Emma Who Saved My Life

by Wilton Barnhardt

  Why doesn’t he quit his job at McKendrick, I asked.

  “He was there first. I’ve been there five years, he’s been there seven, his salary is higher, he has a future there, and I don’t think I do. I mean, it’s reasonable, very reasonable that I should leave—we’re in agreement on that. And I want a change anyway. But we’re not telling people that we’re splitting up, as that might reflect on Jim or me and gossip in the ad biz is so bad, and we just want to be above that, you know?”

  Yeah sure, I said. Emma was untypically saying nothing.

  “So we’re having this party. This party for all the people and I’ll announce that I’m leaving to stay home with my kid or something, and people won’t think we’re splitting up. It’s important that people aren’t running around talking about your private life. So we’re giving this party. Please, I want you both to come. It would mean a lot to me.”

  Uh Lisa, she’s in the salt now—

  “Oh damn it … young lady I swear I … Would you look at what you have done?” Lisa gathered the pile of salt from the unscrewed saltshaker and swept it with a napkin into the ashtray. Lisa gave a light pop to her daughter’s hand as she reached for something else and before she began to bawl, Lisa snatched her up and said, “NO, not a word out of you, we’re going to pick out an Italian pastry now, all right? You want one, don’t you? Here we go . .” She picked up her daughter and went up to the lunch counter, out of earshot.

  Emma turned to me. “I don’t know this woman, do I? Do you know her? I don’t know her.”

  Now Emma. She’s got it rough and she’s happy to be with us.

  “Yeah, talk good ol’ Gil and Emma’s ears off when things go bad. I don’t want to hear about her rotten husband when she doesn’t call us but … what? Four times last year?”

  She’s a working mother and she came to see you in the hospital, and she invites us to parties and things—

  “Those godawful advertising parties, no thanks, no thanks—”

  Sssssh, she’s coming back.

  “So, anyway,” said Lisa sliding into the booth, her daughter still in the aisle, “that’s that. We may reconcile, but you know … this is terrible, but I want to be single again. Not to date or anything, I mean, I’ve had enough of that. I mean to be by myself. I’m looking forward to getting out from under things. I want to start up my painting again. Remember? I was going to be an artist. Now I have lots more connections at galleries than I did. I mean, I didn’t know anything the first time around—it was real amateur hour, you know? Here,” she said patting her daughter, “go sit with Aunt Emma.” Emma loved to hold the kid and bounced her on her lap, amusing her.

  Painting, I said to say something, sounds good.

  “So how are you two for roommates? Temporary, perhaps? Hmm? Anyone want a tenant?” Lisa laughed, grinning.

  “Uh, gee,” began Emma.

  There’s something we gotta tell you, Lisa.

  “Yeah,” said Emma, as it was her news: “I’m leaving New York, it seems. For my mental health.” As Lisa was looking stunned, Emma went on, stroking Lisa’s daughter’s white-blond hair gently. “I think I’ve had enough. It’s time to go. I’ve gotten my book of poems published with the Women’s Consortium Press and I can publish there again if I want. And so I applied to the Stanford Program for Creative Writing and they accepted me, because of my book of poems. And it will mean—I don’t know—lots of opportunities and things, connections—”

  Lisa looked shell-shocked, but said, “Yeah, that’s just so great, Emma, that really is nice.”

  “And so I’m California-bound, this Tuesday. Term starts next week and I’m pretty moved out and packed and—”

  “California,” Lisa said numbly.

  Everyone’s clearing out, I said absently.

  “Oh my,” Lisa sighed. And then it looked like she was going … going to cry, for pete’s sake. She shielded her eyes and her voice got thick as she said, “Well doesn’t that beat all?”

  Emma and I exchanged glances and Emma immediately scooped up Lisa’s little girl and announced that they were going across the street for candy, and as Emma left she gave me a nervous look. In a moment it was just myself and Lisa, who began to cry, noiselessly, tears trickling down her face. Lisa, I asked helplessly, what is it?

