Naked in the Promised Land (24 page)

"I see so many girls with such fine Jewish boys, it's a heartache for me," Rae had said when my nose job didn't immediately yield a prince. "You're better looking than those girls. Why can't you find a nice Jewish boy?"

"I don't want a nice Jewish boy," I callously muttered through the new nose she'd helped pay for, and, because I still had hopes for a Hollywood career, I stuck that nose back into
The Complete Works of Eugene O'Neill.

She would not give up. "Why do you want to make us miserable? Why do you want to make yourself miserable?" she would cry, begging me to attend to real business instead of acting lessons and play rehearsals. When I stopped going to Geller's, her hopes blossomed. "Sophie from the Litvisheh Verein's daughter just got engaged to a wonderful dentist," she told me.

"I'm only sixteen, Rae."

"When me and your mother goes you'll have nobody. Sweet sixteen's the right time to get engaged, especially a poor girl like you. You're better off married to a nice serious boy—a dentist, a doctor, an accountant." She'd mastered that American fable, all right.

Though I still hadn't a clue about how to maneuver in the world, I knew with certainty that the Jewish prince dream she tried to fill me full of was as much the antithesis of fox-advice as the dream of Hollywood stardom that my mother had planted in me. Yet how could I convince Rae she had to give it up? Not by telling her that except in fairy tales, Jewish dentists or doctors or accountants don't marry poor girls who
have no father, whose mother had been crazy, and whose stepfather still was. Nor by explaining that though I was sweet sixteen, I was a woman who already had a considerable history in an era when princes' brides were supposed to have no history whatsoever. And certainly not by insisting that I had no interest in princes. She couldn't hear such things.

Nor did she, any more than my mother, have any real idea of either the limits or the possibilities of lives in America in the middle of the twentieth century. My mother and aunt had barely known thirty years earlier how to survive as immigrants, and their worlds never got much bigger than the shops they worked in or the homes they kept for their husbands. So what tools to help me flourish, what wisdom, could they possibly pass on to me? What besides the example of their failure? What coin that I could turn to good use?

Only the most valuable gem in the universe, much more precious than what the sly fox pretended to offer: the knowledge that I was deeply loved, that I was the most important being in the world to them, all that was left to them. And because I was the cherished remnant, I couldn't let myself be destroyed. My life was important, and I had to find a way to do something with it.

What false starts, what near-disasters, what lows and what highs I'd already known and would continue to know. I had no neatly wrapped fables or maxims from the past to live by (in that, I was actually lucky, though I didn't see it that way for a long time). I would have to start from scratch. I would have to create my own fables, my own dreams, unique ones that I could tailor to myself and live by here in America. Yet where would I get the wisdom to figure it all out?

If I'd spent my life in my mother's shtetl of Prael, the inflexible rules would have been drilled into me from birth: "Be a dutiful daughter." "Learn to cook and sew and take care of the house." "Get married and serve your husband and children." I couldn't have escaped my shtetl fate except perhaps for a short respite in Dvinsk, working for a tailor and sending money home to my parents in lieu of my daily services, until a marriage could be arranged for me.

And if Shtetl Lilly had had a rambunctious, striving spirit in her like American Lil's, the family patriarch would have straightened it out early with a callused heavy hand if gentle persuasion didn't do the trick—or
failing that, the rabbi would have come to visit. Sitting her down on a stool, he would have lectured, with beard wagging, on what the sacred Book said about her obligations as a daughter of Israel. There wouldn't have been many decisions for Lilly of Prael to make in her narrow, little life, because the path was as inescapable as it was obvious.

But Prael had burned away in the Holocaust, and I was an American. For me, now, here, nothing felt obvious, and nothing yet was inescapable. I'd learned a few things so far: Mel Kaufman and company, for example, showed me what I couldn't do and where I couldn't go; Jan showed me that the coyote could be either gender. But who would show me what I
could
do, what doors I could open, what dreams I could invent to replace my worn-out dreams of stardom?

"When are you going to sign up for school?" my despairing mother asked after I'd been back from Jan's hotel room for a week.

