Naked in the Promised Land

by Lillian Faderman

  “Should I get a room with twin beds?” Mark asked after dinner.

  “Nope. I promise not to bite in the middle of the night … or give you any fright,” I said solemnly, and we giggled like teenagers because I’d had two margaritas and Mark had had three, and we’d finished a whole bottle of Chianti with dinner. Now I felt buoyant again. I couldn’t even remember what had upset me so much when I called Rae. We sipped Kahlua over ice for a nightcap; then I waited in the lobby while he arranged for the room, and we followed the red-suited bellhop to the elevator, holding each other about the waist.

  I stripped to my panties and bra and slipped between cold sheets. Mark switched off the bed lamp before he undressed. A beam of light from the corridor shone under the door, and I watched his white shorts moving about in the semidarkness as he folded his jacket, tie, shirt, and then his pants over the arms of a chair, then placed his shoes and socks beside it. I couldn’t stop the shivers, and a swarm of nameless emotions buzzed in me. He climbed into bed, still wearing his shorts.

  “Goodnight, Lil.” He turned toward me, and I felt his lips soft on my cheek; I kissed him back the same way. Now my nervousness dissolved. I was safe with my dear, dear friend. I’d been almost certain I would be.

  We both lay on our backs. When our fingers touched by chance, we clasped hands and lay with them lightly intertwined. “You’re very dear to me, Lil. I want to take such good care of you,” Mark crooned in the darkness, and my breath caught. No man had ever taken care of me. I couldn’t even imagine what that meant. “You’ll be as safe with me, my dear one, as in your mother’s arms,” he said, and I drifted off into sweet sleep.

  I awoke to light and a whiff of cinnamony Mexican hot chocolate. Mark was dressed. He’d gone down and brought back a large pot and two mugs from the restaurant, and we lounged together luxuriously, sipping the still-steaming brew. I pulled the blanket up to my chin for warmth, and he kicked off his shoes and sprawled on top of the covers, reaching over from time to time to refill our empty cups from the big silver pot he’d placed on the nightstand. How pleasant this all was. He told me about his travels in Mexico, about the weirdly shaped giant rock formations off the coast of Mazatlán. “We’ll see them this summer. You get the best view from O’Brien’s. Fabulous!” Later he got up and stood at the window, looking to see if it was still raining. I watched the back of his head. I loved the way his curly hair came to a V in the little hollow at his neck, making him look so vulnerable, like a kid almost. I was jolted: I did love this man I’d just married.

  “I think it’s going to clear,” he said hopefully.

  In the hotel room I’d felt snug and at ease, but once in the car, heading north in another driving rain, I was beset with anxieties again. I imagined my mother weeping like an abandoned child. I was gripped by images of doom—my mother withering away, paralyzed by a stroke, choking and blue-faced with apoplexy, because I’d deserted her, left her alone with Albert in that sham of a marriage I’d tricked her into. I said nothing to Mark. How could he understand?

  Off the L.A. coast, Mark headed east on Sunset Boulevard. On Highland Avenue a fire engine shrieked and gained on us, its red ogre eyes whirling. Mark pulled over, and the fire engine turned in front of us, toward Fountain, on the way to some terrible disaster. What if it were my mother? I saw our bungalow in flames, Mommy inside, trapped.

  “I’ve got to make a phone call,” I begged Mark when we were at Sunset and Vermont. I couldn’t tell him to turn around and drive back to the Fountain Avenue Court Bungalows. He’d think I was crazy. “Can you stop at the next gas station? Please?”

  “We’ll be home in just fifteen minutes,” he said reasonably. “Don’t you want to wait?”

  “Please, please.” My voice cracked with urgency, and he looked at me, puzzled, but he pulled into the first gas station with a telephone sign. I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t wait another minute.

  “When am I going to see you?” my mother cried. “Lilly, why did you run away? Are you going to have a baby?” It was half horror and half hope that I heard in her voice.

  The Jewish wedding was Rae’s idea. She’d planned for years how it had to be when I got married. “You’re all we have left in the world. No more family but you,” she said to persuade me to let her stage a wedding when I called her the next day from my new home.

