Lisa was furiously working in the kitchen, doing five things at once. I offered help.
“No, no, I’m fine Gil,” she said, dumping a ton of mayonnaise into the potato salad. “I know Emma has been trashing me out all day and don’t pretend she hasn’t.”
I pretended she hadn’t.
“I mean, I expect that out of Emma, to complain and make fun of everything and she can get away with it as long as she’s funny and makes fun of herself as well. Be Entertaining—that’s all we ever ask of her, right? But sometimes…”
Sometimes what?
“Sometimes it’s not unreasonable to expect her to behave and not act terribly to everyone.” She took a quick look at me. “This is obviously falling on deaf ears. You think everything she does is perfect.”
Not true, I said, although at that time it was virtually true.
“Well all I’m saying is that it’s not doing any of us any good to wallow in our neuroses and be Fashionable New York Neurotics and become complete bitches, okay? There comes a time to grow up, too.”
Oh no. Lisa no. Don’t talk growing up. We were doing such a good job of not growing up—don’t be like that … My heart sank when she said that. Not that she didn’t have a point.
“She’s out of control,” Lisa went on, washing some of the dusty plates in the beachhouse so there would be something to eat on. “She’s getting worse every day. Pretentious, she’s more pretentious. For someone who hates sex, is screwed up by it, hates anyone else to have it, she certainly is setting a world record for talking about it. Every other word out of her mouth is penis or clitoris these days, or come. Would you like a Diet Cola, Emma? ‘Oh yes, I’d come for one.’ Did you like that movie, Emma? ‘Oh I loved it—I came all the way through it. It gave me a wide-on.’ A wide-on? Think about that. The woman is obsessed.”
That’s just Emma, I said.
“Emma on overdrive. Hyper-Emma, Super-Emma. And you’re getting weirder just like her.”
I wasn’t weirder, I protested.
“Why is she trying to ruin the weekend? Break Tom and me up?”
She’s not, I lied.
“Not born yesterday Gil honey. I know what’s happening. Here”—she threw me a limp rag—“dry some dishes.”
I dried some dishes. Then I said that Emma was not trying to break them up, she was worried that Lisa was going to move out for Tom and leave us and it was because Emma was jealous and possessive of Lisa that she acted odd. But how seriously could you take Emma’s schemings?
“I’m just DATING this guy for christ’s sake! Three lousy weeks, it is not love, it is not Ozzie and Harriet here. Geeeeeez. Normal people let their friends date other people and don’t go insane at the idea that they’re going to find some happiness when they’re not around. What? I can’t have a life out of that apartment?”
Well …
“I mean, I’m tired of psychoses and oh-my-miserable-sexlife and oh-I’m-so-frigid and all this CULT of our own neuroses—I’ve got to get out every once in a while, okay? This weekend is a disaster.”
Everyone was having fun, I assured her.
“Everyone but meeeeee,” she sang.
Dinnertime.
We all sat down to eat Tom’s steaks. Conversation was meaningless and occasionally fun with Emma playing her usual trick of listening overly carefully to what everyone said.
Tom: “There’s nothing worse than a bad cut of beef.”
Emma: “Well, nuclear war…”
Susan informed us how meat was bad for us, how barbaric it was to eat it, how proud she was to be a vegetarian. (“That must be why she wants to sleep with Chris,” Janet whispered to me.) Tom commented a number of times about how good the steaks were. Lisa said the best steaks she ever had were in the West because meat was even better in the West, Texas and all, and even the roadside interstate Mr. T-Bone and Steak House and Jiffy Sizzlin’ chain steakhouse steaks were better than the best thing you could get in New York as a rule.
“What really interests me,” Emma said, enjoying herself, “is steak sauce. Which brands people like best—you’d be surprised how people disagree.”
Tom nodded and told how his father and mother would nearly come to blows over steak sauce, and Emma continued to draw him out on the subject of steak sauce, and Emma mentioned how she put steak sauce on everything and how many many things you could put steak sauce on, steak sauce steak sauce steak sauce. Lisa sat there with her arms crossed, glaring at Emma.
