Part 6: Music Hath Charms

'Well, Joey,' said Emily, grinning at him as she pushed back her chair a bit, puffing out her cheeks and patting her stomach to suggest fullness, 'you certainly know places to eat that give you value for money.'

Joey regarded her with wholehearted admiration. He did like his dates to enjoy their food, and in that respect Emily beat them all.

'Are all English women as fond of food as you?' he asked.

'Oh no,' said Emily. 'Plenty are obsessed with dieting, just like over here, and then there are the ones who eat nothing but junk food and, my God, it shows! But I've always liked good food. I'm lucky, I suppose: as long as I can keep reasonably active, I don't put on much weight, and I can easily get it off again. And rushing about Central Perk for eight hours at a stretch is not a bad way to keep active!'

'You certainly put your back into it,' said Joey. 'Rachel, now – she did as little as she could get away with.'

'I can imagine,' said Emily, grinning. 'I love her dearly, but she's not what you might call energetic – except when it comes to shopping, of course.'

They both chuckled. Then, finally, Joey turned the conversation to a topic that he had been wanting to raise.

'Er, you … there's nothing serious between you and Gunther?' he asked a little tentatively.

'There's nothing between me and Gunther at all,' said Emily emphatically. 'We really are just good friends. Anyway, haven't you noticed, he's got a fan club now?'

'Hey, that's right,' said Joey. 'Suddenly he has girls all over him. I've never seen the guy look happier. What happened?'

'I, um, directed his attention to some women who seemed … interested in him, 'said Emily demurely.

Joey regarded her with respect.  'Boy, you really are something, Emily. You make it up with Rachel, smooth it all over with Ross and calm him right down over the Chandler and Monica stuff, you set Gunther up, and you've become a great partner and roomie for Phoebe. Don't you ever want anything for yourself?'

Emily looked at him with a wicked glint in her eye. 'Well, Joey, there is something that you seem the ideal person to supply – strictly as a one-off, you understand.'

Joey looked at her wide-eyed. 'You mean …?'

'Yes,' said Emily, her wicked look intensifying. She reached across the table and took his hand, squeezing gently. 'I'd like to get laid, as you say.' She smiled at him, completely at ease.

Joey felt quite disoriented. Only very rarely did women come on to him quite so openly. He also felt disappointment. Was Emily seeing him as no more than a convenient way to satisfy sexual frustration?

She was regarding him with an amused expression. 'How does it feel?'

He looked even more startled. 'Huh?'

'Come on, Joey,' she said. 'How often have you had sex when you had absolutely no intention of following it up?'

He ducked his head in acknowledgement. 'Okay, but, but … I, um, I was thinking …' He couldn't find the words to express his feelings, which were rather unfamiliar to him anyway.

Her face changed. 'Oh Joey, were you hoping to start a relationship with me?'

Suddenly unable to look her in the face, he nodded. She squeezed his hand again. 'I'm sorry, Joey. I like you a lot, but I don't think I could get serious about you. Is that going to be hard to take?'

He looked up, to see her regarding him sympathetically.

'Be honest with yourself,' she said. 'Do you really want to start something with me? Or do you just think it would be nice to have me as your girlfriend?'

Joey smiled a bit ruefully. 'I guess that's it, maybe. You're so unlike the girls I usually date. Emily, I really do admire you.'

She smiled at him. 'That's nice. Well,' her smiled turned into an impish grin, 'how would you like to admire more of me than you can see at the moment? Because I'm still interested. I just don't want anything more than … some fun.'

'I'd be a fool to turn down the chance,' said Joey decisively, and he signalled for the check.

-----

I've been a jolly tinker for these forty years or more,

But such a lovely job as that I never did before,

sang Emily cheerfully to herself as she opened the door of Phoebe's apartment. She was feeling great; Joey had been a very satisfying lover. But she really did think she wanted a bit more brains in any man that she was going to go out with regularly.

Phoebe was sitting reading in a chair. 'You're home late,' she commented. 'You had a good time with Joey, then?' Her light tone covered what looked to Emily rather like tension, visible in the set of her body.

'Oh Phoebe, you shouldn't have stayed up,' Emily said. 'As for Joey,' she couldn't help giggling, 'I had a very good time – but it was the kind of thing you only do once.'

Phoeb seemed to relax, and she grinned. 'Emily Waltham, you're a wicked woman!'

'Well, it's hard to be good all the time,' said Emily. 'Now, since you're here, about our cunning plan. After we've done our Central Perk spot tomorrow and go back to the apartment, we start talking the way I suggested.'