  “Oh nothing, I’m so sorry, this is stupid—”

  You’re under a lot of pressure, a new job hunt and Jim and—

  “No it has nothing to do with Jim … Jim the asshole,” she added, making herself laugh through her tears. She got a bunch of napkins and blew her nose, wiped her face. “I’m sorry, I really am—this is not what I wanted to do…”

  Lisa, what is it? Something I can do?

  She looked up at last, red-eyed. “You know, I had counted on something I shouldn’t have counted on, I guess. I thought we could all … oh god, how stupid, I’m sorry—”

  What is it?

  “I thought we, like, could all get a house again. I’m richer now. We could go back to the Village where we started, get a decent loft. The three of us. I’ve been thinking lately how that was when I was happy. When it was just us three. Now we had a good time didn’t we?”

  Some great times there, yes—

  “So you see, I thought, thank god, there’s Emma and Gil and we can get back to what we used to be—plus one, of course, my daughter. I thought that would be so good…” And she teared up again, shaking her head, apologizing.

  I decided to finish out our bad news by telling Lisa about my four-month tour with ’59 Mustang. I went on about it a bit, good career move, I’ll get some time off, etc.

  “Congratulations,” she sniffed, smiling. “That won so many awards.”

  Yeah the touring company ought to do real well. Pay is good. I even get to go back to my hometown, well, Chicago I mean. My agent sent a picture of me to the Sun Times and some lady is going to do an interview with me, local boy made good, all that.

  “Yeah you’ve made it, you’ve really made it.”

  Oh Lisa, I wanted to say, a chorus-guy with a few lines in a touring company, a four-month hell of bad motels and hick-town dates, no, no that was not making it.

  “Well you’ll write, won’t you? We’ll write.”

  Yeah, yeah sure. Letters from the road—that’ll be fun. And you have to keep New York alive and well for me, save my place …

  “Of course,” she laughed, and we laughed and laughed some more and the tears seemed behind her, and for that matter, so did our good times and our youthful past, because there we were talking about writing letters, for christ’s sake, which I’ve never been worth a damn at. Oh we’re not going to write letters—who are we kidding? Chapters in life end and when they end they feel like this.

  “Now when you get back to town,” said Lisa, after blowing her nose again, “you look me up. Maybe we can get Emma to come back to visit and then seduce her into staying.”

  You know how hard Emma is to seduce, I said. And we laughed at the joke, Emma and her celibacy, still going strong.

  She smiled and said something so unexpected from a beaming face: “I am so sad. I really counted on us doing it all again, things being like they were. That would have made me so happy.” Then she gripped my arm, telling me something that seemed to fight its way to the surface to be communicated: “I was as happy as I ever was with you and Emma. Sometimes I think back and go, girl, that was the good stuff, that was your wild time.”

  Well, I said, maybe taking a wrong tack, we think that now. At the time I remember us being miserable and complaining and—

  “No, I’m sure about this one. That was the best it ever was. That was the real good time.”

  And if you can believe this, we actually went to this party of hers and Jim’s. We were curt with Jim. We schmoozed halfheartedly among the advertising elite. There was the little announcement that Lisa was leaving McKendrick to stay home and watch over her little girl and everyone awwwwwwed, genuinely insincere about seeing her go, everyon
e wished her luck, piled on encouragement, love and hugs and kisses. (You never saw so much phoneyness in your life.)

  “They’re happy to see someone more talented than they are leaving the firm,” Emma said, beside me on the sofa, our party-watching post. “I’ll give Jim this. The man has a nice apartment. Stocked bar, a VCR. Forget Lisa, I’ll reconcile with the jerk.”

  You’re going to have to say a proper farewell to Lisa, I reminded Emma.

  “Oh yeah? I’ll sneak out. It’s just better to finish it off, cut it short, turn and run.”

  Yeah but …

  “But what? I know what you’re going to say, that it’s unlikely I’ll see her again for a long while, but that’s all the more reason not to carry on and get dramatic. I don’t do goodbyes. I don’t.”

  What about when it comes time to say goodbye to me?