Dinner ended eventually, after dessert which was a big bowl of cement-thick chocolate pudding made from a mix which no one could finish a tiny bowl of so we had the pudding around all weekend and never did finish the whole thing. Lisa ended up having to wash all the dishes.
“C’mon, Emma, help me wash up.”
“I don’t want to. I’d rather shoot myself than wash dishes.”
Janet volunteered to help.
“NO,” said Lisa seriously. “Emma. Emma and I have to have a little talk.”
So we all slunk away leaving them to talk. Janet and I walked down to the beach, Mandy was wading in already up to her waist. There was one clean unsandy towel and it was Janet’s but Mandy was going to use it so there was a tug of war which made Mandy fall in and so she pulled Janet in soon after her and I retreated to high ground.
You’re not supposed to go in until an hour after you eat, I said.
“Mandy rose from the foam,” said Mandy, narrating her own departure from the surf, “her body glistening in the soft evening light, her body tan and shimmering. The cold water streamed down her bountiful bosom…” (Mandy was sort of flat-chested) “… rivulets tracing the outline of her spectacular form. Janet looked on in envy—”
“I did what?”
“—in envy, as this vulnerable feminine vision found her way to the beachhouse.”
Janet added to the trash-novel narration: “Mandy turned to see Janet emerge from the surf … her body gleaming, her breasts taut but supple, her nipples erect…” Mandy turned and feigned a yawn. “Mandy,” Janet continued, “was beside herself with lust—she had to have Janet, press her seething undulating body close to hers…”
“Now we’re talkin’,” said Mandy.
They went up the shore and took a high, private path along the dunes. I walked around for a few minutes and then spotted Emma emerging from the beachhouse coming down to the shore.
Don’t tell me, I yelled, turning her head, you are actually going to put a foot in the water.
“Now that no one’s looking, I thought I could sneak down here and have a Private Vagary. You’re interrupting my Private Vagary.”
I took a step back.
“Lisa and I, while I—kind soul that I was—helped her wash the dishes, had words.”
Which words, I asked.
“She said I was being evil—that was her word: evil.”
Well you are being evil, and I’m glad she told you. What else did Lisa say?
“Just nastiness to me. She was curt and officious—and I can’t stand it when she gets curt and officious—and she called me a bitch—”
Oh she did not.
“Well, she meant to call me a bitch. It was a high-class Lisa way of calling me a bitch. I got so flustered—I mean, she was talking about moving out, leaving us for good—”
I don’t believe that, I said.
“Well it sounded as if she was about to and would threaten to do so at any moment. Anyway, I got all flustered and ran into the bathroom to pull myself together and I walked in on Tom, urinating.”
A bit awkward.
And then Emma arched an eyebrow, her mouth drawn close to a tight smile. “Ah,” she said, raising a finger, “it however did confirm the Small Penis Theory proposed earlier in the afternoon. He must sneak something extra into bed is all I can figure.”
I’m walking away, I’m not listening …
“Gil, this is what the Warren Commission referred to as the Second Penis Theory!” She followed behind me as
I walked resolutely down the beach. “You’re laughing, I can tell you’re laughing. No use walking away, I know you’re laughing.”
I think we ought to wait until the Warren Commission finds the smoking gun.
Emma (in a rare moment of physicality) caught up with me, and put an arm around my shoulder. “Now you see? That’s why I retain you. You always pick up on my allusions.”
Which wasn’t true.
“Lisa never does know what I’m talking about. If she wasn’t so busy having sex with all the men in New York she might be able to have read more than one book in her life—”
EMMA.
“You always have to explain the jokes to her. Gil, she’s averaging out before our very eyes, she’s going normal on us—”
Emma, this is crap—
“Well all I’m saying is keep your ear to the ground for a new roommate. If she dumps us, we can have a replacement ready—”
Emma, what is WRONG with you? Lisa has dated this guy for no time at all, she’s not moving out unless you drive her out by acting so weird—hey, what happens if I want to date someone? What if I want a social life outside the Sacred Apartment?
