I stammered out that Ruiz’s store had been robbed at gunpoint, shots were fired. Sẽnor Ruiz …
“My god,” she said kneeling beside the chair to face me. “No one was … poor Sẽnor Ruiz, he wasn’t shot or anything, was he?”
He’s on his way to the hospital, I said.
“Oh good god, Gil…” Emma had no more to say than I did. “Where? Like City Hospital? Those quacks and butchers?”
I guess. I had given Sẽnora Ruiz a ten-dollar bill to take her and her kids to the hospital. That awful city hospital. You heard stories about the free clinics and city aid emergency rooms … people dying from knife wounds waiting for attention, old immigrants dying there not able to make themselves understood, being treated for a life-or-death illness by second-rate medical-school students. Perhaps I should have gone with them. Emma, I said, I should have gone with them—Sẽnora Ruiz’s English is so bad—
“Gil, Gil, calm down, it’s a ghetto hospital. They speak Spanish there, they’ll be fine.” She patted my arm. And I started breathing slower; my mind wasn’t calming down but maybe my body was.
“There are some whiskey dregs, if you want some.”
I nodded numbly. She got up to get the whiskey but I wouldn’t let go of her arm. She looked up at me with concern, and sat back down on the arm of my chair. “All right, honey, we’ll get the whiskey in a minute.” I started breathing normally so I let her arm go and she got two glasses and we split the whiskey. I drank it in a shot. She came back from the bathroom with two pills.
“Valium. From my weekly prescription. This is five milligrams which is small potatoes. Here.”
Thanks. Didn’t know she had a Valium prescription.
“Well, you remember that analyst and the masturbation therapy and all that silliness? Finally he gave up on me and gave me a Valium prescription. Last resort. I’m so happy with those little pills. Valium was made for me—I’m whom they manufacture those pills for, Gil.” She held my hand. “You’re doing better now, I can tell.”
It’s amazing what hand-holding will do for you. It’s gotten a lot of bad press, I said.
“Yeah and it ain’t bad, is it?”
Emma, I said, you’re the only person in this city who’d notice if I disappeared, who knows or cares if I’m dead or alive.
“Oh Gil, there’s lots of people—”
No, I mean it. You saved my life—if I hadn’t had you to run to, what would I have done?
“You’da done something,” she said, tightening her hand in mine.
No really—I’m repeating myself—you saved my life.
“Well,” she said, half-smiling, “that’ll be $1.50 then.”
Emma went to get me some cocoa. It was 85 degrees but there I was sitting drinking cocoa, which Emma’s mother gave her after nightmares. My hands were still shaking around the mug.
“I’ll turn on the TV and find something escapist,” she said, doing so.
I asked to stay at Emma’s place that night and she said yes. I wanted some more whiskey but that would have meant going out on the street and I wasn’t ready for that just now. It was very clear in my mind; I could close my eyes and see that red stain when Sẽnor Ruiz opened his coat, as he saw himself for the first time what had happened … that look in his eyes of dissociation, of somehow not admitting the reality of what had happened to his own body …
“Gil, stop dwelling on it. You can stay here tonight, if you like. Janet’s at her wimmin’s music festival in Michigan.”
The phone rang.
“My god, I forgot … it’s a phone-sex night,” said Emma. “The debates.”
Debates?
Emma answered the phone. It was Sheila, and Murray’s call was coming through when the Carter-Reagan debates began in five minutes.
“I’d put it off, Gil, but I need the money—”
Please, be my guest.
“Murray never takes very long anyway. Better get it on the right channel.”
Carter:… and this administration has improved life in the United States, the future is as good as it’s ever looked; this administration has created more jobs, more employment opportunities than any administration in American history …
Emma and I exchanged looks and small laughs—oh I was feeling better already.
… and people are happy and secure in this great land—
Moderator: Time, Mr. President. Governor Reagan, your rebuttal.
Reagan: Well … all I can say is … there he goes again! (much laughter, appreciative applause) Mr. Carter has only to read the newspaper, to ask the average man in this country to find out what the mood of the country is under his administration …
Emma sat looking at the set, shaking her head. “Scary thing,” she said, “watching the man who destroyed the country debate a man who if he gets elected will probably destroy the world.”
