Naked in the Promised Land (48 page)

"But now the good news," the vice president went on. "First of all, Dr. Baxter has approved an early promotion for you to full professor as thanks for the fine work you did as acting dean. And secondly"—he grinned—"I'd like to offer you the assistant academic vice president slot. You'd be in charge of innovative programs and the Experimental College and anything else that seems useful and interesting to you."

"But ... Phyllis?"

"Oh, she'll stay on, of course. I'll have two assistant vice presidents."

What odd fate was it that yanked me back each time I started wriggling free from where I thought I didn't want to be? And now here was a new pulley. If I were the director of the Experimental College, I'd be able to bring courses into the curriculum that would be inconceivable at most universities, and as a full professor I'd have nothing to lose. A new area of study was just emerging out of an infant gay rights movement. I'd be in the best position in the country to help make gay culture and identity—what had been despised by so many and so central in my own
life—a part of academic discourse. The Ivy Leagues, Berkeley, UCLA—it would be decades before they could do it, but as director of the Experimental College, I could bring gay studies classes to California State University, Fresno.

I dreaded calling Binky. I postponed it until I returned home to my apartment after dinner with Phyllis at the ranch. Would she hang up on me?

"Good for you. Congratulations," she said when I told her the news. She didn't sound upset or angry in the least. "There's a Buddhist monastery at Mount Shasta I want to visit," she said without a pause. "Do you think you'd like to come with me for a couple of weeks this summer?"

T
O ME IT WAS LIKE
visiting a distant culture to see the orange-robed monks and hear their chanting, which went on for hours. Interesting; but if I couldn't find in myself what Charlotte Brontë called an "organ of veneration" that would let me practice the religion of my mother and aunt and their slaughtered family, there was certainly nothing in the droned mantras I couldn't understand that had the power to draw me in. Binky, though, was ecstatic—about the Mount Shasta monastery, about Buddhism, about the changes she felt inside herself. She'd found a new passion. "The wise man thinks, 'Here is suffering. Here is the cause of suffering. Here is the path that leads to the cessation of suffering.'" She quoted the monks with the same conviction my ancestors must have had when they quoted the tablets. For the weeks that remained of the summer, we drove north through the cool, wet green of Oregon and Washington and into Victoria, and as she talked on and on I thought about what I might do as assistant vice president for Academic Affairs in charge of Innovative Instruction. Sometimes I thought about how Binky and I were at an impasse, how there was nowhere for us to go together, that I couldn't blame her for her new passion. And sometimes I thought about Phyllis's hands on Zahita, the Arabian she liked best to ride, or the way her hands looked as they played Mozart's D Minor Concerto.

When I returned to campus that fall, the vice president was gone. The rumor was, he'd had battles with the president over tenure issues, so
when he was offered a job as chancellor at the Denver campus of the University of Colorado, he took it. The president replaced him with a business professor who'd been about to retire, a garrulous Polonius who wore bright white shoes in all seasons and didn't have a clue about how to be a vice president except to do the president's bidding. It was pretty clear that he'd never be my mentor, as I'd hoped his predecessor might, but he was affable enough, even though he didn't seem to know that the Experimental College existed. This left me free to be as experimental as I wished: to organize cluster courses in new areas, such as conflict resolution, courses that ignored discipline boundaries—and courses in my major interest, gay studies.

I went down the short list of gay and lesbian professors I knew, but though the Stonewall riots had occurred four years earlier in New York, word of them hadn't yet reached Fresno. "Would you consider teaching a gay studies course in the Experimental College?" I asked. "I wouldn't even know where to begin to look for material," one said. "What does 'gay' have to do with 'studies'?" said another. "Are you kidding?" a third said.

"Please don't use that word on campus," one woman hissed into the receiver before she hung up on me.

"Why can't you do it?" Phyllis asked when I complained over lunch in the cafeteria, my voice barely above a whisper when I used the
G
word.

