Emma Who Saved My Life (31 page)

“… so you tell me, what do
you
think?”

After a minute, I said: gee, we've just gotten to know each other and all—

“If you want to,” she said, moving closer, homing in—the heart is racing now—“then don't hestitate to tell me. No need to be nervous around me.” She was an inch from my face. Great perfume, I notice. Figures.

Uh, I said, uh well, I don't know that I'm ready yet …

Connie smiled, undeterred. “You know,” she said quietly, slowly, and very sexually, “that Emma girl's got you spooked, hasn't she? You are
this
far from falling in love with me, but she's got you afraid to step out of line.”

I nodded. God, I was being vulnerable. I always thought it would be this miserable to be vulnerable and wimpy before a beautiful woman … but you know, vulnerability can take you a lonnnnng way. I don't think I'd ever realized that. It was beginning to dawn on me then that my virginlike fear and trembling might have had its appeal.

“Now,” she said, her voice gravelly, her face very close to mine, kissing territory, “I think you should just consider stepping out of line. Hm? Think that's a good idea?” She put her hand behind my hair on my neck, slipping a finger between my neck and the collar.

You may be disappointed, I said.

“Ooooh no, no,” she smiled, her lips fuller suddenly, that perfume having the intended effect. “I'm never disappointed. I always have a good time. In fact, let me tell you what. We don't have to do anything you don't want to, for starters. In time, I think we could think of many, many things to do.” She scooted herself over to lean across my lap; her arm lowered to my back, the other hand came up to play with that dopey disco-age puffed-up haircut we guys thought looked so cool at the time. You oughta see my
ŕ
esu
ḿ
e picture. You oughta see the photos I have of myself—I look like Farrah Fawcett, feathered hair. YUCK. But I guess you don't care about my hair. I guess you want me to get on with this Sex Scene.

“Nooo, don't worry about a thing, kid. Ole Connie doesn't ever have a bad time. Because she's not after a quickie, a one-night stand, she's after a night of intimacy, of talking…” She tightened her grip on me. I felt it incumbent on me to slip my own hand up to her back. “… of telling stories, of getting to know one another—what better place than…” She nodded toward the door to the left of us.

The bedroom? I ask. (Boy, I'm really Einstein tonight …)

“Uh-huh,” she said, slowly nodding. “Silk sheets. Cost this girl a fortune. Ever spent the night against silk sheets?”

I'd settle for
clean
sheets given how often I do laundry.

“Well then, I think for educational purposes you should stay over. Silk sheets and all.”

I said that it had occurred to me that I was out of my depth. This was her last chance to opt out. She reassured me:

“Hey kid, I never slum it. I only go for class.”

Class, me?

“No, I mean it, you're one classy dude—”

(Note to readers: cut the woman a break for “one classy dude,” this was 1978. Those were important words for me and I'm sorry they were in '70s lingo.)

“—and you gotta drop those deadbeats.”

You mean Emma.

She kissed me lightly; I could feel her breath on my lips a moment before she touched them with her own. “Uh-hm, I mean Emma. Cut her off.” Another kiss. “Give her a little room, hm?” And another kiss. Okay, okay, I'm warming up here. “Let her know that there are other people in the world, people who are…” Pause. Come on, finish the sentence, Connie. “… willing to spend all night, I mean every single minute, I mean not wasting
a second,
making love to you.” She moved in for the kill now, pinning me to the sofa, taking my head in her hands. “Would you like that?”

I said I thought I could fit it in my schedule.

“I know you'd like to, because it's been a while since the woman you love has been doing what she should have been doing…”

I began to protest, to keep up my Emma-affair story.

“No, you can't fool Constance, don't even try.”

No, I said, it indeed
had
been a while …

“That's a shame,” she said, loosening my tie. “A real shame. All that time, you could have been over here with me, getting the works, right? Hm?” She smiled as she bent forward to kiss me more significantly. I mean, I know I'm sitting there being kissed and I should be falling into the experience romance-novellike, but I was sitting there being strangely objective, thinking: Wow, this woman can kiss. She can cook, she can set up a pretty good seduction too. I'm being made here—putty in her hands. Should this disturb me? Well, even if it should it's not. I guess at some point I have to kick in and do my part too. Kiss back in other words, get the ball rolling. But wait.

