Emma Who Saved My Life (17 page)

Tom informed us that the tunnel was under the rock under the river.

“Well that makes me feel
a lot
better,” said Emma. “We can be crushed by the rocks then drowned, flailing about, thousands of us in putrid mud. And what about the blowers, the big fans that suck all the carbon monoxide out. One of these days they're going to break and we're all going to asphyxiate down here. It would be a simple thing for those fans to break. I wonder how long it would take … probably under a minute for us all to suffocate.”

No one comforted Emma. Eventually the traffic inched forward and we emerged from the Tunnel of Death, went through a series of split-second-decision-requiring intersections, and then we were sailing at full-speed down the New Jersey Turnpike.

“So,” said Tom, trying again, “I met Janet and Mandy one night when I dropped Lisa off at your place. How does everyone know each other?”

Before Lisa could answer, Emma said, “Oh, we met them when we went dyke bar-hopping one night.”

“Really?” said Tom. “So they're, uh, lesbians?”

“Yes,” said Emma, “they are.”

Tom didn't seem fazed. “I've always wondered what they did.”

“They perform cunnilingus on each other, as a rule. Although some lesbians use—”

No, no, no, Tom broke in, laughing. He had meant what Janet and Mandy did for a living, careerlike not lesbianlike. Lisa followed with convulsive laughter, Tom kept laughing, and Emma joined in so she wouldn't seem embarrassed, which she was. Many miles and suburbs went by before Emma spoke again, and then only in distress:

“I'm car-zee-ated,” she announced, as we swung around the exit ramp of the Garden State Parkway.

What?

“Carseated. It's when you have nausea in a car. ‘Carzha.' You can have buszha, subwayzha, planezha, taxizha—”

New Yorkzha, I suggested.

“Yes, there are metaphysical connotations, too: like Lifezha, Sexzha, both of which I have all the time.”

Polite laughter. Emma moved close to whisper.

“Okay, so Tom isn't a complete piece of shit, but notice our friend Lisa, huh? She acts differently around him. She's not one of us anymore … she's gone over to the other side—”

Emma—

“No, and that's not all. She waits to see if he laughs before laughing at us, did you catch that? He matters more than we do. This is the great fault of most women, I'll have you know, they get a boyfriend and then the friends go
out
the window…”

I told Emma she was being premature, at least wait and see how the weekend goes. Lisa was nervous having us all together.

“I'll seduce Tom in the dunes—I'll make the sacrifice to put an end to this. Or you can seduce Lisa in the dunes. Or we could really put an end to it and you could seduce
Tom
in the dunes. We both could seduce Lisa, we could share her—”

In the dunes, I clarified.

“In the middle of the Garden State Parkway for all I care. We have got to save her. How DARE she go and have sex—successful, all-American, no-nonsense, healthy, functional normal-people sex without consulting us first? We'll tell her when she can go have sex and when she can't and if so with whom.”

Then there was Highway 9, and the strip, a world of beach-town junk and souvenir places and stores called Kwik-Pik and EZ-Stop and Stop 'N Get It! filled with cheap beach things. We passed a shack with a hand-painted placard advertising
LIVE BAIT.

“Worms. There's a nice thought for you. Someone sitting there selling cans of squirming, squiggling worms.
Teeming
worms.” No takers on Emma's worm gambit. “Some human being goes out and collects those worms,” Emma went on, beating a dead … horse. “What did you do with your one life on the earth? ‘Uh, I filled cans with worms…'”

Every filling station–Kwik Snak junkfood store advertised
SLUSHEES
and
FRE-ZEES
and
ICEES
and
SNO-BALLS.

“The finer question,” said Emma, “what Henry James would have been eager to define, is the precise difference between the Slushee and the Icee. I think the Icee and the Sno-Ball are indistinguishable to the naked eye, both are finely chopped ice covered in some chemical-toilet blue flavoring that turns your mouth blue and your urine green. I think the Sno-Ball was really the forerunner of the Slushee, the Slushpuppy, the Fre-zee and the Coolee, which demonstrates a finer ice-slush technology, a more difficult-to-attain consistency.”

