Beyond Belief (33 page)

The boys my mother pushed me to date, the “young brothers in God’s organization,” were awkward and dull, predictable and dismissive of anything that captured my imagination. It was clear to them, and they made little effort to be polite about it, that I was tempting Satan’s army by suggesting a trip to the Museum of Modern Art or the Guggenheim on a Saturday afternoon (after
service, of course). Instead, they’d treat me to an insipid lunch at a chain restaurant followed by a chaste walk around the park. With increasing dread, I found that most of these dates ended with a repressed daddy’s boy trying to plunge his tongue down my throat or stick his hand up my skirt, clumsily groping for a premature peek at paradise.

At first I complained to my mother in the hope that she’d stop prodding me to accept these invitations, but I quickly learned she wasn’t going to see things my way.

“Reexamine your behavior. What did you do to provoke him?” she would ask, or “How many times have I told you to wear longer skirts? Men are made of flesh and blood, honey. The sooner you get married, the better.”

I
DID NOT GET
married but instead graduated from high school. Though I wanted to go to college, and my teachers tried to intervene, making appeals on my behalf, my parents wouldn’t let me. So I watched all my “worldly” friends take off for college—though some of the boys went to Canada or Israeli kibbutzim to avoid the draft—while I stayed at home and barricaded myself from the constant room-shaking parental battles that raged on.

I was in limbo—neither able to satisfy my mother’s plan for me to get with the Witness Protection Program, as I’d begun to see it, for offering believers the only insurance policy against Armageddon, nor able to defy her outright and apply to college. Since childhood I’d been groomed to enter Bethel, the residential facility for JW missionaries in Brooklyn Heights. I had to admit Brooklyn was appealing, but I knew my attraction was more because of its proximity to Manhattan than to my eternal salvation.

My desire to leave kept bubbling up inside me, growing more insistent, a pushy patient in my internal waiting room. But still I didn’t go. My obstinate ways, however, became an increasing source of friction at home. Though my mother would take my side against my stepfather when he railed against my dreaminess and lack of common sense, in private she rebuked me constantly, swearing that my stubbornness would be the ruin of us both.

I tried. I continued to go to all the meetings and out in service every weekend. I conducted Bible studies with “people of good faith” who were “hungry for the Truth.” Yet I knew in my heart I was starving. I was living an inauthentic life, taking no pride at all in separating “the sheep from the goats.” Like a racehorse at the starting gate, I felt pumped to run, snorting at the sight of the track, waiting for the bell to ring and the gate to open to a much wider world.

That gate would open when I turned eighteen. This would be the perfect opportunity to test my mother’s commitment to “Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and to God the things that are God’s” (Mark 22:21). As she saw it, Caesar, in the form of the U.S. legal system, decreed that I became an adult at age eighteen and would thus no longer be her responsibility. Till then, I was pretty much her property, requiring constant guidance and surveillance. I saw my emotional, if not spiritual, salvation in this argument. We didn’t celebrate birthdays, but now my eighteenth would be gift enough.

As soon as I could I secured an inexpensive room in a Queens apartment share and announced to my parents my plans to move out. My stepfather seemed relieved; my mother immediately checked to see if I’d be living close to a Kingdom Hall. I would and so she agreed, perhaps looking forward to a break from the tension between us.

M
OVING DAY WASN’T WHAT
I hoped for. My mother had a last-minute change of heart. Perhaps she imagined I’d be whisked off to my new living quarters in a chariot sent by Jesus, but to her disgust my equipage was three school friends, home on a college break, honking from a waiting VW Camper. Not able to keep it together, she panicked, burst into tears, and commanded me not to leave. She blocked the door.

“Please, Mom!” I cried. “It will be fine. I’ll call you later, I promise.”

As I picked up the carrying case of LPs with one hand and my suitcase with the other, she began pulling at my clothes with frenzied force, tearing my collar, and ripping my pants, screaming. “You came into my life naked and you’ll leave naked! You think you know anything at all? You’ll leave when I tell you to leave!!”

