encounters, ships that pass in the night. I could hardly wait until the next woman.
And then I heard Emma’s voice cut through the crowd: “Oh I always vote for entertainment value. Nixon, and then Carter. I mean how could that miss, a peanut farmer with a booze-loving brother, Bible-toting sister, one of those steely Southern women pushing him along like Lady Macbeth, Mama on the front porch down home callin’ the shots. I mean, this was surefire entertainment, and I voted Democratic fast as I could.”
“I don’t think that’s very responsible,” someone said.
“Or particularly amusing,” someone else said.
I needed a drink so I went to get one and when I came back Emma was in high gear: “Well a little nuclear war wouldn’t hurt us too bad—I’m sort of in the mood for it, looking forward to it finally happening almost.”
“Be serious,” said a woman impatiently.
“Oh I’m quite serious,” said Emma.
“Well then that’s stupid and so are you.”
A bit flustered she went on. “No, I mean I foresee a time in a post-nuclearwar world in which … in which a new romanticism, a new literature—”
“We should have a nuclear war for literature’s sake?” said the woman, shaking her head. “Look, we’re trying to have a serious conversation here about arms control, Salt I versus Salt II, and you interrupted so why don’t you spare us this, okay dear?”
Emma retreated to the other side of the room. Emma, I wanted to tell her, your routine is … routine. It’s not gonna work here.
Connie approached again. “What’s with Emma? Not exactly the Most Popular Girl. Got enough to eat there, kid? Good, good.”
I met Saul, I said.
She gave it a flicker of thought. “That’s nice. Did you all have a good talk?”
Well, we just small-talked.
Connie flashed me a look. “Saul never small-talks.” And then she went back to see to someone’s empty wineglass.
I was feeling two-drinks happy. Where was Saul? I wouldn’t mind talking to him again, getting a little background on Connie, not that that was playing fair exactly. But why not?
“No the band has no management yet,” I heard Emma’s voice say, “but we’re doing a series of tape projects. Our bass player, Cock, has this in at Alternative Audio and they put out bootlegs of Fucked-Up Youth, Squirming Fetus, those bands—”
“But aren’t bootlegs illegal?” the woman beside Emma on the sofa asked.
“Oh yeah. But so is dealing in blackmarket barbiturates, but the band does that too for money. We’re doing this tour with Up Your Ass—actually, they’ve got a new lead singer from London so they’re changing the name to Up Your Bum…”
Emma, I’m coming to GET YOU.
“Have you heard their new single, ‘Vomit Choke’? It’s about going to sleep on a full stomach and shooting up heroin—you’re just asking to drown in your own vomit that way—”
“Excuse me, I think I need another drink,” said the woman, as she hurriedly went in search of wine on the other side of the room.
“Hello, Gil,” said Emma, looking at her plate of hors d’oeuvres, avoiding my eyes. “Ellen here was just telling me about new pension-plan tax-dodge schemes and she asked about my plan and I said my line of work was irregular and she asked more about it and I told her, so get that look off your face.”
Would you please try to be sociable?
“I need human beings to work with, Gil—this is a tough crowd.”
It’s not a crowd, it’s a cocktail party given by my … my girlfriend.
“Did you know that Jasmine does phone sex? You know where middle-aged men call up and a girl talks dirty to them? You get thirty bucks a throw—it’s a respectable business Gil, all the major credit cards are accepted.”
My arms are crossed. My expression is unpleasant.
“Anyway, I asked Ellen what tax breaks Jasmine was eligible for, being self-employed. She said, after much throat clearing, that our phone bill was deductible as a business expense. If we incorporate—”
Emma I think you should leave the party.
Her eyes met mine. She stood up and stared intently at me, lips pursed, and that right eyebrow raised. She said quietly, “You’re asking me to leave?” And she said that in an intense tone, suggesting ominous consequences.
Do what you want, I said, and walked away.
I found myself drawn into a discussion of the health spa in the atrium of the Golam Brothers Building on Beaver Street, how some middle-management type who hogged the whirlpool shouldn’t even have been admitted to the executive club, how the heated towels were hotter last year, how the staff was more courteous before J. P. had his heart attack, how there was this new masseuse named Kira with the greatest body in the world and how this visiting bond salesman in from Chicago chased her around the saunas while the men yelled “Get the goods, Bob! Get the goods!” (All right Emma, nearly a decade on, in print, before the world, you were right, these people weren’t my people, they were phoneys and bores, and I should have come clean at the time.)
