Naked in the Promised Land (47 page)

"Think of all the years we wasted when we were both on campus and didn't know each other," Phyllis said when she walked me to the car
at the end of another evening spent devising strategies. Everything was quiet in the warm spring night except for the sounds of crickets in the grass and frogs in the ditch and the banging of my heart.

I had to prevent myself from putting my arms around her as I had in my dream. I told her about Binky instead. "I don't go to L.A. every weekend just because I miss bagels in Fresno," I began.

"Well, I guessed," she said, "years ago, when I saw you two together. I came here with someone too. She left a couple of years ago to get a doctorate at the University of Arizona."

"Then she'll be back in another year or two?"

"It's never the same river twice," Phyllis said.

Marshall High School also wasn't what it had been to Binky five years earlier, when I'd watched her share her literary passions with a rainbow of adoring kids. "No more United Nations," she sighed to me over the phone one evening. "This kid called me a
white honky bitch
today," she cried another evening.

"Oh, Binky, oh God, I'm sorry." I knew how the words must have hurt her. "I wish I could be home to take you in my arms."

"Well, you're not," she snapped. "You're two hundred miles away."

And you've still never said anything about the baby, though it's been two years since you asked for time to think about it,
I wanted to snap back. (But that was unfair, I knew. I couldn't have a baby right now anyway.) "Love, the semester is almost over. Let's have a wonderful summer together," I said instead. "We'll go somewhere romantic ... the most romantic place we can think of." We had to learn how to be together again, how to touch again. We occupied the same house every weekend and slept in the same bed, but we were exhausted from our separate weeks and preoccupied with tensions we didn't share. "I love you," I cried now over the phone.

I think it was in Montego Bay that I really understood how you always take yourself with you, no matter where you go. If it's not working for two people at home, it won't work while they're sipping piña colada on a sandy beach. We'd already left Kingston because it was too hot. Or too noisy. Or too crowded. Because we weren't having a good time.
Now we drove the length of Jamaica in a rented car, squabbling absurdly all the way about whether the window should be down or the air conditioner should be on, whether to have our big meal at lunch or at dinner, whether to spend four days at Montego Bay or a week. When we fought, there in Jamaica where we'd come to learn how to be in love again, I felt defeated. Even Fresno would be better than this, I thought, remembering Phyllis's kitchen where you could look out the window and see Arabians grazing in high grass.

It was night when we arrived at Montego Bay, and the blue-black sky I saw from our balcony looked as though someone had taken an ice pick to the heavens and pricked out thousands of tiny silver holes. I could hear the soft lapping of the warm waters, and I could hear Binky unpacking in our room, hanging things up, opening and closing drawers. An aroma of gardenias wafted up from some secret bush below. Finally Binky came to stand beside me on the balcony and look up at the stars. I moved to put my arm around her and she let me, though there was nothing yielding in her posture. "That was a long drive," she said after a minute. "Guess I'll turn in."

"Okay." I dropped my arm.
Let her turn in. Twelve days in Jamaica, and we'd never once made love.
I stood on the balcony, enveloped in humid air that was as sensual as touch. Between the brief lulls in the lapping of the water, I could hear somebody on a far beach playing a drum, an insistent calypso beat. Then in the darkness tears rolled down my cheeks, down my chin.
You want too much out of life,
I chastised myself.
You want more than anyone can get—work of consequence, a home, a baby, a lover. You haven't changed a bit from your seven-year-old self—the spring of '48, the train to Los Angeles, a suitcase bulging with gigantic wants.
Now I pressed against the moon-cooled railing, leaned as far over as I could to glimpse the source of the heady gardenia smell, wished like a moonstruck adolescent for a lover to be standing there with me. Maybe so much wanting was wrong, but I couldn't stop no matter how I tried.

We left Montego Bay after four days. Perhaps things would be better in Ocho Rios. But the drive seemed interminable, and we had almost nothing to say to each other. Better than fighting, I thought glumly. From the road right outside the town, Binky spotted a small, nondescript hotel and pulled into its empty parking lot. "I'm too tired to look further," she said, overruling my perfunctory protest.
It doesn't really matter,
I thought.
A romantic hotel would be a mockery anyway.

