Naked in the Promised Land (41 page)

***

I moved out of Rae's apartment and away from Curson Avenue into a bachelor apartment near campus. I'd been promoted to teaching associate, and in the summer I would be working for the Upward Bound Project, tutoring underachieving East L.A. high school kids to prepare them for college. I could afford my own place; and if Jerry and I didn't have to go a motel all the time, if I could try to cook dinners for him and we could spend the whole night together and wake up to each other in the morning, couldn't we learn to connect? We wouldn't have such compartmentalized meetings that ended in athletic, predictable sex acts and then good-bye.

My mother was surprisingly calm about my move. "I don't get to see you that much anyway. You're either eating by her or going out with him."

"It's not good for a young girl to live alone," Rae protested when I told her about the apartment.

"Well, maybe I won't be alone for long. Maybe Jerry and I will get married soon."

I spied a smile playing around my aunt's lips, as though she could already see the pram with the infant inside sitting in her living room.

"I know you're all busy with Adonis," Paula said the week I moved into my new apartment, "but you can spare a friend just one Saturday. Remember, I'm the one who found him for you. I want you to come to my little dinner party, just you, my sister who'll be here from Philly, and an old college roommate of mine." But the next morning she called to say that the sister's nine-year-old son had woken up with tonsillitis and a fever of 104 and she'd canceled her trip to California. "Come to dinner anyway. My old roommate is still coming, and honestly, I don't know what I'd do with her alone. She's nice, but her enthusiasms are incredibly exhausting. A confirmed old maid schoolteacher to boot." Paula said it with pointed aversion. "Do a buddy a favor."

Binky was a big woman with the look of a young Gertrude Stein, except that her eyes were a light blue and her auburn hair was tipped with gold and was thick and glossy. "Kennedy hair" was how I came to think of it.
We sat on the folding chairs at the kitchen table while Paula pushed books and papers into a scattered heap that rested where her sister's place setting would have been. Then, as Tsatska nosed her legs, Paula dished up the overcooked spaghetti and the iceberg lettuce she'd pinked with French dressing.

My first impression of Binky was her bluster, but I sensed a bashfulness too. "Superbrain!" she called Paula in a booming voice when Paula remarked that Professor Cohen had told her to send her seminar paper on the Bergsonian concept of time in
Tristram Shandy
to
PMLA.
I watched her while she and Paula talked about old times, and once in a while I caught her glancing at me shyly. I thought her handsome.

"What do you do?" I asked when Paula went to dish out the ice cream she'd bought for dessert.

"I teach at Marshall High. The only public school in the city that's proven integration can work." She took flame instantly with the subject. "I see a hundred and fifty kids every day in my classes—black, white, yellow, brown, red—you name it. And they love each other. No gang fights. No Watts riots. No white flight, thank God." Her broad smile flashed a mouthful of strong, straight Kennedy teeth. "I teach creative writing, and they turn in fabulous stuff. Fabulous! To hell with those people who say that Mexican kids can't write, that Negro kids are lousy students. I see every day how great it can be."

Paula reached over Binky to deposit a dish of watery chocolate ice cream on my plastic placemat and flash me a doleful look that said: "What did I tell you?"

"I teach American lit too, and I don't have to struggle to make them read." Binky was unmindful of her hostess now. She waved her long, slim hands about with unexpected grace as she talked. On the finger where most women her age sported a wedding ring she wore a handsome jade stone set in heavy gold. "They love it because I give them stuff that has something to do with their lives—Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin. To hell with the usual curriculum! We need more voices, different voices, in the classroom. All the teachers could do it if they weren't such lazy sons-of-bitches." Then, as though she were embarrassed that she'd said too much, she looked down at her
hands, now spread quietly before her on the table. "They're my kiddos and I love 'em," she added softly.

I looked at her hands too. I couldn't take my eyes off them. They were truly beautiful hands. "I like those writers also," I murmured. "Do you know Countee Cullen? 'We shall not always plant while others reap The golden increment of bursting fruit."

"Countee Cullen! I love Countee Cullen! 'Not always countenance, abject and mute, That lesser men should hold their brothers cheap.'"

"Ralph Ellison?" I laughed, enchanted.