I slept until ten or so every morning now, and when I woke I stayed in bed, staring at the squiggles and patches you could read like a Rorschach test that were made by the peeling lavender paint that covered the walls and ceiling. I didn't know what I'd do with myself if I left my room. If I wasn't going to be with Jan anymore or go back to Geller's or read plays or take modeling jobs, how could I pass the day and the long evening and the night?

"You have to register for Hollywood High School. Mrs. Marcus from next door told me. You hear me, Lilly? It's five blocks away. Sunset and Highland." Since I'd disappeared for days, my mother never talked to me anymore without the shrill edge of lamentation in her voice, as though she feared I'd already taken the inevitable next step after letting myself be photographed in the nude. There was nothing I could say now to reassure her. Hadn't I reassured her after the terrible discovery of the pictures? And right after that I vanished, didn't even call her. What good were my reassurances?

"In a week it starts. You need to sign up," my mother nagged.

All the previous year I'd waited for my sixteenth birthday so I could quit school. Now I was sixteen. Why should I go back? And yet if I didn't, what would I do with the rest of my life?

If no patriarch or rabbi is imposed on you, or even available to you, to whom do you turn in America for guidance?

I opened the Yellow Pages to Psychologists and with a steeled finger dialed a number.

When Dr. Sebastian Cushing heard that I was only sixteen and my family had no money, he told me about a counselor who was hired by the Rotary Club to talk to underprivileged youths in trouble.

When had I not been an underprivileged youth in trouble?

"But his clients are mostly male juvenile delinquents." Dr. Cushing oozed sympathy over the phone.

"That's okay, I'm a juvenile delinquent, even though I'm a girl," I told him truthfully, and scribbled Mr. Maurice Colwell's number on the yellow page.

The old stone edifice looked as though it had once housed studio glamour, but when you walked through the big oak door you were assaulted by the pungent odor of chlorine coming from a huge, enclosed swimming pool. The building was now the Hollywood YMCA, a shrine to male physical fitness, and Mr. Colwell's office was on the second floor.

I stood at the desk, feeling awkward and waiting to be acknowledged by the only female in sight, an elderly lady in a prim chignon who worked the switchboard. I could hear the gruff shouts of male camaraderie behind the closed gym doors and the dull bouncing of basketballs.

The switchboard lady directed me up the marble staircase and down a dark hall to Maurice Colwell's cubbyhole of an office.

"Come on in. Lillian, right? Come on in." His voice was jarringly robust. He rose and extended a big mitt of a hand, but he didn't move from behind a desk that was topped by a rat's nest of scattered books and piles of papers; torn, empty boxes of Kleenex and one full one; and a cane with a duck-bill handle on top of it all. He had a brownish crewcut, and he wore round, horn-rimmed glasses and a gray flannel suit with a navy tie, like a respectable Rotary Club type. "Babbitt," the guys at Geller's used to call men who looked like that.

"So, tell me, what's your story?" Mr. Colwell asked without ceremony, pointing me to a metal folding chair opposite his desk. He sat on one too, leaning forward, cupping his cheeks in his hands, his elbows balanced on a piece of the desk's disorder. He looked like an owl on a perch.

How could I begin to tell my life to a strange man in a depressing office while brawny jocks walked up and down the halls? I searched my head for bland words that would tide me over until I could get out of there.

"While you're thinking, let me tell you one," he began. "There was this
schnorrer,
you know what a
schnorrer
is, right?"

I remembered what my mother and Rae had said about Fanny. "Yeah, a person who acts like a beggar." This guy's name was Colwell?

"Right. He goes to a rich man and says, 'I'm hungry. Give me something to eat.' And the rich man says, 'What
chutzpah!
Do I need to translate?"

"No, it's nerve ... or daring ... like, outrageous daring."

"Yeah. So the rich guy says, 'What
chutzpah,
a man like you, with the arms of an ox, what right do you have to go around begging?' And the
schnorrer
says, 'What should I do for the lousy few cents you'll give me, cut off my arms?'" Maurice Colwell grinned, and the gap between his front teeth looked wide enough for a cigarette to get lost in.

I laughed, more at his silly grin than at the joke, which I wasn't sure was really funny.

"Now let's see a little
chutzpah
from you," he said seriously. "What's your story?"