Terrified but determined, I yanked her off me, grabbed my belongings, and ran out of the house and into my scary, necessary new life.

W
ITH THE HELP OF
an employment agency I found a job that felt like I’d won the lottery: secretary to the international sales manager at a major paperback publishing house. My boss, Mr. Alwyn, was an elegant Welshman. One of the first tasks he assigned me was choosing books to be packed in shipments to U.S. military outposts in Southeast Asia—gifts of literary ammunition for fighting the Vietcong. We both pretended he didn’t know I was slipping in copies of Dalton Trumbo’s antiwar novel
Johnny Got His Gun
.

I did not report this part of my job to my mother, as I’d been taught from an early age that Witnesses must remain neutral. To identify as a pacifist meant I was taking a political stand—at about
the same level of “wrong thinking” as pledging allegiance to the flag. I seemed incapable of anything
but
wrong thinking in more and more areas of my life, but I was equally incapable of going back. I should have been reading Watchtower Society publications such as
Make Sure of All Things; Hold Fast to What Is Fine
on my daily subway commute. I tried, but I forgot the words as soon as I read them. I learned that my publishing job not only paid a decent wage, it also offered a complimentary copy of every new title. What I actually wanted to hold fast to was the literary alchemy of these fiction writers. I was thunderstruck by sentences from Donald Barthelme: “There was a sort of muck running in the gutters, yellowish, filthy stream that suggested excrement, or nervousness, a city that does not know what it has done to deserve baldness, errors, infidelity.” As I took in these words, my nerve endings donned pom-poms; my eyes became pied pipers, leading me over the edge of a cliff. I was unable to save myself.

In order to pass muster in my adopted environment, in my new life I was an undercover agent disguised as a sophisticated young woman of the world. I didn’t want to reveal how small and proscribed my background was. There was so much I didn’t know, and social minefields to be avoided everywhere. Invited to join my young coworkers after hours, the conversation often turned to gossip about who was “banging” whom or who was bragging about “going down” on a certain member of a famous band. I nodded, clucked my tongue, and laughed in all the places I hoped were appropriate, trying desperately to evade detection as an alien interloper.

Sex was something never discussed at home. Once or twice my mother had alluded to a passionate relationship with my real father, but I wondered whether when she found “the Truth” by
becoming a Witness she simultaneously lost her mojo. I didn’t really know anything about how sex worked but I had two images in my mind, both gleaned from movies. One was the moment of recognition, a magnetic, unstoppable falling into each other, and the other was the Tin Man in
The Wizard of Oz
—he needed an oil can to keep him happy and moving.

I was a lonely fledgling, just starting to see myself reflected in the response of others. I allowed myself to believe that I
would
be recognized, met, by an interesting man, and I wanted to have the oil can ready. The familiar
When? When? When?
pulsing through me was developing a lustier tone.

One morning he arrived, pushing the office mail cart. He was dressed in a nubby silk shirt, leather pants, and Frye boots. I was immediately attracted to his delicate face, jutting cheekbones, dark pointy mustache and long black curly hair. He was d’Artagnan, Richelieu, Bonnie Prince Charlie.

He was also tripping on acid, and the rolling cart of alphabetized hanging files he pushed near my desk was not cooperating.

“Well, hello Miss,” he whispered conspiratorially. “I can’t seem to find your mail. What’s your boss’s name again?”

“Alwyn. David Alwyn”

His eyes spun like roulette wheels. He was genuinely confused. “So what letter would that begin with?”

“‘A’ . . . uh, the first one.”

Instead of responding to that information he sat down on the corner of my desk and shook his head, sighing, “Nevermore. Nevermore.”

“Why are you quoting Edgar Allan Poe?”

“Nah. It’s Verlaine. Can’t you hear it?”

