Emma Who Saved My Life

by Wilton Barnhardt

  But I said: Yeah, what a relief. Sure is great, and about time too.

  “Get me the old battle-axe’s autograph, okay? Although she didn’t deserve an Oscar for Pillar of Fire—shoulda gone to Bette Davis that year. Don’t tell her I said that. Just get the autograph. Now tell me about Sophie.”

  Sophie? Who told you—

  “Never you mind my sources.”

  Oh yes of course: Janet ran into us at Rodrigo’s—

  “You little yuppie you, Rodrigo’s. Workin’ the West Side now, huh? Coming up in the world. They must be paying you better.”

  Yep Emma, they were paying me better.

  My new apartment was in a fine old brownstone on 96th Street in a not-quite-yet-regentrified old neighborhood; the occasional drug deal, wino asleep on the stoop, mugging here and break-in there, marred what was clearly destined for Yuppie Renewal. How gauche of lower Harlem not to take the hint and leave … For a long time it was less my apartment than Allyn Farrington’s ex-apartment. He had picked the gray tasteful carpet to go with the light blue pastel wall paint, the faint pink foyer, the mauve bedroom, all with matching curtains, shades, which complemented the sofa. As it was a furnished apartment, he had to leave all his decorations behind.

  “And I’m leaving you that plant,” he lamented. “You are good with plants, aren’t you?”

  Great, I lied. (I could make the Congo wither and die …)

  “Oooohhh,” he dithered, “it’s one of my favorites too.”

  Why don’t you take it?

  “Oh I just can’t…”

  Allyn (yes, he spelled it that way) was another actor in the stables at Gardiner & Gardiner, my new agents (two sisters, known in the business as Jerry and Janie). Kind, decent, caring people, a real concern for their clients—I had been meeting the wrong people, that was for sure. I should have come to these two my first week in New York. Matthew (the guy who was thrown out of Odessa’s before me, during the Anus-lips Scandals) had gone over to Gardiner & Gardiner. I called him up, begged him for an entŕee, Jerry took a liking to me. Here I am a working actor on Broadway. I had to say it out loud to myself half a dozen times each night before I’d believe it: ON BROADWAY. Gil is on Broadway. You know Gil Freeman, back in high school? Did you hear he was in some Broadway play this month? Excuse me cab driver, could you take me to the Summerscale Theater on Broadway, my makeup call is 7:30 … Every other sentence out of my mouth contained the word Broadway—I was bragging, yes, but also I had to keep saying it in order to believe it. If I kept saying it often enough I might even convince myself how happy it’s made me. Richer, more famous, nice apartment, less happy. Figure that one out.

  Oh yeah, back to the apartment. It was Allyn’s: thirty-three years old, thinning hair, dressed like an eternal frat boy, had the uniform gay mustache. I had always dismissed him as a pretentious, irritating, prissy homosexual. “Can you belieeeeeeve,” he said, when Jerry and Janie took their younger actors out on a business lunch, “that they would put this tablecloth with these napkins? Pleeeease.” But I had misjudged him. He was in reality a pretentious, irritating, prissy homosexual with a soon-to-be-free West Side rent-controlled apartment. Actually, having stared at those mauve walls for two years, I have decided his taste wasn’t that great—he just had opinions.

  “I can’t belieeeeeeve I’m moving,” Allyn exhaled as he took down a framed sketch of a near-naked dancer, silver, thin frame, navy blue backing to match the light blue walls. “I said I’d never move in with anyone again and here I am doing it. Looks like I’ll be decorating all over again, as well—Jason’s place is…” He couldn’t find the correct word of revulsion to finish.

  Anyway, that was my apartment. I put up show posters (ones I was in), I put up my prints I’d bought from the Metropolitan, my poster of Brando as Stanley Kowalski next to my poster of Gielgud as Hamlet—all my artifacts and souvenirs. Never felt like my home, though. I should have repainted it or ripped up the carpet or trashed it somehow to make it more like what I was used to. Emma had never seen the place.