"How do you know
'chutzpah,'
" I asked.

"I'm an honorary Jew. My wife's Jewish," he said. "
Nu?
" and he leaned so far forward that the upper part of him was halfway across the desk.

I told him. What did I have to lose? About my nude modeling and the Open Door and how I kept my age a secret and about getting
D
's and
F
's at Fairfax High School and not wanting to go back to school, and then about how I'd failed my mother and made her get married—and here tears tumbled out, and he handed me the full Kleenex box—and why I gave up on my Hollywood dreams that I'd hoped and planned for
since I was a little kid, and how I still thought sometimes about what it would be like to go to New Orleans with Jan on a motorcycle. I handed him my whole life.

"So, you really think you're a homosexual, huh?" he asked after two hours.

"I don't
think
I am. I am," I said. Did this guy in a Brooks Brothers straitjacket want to rescue me from being gay?

"Well, listen good. It doesn't matter if you're a polka-dotted baboon, you still gotta eat. And if you're a homosexual, you don't want to get married, right? So you gotta work to eat. And if you gotta work to eat," he intoned with Talmudic scholar logic, "it may as well be a good job that lets you eat good, right? So you better finish high school and get yourself into college. You don't want to go full-time now, I'll write you a letter, you take it to the principal, and he'll let you leave before lunch every day. Deal?"

He was right. Why hadn't it occurred to me? If I didn't want to get married, I'd have to work. If I couldn't work as a movie actress and didn't want to work like my poor mother at some miserable job that paid next to nothing, I had to go to school.

"So what do you like to do—when you're not carousing in bars or picking up sociopaths or risking your neck on motorcycles?" He blinked his owl eyes at me. I couldn't figure out if he was trying to moralize or be funny. What could I tell him about what I liked to do? Make love with Jan?

I fished in my memory: "I used to read plays all the time," I said.

"Good start." He stirred around in the mountain on his desk. "You'll love this,
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
It's a novel, a poor girl who becomes a writer, Irish Catholic—not like you but not that different. Read it and tell me next week what you think. This too, and these." He extricated a half-dozen dog-eared paperbacks from the debris and handed them to me.

"See you next week," he said, offering his mitt again in a handshake that swallowed up mine, "but in the meantime, think about this one, okay? There was a king two hundred years ago who hated Jews and he made this decree: 'Every Jew who steps foot in my kingdom has to say
something about himself. If he lies he will be shot, and if he tells the truth he will be hanged. So one day this Jew comes—long black coat, sidelocks, the works—and the king's guards command him to tell something about himself. 'I'm going to be shot today,' he says. This really puzzles the guards (they all have
goyishe kups)
—what should they do with this guy? They go ask the king for direction, but he's puzzled too.
'If I shoot the Jew, it implies he told the truth,'
the king says to himself,
'but in that case my decree says he should be hanged, so how can I shoot him? But if I hang him, that implies he told a lie, and for a lie my decree says he should be shot, so how can I hang him?'
What can he do? He's gotta let the man go free." The gap-toothed grin. "Quick—what's the moral?"

I laughed inside. This guy really was funny. But I shrugged in answer to his question.

"The moral is," Maurice Colwell said, "you have to use your head in this world. Now, chew on it."

He pulled his cane from the pile and walked me down the hall with a bobbing limp, one foot encased in an elevated shoe that tried in vain to make up for the shortness of the leg. "Polio," he told me much later. "That's how I started reading. You stay in bed for a year or two, you discover a lot of things."

I hugged his books close to my chest and walked west on Sunset Boulevard, back to the Fountain Avenue Court Bungalows. Maurice Colwell was right—about almost everything, but mostly about my using my head. I'd stopped doing that. But now I would go back to school, and I'd figure out what I wanted to be and how to do it. I'd spent a good part of the last year in photographers' studios, dressed in feathers and harem pants and beachballs and nothing; I'd been in the Houdini whorehouse; I'd consorted with addicts and drunks; I'd been a regular in gay bars; I'd made love in a flophouse with a butch pimp. And now I needed to be an eleventh-grader. I had to bring this off. I had to get the high school diploma that Mr. Colwell—Maury, he told me to call him—said I needed if I was going to go to college and become somebody.