Emma Who Saved My Life (27 page)

You should always ignore it when you hear
I have been lonely all my life
because that's crap, of course you haven't, and it's just a mood, a bad stretch of life and it will go away one of these days. But what staying power
I have been lonely all my life
has once it gets into your head. I left the pizza place and passed old people, old New York old people, this middle-aged gay guy … yes, I said, like them:
I have been lonely all my life.
Oh what nonsense. Go home and go to bed. But going home in the early evening meant passing our landlady Mrs. Dellafini, the widow, and I avoided her because she might talk to me and bore me, bore me about her cat, the cat who was her only friend … and I thought, see? There are a lot of us, and like Mrs. Dellafini
I have been lonely all my life.

I went and sat in Father Demo Square and could not stop finding depressing things to think about. From out of the blue I thought: Emma will one day break her celibacy streak with someone. It's bound to happen one day, isn't it? She said so that time at the beach. And you, Gil, won't be the guy she breaks it with. Okay. Fine. Right. I am going to go away and make my own life anyway. A theater life. Why, I bet Monica and Tim and Donna and the crew are at McKinley's Bar on 44th right now. It's their night to work and they'll be there. I should go to them. No, I'm in a shit mood. Do you want to sit here and sink deeper into your shit mood? No, I'll call McKinley's and tell them I'm coming. I called McKinley's and they were there and I told them I was coming.

I went down to the subway. Lots of lonely people on the subway, I noticed. Lonely lonely people.
I have been lonely
—

NO. STOP THINKING THAT.

And so I get to McKinley's and as I go in I hear them scream and welcome me and usher me back to Our Regular Booth, and I regret this already. I do not like my friends.

“Gil, Gil, you're just in time,” said Monica, waving me over to sit beside her. “I was just telling them this—you know the story…”

I knew all her stories. She told these stories we all had heard and stranger yet, these stories we were all
there
for the real-live source of, so when she embellished and exaggerated and turned her co-star's flub or messed-up line into an onstage twenty-minute ordeal (which we all knew it wasn't) why didn't we all speak up and go: Monica, this is crap. Back to reality, please? No, we could not have done that any more than we could have said Tim, you'll spend your whole life as a techie being taken for granted, and it's not as if you're that good, and maybe that explains why you'll be a lifetime Venice Theater wash-up. And Donna, you're so busy inventing what you think we want to hear about your make-believe social life that you don't have time to consider that you don't really
have
a social life, or a lover, or a chance of getting one anytime soon. And as for you Crandell—

NO. CUT THIS OUT.

“Gil? Earth to Gil?” Monica laughed her chipmunk laugh. “Earth to Gil?” Did she think that was clever? “Wake up, boy, are you listening?”

Yes Monica, yes Monica.

“And anyway, you know Fuskins, what an old turd he is, so there we are and he flubs the line, he says…”

I look at my friends whom I can't stand tonight. Donna is laughing at Monica, bated breath, waiting to tell her own story, the story she is making up right now, watch her eyes, she'll outdo Monica, just watch … Tim is bored. Why doesn't he say he's bored? This little circle is his whole life, isn't it? God, I don't want to be in that position. Or am I soon to be in that position?
I have been lonely all my
—

ORDER A DRINK NOW.

“Is something wrong, babe?” Monica was irritated because I usually back her up, set her up, push her stories through. Why do I do that? I don't like her at all, and my not liking her at all is exacerbated by the fact that I slept with her and now I'm stuck being nice to her. Not that I wouldn't sleep with her tonight. Maybe I should sleep with her tonight. Would she?

In this spot: an hour, two hours, two and a half hours of boring theater talk, recycled gossip, tales told for Time No. 78.