"Ellison! That man's my God. That man has written one of the most important American novels of the century!"

"Yes, oh, yes," I agreed as silent Paula got up to take the dishes to the sink.

"Can I give you a lift?" Binky asked at the end of the evening when I stood at Paula's door waiting for her to find where she'd placed my purse and sweater.

Later, in Binky's car, we sat in front of my new apartment, both of us speaking lines we knew by heart from Gwendolyn Brooks, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, correcting each other in fevered enthusiasm or reciting in perfect harmony. "I guess I'd better go," I finally said when I saw the illuminated hands of her car clock show 1
A.M.

"This evening has been a gift to me. An absolute gift," Binky said. Her voice was as passionate as when she'd recited the poems we both loved.

"Me too," I said, meaning it. I dared to rest my hand on her arm before I opened the car door. "Hey, come to dinner. Tomorrow. You'll be my first dinner guest in the new apartment."

"Oh, I'd love that!" I felt her fleeting touch on my shoulder as I slipped out of the car.

"Bye." I turned around to wave, and she was watching me, waving back.

We touched no more than we had the night before, that Sunday evening over the tomato omelette I served with a bottle of straw-colored chablis. We talked mostly about the books we loved. She told a funny story
about a disgruntled colleague who had reported her to the principal: "She's neglecting to teach the patriotic classics that have made America the superpower it is," Binky mocked the man's pompous voice. We said very little that was personal. She mentioned only that she lived alone; I never said anything about the women I'd been with or about Jerry either.

But when she was getting ready to leave we stood together on the landing, not speaking, and I heard my heart sounding in my ears, pounding as it hadn't since I first laid eyes on D'Or.
Was it happening all over again?
I had to swallow hard before I could say, "May I call you tomorrow?"

"Please,
please
do," she answered, and we stood there, looking at each other, not saying anything more for a full minute before she lowered her head and walked down the stairs.

I hurried back into the apartment and leaned on the big window, a knee on the low sill, watching by the light of the streetlamp as she got into her car, watching her sit there and not move for a long time, her arms draped around the steering wheel.

I tried to make my mind go blank, but I felt as though I were jumping out of my skin all night long. "Please,
please
do." She'd said the second
please
breathily. I could see her well-shaped lips as she said it,
pleeeze.

B
INKY HAS HER OWN
apartment, but most afternoons she comes directly to my place when she's finished with her day at Marshall High School. I hear her footsteps on the stairs, and my heart begins its delirious gigue. She knocks, and I put down my Benjamin Farjeon notes and my pen and take a deep breath before I fling open the door. We clasp each other and kiss and grasp and gulp and gasp as though we've been tortured by a separation of months.

Most nights, after a short dinner and long hours of love, we fall asleep in each other's arms, and at 6:45
A.M.
we're awakened by a love song on the little clock-radio she has given me that sits on the table beside my bed. Binky pulls away slowly, tiny millimeter by tiny millimeter. "It's as excruciating as chopping off an arm, a leg," we groan to each other every morning about our disjoining.

The bed is bereft of her warm skin and sweet flesh, but I lie there, eyes closed, engrossed by love images from the night before, imagining her beside me still. Then, to my sleepy delight she appears again, as in a dream, smart now in her teacher's uniform—a tailored dress, high-heeled shoes, seamed nylons, her gold-tipped Kennedy hair neatly coifed. In her hands she's holding two steaming cups of coffee. She sits on the edge of the bed while we sip and intertwine fingers and fill ourselves with last looks to carry us through the long day. Always, before she leaves, the radio disc jockey announces: "Comin' up—my favorite start-the-mornin'-right song,"and the singer croons, "Sunny, yesterday my life was filled with rain. Sunny, you smiled at me and really eased the pain." I set my coffee cup on the floor and nestle my head in Binky's lap. The song is about
Binky, who most certainly, as the words say, is my sunshine, my rock, my sweet, complete desire. She tells me I'm all those things for her too. "I can't remember living before I met you," she says.

She leaves for the day, and I take my place at my desk, where I concoct with renewed vigor one sentence after another about Farjeon's stylistic shifts. I'm determined to finish this academic exercise quickly so that I can go on to more gratifying work.

