Naked in the Promised Land

by Lillian Faderman

  “Okay,” she said with a sigh, “two years.”

  On the campus I found that mementos still remained of the past, such as the wrecked Ethnic Studies program, but the big storms had subsided. A new dean and a new vice president for Academic Affairs were already in place, working on repairing the wreckage. The ambiance of the campus had changed too. The bearded and fiery radicalism of the last years had shifted the perimeter of what was radical. The rhetoric of the radicals would make my soft-spoken message seem tame, I realized. For what I needed to do, the times couldn’t be better. “The college needs an affirmative action policy,” I could say in a reasonable tone of voice. “We need an interdisciplinary women’s studies program.” I could make those things sound as though they weren’t much, as though what I was asking for wouldn’t bring upheavals to the academy that were even more revolutionary than the demands of the boycotters and protesters and marchers of the last few years.

  Phyllis Irwin was about forty, with prematurely silver hair and blue eyes that seemed familiar though I knew we’d never before met. “I’m a horsewoman,” she’d said, and told me she owned a ranch. Maybe that was why it took me so long to realize it was Rae’s blue eyes that hers reminded me of. The idea made me laugh out loud: Rae as a cowgirl.

  She was about Rae’s height too, or maybe just two or three inches taller, and a lot trimmer; and she was a music professor and a pianist, and now assistant vice president for Academic Affairs. She called herself Scotch Irish and lived with Muffy, a silver schnauzer. No, Phyllis and My Rae were nothing alike, of course not. But the more I got to know her, the more it felt as if they were. Maybe she reminded me of Rae because they were both small and feisty.

  Phyllis had called early in the fall semester to invite me to lunch. “I have you to thank for my new position,” she’d drawled over the phone in a Texas twang. “I wouldn’t have applied, but when I heard they made you chair of English I thought, ‘Yeah, maybe things are finally going to change around here.’”

  “We’ve got to push for more women and minority faculty,” we’d said before our conversation was over.

  “Right! At the least, fifty percent of new hires have got to be women and minorities.”

  “Right! We’ve got to get the college to set goals in that direction.”

  How fantastic, to have someone I could talk to about such things, an ally—two women administrators in a college, collaborating on behalf of women. Had that ever before happened in the history of the world? I’ll call Binky this evening, tell her how our sacrifice is already paying off. “And we’ve got to get more courses about women in the curriculum,” Phyllis and I agreed before we hung up.

  Over lunch in the crowded faculty cafeteria we seemed to have less to talk about. “I first saw you about four years ago,” she finally said. “Actually, it was right here. At this very table. I even remember what you were wearing.” She laughed and looked down at her coffee cup as she said it. “A flared blue skirt with a white silk blouse. You were with someone … a tall woman with light hair.”

  Binky. “Yes, my roommate.” I didn’t know this person. I wanted to work with her, but I’d have to be careful about what I told her.

  She called again a week later. “The vice president said we ought to write an affirmative action faculty policy together and present it at the academic senate.” We whooped. We’d change the campus.

  We had dinner together, usually at her place, every night that I wasn’t in L.A. We talked mostly about what we’d do for women on campus. “I’m so happy you’re here. I hate to eat alone,” she said one evening. She was standing near the sink, wrapping bacon slices around thick filets. She looked up at me, then quickly back at the steaks. I began to say “Me too,” but I stopped myself and said nothing. I didn’t stay long after we ate. I slipped out the door, into the black night, and drove back to my apartment at fifty miles an hour, though the posted speed limit was thirty. The rooms were dark and mausoleum-still. I switched on a light in the kitchen; then, so lonely for a voice, I picked up the wall phone and started to dial my number in Los Angeles. Halfway through I hung up. I dialed Phyllis’s number, but I replaced the receiver after one ring. I sat at the table and stared into space.

