Emma Who Saved My Life (67 page)

Yes, though it's none of your business.

“And that Monica creature. And god, the all-time lowest, Betsy. You got it up for Betsy when you couldn't manage it for me?”

Your rage is taking a very unpleasant and vindictive turn, Emma. (All right, all right, I was less eloquent than that.)

“Betsy looks like she was squeezed out of a tube. Wormlike, clammy. Terminal wimp with no sex appeal. Maybe that's what it takes for you.”

I wouldn't have touched Betsy with a
bargepole
if it hadn't been for the herpes. And secondly …

OOOOOOH but you can bet I didn't even get to “secondly.”

“HERPES?? Why did you fucking sleep with a woman with herpes? Oh GOD, no no no—you bastard! You … you criminal—you creep! SLIME MOLD! I'll kill you…”

(Oh Emma, I swear, I swear on a stack of Bibles, I'd forgotten ALL about the herpes, I promise, I just got so caught up in the idea of sleeping with you—I wasn't infectious, I promise!)

“… Piece of human shit!” she went on, as she began to assail me, fists, fingernails, and then she took her ten-ton purse and swung it at me, right into my face, and I went DOWN to the ground, my nose bleeding, and later a black eye (which didn't hurt my playing a hood in
'59 Mustang,
but putting on makeup was hell for the first week).

“Hey what's going on down there?” yelled the policeman on the other platform across the tracks.

Emma swung at me again and this time her purse fell open, spilling out everything, including her brick: a .38 Smith & Wesson.

“My god,” yelled someone, “it's a gun!”

The handgun clattered down the platform, coming to a rest near the edge. The policeman on the other platform blew his whistle and ran toward the overpass to get over to us and arrest Emma for possession or me for rape or someone for something—just as the train came in.

I dragged Emma, still hitting me, into the car. OH GOD, please let the train pull out, please …

“I'm not leaving my gun,” Emma said, attempting to run back and get it.

YOU WANNA GO TO JAIL? I yelled at her. The doors closed, the train pulled out; there was the sound of whistling—the cop blowing this whistle till he was blue in the face. The occupants of the subway car looked up at us, terrified but curious enough to keep staring.

“That's TWO guns you've made me lose, asshole,” said Emma, shaking free of my grasp. “You've robbed me of my guns, you've robbed me of a chance for motherhood, and you've given me herpes all in one day. ARE YOU HAPPY?”

Yes, actually. I couldn't stop smiling.

“What on earth are you laughing about?”

I'm not really sure, but I couldn't stop.

“You've fucked up my whole life and this is it … I don't ever want to see you again, you jerk. You better not be infectious or I'll kill you with my next gun. WOULD YOU STOP LAUGHING?”

I'm sorry I can't help it.

“I'll never forgive you for fucking me—or rather for fucking me enough to give me herpes but not fucking me enough so I can have a child in California—what are YOU looking at you OLD BAG? This is between this TURD and myself, mind your own business … Gil Freeman I'm going to strangle you on the spot if you don't stop laughing—”

Don't you see even the tiniest bit of humor in all this, Emma?

“HELL NO—and you owe me for that gun too, buddyboy, I wanna see a goddam check in the mail.” Then she became intensely, furiously quiet: “Would you
please
stop laughing?”

Far Rockaway, I said, catching my breath—what a place!

Emma was distracted, her eyes tearing up, her face red, her lip trembling. She looked out the window, which held our faint reflections; beyond was the distant skyline of the city in the gray drizzly early-autumn evening. “Nice name, Far Rockaway … beautiful name. Too bad the place is a dump.”

ENDING

AND I guess that's what I wanted the book to say: Lots of things have pretty names, the Theater, New York City, Being a Poet, Being an Actor, Fame and Fortune, Far Rockaway, Emma Gennaro, the Quality Item, pretty ideas with pretty dreams attached to them. Listen to the words: Broadway Star. Isn't that everything you'd ever want to be? But what's in the books, on the billboards, what has the reputation, these things often let you down and—Emma, wherever you are, you'd appreciate this—when you get there, sometimes the place is a dump. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot to be said for the American Dream. But you wake up from dreams.

After the Far Rockaway fiasco, it was very easy to stay with Sophie and that plan of turning around after a rest and coming back to New York got more and more remote. So I didn't go back. I mean, without Emma it wouldn't be the same, would it? And it would take no time at all before I got fed up and irritated by all the hassles of theater life, right? And Lisa writes me every once in a while and tells me how the East Village is more and more white upper-class kids (as we all feared it would get), Manhattan rents are through the roof, $1000-a-month range, all the places I liked to hang out are yuppie-redecorated, and so many places have closed, been torn down, those family-run hash houses, those local Irish bars … See? Hundreds of reasons I'd hate it if I went back. In addition to the big reason I won't go back, Sophie, eight months pregnant with the World's Greatest Child, sitting there across the room. No. I can never go back.

You know—and I guess this sounds neurotic—I can't go to the theater anymore these days. If the guy up onstage is too amateur, it's painful because I could get up there and do better. If the guy up onstage is good, if he's stagestruck, if he's got that gleam in his eye and hears in the small-town polite clapping of Evanston the thunderous ovations of New York … well, it's just hard to watch, that's all. I've got a job now doing—

Uh, wait. If I tell you what I'm doing for a living now you really
will
yell SELL-OUT! And in a way you'd be right. But hey, I've got a nice little office and a typewriter and a top desk drawer where for several months now in spare moments, during coffee breaks and lunch hours I've been adding to this pile of paper you're reading. And that's been rewarding, looking back over everything before this next chapter of my life starts.

