Emma Who Saved My Life

by Wilton Barnhardt

  Well that was easy enough.

  Philip Proctor had been a small businessman and he had failed in his own pursuits when his wife was getting published becoming mildly acclaimed in hers. So there was the added layer of self-doubt, of unsure talent to make Philip interesting. Sort of like me and acting. Philip, the sympathetic loser. Lydia, the brilliant exasperating neurotic, and, in the end, when she kills herself, a loser too. This wasn’t exactly a cheery play.

  I don’t know, I said to Reisa, if you can understand. But all my life I’ve gotten by, I feel like a faker—

  “Don’t we all,” she said, smiling, shrugging.

  But this play is good and you make it great. I can’t match you. I’m not in your league.

  She didn’t want to hear this. “Gil, I’m dime-a-dozen. I agree you may very well need a break, take some time off, but it’s hardly a matter of me being better than you—”

  I was laughing: But Reisa you’re fantastic, you are!

  She looked down in her cup. “Your ŕesuḿe is ten times better than mine, you’ve been on Broadway—”

  All of that is NOTHING. I can’t turn in that kind of hard performance you’re doing.

  She shook her head. “You’re making me blush.”

  I’ll tell you why you’re good. You know the scene where you find out your son is dead in the Korean War? And you make a decision to finish the letter you’ve begun to him, even though it’s for nothing? And as you write the letter a poem evolves and you fight with it, wrestle with it, cursing fate, cursing God, and at the end when you arrive at the last line, you smile, smile deliriously. Your heart is breaking, your son is dead but you have wrested some solace, some ethereal arrangement of words from it—you’re great there. That smile!

  Reisa set her glass down and leaned forward. “Yes, I keep waiting for Greg to stop me, but that seemed right, that smile—”

  Because it’s not expected and it’s a smile of triumph, but also of sadness and you communicate that, we’re in your mind, we know it’s not a happy or selfish smile.

  “I worked at that scene,” she said softly, almost afraid to give herself her own due. “It took forever to make myself happy with it—”

  Reisa, don’t you realize that I’ve never done anything like that in my life! I put on costumes! I fake accents, I imitate, I’m putzing around up there. But you create, you bring to life.

  She was silent for a moment, then looked up calmly—no one had told her this before (stupid philistines!) and she was allowing herself to be unashamedly satisfied with her work.

  It’s not just being up there with you, Reisa. It’s a lot of things—I’m losing my momentum for the theater. The joy’s gone out of it for me—

  “Gil it becomes a job after a while, all things do. So many days I don’t want to come in, I want to call in sick—there are days I hate the theater.”

  But your gift will keep calling you back, will keep providing rewards I’ll never know.

  She touched my face, reaching across. “You go take your break, Gil Freeman. And you come back to New York and you get back on the stage and you knock us dead. There’s more in you than you realize.”

  I just wanted to say thank you, I said, rising, making for the door. There’ve been nights I’ve found nothing good to say about the theater. A collection of human misfits and phoneys—

  “I know, I’ve given this speech too.”

  —has-beens, washups, deluded nobodies … and then you see it done right, like when I watch you perform. And the theater is the greatest magic act in the world.

  My agent Jerry was a sweetheart about my getting out of the play: “Gil, take it from me,” said Jerry, putting down her file folder. “You need a break. You need a rest. You need out of New York. I’ve seen this and heard this before.”

  I’m sure I’ll be fine, Jare. This talk has helped a lot.

  Jerry studied me, not liking what she saw. “Let’s get a hotdog, huh?” We left her office, away from the secretary, away from her sister, down to the bustle and noise of 48th Street, half a block from Times Square. We walked toward the commotion, in search of a hotdog vendor.

  “How long you been doing this?”

  Almost ten years, Jerry.

  “And how long have you been away, like back to your hometown?”

