Naked in the Promised Land (37 page)

I've been too hard on her,
I thought, shamed now by my ongoing pettiness.
If I can't be sympathetic to her problems, who in the whole world can?

I bounded up the three flights feeling just a bit foolish. I was carrying a teddy bear to a thirty-five-year-old woman. Yet, why shouldn't we do such things for each other? What did years matter between lovers? Lovers could do anything—they could take away the hurts of childhood.
Here you are, little girl,
I'd whisper as I gave her the present.

She did say "You remembered!" when she opened the pink box, and
then she put the gift down and hugged me. But I'd seen something fleeting in her eyes when she'd pushed the tissue paper aside and glimpsed the fur. What?

"Well," I laughed. "Do you really like it?"

"Yes," she exclaimed, then her lips pursed analytically. "I love it, because it came from you ... but ... it's not exactly ... Do you really want me to say it?" Her voice was little-girl high.

"Yes. What?" She paused for a long time, as though considering whether to come out with it. "What?" I asked, impatient now.

"It's not ... Oh," she squeaked, "it's not like the one I wanted when I was a kid. The one I always wanted was a little panda bear—they're black and white, just like the one in the Union Square window. They're small and you can cuddle them," she said wistfully.

I tore the brown thing from her arms. "Forget it!" What would I do with the absurd object? "It was dumb of me," I snarled. I hid my childish grief in anger; then the anger became more real than grief, and my fingers itched to pull the bear's head off, to rip the phony fur to pieces. I hated it!

"No, no. I love this bear. Really," D'Or cried.

And I hated that grating little-girl voice! She tried to retrieve the stuffed animal from my arms, and I wrested it back from her. "I don't want you to have it now," I yelled, pushing open the side window that overlooked the alley. I hated her too. "You've reduced us both to infants!" I pushed at her grasping hands, hugged the ridiculous thing to my chest, then flung it out the window with all the force my arm could muster. It rebounded against the neighboring building, then somersaulted silently.

"No!" she screamed, as though it were a person. We both peered down in horror. By the light of a window on the first floor we could see it, splayed on the ground in a puddle of water, a dead child, a pathetic, broken thing.

"Why did you do that?" D'Or cried.

I slept on the bare dining room floor that night, my black coat my blanket. The next morning I left earlier than usual to catch my cable car and the three buses to the Berkeley campus.

***

But we didn't always fight. San Francisco was gloriously warm and sunny the summer after my junior year. I stayed on at the President Follies, but since I wasn't in school, from Monday through Friday I was free until the evening. Our favorite thing was to go to Tiburon and sit in some isolated spot near the water, gazing at the blue bay, chatting and dreaming about how someday we'd travel and see the Bay of Naples and the Bay of Rio, and all the other magnificent bays in the world, how we'd write books together and support ourselves as authors. We loved to drink mai tais at Tiburon Tommy's that summer and wander around the green hills of Marin, our hands linked until someone approached. We'd jump apart, and when they passed we'd laugh and link hands again. At those times we were in love once more. I'd forget about our fights and how often after a rage I'd feel sickened, contrite, trapped; how I'd look down to the alley from the side window to see on the ground, not the brown bear, but a dead D'Or or a dead Lillian; how often I'd be sure that our life together would end in homicide or suicide.

Our knockdown drag-out fight came near the end of the fall semester. "I read this really fascinating article in the
Examiner
today," D'Or said as I was getting ready for bed after the Saturday midnight show at the President. "Are you too tired to listen? It's pretty long."

"Yeah, I'm exhausted." But I could tell she really wanted to share it with me.

"That's okay. I'll just summarize. Listen to this: Dr. Steven Donnelly, a Cornell professor, studied a hundred women who were employed as exotic dancers—like you. He looked at their families, economic background, everything." She was excited, as though she'd finally discovered the key to a giant puzzle.

"Um-hmm." I flopped onto the unmade bed.

"Can you guess the primary thing they had in common?" D'Or asked, a ninth-grade teacher administering a quiz.

