Naked in the Promised Land (29 page)

"But what about me?" Nicky cried.

"What about you? I'd still see you. We'd still be like we are now. This is just..."

She flung open the door with such force that it banged against the wall and books tumbled from a shelf. She stormed out. I didn't see her again for seventeen years.

Mark called while I could still hear Nicky's heavy steps thundering down the walk, while I was still wrestling with the impulse to chase after her and say I was sorry. I sat on the plastic-covered orange chair in the living room while I talked to him, and I could see my mother at the kitchen table, picking up the gin rummy cards Albert had dealt. My
hand that held the phone was shaking. "I guess it's over between me and Nicky," I told Mark. "I said the nuttiest thing, and it really upset her." I whispered so my mother and Albert wouldn't hear.

"What?" Mark sounded concerned.

"I don't know why I said it," I laughed self-consciously. "I told her you and I are getting married."

There was a long pause at the other end of the wire. Then Mark said, "Let's."

I'd led him there, but why? How could I marry a man? Except for Maury Colwell, my experiences with men had been grievous. I'd call Mark back. I grabbed at the phone. I'd never even felt close to one of them; they were as alien to me as apes. Suddenly I couldn't remember his number. I'd tell him that the comedy routine we just did was as funny as George Burns and Gracie Allen. We'd both laugh.

No. Why should I? Marrying him would solve lots of problems, and it wouldn't be at all the way it had been with other men. First of all, we were both gay; it would be a front marriage, plain and simple. And second, Mark had none of the bad features of other men. And he had all the good ones: He knew things that were a mystery to me; he knew how to maneuver in the world. In fact, his good points were so numerous that I wondered what I had to offer a man like that. Maybe he thought that as a child psychologist he needed a wife so that people would think he was heterosexual. Okay with me! I could help him just as he was helping me with my mother and aunt. And he'd said he thought that passion and domesticity don't go together. That must mean he didn't want to live with a man again, so we could be companions forever.

"He proposed!" I sprang in the air as though catapulted from a sling, as though joy had made me wild. "He proposed!" I cried again, unsure myself whether the joy was contrived for my mother's sake or real.

Albert and my mother jumped up from the kitchen table and came running, both of them. "You'll move away?" My mother paled. "Lilly, no! When? You're so young."

"
Mazel tov,
" Albert shouted, forgetting forever the time he called
me a tramp and we grappled with each other. He extended a hand of forgiveness and congratulations to his daughter who was going to marry a doctor.

Three days later I left the house in the morning as though I were going to school and waited for Mark to pick me up on the corner. "We'll go to Tijuana. They don't have age restrictions there." He'd planned it out very practically. "In L.A. your mother would have to come with us or we couldn't get a license."

"What a lark," I thought as we drove out of L.A., and my heart sang. But my mood turned as heavy and gray as the lowering sky before long. What was I doing? As we zoomed past oil rigs near Long Beach, I realized it was already too late to stop.

It was Rae I called afterward, collect, from a Texaco station near the San Diego border while the attendant pumped gas into Mark's car. Rain hit the glass phone booth in great slashing splotches, and I shivered in the damp wind and the dark. "I just married the doctor," I told Rae, weeping real tears into the phone, wiping my nose furtively on the sleeve of my jacket. "Call my mother and tell her."

"
A dank Gott,
" Rae cried, "the best thing! Now finally you'll have a good home."

We drove through the rain looking for the El Cortez Hotel, and Mark said softly, contemplatively now, as though he'd been thinking about it for a long time, "Ours is the kind of relationship where we reach out to each other with one hand and to other people with the other."

I nodded. "
Il va sans dire,
" I answered, showing off a phrase he'd taught me. He turned to me and we grinned in complicity.

"They've got a good restaurant downstairs at the El Cortez," Mark said.

I'd learn how to drive and he'd get me a car, he told me over the oysters. "From my house it's an easy jaunt to USC or UCLA." In a few months, when I graduated from high school, we'd go to Mexico together for the summer. He'd show me Mazatlán and Guadalajara and Acapulco. His supervisor at the hospital had told him about a summer
lectureship he might apply for, in psychology, at the University of Mexico. Would I like to live in Mexico City for six weeks?

"Should I get a room with twin beds?" Mark asked after dinner.