The room was as dismal and anonymous as if it had been a Motel 6. I hung my clothes on the wire hangers, wondering if it were possible to change our airline tickets for an earlier return. When the phone rang, I thought it must be a wrong number.

"Well, eureka!" It was Phyllis's voice, as if my thinking of her on the way to Montego Bay had conjured her up.
Like Rae and my mother in Wheeler Hall.
"How did you know we were here?" I cried as I shot a guilty glance at Binky.

"They don't have that many hotels in Jamaica." She sounded girlish, breathless. "I was ready to phone them all. Terrier persistence. I get it from Muffy."

Binky was staring. What was she thinking of this strange call?

"Hey, I'm calling on official business," Phyllis laughed. "From the vice president's office. Are you sitting down?" She paused only for a second. "Your dean resigned today."

"Jim Light?" Why did I need to know that in the middle of Jamaica?

"Yep. He's been offered a provost position in New York. And ... the vice president told me to find you." She paused, and I struggled to make sense of what she was saying. "To find you and ask if you'd accept the position of acting dean of the School of Humanities for next year."

"What happened?" Binky saw the panic on my face. "What's wrong?"

"Can I have a day to think about it?" I managed to say into the receiver. But as soon as I said it I knew there was nothing to think about. There was no way I could turn down the offer. There had never been a woman academic dean at the college.

"Oh, we also found out today that our name change was approved. We're now California State University, Fresno. You'll be a
university
dean. Oh, and I've been checking your mail like you asked me to. Harper and Row sent the galleys for
From the Barrio.
They look great!"

"You just have to be important, don't you?" Binky said when I told her about the deanship. "Do what you want. It wouldn't make any difference what I said anyway." She pulled her bathing suit from the drawer she'd placed it in minutes before. "I'm going to the beach," she said over her shoulder.

We should part. Now,
I thought, as we bumped through dense clouds back to California. But we'd loved each other, hadn't we? Binky was leaning her head against the window of the plane with her eyes closed, an expression of infinite sadness on her mouth. I stared now at the face I'd found so handsome—the strong nose, the fine cheekbones. I felt sadness too, for her, for us ... for those times when she said she couldn't remember living before she met me, the way I'd grab her in my arms at the door when she came home from school, how excited and hopeful we were when we got the contract for our book
...

Twice a month the nine academic deans sat around a long table in a formal chamber and discussed administrative matters with the vice president for Academic Affairs and the assistant vice president, Phyllis. The vice president's secretary sat at his side and kept her head bent over the steno pad on which she took lightning shorthand. The deans were almost all cut from the same pattern, with dark suits and somber ties, bald or balding heads, and a bearing that announced
I'm engaged in serious business here.

"How are you supposed to
look
if you're a woman and thirty-two years old and have just been made a dean?" I asked Phyllis lightly, though the question really troubled me. It seemed important not to call attention even before I opened my mouth to how different I was from almost everyone else in the room. There were no models of women deans for me to emulate, no real-life images to show me how to make sure the appearance of the messenger wouldn't distract from the message. Where could I look?

Only to the movies of my childhood. How would Joan Crawford or Barbara Stanwyck be dressed to play a lady executive? Severe suit, button-down shirt, no-frills hairdo. That would be my costume. The visual effect I strove for wasn't mannish exactly, but neither was it womanly, since
woman dean
was an oxymoron in 1972.

But no costume could blind the other deans to the fact that a woman had been placed in their midst. They were always gentlemanly, but every time I spoke they seemed to flinch, as though from a tiny electric shock. "If there were just one other woman dean," I complained to Phyllis.

Yet my work as head of the School of Humanities came easily to me. I knew what needed to be done and I liked doing it. I'd heal old wounds and create trust between the departments and the dean's office. I'd be the faculty's advocate to the administration. If my style in dean's meetings was neuter-gendered, the style I strove for when acting for the school was decidedly female, maternal, a bit of a tiger mother. I'll never know if my school finally got long-delayed promotions and badly needed positions because of my approach or because the times had changed and the school's radical stance no longer seemed threatening to a punitive administrative hierarchy; but I know the faculty was happier than they'd been in a long time.

