Emma Who Saved My Life: A Novel

BEGINNING

IF I had it to do all over again, I think I’d try to find some way to skip being nine years old. Because that’s when it bit me—the Theater Bug, I mean. I ended up devoting twenty-one of my thirty-five years to pursuing stardom on the stage and, looking back, I wonder if the height of my career might not have been when I was nine. It may have been the last time I was totally, utterly secure in the theater.

For those of you that missed my performance, I played Little Jimmy in The Parson Comes to Dinner, a 100% amateur theatrical put on at the Oak Park Community Playhouse, in the suburbs of Chicago. I don’t think I knew the sheer depth and scope of my role until the first night’s curtain call. They clapped at me. I know people generally do that at the end of plays but at nine I hadn’t worked out the finer points and, frankly, I took it very personally.

SO, the next night I figured out that the more I did onstage, the more they might clap for me. The French maid did her scene while I titillated the audience with untying her sash. The woman who played my mother walked on and delivered her monologue while I intrigued the audience with whether, behind her, I was going to knock over a vase. I had one little line: Ooooh Mom, it’s not my bedtime yet, which was to be delivered in a kiddie whine. You’d be surprised how long you can make that line last when you put your mind to it. Oooooooooooh Mahhhhm … About here I shifted my little weight back and forth and looked adorably at the audience in a way that I perfected in our bathroom mirror, and I’d continue it’s not … I mean it caaaan’t be (what a pro! already improvising) my beedddddtiiiiime, right nowww. Right now works out to a few milliseconds longer than yet.

You might have thought this scenery-chewing would have earned the enmity of my fellow thespians but this was, after all, The Parson Comes to Dinner and I think they sort of liked it (since the audience liked it) and when it came time for my little step forward at the curtain call, the audience clapped even louder than they did the first night, and when everyone had had their portion of allotted applause, the man who played the Parson in The Parson Comes to Dinner scooted me out for MY VERY OWN INDIVIDUAL BURST OF APPLAUSE … and well, that was that. We were off and running. Toward the bright lights of the theater, in summerstock local theatricals, in church camp musicals, in high school productions (I was Joe Football in the Oak Park Follies of 1972, which was revenge since the football-types called me a faggot all the time), then to college at Southwestern Illinois where I was a theater major. I even dropped out of college as a sophomore to go make my fortune in New York, for ten long years, hoping, dreaming, struggling, scheming … and I think, if I’m honest, waiting for it again: that embracing, completely saturating very own individual burst of applause. These days, however—

Is that typing I hear?

(That’s my wife, home from work, just walking in the door.) Yes, dear. The autobiography is under way.

About time! I was tired of hearing you talk about it. How far along are you?

I’m nine, it’s page two, and would you mind fixing dinner tonight? I’m on a roll here.

I suppose your starting this project at 4:45 p.m. was not part of a larger strategy to put me in the kitchen, was it?

Of course not. (This woman knows me pretty well.)

It’ll mean just sandwiches if I fix it. Poor worn-out fragile pregnant woman that I am…

She’s not even two months into this and already meeting her demands has become a challenge. Last night I got rooked into driving up to Skokie for Chinese take-out. I can only imagine what the seventh and eighth months will be like around here.

Actually, I can’t imagine it.

I can’t imagine being a father. Between you and me, I thought kids were something other people had. But we agreed this was the right age and the time was right and … I guess the problem is I still have New York on the brain, residual theateritis. No, I’m not going back—I’m happily married, I’ve been working out here for four and a half years now, and I’m looking forward in an abstract way to being the world’s greatest father to the world’s greatest son or daughter. But I was a different person in New York.

What kind do you want? she’s yelling from the kitchen. The management’s pushing baloney tonight. It’s forming a wall in the back of the fridge.

Peanut butter and mayonnaise on white Wonder-type bread.

Silence. I wait for the comment.

As if the morning sickness wasn’t bad enough. That I have to craft such atrocities with mine own hands…

You know when I said I was only secure in the theater once, when I was nine years old? I can think of another time. When I decided it was time to leave New York and take a long break. Maybe for the first time in ten years I really felt like my own person, in control of events for once, and part of my happiness was having the theater in proper perspective. Also, I was probably looking for an excuse to go home. Which is ironic. Because sometimes here in Evanston with the next few decades of my life chiseled in stone before me—well, the rest of my life, really—I wonder if lately I haven’t been looking for an excuse to go back.

1974

IT was still a time when people moved around the country by Greyhound bus. That’s how I moved east, and it meant my introduction to New York City was through the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Lisa, my only friend in New York, was going to meet me at 2:30. She showed up at 3:15, but forty-five minutes late is pretty good for Lisa.

