Naked in the Promised Land

by Lillian Faderman

  I threw my clothes on the floor and sank into the bed, longing for some kind of magic to transport me to my mother’s bungalow, to my old room. Yet I couldn’t go home, I realized soberly. If I left Mark now I’d be back where I started; I’d never be able to break away from my mother. How could I go to college?

  A while later I felt Mark get into bed. I turned away from him, furious still.

  “Stefano’s sleeping on the couch,” he said.

  “Go to hell,” I muttered. Then I must have fallen asleep.

  When I was awakened by a light, caressing hand on my pubes, I fought through a sleepy miasma to make sense of things. It couldn’t be Mark’s hand—his back was turned to me.

  Fear seized me. I jumped from under the covers. Stefano was kneeling on the floor by my bed, a compact bundle of pink flesh and muscle, a pleading look on his face.

  “Goddam it! Mark!” I screamed, flinging my pillow at the naked, kneeling form, grabbing a butt-filled ashtray to throw. “Help!”

  Mark was on his feet in a second, trying to grasp what was going on, then seeing Stefano, who’d risen and covered his genitals with both hands. “You’d better go,” Mark said in a voice I thought maddeningly calm. Stefano looked disoriented, like a kid who’d expected a hug and gotten a slap; then he went, quickly and quietly. I heard him gathering his clothes in the living room, and I clutched the ashtray until the door closed behind him.

  “It’s your fault! You called me a faggot in front of him,” Mark sneered. “What did you expect, damn you? He probably thought we both wanted it!” He pulled his pillow off the bed and stormed out of the room. I heard him plop on the couch Stefano had vacated.

  I was furious with Mark for days. I couldn’t stop thinking about how he’d left me at O’Brien’s, disappeared without a word, how I’d been sick with worry, not just for myself but for him too. My mind kept going back to it, as to images of a gory accident. But in between those thoughts I remembered the times in Los Angeles when we’d first met. What had happened to the Mark who’d taught me about Rubinstein and the Spanish Civil War? How charming he’d been with my mother and Albert in the beginning. How perfect the first night together in San Diego had been. Didn’t we love each other still? I shouldn’t have called him a faggot … and because I did poor Stefano was misled and it all ended so badly. So much was going wrong between Mark and me.

  And there was something else, something awful I couldn’t stop thinking about: Where had he been if not with a man? A prostitute probably, a hustler, who’d demanded jewelry because Mark didn’t have enough cash to pay him. I was mired in dark, convoluted feelings—disgust, but rejection also, and jealousy too. Il va sans dire, I’d said so brightly at the beginning when Mark had reminded me that of course we’d be intimate with other people. But that was before he and I had become lovers. Once we’d drifted into that surprising territory, the rules had changed. Or had they? I was jealous that Mark still wanted men, but wasn’t I stirred still by women? Where was my apex of desire? I saw Beverly Shaw’s competent, manicured hand as she held the microphone, the way her skirt had hiked over her shapely, nylon-covered legs when she’d crossed them. The vision ignited in me all over again the fantasy of my lips between her thighs. Mark’s lovemaking had never excited me like that, so why was I bothered that his apex of desire was not me? It was a contradiction I couldn’t make sense of.

  We were polite to each other now, but I knew I could never trust him to act with consideration for me, and he’d stopped trusting me too. Something had broken that day for both of us. One morning about a week later, waiting for the waitress to seat us in the café where we’d been getting our breakfasts, we saw Stefano’s white-blond head bent over a cup of coffee at a corner table, and Mark and I quickly backed out. We didn’t say a word to each other, about Stefano or anything else, as we walked through the streets looking for another restaurant, though I knew we were both reliving the whole episode. It was after we were seated in a new café that Mark said, so low I almost didn’t hear him, “The danger of a Jew marrying a non-Jew is that when they get mad at you they call you a kike.”

  “That makes no sense. We’re both Jewish,” I said, though I knew what he was alluding to.

  “You called me a faggot,” he persisted softly, and tears sprang into his eyes.

  I reached for his hand, but he pulled away. “Mark, I’m like a faggot too,” I reminded him.

  “Are you?” he snickered.

  “Yes,” I said with conviction, “I am.”