  One night, in Los Angeles, in the bed I share with Binky, I dream about Phyllis. She’s invited me to lunch at her ranch, and I lean against the kitchen counter, watching while she shucks oysters. Outside the window two white horses stand gleaming in the sunshine—a mare and her baby. The colt nuzzles and nurses while its mother licks at its fur in voluptuous content. Now Phyllis is slicing apples, and from where I stand I can smell their freshness and sweetness. I know if I do it, some great change will happen—there’ll be no going back—but I can’t stop myself: I put my arms around her, draw her to me. Her mouth tastes like fresh apples.

  I jumped awake as though I’d been slapped. In the darkness I could see Binky’s head, inches from mine, and I turned over guiltily and closed my eyes again, but my sleep was over.

  “The vice president said we ought to plan a women’s studies program together,” Phyllis came by my office to say at the beginning of the next week. “He’s making it part of my assignment.” I remembered with a rush of heat to my face how she looked in my dream, bent over the apples.

  Sheila, my secretary, buzzed me and said, “Uhh, line 2.” She sounded confused.

  “Who is it?” I asked.

  “Wouldn’t give a name or say what they wanted…”

  The voice on line 2 was unfamiliar, boyish, but I was sure it belonged to a woman. “Lil?” it said.

  No one had called me Lil in ten years. Lil had absolutely no connection to Lillian. “Who’s this?” I demanded.

  “Remember Nicky?” She laughed.

  “Just a minute,” I said quickly. I jumped up to close my office door. Sheila didn’t need to overhear my conversation with somebody from another life.

  “You’re easy to find,” the voice said when I returned to the phone. “This is only the fourth call I had to make.”

  “So, have you written your novel?” That I said in a loud and friendly voice, just in case Sheila was listening through the door.

  “Been busy doing other things. Remember what you once told me about Jan?” I jumped again and pressed at the door, to make certain it was closed. “That’s the way my life has been.” She wanted to tell me all about it—the women she’d lived off, the clothes and jewelry they’d bought her, the opium she’d tried, the crystal she’d been addicted to. She sounded jolly, flippant. I listened, nervous, but morbidly fascinated as well. I’ve got to hang up, I kept thinking. “Now I’m a madam,” she laughed and spun another story about the house she managed in San Francisco.

  Why had she called to tell me this? And what did I have to say to her now, this creature from another universe? “You’re not what you think you are, Nicky,” I told her. I felt foolish as soon as I uttered it.

  “I’d better be what I think I am. Otherwise what’s it all for? Besides, I’ve had a damn good time, Lil.”

  “So why are you calling?” I forced a laugh.

  “I just wanted to hear your voice. Lil, can I call you from time to time?” she asked softly.

  Suddenly I saw her as though it had been fifteen days instead of fifteen years and she was still that big galumpf of a girl who was so bright and naive and unlucky. And if there’d been no owl, no tiger, no weeping, clinging creature crying in my wilderness years before, wouldn’t the bogeyman have pounced and carried me away as he had her?

  “Lil?” she repeated when I didn’t answer right away.

  I went to the faculty senate with my nails biting into my palms, but there was almost no resistance to the proposal Phyllis and I had drawn up to establish a women’s studies program at Fresno State College. When the senate president called for a vote, it was adopted by a large majority. Two faculty slots would be set aside for instructors, who would teach the introductory courses. The rest of the program would be interdisciplinary.
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  Phyllis and I kept plotting. We’d get the college to allow the Intro to Women’s Studies class to satisfy a General Education requirement, along with Intro to Ethnic Studies. We holed up in the assistant vice president’s office and planned more strategies. We continued to plan in the evening, as I watched her feed the horses, and as we sat with Muffy on the ditch bank and looked at the sunset, and as I helped her make dinner.

  “Think of all the years we wasted when we were both on campus and didn’t know each other,” Phyllis said when she walked me to the car at the end of another evening spent devising strategies. Everything was quiet in the warm spring night except for the sounds of crickets in the grass and frogs in the ditch and the banging of my heart.

  I had to prevent myself from putting my arms around her as I had in my dream. I told her about Binky instead. “I don’t go to L.A. every weekend just because I miss bagels in Fresno,” I began.