Now I very much wanted to look like Coolness Itself so I went to Male Prostitute/Pot-Heroin-Cocaine Central, the men’s room, to Freshen Up, and there I am before a dingy mirror trying to look tough, New York tough, Gil in the big city … nope, it’s not gonna work. I’m still five-ten, I’m still a wimp, I can barely lift my suitcase. I am however a man in my own time: brown, aggressively tangled hair to the shoulders, a tie-dyed T-shirt (yellow with bursts of white—I loved that old thing), a denim jacket, a very patched-up thin pair of ratty jeans, my peace-sign belt-buckle and, for christ’s sake, my HEADBAND—just for New York, to let the nine million know how with it I was. God. You know that bank robbery in Tulsa? That series of liquor-store holdups in Nebraska? The old couple in the trailer park I killed for 50¢? That I can live with. What I’ve never been able to forgive myself was being so obviously a just-off-the-bus, immature twenty-year-old.

Because Lisa was late I decided, unchaperoned, unassisted, I would take a first step outside into the metropolis. The bus station is right on 42nd Street so there I was five seconds later walking against the tide of teenage hooker runaways, fourteen-year-old junkies, police busting some black guy for something, old men stumbling out of the porn-sex shops. I beat a retreat when this over-made-up transvestite tried to put his arm around me (Nice headband, sugar). Gosh, New York City. Mom will be so thrilled when I write her all about it. We’re going to have to take this city, your new home, Gil, slowly, in small doses. Back to the bus station coffee shop to wait for Lisa.

Lisa.

Oh I cringe when I tell you what was most on my little mind as I entered New York, riding in through the Lincoln Tunnel, my face pressed to the green bus glass trying to take it all in from the Jersey side of the Hudson. My name in lights? How was I going to be a star in record time? Nooo, my big concern was if I could kiss Lisa on the lips. I never had. This was a good excuse, I figured, since I hadn’t seen her in four months. We would be sharing her sublet for a year, after all. I had decided not to return to my junior year of college and instead come to make my fortune in the big city and, while I was being romantic, why not kiss Lisa with a Big Romantic I’m-a-Man-Now Kiss. Adults did that kind of thing and I was an adult. Somewhere on the bus ride between Southwestern Illinois University and Port Authority, I can assure you Lisa, I ceased being the theater-department sophomore jerk and became a full-fledged budding-actor-in-New-York jerk.

At 3:15, there she was.

Gil! She ran to give me a hug.

Lisa! (All right, get those lips into position …)

Let me look at you, she said, holding me at arm’s length, hands on my shoulders. Damn. Kiss was out. You’re early…

No, I’m not—I said 2:30.

I thought you said 3:30, honey. Sorry. Where’s your junk?

It was one overpacked suitcase, in a locker.

Look, let’s drag it to Seventh Avenue and hail a cab there, she said, tossing her hair, her beautiful long frizzy blond natural ’70s full head of hair. Never, she said, try to go crosstown in a cab or it’ll cost a fortune. Stick to going up or down the avenues—you’re there in no time.

Three months in New York, and she was an expert, she was a zany-madcap-young-girl-in-New-York, and boy did I want to fall in love with that.

We got our cab. I’m in the back with my suitcase, head out a window, looking at skyscrapers, the mark of the newcomer.

Headband’s new, isn’t it? Lisa asked.

No, had it forever. (Okay, that was IT for the goddam headband.)

I was fascinated by everything that passed by, Lisa was jaded and blaśe. I asked questions, she answered them …

Oh this? This is the garment district, actually. Oooh look at that rack of fur coats. Still waiting for a rich man to give me one.

And then the Village, western half, not yet yuppified in 1974. Following a brief tour of Lisa’s sublet, owned by a single mother with two kids who were in Europe for a year, we went to Lisa’s favorite Village cafe and sat at an outside table.

Think he’ll do it tonight?

Who do what?

Nixon resign. Where’ve you been? Lisa pulled out the last of her cigarettes. "I’m quitting you know. This … this is the last cigarette I’ll smoke during the Nixon administration. Emma’s got a friend at Newsweek who says it’s a sure thing, he’ll step down tonight. Which oughta be a relief for Susan."

Susan wasn’t a Nixon fan?

No, I mean her party—she’s the person whose party we’re going to tonight. I wrote you about her parties. They’re famous. Susan’s Soho Parties. I wrote you all about them, how incredible and bad they were, remember?

No she didn’t. I only got one letter from Lisa the whole summer and that was the one that invited me out to move in with her.

"I did too write about Susan’s parties. Anyway, we’re going to one, so, uh, psychologically prepare yourself. You’re gonna meet every loser in New York tonight—these parties are great for the old ego, I’ll tell ya that. The waitress made a near pass and Lisa leaned out to flag her down to no avail. You saw that, didn’t you? She saw me, she saw me…"

I could get used to Cafe Life, I thought. This was the Cafe Prato and if the waitress noticed us we were going to have cappuccinos. Lisa went on talking about work and herself and her new easel and other stuff, while I thought about my luck. Lisa (two years older than I was, a graduate of SWIU), had left for the big city upon graduation, got a sublet for a year in the Village. June 1974 to June 1975. She’d had two roommates lined up but they had a big falling out and weren’t speaking, so there was Lisa left holding the lease. I wrote her and said—I’m cringing again—how Southwestern Illinois was holding me back, how I should move to New York and take my chances, how I was better than any of my classmates, knew more than the directors, etc. And then surprise: Lisa writes back and says, DO IT, drop out, come move in with me and this girl I met named Emma. Would I mind living with two women? Me, a sexually frustrated college sophomore with a strong crush on Lisa, object to moving in with two women in New York City in a snazzy sublet in the Village? WOULD I MIND?