  There wasn’t a New Gil, but there was a New Gil Lifestyle:

  I hear Emma’s in Bellevue. I call a cab. I don’t have to take the subway everywhere anymore. I step outside into the front hall. I see my New York Times, my New Yorker, lots of junk mail. The junk mail is a result of the magazine subscriptions, which are a result of having a bit more money. I get into the cab. I tell him to take me to Bellevue but by way of Broadway Florists at 79th Street. I go in and point to the standard $25 bouquet. Will that be cash? No, I will use my credit card, which I now have. The card I used to take Sophie to Rodrigo’s for a $120 splurge. At which time I wore my new suit, managed the time by looking at my new watch. I know MBAs were starting out in the city with first salaries of $40,000 and my new pocket money was small change, but everything’s proportional remember. For the first time I had to let the government take my taxes out of my paycheck—in fact, like a lot of actors, I was thinking of going to a tax lawyer who knew all the loopholes about self-employment expense write-offs.

  “So Sophie, huh? Not another Betsy, I hope,”

  Sophie, I said, is a very—

  “Sweet girl? Good lay?”

  —sophisticated and intelligent woman who was valedictorian in my high-school class—

  “Tits? Big tits there? Bazongas? Honeydew melons? You can tell me. Never known a Sophie with pert breasts.”

  She stayed in Chicago and went to the university there and got a bachelor’s in sociology—

  “A bullshit major.”

  —and stayed for a master’s, and now she works at Northwestern conducting social research—

  “Bourgeois paper-pushing academic ivory-tower worthless work, it sounds like. Probably puts out for the professors…”

  —social research about social norms in the ghettos in the South Side of Chicago; she thinks ghetto culture, though horrible, is in some ways more valid than suburban white culture—

  “Oooh yuck, a liberal do-gooder, self-righteous, I bet. I hate people devoting their lives to Good Works—she probably works with handicapped children on weekends, works charity telethons, vegetarian, right? Into animal rights.”

  Are you quite done? It’s nice to see you back in form, Emma. Savaging my love interests.

  “The Girl Next Door, after all these years. The Girl Back Home. So, when you moving back? You can live in Oak Park, maybe get your parents to rent your old bedroom to you. It’ll be as if you never left the Great Midwest.”

  It’s not a full-fledged affair yet, so save your ammunition. She ran into my mother in a supermarket and they talked and Sophie then asked about me because she had a conference in New York and she wanted to look me up—

  “My blood chills at the prospect of the woman you love going to … ugh, conferences. How is she in bed—that’s the important thing.”

  Emma, you never change. And whether that’s the good or bad thing about you, I’ll probably never be sure.

  And there was a pause and we had come close to an odd and hard-to-deal-with subject: our relationship. I could walk out of there and not see her anymore. I could start back up again and be a loyal friend, be supportive and do my Dina imitation and get used as before. I could do what I want—hey Betsy, hear that? If you didn’t know any better, you’d think I was becoming more SELF-ACTUAL.

  “What’s going on in the outside world? Have I missed anything? Nuclear war?”

  Reagan’s working on it. We’re in El Salvador and Nicaragua pretty heavy. Recently the administration, in cutting back money for school lunches, declared they still met health guidelines because ketchup could be counted as a vegetable.

  Emma laughed. “Oh I hate being in here when I hear stuff like that. America never lets me down in that regard.”

  It’s three; I’m going to have to go soon …

  “You’re fine until Lucrezia Borgia comes back, so settle down, kick your shoes off.”

  Why don’t you tell me the story now? How you
got in here in the first place.

  Emma sighed, looked to the Christmas lights serenely. Maybe she had rehearsed this, maybe not. “It’s sort of funny in retrospect. If it weren’t my life, I’d laugh about it. In fact, it is my life and the other day I did laugh about it.”

  (I wasn’t going to say anything for a while.)

  “Anyway,” she sighed, “you know how depressed I was last year before you moved out in a huff—”

  You can’t blame me, I began—

  “No, no, of course not, not that I wanted you to go, or thought you should go…”

  I am quiet again.

  “Anyway, there’s my dad with lung cancer from smoking all his life and I’m sorry he’s dying but I still don’t want to go back and play sappy TV-movie reconciliation, you know? I guess it’s expected of me, to go back and pretend we never hated everything about each other and spent our lives criticizing each other—I’m supposed to fall down and say how much I really have always loved him and that I’ll always be Daddy’s little girl and yuck, none of that’s true.”