  We never make love anymore. Mark never approaches me that way, and even if I didn’t feel ambivalent about it, I wouldn’t know what to do to seduce him. What am I to him? I don’t know anymore. What place do I have in his life or he in mine? Sometimes I feel that I’m living someone else’s life and I have to leave and find my own. But how?

  For now I’m trapped here, and I’m always scared and suspicious. I ask him for some money, to keep in my purse for emergencies, and without comment he gives me a little roll of pesos. I feel like a child, to have to ask for money, and I hate it, but what if he disappears on me again? He’ll get drunk; he’ll find a pretty boy; and I’ll be stranded in the middle of nowhere. Now I’m always watching where he looks.

  José, the boy behind the counter at the little store with the bebe pepsi sign, has apple cheeks and café-au-lait skin that makes his green eyes greener and his white teeth whiter. He’s about fifteen or sixteen, and every morning when we go downstairs Mark says to him jovially, “Señor José, como se va? ” The boy is all smiles for Mark.

  One day Mark makes a stack of half a dozen shirts that have just come back, starched and neatly folded, from the laundry down the street. “What are you doing?” I ask.

  “I’m taking them down to José,” he says casually. “The poor kid dresses in rags.”

  When I looked out the living room window one morning, on the peaked roof across the street sat two blue-black vultures. They perched, one on each side of the peak, their wings extended, their fingered tips long and hideous. The next time I looked there were four—two on each side. I promised myself I wouldn’t look out that window again. Whenever I passed near it, I averted my eyes, fighting the impulse to look, forcing myself to gaze anywhere but there. But one day I looked: The quickest of glances showed me that now there were six—three on each side, their grotesque beaks pointing precisely in the direction of our building. They had come for me. I was seized by certainty—they were just waiting a couple of weeks, for my eighteenth birthday.

  I ran to the bedroom, where Mark was dressing, and threw my arms around him, buried my cheek feverishly in the pelt of his chest. “We’ve got to get out of here!” I cried. I told him how the vultures were multiplying.

  For an instant he held my arms as though to peel me off, then seemed to change his mind and patted my back instead, like someone soothing a sick child. “But I’ve paid the rent until July nineteenth,” he said gently.

  That would be one day after my birthday. “Please,” I begged, dropping to my knees. I had to convince him. “The nineteenth is too late,” I cried. “We have to leave now. Please, Mark!”

  And we did. “Okay,” he’d said, amazingly, and we rushed to throw our clothes into suitcases as if we were heeding a hurricane warning. Then we ran into the street and he waved a taxi down. I didn’t look back to see how many vultures were on the roof now. We caught a bus to Mexico City that very day.

  On the bus I was suddenly embarrassed by my “acting out,” as Mark called hysterical scene-making, but he held my hand as we rumbled south. “We’ll be in Mexico City in just a few hours,” he assured me, his voice low and soothing, a kind doctor. “Everything will be all right.”

  Mark leaves in the midmorning, and most evenings he comes back around eight or nine o’clock, tired out but exhilarated still by his heady day. “Dr. Sanchez says the field is wide open for psychologists in Mexico,” he tells me, or “Dr. Cordova was really funny today. She said they’d erect a monument to me if
I help them set up a department of psychology.” He’s in love with his work, with the campus, with his colleagues. To me they’re phantoms; he introduces me to no one, and I never even set foot on the university grounds.

  What do I with my days? Mark gives me a little money to wander around Mexico City, and though I still hate to take it from him, I do. I walk and walk, all day long, and when I’m tired I stop in a café and have something to eat and watch the passersby. I feel fine, though a tiny bit shaky still, as though I’ve recuperated from a high fever. Mexico City is beautiful, as I imagine Paris would be, grand old buildings and shop windoows with lovely clothes, perfumes, flowers, jewelry. One day I stop to watch a procession of young men, hundreds of them, winding down a main boulevard, shouting with gusto, waving arms and placards. A trio passes close, the man in the middle grasping a hand-lettered sign that says 5 centavos, the two on either side holding a miniature open coffin, all three bawling great crocodile tears.

  “What’s going on?” I ask the balding man beside me who’s been trying to pick me up in Spanish and English. “University of Mexico students, señorita,” he tells me. “They are protesting because the bus fare has been raised from five centavos to seven. Very bad for poor people.” I turn back to watch. I love their faces, so alive with passion and humor.