Anyway, it’s a Nixon Resignation party tonight at Susan’s, Lisa said, inhaling and exhaling her last cigarette seriously. She was going to make us dress up like Watergate criminals or Pat Nixon or something, but I talked her out of that.

I wanted to know more about Susan.

No you don’t, Lisa said, smashing her cigarette out in the ashtray. You don’t know what a state of grace you are in right now. She’s four hundred pounds and she wears these… She shook her head. No describing her. You have to meet her.

The waitress passed by again, ignoring Lisa’s exaggerated semaphore to get her attention. Did you see that? They hate me here. I spend all my money here and they hate me.

I ventured: Susan is sort of a friend?

Oh god no. No one really likes her, we just like going to her loft parties. She’s rich. I can’t feel guilt about despising her and drinking her booze because she can afford it. Can’t feel sorry for anybody rich for some reason. Lisa looked sadly at the smoldering butt. Then she went inside the cafe.

I sat there alone a minute, reviewing the essential fact of the day: I was in New York. Ta-da.

"They’re snotty inside this place as well, said Lisa, returning with a pack of cigarettes. Before I could ask if Nixon had resigned: There is obviously some confusion about what I said earlier. She flung the cellophane wrapper off in a single gesture. I was referring to this pack of cigarettes. I don’t buy another pack until what’s-his-name is sworn in. Actually, she went on, as she lit up, I’m really chain-smoking to celebrate your being here and rescuing your college chum from bankruptcy and eviction. Then she sunk her sharp fingernails into my arm. You ARE moving in, aren’t you?"

Yes yes yes. No turning back now.

For Our Audience at Home: Yeah, Lisa knew I had a crush on her. She enjoyed it. No intention of letting me do anything about it, of course, but it certainly didn’t bother her that I was going to be adoring and worshiping around the house each day. Give it time, I thought. I grow on people; I’m like an industrial solvent, I’ll wear you down …

Lisa licked her lips and tossed her hair back characteristically. What did your parents say when you told them you were moving in with me, a Modern Woman of the World?

It wouldn’t matter what they thought, I told her. They weren’t happy about my dropping out and they were set against my moving here and I’m sure Mom didn’t care much for my living with a Woman of the World, but HEY, what am I, a kid? I told Lisa I was on my own and I didn’t care what my parents thought one way or the other.

Which wasn’t entirely true. I moved out with $400 I had saved and Mom gave me another $400 and I never told anyone that she gave it to me, lest I seem less independent. They really hated the whole idea—for them New York was where you went to be killed while your neighbors looked on, land of drugs and garbage strikes and—you had to hear my mother pronounce this for what was probably the first time in her life—hoe-moe-sex-yoo-uhls, which would be chasing her son down Broadway and back, day and night. Hey man, like, they wanted me to finish my degree, and that wasn’t my scene man; you know, get a haircut, get a job, a concept right up there with Peace With Honor—the Establishment, man. I shouldn’t parody how I felt at the time. Sorry.

I guess your parents think we’re sleeping together or something, said Lisa. (What was this—Parent’s Day?) They probably think I’m leading their little boy astray.

Wasn’t it obvious I was so astray already? We laughed together, ha ha ha. Sex with Gil. What an idea.

Lisa and Gilbert, Their Early Years:

I met Lisa my first year at Southwestern Illinois. She was the resident advisor on the girl’s hall in the same dorm, for our Sister Floor, and there was this Hayride Hoe-down Night and each guy was assigned a Pixie and we had to buy little gifts for—

NO, THIS IS TOO STUPID. Let’s just say she was a junior, I was a freshman, and we liked each other a lot and I went and sat in her room a lot and ate her homemade cookies a lot and I was flattered that she didn’t throw me out and thought I was mature enough to be seen with her, and I don’t know what she got out of it, but you might just have to accept the fact I’m a Fun Guy and people sometimes like me. Anyway there was this fellow, Ted, and they were going out for—no, correct that: they were breaking up for years, longer than most marriages last. Nations rise and fall in the time it took for them to work out the fine details of breaking up. Now I see they were very immature, but back then that struck me as Real Life Drama because sex was involved which meant it was mature and important, which shows you how little I was involved with sex at the time.

Didn’t take long, huh? Onto SEX, this author’s almost-favorite topic. I’m warning you now—I like making lists, categorizing, analyzing, and I also warn you everytime I’m sure I’ve gotten it sorted out, I’m wrong. Nevertheless (and I’m not alone here) women in my early twenties fell into three distinct categories. We got room here, don’t we?