Emma stopped walking, put her hand to her head. We were about to receive a dose of Italian-American fury: “WHAT? You’re not planning on stepping out of line are you? Who’ve you got in mind? Oh, yeah, that goddam Monica—are you seeing her?”
It’s none of your busi——
“Monica? the weasel-woman with … with hair that goes, ulllcch, Gil, NO. Tell me right now. Are you seeing her?”
I said I wouldn’t tell her given her tone. Then I said no, I wasn’t seeing Monica.
“We’re two very strange people, Gil,” she said seriously, “and as no one else is really like us, we have to stick with each other. I’m not kidding: I mean the rest of our lives. You don’t think I’m serious, you’re smiling. Half the times I’m serious these days you think I’m joking.”
Did she mean that? Was that a declaration of love?
“I can’t break in a new person at this age. I’m beyond changing.”
I had to give that a thought or two: the rest of our lives.
Emma seemed subdued. “I hate it when my mouth just keeps going. Forget I said anything.”
Emma, I said, can we deal with everything later? Right now, for Lisa, our friend, who loves you, who you love too—
“Yes yes yes, I know,” she said, chastened.
—just watch the mouth and BEHAVE, okay?
Emma smiled, nodding. She really hates being criticized, it brings her to the verge of tears. She can say five hundred bad things about herself—that’s all right. But if someone else implies them, her eyes get watery and her face gets red and voice weak. And she was that way now. “Right,” she said, “new leaf. Watch me, Gil. I’m going back to the house and have fun with Lisa. Tell her I think Tom is a hunk, a Greek god.”
And you’re not going to break anyone up or seduce anyone in the dunes?
Emma looked at me simply. “Gil, there’s only one man I would cash in my celibacy for. Elvis Presley, circa 1956.”
Tricky to arrange at this point.
“Well, I’ll agree, my standards are high. Can’t be sleeping with just everybody.”
And I walked along the beach, thinking things over, and wondering if the things I was thinking about were even worth thinking over. There were times with Emma where it came to me clearly: NO MORE EMMA, you don’t need this, you don’t behave right around her, it’s not so much being in love as just being in a big mess, an interesting mess, but a mess. On the other hand, sometimes … What We Had Was Love …
“Gil!” It was Tom, I discovered, as I turned around. He was running to catch up with me. Oh yeah, that’s right, I’d promised Lisa that I would make friends, make sure he had a good time. “Gil wait up!” he called, catching up with me. “I wanted to walk up the beach too and then I recognized you up ahead, that crazy Hawaiian shirt.”
Yeah, crazy me and my crazy shirt.
“Thought you were going to come down and play catch with the girls,” Tom said laughing.
Well I passed on that.
“Did you play baseball? You look like you might have played baseball in school. Right build.”
No, didn’t do anything that involved coordination. Just was in the theater.
“Oh yeah,” said Tom, absolving me, “I had lots of friends in the theater in high school. I actually got to be an extra in our high-school musical pageant,” he said laughing again. “Not quite ready for Broadway like you.”
Tom was going down bad with the baseball opening, but the Gil ready-for-Broadway was sending him up the charts. Nice guy, this Tom, a man of taste … We made small talk—no, make that electron-microscopically small talk, as we walked toward this pier ahead of us, one of those elusive horizon beach piers you never really catch up to. We gave up as we hit the beachfront of a little town called Shoretown, which, true to its name, was indistinguishable from any other city on the shore. There was a bar. Did I want a beer? Tom asked. Yeah, why not—two guys sneaking off for a beer, a macho Man’s Beer, while the women cleaned up back at the house. I felt the decades rolling back the longer I stayed with Tom, it was rapidly approaching the Eisenhower era.
“Here we are,” said Tom setting down two long-necked Budweisers, as he turned his chair around backward to sit in. Why do people sit in chairs like that? “Lisa tells me you and Emma are an item.” Well, Tom wasn’t wasting any time, getting right down to business. Perhaps this was what he wanted to talk about all along …
I said we weren’t an item, really.
“Lisa thinks you two will end up together one day.”
Does she have any evidence for this? Did Emma tell her this?