  “Well, I guessed,” she said, “years ago, when I saw you two together. I came here with someone too. She left a couple of years ago to get a doctorate at the University of Arizona.”

  “Then she’ll be back in another year or two?”

  “It’s never the same river twice,” Phyllis said.

  Marshall High School also wasn’t what it had been to Binky five years earlier, when I’d watched her share her literary passions with a rainbow of adoring kids. “No more United Nations,” she sighed to me over the phone one evening. “This kid called me a white honky bitch today,” she cried another evening.

  “Oh, Binky, oh God, I’m sorry.” I knew how the words must have hurt her. “I wish I could be home to take you in my arms.”

  “Well, you’re not,” she snapped. “You’re two hundred miles away.”

  And you’ve still never said anything about the baby, though it’s been two years since you asked for time to think about it, I wanted to snap back. (But that was unfair, I knew. I couldn’t have a baby right now anyway.) “Love, the semester is almost over. Let’s have a wonderful summer together,” I said instead. “We’ll go somewhere romantic … the most romantic place we can think of.” We had to learn how to be together again, how to touch again. We occupied the same house every weekend and slept in the same bed, but we were exhausted from our separate weeks and preoccupied with tensions we didn’t share. “I love you,” I cried now over the phone.

  I think it was in Montego Bay that I really understood how you always take yourself with you, no matter where you go. If it’s not working for two people at home, it won’t work while they’re sipping piña colada on a sandy beach. We’d already left Kingston because it was too hot. Or too noisy. Or too crowded. Because we weren’t having a good time. Now we drove the length of Jamaica in a rented car, squabbling absurdly all the way about whether the window should be down or the air conditioner should be on, whether to have our big meal at lunch or at dinner, whether to spend four days at Montego Bay or a week. When we fought, there in Jamaica where we’d come to learn how to be in love again, I felt defeated. Even Fresno would be better than this, I thought, remembering Phyllis’s kitchen where you could look out the window and see Arabians grazing in high grass.

  It was night when we arrived at Montego Bay, and the blue-black sky I saw from our balcony looked as though someone had taken an ice pick to the heavens and pricked out thousands of tiny silver holes. I could hear the soft lapping of the warm waters, and I could hear Binky unpacking in our room, hanging things up, opening and closing drawers. An aroma of gardenias wafted up from some secret bush below. Finally Binky came to stand beside me on the balcony and look up at the stars. I moved to put my arm around her and she let me, though there was nothing yielding in her posture. “That was a long drive,” she said after a minute. “Guess I’ll turn in.”

  “Okay.” I dropped my arm. Let her turn in. Twelve days in Jamaica, and we’d never once made love. I stood on the balcony, enveloped in humid air that was as sensual as touch. Between the brief lulls in the lapping of the water, I could hear somebody on a far beach playing a drum, an insistent calypso beat. Then in the darkness tears rolled down my cheeks, down my chin. You want too much out of life, I chastised myself. You want more than anyone can get—work of consequence, a home, a baby, a lover. You haven’t changed a bit from your seven-year-old self—the spring of ‘48, the train to Los Angeles, a suitcase bulging with gigantic wants. Now I pressed against the moon-cooled railing, leaned as far over as I could to glimpse the source of the heady gardenia smell, wished like a moonstruck adolescent for a lover to be standing there with me. Maybe so much wanting was wrong, but I couldn’t stop no matter how I tried.

  We left Montego Bay after four days. Perhaps things would be better in Ocho Rios. But the drive seemed interminable, and we had almost nothing to say to each other. Better than fighting, I thought glumly. From the road right outside the town, Binky spotted a small, nondescript hotel and pulled into its empty parking lot. “I’m too tired to look further,” she said, overruling my perfunctory protest. It doesn’t really matter, I thought. A romantic hotel would be a mockery anyway.

  The room was as dismal and anonymous as if it had been a Motel 6. I hung my clothes on the wire hangers, wondering if it were possible to change our airline tickets for an earlier return. When the phone rang, I thought it must be a wrong number.