1. The Only-Good-For-One-Thing Girl who is only good for one thing, and it was the ’70s and everyone was rushing around telling me this was unliberated and sleazy and dishonest, and there’s more to life than losing your virginity which is what I spent my late teenage years trying to do. I lost it over and over again with girls like this. But what the sensitive young man of my era should desire, I knew, was

2. The You’re-Like-A-Sister-To-Me Woman who is like a sister to you. Now you should just never NEVER go to bed with a woman who is your friend but you feel zilchola for sexually because at that early stage in your sexual life it’s going to mess with you in a big way. I don’t think young guys these days feel compelled anymore to sleep with their wonderful female friends who don’t happen to be lucky enough to look like Vogue models. But I did. I was the Sensitive Young Man of the New Age, struggling toward enlightenment, dealing with outmoded but latent sexism, trying to meet the New Woman on her own turf, pursuing a caring, nurturing relationship with someone I admired for her mind, someone as exciting to me as Mamie Eisenhower.

And this was where I got depressed. What I wanted to come along was a woman with whom the sex would be as stupendous as the intellectual companionship, and she had a name, the concept of her is legend, she’s out there … the Quality Item.…

Someone should have lowered a sign saying: you think Early-Twenties Heterosexual Average Middle-Class American Male Problems are bad, just wait until the Late-Twenties Heterosexual Average Middle-Class American Male Problems strike, chiefly, getting ANYONE to sleep with you. It is never as easy as college EVER AGAIN. As a younger guy I was obsessed with why things weren’t 100% perfect, why sex wasn’t all they said it would be, whether I should trade in someone good for someone potentially perfect, what the other guys were thinking. God, you hit the early thirties and you … you just want someone to have a hamburger with, you know? You develop an affection for human frailty and women who look like human beings live in their bodies, and you find yourself wanting to hug the middle-aged woman on the bus or get to the plain-looking sixteen-year-old before her tenuous adolescent confidence is defeated, you stop thinking of Playboy Centerfolds, Ideal Women and pedestals and rectifying all that’s imperfect and disillusioning in the world on the battleground of a relationship with some poor unsuspecting GIRL. But back to Lisa: Lisa was such a ticket, and I knew it from the moment I saw her. She was

3. The Quality Item who is, to repeat, the first woman you meet in whom erotic beauty meets the class act, the girl with the brains, admirable, adorable in every way plus she is of an order of beauty, intelligence, worth, sense, taste, etc., that is usually—and here is the key, so listen up—OUT OF YOUR LEAGUE. The male ego’s gotta make a beeline for this one and has to be loved back in return, or that’s it for you, you’ve had it, you’re nothing, you’re condemned to a life of barfly ex-cheerleaders, one-night stands, misery. I know guys who spent a decade pursuing their Quality Item Fixation—no one (thank god) is as important as that first, hotly pursued Quality Item. After you get her and see whoopdiedoo, no big deal (or marry her and live happily ever after—it happens I guess), you don’t run after women on pedestals anymore. Women, yes; pedestals, no.

And so there I was that day in the Village, just two hours off the bus, my suitcase a block away in her Carmine Street sublet, I was sitting at an open-air cafe as the light grew longer and more orange, the evening turned a touch cooler, and there was Lisa (who was just soooo New York to me, even though she’d been there three months), adventurous and rebellious (she had moved to New York City, like me, over the objections of her parents) and talented and trying to make it as a painter, doing commercial art jobs and temporary work by day, and she was in the Village (which was a distillation of all that was wild and exciting in New York) and I wanted to make my life the equal of hers, I wanted to be an actor working in New York, an actor of some success and note, and I would do it so perhaps there would come a time, somewhere in the future, that the Quality Item would look up at me from across our shared breakfast table and say: yes, it is you, isn’t it? YOU’RE THE ONE AFTER ALL, GIL. You are MY Quality Item.

A man showed me his penis on the bus yesterday, Lisa said, staring out blankly into the square.

Yeah?

This town’s a toilet bowl, Gil, she said lazily, almost stifling a yawn. Mayor Beame says it’s the Big Apple but it’s just as often the Big Toilet Bowl. I was reading today some expert saying the city was going to have to declare bankruptcy soon. If that happens it’ll sink even deeper in its craziness. But Emma says you have to learn to love the squalor, she added, taking a deep drag on the second cigarette in the Nixon pack. She laughed a private laugh, thinking again about Emma, soon to be the third person in our sublet. You’re gonna love Emma, she said. You won’t know what hit you.

There was a flurry of pigeons in the square across the street from us as this old baglady tossed up a dirty hotdog bun, watching it fall, waiting for all the pigeons to swoop around it; then shooing them away, retrieving what was left of the bun, throwing it into the air again, repeating the process with a cackle.

That’s the Pigeon Lady, said Lisa, familiar already with the locals. She goes around in the gutters and in the trash cans hunting for bread crumbs for her babies, her pigeons in Father Demo Square. The woman cackled again, scuffling amid the fluttering pigeons. And look, Lisa said, nudging me, there’s a weird one.