No one was listening to Emma. She again elbowed me, leaning in to whisper, “This is a tough crowd. This knocked 'em dead in Peoria. Don't I pay you to laugh at everything I say?”

I'm laughing, already, I'm laughing.

“There was a moment, a brief moment that I
almost
had mercy, let my guard fall, almost forgot the sanctity of my mission. This Tom has to go. When she doesn't laugh at everything I say then we're dealing with a New Lisa. Look at her … holding hands with him. In his Impala. She's turning into Pat Nixon before our very eyes.” And then, as the inspiration hit, she said to the front seat: “I'd really like a Slushee now.”

Emma wanted to stop because she was nauseated and there's something about a big car's backseat that is nauseating with that car-smell air conditioning and so I said I'd like to stop too. Lisa sort of wanted a diet drink. Emma wanted a Slushee. Tom didn't want to stop anywhere because he wanted to get down to the beachhouse and open it up before Susan and the others arrived. Emma requested a Slushee again. So Tom spotted a
SLUSHEE
sign at Eddie's Convenience Mart but he couldn't get over in time so we had to go up the road and make a U-turn (which took forever because of all the traffic going the other way), drove back to Eddie's and tried to make a left turn into the parking lot (which took forever because of all the traffic coming from
that
way), but after the traffic subsided we turned into the gravel parking lot of Eddie's Convenience Mart: For All Your Beach Needs.

“I have many beach needs,” said Emma, bursting forth from the Nausea Car, “and we may be here a while.”

Eddie's Convenience Mart had aisle after aisle of junk, a tanning oil section, a beach inflatable-toy section, a pulp beach trash-novel section, a fishing lure corner, two freezers full of Frozen Confections, two refrigerators full of drinks. Lisa got a diet drink, Tom got some tanning oil, I got a candy bar and a blue Slushee only because Emma said she was getting one but then changed her mind and said she would vomit if she had to get back in the Impala with a Slushee, but she did buy an inflatable porpoise, an issue of
Soap Opera Digest,
the steamiest romance novel she could find in ten minutes of browsing, and a postcard of Eddie's Convenience Mart with a picture of Eddie in the parking lot, a fat man in Bermuda shorts, raising his hands in a gesture of welcome. At the cash register Emma asked if Eddie was around and she was told Eddie was dead and the store had new owners and Emma asked why they didn't change the name and they said that they kept the name as a tribute to Eddie.

“Eddie's gone to that big Slushee-stirrer in the sky,” she said as we left.

“You know,” Tom began, feeling philosophical on the way to the car, “sometimes I think the Good Life is something like this. I think, hey, why don't you drop the rat race, the hustle and the worry—”

“The bustle,” said Emma, finishing up his clic
e.

“Yeah, the hustle and the bustle of Wall Street,” he went on, and I didn't hear the rest of it, but it was the usual: quit this very profitable I-make-more-money-in-an-hour-than-you-do-in-a-month type of job and go away and do something simple and menial and I guess people are sincere when they say it, but somehow that makes it even worse. And Tom was still going on about it in the car: “… and I mean what more do you really need? A roof over your head, right? Eddie must have a very uncomplicated, relaxing life.”

“Yes, very relaxed at the moment,” Emma added.

“And sometimes I envy that. Knowing the local fishermen. The local kids who come down for things—”

“Like Slushees,” Emma said, still being helpful.

“Yes, I can sometimes see all that. You know, when I retire.”

“Tom's Convenience Mart.”

Lisa said nothing, her arms crossed in the front seat. She knew us too well and she knew we thought Tom was generating bullshit, and that Emma, in her way, was laughing at him.

Emma prodded me again as we got back on Highway 9, the car noises covering her whispers. “Something very interesting happened in the course of Eddie's Convenience Mart, something very subtle.”

So subtle I didn't know what it was, in fact.

