Emma Who Saved My Life

by Wilton Barnhardt

  “Oh turn off the bathroom light,” she said, slipping under the covers, fully clothed. “Let’s get this over with, this horrible thing…”

  I turned off the light. And stumbled into the TV as I made my way to the bed—I cursed, Emma laughed.

  “Watch out for the TV,” she said.

  Thank you. Is this the bed? I asked, feeling about.

  “Watch those hands. You’re within striking distance of The Breasts. Everything’s off if The Breasts get molested in any way. Keep that in mind.”

  We both say nothing for a moment.

  “I think we should keep a running patter throughout. I don’t want this to get too heavy here.”

  You know I don’t think there’s a GREAT DANGER of us getting carried away in the throes of passion somehow. But I know we’re going nowhere if you keep insulting me and making stupid remarks—

  “I’m a little nervous. Can you understand that?”

  Yes, all right. Let’s get on with it. I think we should start by kissing … (I knew as soon as I said that, that that was a NO GO.)

  “HA! Freeman, it’d be like doing it with my brother. Now cut the nonsense. Get hard, put it in, come, take it out, and let’s get back to Manhattan.”

  I am not aroused Emma. I need some concessions here.

  “No Breasts.”

  I don’t care about The Breasts—FORGET I ever mentioned your goddam Breasts.

  “I think we can do without abuse of my Breasts, Freeman. I think we can live without insulting my appendages.”

  Concession No. 1 is that we touch each other’s … parts.

  “No touching of parts.”

  EMMA, for Christ’s sake. I’ll touch you down there and you touch me and—it’s obvious, isn’t it, we both have to be aroused. Isn’t it?

  Emma was quiet a minute. “Uh, necessary huh? It’s been a while, you know. You can’t just DO IT and let me lie here? Please Gil,” and she sounded pleading, desperate. “Don’t make me do anything. I don’t care how you … just…”

  Oh good god. All right, all right. But this is like pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. I can’t just aim and go in … you’ll have to help me, directionally, like.

  “I should have brought my mittens. I see that now.”

  That’s a minor concession, Emma. When I say I’m ready, I’ll roll on top of you sort of, in the right position, I think, and then you close your eyes and think of Brooklyn, reach down there and help me put it in. And another thing: elevate your hips.

  “Why?”

  It’ll help.

  “Help what?”

  Help things along.

  “What things along? Oh. Okay, yeah. Sorry Gil don’t get exasperated with me, just a little patience. Patience. What are you doing over there?”

  I’m trying to … you figure it out.

  “Oh. Is it working? What do you guys think of when you try to get it going there? Playboy centerfolds? Naked women? Do you think of the vagina directly or generally, or do you concentrate on what it feels like? What? I’m interested, really. Is it some right-side-of-the-brain longing for the mother’s womb or—”

  Emma. Darling. Love of my life. Would you not mention my mother when I’m trying to arouse myself?

  “Why do I get the sense most guys could have done this already?”

  THANKS A LOT, EMMA.

  “Okay I’ll shut up. I didn’t think you had to concentrate that much. I thought you just whipped it out and it hardened right up.”

  Maybe when you’re fourteen.

  “Really? It changes? I mean, I know about old men not being able to get it up; guys getting impotent and flaccid and LIMP and—”

  EMMA, A NEW SUBJECT PLEASE.

  Emma tried being silent a moment.

  “How’s it going?”

  Marginal.

  “Oh you know,” she said laughing, “this is so stupid—why didn’t I think of this before? I can do a phone-sex routine.”

  Oh really now—do I look like some middle-aged used-up man of waning virility in need of that kind of trash?

  “Yes, at the moment. Here we go…” Emma breathed heavily for a few seconds. “Oh Gil, oh my … you’re gonna do it to me aren’t you? You’re gonna break me in half with your incredible manhood…”

  Oh c’mon, Emma.

  Emma started making more realistic noises. “Ohhhh yes, I … I want you inside me, all the way in big boy…”

  To my everlasting shame this is working, go on.