  I’m a wanderer alone in a foreign city, and I don’t dislike it. I have plenty of time to dream and to figure out my life. I can’t be someone’s wife. That would be a false me, no matter what the circumstances were. Everyone is rushing somewhere, to business, to romantic trysts, to change the world, and I love to mill in the crowds, to pretend to rush along with them. Of course I have nowhere to go yet, but I understand how important it is: You absolutely must have somewhere to go in life. That I’ve always known. I just forgot for a while.

  Dr. Cordova asked him to stay until December, Mark said. He ran a hand through his tangled curls, pouring himself a cup of the hot chocolate he’d made on the hot plate in our little apartment. “It’s a really attractive offer. I’ve decided I don’t want to go back to Children’s Hospital anyway.”

  “But I thought we were going back next week.” I took my toast from the toaster and busied myself looking for a plate. Would he try to keep me here? UCLA started in two weeks; Id promised my mother wed be back for the High Holidays.

  “Lil, look.” I turned to look at him and our eyes connected, but only for an instant before he looked away. “You go back now. It’s just a few months, and I’ll join you in December.” He looked at me again and smiled sweetly. I smiled back sweetly.

  “I’m going to have to ask you a big favor,” Mark said, rinsing his cup, his back to me. “Would you mind taking the bus? It costs a fraction of the plane, and I’m really strapped. They won’t pay me until the session is over. It only takes three or four days.”

  He came to the bus station and waited with me, handed my suitcase to the driver, kissed my cheek. “I really love you a lot,” he said. “Do you know that?”

  “I love you too,” I told him, my lips touching his stubbly cheek, but I doubt either of us meant it.

  I’m happy to be on the bus. I wave good-bye to him from my window, and he smiles and waves and smiles. I breathe easier when we pull out of the station. I’m the only one on the bus who isn’t Mexican, and I’m the only female who’s alone, but I know I’ll be all right. I can take care of myself. I don’t want it any other way. I never really truly believed it could be any other way. We ride for long stretches of city, then green, then desert, then small villages and more desert, through places whose names I’d never heard before and would probably never hear again. I look out the window, watching the bus gobble the miles of road. I’m going toward Los Angeles, toward my mother and Rae and UCLA and my future.

  The bus makes several stops a day so that the passengers can get food. In a little restaurant, in a town whose name I never learn, the waitress is a young girl who looks like Prince Valiant—smooth black hair that comes down below her ears, long smooth bangs. She wears a boy’s checked shirt and boy’s pants. All the time I’d been in Mexico I hadn’t seen a single female in pants. Her black eyes are handsome and intelligent. I can see how efficient she is, how focused on her tasks, what a hard worker. I wish she could get on the bus with me, that we’d travel in the same direction—to Los Angeles, to UCLA—and we’d both become … what? Lawyers? Psychologists maybe. Do I imagine that when she gives me my check our eyes lock? “Thank you very much,“she says in English, with only a trace of an accent. I watch her from my seat at the window until the bus pulls onto the road that will take me back to Los Angeles.

  LILLIAN

  13. HIGHER EDUCATION

  I WENT BACK to the Fountain Avenue Court Bungalows because for the time being I had nowhere else to go. My mother pressed me to her breast, kissed my face with loud smacks, carried on as though I’d been gone for decades.

  “Mom, I’m tired,” I pleaded. “All I want to do now is take a hot bath.” My white cotton dress was gray from five days on dusty Mexican roads, and my hair was a mess of wiry tangles.

  “All by yourself he lets you go? On a dangerous bus from Mexico?” My aunt was waiting there too, just as I’d feared, an angry little warrior with balled fists on plump hips.

  “He’s a paskudnyak, a bad one,” my mother cried.

  “Look, he’s coming back in December. They’re keeping his old job for him at Children’s Hospital,” I improvised over the din of running bath water. “Mark’s helping set up a very important department of psychology at the University of Mexico. He’s like a hero down there.” I shooed them out of the bathroom and locked myself in. If they knew it was permanently over between me and Mark, they’d try to trap me again. “I had to get back now to start UCLA, and I’m going to live in a dorm near campus,” I shouted without stopping for breath. “When he returns, we’re renting this beautiful house in Malibu.” I closed my eyes, sank down in the water to my nose, and stayed there.