“On the way down we were trying to make him like us—or rather I was, you've just been sitting here like a pile of nothing. But the whole I-wanna-give-it-all-up, that Big Bad Wall Street crap was his way of reaching out to us…” Emma poked my arm, she was giddy with her theory. “He's trying to show us there's a touch of the Old Bohemian in him, and of course, there's not. We'll have him wrapped around our finger by weekend's end.”

Emma, I protested, your scheming is going to hurt Lisa.

“We're losing her to the other side, the establishment.” Then after a minute: “Doesn't she have any consideration for my feelings? Having healthy, uncomplicated, unneurotic sex in front of me, just right in my face—it's like she's saying Here Emma, look at me, this is how normal functional people behave.”

Emma, for god's sake—

“La Rochefoucauld knew: One finds something not altogether unfortunate in the misfortunes of one's good friends.”

Emma, you start behaving yourself right now. I am part of no conspiracies. If you want to wreck the weekend, it'll be your doing and I'll be just as mad at you as Lisa.

“Okay, okay,” she said, flopping back in the seat.

From Highway 9 we went on this county route and then turned and turned and turned again (Emma groaning with each turn, commenting on her imminent illness), and then turned finally into a driveway, two ruts through the mixture of soil and sand, and there we were: Tom's Beachhouse. It was two stories, a big gray box with lots of screened-in windows, a porch to the side and another second-story porch facing the ocean, steps that led down the dunes and the spiky grass to the strip of beach; there were clotheslines with towels hanging limply, rusting lawn chairs on the decks, a barbecue. All people on the Jersey Shore name their beachhouses and the Davidsons had named theirs Dunecrest and there was a sign on a pole supporting a gaslight (which was really electric) and someone had written
DUNECREST
in cursive with a wood-burning set across the sign.

“Dooooooncrest,” intoned Emma. “The new CBS afternoon soap. Six people. One beachhouse. The passions, the turmoils, the sexual inadequacy and impotence…”

Lisa, getting the coolers from the trunk, flashed Emma another death-ray look.

“I think it's a beautiful name,” said Tom. “Very poetic.”

“Yes,” said Emma, taking her embossed journal in hand, “maybe I'll write a poem called that. ‘Dunecrest' by Emma Gennaro.” Lisa rolled her eyes, and turned to stomp into the house.

“If you do write something, show it to me,” said Tom, smiling and genuine. “Lisa says you're a poet and are going to be famous one day. She thinks you're very talented.” And then Tom went to help Lisa with all the stuff she was carrying.

Aren't you a little
tiny
bit ashamed, I asked Emma. Lisa was Emma's biggest fan, Tom admires Emma, everyone loves Emma and what is Emma doing? Plotting their annihilation. But Emma wasn't listening to me. She stared out at the sea.

“I bet Tom has a small penis,” she said blandly. “I bet if you had the stopwatch on him, he doesn't clock ten minutes.”

Susan's car pulled into the lot: “The Dykemobile is here!” screamed Susan. Chris bounced out of the car and told how on the way they had made him an Honorary Dyke, and how Susan got lost despite Tom's excellent directions. We all trudged toward the house with our stuff.

Susan fought to share a room with Chris, and no one put a stop to it. Emma and I got to share a bed. I made a joke about sleeping next to her, snuggling up as it got colder, ha ha ha.

“I'm coming up on my two-year celibacy mark and the support group is throwing a party for me and I'm not going to mess up my record for the likes of you. Nothing personal, you understand.”

Now I had honestly put aside all thoughts of Emma—really I had. But that was before I had to spend a four-day weekend in a bed beside her, both of us laughing and drunk and conspiratorial each night. If it hadn't been for the bed, I would have been my normal indifferent self concerning having sex with Emma. No, really. If you go two years and turn down all offers and go to support groups and walk down the street virtually wearing a sign
I AM CELIBATE
, then I take you at your word. Emma unpacked and I watched her throw a garment on the bed.