Naked in the Promised Land (26 page)

"You don't have to go in right away, do you?" she asked when we turned the corner onto Fountain Avenue. She was a character; I'd never met anyone like her. So I plopped down with her on the apartment house lawn next door to the Fountain Avenue Court Bungalows and listened for another half-hour as she poured out her life story, plucking nervously at blades of grass and dandelions. In six months she'd already been to Chicago, Des Moines, Cheyenne, Salt Lake City, Reno, and San Francisco. She pronounced the name of each city with pleasure, a world traveler who'd seen wonders. "And I've made a lot of money. I'm good at it," she said in a boy's clear voice. "The crew boss keeps the money on the books for you, and they pay all your hotel bills and stuff. Then, when you're ready to leave, you get your wad."
Waaad,
she pronounced
it, making the word sound as though it meant
chest of gold doubloons.
Though she was a year or two older than I, I felt like a jaded woman in comparison. The whoppers she'd told in the service of the
Ladies' Home Journal
hadn't yet made her eyes look hard and savvy, and there was an ingenuous air about her. She'd been a carhop before she joined the magazine crew, a telephone operator before that. "But what I really do is write," she said.

Sometimes, when I got rave comments from an English teacher on an essay, I thought that I might like to become a writer. It seemed as exciting as being an actress—more exciting, really, because it took intellect. ("You put some squiggles on a paper, and miraculously your mind goes out to the minds of thousands of strangers. You'll never even see them, but you've taught them, you've touched them," Maury had said. "The greatest profession in the world," he called it.)

"I've got around fifty pages done," Nicky said now, and I listened, awed. "The book's actually about me, but I call her Blackie, a butch from St. Louis, eighteen years old, travels around the country, trying to make it on her own. I'm naming it 'Walk With the Wind.'" When Blackie is twelve, she wins a national short story contest for Catholic school girls, first prize, and the story, "Big Red," about a
Call of the Wild
kind of dog, is printed in a magazine that goes to all the Catholic schools. The nuns at her school say she'll be the next Graham Greene. But when she's sixteen her mother makes her go to work for the St. Louis telephone company, even though the principal nun pleads with the mother, says she'll get Blackie (Nicole, she's called then) scholarships to college. Nicole's mother is adamant; she went to school only until she was sixteen, and what was good enough for her should be good enough for her daughter. So Blackie begins a life of plugging wires into the phone company's main switchboard. "I'm a homosexual," she tells her mother when she's seventeen, because she's fallen in love with a girl at the phone company. That's when her mother kicks her out, won't even let her take clothes with her, just says, "I don't have a freak for a daughter."

"Did that really happen?" I asked, incredulous that there were mothers who would do that to their children.

Nicky cracked her knuckles, loud, first on her left hand and then on
her right, before she answered, "That's just the way it happened. That was last year. I've been walking with the wind ever since."

"But ... doesn't she yell at you to come home when you phone her?" I remembered my own telephone booth calls to my hysterical mother.

"I only phoned once, when I got fired from the carhop job for stealing 'cause the pay was so lousy and I had no money and no place to go. I said, 'Mom, it's me, it's Nicole. I wanna come home, Mom.' 'I don't know any Nicole,' she says and hangs up. Bitch, huh?" Nicky grinned, but I saw her lower lip quiver.

"Can't I come in for a few minutes?" she asked, clutching my schoolbooks to her chest when I said I really had to get home now.

She was nothing like Jan, and I'd never met anyone who wanted to be a writer before. "You better tuck your shirt in and put on some lipstick," I said, handing her a tube of Red Hot Peppermint that I fished from my purse.

She looked horrified for a flash, but she took the lipstick. "I don't have a mirror," she said. "Tell me if I'm doing it right."

My mother was playing gin rummy in the kitchen with Albert and didn't even notice her. "I got a friend from school," I shouted in my mother's direction, and Nicky and I slipped into my room. "Okay," I heard my mother say. Albert said nothing. I closed the door and pulled from my cache of books a bunch with garish covers that I'd found on the twenty-five-cent paperback rack at the drugstore—
Women's Barracks, Queer Affair, We Walk Alone, Odd Girl Out.
"Take them," I told Nicky. "They're about lesbians, but your story is a zillion times more interesting. I know you'll get it published." My ambition for her was growing like a beanstalk.