I looked at her, this orderly, quietly dignified little woman. "Everyone knows what good friends we are," I laughed. "If I come out, they'll suspect you too. Doesn't that bother you?"

"No," she said flatly.

"Well..." I was about to say
I wouldn't even know where to begin to look for material,
yet that wasn't true. I knew how to do research. What was there to stop me from learning how to teach gay studies?

Nicky called again that fall. She'd tracked me down in the assistant vice president's office, but I didn't even jump up to close the door this time, not even when she said, "I've been in jail, Lil." I listened to her boy's voice telling me the latest chapter in the bad novel that was her life.
"The house got raided"—she laughed—"and we all got busted. I got carted off in a paddy wagon together with the hookers. It was no big deal. Really. Except for the lousy jail food and the lumpy pads you had to sleep on. The guys who owned the house sprung us loose after a few days. Now they want to set up in the Tenderloin and keep me as the manager. What do you think?"

Why was she calling me again? "I already told you what I think. That you're not what you believe you are. That you have to stop." But what did I know about her now, really? Red ogre eyes whirled in my head. She wasn't still the eighteen-year-old with puppy feet whom I'd taught how to kiss, who liked to read
This Is My Beloved
because the beloved's name was Lillian. But if she was calling, it must be because she wanted me to tell her something. "Nicky, you have to stop," I repeated.

"To do what?" She laughed again, though I sensed she was really listening.

"Nicky, you wouldn't be talking to me right now if what you've been into weren't wearing thin. Isn't that right? Let me help you get into college. You can do a lot with a diploma." The Maury solution again. But it was all I knew ... and why shouldn't it work for her as it had for me?

"I'm up shit creek, Lil. We used to be in the same boat," she laughed.

"Well, I found the oars. Let me paddle you out too." The red ogre eyes whirled again, but I clicked them off. How else could she escape from her ongoing melodrama?

In November the Fresno fog settles in for a long gray sleep, and the whole San Joaquin Valley seems somnolent and still. For days sometimes you can't even see the stoplights in town until you're almost on top of them. Most evenings after work I drove at a crawl to Phyllis's ranch, and then at nine or nine-thirty back to my apartment in town. But one night after we'd said good-bye, I opened her front door and saw that the porch light had its own little envelope of haze around it, illuminating nothing. I couldn't even make out the three steps that led from the porch to the paved walkway.

"How can you drive through that?" Phyllis said over my shoulder.
The heavy white blanket of the fog was palpable even at the door. How would I avoid the ditch bank that bordered the ranch? "Look, this place has four bedrooms," Phyllis said. "Stay."

I came back to the bright light of the living room, chilled from my thirty seconds in the cold. "I've got an apple liqueur, Calvados," she said, and went to get it.

Our fingers touched when I reached for the snifter. We looked at each other, saying nothing, though my mind was gyrating like a flywheel.
If I do this, what will happen to Binky? If I do this, nothing will be the same again.
Then the whirl stopped, and I put the snifter down on the coffee table, deliberately, carefully. I drew her into my arms.

"Ohhh," we breathed together, as if we'd found some vital thing we'd mislaid years before.

And that night—as Radclyffe Hall wrote—we were not divided.

"What do you eat for breakfast?" Phyllis asked the first morning as I drifted into wakefulness and worry, and then delight. How lovely, how giving, she'd been.

She was dressed in her ranch uniform, blue jeans and the blue sweatshirt that picked up the blue of her eyes, and she'd already been out to feed the horses. She sat on my side of the bed and placed her fingers on my bare shoulder. "What do you eat for breakfast?" she asked again.

I rose to my knees and pulled the blue sweatshirt over her head. "No breakfast this morning," I said.

On Friday evenings Phyllis drives me to the airport, parks the car as far as possible from the high aluminum lamp posts, and we hold each other for a few frantic minutes before I must break loose and run to catch the small plane that will take me to Los Angeles and Binky, who is waiting at the other end. There Binky and I hug, and I marvel that Phyllis doesn't show on my face. Should I say it? But we've been together for seven years. How can I find the words to tell her?