Connie hopped up. “Be back,” she said, walking toward the bedroom. “Don't go away now.” The door closed behind her. Sex preparations. God, this was of such a different echelon from the Monica grope-and-pounce lecheries. This is real movie sex, I said to myself. This could be filmed. Well,
she
could be filmed. God knows what will become of me in there, in the Bedroom. Odd. I used to have serious postcoital tristesse back in my fumbling college encounters—it was always disillusioning, empty-making, sort of a big letdown. Now I'm having precoital tristesse. Stop thinking, I tell myself—can't you ever go on automatic?

Do you remember the guy waaaay back there talking about sex for the Average Middle-Class Heterosexual American Male in his early twenties? WELL, HE'S BACK! And he has decided on a similar list for the Average Middle-Class Heterosexual American Male in his
mid
-twenties. One doesn't look for types anymore, the women are irrelevant really, but one's
relationships
fall into a number of categories:

1. The Transition Woman.

The woman, like Connie for me, who takes you from post-adolescent sex (backseat fumblings, stopwatch sex, grope search and destroy …) to adult sex (silk sheets, lots of seemingly profound talk in bed, foreplay, glasses of brandy). You feel older, wiser, newer, better afterward. And you almost invariably have the right perspective on it, and nearly never fall in love with her.

2a. The Placemarker.

These can go on for years. You love them. They are nice. They love you (usually very much) but you know out there somewhere is someone better. This woman is so cheated on, it's not funny—she doesn't know
half
of what goes on behind her back. Most long-term girlfriends are like this. On occasion this woman moves in, but usually the guy will insist on separate accommodations for the sake of noncommitment.

2b. The Maybe-Wife.

Yeah, you'll give it a shot, commitment, fidelity, sincerity, loyalty … but it will still seem something is missing. Some marry this woman, the first long-term well-working relationship after college. Looks good on paper. But I think it's fair to say there's a lot of growing up left to do yet and those sacrifices you make for the Maybe-Wife (or real-life wife) will eat at you around twenty-eight or twenty-nine (“I coulda been halfway up the ladder by now if I hadn't stayed in Podunk while you finished beautician school…” etc.) and she will get the blame for much she shouldn't. In fact, every time the guy misses being free for a moment—a spare baseball ticket he can't accept, a night out with the boys he can't participate in, the single ex-roommate wanting to do the town while he has to drag his feet—the Maybe-Wife is going to get the abuse for it. In time, the Maybe-Wife, once so important, so viable, will be shuttled to Placemarker status whereupon she will be in danger of replacement. I never went for a Maybe-Wife. All my theater friends had these heavydeep'n real relationships going on, lots of fighting, lots of tears, lots of compromises.

3. The Quality Item.

Ah, she's still around, not as present or as possible as before, but she's got staying power. You'll throw it all over, every concern, every contingency, for this one. Because you have asked yourself this question a lot lately: why am I in the middle of the prime of my life without having had my true and lasting and endlessly perfect love? (Yeah, there's another one of these lists before the book ends—thought I'd warn you.)

ANYWAY, there I was with the Transition Woman.

Her bedroom was worth everything—she could have been a lot less than she was and I would have stayed for the plush soft carpet, the new silk sheets, the sheer ease and comfort and quiet and
coolness
which her air conditioner provided. I could stay there, lying beside her, my arm across her waist, forever. She was right: the night did seem to stretch out before us. It was eleven or so according to the glowing digital clock.

“Plenty of time for an encore,” she said.

If I'm up to it.

“You will be,” she said, nestling closer. “You wanted that a lot, kid. Been a while?”

About a hundred years.

“I love it when a man is hungry. You know he means it.”

While I'm contemplating the C-grade dialogue, her hand moves lower.