  “Sure,” I answered magnanimously. Actually, I was feeling quite a bit like a success by now. Against all odds, I’d given her the fabled Jewish prince. I’d really done it! And my mother was happy, too. We lived only a few miles away, and I promised to bring my husband to the Fountain Avenue Court Bungalows for Friday dinners. She was ecstatic about the prospect. She’d be making Sabbath dinners for her married daughter and her handsome son-in-law who was a doctor. It was almost as good as if I’d become a movie star.

  “Is it okay?” I asked Mark anxiously later. “The wedding? The dinners?”

  “Why not? We’re partners in crime,” he said and laughed.

  He was joking of course, but it hit me like a lash: I’m cheating them. The whole point had been to get them to believe this was a real marriage, and it wasn’t. I made no answer to his quip; instead I busied myself hanging my clothes on the side of the bedroom closet he’d cleared for me. But the sting of it—crime—wouldn’t let go of me.

  But maybe it wasn’t cheating. Mark and I did love each other—not the way my mother and aunt thought, but still it was love. In a way it was even the kind of love Rae had always said she wanted for me: someone who would take care of me. Wasn’t that exactly what Mark had said he’d do—take good care of me? They’d even used the same words, though I wasn’t really sure what either of them meant. I still hoped to go to college to become someone who could take care of herself. But what was important now, it seemed to me, was that Mark’s intentions truly were what my aunt had hoped. So we weren’t really cheating after all. I took comfort in the logic. “Done!” I emerged from the closet and went to sit at Mark’s side, content again with the wisdom of my marriage.

  ***

  Mark invited to the wedding an older couple he’d never mentioned before, Gilbert Pollack, a bony, stooped dentist he knew from the hospital, and his wife, Vera, a plump, matronly lady who fawned over Mark, straightening his tuxedo jacket, adjusting his curls around his white yarmulke, as though he were her kid. They were the ones who said they’d take him out for a drink while my mother fussed with my veil in the dressing room of the Litvisheh Verein Hall. “He’s so nervous, like a boy. Look, his face is as white as his yarmulke.” Vera’s laugh was high and tinkly. “We’ll get him out of your hair and bring him back in plenty of time to walk down the aisle.” I glanced at my husband. He really did look scared. We smiled wistfully and waved fingers at each other as his friends led him off.

  While Rae tacked up a dart that had unraveled at the waist of my white dress, my mother brought me a 7-Up so I wouldn’t get thirsty while I was under the chupa, the marriage canopy. Albert came in with his solitaire deck, which he kept in the jacket pocket of his stiff new suit, and he told me I looked very nice and that my mother was so proud of me. I got up and kissed his cheek and said I was happy he had come to my wedding. Then he sat at a dressing table, where he played a couple of games away from the crowd, and out he went again. I could hear a din of voices, mostly Yiddish, coming from the hall. A song began in a screeching voice that wavered up and down, and then a few steadier voices joined in and a smattering of palms beat time on the tables. “Shpilt oyf a chasene tantz, Greyt un das chupa kledyl,” they sang in Yiddish—“Play the wedding dance, Prepare the wedding dress, Toward him you’ll go like a princess when he returns from battlefields and oceans.” I could see how proud Rae was that her friends and neighbors were singing a bridal song for me. She virtually strutted on her short legs, in her long shiny dress, and I wanted to cry because I’d made her so happy. My mother, her eyes bright, sat close to me and along with the singing voices that came from the hall she sang-talked, the way sh
e had when I was a child.

  After a while the singing stopped, and I could hear only the drone of chatter. It was almost six o’clock, when the wedding was supposed to begin. But Mark wasn’t back yet. My mother left me and went to peer out the darkening window.

  As the room grew dimmer with the setting sun, my aunt’s face changed. Her mouth became tight. She looked at her watch every few seconds and then got up and stood at the dressing room door, where she could see who was and who wasn’t in the hall. Mr. Bergman came in, his daughter and granddaughter behind him. He snapped on a light, and I heard the concerned buzz-buzz of his whispers to Rae and hers back to him.

  “Congratulations,” said Diane, the granddaughter who was about my age, but she looked at me as though we’d just learned I had terminal brain cancer.

  “Thanks,” I answered in a too-loud voice.

  At six-thirty the rabbi came to ask my aunt when he could begin.

  My mother moaned.

  “Vus fur a finsterer nacht, what kind of dark night is this?” my aunt said, groaning.