The phone rang.
“Showtime,” said Emma. She picked up the phone.
Pause. In the interim while he talked, Emma lit up a cigarette.
“Yeah, I’ve got it on now, Murray…”
Reagan: I foresee an America that harkens back and remembers its past, hard work, honesty, dignity …
“We’re sitting five rows back from the stage and Governor Reagan is talking … yes, he does go on, doesn’t he? I can tell you’re a reporter for the Washington Post, you’ve got your pad and pen and … yes, what an exciting life you must lead. I too am a journalist. I’ve seen you in the press pool many times but I didn’t dare say anything, but I guess it’s pretty obvious that I’m attracted to you. Am I mistaken or are you aroused sitting beside me listening to this? What? Yes, yes, I see I’m right. Yeah, that’s right, why don’t you move your raincoat up to your lap … no, it’s cold in here and nobody would think it strange. I hear you taking down your zipper … are you going to show me something? Oh I never suspected, what a beautiful, mammoth, rock-hard instrument you’ve got there.”
Reagan:… the natural goodness, decency of the American people. I think the leader of the country ought to feel and know that decency, be in touch with that spirit …
“Oh baby,” Emma continued, taking a quick drag of the cigarette, looking at the stopwatch. “Oh god, I just want to pull off that raincoat and do it right … but, but people would see, the whole auditorium, the whole nation … but I want you so bad…”
Reagan:… and I think one such necessity is a president who will see that prayer is put back in the schools. When I was a boy in Dixon, Illinois, in a classroom right before the Pledge of Allegiance we had a short nondenominational prayer, and, well, I don’t think it did me or the thousands of Americans who knew this too, any harm at all …
“Ooh, yes, yes, slip your hand under my skirt I don’t care who sees yes that’s it oh how do you know what to do? You too? Yes I can tell … here it comes, here it comes…” Emma gave me a wink and the thumbs-up sign.
Reagan:… and well, I just think that America needs leadership, someone who can help the American people rise to that decency and pride and strength for which they’re known. And, well, if I may add—
Moderator: Time, Governor.
Emma was finishing up her business. “Yes, we’ll meet at next week’s debate too, Mur, you bet. I’m so hot just thinking about it. I’ll see you then, Murray. I’ll be so hot for it…” She set the phone receiver down quietly, and turned to me:
“Forty bucks.”
1981
THINGS had been going so well for so long, that when Sẽnor Ruiz sold the store and house to move to Jersey (the speculators had offered him the moon) AND when I was cast in the worst production of my life (Rigatonio, details forthcoming), I had mistakenly assumed that this bad stretch of a week ago, ending April 25, 1981, would go in the books as the Official Low Point in My New York Years. I felt so dismayed that I was dying to see Betsy—I hadn’t seen her in over a month. We met at 11 p.m., Jackson’s Diner in the theater district, on 54th Street.
“Eat in this place all t
he time, do you?” said Betsy with a sigh as she slipped into the booth across from me.
Great breakfast special here. Can I get you one?
“I think not,” she said, trying to smile, “I don’t want to die of food poisoning. We have something to talk about, Gil.”
Don’t we always, Betsy?
“We can’t see each other anymore.” She looked resolute. I wasn’t going to argue because I figured one of these days this scene would be played out. But why when I was one step away from clinical depression?
“This can’t be a big surprise, Gil,” she went on, looking down at the place setting. “You haven’t seen me in over a month. You don’t call me at all—”
But last week I called from the theater—
“For five minutes and it was two weeks ago and you asked me to check the TV listings to see what time a movie was on so you could catch the late show when you got home.”
True, all true. I would now be quiet and sit there and take what was coming to me.
“I know you don’t love me. I can’t say I love you either. But we like each other—at least I think you like me. And even as just friends we should … you should have done better by me, treated me with a little respect.”
(I had suspicions suddenly that Betsy wouldn’t be playing out this kind of irrevocable grand scene unless she had another guy to run to.) There’s someone else, isn’t there? I asked.