  I delayed getting out until my skin was prunelike, but they were both still standing in the hallway when I opened the door, my mother looking tragic, my aunt glowering as if she wanted to yank Mark’s thick black curls out of his scalp. The hardest part came next.

  “Rae, look,” I said. “He hasn’t gotten paid yet. Could you lend me the money for a dorm room?”

  “What do you mean, dorm room?” my mother said. “You stay here till he comes back. You have your own room and everything here.”

  “No way, no way! I need to live near the campus. I can’t get to UCLA from here without wasting precious hours on the bus every day.”

  “Why do you have to go to college when you have a husband?” my mother yelled.

  “What kind of a husband is that? A carrot should grow from his ear!” Rae shook her fist at my absent husband and grabbed her purse. “Come to the Bank of America with me,” she said.

  My spirits are leaden one minute, soaring the next. My marriage has failed, but isn’t a wonderful new chapter of my life about to begin? With my scholarship money I buy my schoolbooks. Introduction to Humanities—The Oresteia, The Odyssey, The Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, Hamlet, Paradise Lost, Madame Bovary, books about the failures and triumphs of men, things I’d never even thought about before, words set down hundreds of years ago, so vivid they could be happening today: The miracle of it, I think, worshipful even of the printed pages, to me like sacred text. Elementary French—the heavy, grainy-green cover feels significant with promise: I’ll learn to understand people who speak no English, to read their ideas; someday I’ll even go to France. Introduction to Psychology—I’ll know what Mark knows; this is the first step. I daydream of a Dr. Faderman whose astuteness and wisdom will cure the obsessive, the agoraphobic, the compulsive, the paranoid. The books will be my key to a new life. Nothing will be impossible—they will make me a new person, the person I want to be.

  I have a week before classes start. I line the books up neatly on the shelf in my room at Rudi Hall, then I take the
m down, one by one, and pore over them, ravenous. I am a college student. A UCLA scholar. I’ve escaped from furnished rooms in the Bronx and East L.A., from nude modeling jobs and the Open Door, from all the forces that have worked to keep me down—the bastard who was my father, Fanny who’d told me what a poor girl couldn’t do, Mr. Mann and Falix and Carlos and Jan—all of them. Already I feel like a success.

  As we’d stood in line together at the Bank of America I told my aunt: “Of course Mark is sending me money for food. He just didn’t have enough this month for a whole semester’s dorm rent.” But how would I eat? Now, just before the start of classes, I found thumbtacked to a wall of the common room at Rudi Hall a printed sign that said JOBS and under it handwritten white index cards: Baby Sitter Wanted, Part-time File Clerk, Student Library Assistant.

  I spent four hours a day during the first week of classes wheeling loaded carts up and down the stacks of the UCLA library, searching for Dewey decimal numbers, putting books back on the shelves, envying students with the leisure to sit and actually read those books in the beautiful, old wood-paneled, high-ceilinged room. At the end of the week, I stood in line at an office in the bowels of the library in order to pick up a little brown pay envelope. Inside I found a check for $23.25.

  It wasn’t a decision I struggled over. Being exploited as a student library assistant wasn’t much more pleasant than being exploited as a pinup model, and the pay was a lot worse for a lot more hours. Why shouldn’t I use all the gifts I had, every one of them, to get where I needed to go? “Andy,” I cried into the first public telephone I could find, “it’s Gigi Frost. Remember me? I’d like to come back to work.”

  “Hey, the hourglass girl who doesn’t own a bra.” Andy laughed. “So what happened? Your boyfriend run off and leave you?”

  “Something like that,” I said. “Say, look, can I work on weekends in group shoots?” Four hours on Saturdays, four hours on Sundays, and I’d go back to the dorm with forty dollars in my pocket. It felt different to me now than it had two years earlier: I wasn’t worried anymore about the photographers and where they might tempt me to go. Now I knew where I was going. Now I was sure I wouldn’t let anything stop me from getting there. If I quit the library job and modeled on the weekend, I’d have twelve extra hours a week in which to study.