“That's the spirit,” she said, rolling about to lie on top of me. She brushed the hair out of my eyes. “Let's tell dirty stories, hm? Like your first time?”

Oh god.

“I'm not kidding. Tell me yours and I'll tell you mine.”

It was fairly horrendous.

“Not half as bad as mine, I promise.”

I made the story short and sweet: Karen Schmitt, seventeen, last year of high school, senior picnic, drifted away from the class for a walk in the woods in which everyone whooped and yelled and figured we were both going to neck and hold hands and we surprised everyone and ourselves. Never saw her after I went off to Southwestern Illinois. Whole thing lasted five minutes tops. I've always wondered …

“Wondered what?”

Just sort of what happened to her, and whether she's doing all right.

Connie squeezed me closer. “She's probably kicking herself for not holding onto you a little tighter, letting go of a good thing.”

Doubt that.

Yeah yeah, I know I know, she was laying it on thick, pumping me up, making me feel like I had a Place in the Universe, not to mention her life. I could reinterpret the whole thing, of course, and examine every statement and reduce it to motives and bedroom talk and insincerity and role playing, but please don't make me do that. Let me cut my best deal with my memories—so few seem this warm and worth remembering.

“Davie Epstein was my first. After the prom I told you about. I had … gee, I shouldn't confess what a little snob I was, but I had this long-running schoolgirl fantasy that I was going to lose it with some upper-class WASP Harrrrrvad boy. I had the whole thing planned out, the lines, the look, the right dress. No one was going to know I was a middle-class girl from Brookline.”

I didn't assume she was middle class.

“My father managed a watch and jewelry store. You could put the whole thing in this bedroom.”

Would never have guessed. I picked her for a close friend of the Rockefellers.

“Brookline, Massachusetts?”

I'd never been. Her folks must be proud of her.

“Not really. We don't get along very well, but there are many people to blame for that, my sister, my brother. A long story and I'll tell you sometime. Anyway. I had this fantasy. This blond achingly beautiful Ivy League prep-school boy, played by Robert Redford right? He was going to come along and find me irresistible—I look WASP don't I? This wasn't out of the question. So here was Davie, Davie who stayed to work in his father's office, who didn't go to college, who didn't want me to go to Harvard, who figured correctly it would mean the end of our relationship if I went (and he was right), this Davie was all over me prom night. And so when he drove me home he got real fresh and I said no, and he said why not, and I said I was a good girl and … and, some shit, I was waiting until I was married or something. But he kept asking.”

Did he get violent?

She didn't say anything for a while. “No. Not at all. He seemed defeated. He said that this was the last time together, I was going off to Harvard, we were through, he would have nothing, I would have everything. That kind of thing. He said…”

In the dark I couldn't tell what she thought of her own story.

“… well, he said, he wanted to make love because that was all he had, and that he wanted to have a memory of me, something real since I was going away from him forever. He was a realist, that Davie.”

I didn't say anything.

“So, I thought about it and I said yeah, okay, and I stretched out in the backseat in this silly prom dress all pulled up. And he got out and undid his pants and entered me but it didn't last or get anywhere, he couldn't come or anything. And I just sat there with all this taffeta and dress material pulled up around me waiting for something to happen, to me, to him, just something.”

Poor guy.

Connie laughed ironically. “Our last date.”

Yeah.

“And to boot, his first poke was a goodie. I got blood all over my prom dress and I lived in fear of my mother seeing it. Oh what a mess, what a mess. Not an auspicious start.”

Few people's ever are, really. At least I think that's right.

“I wonder sometimes too,” she went on, rolling off me (it was getting hot), “what old Davie is up to. He's married now, I know that. Sometimes I have this fantasy. When I go home to Brookline, picking up the phone and saying, hey Davie, kid, let's take another crack at it, let's turn an awful memory into a good time.” She held my arm firmly. “Do you think you can make up for the past, Gil? If I went back and we did it up right this time, wouldn't that make up for it? Wouldn't it kill the bad part of the story? Change everything?”