My mother did catch a glimpse of her a little while later, as she was leaving, but she didn't seem to notice that Nicky looked like a boy. There'd been no butches in the shtetl, or in the movies she'd seen, or in the shops where she'd worked. "She's so tall for a girl. I never saw such a tall girl" was all my mother said.

Nicky came again on Saturday and then on Sunday, and when the workweek started she came the minute she was free in the late afternoons. Maury told me I needed to fill out college applications and write
my essay on why any college should be happy to get me. I'd already decided to apply to all the good colleges in Los Angeles—UCLA, USC, Pepperdine, Occidental—because I wouldn't be too far from my mother at any of them. Nicky stayed with me in my room as I strained over my work. Sometimes she wrote a bit of "Walk With the Wind" or she read one of my drama books or novels, her big frame stretched out on the floor near me as I sat at my little desk. "Can I read you this?" she'd ask from time to time. I didn't mind the interruptions because usually she read passages I liked too, and I thought her comments were so smart, better than mine. "You're the one who should be applying to colleges," I told her. It was cozy—her company, our shared tastes—and I found myself dreaming a little, about how she'd become a famous writer and I'd become ... I didn't know what yet, something else good.

When she kissed me the first time, there in my room, it was a shy, kid's kiss, with soft, closed lips. "Don't you know how to kiss?" I teased, and I showed her, like an older woman. Somehow, though, the pieces didn't fit; it didn't seem at all ... sexy. Still, I went out to the living room to tell my mother: "Nicole is staying over. She's helping me study for a test."

I turn the lock and put out the light after I hear my mother or Albert close the door to their room and two pairs of shoes drop on the floor. I take off all my clothes and throw them in a pile. I can see Nicky's shadow, her back to me, as she gets out of her shoes, socks, shirt, pants, and nothing more. She climbs into bed before I do, covers herself, and then she reaches out for me. I slip under the blanket and she caresses me everywhere. Id longed for a lover, and now I've got one who is so sweet and bright and ardent. But something crucial is missing. Whatever it is lets my mind keep wandering to other things—the sound of my footsteps on the marble staircase that leads to Maury's office, the dark circles around my mother's eyes. And suddenly I know: It's not Nicky's fault that I'm not stirred deeply. Together we are two left shoes. What I really want is an older woman.
An older woman.
Even the phrase excites me.

Yet I didn't want her to leave. I really liked the way the gay boys on Hollywood Boulevard coupled us—we were Lil-and-Nicky. Sometimes on weekend evenings I'd put on my harlequin capris again and the high
heels that she loved, and we'd strut down the boulevard, her arm a shawl round my shoulders. "It's okay," she assured me the first time. "Everyone thinks I'm a guy." I decided she was probably right, and I relaxed into the masquerading fun of it, the charm of fooling the tourists who thought we were like them. "You make a stunning couple, darlings," Destiny gushed. I liked even more the way she sat with me while I did my schoolwork, and how we talked about her finishing "Walk With the Wind" and selling it for a lot of money. We were discovering books together like
The Prophet
and Edna St. Vincent Millay's
Renascence.
She said the book she loved best was Walter Benton's love poem sequence
This Is My Beloved,
because the beloved's name was Lillian. She recited the Benton poem "Your Eyes" to me again and again in a rich, melodious voice, her intonations subtle and canny.

In about a month the magazine crew had milked all the neighborhoods in L.A., and Nicky's boss told them they were shoving on to San Diego. She ran to my house as soon as she found out. "Tell me to stay." She held my hand, peering into my eyes and pleading, like a Victorian suitor proposing.

"Yes, stay," I said. I'd be lonely again if she left.

I went with her to collect her clothes and money at the hotel where the magazine crew had lived, the Hotel Royal Astor, a building as grimy as the one I'd lived in with Jan. The glass front door had a crack running its length, as though someone had taken a crowbar to it, and the lobby was decorated by a single overstuffed chair that leaked straw guts. I followed Nicky up familiar-looking unlit stairs and down a smelly corridor.

The crew boss had a thin black mustache and a cocky tilt to his chin. He wore red suspenders and his hair was slicked, like a 1930s gangster. Without so much as a glance at Nicky, he kept putting things into a suitcase and muttered that she had fifty dollars coming.

Even from where I stood at the door I could see the deep flush that spread over her face and neck. "But what about all my money on the books?" she cried.