  “… Oh baby, you’re getting so big and so long, I think it’s not going to go in—and I’m so hot for it, I’m just dripping with the thought of it in me … Oh yeah…”

  I think we’re getting there. Now Emma, don’t be alarmed but I am going to touch the vicinity of your pudenda, and I think you should be prepared to take my, uh … my—

  “Your gigantic manhood, your mammoth organ into my hands and guide you into my moist valley of desire…”

  Yeah something like that. You ready?

  “Oh yes baby,” she said, still in that awful high porn-film actress little-girl voice. “Oh yes, I’m going to take you in my hands and put you in so far…” Emma fell silent as she reached out.

  Something wrong?

  “That is the most disgusting thing in the world.”

  I think I liked the phone-sex better.

  “Oh Gil, you’re such a STUD, it’s so giant and…” She started laughing.

  Burning with embarrassment, I ask what is SO funny.

  “Nothing, nothing … and uh, yeah put that in me, this mammoth…” Hysterics from Emma. “Sorry, I’m sorry, it’s just I expected something a tad bit bigger after all that—”

  Emma, I am getting up right now and leaving—

  “No, no, no—please, I’m serious now.”

  So we could be even, I lowered my hand between her thighs. Ha, I said, just as I thought.

  “What?”

  JUST what I thought, I repeated.

  “WHAT?”

  You’re about as aroused as I am.

  “What are you doing now?”

  I’m trying to sexually excite you, make you writhe with passion, walk the ceiling, etc.

  “Get your hands off of that. I happen to be sensitive there.”

  I’m not going to be able to slide right into the Sahara Desert, Emma. So get with it.

  “SAHARA DESERT?”

  A little healthy viscosity would help—

  “You know how I feel about viscosities.”

  SEX IS VISCOSITIES, you idiot—it’s a fact of life!

  “Bastard, get off me.”

  Ha, it’s all right to run me down and insult everything about me, but I can’t say anything about you.

  “I told you I’m in charge of this sex. Now you have five minutes to get this over with or we’re going home. The clock is running.”

  Well.

  You know, it would be a good time to finish off that list. The kind of women frequented by the Average Middle-Class Heterosexual Male in his late twenties to early thirties:

  1. The Good but Uninspiring Woman.

  Not too different from the Placemarker of the last list, a woman there until someone better comes along. Except often someone better doesn’t come along and there she is, the Old Regular, the old standby. The man who rounds thirty with this woman in his life will probably marry her (but he assures himself he will eventually cheat on her, maybe with the Quality Item), and he’d actually love her more and respect her more if she wasn’t so content and complacent. He has the gnawing sense that she thinks she’s done very well to land him, while he sold himself short by settling down with her. I’d say this describes (now that I’m back in the Midwest, writing this) about 60% of all couples. And most couples are unhappy by this point. Something about the magic 3–0: If you’re single you want to be married, fearing a life of loneliness, childlessness, alone at your death-bed; if you’re married you fear your youth is slipping away and you yearn to be single again for that last fling. Beca
use somewhere, out there—though vaguer and less likely than ever—is

  2. The Quality Item.

  The ideal, the ultimate, the one of your dreams. And your dreams have been perfected by this point, taken far from the realm of realistic expectation. How do you kill the desire for that all-encompassing perfect woman who may or may not exist? I’m not the one to ask this question since I don’t believe in the Quality Item anymore. The Quality Item, the Woman of Your Dreams, is the last vestige of adolescence and my adolescent notions about most things have been pounded out of me at this point. But it was a handy delusion, wasn’t it? It led you further than you might have gone—but then again, you might have broken a few hearts unnecessarily, thrown aside someone perfectly wonderful, holding out for that someone better who never comes along, who never maybe existed.