This old, grizzled man, like so many of the old downtown bums, a scarecrow-man, tattered clothes, gray with unwashed years of soot and street-sleeping, would go up behind someone and lecture them, yell at them, use impassioned gestures, like a Southern senator, except no sound ever came out—it was just a mute pantomime. If anyone turned around, he mouthed Sorry meekly and backed away, only to begin haranguing again. We watched him do this until the man reading a paperback got up and left, irritated.

Yet I don’t feel that sorry for him, said Lisa, musing. It’s hard to feel sorry for someone whose delusions are … I dunno, authoritarian. What gets you is someone like Dolly.

Eventually I saw Dolly. Dolly was the Queen of the Pathetic, one of the regulars on Carmine Street. She was this obese black woman who searched the trash cans of New York City for tattered dresses—thin women’s dresses, little girl clothes, baby clothes even—and she would parade around, holding her find up, press it to her chest, smooth it out, and stop you as you walked by: You like my dress, my pretty dress? I’m gonna wear this dress. It’s good on me, my new dress, it looks so good on me. You like my dress? And so forth. After a month you got used to the sounds under your window, six in the morning, My name is Dolly and this is my pretty new dress. You like my new dress?

Lisa sent up a hand for the waitress again, who turned as Lisa mouthed Check. No tip for you, baby, said Lisa under her breath. I learned a lesson the other day, she went on. "I was on the subway and there was this kid, twenty-one or so I guess, but he looked like a sad twelve-year-old. And as the subway got going under the river to Queens where I was looking for a studio to paint in, he got up and, looking weak and sickly, gave this speech: ‘I’m Tim and, like, I’m a heroin addict and, like, it happened in Vietnam and I’m sorry about it but I gotta ask you people for money ’cause, well, like, I gotta eat and, you know, get some stuff. I don’t wanna commit no crimes or nuthin’…’ Gil, I tell you, my guilty white bourgeois heart went out to this kid and I dug deep and gave him a dollar and I looked around me, and all these cold bastard New Yorkers weren’t even looking or listening, pretending he wasn’t there. When they looked they looked at me as if I was the weird one for giving him money."

Well it’s a jungle out there.

Yeah right, she said, rolling her eyes, and that kid was a con, because last week I saw him again doing a routine about being thrown out of retarded school and his mother being sick and in intensive care and how he can’t take care of his mama. I mean, if you didn’t know, this stuff would break your heart. This one woman across from me just coughed up a handful of coins. I was thinking, hm, first week in town, huh?

Strange city.

This town, she said lighting cigarette number three, particularly the crime, the streetcrud harassing you, the panhandlers and the goddam hippie leftovers—it gets to you, as you trudge back from your $2.50 an hour job, you know? If you stay here long enough, you wanna form a vigilante squad, you want Dirty Harry to come clean the streets. You’re ready for a Goldwater comeback.

Now now.

Three months ago I was a McGovern Liberal. I would have given my body to Eugene McCarthy. Now I sound like my mother back in Milwaukee, for christ’s sakes.

Speaking of family, how was her brother?

Don’t ask, she said. he’s still doing his Love Generation routine in San Francisco. It’s just like Washington Square, over a block or two. We’ll walk through it on the way to see Emma. I mean, hey, that stuff’s nice, beads and sitar music and people selling earrings made out of tinfoil, but come on, you can’t keep living that way. Aren’t you glad we had our older brothers and sisters to do all that dumb shit so we didn’t have to?

The waitress slung the check on the table: Have a nice day.

Well I wasn’t planning on it, said Lisa, but if you insist.

It was great then, that afternoon—I hadn’t one ounce of an idea of the sheer grind of living in New York, day to day. Walking around Washington Square, with Lisa narrating, seeing the colony of activists, artists, jewelry-makers, guitarists, people selling beads and African batiked cloths, pottery, their knitting, the pamphleteers, people waving petitions, Jews for Jesus, brochures about federally funded abortions and harassment of homosexuals by police; someone pinned a flower on me asking for a donation to the Temple of Universal Love, whatever that was; there were the better-dressed hippies sidling up and offering one-word drug pitches (Snow? Hash? Weed? Pills? Horse?), the teenage juggler with a hat full of coins in front of him because he was very good, the buskers harmonizing only half as good as Peter, Paul and Mary on the song they were attempting, the ill-nourished runaway who was beyond persuasion, circles under his eyes, pallid, on something, Can you give me some money, man, huh, can you? Lisa put a quarter into his hands, thinking perhaps of her brother in San Francisco (who got messed up really bad on drugs), and he pocketed the money without acknowledgment and stumbled through the crowd, intent on the next handout. Washington Square in 1974, the last hurrah of the dying ’60s. Even more mysterious than how the Love Generation came about in the U S of A, God’s Country, was how completely it was to disappear without a trace by the mid-’70s. Yeah, I know, a lot of the idealism was self-serving and self-indulgent, but you look around now at every smart, talented person rushing to get in the door of the nearest investment bank and you can’t help but think back on August evenings as late as 1974 when there was something beyond the color and the music, a spirit (I know, yucky word, but what else do you call it?) that the United States might have done well to hang on to a little longer. This seems a long time ago.

Playtime’s over, said Lisa, pulling at my sleeve, we’ll come back and mess around later. Let’s get something to eat.