She was enjoying this, that feminine love of romance-novel drama. “Yes,” she breathed, looking away.
(Good riddance, I’m thinking.)
“… Yes, it’s true. Roger is back in my life.”
(The clown who gave her herpes! Back again! The key here, I think, was I treated her indifferently but I didn’t treat her brutally. If I had treated her like Roger, been a real Grade A bastard, she’d have been eating out of my hand. And so, no doubt, Roger had sent her down here to break it off with me. Fine. In my heart, some time ago I had already dumped her. Well, she had never been in my heart, really.)
“I know this is going to be rough on you…” she went on. This part of the bad-TV-movie scene was all right. What was less all right was that desire of ex-lovers to give you those special words of advice upon leaving.
“You know Gil,” she said, “you’d be a lot happier if you took more control of your life. Sometimes I wonder if you know who you are.”
(Darling, I know who I am. I am the guy who is still here. Everyone I began this New York odyssey with has packed their bags—Tim, Crandell, Monica, even half the staff at the Venice Theater, Mandy is in a women’s commune thing in Oregon, Janet is now moving to be with some girlfriend in Hoboken, Jasmine is living in L.A. now being the toast of the punk scene, Lisa is supermarried being a super career woman and a supermom (and that is just as good as moving considering how far she is from the artist she wanted to be) and Matthew, my best former pal at the agency—they are all gone now. I’ve come to that stage every New Yorker fears: I’m the only one left, the last holdout. Except for Emma.)
“… and I think you ought to be more … more self-actualizing, Gil. You go where you’re pushed a little too much. You’re miserable in this play because you couldn’t say no to Odessa. Stand up to her, change agents, do something. And you were talking about moving back in with that Emma woman…”
I swore I’d never do it, but I had nowhere to move, and Emma—with Janet leaving on short notice—was equally strapped. I smile, sitting there not listening to Betsy in the booth. There was a time when my life would have been fulfilled by the idea of Emma and myself, one apartment, living together, couple-like.
“… and of course, I can’t pretend not to mind your moving in with her. She obviously means fifty times more to you than I ever will. I can’t still see you while you’re living with her.”
Fair enough. And accurately assessed. It’s pitiful really—even in her drop-dead goodbye-forever speech, Betsy’s self-doubts and insecurities surface.
“I know I was never as smart or funny or whatever it was that you liked so in Emma. I wasn’t as pretty, I…” Then she remembered I was the one who was supposed to be made to feel bad. “Anyway,” she says, picking up her purse and standing, “good luck, I really mean it. Hope you see your name up in lights.” A chaste cheek-kiss and then she was through the door.
And I didn’t mind watching her go, I didn’t mind never seeing her again … until she was five minutes out the door. And I felt (1) all alone again, single for life, we’re back to square one in the sex department, (2) sad for the opportunities I didn’t create for the both of us—why didn’t we take a weekend trip somewhere? why didn’t we have activities other than sitting around her apartment eating take-out Chinese?—and (3) because all the Gil-was-a-bastard memories floated to the surface, I wasn’t so much guilty as I was sad that I wasn’t as nice and good as I always thought I was.
Okay, we’ll update that. Tonight, May 2, 1981, is my new nadir. I got nowhere to live, except with Emma—and I have deeeeeep misgivings about that prospect. My career is yet again in a holding pattern, a classier, more visible one than the holding pattern I was stalled in at the Venice Theater, true enough, but career stagnation has set in yet again. I’m twenty-seven. I am doomed to play young men’s roles, teenagers, streetkids, rebellious sons. I am on the verge of aging out of the only way I will ever make a living. The hairline is receding. I’m flabbier than I used to be (not that anyone can tell when I’m dressed). I don’t have the theatrical teenage bounce and energy needed to convince an audience I’m nineteen and when I try to stoke it up, it’s forced. I once dreamed of movies and TV but that’s looking less and less likely—theater’s my ticket and I’m stuck doing summerstock, walk-ons, desk clerks, townspeople, First Stranger, Policeman 2, Young Man 3—these are the roles I have to wrench into respectability on my ŕesuḿe. But Rigatonio was the worst.
