Emma Who Saved My Life (10 page)

A gloomy pause.

“Wait a minute,” said Lisa.

She came back with some Wipe-Away Paper Towels and a bowl. Lisa was at New Marketing Ideas Ltd. making cardboard display racks for Wipe-Away Paper Towels, so consequently we had a gross of paper towels which we used for everything, including stationery.

“We're gonna strain the wine,” said Lisa. “We are not pouring that wine out—we can't afford another bottle.”

Lisa held the paper towel taut and Emma poured the wine through it and it drained into the bowl below. But Emma got worried that some small glass fragments had gotten through, and after all, popes and Chinese emperors and Caesars were always putting ground glass in people's food to kill them, so we strained it again with a new towel and Emma poured Bowl No. 1 onto the paper towel to drain into Bowl No. 2.

“Strange taste,” said Lisa, after toasting My Glorious Future.

“Tastes like Wipe-Away,” said Emma. “Absorbent but not precocious, a distinct aftertaste … a two-ply wine.”

Well, when you don't eat, a third of a bottle of Chianti can hit you pretty hard and make you giddy, and our drunken evenings, like this one, usually ended up on the roof, up the fire escape. The Carmine Street roof wasn't as good as Susan's, it was blocked in on all sides, but you could look over to the street. It was ten p.m., the street was still hopping, a vendor on the corner selling beads and belt buckles, down below a busker we called the Tambourine Man because he could only play two songs over and over, “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “Blowin' in the Wind.”

“Here's our chance to kill that guy,” Emma said, “we bean him with a flowerpot. He's
got
to get a bigger repertoire if he's going to play outside our window.”

“It's cold up here,” said Lisa. “I'm going down, bye-bye.”

Emma and I lingered.

“‘Hey Mr. Tambourine Man,'” recited Emma, “‘play a song for me.' Now what kind of song
can
a tambourine man play? Dylan is God, but have you ever thought of that?”

I put my hand on Emma's shoulder. She seemed to freeze. I told her thank you again for helping me get employed. After I'd kissed her on the roof at Susan's party she had followed up that encounter with so much celibacy talk, so much I'm-through-with-sex I got the message: you don't do it for me, Gil. So I laid off. But she'd kissed me congratulations that night. Pretty pathetic, huh? We get two kisses in almost a
year
of time, both platonic, and I'm rushing back for more rejection. I kiss her again; I aim at the lips but she turns her head just a bit, so I get the right half of the mouth, and she tries, so it won't embarrass me, to kiss back a little.

“Gil, you know…” she began in that you're-just-my-friend tone of voice all women have perfected by the age of sixteen.

That wasn't a romantic kiss, I said, that was a thank-you friendship kiss. (Which was a lie; I shouldn't have ducked out there.)

She breathed heavily. “Look I just gotta get some things straightened out in my life first, you know? I'm happy for you and all that, but I'm still where you were a month ago: nowhere. My journals suck, my poetry should line the bottom of a birdcage. I'm getting uglier each year—”

That's crap, Emma.

“I am not pretty enough or talented enough to have sex at the moment. Or at least enjoy it if I had it.” She smiled and turned to the back fire escape to go back down. “I publish a book of poems next year, I'll sleep with the New York Giants.”

I'll try out tomorrow. Does this offer extend to the waterboy?

She shook her head, laughing. “Don't mess things up, Freeman! It's great, the three of us, just as it is.”

Not an auspicious celebration, but we're talking about the Venice Theater so maybe it was appropriate. And I can't even drink Chianti anymore. Living on the fringes of Italian neighborhoods and buying countless bottles of $1.99 Chianti (“Uh-oh, this Chianti is made in Ohio,” said Emma once, dourly looking at the fine print) finished off my appetite for that wine. An exception, however, could be made for the San Gennaro Festival in Little Italy, during which great quantities of Chianti were necessary for getting Emma drunk. Emma Gennaro, predictably, considered this saint's celebration her personal holiday.

Emma explained it to us as we walked along the crowded streets of Little Italy, the sidewalks taken over by booths and amusements and foodstands. “Everyone knows the San Gennaro Festival is in honor of me, but some will tell you it honors an obscure Neapolitan saint who stopped the lava from Vesuvius at the gates of the city or predicted an earthquake or whose body refused to rot—I forget which.”