I followed Lisa as we approached the eastern edge of the Village, where things began to look even seedier, the shops untrendy; the posters and signs turned more ethnic (Ukrainian and Italian, with misspelled English translations underneath), the people a little more worn-looking either from having to work grueling daily jobs, or from being unemployed.

We’re headed toward Baldo’s Pizza, if I can remember where it is. That’s where Emma works.

In a pizza place?

Yeah, said Lisa, because poetry-writing doesn’t bring in too much. Gotta support your habit.

Was Emma any good?

Lisa slowed the pace a bit. Yeah I think so. Then I don’t know anything about poetry. Or theater for that matter—so you’re safe too from critical opinion.

Did Emma know about art?

Good god, Emma knows about everything. More than me about art, more than you about theater. She’s scary. Sometimes I have second thoughts about asking her to move in as our third—I’m going to feel so stupid.

Tell me again, I said, how you met Emma.

I put all that in a letter to you —what were you doing with my letters?

Lisa NEVER wrote ANYTHING TO ANYBODY—pay no attention to her.

How I met Emma? Lisa paused and decided which rundown, dangerous-looking street to take. I met her at a Susan-party. She’s staying with Susan—poor girl—until she moves in with us. Emma wanted to meet you first before she moved in, though, so make a good impression … we’ve passed this porno bookshop thing before haven’t we?

We found it after fifty wrong turns: BALDO’S PIZZA, in flashing pink neon. Inside there was a waiting area with green and white and red patterned floortiles, Italian flags, several posters of a national soccer team on the walls, postcards from awful places, and one-dollar bills glued to the cash register under a sheet of faded yellow tape. There was a sample pizza out on display that looked like some modern art conceptual-thing, all dried out, the tomato and cheese a surreal red and yellow, all sort of glazed over in grease.

You think it looks bad, said a woman behind the counter, you oughta taste it.

And that was Emma Gennaro.

She was covered in flour (one got the impression more flour lingered in the air than ever went into the pizza at Baldo’s), but I could still make out that she was about an inch taller than me—a tall girl, lean, angular, with long straight brown hair that got tossed back angrily a lot, or in disgust—a trademark gesture. I’m not good at describing people. Just think of a pretty Italian-American girl who is not an immediate knockout—not Sophia Loren—but in five minutes or so, after getting used to her, she’s quite striking, made very striking by her hand gestures and expressions that seem to take up all the space in the room. Give her ten minutes and you’d be convinced she was a beauty, but now that I think back I’m not so sure anymore—the photos could go either way. I’m not much help, am I?

Gee, I haven’t described Lisa either. Let’s see … Lisa was the pretty girl in high school who was popular and Class Secretary, looked like she belonged in an Ivy League college recruitment catalogue, the girl in the stylish outfit—yes, she wore outfits—sitting by the river that reflected willows and rowers and swans; and she looked like the kind of girl who might be the only cool member in her sorority but dropped out of it once it got too cliquish and stupid but she might not mind your knowing that she got into it in the first place. You could see her as a woman in business, but you could take her camping too—she wasn’t conservative-looking, really, just clean and bright and dressed tastefully, just not her own tastes. Even when she had a punk phase (that’s later on) she looked stylish, nothing too outrageous or jarring. It doesn’t seem like someone who would want to be an artist, does it? She should own a bookstore or something.

What is this, the UN? yelled a big man with hairy shoulders who stormed out of the back room in a U-necked t-shirt, he too covered in flour. I pay you Emma to talk or to dish out pizza?

Yeah, you pay me next to nothing to dish out the worst pizza in town, she said, waving a finger at him provocatively.

Whadya mean woise pizza?

I mean when I wanna pizza I go down the street for some; that’s what I mean by the woise pizza.

When she wanted to, Emma could really lay on the Italian-American routine, the singing insults, the exaggerations and drama, the gestures. She was a quarter Italian and she told me the family history a few times, full of hard work and immigration and American Dream and bootstraps and fingers being worked to the bone. Gennaro is Neapolitan, but in the late 1800s her family moved north so they could make something of themselves, married Milanese, then took on America, Ellis Island and all that, settled in New Jersey, then Indianapolis as of the last generation, her hometown. Catholic guilt? Nah, she’d say, I wish I had been brought up stricter—I’d have an excuse for being so screwed up. I went to a suburban Catholic church, never confessed anything, went to mass at Easter and Christmas. Any longings for the Old Country? What old country? she’d ask. "New Jersey? I wish I had had a richer ethnic upbringing—it’d give me an excuse for being so screwed up. My folks tried hard not to be Italian—I can’t speak Italian worth beans. Some people here in New York get fish on Fridays and Grandma telling folk tales and Grandpa drinking grappa after mass, and all that, but nyehh, I had Indianapolis and shopping malls, Girl Scouts, all kinds of Americana and crap. Difficult childhood in conservative Indianapolis? Not really. It’s a nice place, a nice boring place. I was too boring back there to mind it. But I’m interesting now. Sorta wished I had grown up in Little Italy, the mean streets with all the passion and drama. We looked at each other and simultaneously said: It’d give me an excuse for being so screwed up."