  How’s he doing, by the way?

  “Same. Still sick. Chemotherapy is hell and he still sneaks a cigarette now and then—THAT much I like about him. You and I, Gil, weren’t talking in November,” she clears her throat, “so you managed to miss the great drama of my going home for his fifty-sixth birthday. It might be his last, so we all came home—even my brother Vinnie who hates Dad more than I do—and we sang happy birthday and I wanted to shoot myself for the emptiness of it all, the sham. God. Where’s my piece by the way?”

  Piece?

  “My piece, my cannon. My ROD.”

  Dina and I took your gun to a pawn shop and she’ll write you a check; we flushed all extant pills in your apartment down the toilet. Your place is habitable again.

  “Sure know how to take advantage of a girl when she’s down and out,” said Emma, not too upset however. “Well, anyway, it’s my mom and dad’s thirtieth wedding anniversay next month, another Last Chance occasion, right? And I tell Mom that I’m not taking time off from work to come out for another dog-and-pony show, and we fight and scream and say things. She was just here, this week.”

  Your mother?

  “Yeah, and she wants to take me back home to Indiana for a while, and I said yes, so maybe we’ll be back in the rolling Great Plains together, we can visit, me with my kidnapped child, you with your big-titted sociologist vegetarian friend—”

  How long will you be gone?

  “Indianapolis? Are you kidding? I’ll be on the first bus back as soon as I … what do you call it? Dry out? Clean myself out? Whatever. And I think I can do that pretty easily in Indiana as I was a scared Catholic schoolgirl there, never took a drink, never did anything bad, never smoked a cig, no sex.”

  Just like now.

  “Yeah just like now.”

  Pause. Still waiting for the Big Story.

  “So no one’s around, right? Janet’s in California doing something on university discrimination, Dina’s up in Connecticut at her mother’s, I can’t find Joanna; Lisa—I’m so desperate I even call Mrs. Yuppie herself … she’s not available, she’s doing something with the kid, she and Jim are having problems, etcetera etcetera. I even call the girls from work and that’s no good. I’ve seen all the movies ever made by this point. YOU, of course, aren’t speaking to me.”

  Go on.

  “And I’m really vulnerable, so I’m taking a few more pills than I should have taken and I go to my analyst and he trashes me out, calls me self-indulgent, calls me self-involved, selfish—”

  I thought you had this guy trained to lick your boots.

  “Well I thought so, but he took this day of all days to use the ‘kick in the pants’ strategy and I left feeling shittier than ever.”

  And that’s when you went home and took too many pills?

  “Gil, I’ve told you, this wasn’t a suicide, this was an accident.”

  Keep talking.

  “So I sneak another pill on the way to the group-therapy session, and I remember shit, it’s my day to talk and have my guts spilled and have everyone give their sanctimonious advice about my life and what’s wrong with it … so, for good measure, I take another pill.”

  Oh Emma.

  “Anyway, I go on motormouth-mode, I tell these people everything. You should see them trying to make sense out of my life—which, as we both know, is impossible. We talk about my dying father, we talk about my failed friendships, we talk about pills, we talk my celibacy. Lot of theories on that one: Was I secretly date-raped once? Was I abused as a child? Was I actually still a virgin? A lesbian maybe? I heard it all.”

  Anything sound good?

  Emma laughed mildly. “You know, Gil, apparently I will suffer all my life because I don’t want to have some guy’s urogenital organs within my body. I must be the freak of the world. I find the male sexual apparatus vulgar—it’s like a … a popgun going off. Am I certifiable because I don’t think it’s a good time having this thing go off inside me once a night? I got a lot of problems, okay, but I have NEVER felt my choice to be celibate was one of them.” She was done with her speech. “I think it’s one of my few triumphs over the human-animal state.”

  And you told the group this?

  She laughed more fully. “Oh no, I really let them have a good session—I cried, I confessed, I was vulnerable, I broke down, I put on a good show. I’m never going back there. I told them…”

  What? Emma was getting the giggles again.

  “I mean, what didn’t I tell them? I told them things I never told anyone before. About getting rid of my own virginity, for instance.”

  My eyes must have widened.