  Did Gilbert have an accident? Maybe Mark was in the hospital. “Stop it!” I yelled at my mother and aunt. “They’re just caught in the traffic. What are you carrying on about?” Had he changed his mind? Maybe he’d taken one look at the funny wedding guests, in their ill-fitting fancy clothes and terrible accents, and decided he wasn’t going to get mixed up in such a family.

  Mark returned about six forty-five, his eyes unfocused, his mouth slack. Gilbert’s arm was around his waist, keeping him upright, and Vera’s hand was at his shoulder, steering him through the dressing room door. I wanted to hide my husband, spirit him off, so my mother and Rae wouldn’t see him this way.

  “Oy, God in heaven,” my mother shrieked and grasped the windowsill.

  “Coffee,” Gilbert mouthed to me. He and Vera maneuvered Mark to a chair and helped him sag onto it.

  My aunt shoved Gilbert and Vera aside and pounced on Mark. “What’s going on?” the foghorn blared. “How you can disappear like that, with the rabbi waiting, and Lilly, your wife?”

  “Rae, stop it, please,” I implored, trying to pull her away. She stood planted, breathing hard, glaring at him, but said nothing more. I rushed to get coffee from the big samovar in the hall. “Leave him alone!” I shouted over my shoulder.

  I galloped back with the steaming black brew, ignoring the curious eyes of the wedding guests, and I placed it to Mark’s lips. “It’s okay, just drink, drink,” I encouraged him.

  “Red-dy,” Mark slurred now. “I’m in fine father … feather. Look!” and he rose to his feet, shrugging off Vera’s steadying hand. He swayed toward me, arm extended. ” ‘s get married,” he said.

  “Oy, Gott!” my mother shrieked again.

  “What kind of lousy friends are you to go get him drunk!” my aunt hollered in Vera’s face. “Skunks!”

  “Stop!” I shouted at my aunt. “It’s okay now. We’re starting.” There was nothing for it but to go ahead. I turned to Mark, keeping my voice steady: “Can you walk?” I took his arm with a steely hand, ready to hold him up if necessary.

  “Yep.” His mouth pursed in concentration and he put a foot forward.

  “He had a lot, but he didn’t seem drunk until he stood up,” Gilbert lamented to the air.

  I was supposed to walk to the canopy holding Mr. Bergman’s arm, and Mark was supposed to be standing there to greet me. But I couldn’t be concerned with such formalities now. I guided my husband down the aisle. We passed Denny first, in his powder-blue tuxedo and pink ruffled shirt. He blinked with astonishment. As Mark and I stumbled in tandem I caught quick glimpses of other faces. They mirrored Denny’s. Nobody could mistake Mark for sober.

  When the sour-faced rabbi saw us coming, he jumped to his feet and took his place under the blue and white velvet canopy. Would we make it there? Without Mark’s falling down? The walk seemed interminable. The rabbi waited, his expression blank, for us to halt in front of him. Finally he uttered the few words that would make us man and wife under the law of ancient Israel. That done, he placed the wrapped glass near Mark’s shoe and told him he must smash it. Mark lifted his foot gingerly and crunched. Then he screwed up his face and bawled like a baby.

  “Mazel tov!” the guests shouted dutifully, as though nothing at all unusual had happened, and there was a patter of applause.

  12. A MARRIED WOMAN

  OUR LIFE TOGETHER is a dream and a nightmare.

  Mark takes me to San Francisco, a long weekend—to Aïda at the opera, to Anastasia at the Curran Theater, to the Top of the Mark and the penthouse restaurant at the top of the Sir Francis Drake. In between he expounds—on Maria Callas, Ingmar Bergman, Rosa Parks, the 1957 Civil Rights Act. He’s eloquent, ardent, and I eat it all up, along with the caviar on toast points, the tournedos, the crème brulée. We visit all the gay places, Gordon’s, the Paper Doll, the Black Cat. “That cute one with the curly blond hair, over at the bar, he’s cruising you,” I say to Mark. “There’s a Barbara Stanwyck look-alike in the booth behind you, and she’s sizing you up,” he leans across the table to whisper. He smiles at the cute blond; I turn around and, with my eyes, flirt in the direction of Barbara Stanwyck. But Mark and I go back to our hotel together, slightly tipsy and very contented, holding each other around the waist.