Do me a favor, Emma was saying, and fire me—do me a big fat goddam favor and fire me, get me outa this place, willya do that for me? You think I like seeing people come in here all the time, DYING for a pizza, hungry, starved for pizza, and take a pathetic look at this garbage and whisper, gee, let’s go someplace else, it doesn’t look very good here? Hey, and don’t walk away while I’ma talkin’ to you!

Baldo came back from the kitchen: You’re talkin’ to me?

Yeah I’ma talkin’ to you.

Baldo locked Emma in a big embrace, a cloud of flour flying up from the apron: You gonna apologize ’bout my pizza, ey?

Hands off, hands off—you mess me up like you mess up your pizza… Both were laughing at this point. You gotta meet my roommates, she said, fighting him off. This is Lisa, this is Gilbert.

Baldo tipped his silly Italian pizza-chef’s hat to Lisa. Her I seen before here. Pretty face, I remember that. You— He meant me. —You I don’t know. You livin’ with these two? You are? A baby like you? Gonna be nothin’ left of you, sonny boy. This one’ll kill you— He recommenced his tickling attack on Emma who was now armed with a garlic shaker.

How ’bout a faceful, huh? Get your hands away from me. I think it’d be nice if you gave my friends a pizza slice. It’s Gil’s first slice of pizza in New York. Not that this shit is pizza. She dodged another lunge of Baldo.

Free slice? he cried, slapping his forehead, looking to the ceiling, beseeching the gods. What am I? The return of Mayor Goddam Lindsay? I look like Welfare to you little gurl? Scuze me but the soup kitchen is that way to the Bowery, ey?

We got three free slices and they were terrible, but even bad New York pizza is better than a lot of good things and I was happy to be eating a slice of it, walking along the East Village, down St. Mark’s Place, where the trendy, filthy, fashionable and wretched all meet and intermingle to this day (very NYC, as Lisa would say), with Lisa on one side of me, Emma on the other. Wow, Gil in New York with TWO WHOLE WOMEN!

Let’s get drunk, said Emma, holding her hands to her face. God, my hands have permanent pizza smell. I go to sleep smelling this stuff—I dream about oregano. Every night, pizza dreams, like Disney—little pepperonis jumping on my pillow, the Dance of the Garlics—

You’re right, let’s get drunk, interrupted Lisa.

I was on a budget so I asked why we should buy drinks if there was free booze at Susan’s party.

Yeah, but you need to be drunk, said Lisa, even to go drink her booze. You need serious alcoholic conditioning beforehand. And sometimes the drinks there are atrocious.

Emma nodded. On St. Patrick’s Day she had a green Irish whiskey crushed ice punch, which … ulllch, it looked the same coming up as going down.

Lisa added, And the refreshments—good lord. Third world African nut paste, and Indian grain mix and, oh god, if it’s vile and sick-making it’s out on the table.

Joan’s in charge of food tonight, said Emma, which set off a string of curses from Lisa.

We settled on an Irish bar called The Irish Bar and it was done up in green foil and shamrocks and little plastic leprechauns hung from the liquor racks and the gruff man behind the counter and the quietly sodden lot inside didn’t seem connected to or responsible for the frivolous decorations. We found a booth with lumpy, badly stuffed vinyl upholstery, but it was toward the back. Emma went to get three 50¢ beers.

This is a drinkin’ bar, said Lisa, scooting into the booth beside me. It’s a drinkin’ man’s jukebox too. About ten versions of ‘Danny Boy.’

Emma put down the beers; Lisa lit up a smoke. As we had no mutual acquaintances, Lisa and Emma began telling Susan stories and Susan Party stories, giving me a rundown of the legend of Susan before our eventual meeting.

Three Most Popular Susan Stories:

1. He Was Masterful, a.k.a. I Came Seven Times

Time: A Susan Party, sometime in the spring

Place: Soho loft

There was Her e who was a male model and very gay and very stuck on himself and he began to brag that he could screw anything that moved and perform admirably and that he should be a gigolo, etc., so after a while his friends prodded him in the direction of Susan and said What about her? and he said he could do it but he wasn’t going to, but then his friends accused him of lack of resolve, that perhaps he had met his match, so he got real drunk and stumbled over to make a pass at Susan, who had never had a chance with such a hunk before. Susan ran around soliciting advice, making sure everybody knew about it—of course, she was really a lesbian separatist as she had made clear many times before and she hated men but for the experiment of it, the wildness of it—and she was wild (You know me, I’m just crazy—I’m mad, I’m perfectly mad! I do all kinds of crazy things; I’m that way, you know?)—so she should just go ahead and do it, and it was politically correct sleeping with a gay man anyway, she figured. Well the core group of her acquaintances (couldn’t quite say friends) all agreed that no matter how bad Susan wanted to tell them allllll about it, they would act like it was no big deal, which made sense because Susan had claimed hundreds of lovers and there was no reason for her to run around as if this were her Big Score. It just about drove her crazy—she tried to work her Night of Passion into every conversation, she’d start discussions with strangers about it but she couldn’t get much of a reaction out of anyone. So her story, which she told repeatedly, got more honed, more sensational. Welllll, (Emma did the imitation, low raspy smoker’s alto) … he was masterful, an artist… (Emma did a long draw on the pretend cigarette, a disinterested look into the distance) … a craftsman. I was like a block of marble, a big block of marble and he was, like, a sculptor…"

I interrupted: No one talks that way.