  A few weeks here and there, Christmas, Thanksgiving sometimes, an occasional pop home in the spring. I’m not big on Oak Park, Jerry—my parents weren’t encouraging about my being an actor and now that I’m working … (It seemed vain to talk at the moment of my working, as I was trying to get out of a part in a play and causing my agent loads of grief) … now that I’m getting my name in the papers, I hate the idea of going home and pretending nothing has happened, as if I don’t resent them for not supporting me—

  “Your parents are normal human beings, Gil. Forgive them for that. They’re probably dying to make it up with you. Dying being the operative word—parents die, you know. Get the shit worked out so there’ll be no regrets. Trust me on that.”

  (Jerry and her sister Janie lived together, ran their agency, talked daily to Mother on the phone—a real close family that didn’t seem able to admit any new members. Family was one of Jerry’s big things.)

  “What if I got you in a tour? There are five or six musicals with light singing roles making the rounds this summer. Grease, there’s a Hello Dolly! touring with Donna Lundsford, ’59 Mustang, Fiddler on the Roof is getting trotted out again—”

  You mean go on the road? Me?

  “You know, as a break. No starring role—chorus stuff, easy stuff. Big casts, lots of drinking, lots of screwing around, put in your three hours each night, see the country.”

  I’ll think about it. Sounds good. We had walked into Times Square, the one place in New York that’s never dull, never still, never closed. When you imagine Broadway, you imagine this spot, the blinking lights, the sleaze and sex shows next to family soda fountains and souvenir stores (PUT YOUR NAME IN HEADLINES!!), tattoo parlors, take-out sushi, Thai boxing taught here … a New York in miniature. Jerry stopped before a vendor and ordered two hotdogs.

  “I don’t know what went wrong with Her Gentlest Touch, Gil. I thought that part was made for you. It’s not as if you’ve had tons of leading roles, either.”

  It was perfect for me. As perfect a role as I ever had.

  “Can I ask you a question—a personal question?”

  Sure. Mustard on mine, please.

  “Thanks,” Jerry said, handing the vendor the money, leading us away toward the traffic island in the center of the square. “Are you unhappy because you’re not on Broadway anymore? I know Mother’s Day was big-time and this off-Broadway deal may seem small-time to you—”

  No, that’s not it, Jerry.

  “It’s hard to come down off the mountain, but it’s not always Broadway in this business, you know? I gotta little girl who did the youngest daughter in Family, Family, got on the cast album and everything—she’s in Staten Island doing the umpteenth local Sound of Music, ‘doe a deer, a female deer’—that old shtick. Staten Island. You don’t get to Broadway every year.”

  I know that.

  “If you love the theater and it’s in your blood, it doesn’t matter if it’s Peoria. Can you play Peoria, Gil?”

  (Jerry, that’s nice talk, that’s real pretty talk. But neither I, nor most of my fellow actors, wants Peoria, wants Staten Island, wants Queens. I guess I was spoiled, by the salary, by the perks. When Rosemary was in her last week, we had limos pick us up to take us to the theater, a gesture from the producer. And now I was back in Chelsea, small struggling theater, good cast, good play, working at a five-week run, a smattering of an audience, with—if we’re lucky—a few mentions in the press, a spare paragraph or two. Some part of me didn’t want to be back there. But, as Jerry explained, it was a step up, to a leading role.) I don’t know, I said to Jerry, doing her the justice of not pretending to be better than I was. I need some time to sort out this theatrical
career of mine. I need to come to grips with Peoria.

  In the meantime I told Jerry to put me down for the road show auditions, male stuff.

  I think half of moving out of New York is running around telling people you’re leaving, getting used to the idea yourself. I decided to start with Janet. I got on the PATH train to Jersey, and as I walked up the street where she lived I thought to myself: What does Janet care you’re going? You and Janet have never been close. To her, you’ve always been Emma’s friend. You never got past the surface with her, this black lesbian separatist with a chip on her shoulder a lot of the time. She’s now living with this redheaded sportswriter. Another white girl. Wonder why it is all of Janet’s girlfriends have been white, most of her friends are white? You could never ask something like that. All you’ve got in common is Emma, and ten years of New York, being aware of each other on the sidelines.

  “You better come back,” said Janet, after coffee, seeing me to the door. “There are not many of us originals left. Come back and help us keep the East Village and Hoboken the proletariat slum we’ve come to know and love.” Good old Janet. That woman could wrench the political sentiment out of day-to-day life like no one else.