"Nope. I promise not to bite in the middle of the night ... or give you any fright," I said solemnly, and we giggled like teenagers because I'd had two margaritas and Mark had had three, and we'd finished a whole bottle of Chianti with dinner. Now I felt buoyant again. I couldn't even remember what had upset me so much when I called Rae. We sipped Kahlua over ice for a nightcap; then I waited in the lobby while he arranged for the room, and we followed the red-suited bellhop to the elevator, holding each other about the waist.

I stripped to my panties and bra and slipped between cold sheets. Mark switched off the bed lamp before he undressed. A beam of light from the corridor shone under the door, and I watched his white shorts moving about in the semidarkness as he folded his jacket, tie, shirt, and then his pants over the arms of a chair, then placed his shoes and socks beside it. I couldn't stop the shivers, and a swarm of nameless emotions buzzed in me. He climbed into bed, still wearing his shorts.

"Goodnight, Lil." He turned toward me, and I felt his lips soft on my cheek; I kissed him back the same way. Now my nervousness dissolved. I was safe with my dear, dear friend. I'd been almost certain I would be.

We both lay on our backs. When our fingers touched by chance, we clasped hands and lay with them lightly intertwined. "You're very dear to me, Lil. I want to take such good care of you," Mark crooned in the darkness, and my breath caught. No man had ever taken care of me. I couldn't even imagine what that meant. "You'll be as safe with me, my dear one, as in your mother's arms," he said, and I drifted off into sweet sleep.

I awoke to light and a whiff of cinnamony Mexican hot chocolate. Mark was dressed. He'd gone down and brought back a large pot and two mugs from the restaurant, and we lounged together luxuriously, sipping the still-steaming brew. I pulled the blanket up to my chin for warmth,
and he kicked off his shoes and sprawled on top of the covers, reaching over from time to time to refill our empty cups from the big silver pot he'd placed on the nightstand. How pleasant this all was. He told me about his travels in Mexico, about the weirdly shaped giant rock formations off the coast of Mazatlán. "We'll see them this summer. You get the best view from O'Brien's. Fabulous!" Later he got up and stood at the window, looking to see if it was still raining. I watched the back of his head. I loved the way his curly hair came to a
V
in the little hollow at his neck, making him look so vulnerable, like a kid almost. I was jolted: I did love this man I'd just married.

"I think it's going to clear," he said hopefully.

In the hotel room I'd felt snug and at ease, but once in the car, heading north in another driving rain, I was beset with anxieties again. I imagined my mother weeping like an abandoned child. I was gripped by images of doom—my mother withering away, paralyzed by a stroke, choking and blue-faced with apoplexy, because I'd deserted her, left her alone with Albert in that sham of a marriage I'd tricked her into. I said nothing to Mark. How could he understand?

Off the L.A. coast, Mark headed east on Sunset Boulevard. On Highland Avenue a fire engine shrieked and gained on us, its red ogre eyes whirling. Mark pulled over, and the fire engine turned in front of us, toward Fountain, on the way to some terrible disaster. What if it were my mother? I saw our bungalow in flames, Mommy inside, trapped.

"I've got to make a phone call," I begged Mark when we were at Sunset and Vermont. I couldn't tell him to turn around and drive back to the Fountain Avenue Court Bungalows. He'd think I was crazy. "Can you stop at the next gas station? Please?"

"We'll be home in just fifteen minutes," he said reasonably. "Don't you want to wait?"

"Please, please." My voice cracked with urgency, and he looked at me, puzzled, but he pulled into the first gas station with a telephone sign. I couldn't help it. I couldn't wait another minute.

"When am I going to see you?" my mother cried. "Lilly, why did
you run away? Are you going to have a baby?" It was half horror and half hope that I heard in her voice.

The Jewish wedding was Rae's idea. She'd planned for years how it had to be when I got married. "You're all we have left in the world. No more family but you," she said to persuade me to let her stage a wedding when I called her the next day from my new home.

"Sure," I answered magnanimously. Actually, I was feeling quite a bit like a success by now. Against all odds, I'd given her the fabled Jewish prince. I'd really done it! And my mother was happy, too. We lived only a few miles away, and I promised to bring my husband to the Fountain Avenue Court Bungalows for Friday dinners. She was ecstatic about the prospect. She'd be making Sabbath dinners for her married daughter and her handsome son-in-law who was a doctor. It was almost as good as if I'd become a movie star.