"Not a clue." I felt my stomach tighten. I had so little in common with the girls with whom I worked. I liked them because they worked hard for their bit of money, and they were always sweet to me, even though we didn't say much to one another because my "nose was always
in a book," as Celestial Celeste had remarked the other day. But I was as different from them as a raven from a salmon.

"The Cornell professor found that all the women in his study came from the lower socioeconomic classes and were rejected by their fathers," D'Or enunciated, standing over my prone body. "
Every
one of them had those things in common," she squealed.

I sat up in bed, yanking the covers tight around me. "Look, I'm working at the President, not because I was rejected by my fucking father, but because somebody's got to pay the rent and buy the fucking food around here." I felt my face contort. How ugly I felt, how ugly she made me feel. "And as long as I'm going to school, there's no other job I can get that will let me do that and have time left for study," I yelled.

D'Or still hovered above me. "The point is," she said in the cool voice of a detached observer, "you wouldn't have been able to conceive of such employment if you'd had a normal relationship with a father and if—"

"What the shit does that mean?" She was telling me I was a victim. I'd struggled so hard not to be that, to exercise control over my life. I bounded out of bed, grabbed her shoulders, shook her. "Did you have a normal relationship with your father? You're crippled, damn you!" I raged into her face. "At least I function in the world. I may be a bastard and low class, but who's supporting the Daughter Goldenrod, you bitch? Who?"

"I'm just explaining why you're so willing to take your clothes off in front of strange men." She shrugged me off with maddening calm. "There's never anything wrong with the truth, Lillian."

"You go to hell with your truth!" I leapt at her again, claws extended, ready to throttle. She dodged and I tripped, and my head met the wall with a dull thud. "Go to hell," I muttered, ashamed, disgusted, wrapping my arms around myself like a straitjacket. She would drive me to distraction, to deadly violence. I went to stare out the window.
I will either jump or push her,
I thought again.
What a blessing it would be, what a satisfaction!
The splayed brown bear was still down there. I could see it, nothing but a desiccated heap of rag after all these months. If I didn't get out soon, that would be one of us.

***

But then, before long, I'd watch how a beam of sun played with her hair as she sat at the red table. Or I'd think about the way her black leather jacket had flapped in the wind at her father's funeral. Or some poem or piece of prose would move me to tears, and she'd let me read it to her. "Yes! I love that, yes!" she'd cry. Her gray eyes were beautiful to me again, and I'd forget, for a while, how she made me feel ugly and common, how she made me feel like committing mayhem.

That's the way three years passed on Washington Street.

In the late winter Mara Karrara came to the President Follies. I'd never heard of her, but people who knew about burlesque knew her name. Mr. Chelton rented two huge searchlights to stand in front of the theater and send great beams to the sky that were visible for miles around. For the first time since I'd been at the President, the theater was packed for almost every show. Bathsheba, who'd watched the first crowd come in, reported, "Everybody dressed up fancy today, no guys carrying newspapers for their laps."

"The Queen of South American Burlesque" was Mara Karrara's tag. She was a honey blond, with gleaming honey tones to her skin and a bearing that was regal despite her petite stature and voluptuous, pear-shaped breasts. Mara was a real dancer, with all the balletic skill and class that D'Or had once pretended I could put into my poor little numbers. Her costumes were extraordinary too—huge headdresses of exotic green and gold feathers, jeweled lamé capes, extravagant gowns of heavy satin. Toward the end of her act, when she had already rid herself of cape and gown and headdress and shaken out her honeyed tresses, she paused before the audience in only her golden skin and the patch of pink G-string; then she reached into a gigantic basket of colorful wax fruits on stage-left. Out came a live green snake, long and fat and penile, with which she danced an intricately choreographed ballet of love. Word got around that Chelton was paying her two thousand dollars a week and that she'd earned her entire salary on the first weekend.

"You know what she does when she gets out on that runway?" Satana sneered. "She takes a picture. That's how come they like her so much."

I knew what
take a picture
was supposed to mean, but I'd never seen it: The stripper pushes her G-string aside, pulls her labia open, and exposes her clitoris to the audience. "My boyfriend saw the show and he told me," Satana insisted when I said, "Why would someone with such a great act do that?" I'd watched Mara from the wings whenever I could—she really was an artist—though of course I couldn't see the end of the runway from the wings. But I decided the
take a picture
story was born out of jealousy, because Satana had also whined the night before, "What's so great about that Mara Karrara for her to get two thousand bucks a week and us to get peanuts?"