Tim had to be going. Donna too, with the usual show of her travails of riding to Harlem on the subway, men men men, animals, she'd be lucky to get to her apartment without getting raped, at least that's what she was hoping for, ha ha ha … Why are you making light of rape, Donna—has it gotten to that? You wouldn't like to be raped, you really shouldn't talk like that and be even more pathetic than you are. There was this story they told about Deanne Potter in my high-school class: that Deanne Potter was this really fat and ugly girl (although her face was sort of pretty, you could see it attached to a thinner girl) and she had bad acne and an abusive mother, no father, and that she would go down to Scoville Park and sleep on park benches hoping to be raped by somebody … could that have been true? AND WHY THINK OF IT NOW? What was with me tonight?

It was me and Monica and Crandell now.

“Well,” said Crandell, nodding knowledgeably, squinting like a fireman assessing a burning building, “it's down to the three of us. Yep, we stick together, you gotta give us that. I can see it, Gil will run the theater one day, Monica will get all the leading female roles, and I'll get the male ones—we'll run the place. If we can just
hold out.
” He nodded again, dramatically. “If we can make it, against the odds—show those bastards.”

What kind of two-bit scene are you playing here, Crandell? What is this soap opera? Why does it get that way with you at this level of drinking, at this time of night? (I'm thinking this, not saying it, of course.)

I will walk Monica home. Monica thinks this is strange, she can walk home by herself, but great, great, she'll like the company. Away we go to the Upper West Side, up Ninth Avenue.

Talk, talk, talk.

“No Gil, we haven't seen a lot of each other,” she said at some point. “We used to talk an awful lot, didn't we?”

Not only talk, I say, nudging her with my elbow, heh-heh.

And then she laughs, a weren't-we-once-foolhardy-and-young kind of laugh. She's playing some kind of scene here too. But then, so am I.

“I was telling Paul the other day about you, about how you forgot that time to put out the ashtray for Garner Fuskins…”

Paul?

“… and how we were hiding you—here Gil, get under this, get under that, in this closet, in that closet—do you remember? My god, I thought, we
all
thought, he was going to kill you…”

Paul?

“And then he found you and nearly throttled you and I thought, my god, he's going to kill Gilbert, I have to help and I had this scene I was going to play, I was going to run up to him and pretend we had just gotten engaged and that someone had filled in for you even though your name was on the assignment sheet—”

PAUL? I finally ask.

“The guy I'm living with.”

And so back to Brooklyn, back to Brooklyn and the subway the other lonely people were on tonight, all the people who could say
I have been lonely all my life,
except I could say more than that, I could say
I WILL be lonely all my life.
If you can help it you should never get to
I have been lonely all my life,
and having decided that, you should NEVER let it slip even lower to
I WILL be lonely all my life.
Or else, you'll be as depressed as me in 1977 and you wouldn't want that.

“Where the hell have you been?” asked Lisa in a pinched whisper when I got back, the second I got in the door.

Out.

“You don't know what I went through tonight here with Emma.”

I thought Lisa was on her usual Bob-date and Emma was out watching a movie or sulking or with Mandy. But no.

“We were at the hospital, that's where. Emma thought she was having a heart attack, she couldn't breathe and was gasping for air and I thought it would pass—”

Where was Emma now?

“In her bedroom sleeping, with twenty milligrams of Valium in her. She was passing out so I called an ambulance.”

How were we going to pay for an ambulance? Good god.

“And we went to Brooklyn General and they told her it was some kind of panic attack, nervous breakdown stuff, and she wasn't having a heart attack.”

Well thank goodness.

Lisa flopped down in a chair. “And while we were there I talked to a doctor and told her she was all strung out because of her imaginary brain tumor and he made us an appointment with a neurologist, for a CAT scan.”

Neither of us said anything.

Then Lisa looked up with a half-smile. “So. How was
your
night?”

The hospital called confirming the appointment at an East Side clinic, a week from the next Friday. We braced ourselves.

“I'm getting a CAT scan tomorrow,” Emma announced the day before, cheerily. “No big deal. I'm not nervous. They just put your head in a vice and inject things and … and the thought of it makes me want to die beforehand. Why am I doing this? To hear the wonderful news that I'm going to die of a brain tumor, lose my mind. You guys, wanna go for a pizza? We can get mushroom and onion in anticipation of the
vegetable
I'm going to become…”

Black Friday, the day of Emma's CAT scan, was rainy and we couldn't get a cab to show up and Emma paced around the apartment nervously, not speaking to us except to say something disparaging and defeatist. The cab arrived and Lisa and I waited in a sterile white modern hospital waiting room at Lenox Hill for the whole thing to be done with.