Binky drops me off at the L.A. airport on Monday mornings instead of Tuesday and picks me up on Friday evenings because, as an administrator, I have to be on campus five days a week. "Dottie said that not even for a million bucks would she fight the madhouse traffic at the L.A. airport to pick someone up," Binky says, laughing, one Friday as we sit in a jam of cars and honking horns on the Santa Monica Freeway. "She tells all her friends to take a taxi."

"What are you saying?" I ask Binky.

"Nothing." She laughs again. "You're not just a friend, are you?"

But I feel more and more like a stranger in the Laurel Canyon house that's mine now only on weekends, and not even then really. I wander through the rooms, getting acquainted all over again with the space. When I wake up in the middle of the night and head for the bathroom, I bump my nose on a wall because I've gone in the direction of my bathroom in Fresno. Nothing is familiar here anymore. Every Friday night I find towers of new books piled atop the old ones on the little coffee table and scattered in a great heap on the narrow shelf above the bed and stacked on the floor beside the toilet—Introduction
to Zen Buddhism; Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind; Tibetan Buddhism.
Once in a while I pick one up, peruse a few pages, try in vain to
track, then shut it again. The words are so far from the world that interests me right now.

"Sometimes people grow in different directions," Binky tells me after one of our petty squabbles.

I didn't realize until I was awaiting the president's decision how much I wanted the permanent deanship. The Dean Selection Committee had read through hundreds of applications and chosen five finalists. "You're our top choice," a committee member told me off the record. If I could become a dean at thirty-two, couldn't I become a college president at forty? How many women college presidents were there in the world? I'd grab the golden apple, I decided, not just for myself—for other women too. I'd be the model for them that I'd craved for myself. In Fresno that week I could think of nothing else.

That weekend it rained in Los Angeles, and I spent most of it sitting in the Topsy room, gazing out at the sheets of rain that knocked blossoms off the citrus trees and seemed strong enough to pierce the cheap wood and thin asphalt roof of the garden cottage. It looked frail and neglected now.

On the last evening, Binky came to sit beside me in the dim light of the Topsy room. We'd hardly spoken all weekend, but now we held each other. "What are we going to do about us?" she said in a little voice.

"We're in a mess," I said, and we both smiled sadly.
I should let her get on with her own life, I should get on with mine.

"You know I want you to be happy," Binky said now. "I want you to have a baby if that's what it takes." The rain pelted the roof of our house, then lightning cracked. "I love you," she said above the angry rumble of thunder that followed.

Sitting in the airport, waiting for my Monday morning plane, I felt like an ant on those 33
¹
/
₃
records Eddy used to speed up to 45. How would I ever be able to think my way clear? I made plans all over again as the little prop plane bumped through the clouds. If I didn't get the dean-ship, it would be a sign that I'd been headed in the wrong direction. Fine. I'd quit, and Binky and I would live together and I'd write and
have the baby. But even as I told myself how it would be, I couldn't believe it would happen. She'd said she'd be an aunt to my baby. I couldn't imagine her being what Rae had been to me. I knew that wasn't the kind of aunt she meant.

And ... Phyllis. I'd miss her. A ripple of old sadness and loss stirred in me. Rae walking down the steps of Fanny's porch, into Mr. Bergman's waiting car. A rip in my heart.

Later that day the vice president showed up in my office and sat across from me in a swivel chair, smiling kindly. I sensed what he was going to tell me. President Baxter had decided, the vice president said, that considering the difficult history of the school, he needed to appoint an older person as dean. He'd chosen a man from a Texas university who'd been in administration for twenty years.

Only for an instant did I feel that the golden apple had been torn from my hand.
I'll definitely quit and go back to Los Angeles,
I thought, relieved now that the path I would take was clearly marked. The minute the vice president left my office, I'd call Binky at Marshall High. "I'm coming home," I'd say when she got on the phone.