  When we’re home, Mark sometimes cooks for us—bouillabaisse, quiche lorraine, osso bucco—succulent dishes I’d never even heard of before; and I’m his awed little sous-chef, chopping, dicing, cracking eggs. Often we go out, to the Ginza where I learn to eat with chopsticks, to La Chic Parisienne where he orders for both of us because only he can read the menu. We have cocktails and wines and liqueurs, and by the time we get home it’s ten o’clock or eleven. That’s when I begin my homework—Latin, trig, physics, advanced comp. I get four or five hours’ sleep most nights, and, though I know they’re lying on their pillows in a corner of the kitchen, sometimes I see Genghis and Khan slinking around the living room as I sit on the white leather couch and study. Sleep deprivation makes me hallucinate, but I don’t care because we had a marvelous evening.

  When I take the SAT, early on a Saturday morning after four hours of sleep, I see Genghis and Khan parading up and down the aisles of the auditorium, and I put my pencil down to watch them. “Time!” the monitor calls, and I’m horrified.

  One Saturday we went back to the Sea Lion. We giggled all the way home about an officious waiter with a red toupee who began every sentence, “Well, my dear sir and madam,” and we stumbled through the front door together, still silly, leaning against each other for strength. Then Mark stood upright and looked at me seriously. “Oh, my dear Lil,” he said. “I’m so happy you’re here,” and we held each other tightly.

  “I love you,” I told him.

  “I know you do,” Mark said, still holding me, and then after what seemed to be a long time, “but only like your brother, I guess.”

  I never had a brother. I wouldn’t know what it felt like. “No,” I answered slowly, my hand on his cheek now. “Like you’re really my husband.” That night we made love.

  I’m not at all frightened or repelled as I always thought I would be with a man, nor is it as it was with Jan, nor as I’d lived it so intensely in my imagination with Beverly Shaw. No volcanoes erupt. I feel no overwhelming lust in him or for him, but I love to hold him afterward, and I love the smell of his men’s cologne and his shampoo and the feel of his strong back under my hands and his tight, muscled buttocks. When I’m sitting up late with my homework and he’s gone to bed, I’m tantalized by the urge to wrap around him so that we are like two spoons, or to curl my fingers in the lush black hairs of his chest. I never loved a man before, and it feels bizarre. But how could I not love Mark? Mornings when I wake up before he does I study his face—his long, thick lashes, the strong cleft in his chin, the delicate pink of his lips. I touch his cheek, gently, so he won’t awaken. I love his face. This is the face I adore, I tell myself.

 
But Mark drinks. He can drink and drink and still be fine, just as in the days before the wedding. Then he has the one sip that makes too many, and in a fingersnap “fine” slips into dead drunk. Nowadays he’s not as careful as he used to be to stop short of that one sip.

  If we’re in a restaurant, I sometimes have to wrestle him before I can grab the car key from his tight fist and sit on it or drop it down my blouse; but I don’t know how to drive. “Please call a cab!” I beg the waiter by mouthed words and urgent looks, please help me lead my husband out and settle him into the waiting taxi. If the waiter takes his arm, he’ll pretend for a few minutes to be less drunk than he is and make himself stay on his feet. I can’t handle his dead weight by myself. I hate the wobbly-legged, slack-jawed creature that’s taken over Mark.

  If that one sip too many comes when we’re at home, it’s worse. From the cupboard Mark grabs each and every wineglass, martini glass, whiskey sour glass—every vessel that will break—and he hurls them one by one against the kitchen wall, possessed, sobbing as though his heart has shattered into shards along with the crystal.

  “Stop!” I cry the first time. I try to restrain his pitching hand, and he pulls back and slugs me in the eye by accident. I’m too baffled and scared to try again. When the glass smashing starts, I skitter to the bathroom and lock the door; I sit on the edge of the bathtub, rocking myself, until it’s done. Who is this stranger going crazy outside the door? Then when the noise stops, I dart out and slip soundlessly into bed, but I can’t close my eyes. I stare into the darkness, apprehensive. When I feel his side of the mattress sagging, I turn to the wall.

  In the morning the other Mark is back. He sweeps all the bits of crystal into a dustpan and deposits them in the kitchen garbage pail. “Guess I really acted out last night. Sorry,” he says, sheepish, after a while.