"You are very nice," Mara said when I nervously complimented her on her act. "Very nice." Her deep-red lips smiled vivaciously, and she molded her hands to suggest breasts and waist and hips. Our eyes connected, then she winked a long wink. She traveled with a man—"my manager," she called him when I dared to ask if Sergio, a stomachy gentleman with thinning gray hair who looked like an insurance salesman, was her husband. "He make my costume, teach me the dances, everything," she said, straightening with competent fingers a twisted shoulder strap on my new red gown, then patting my bare shoulder.

"That Mara Karrara gets two thousand a week, can you imagine?" I exclaimed to D'Or. I just wanted to hear myself say Mara's name out loud. Her bright smile kept playing itself over in my head. I kept feeling her long fingers as they smoothed my gown strap.

"I've never heard of a woman making that much money." D'Or's eyes grew wide at the munificent sum. "Does she really have anything you don't have?"

"Nah." I laughed. "Only that she's beautiful, she knows how to dance, she has incredible costumes, a fantastic act, a manager who knows what he's doing."

"Couldn't her manager train you?" D'Or asked.

"Why would he do that?" I shrugged.

But why not? I hadn't thought about it before. Maybe he would take me on. If I was going to be a stripper, even for a little while more, why shouldn't I try to be a star? What couldn't D'Or and I do with that kind of money? "Hmm, maybe it couldn't hurt to try," I said.

We became almost giddy about the scheme. With Mara and Sergio, I'd get into big-time burlesque, travel the fancy circuit—Las Vegas, Rio, Paris, places like that. I'd spend a year or two at it, earn a real nest egg for us. I wasn't even twenty-two. I had plenty of time to go to graduate school.

"You'd be able to afford Harvard or Yale," D'Or said, serious now. "I'd move east with you if you wanted an Ivy League," she promised.

The more I thought about the idea, the better it seemed. I sat in my Milton seminar the next day, figuring out the details as a student droned his paper on "Eve's Impaired Judgment." If I earned a lot of money now, I wouldn't have to work in graduate school, and maybe if I felt less pressure, D'Or and I wouldn't have so many fights. I did love her. Whenever I'd been certain that it was over, that we were finished, I'd see a gesture of her hand, an angle of her head, or she'd say something like "Oh, Creature, what would I do without you?" and I'd feel the love well up all over again. I couldn't leave her, but neither could I go to graduate school and keep living with her and fighting with her and working as much as I had been.

"Okay," I told D'Or that evening, "here's the plan. You go ask them. You'll say you're my manager. Go ahead and tell them I'm a college student and that I can join them in June, when I've finished school." What if I did it for just one year? Say I made only half of what Mara got—I'd come out with around fifty thousand dollars. It would see us through graduate school and years after if we were even a little careful.

Sergio watched my act from the wings after D'Or talked to him. I sensed how his serious eyes were trained on me, following me, like someone evaluating a business proposition, but when I glanced back and saw him in the shadows he had a tiny smile. The next morning, before I left for school, he called D'Or to say that both he and Mara would like it if I joined them. They'd be in Toledo, Ohio, in June, and I could meet them there.

That evening Mara invited me into her dressing room, and I watched her in the mirror as she placed the huge feathered cap on her head. I'd travel with them, she said. Sergio would make costumes for
me, she would teach me dances like hers, we would have a very wonderful time. We smiled at each other in the mirror. "Very wonderful," she repeated. Then she turned to hug me, her green and gold feathers brushing against my cheek, and she hurried out to take her place in the wings before her music started up.

Now, when I was drifting off to sleep at night, I saw Mara's golden skin; I saw it in my dreams too, and when I awoke in the morning. I was discomfited by my fantasies, and suddenly I was badly confused. Was I going with them to make money for graduate school and for D'Or and me or was it because of Mara? My head rested on a pillow only millimeters from D'Or's. What kept my perfidious thoughts from slithering out of my skull into hers? I wondered guiltily.