  I’ll be back, I said. I’m just leaving for a short break.

  Janet squinted at me. “You sure you’ll be back? A lot of people say they’ll be back and they don’t get back.”

  SURE. I’ll be back in New York before you know it. I just have to see home for a little while, catch up with some people, I have a friend Sophie out there in Evanston, I’ll see Mom and Dad. Very few people in New York have moms and dads of course, and I watched Janet’s eyes glaze over as I mentioned them. We transplanted New Yorkers all were hatched somewhere near Central Park.

  “Great dyke scene north of town in Chicago, I hear,” said Janet. And there was a goodbye pause. A last burst of nostalgia ensued:

  Remember that snapshot I took of Janet, Gay Rights Day parade (which they tried to drag me to and I received abuse for not going), Janet’s big Angela Davis afro, medallions, black power badges, lesbian protest T-shirts? Remember Susan’s party for the resignation of Nixon? Remember that trip out to the Hamptons with Janet’s girlfriend, that rich heiress Jewish American Princess who ended up fighting with Janet about whether she flirted with the woman at the gas station? Do you remember the dinner Emma and everyone made where Lisa forgot to put whatever it was in the pumpkin pie and it turned out liquid?

  “Honey that was nothing: Do you remember how the turkey had been in the oven all day and Emma was so busy running us out of the kitchen and being Miss Head Bitch that she forgot to turn the oven on! The last Thanksgiving dinner with Emma—or so I swore at the time.”

  Oh god, next Thanksgiving we ought to have a reunion of that comedy show.

  “You’re right, we really should,” she said laughing, remembering no doubt Emma being useless in the kitchen, getting drunk, wearing this dumb homemade black construction-paper Pilgrim’s hat. “Oh god that was funny—yes, yes, we’ll have that reunion. I’ll get on it right away.”

  It never happened—those things never do happen—but we ended laughing, Janet and I, and I felt warm walking down the stairs on my way home, warm and a little sad.

  Peoria wasn’t all that was wrong. The last few years I felt as if I had been given a vision of how I didn’t want to end up:

  Rosemary Campbell, success. Success at the cost of her humanity. Tucker Broome, washup. A life alone in the theater, the bottle for your friend. Charity Glenn, fame addict. She was someone once and now she can’t live without it again, she’ll give her life to win that moment of glory back, in cheap TV, in second-rate projects, she just can’t let go, just can’t walk away. There were the heroes too, weren’t there? Bonnie McHenry and Joyce Jennings? Neither were married, both went home alone, a little drink before bed maybe, a little late-night TV. No, true, they’re not unhappy housewives in the suburbs but can you be so sure they’re not making the best of a lot they found themselves stuck with? Where do you end up, Gil? Bit parts until you’re sixty-five? Retire to one of those old showmen’s homes, old actors, sit with the music-hall leftovers reminiscing about the good times before visitor’s hour in the solarium? And who’s going to come visit you? I made a mistake somewhere, didn’t I? Emma’s got me spooked. If you have a long-term relationship with a good considerate woman, maybe even marry her, have kids—that’s Suburban Death, it’s average and normal (Emma’s worst condemnations). It doesn’t have to be. Ninety-nine percent of humanity has thought love and constancy and children were a pretty good idea, why did I listen so much to Emma Gennaro who was competing for flakiness with the late ’70s?

  On the other hand, I know exactly why I listened to her. I had been in love with her.

  “So you’re going to go on a road-show tour, huh?” said Emma. “I bet, knowing showpeople, that’ll be one long orgy.”

  I hope so.

  “What is this city going to do without us? Can it survive without one of us here?”

  That’s another thing. Emma, Miss I’ll Never Leave New York herself, was leaving New York. She had applied to Stanford’s program for creative writing, sent in her book, they had given her some money, and she was going to do it, Emma in the Golden Land.

  “Stanford’s got this grad accommodation mobile home park, Gil,” she said gleefully, looking over her forms and folders and questionnaires they sent. “I see volleyball parties with Emma at the net. I see surfing, I see becoming a hippie. I see barbecues every night, I see eighteen-year-old California beach bunnies pouring out their hearts to Mother Emma, ‘Todd doesn’t love me anymore…’”

  I thought you hated barbecues. The suburban connection.