  Emma looked at me and we made one of those terrifying eye contacts that chilled us, melted us. “Well now, let’s not think about that one,” and then Emma got up in search of more refreshments, and I watched her. It sounds like I still love her to say this, but there was never anyone who took up space quite like she did. She moved so gawkily, so awkwardly, almost stumbling toward the refreshment table, all elbows and wild gestures … and yet it was all perfect, completely consistent. And her voice, lilting and unendingly cynical, all sentences musically soaring to great heights always to end up with a big punchline delivered in a cynical alto. She was nasal and could whine and sing her complaints and—how do I explain this?—if anyone else carped and carried on like she did without that face, that tone of voice, those gestures, well it wouldn’t work, it would be intolerable. On occasions like this I had to remind myself just how much I was not in love with her. But indeed I wasn’t.

  “Well, I don’t understand why everyone’s so down on nuclear war,” I heard her say, standing in a foursome of ad people. “I mean, god, the whole business in Beirut—let’s put Lebanon out of the world’s misery, there’ll be no more massacred peacekeeping forces, no more hostages. Drop the bombs. You Reagan fans promised me this man was gonna drop bombs, and I wanna see some fireworks.”

  Her foursome was amused, everyone laughed, suggesting a few other places nuclear bombs ought to be dropped: Iran, Cuba, Libya, New Jersey.

  “I’ve said it for years,” Emma went on, “there’s a chic to post-apocalypse; it’s not gonna be so bad after it all blows over—”

  “If you survive,” said one woman.

  “Oh it’s gonna take much more’n that to get rid of Emma, I tell you,” said Emma. “Reagan’s a complete disappointment to me. You know I vote for entertainment value and frankly I’m surprised to find the man becoming a cult hero, popular. I thought he would be impeached by now. The damn country’s picking up it seems. You just wait, though. When it starts falling apart it’s gonna make great viewing.”

  One woman said through a whiny laugh, “You really vote for entertainment value?”

  “Absolutely. So does America, only it doesn’t realize it yet.”

  Emma and her new admirers even got onto John Kennedy and I thought, oh boy, here we go again, it’s all over now, but she had ’em in the aisles, she was a hit—trashing Kennedy, sticking up for Nixon, her Antichrist theory of Ronald Reagan, advocacy of nuclear war, her radical reforms of New York City government, why half of what’s in the Museum of Modern Art should be burned, a defense of the worst TV shows in the world … She was a Constant—this occurred to me as I think it never had. An unbending Force in the Cosmos. After Emma I’ve limited my crushes and romances to human beings, and it’s behind me, my days of falling in love with Forces in the Cosmos. But you can’t blame a guy for trying.

  Emma did cut out early on Lisa’s party, shirking goodbye duties. That should have tipped me off that she might do the same with me, and I shouldn’t have been too surprised, on the Saturday before Emma left New York, to hear this from her on my answering machine:

  BEEP! Well Gil, this is goodbye. I can’t see you. What am I going to say after nearly a decade, huh? ‘Well, it’s been fun!’ I mean, c’mon, let’s not do corny maudlin things we’ll both one day regret …

  By god, Gennaro, I’m having my soppy goodbye and no one is going to take it away from me!

  So anyway, so long Gilbert. It’s been fun. Ha ha ha. I’ll write of course and we’ll visit and it will be as if I never left, right? Hey, there’s long distance, you know me and long-distance bills—I think nothing of racking up the big numbers. Then, a pause. Well come on, come on, say you love me Emma. Bye-bye kid. CLICK.

  No, Emma, no.

  I got my coat and went over to 10th Street and pushed her buzzer. I pushed it again. Nothing. I waited until someone in the building came in and let me through the door and I went up to her apartment, where I heard shuffling from within. I tried the door and it was open. If she heard my voice in the stairwell thanking the person for letting me in, she hadn’t made it to lock the door in time. I walked inside and all was bare, in packing boxes, in big yard-size trash bags. Oh what emptiness, the abandoned apartment of a friend, those second homes. She was gone. I went into the kitchen, and then to the bathroom … WAIT. Her toothbrush and stuff were still there … then I heard a tinkling in the closet of coathangers jingling against each other. I went to the door of the closet and tore it open in a sudden gesture.

  “Fucking coathangers,” said Emma, crouched down in the closet.

  WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM NOW EMMA GENNARO?

  “It’s for your own good I left you that message. You weren’t supposed to come over here. You were supposed to curse my name and forget me.”