"Yeah, that's fifty dollars," he snapped, still not looking at her, pulling a ledger book out of a big box and throwing it on the unmade bed. "Look, here." He pointed with a blunt finger on the page, and
Nicky leaned down, craning to see. "Right here—hotel rent, food, clothes, spending money." He flipped the pages wildly. She kept shaking her head at the figures. "A doctor in October when you had the flu—look at how much that cost us." He stabbed his finger like a shiv on another page.

"But I've been working since July. I'm the one who sold more than anybody!" Nicky wailed. I stood with my back pressed up against the door, suddenly scared for her.

"Damn it, it's all there!" His voice rose, and he slammed the ledger shut and glared at her. "You made $1,265 since July, and the company spent $1,215 for your upkeep. Can't you read?"

"Hey now, look..." I squeaked and came up behind him.

"Who the shit are you?" He whirled around as though he hadn't seen me before and curled his lip as if regarding a cockroach. My stomach tumbled and I backed to the wall, but he waved me off with a flip of his hand and turned again to Nicky. "We owe you fifty bucks, and that's what I'm giving you," he said now in a tone of sweet reason.

"That's impossible," Nicky moaned.

"Fucking dyke!" The reasonable veneer vanished quickly, and he tossed the ledger on top of the box. "Wadda you gonna do, call the cops?" he drawled.

Nicky looked at the closed ledger. Her mouth worked, but nothing came out.

"Do you want the money or not?" he snarled a few minutes later, locking his suitcase with a key, then sticking the ledger back in the box. "I can't just stand here clapping my jaws with you. Look, you're quitting on us without notice. By rights I don't even have to give you the fifty dollars."

"Carl, don't do this," she begged. "You can't do this!" But he'd already thrown two twenties and a ten on the floor. He put the box under an arm, then grabbed his suitcase and slammed the door behind him.

Wendell says Nicky can crash on his sofa until she gets work. Every morning she stands on the corner of Fountain and Orange Grove avenues, waiting to walk me to school so we'll have a few minutes together. When I get to the corner, I al
ways find her studying the
Help Wanted—Women
section of the
Los Angeles Herald
and circling ads with a green pencil stub—salesgirl, countergirl, file clerk. Now her hair is longer, her shirt tucked in, and she wears my lipstick and eye shadow. "I'll find something today," she says every morning, her energy renewed. But at three o'clock she's waiting for me at Coffee Dan's, lipstick worn off, eye shadow smudged, shoulders drooping. By then she's answered every ad, trekked all over Los Angeles. "They just turn me away without even asking me anything."

One place, a department store, doesn't turn her away immediately. A woman in the office gives her four pages of forms to fill out and a six-page test to take. The woman grades the test while Nicky sits there, then calls her over and says, "You got 100 percent! Goodness, we've never had anyone get 100 percent before!" She tells her to go to another room and wait for the interviewer, who emerges from his office a couple of hours later, takes one look at Nicky, and says, "We don't hire tomgirls here."

When Nicky related that last story to me and Wendell in a booth at Coffee Dan's, he tried to lift the pall by telling us about a new bar in North Hollywood—"mostly lesbians, very chi-chi. Let's go this Friday." He smiled. "It'll be my treat."

"No, I better not," I said. If the bar got raided, my Herculean labors at Hollywood High would have been for nothing.

But Nicky immediately shifted mood, as though the brutal insults she'd survived for the past weeks were dead and buried and she was ready for life again. "Oh, yes! Lil, please," she begged. "We've never been to a bar together. Please, I need some fun now."

The Club Laurel was nothing like the Open Door or the If Club. The neon marquee in front read:

"B
EVERLY
S
HAW,
S
IR
"
S
ONGS
T
AILORED TO
Y
OUR
T
ASTE
A
PPEARING
N
IGHTLY FOR
Y
OUR
L
ISTENING
P
LEASURE

A colored picture in the blue-draped window showed a woman, forty perhaps, perched on a piano bar in a short dark skirt, high-heeled shoes, black bow tie, white tailored jacket. Her long legs were crossed at the knee, her lipsticked mouth was open in song, and she held a microphone in her hand as though she were romancing it. I stared. I hadn't seen anyone so gorgeous since I'd last laid eyes on Irene Sandman. But there was something more: The woman in the picture projected a kind of power—not masculine exactly, but certainly not at all feminine. I'd never seen anything like it before. I was mesmerized.