So
let's finish up: Emma did not get herpes, hasn't had a child yet, only stayed in California six weeks before returning to New York. The last time we talked was when she snapped “Have a nice life, bozo,” and stormed off the subway train at Washington Square. And let's see, that was … god, almost five years ago. Sophie says I'm still a bit in love with her. No, Soph, scarred for life is more like it. This book isn't a love letter, it's partly an attempt to try to figure out someone named Emma who saved my life from being unexciting and half-lived a lot of the time: there I'd be, teetering on the brink of normalcy, of averageness … of happiness. And Emma you'd pull me back every time.

Sophie says I'm writing this to spite Emma, to succeed in the written word where she didn't. Eh, maybe a bit. Mostly I wanted to tell you about this particular life as it may be the only book this life may have in it, and you get so many success stories these days, so much Yuppie Dream, so much life-at-the-top. There are people out there who don't get to the top, who walk away, who give up, but who also don't mind really, and I thought I'd tell that story.

You know, my last days in New York after Emma left were very quiet and dull and I packed for the last time (God, what a relief not to be hauling myself inhumanly around that city with All My Things). And I decided I needed a New York Moment, a last time of goodbye. And I thought up all kinds of Last Goodbye stuff to do, go up the Empire State Building, go out to the Statue of Liberty, even go back to Far Rockaway. Naturally none of this panned out—I got very busy toward the end with my landlord and my bills and New York Telephone and I kept going out with the cast of
'59 Mustang
and getting to know them and getting drunk and then … damn, it was suddenly my last day. I picked up my U-Haul in the Bronx, drove to the West Side, loaded up and prepared to drive to Chicago (later I'd get on a train and come back to join the cast in Boston). So I'm on my way in the Lincoln Tunnel, crawling in a traffic jam about 7:30 p.m., and when you get out of the tunnel there's a spiral highway that winds up to ground level and to your right is one of THE Views of Manhattan—the island is spread out in a panorama of lights and glimmerings, a city shimmering like the hope that it is, a beacon for newer, fresher, younger people, and I looked at it a little distantly and thought: well, that was then and I feel a part of somewhere else already, and then I thought: maybe I didn't get my name in lights, maybe I didn't set the place on fire, maybe all of New York doesn't know my name, but there are scratchings on the wall, New York, little pieces of graffiti in certain off-Broadway theaters, a linoleum floor I put down in Brooklyn, telltale signs that I was there, and maybe one day I'll be removed and assured enough to go back and look for a few of them, point them out to my boy or girl, maybe. Glimmer and shine and pulse over there always, I thought—never let us down in America, always be there for us to expend our youths and dreams and energies and lives upon. It is time to go, New York, and one last thought before I go is—

HONNNNNNK!
The car behind me was not appreciating my New York Moment. I wanted to get out of the car and tell him, HEY BUDDY, don't you know this is my swan song? A chapter is ending here? That's how it goes these days, huh? Moving forward at the sounds of horns on highways, at the cue of traffic signals, turnstiles, tollbooths, ushered and rushed to the next stop on the itinerary, and there are days on the commuter train in the winter when it's got dark early and you can't see out because of the reflection and you might put down your paper or put aside your book and really look at yourself, because amid the noise and the smoke and the strangers and what's become of your life: there you are.

So wish us luck on the kid. And I hope you're happy these days. I am.

Which is not to say that there aren't nights when I put on my coat and take a walk here in Evanston and go down to the lakefront near the university and walk along the rocks and get nostalgic and look up at Chicago, all golden and clean, reflecting down the shore to me, and think: that's nice, that's real nice, but I knew a place once where the lights were brighter, and the air was filled with dreams.

 

Read on for a sneak peek at
Wilton Barnhardt's new novel

Available August 2013
in hardcover from St. Martin's Press

www.stmartins.com/lookawaylookaway

 

Copyright © 2013 by Wilton Barnhardt

 

Advance Praise for Wilton Barnhardt's

Lookaway, Lookaway

 

“Barnhardt's fourth novel is a revelation: witty, savage, and bighearted all at once; it is
the
Southern novel for the twenty-first century.”

—
Kirkus Reviews
(starred review)

“
Lookaway, Lookaway
is a wild romp through the South, and therefore the history of our nation, written by an absolute ringmaster of fiction.”

—Alice Sebold, author of
The Lovely Bones

“Move over, Tom Wolfe! Writing with brilliance and brio, Wilton Barnhardt has penned a hilarious satire that often has surprising depth and hits way too close to the truth.”

—Lee Smith, author of
Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger

“Wilton Barnhardt has written the big Southern novel I've been wanting to read all my life. I can't think of a book that better expresses the complexity of exactly where our Southern culture is right now. His insights into his characters—both male and female—are rich and genuinely hilarious, expressed with a dangerous level of humor and pain.
Lookaway, Lookaway
is entirely remarkable. I finished reading it and started again on page one to see how he did it. (I still don't know.)”