  “Well, we might as well both be suburban since you’re going back to sink into the abyss with that Sophie woman.”

  And that was one more thing. If I took a break in the Midwest, I at least had a place to stay. Sophie had been to New York twice since I saw Emma at Bellevue, she had even bought a book of Emma’s poems. “One complicated young lady,” said Sophie, smiling, putting down the book when she’d finished. The book purchase had softened Emma’s smear campaign for a few months but she was back in force again.

  “Don’t marry that girl, Gil. It’ll be Jim and Lisa all over again. Marriage leads to misery!”

  Speaking of Lisa, I got another party invitation.

  “Me too. Another advertising party, ooooooh boy.”

  We oughta go, you know. Tell Lisa we’re leaving. Emma had seen lots less of Lisa than I had, so she was squirming uncomfortably. C’mon Emma, you can play with Lisa’s little girl.

  “All those advertising yucks—I can’t take it. And we shouldn’t tell Lisa we’re leaving town at a party. I guess we’d better invite her out.”

  Which we did. Down to the Village to the Cafe Prato near Carmine Street. Emma and I staked out a booth inside, ordered cappuccinos, Emma insisting on a plate of fries.

  “I can’t believe I’m almost thirty, Gil.”

  Gonna tell me your birthday at long last?

  “Nope,” she said munching fries. “But I’ll be in California for it. Hurling myself off the cliffs of Big Sur.” She laughed. “I really don’t care about turning thirty. I feel my twenties were a write-off, but I’m going to get my thirties correct.”

  You met ME in your twenties.

  “Oops sorry. You know what I mean. Have a fry.”

  Why don’t you offer them before you goop them all up in steak sauce?

  “Because you’d eat them all—ah, I see Lisa and progeny…”

  In came Lisa, slipping in the booth across from Emma and me.

  “God this has been forever!” she said, setting her daughter down to her side on the booth. “It’s been years since I’ve been here. You remember Gil, your first day in town?”

  It has crossed my mind.

  “I associate this place with fierce nicotine fits—remember?” Lisa looked as good as we’d seen her in years, freer, m
ore relaxed. “I thought I’d never quit smoking, particularly living with Emma the smokestack—we’d get each other chainsmoking pack after pack down here, remember?”

  Yeah, we said, hoping to keep nostalgia at a minimum.

  “But I did quit,” Lisa added, ruffling her little girl’s white-blond hair. “I quit when I got pregnant, for you, didn’t I honey?”

  We have some news, I began.

  “Just a minute…” Lisa’s daughter had squirmed under the table and was now in the aisle, threatening to topple a waitress. “Honey, you get in here, you…” Daughter, giggling, ran down the aisle. “I said come here. Come here. Look young lady…” She used her last-straw voice: “NOW.” Daughter came running, Lisa scooped her up and set her firmly beside her. “Just sit right here and don’t get into that…” Lisa moved the steak sauce out of reach.

  “Yeah we had to come here one more time,” Emma said, hoping to open up the discussion of our departures.

  But Lisa had plenty to talk about. Jim, mostly. She spoke in a serious adult tone so as not to interest her three-year-old.

  “So I was right, there was someone else,” said Lisa. “Some copywriter at J. Walter Thompson. I mean, not that I blame him in a way, I’ve been a holy bitch to live with. But still. Anyway Jim and I talked it over and we don’t want to get a divorce, at least not right away. So we’re going to separate and see how that works for a while—I said PUT THAT DOWN, now … oh honey, look what you’ve done…” Lisa quickly whisked a few napkins from the dispenser and dipped it in her ice water and dabbed her daughter’s dress now streaked with mustard. “I swear, would you … oh, honey, please just sit there, can you do that for Mommy?” Then back to us, continuing about her marriage’s failure in an even and almost businesslike tone: “So anyway, I’m going to leave McKendrick Advertising, and go elsewhere. I’ve started sending out ŕesuḿes. It would be too weird to be there at work with him every day—that may have been the problem anyway, seeing too much of each other.”