Phoebe's eyes lit up. 'Are we really gonna do this?'

Emily nodded. 'I think the time is ripe.'

'Yay!' cried Phoebe. 'It's been so hard, watching them both suffer.' She looked at Emily lovingly. 'You're making such a difference to our lives, Emily, and not just ours. Gunther's a new man.'

'Yes, isn't he?' said Emily eagerly. 'Some attention from his admirers was all it took. I don't know that he's settled on one yet.'

'Well, would you, if you were a man and had hot kids like Elizabeth and Jenni and Katie interested in you?' said Phoebe, grinning broadly. 'Mind, he ought to be careful. They might take it into their heads to get together and kidnap him and, like, ravish him in a body.'

Emily laughed at the mental picture conjured up. 'He'd probably die of an overload of bliss.'

Phoebe joined in the laughter, stretching out a hand and placing it on Emily's arm, in an apparently spontaneous gesture of affection. Emily put her hand over Phoebe's and patted it gently.

'Time to turn in, pardner,' she said in an 'old West' accent.

'Yup, guess so, gotta get some shut-eye,' Phoebe replied in the same way, and then she did a 'Pttt … dang!' to imitate spitting tobacco juice into a spittoon, something Emily had picked up from an old Goon Show and liked to do now and then. Emily laughed and repeated it. Smiling at each other, they went to their bedrooms.

-----

On Sundays, Emily and Phoebe did their singing spot in the afternoon, because Central Perk closed early. Both were in a frisky mood, it seemed, and they sang all kinds of cheerful and nonsensical stuff. But Emily varied her selection with some love songs that had good tunes but were often rather sad in their content, like Yellow Bird and Lemon Tree. She took a moment to explain that when she was in a good mood she sometimes liked to sing sad songs, and then launched into the tragic Banks of the Ohio, which had a good chorus that everyone could join in. She finished with Wildwood Flower, which she sang in a version that had a more upbeat ending:

I will dance, I will sing, and my heart will be gay;
I'll banish this weeping, drive troubles away.
I'll live yet to see him regret the dark hour,
when he won, then neglected his frail wildwood flower.

Ross, who had as usual been sitting rather gloomily, not joining in, seemed very struck by this and looked across at Rachel without her noticing.

Soon afterwards the whole group returned to Monica and Rachel's apartment to consider plans for the evening. Phoebe and Emily were carrying on a discussion of how some tunes fitted the spirit of a song better than others, and as this was a topic that anyone who ever listened to music could join in, most did so, citing songs that they knew. But Ross remained silent. Emily admitted that there were some songs that she liked largely for their tunes, or even just the tunes of their chorus, such as Country Roads or Carolina on My Mind.

'Plaisir d'Amour is another,' she said. 'The refrain is beautiful, but the words of the verses are simply trite, whether in the original French or the English version I once heard on a Joan Baez record.'

'That means Pleasure of Love, doesn't it?' said Phoebe. 'Sing us the refrain.'

They all fell silent as Emily sang, in a slow pure tone,

Plaisir d'amour

ne dure qu'un moment.

Chagrin d'amour

dure toute la vie-ie-ie.

'What does it mean?' said Monica, glancing in a rather worried way at Ross, who had made a little choking noise and was showing pain in his face. Evidently he knew perfectly well what it meant.

'The pleasure of love lasts only a moment,' said Emily. 'The pain of love lasts your whole life.'

'Wow, a really sad sentiment, if a bit overstated,' said Phoebe rather quickly; she had also glanced at Ross. 'Hey, I once read a Scottish poem about love called, um, something about bonny Doon. Do you know a tune for that?'

'Ye banks and braes of bonnie Doon, by Robert Burns,' said Emily. 'You bet I do. It's a very beautiful tune, but I'm not sure I should sing it. It's very sad.'

'Oh, go on,' said Joey, oblivious as always to the undercurrents. 'I love to hear you sing.'

Chandler, Monica and Rachel also begged her to sing it, so Emily sighed and agreed. 'I'll anglicise it a bit,' she said. 'Lowland Scots is hard to pronounce properly. It's from the woman's point of view.'

Slowly and clearly, she sang,

Ye banks and braes of bonnie Doon,

how can ye bloom so fresh and fair?

How can ye chant, ye little birds,

and I so weary, full of care?

Thou'lt break my heart, thou warbling bird,

that wantons through the flowering thorn:

Thou mind'st me of departed joys –

departed, never to return.