  I never could get through Emma’s Victorian tomes on her bookshelves, but I could manage the recent stuff, all those contemporary novels by Roth and Bellow and Mailer and they all have middle-aged men, somewhere between fifty and sixty, throwing it all away—family, money, prestige, self-respect—on some whore, some BIMBO, huffing and puffing away, it was so good, it was so wonderful, she was so right, etc. Good god, I hope by the time I’m that age I’m not like that about sex. What I’ll want then, I suspect, is what I pretty much want right now, and that’s

  3. A Woman with a Little Sweetness.

  I’m not talking about subservience or playing housewife or making my meal every night or cleaning up after me—this is not, I believe, an antifeminist concept; it applies to men as well. If I have to explain to you what sweetness is, then maybe you don’t know it when you see it. Sophie may not be as point-by-point beautiful as Emma was (frankly, I ceased to regard Emma’s looks after 1980), and Emma might be a touch smarter and brighter about things, and certainly life was far more exciting—accidental suicides, new problems each week, hospitals, the unending one-liners and wit … but SON, lemme tellya, I would trade ten years of Emma-drama for a solid month of Sophie and a little sweetness. Those unconscious thoughtless considerations, doing on occasion what she hadn’t planned on, her being able to dismiss my current problems with understanding and not condescension, her … like last night, I’m typing away at this, right? She sits across the room in her flannel nightshirt, pregnant to the max, waiting for me to finish, reading her sociology book, drinking cocoa. I’m gonna be a while, I say. That’s all right, she says. I guess she was waiting for me to go to bed at the same time as she does—not for smooching, not to talk, not for anything, I think, but the idea that we ought to get into bed at the same time, and that it should just be that way. There are a lot of examples I could give, but Sophie has told me she had better not figure too largely in this book. So take my word for it. Oh Mrs. Jackson, you are SO right—a man will go elsewhere in his life for a little sweetness.

  “All I ask is one fucking favor and you can’t even do that,” Emma reminded me as we stood there at the Broad Channel station, waiting for the A train to take us back into town. “I’m completely humiliated. I am going to put myself in a tub of boiling water when I get home, to rid my body of your … ulllch, secretions.”

  You’re an unfeeling bitch, I said (or something like that).

  “First, buddy boy, you can’t get an erection for half an hour—”

  COULD YOU PLEASE not tell the whole subway platform here?

  “Then when you finally do have the goods, you don’t make it to the target in time.”

  THAT could have been prevented if you had let me work a little closer to the destination—if I coulda had a little help—

  “I TOLD you. The only time you could put it in was when it was time for the damn thing to go off! Just face it, you blew it.”

  You’re making a scene—

  “I don’t care who knows—I’ll tell the world!”

  You’ve got that cop on the other platform staring at us now, so cool it.

  “Stupid bastard. I bet that cop could do the trick. In five minutes behind the trashcan here.”

  All right, bitch, why don’t you go ask him then?

  “How do you think it makes me feel, huh? Slimed all over by your … your parts without the goods to show for it.” Then, abruptly, her voice breaking: “I suppose I’m the ugliest cow in the world.”

  Emma, you’re beautiful to me as always, but don’t pretend you were nice to me or did anything to attract me. And you’re getting very worryingly hysterical and weird on me—

  “I’m having a nervous breakdown if you want to know why. I’m shaking, look at me.”

  I don’t know why or HOW you got so goddam fragile Emma. But I have less sympathy than I might. I see the train. At last.

  “So was this just me? Do you have this problem all the time? Did you ever function with the Bitch Sophie?”

  Yes, though it’s none of your business.

  “And that Monica creature. And god, the all-time lowest, Betsy. You got it up for Betsy when you couldn’t manage it for me?”

  Your rage is taking a very unpleasant and vindictive turn, Emma. (All right, all right, I was less eloquent than that.)

  “Betsy looks like she was squeezed out of a tube. Wormlike, clammy. Terminal wimp with no sex appeal. Maybe that’s what it takes for you.”

  I wouldn’t have touched Betsy with a bargepole if it hadn’t been for the herpes. And secondly …

  OOOOOOH but you can bet I didn’t even get to “secondly.”

  “HERPES?? Why did you fucking sleep with a woman with herpes? Oh GOD, no no no—you bastard! You … you criminal—you creep! SLIME MOLD! I’ll kill you…”

  (Oh Emma, I swear, I swear on a stack of Bibles, I’d forgotten ALL about the herpes, I promise, I just got so caught up in the idea of sleeping with you—I wasn’t infectious, I promise!)