“S’more coffee, babe?” said Valene, the waitress at Jackson’s Diner. She was a sharp-looking sixteen, a black girl savvy beyond her years with reserves of open-eyed innocence, the daughter of the husband-wife team who ran the night shift. Only so much could be wrong with New York as long as Valenes could be produced on Manhattan Island.
“Starin’ out into space a lot there, Gilbert. You got no cream. I’ll getcha some cream.” Valene made off with the empty cream tin.
It was Saturday night. I had thought Betsy and I would be going home together, back to her place. I had used some of my after-shave, wore my clean shirt. Not the evening I had thought I was going to have.
“Here’s some of our special cream, Gil. I got the special stuff just for you.”
Milk the cow yourself, Valene?
And then she explodes in this high-pitched unrestrained laugh. It didn’t take much to make her laugh—that good heart of hers, I think, was a little closer to the surface than in most ordinary people. I wonder how many waitresses or bank tellers or coffee-wagon ladies know that they are sometimes the only connection to humanity for some depressed people in New York—everything goes wrong and there’s the coffee-wagon lady, the sweet girl at the cash window, the Valene who gets you a nice full cream tin: All right, I guess I’ll live another day after all.
“Cheer up, honey. Don’t like to see you looking so down. You in any plays this week?”
I’m in a real stinker, Valene. Everyone’s gonna laugh at me.
“Is it a comedy?”
Supposed to be.
“Well there you are. They’s supposed to be laughing.”
If they put you in it, it’d be a hit.
“I’m gonna be a star one of these days, Gilbert. You remember I said it.”
I don’t doubt that, Valene.
“This turkey you in is gonna be over soon, right? You got some’n else lined up?”
Nothing at all.
“‘Well they’s saying it’s a bad year for Broadway,” and then she laughs her high-pitched laugh, and walks away. Valene: it’s pronounced Vay-lean. It sounds like some kind of petroleum pr
oduct; put some Valene in your tank. A customer put a quarter in the jukebox and suddenly it’s an old Marvin Gaye song and Valene is dancing, up the aisles with the coffee, dancing in place at the table, moving this way and that way, sometimes she’d get into a groove so good she’d just have to stop and dance it out. “Coffee at number twelve, Valene,” her mother would announce from the register. “I can’t Mama, I’m workin’ out.” “I’ll work you out girl if you don’t get the coffee to number twelve,” said Mrs. Jackson. Valene also sang. She had all the vocal moves down pat, all the Aretha-notes, but it just wasn’t … wasn’t quite on pitch somehow. She sang in her church choir, she had a solo now and then—Mrs. Jackson, though I never heard her, was supposed to be dynamite with a gospel number. Mrs. Jackson invited me to church up in Harlem one time and I don’t know why I didn’t go … well actually, I do. I didn’t go because I’m a white Midwestern wimp who didn’t want to be the only whiteboy for miles, so I missed out and I’m the schmuck. But I’m getting ahead of myself telling about the Jacksons. I’d like to tell about the Jacksons because I loved that crazy family and that crazy diner, and the rest of my life was pretty grim by comparison.
Like my agent (ex-agent now, of course) Odessa Benbow.
Foul old ugly Napoleonic five-foot mutant woman, gray dirty moplike wig balanced sloppily on her round head, a face that looked like a cross between Queen Victoria in later years and a purebred boxer, lipstick that would always turn clotted and brown and a cigarette always one-inch long, always dangling from those greasy brown lipstick-lips, all wrinkled and anus-like from years of smoking. I danced with her one time at some social function and she grabbed me in her pudgy tiny sweaty hands and I thought of England and put my arms around her and it was like hugging a lawn-sized garbage bag full of water, and she talked up at me nonstop, swaying drunkenly, blasting me with martini breath and hors d’oeuvre breath (she drank constantly, her breath was always some amalgam of booze and the last thing she’d eaten). She had no sex or social life, so her clients—controlling them, invading their privacy for professional reasons (ha ha)—became her life, her obsession.
Emma Who Saved My Life Page 37