Emma Who Saved My Life Read Free Page A

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.
    â€œA man showed me his penis on the bus yesterday,” Lisa said, staring out blankly into the square.
    Yeah?
    â€œThis 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.
    â€œThat’s the