  “Oh come on, I’m sure I told you that one. No?” Emma seemed rather proud of this. “Paul, my first boyfriend always said he didn’t want no Catholic schoolgirl virgin so I went home and thought about it and went, hey why not, let’s get this over with, so I broke my own hymen so I could be a woman of the world at sixteen. In retrospect, I’m glad I lost my virginity to myself. I wouldn’t want it any other way,” she added laughing. “Well, you should have seen the vultures, the amateur psychiatrists fall all over themselves to analyze this. This was the cause of my celibacy, this was the cause of everything ever bad in my life, etcetera.”

  Maybe it does have something to do with it.

  “No it doesn’t. Anyway, the Bitch Cheryl asks what therapies I’ve been taking and I tell all about the masturbation therapy and how it seems to be working and loosening me up and making me…” She buries her head in her hands. “I mean, how degrading, to sit there and talk about your masturbation therapy—I mean, I’m at an all-time low. I tell them that just this week—hot off the press, folks—I became comfortable enough with myself to engage in penetration. And I started tearing up, tears of joy, because I had reached this landmark.” Emma picked up the pillow underneath her and buried her face in it: “Just let me DIE, put me to sleep, put me down…”

  I stifle any laughter and say everyone tells things at those groups, no big deal.

  “Oh but there I was having this drug-induced crying jag with these creeps and the Bitch Cheryl comes and hugs me and there is applause and support and nurturing and group positiveness and everyone pats me on the back and hugs me and GOD, I saw myself. I said to myself: Emma, you’re at rock bottom. You’ve officially become someone that you’d make horrendous fun of.”

  Don’t be too hard on yourself.

  “And so I run to the bathroom and get some tissues to stop being emotional and stop crying and I feel like such an idiot for doing that psychoanalytical striptease out there so I take another pill.”

  Sounds like a mistake.

  “Right. So I’m walking back home just to be moving and not sitting around feeling bad and who should I run into but Joanna.”

  Joanna, whoopdiedoo.

  “From the temp agency, remember? I know you hate her and think she’s a bore, and she is, but she cares about my problems
. Anyway I’m desperate enough to go out with Joanna and we go to a bar. I tell her I’m depressed and I make up something just to justify my being so down—I tell her you and I broke off our engagement and we’re not speaking.”

  Me and you?

  “Yeah well I needed some sympathy and that’s what I said. And we weren’t speaking, that much was true. So Joanna is a pal. I have one tiny vodka and orange juice and then, since she’s buying drinks (so desperate for company she’ll foot the bill, I figured) I keep telling her just an orange juice please, just an orange juice. Well she thinks I mean the same drink over and over again and to be a pal she has the bartender put double and triple shots in there and I can’t tell because I could be drinking shoe polish at this point, I was so out of it, my tongue wasn’t working—”

  So you got drunk and had too many pills in you?

  “Well I had this fifty-milligram bottle, right? And I had this illegal other bottle I’d gotten hold of and I thought the latter was the former so I thought I had three medium pills in me and I really had much too much. Well anyway this wave of nausea hits me, the abyss is opening before me, I sense all that stands between me and the void is my ability to keep myself awake. I tell Joanna to get me to a hospital except it comes out like Joooo uhnnnna, gib me to duh hahhhhhspill … It’s like I have novocaine in my mouth. NEXT thing I know I’m in the bathroom and someone is splashing cold water on me, then someone’s trying to get me to throw up but even my gag reflex is asleep here, and then I’m being led to an ambulance.”

  But how did you end up in Bellevue?

  “I’m getting there, hold your horses. I’m in the ambulance, right? I’m stabbing myself with my fingernails to keep myself awake. The attendant pokes me and slaps me so I won’t pass out. I mean, this is it, Gil, me and death, the Distinguished Thing, hourglass and scythe. You know what’s odd? There’s a very reasonable part of me that’s still thinking quite clearly and that reasonable part is sort of laughing. Like when the guy slaps me, it’s thinking: Hey buddy, watch those hands, you enjoying this? And when Joanna threw water on me in the bathroom at the bar, it’s thinking: You’re really messing up my blouse here, Jo. You know, Joanna, if you did something different with your hair you might just get a date or two. I mean, this still small voice is cracking jokes.”