“I want
that,
” Lisa said, interrupting, pointing to a van selling deep-fried pastries. “That pastry thing in that … passticker … passticher…”

“
Pasticceria,
” said Emma, using an elaborate Italian hand gesture.

We goaded Emma into ordering the triangular cake-thing in Italian, but she got shy. “Nah, I can do my tourist Italian around the apartment but not here—”

“Ey? Whatsa mattuh?” said Lisa doing a Godfather imitation. “You no part of the Family anymore?”

“Ssssssh,” said Emma, restraining Lisa. “This ain't the neighborhood for Godfather jokes.” Emma pointed to the pastry. “
Una sfogliatella, per favore, signora.
”

“Whut?” said the large woman in the van.

“That thing, there,” Emma said surrendering.

Emma explained that Little Italy Italian wasn't schoolbook Italian. “Besides,” she added, taking a swig from our mutual jug of Chianti, “you try saying
sfogliatella.
” And on we walked to take our positions on Mott Street for the big parade. “Anyway, are you guys gonna let me finish this or what?” Emma went on. “San Gennaro died and they drained off some of his blood, and every September nineteenth, in Naples, the priest comes out with this vial of dried blood and shakes it and dances with it and prays over it and puts it up various orifices and eventually they either give up
or
the blood liquefies. And that means it's going to be a good year for Naples … which means plague deaths, Camorra shootings, murders and rapes will only be in the tens of thousands.”

The parade was amazing: they had this five-story model of the Madonna and another one of San Gennaro, and the Madonna one was draped in expensive relics and jewelry from the local church.

“Looks like a bunch of tinfoil to me,” said Lisa.

And more amazingly, the Madonna was cloaked in a long robe of dollar bills, each strand of cash joined end to end, representing the parish's contributions. The Virgin strode by us (supported unsteadily by a group of young men in T-shirts, all desired physically by Lisa); we watched the train of dollar bills flag by.

“That is just beautiful,” said Emma, after a long swig of Chianti. “I like it when the Catholic church is upfront about its materialism. I expect to be cloaked in dollar bills when we get home.”

Here I can tell you about what became Emma's One Annual Joke, which she made as if she had forgotten that she'd done it all the years before. Come Sunday morning, parallel with the festival in Naples, she would rise and present herself to her friends and if she had a hangover (and her blood hadn't liquefied) then it was a bad year for her and her friends, the surrounding metropolitan area and the world at large; if her blood had liquefied and she bounced out of bed without a trace of Chianti hangover, then there was to be prosperity and happiness. She was generally accurate—at any rate, after her Saturday night bottle of Chianti, two greasy hot sausages on an Italian crust of bread smothered in peppers, a take-out spaghetti carbonara, lots of deep-fried pastry things in powdered sugar, and three cans of beer we had waiting for us back in Brooklyn, Emma emerged from her bedroom unhungover, dispensing blessings for her idolators.

Brooklyn.

For the historians taking notes, let it be recorded that it was Emma and I who found the new apartment. Lisa had the only daytime job of any of us, and the only one that didn't pay shit, although she swore she was leaving New Ideas Marketing Ltd. any day now but the thing about makeshift, just-for-a-few-months jobs is that they always pay enough money to seduce you into staying, into putting off artistic struggle/starvation another month. Lisa spent the day in the Tri-State Area supermarkets sticking happy-face decals on Smile-So-Bright toothpaste buy-now-get-asecond-tube-free display racks. Once we all three were shopping in the Associated for our staples (cookies, cheesey puff-things, generic pasta, liters of diet cola, generic beer, tons of Associated homebrand peanut butter, and one special piece of junkfood apiece, which we allowed ourselves) and Lisa saw one of her display racks, her “artwork,” her Claim to Immortality; she sneaked up with a pen and autographed it. Which is to say that house hunting was left up to Emma and myself (I worked nights doing horrible, menial things at the Venice Theater; Emma was at Baldo's from 10 p.m. until 3 a.m.). To be honest, throughout the spring we got lazy, always figuring we had
months
to go before June came and we got thrown out of the Village sublet.

“You know, I'm not entirely unreligious,” Emma said once. “I do pray on occasion, suburban Catholic upbringing notwithstanding. I've been praying for the woman and her two little brats to die in a plane crash coming back from Provence and leave us this apartment. We could be squatters.”