  Would you please give it a break? We have, I informed her, a good 48 hours until you leave for California. We are going to spend it together.

  Emma pouted, now standing in the closet. “Go away from me, young boy. I’m no good for you. Your life is elsewhere…”

  Would you cut this out?

  She stepped out of the closet. “I can’t deal with goodbyes. And lately … oh Gil, I have this plan that came into my head and it’s REALLY BAD, I mean EXTRA even-crazy-for-me BAD…”

  What is it?

  “I gotta leave town before I talk myself into going through with my new project.”

  At that point I could have been persuaded to come back to New York, so I said I hoped she did stay; I’d help her do whatever she wanted short of robbing a bank. She smiled briefly, ironically, and said I’d be sorry I volunteered. We’re not gonna kidnap Lisa’s daughter are we?

  Emma was quiet a moment. “I don’t want to commit myself or rule out any options.”

  I insisted on our final goodbye and Emma conceded to spending Sunday afternoon with me. And Monday, your last night?

  “No, I got something I have to do,” she said.

  I made her swear endless allegiance, no tricks, cross her heart and hope to die. And so I puttered around Manhattan, tried to interest myself in shops and records and a copy of Backstage. I sat having coffee in McDonald’s looking through Backstage. MY MY, how that little rag still gets to me—it is a listing of cruelty, a roster of hopes one in a thousand can expect to make real. Maybe ten good parts a month pop up in that newspaper and there are probably 50,000 actors who get the gleam in their eye and have their hearts beat faster and suddenly see it all work out, every dream, every ambition. I sat there and read the openings and I shook my head—I hope not to look at you for a good six months, Backstage. And I thought to myself once again, maybe this business is for the Reisa Goldbaums, the real talents.

  I started enjoying my swan song. I went to the East Village to look up old monuments. The Ruizes’ Caribbean Foodstore was gone, the whole block had gone to developers. It would be another few years before they could drive everyone out. Even the East Village—who would have thought it? Eight hundred dollars a month on Avenue D! Impossible. And now there’s a chain jeans store near St. Mark’s, the streetcrowd is increasingly white yuppie, striped shirts with beige shorts, very frat boy … There goes th
e neighborhood. They won’t be happy, Mayor Koch, the Reaganites, half a dozen landlords I could name, they won’t be happy until every bohemian, every real person, is off the island, will they? Maybe one day Manhattan can be the tasteless condominiumized suburbs people used to flee to. Ah, I’m out of town—it’s not my fight anymore.

  Slut Doll is gone, no use looking up Betsy, Nicholas at the Soho was his usual bland self, Joyce Jennings welcomed me with open arms at the Venice (“Of course you’ll be back!”) and here’s old you’ll-never-make-it-in-this-town himself, Dewey Dennis:

  “Well, saw you in the big show last year, my boy—always knew it! Always knew you’d pull it out. Aren’t you glad I chucked you out the door so you could go on to fame and fortune, ahahahaha! You were always good, Gil. Damn good. Come and audition for us next fall, I think there’s something for you here…”

  All is fair in the theater world: I shook his hand and wished him well and meant it (the schmuck …).

  And Bonnie McHenry fit me in for drinks one afternoon at the St. Regis, which was kind. Oh she’d remember me, sorry it didn’t swork out with Odessa, wasn’t that a time we had in Bermuda Triangle, she’d never forget me, John. I didn’t even want to trouble that grand beautiful perfected stage smile of hers by telling her it was Gil, not John. And so the summer ended and it became cooler and approached October, and I went by a few old landmarks and let the fall breeze blow through me; I would stand on the Staten Island ferry, looking out at the harbor, and feel the finality of a number of things. It was time to go.

  Let’s not pretend I’m superhuman. On-again off-again work is very wearing, very insecure-making. I’ve proven I’m not a wimp, I’ve proven I can take it—I’ve survived most everything. But I wouldn’t mind putting my feet up for a while, and giving my endurance-survival faculties a break. I don’t want to be begging Jerry and Janie for work in barn-dinner-theater Rodgers and Hammerstein revivals through my thirties. At twenty-three that’s adventure, at twenty-seven that’s a richly lived life, at thirty that’s suicide-inducing.