“Don’t know,” he said, shrugging, pausing for a sip. “She just said she had a hunch. What’s it like living with two hot-looking chicks, eh?”
Hot-looking wasn’t the word I’d have used for Emma and Lisa, I thought. In fact hot-looking, like chicks, is not a word I would use EVER. Hmmm, it occurred to me I hadn’t had Men-with-Beer-in-a-Bar talk since college, and I didn’t like it then much either. CHICKS?
“Must be something, Lisa and Emma running around in their panties and stuff. Guess you just get used to it.”
A panty man. Joyce, Faulkner and Tom Davidson.
“You don’t have to be secretive with me. If you’ve scored with them, you can tell me. I think you’re amazingly lucky—I wish I was that lucky.”
Scored with them. Gil, Lisa and Emma, zero at the half, game called off due to lack of interest. I said, yeah, I was lucky.
“So it’s really platonic, huh? Nothing funny going on.”
Yeah, Tom, I said, don’t you have any purely female friends?
Laughter. “Not that I wouldn’t want to go to bed with!” And more laughter, a long take on the beer that finishes off the bottle.
I didn’t say I didn’t want to go to bed with them.
“If you’re getting somewhere with Emma, more power to you, man.”
You like Emma, do you Tom?
“The great thing about going out with Lisa was getting to meet Emma, I think. I’m thinking of asking her out.”
WHOA HORSES. Now let’s get this straight—
“No, I mean, after Lisa and I call it quits, don’t want to offend her. Look there’s nothing serious between Lisa and myself; we’ve just been going out three weeks, it’s not as if we’re engaged or anything, is it?”
Well no. I guess dating Emma would be all right once Lisa and he go their separate ways … dating Emma? Does he know what he’s dealing with? How inconceivable it is that she would “date” anybody, how impossible it would be to … Ooooh. Wait. Hold it. What if she DOES go out with Tom? And they, you know, DO THINGS. No, no, no, no, no, we’re gonna nip this in the bud here:
I said it’s unlikely she’d date anybody.
“Oh hey, that’s why I am asking you. Like, I’m not a thief, if you’ve got design
s on her I don’t wanna step in and mess things up, that’s why I’m asking. But she doesn’t go out much?”
She’s a lesbian, I said.
“No, really? Oh no. Really?” He shook his head. “That makes sense, all the dyke friends at the house. Shit.”
Yeah, I went on, I think she’s hung up on Lisa actually.
“No kidding? Shit. Hey,” he said, laughing, getting up to get us some more beers (he had all the money, he was paying), “wouldn’t mind watching those two, you know—hehhehheh, you know?”
You’re a crudbomb, Tom. No I didn’t say that, just thought it. Never insult the man buying your beers (Poor in New York, Lesson 23). Actually, I’m not much less of a crudbomb. What if he tells Lisa I said Emma was a lesbian, after Lisa no less. I’ve got to get to Lisa first and tell her … no, she’ll be hurt to find out he’s after Emma. I gotta tell someone. Mandy will back me on this …
8:20 p.m. The violet sky, dim beach light, the soft lapping sound of twilit waters (yeah, with dreck like that, I should be writing “Dunecrest.”) We get back to the house to a chorus of Where have you boys been, you two go out on the town? A night out with the boys? Boys will be boys. I went through the beachhouse trying to find Mandy, passing a room with Susan talking to Janet (“… it’s important as a lesbian like myself to create an actualizing sphere about myself, to achieve positive reinforcement within the womanspace…”) which I steered clear of. Mandy was out on the porch.
“Hey Gil, what’s up?”
Could we go for a walk?
I told her what I had said to Tom.
“Perfectly understandable lie,” she said sympathetically. “But I think Emma’s sincere about her celibacy—she won’t go out with Tom, or sleep with him…” She trailed off, thinking about it. “He is a bit of a hunk, isn’t he?”
I faltered. Would that matter to Emma? She always says she can’t stand vain, hunky athletic jock types …
“Maybe it’s because she can never get them interested in her,” Mandy said slowly. “One thing comes back to me from those celibacy meetings … nah, it’s just crap.”
Emma Who Saved My Life Page 15