There were no plane crashes and slowly, grudgingly we started hauling ourselves all over the rat-infested, lousy, overpriced, dilapidated, dangerous world of cheap New York apartment hunting. We would sit in the Prato, Emma and I, and circle ads with a red crayon and then look at the paper, go nahhhhh, and talk ourselves out of getting up and going to look at the place.

“Don't hand me this garbage,” said Lisa, being a bitch one day. “You're not looking hard enough. Stop messing around.” So she joined us next weekend, and then we were all irritable and frustrated.

We packed up completely, everything in boxes, and we were reduced to living out of crates, suitcases, and overnight bags. Emma arranged to stay with Mandy, who was going through some changes and wanted company, even if it was Emma on the couch. Lisa bit the bullet and asked to stay with Susan. Lisa chipped in and I stayed at the YMCA. Three people not having any fun.

So we met at Mario's Coffee Shop in the East Village to compare notes after living separately and apartment-searching for four fruitless days. Lisa hugged me for a whole thirty seconds, a defeated woman. And Emma shocked us both—she showed up last—by giving us a big hug and a kiss each.

“God, I missed you both,” she said, turning red a moment later, checking my eyes to make sure I didn't make too much out of the platonic kiss. We're up to
three
kisses now. Yes, I was keeping score. “Our apartment,” Emma continued, “must never die. As God is my witness we will be roommates for life. I love Mandy but I'm going crazy over there.” She sank into the booth at Mario's beside me. “And every place I've looked at is a slum dwelling.”

It had been a typical week of apartment hunting: Lisa had almost been raped by a landlord, Emma saw a great place except for the rats that came running out of the bathroom when she opened the door, I opened up a kitchen cabinet which contained no fewer than one million cockroaches which went up my arm and you can envision my unmanly screams, dancing about trying to get them all off me.

“But there is some good news,” added Emma to our tales. “Mandy has discovered her Lesbian Self.”

But we thought she was in Emma's Celibacy Support Group.

“Well she was,” Emma explained, “but Mandy decided she wasn't really celibate, but rather that she had been repressing her lesbian tendencies. So she's going out now with Kim Li—”

Your Vietnamese friend?

“Well there are so many Kim Lis in my life. Yes, my Vietnamese friend.”

Lisa smiled for one second. “Great. I'm happy for them. What does that have to do with us?”

“Kim Li, wealthy refugee that she is, has a
car.
And Mandy asked if we could use it, and we can. We can hunt for apartments with a car! That oughta spice up apartment hunting.”

It sure did. And slowed it down more than ever. Our borrowed car was a NEW TOY to play with, wheels, automotivation, the road before us, the highway song, bridges, tunnels, intersections, places we'd never seen …

“I want to go to that place called Fresh Kills,” said Emma, looking at the city map and the Dutch-named inlets on Staten Island. “I envision a gritty cop movie, some serial killer who deposits the bodies of his victims at Fresh Kills. I see Sinatra or William Holden as the crusty detective standing over the corpses, police cars, sirens, he looks up, shakes his head, ‘Someone has a real sick sense of humor, sergeant…' I could sell this screenplay, Gil, don't laugh.”

July 10, 1975. Ten days had elapsed.

“You
are
looking, aren't you?” Lisa asked, running out of patience with us. She said Susan billed her stay as “one big slumber party,” and was overly affectionate, and spoke eloquently about women sleeping beside each other, an openness between them, something foreign to men … “Just find a place goddam soon,” she added on the phone to Emma and me, huddled in a pay booth. Lisa was desperate for money as well, none of us having really enough for a down payment, so she took on extra weekend work, going out to supermarkets herself and standing behind a display booth for Connecticut cheese and the Connecticut Cheese Association which was pushing something called Connecticut Edam. She would go out to Queens and stand there in a red and yellow uniform with a big sweatshirt with CONNECTICUT CHEESES: EAT 'EM! on it passing out cubes of Edam cheese on the ends of toothpicks; she was asked to write down occasional comments which no one gave her so she had to make them up. She told us about bending down to put an I LOVE CONNECTICUT CHEESE hat on a little kindergarten-age boy when she had a moral qualm about children walking around with advertisements on them, oblivious instruments of capitalism. “And on top of all that,” said Lisa as her phone money ran out, “I'm constipated like you wouldn't believe from eating all that goddam—” Click, dial tone.