"Is it okay?" I asked Mark anxiously later. "The wedding? The dinners?"

"Why not? We're partners in crime," he said and laughed.

He was joking of course, but it hit me like a lash: I'm cheating them. The whole point had been to get them to believe this was a real marriage, and it wasn't. I made no answer to his quip; instead I busied myself hanging my clothes on the side of the bedroom closet he'd cleared for me. But the sting of it—
crime
—wouldn't let go of me.

But maybe it wasn't cheating. Mark and I did love each other—not the way my mother and aunt thought, but still it was love. In a way it was even the kind of love Rae had always said she wanted for me: someone who would take care of me. Wasn't that exactly what Mark had said he'd do—take good care of me? They'd even used the same words, though I wasn't really sure what either of them meant. I still hoped to go to college to become someone who could take care of herself. But what was important now, it seemed to me, was that Mark's intentions truly were what my aunt had hoped. So we weren't really cheating after all. I took comfort in the logic. "Done!" I emerged from the closet and went to sit at Mark's side, content again with the wisdom of my marriage.

***

Mark invited to the wedding an older couple he'd never mentioned before, Gilbert Pollack, a bony, stooped dentist he knew from the hospital, and his wife, Vera, a plump, matronly lady who fawned over Mark, straightening his tuxedo jacket, adjusting his curls around his white yarmulke, as though he were her kid. They were the ones who said they'd take him out for a drink while my mother fussed with my veil in the dressing room of the Litvisheh Verein Hall. "He's so nervous, like a boy. Look, his face is as white as his yarmulke." Vera's laugh was high and tinkly. "We'll get him out of your hair and bring him back in plenty of time to walk down the aisle." I glanced at my husband. He really did look scared. We smiled wistfully and waved fingers at each other as his friends led him off.

While Rae tacked up a dart that had unraveled at the waist of my white dress, my mother brought me a 7-Up so I wouldn't get thirsty while I was under the
chupa,
the marriage canopy. Albert came in with his solitaire deck, which he kept in the jacket pocket of his stiff new suit, and he told me I looked very nice and that my mother was so proud of me. I got up and kissed his cheek and said I was happy he had come to my wedding. Then he sat at a dressing table, where he played a couple of games away from the crowd, and out he went again. I could hear a din of voices, mostly Yiddish, coming from the hall. A song began in a screeching voice that wavered up and down, and then a few steadier voices joined in and a smattering of palms beat time on the tables. "
Shpilt oyf a chasene tantz, Greyt un das chupa kledyl,
" they sang in Yiddish—"Play the wedding dance, Prepare the wedding dress, Toward him you'll go like a princess when he returns from battlefields and oceans." I could see how proud Rae was that her friends and neighbors were singing a bridal song for me. She virtually strutted on her short legs, in her long shiny dress, and I wanted to cry because I'd made her so happy. My mother, her eyes bright, sat close to me and along with the singing voices that came from the hall she sang-talked, the way she had when I was a child.

After a while the singing stopped, and I could hear only the drone of chatter. It was almost six o'clock, when the wedding was supposed to begin. But Mark wasn't back yet. My mother left me and went to peer out the darkening window.

As the room grew dimmer with the setting sun, my aunt's face changed. Her mouth became tight. She looked at her watch every few seconds and then got up and stood at the dressing room door, where she could see who was and who wasn't in the hall. Mr. Bergman came in, his daughter and granddaughter behind him. He snapped on a light, and I heard the concerned
buzz-buzz
of his whispers to Rae and hers back to him.

"Congratulations," said Diane, the granddaughter who was about my age, but she looked at me as though we'd just learned I had terminal brain cancer.

"Thanks," I answered in a too-loud voice.

At six-thirty the rabbi came to ask my aunt when he could begin.

My mother moaned.

"
Vus fur a finsterer nacht,
what kind of dark night is this?" my aunt said, groaning.

Did Gilbert have an accident? Maybe Mark was in the hospital. "Stop it!" I yelled at my mother and aunt. "They're just caught in the traffic. What are you carrying on about?" Had he changed his mind? Maybe he'd taken one look at the funny wedding guests, in their ill-fitting fancy clothes and terrible accents, and decided he wasn't going to get mixed up in such a family.