  “Well, eureka!” It was Phyllis’s voice, as if my thinking of her on the way to Montego Bay had conjured her up. Like Rae and my mother in Wheeler Hall. “How did you know we were here?” I cried as I shot a guilty glance at Binky.

  “They don’t have that many hotels in Jamaica.” She sounded girlish, breathless. “I was ready to phone them all. Terrier persistence. I get it from Muffy.”

  Binky was staring. What was she thinking of this strange call?

  “Hey, I’m calling on official business,” Phyllis laughed. “From the vice president’s office. Are you sitting down?” She paused only for a second. “Your dean resigned today.”

  “Jim Light?” Why did I need to know that in the middle of Jamaica?

  “Yep. He’s been offered a provost position in New York. And … the vice president told me to find you.” She paused, and I struggled to make sense of what she was saying. “To find you and ask if you’d accept the position of acting dean of the School of Humanities for next year.”

  “What happened?” Binky saw the panic on my face. “What’s wrong?”

  “Can I have a day to think about it?” I managed to say into the receiver. But as soon as I said it I knew there was nothing to think about. There was no way I could turn down the offer. There had never been a woman academic dean at the college.

  “Oh, we also found out today that our name change was approved. We’re now California State University, Fresno. You’ll be a university dean. Oh, and I’ve been checking your mail like you asked me to. Harper and Row sent the galleys for From the Barrio. They look great!”

  “You just have to be important, don’t you?” Binky said when I told her about the deanship. “Do what you want. It wouldn’t make any difference what I said anyway.” She pulled her bathing suit from the drawer she’d placed it in minutes before. “I’m going to the beach,” she said over her shoulder.

  We should part. Now, I thought, as we bumped through dense clouds back to California. But we’d loved each other, hadn’t we? Binky was leaning her head against the window of the plane with her eyes closed, an expression of infinite sadness on her mouth. I stared now at the face I’d found so handsome—the strong nose, the fine cheekbones. I felt sadness too, for her, for us … for those times when she said she couldn’t remember living before she met me, the way I’d grab her in my arms at the door when she came home from school, how excited and hopeful we were when we got the contract for our book …

  Twice a month the nine academic deans sat around a long table in a formal chamber and discussed administrative matters with the vice president for Academic Affairs and the assistant vice president, Phyllis. The vice president’
s secretary sat at his side and kept her head bent over the steno pad on which she took lightning shorthand. The deans were almost all cut from the same pattern, with dark suits and somber ties, bald or balding heads, and a bearing that announced I’m engaged in serious business here.

  “How are you supposed to look if you’re a woman and thirty-two years old and have just been made a dean?” I asked Phyllis lightly, though the question really troubled me. It seemed important not to call attention even before I opened my mouth to how different I was from almost everyone else in the room. There were no models of women deans for me to emulate, no real-life images to show me how to make sure the appearance of the messenger wouldn’t distract from the message. Where could I look?

  Only to the movies of my childhood. How would Joan Crawford or Barbara Stanwyck be dressed to play a lady executive? Severe suit, button-down shirt, no-frills hairdo. That would be my costume. The visual effect I strove for wasn’t mannish exactly, but neither was it womanly, since woman dean was an oxymoron in 1972.

  But no costume could blind the other deans to the fact that a woman had been placed in their midst. They were always gentlemanly, but every time I spoke they seemed to flinch, as though from a tiny electric shock. “If there were just one other woman dean,” I complained to Phyllis.

  Yet my work as head of the School of Humanities came easily to me. I knew what needed to be done and I liked doing it. I’d heal old wounds and create trust between the departments and the dean’s office. I’d be the faculty’s advocate to the administration. If my style in dean’s meetings was neuter-gendered, the style I strove for when acting for the school was decidedly female, maternal, a bit of a tiger mother. I’ll never know if my school finally got long-delayed promotions and badly needed positions because of my approach or because the times had changed and the school’s radical stance no longer seemed threatening to a punitive administrative hierarchy; but I know the faculty was happier than they’d been in a long time.