“What if there's something?” Lisa said, tossing a year-old
Time
magazine back on the coffee table.

There won't be, I said. Her symptoms are six weeks old and most of them are self-induced and hysterical and she read a book about brain tumors and she told them all the right things to get them to give her a CAT scan.

Emma emerged, white as a corpse, clutching a handbag with an unsure hand. We went out for coffee, heard about it, assured her nothing was wrong, that everything would be all right, while Emma just looked into her coffee and said, “No, no. I know in my heart I have a brain tumor—from the moment I thought of it I knew that's what it was.” And this went on for a week, then a phone call came for her to come back and talk to a Dr. Shears at Lenox Hill. She asked if her friends could come with her and Dr. Shears said yes.

No one got any sleep the night before the appointment. Lisa took a day off work—she told her boss the story and no one is so heartless not to let someone accompany a friend to the brain-tumor doctor—and I called in sick. We waited and I prepared myself internally for the worst. How would I deal with this? Would we stay with her, care for her? Send her back to her parents she couldn't abide with the suburban Catholicism and her Aunt Leonie's miracle-working priests? But what a burden it would be … and yet we had a duty toward her. Somewhere in this gray inner discussion was a sense of unfulfilled love to make it all the more poignant. When I play Romeo, I told myself, trying to compensate, at least I can associate the experience of losing Emma, the one I loved, the one—it came to me right there—who was the Love of My Life, whatever that would be worth to anybody—

“Would you please come this way? Dr. Shears will see you now.” The receptionist, cold from years of ushering people in to hear the worst, took us into another office mechanically. Emma sat in a big chair between us; Lisa held her hand. Dr. Shears came in with a folder marked Gennaro. Dr. Shears was a light-skinned black woman, cigarette pinched in her lips, a look of permanent harassment on her face. She coughed, put the cigarette out, only to fish through her white robe for the pack and bring out another cigarette, and then she took her chair, looking through Emma's folder, a look of annoyance on her face.

“Gennaro?” she said. Emma cleared her throat to identify herself. “Yes, well,” said Dr. Shears, “you're perfectly fine except for being a selfish little girl who's wasting my time and somebody's money.”

Emma blanched, beginning to say something—

“No, now girl, I get about thirty-five patients a week for CAT scans, right?” Dr. Shears talked through the cigarette. “And I'd say a good half of 'em are some other illness or stress problem, and one or two have some possibility of a tumor, but I get at least 40% people like you, people convinced they have a brain tumor so much you might think they actually want one. Now I've seen your type, several times a week so don't you lay one on me—you told me you had a
half-year
history of headaches and fainting and dizziness and insomnia and all kinds of stuff and I am inclined to believe, looking at this report, that you are one more New York girl who needed an analyst and not a CAT scan. This city's full of sick people who need time on my CAT scanner and you took up some of it. Which I don't appreciate.”

Emma couldn't speak, she started to say something, when Dr. Shears got up.

“Come on with me, girl. We're gonna go down the hall and take you on a little tour.”

Wordlessly we followed.

Dr. Shears put an arm around Emma, changing tone, softening. “Now baby I'm not trying to hurt you, but you can't go and do this kind of thing every week now, hm? I just want to show you some'n and you can go on home with your friends, okay sugah?”

We walked down the white ammonia-scented hallways, everything terrifyingly sterile, ultra-hospital, fluorescent and sanitary. Dr. Shears stopped before a room, the door next to a big glass observation window, the curtains pulled shut. She opened the door and we went in. It was dark, the curtains were closed to the outside window too.

“Light hurts Mrs. Gonzalez's eyes,” she whispered to us, “that is, the days she can see.”