Lisa was laughing uncontrollably at Emma’s apparently accurate imitation. No, you’re wrong, Emma said. "One person does talk like that."

Anyway, in her quest for a reaction, Susan would put a hand on your arm and say, that worldly look in her eyes, one omniscience confiding to another, "You know, he was so good … I came three times. He knew what a woman wanted—these gay men, believe you me. Sensitive. Not ANIMALS like so many… (in utter disgust) mennnnn… Anyway, by the time the story reached Lisa she had come six times, and Emma (who had heard it earlier when it was up to four) heard her say I came seven times."

Lisa stopped laughing to add, Mandy, a friend of ours, has an open bet that it’ll be up to nine before’s year’s end.

Emma shook her head, adding, Yeah and the punchline, of course, is that Her e, sober and utterly embarrassed the next morning, said he was too drunk to do anything, he just sort of fell asleep on top of her. God knows how her mind works.

Lisa said, She’s obviously never HAD an orgasm to tick ’em off like that. Or else, maybe it’s the opposite—maybe she’s such an easy mark, you just put your hand anywhere on her and BANG.

We all laughed, ha ha. I couldn’t have sworn what a woman having an orgasm was like either, so I laughed loudest of all.

2. Truth or Dare, a.k.a. I Want to Show You My Breasts.

Time: a month previous

Place: an uptown theater party, 2:30 a.m.-ish

Susan’s favorite game was Truth or Dare in which she only had one line of questioning: everybody else’s sexual experiences, which when listened to allowed her a chance to tell about hers (whether she had them or thought she had them or made them up and forgot she made them up, wasn’t known). If you didn’t tell the truth in Truth or Dare you had to do the dare, which was usually something harmless like downing your beer in one. But Susan kept saying things like Oh god, I mean, just don’t dare me to take off my top, I’d be so embarrassed! and I’m going to dare you, Cindy, to take off your top—just don’t dare me! Soon it became obvious that the game would not proceed until Susan was allowed under some pretext to take off her top. So someone challenged her and she took off her top, exposing this big fat pair of meaty breasts. I’m really comfortable with my body weight. I like being this size, etc. Finally, being persuaded to put her top back on, she started asking questions like "How would you react if I took off all my clothes? The Truth or Dare players insisted there had been enough exhibitionism for the night, but one guy (the guy who dared her to take off her top) was intrigued and dared her to take off all her clothes, and of course she just couldn’t bring herself to answer the question. Oh my god, you mean I have to take off … take off ALL MY CLOTHES? Machine-gun laugh. So she retreats to the bathroom and a sizable percentage of the party clears out, heads for the door having had enough, and the rest stay to see Susan emerge from the bathroom which she does. The game never got back to normal after that with Susan asking impossible to answer questions (Would you kiss my breasts?) with follow-up dares (You have to take off all your clothes too and run down the hall and back with me…").

She was drunk, but still, sighed Lisa, barely able to sip her second beer from giggling.

Sounds a bit pathetic, I said.

You’re making the mistake of taking Susan seriously as a human being, said Emma, which once you meet her, you won’t do anymore. She’s impervious. You could walk right up to her and go: Susan, you’re a fat pig and the most ridiculous person in the world. It wouldn’t register—her mind omits any negative input.

Lisa kept giggling, almost spewing her beer. Tell … tell Gil about her, uh, subscription…

Emma put her head down on the table laughing.

What? What is it? I asked.

Emma reared up, tears in her eyes. I don’t know you well enough to tell you this one.

Come on, come on.

Lisa and Emma enjoyed some more convulsive laughter.

It’s probably not that funny, I suggested.

You’re right, it’s not, Emma said, before she and Lisa made eye-contact and slid off into hysterics again.

I went to the bathroom and came back and they had calmed down and had ordered more beers and a bowl of peanuts.

There, said Lisa. We’re all right now.

And then they broke up again, virtually having to fall to the floor to hold onto themselves.

What? What? What? What?

Okay, okay, okay, said Emma, fanning herself, trying to catch her breath.

3. Susan’s Magazine Collection

Time: this week

Place: Susan’s loft, the bedroom

Emma had come into the bedroom to ask Susan how to turn on the gas stove and as Susan couldn’t explain it, Susan left to do it herself and Emma wandered absently around the room noticing that Susan had been reading this porn mag, lying there on the floor, by her bed.

Emma hid her face in her hands. I don’t know you well enough to tell you the title. Lisa, you do it.

Lisa tried to sober up and began to say with exaggerated dignity, It was called Big…" Then she