Emma’s voice from across the room, again: “Of course, Carter was right to give back the Panama Canal, and the Brits should give back Hong Kong when the lease runs out, Gibraltar on general principle, and the Soviets Eastern Europe—colonialism is dead. Until we prove that to the third world we’ll never be able to get along with them or be able to depend on them for support.”
“Panama can no more run that canal,” said a man, “which we built, which we manage, oversee for security reasons, than they can run their own banana republic. The terms of our treaty were no worse, no more corrupt than other agreements of that period—”
“Which is to say pretty corrupt,” Emma interjected.
“I like Senator Hayakawa’s remark,” said a woman with a nasal voice, “that we stole it fair and square.”
“Well, you would like it,” said Emma, “because it’s the slick kind of obscurantist Republican doublespeak that appeals to conservatives and the American business community alike. Let’s laugh away all our Latin American atrocities, all our South American imperialism, inept meddling from Teddy Roosevelt to the CIA and Allende—”
“Hold on hold on,” said the woman defensively. “Don’t put words in my mouth—”
“You name the goon and we put him there—Somoza, Papa Doc and Pinochet and D’Aubisson—a real rogue’s gallery, all best friends of the United States.”
The man broke in. “And you would rather have, I take it, Castro, or local versions of Castro, all over Latin America, from Tierra del Fuego to the Rio Grande one day? I’d rather have Battista, given what Cuba represents today.”
“You wouldn’t rather have Battista,” said Emma, exuding distaste, “if you were a poor Cuban slave laborer, with a starving family on a bourgeois sugar plantation in 1958, and Cuba would be in our sphere of influence if hysterical Fascist generals hadn’t drawn up that half-baked invasion and that half-brained John Kennedy hadn’t agreed to it…”
Strangers were gathering. She’d done it now, defiled the name of America’s patron saint, JFK, the Light still shone from his face through the ’70s …
“What was that about Kennedy?” said a bearded man.
Emma don’t do it … don’t do it …
“I think he was the lousiest president in the twentieth century after Harding is what I think. For one thing, how can you make a historical judgment on two and a half years, and another thing, if you do, how can you overlook wiretapping Martin Luther King, trying to assassinate world leaders, Castro among them, a two-bit doomed-to-fail mission to Cuba, let us not forget ladies and gentleman the Vietnam War—that little costly number, though I suspect the economic boom justified it for most of the people in this room—”
Wooooo boy.
“—and let us not forget that during the Cuban Missile Crisis he put the nuclear missiles on alert, making him the first president since that war criminal Truman to consider firing the damn things.”
Connie approached scowling. She said coolly, “I want to thank you personally for bringing this acquaintance to my attention. How can I repay you?”
What could I say? Well, I began, she has a point about the CIA and American involvement in South—
“This is a cocktail party,” Connie continued in a level, deadly tone, “and not the UN, and maybe you and your Brooklyn crowd don’t get asked to many of them, but they are generally civilized affairs where people mingle and are nice to one another—”
I know, I know, I know—no need to be sarcastic, Connie, I’ll retrieve Emma at once.
“What is your problem?” Emma said icily as we moved to the foyer of Connie’s apartment. “A little too loud for you?”
Yes and you know it.
“I embarrass you in front of all your young-banker friends?”
I don’t give a damn about them, but I care about Connie—
“She’s the phoniest piece of business here!”
Sssssh—damn you, Emma, keep your voice down—
“She must think she’s Madame de Stäel, whirling about, playing Hostesse. These people are losers—her social circle is nothing. I don’t doubt there are some interesting people on Wall Street but they’re not here. Let’s judge her by her own terms—”
We’re not judging Connie one way or the other—
“No, let’s judge her by her own standards. There’s not an executive here, it’s all middle management, assistant to the assistants. The big boys down there must know what she is, one more whiny little grasping Radcliffe nouveau-riche slut in a Brooks Brothers suit—hey, how do you bet she got her job at Schmolem Brothers? Huh?”
Emma Who Saved My Life Page 25