Le ver est dans le fruit, le réveil dans le rêve,

Et le remords est dans l’amour: telle est la loi.

Le Bonheur a marché côte à côte avec moi.

Ain’t it the truth?!

The worm is in the fruit; in dreaming, waking;

In loving, mourning. And so must it be.

Happiness once walked side by side with me.

“Mon Dieu!”
I murmured, shocking myself that I managed to swoon and blaspheme simultaneously.

He reached into the top basket, grabbed all the mail that was in the file marked
G
, kissed it, handed it to me, and then sauntered round the corner, out of sight.

Over the next weeks Lee asked me out a few times, usually dinner in Chinatown at Hong Fat, where the steamed dumplings made up for the notoriously rude waiters. We saw the midnight show of
El Topo
at the Elgin, our movie tickets guaranteeing a contact high from all the pot smoke wafting through the aisles; we heard Richie Havens’s driving guitar at the Fillmore East. The more time I spent with Lee, the more I felt the arrow of my self sharpening, becoming bolder, more confident.

When I learned my roommates would both be away for the weekend, I worked up the nerve to invite him over to my place. Blocking out my mother’s voice intoning dire warnings against the sins of the flesh, I took some cash out of my savings account, went to the lingerie department of Bonwit Teller, and purchased a floor-length, forest green negligee with a plunging neckline. Lee had introduced me to Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, and
The Story of O,
tomes definitely missing from the Kingdom Hall reading list. I
wanted to read everything and then do everything, with him. All of my programming began to unravel.

He was living in the Chelsea Hotel with a California heiress, a situation that presented a conundrum for me. He made no bones about his disdain for monogamy, declaring it “a patriarchal construct that cuts people off from what gives them the greatest pleasure—the freedom to love without restraint.” I wanted him to guide me in freeing myself from all restraints. I just plain wanted him.

Despite my best efforts to avoid it, the apostle Paul’s pep talk to the Colossians flashed across the screen of my mind the day of our date like a PSA from heaven: “
Keep your minds fixed on the things above, not on the things upon the earth . . . deaden, therefore, your body members that are upon the earth as respects fornication, uncleanness, sexual appetite, hurtful desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. On account of those things the wrath of God is coming
.” Slipping into the green negligee, I canceled my spiritual insurance policy, the throbbing “When, When, When?” replaced by “Now, Now, Now!”

T
HE SHOCK OF NO
longer being a virgin was immediate and dizzying. The “no-backsies” permanence of my fall from grace produced a terrifying and stomach-churning sensation, like the held-breath anxiety of being pushed on a swing from a colossal height. Feeling completely exposed to Jehovah’s (and probably, in her own omniscient way, my mother’s) scrutiny and judgment, I took shelter in denial. When Lee left the next day, I told myself that what had happened between us, the whole long night of conjoined naked choreography, was only a prelude to “the real thing” but was not actual sex. It had been so easy, so instinctive. If I’d actually committed this forbidden act, why wasn’t it accompanied by the smashing of
stone tablets, the blast of Joshua’s horn? Where was the manifestation prophesied in the seventeenth chapter of Revelation, one the entire borough of Queens would surely have witnessed:

“Come, I will show you the punishment of the great prostitute, who sits on many waters. With her the kings of the earth committed adultery and the inhabitants of the earth were intoxicated with the wine of her adulteries . . . I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast that was covered with blasphemous names and had seven heads and ten horns . . . This title was written on her forehead:
MYSTERY BABYLON THE GREAT THE MOTHER OF PROSTITUTES AND OF THE ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH
.”

But lo, the Earth did not shatter, and the sea did not swallow me up. The police had not knocked at my door, nor had the downstairs neighbors. There was nothing in the paper about it. I began to feel somehow both lighter and fuller, with the knowledge that there was no going back. As far as I could tell, God was fine. I was absolutely sure that I was too. My mother, however, was another story.