She was drawing breath for the second verse when Ross cried in a voice full of pain, 'No more, please!' They turned to him in surprise if not alarm, to see tears streaming down his face. 'I can't bear it,' he said in a choking voice. 'Oh God, it fits, it all fits! Departed, never to return. I've had so much love, and I threw it all away!' He buried his face in his hands.

'Oh no no no!' cried Rachel in sudden anguish, jumping up and rushing over to kneel by him, putting comforting arms round his shoulders. Tears in her own eyes, she directed a look of burning reproach at Emily and Phoebe. 'Why are you tormenting him like this?'

'I, I … I didn't intend to hurt him,' Emily stammered; she had certainly not expected Ross to react so strongly. Phoebe also looked rather abashed.

Rachel snorted, then ignored them and turned back to Ross. She hugged him and murmured in a soft voice, 'Ross, Ross, Ross, the joys can return, I promise you!' She drew a deep breath. 'I love you, Ross,' she said in a stronger voice. 'Could you love me again?'

For a moment everyone held their breath. Then Ross raised his head, hope blazing from his eyes. 'You really mean it?'

'Yes, Ross,' she said, looking at him with big serious eyes. 'I know I have a history of telling you that I love you at the wrong time, but now I think it's the right time – third time lucky, in fact.'

'Oh Rachel,' he said rapturously, and drew her to him to kiss her. Everyone's face was suddenly wreathed in smiles from ear to ear.

'You set this up, didn't you?' Monica muttered to Emily.

Emily nodded. 'But I really didn't expect Ross to be affected so badly, and I'm sorry about that. It worked, though, didn't it?'

'Lobsters once again!' cried Phoebe gleefully. 'Emily, you're a genius!'

Ross pulled back from Rachel and looked at Emily with growing suspicion. 'Did you cook this up together?' he growled.

'She did it for me, Ross,' Rachel cried before Emily could answer. 'I wanted to get back with you, but I didn't know how you felt. I really didn't know she'd do that, and I'm sorry you were so upset.'

'So am I, truly,' said Emily, trying to project sincerity. 'I swear, Rachel wasn't in on this, she just accepted my offer of help. I,' she swallowed, and said a bit falteringly, 'I just wanted to see you happy, Ross.'

Ross's expression remained uncertain for a moment; then he grinned. 'Just this once, the end justifies the means. You forced me to confront my feelings fully.' The grin expanded into a beam. 'I, I couldn't be happier. It's like my life has been totally turned around.' He gently pulled Rachel onto his lap, and gave her a loving hug. 'Back together – it's been my dream.'

'Mine too,' said Rachel, snuggling against him. 'Of course, I do have one teeny, tiny condition.'

'Which is?' he said, his grin showing that he suspected what was coming.

'Never say we were on a break again.'

As the others laughed, Ross hugged and kissed her. 'You got it.' He looked over her head at Emily. 'You're a miracle worker, Emily. Why can't you find someone for yourself?'

'Well, I don't know,' said Emily uncertainly, unprepared for this. 'Maybe I'd have to go back to England for that. But then again' – she looked directly at Phoebe –  'in so many ways, I'd rather go on living here.'

Phoebe looked back at her. 'I want you to stay,' she said, her voice a little hoarse and trembly. She gulped. 'I, well, it just feels right having you around all the time and being partners with you, as right as it ever was with Leslie. We, we don't have to be, like, lovers as well …'

Emily produced a delightful smile. 'Maybe we should put that in a file marked 'Pending' or 'Keep them guessing'. Phoebe, I feel the same as you do: we go together, we fit. So I'll stay.' She threw back her head and sang, with great feeling, an impromptu adaptation from Bob Dylan:

Well, it feels great,

Not to be on my own,

Got my direction home,

Not a complete unknown,

No more a rolling stone.

Anyone who looked closely might have seen that her eyes were just a little shiny, as if from incipient tears; but her voice remained completely steady.

'Oh Emily!' cried Phoebe, as emotionally as Ross had cried Rachel's name. Her face ecstatic, she swept her into a crushing hug. The others looked on indulgently, most of them sure that there was love on both sides. If it wasn't the ordinary kind of love, well, that was to be expected with two such unusual personalities.

'So that's all settled,' said Joey in satisfaction as Phoebe released a somewhat pink-faced and flustered Emily. 'Now, are we going to send out for pizza or what?'

-----

Author's Note: Well, th-th-that's all, folks, although I will listen sympathetically to pleas for an epilogue. It may be the last story I do for a while; I really must pay more attention to my real-life writing. But as long as I keep getting reviews like the ones I have been having for this series (thank you all), I am not giving up writing, and I am always open to suggestions as to what I should do next (I do have the outline of a Wild West idea).