  “… Piece of human shit!” she went on, as she began to assail me, fists, fingernails, and then she took her ten-ton purse and swung it at me, right into my face, and I went DOWN to the ground, my nose bleeding, and later a black eye (which didn’t hurt my playing a hood in ’59 Mustang, but putting on makeup was hell for the first week).

  “Hey what’s going on down there?” yelled the policeman on the other platform across the tracks.

  Emma swung at me again and this time her purse fell open, spilling out everything, including her brick: a .38 Smith & Wesson.

  “My god,” yelled someone, “it’s a gun!”

  The handgun clattered down the platform, coming to a rest near the edge. The policeman on the other platform blew his whistle and ran toward the overpass to get over to us and arrest Emma for possession or me for rape or someone for something—just as the train came in.

  I dragged Emma, still hitting me, into the car. OH GOD, please let the train pull out, please …

  “I’m not leaving my gun,” Emma said, attempting to run back and get it.

  YOU WANNA GO TO JAIL? I yelled at her. The doors closed, the train pulled out; there was the sound of whistling—the cop blowing this whistle till he was blue in the face. The occupants of the subway car looked up at us, terrified but curious enough to keep staring.

  “That’s TWO guns you’ve made me lose, asshole,” said Emma, shaking free of my grasp. “You’ve robbed me of my guns, you’ve robbed me of a chance for motherhood, and you’ve given me herpes all in one day. ARE YOU HAPPY?”

  Yes, actually. I couldn’t stop smiling.

  “What on earth are you laughing about?”

  I’m not really sure, but I couldn’t stop.

  “You’ve fucked up my whole life and this is it … I don’t ever want to see you again, you jerk. You better not be infectious or I’ll kill you with my next gun. WOULD YOU STOP LAUGHING?”

  I’m sorry I can’t help it.

  “I’ll never forgive you for fucking me—or rather for fucking me enough to give me herpes but not fucking me enough so I can have a child in California—what are YOU looking at you OLD BAG? This is between this TURD and myself, mind your own bus
iness … Gil Freeman I’m going to strangle you on the spot if you don’t stop laughing—”

  Don’t you see even the tiniest bit of humor in all this, Emma?

  “HELL NO—and you owe me for that gun too, buddyboy, I wanna see a goddam check in the mail.” Then she became intensely, furiously quiet: “Would you please stop laughing?”

  Far Rockaway, I said, catching my breath—what a place!

  Emma was distracted, her eyes tearing up, her face red, her lip trembling. She looked out the window, which held our faint reflections; beyond was the distant skyline of the city in the gray drizzly early-autumn evening. “Nice name, Far Rockaway … beautiful name. Too bad the place is a dump.”

  ENDING

  AND I guess that’s what I wanted the book to say: Lots of things have pretty names, the Theater, New York City, Being a Poet, Being an Actor, Fame and Fortune, Far Rockaway, Emma Gennaro, the Quality Item, pretty ideas with pretty dreams attached to them. Listen to the words: Broadway Star. Isn’t that everything you’d ever want to be? But what’s in the books, on the billboards, what has the reputation, these things often let you down and—Emma, wherever you are, you’d appreciate this—when you get there, sometimes the place is a dump. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot to be said for the American Dream. But you wake up from dreams.

  After the Far Rockaway fiasco, it was very easy to stay with Sophie and that plan of turning around after a rest and coming back to New York got more and more remote. So I didn’t go back. I mean, without Emma it wouldn’t be the same, would it? And it would take no time at all before I got fed up and irritated by all the hassles of theater life, right? And Lisa writes me every once in a while and tells me how the East Village is more and more white upper-class kids (as we all feared it would get), Manhattan rents are through the roof, $1000-a-month range, all the places I liked to hang out are yuppie-redecorated, and so many places have closed, been torn down, those family-run hash houses, those local Irish bars … See? Hundreds of reasons I’d hate it if I went back. In addition to the big reason I won’t go back, Sophie, eight months pregnant with the World’s Greatest Child, sitting there across the room. No. I can never go back.