I had only the vaguest idea of what such work might be, but Binky was at the center of that too. She asked me to spend the day at her school, "to see what I do that the UCLA English and Education profs turn their academic noses up at." I was awed by what she did, how the students loved her, trusted her. "My little United Nations," she called them. Four kids from her first-period American literature class—one Negro, one Oriental, one Mexican, one Jew—showed up in her room during morning break, lunch break, afternoon break.

"We're just hanging out," one of them said with a shrug when I asked, amused, if they had another class with her that day.

"We just like to shoot the bull with Miss B.," another confessed. They looked at her—all of them—as though they were in love. They sat on the desks or on the floor near her, munched sandwiches or apples, and she gave them her attention, her little bit of free time, her wisdom. The "bull" was mostly literary because she'd made books come alive for them, opened a universe of ideas, told them to ponder what other teachers told them to take for granted, and they caught fire with what they learned from her. Long before Ivy League scholars thought of it, she taught them to question the canon that was sacrosanct in all American schools. "How come everyone has to read
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin,
but you don't get to read
Black Boy
unless you're in Miss B.'s class?" Arthay asked. "Wright can write circles around Franklin," Ian said. "The Japanese and Chinese have been in America for more than a hundred years. How come nobody tells us about Oriental writers?" Lloyd asked. "How come there's no Mexican writers like James Baldwin?" Rafael wanted to know.

And I caught fire too with those novel ideas. "They're right," I said
over the pizza Binky and I shared in Westwood Village. "In eight years of university courses, I've read just about nothing but white men, as though they're the only ones who ever said anything important about the human experience."

"I'd give anything to find good Oriental writers and Mexican writers and let them speak for themselves in my American lit classes," Binky said.

"Wouldn't that be a wonderful idea for a book? It could be poems and stories by writers of all colors." No book like that existed, but why shouldn't it? "Binky, why couldn't we do it—together? Just as soon as I finish my dissertation?"

"God!" she shouted. The pizza-dough thrower behind the counter shifted his eyes to us and missed his catch. "Let's do it," she cried.

"By all means, I have absolute confidence," Professor Booth told me in the fall of 1966 when I asked if he thought I was far enough along on my dissertation to begin my job search. "Absolute confidence," he repeated, smiling his cordial Pickwickian smile. He ruffled through a little stack on his desk and pulled out several fliers to hand me: job announcements, I saw with a tremulous glance, for the 1967–68 academic year. "I'll pass on to you whatever else comes up that's suitable," he said helpfully, holding his office door open with a slight bow as I left. Would somebody actually give me a job as a college professor?

I stood outside his door and perused the announcements. There were four—Wilberforce College, Michigan State University, a small, regional campus of Purdue, and Fresno State College. I'd have to go to Xenia, Ohio, or East Lansing, Michigan, or Westville, Indiana, or some godforsaken town in the San Joaquin Valley of California if I wanted to be a professor. My cheeks burned as if they had been slapped. A Ph.D. would open great things to me, Maury had promised. Had I walked through a forest only to pick up a crooked stick? I'd have to live alone in some far-flung alien place where there was a college that would hire me. How could I leave Binky when I'd just found her, and my mother and Rae?

Paula was the last person I wanted to see at that moment, but she spotted me near Professor Booth's door and dogged me down the stairs
of Rolfe Hall. "So, is Booth recommending you for the Berkeley job? There's one at Columbia too. Dr. Nix is recommending Ron Hommes for both," she said with a smirk.

"Ron's dissertation is on Henry James, so the position must be for someone in American lit." I stopped to drink water at the hall fountain; I took slow sips, straightened up, bent down for more sips, but she wasn't going to leave. "I do Victorian lit," I mumbled to the faucet. Her snicker made me enormously despondent.

"You know Lois Damer? She's Nix's student too." Paula trailed me from the building, hopping around a crunch of students to keep up with me. "Her dissertation's on Edith Wharton. You know the job he's recommending her for?" she asked with a meaningful sniff. "Long Beach State." Finally she left to go off to the stacks, to labor the rest of the day and far into the night on her George Eliot dissertation.