On Monday mornings Phyllis is waiting again, to drive me to my office, to drive me later to the ranch, to have dinner and breakfast with me, to make love with me. How can I leave her on Friday afternoon? I'm a juggler with a clown's
mask, and soon the balls will come banging down on my head. I'm Lilly on the run, age eight, bounding from Mommy to My Rae to Mommy to My Rae.

One Monday in February, all the flights to Fresno were canceled. "Pea soup fog," the clerk at the United Airlines desk said brightly. "Fresno's been shut down since Saturday. I don't think we'll be landing anything there today."

"Oh, no, I've got important meetings today," I wailed.

"Well, I can get you on the nine forty-five to Merced," the clerk offered. "That'll get you closer." But Merced was an hour away from Fresno, and if the fog was that bad, I probably couldn't get a taxi to take me in.

Phyllis had just gotten to her office when I called, and when the plane landed in Merced, she was waiting at the gate. How many times already had I seen that neat form and silver hair waiting for me at an airport gate or looking after me as I was leaving? I drew her into my arms now, and we gripped each other as though I'd just returned from Mesopotamia.

Twenty miles out of Merced patches of blue were breaking through the gray sky, and a silvery perimeter peeped around a great cumulous cloud.
I shouldn't have bothered her to make this long drive,
I thought, embarrassed now.
The L.A. plane will probably land in Fresno before we get there.
"I'm gonna make you an offer you can't refuse," Phyllis broke the quiet to say. "I've been thinking about it for a long while, and on this morning's drive, though I couldn't see the road clearly, I saw everything I'm about to say like I was peering through crystal." She recited the lines as though she'd been rehearsing them all the way to Merced. I watched the firm grip of her hands on the wheel and braced myself. It would be an ultimatum. How would I answer it?

"I've heard you talk for almost three years about how you want a baby and how you're worried that if you keep putting it off it'll be too late." She slowed the car, looked at me squarely, reached for my hand before she looked back at the road. "I'm proposing. I know I'll make a good other mother. Live with me and have the baby and we'll raise it together."

I gasped as though I'd been socked in the diaphragm.

By the time we reached the campus, the sky was a clear and cloudless blue such as I'd seen in Fresno only on days in late spring.

I open my purse and there's a small packet of seeds inside, though I don't remember buying them. The picture on the envelope shows graceful sheaves of some sort of grain. I'm a city girl who can't tell one grain from another, but the sheaves look golden. Lovely. So desirable. More precious by far than golden apples. "We must get the seeds in the ground immediately," I rush to tell Binky.

She's reading a big book, and I strain to see the title.
The Influence of Zen on American Literature,
I make out the words on the cover. Or does it say
Zen and the Art of Archery?
Or
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance?
No matter. I can barely see the top of Binky's head, which now she raises so that her eyes are visible. "Go plant them," she says sweetly, and waves her hand toward the back of the house, toward the bare little square of land in front of the empty Writing Cottage. "There's
plenty
of room to plant
whatever
you want there." She gestures expansively with both hands. Then the hands disappear and she lowers her eyes and then her head again, and I can see nothing but
The Upanishads.
Binky has vanished.

"But who'll help me harvest?" I shout toward the book.

"They're oat sheaves," Phyllis whispers in the wind.

I wanted to say it at the L.A. airport, but the words wouldn't come. Nor would they come on the way to Dottie's house for dinner, where I pushed the food around on my plate and pretended to listen to Betty's funny Hollywood stories and felt my cheeks stiffen from the phony little smile I kept plastered on my face. As Binky slept, I stared into the dark for a hundred lonely years and then watched the gray light slowly fill our bedroom. I could see her long, graceful hands, thrown over her head now, palms up, in peaceful surrender to sleep. She stirred; I crept noiselessly from the bed, like a thief. I'd take a shower first.

Binky was still in bed when I returned, her face to the wall now. I'd already gotten my clothes on. Though she didn't move and her breath was regular, I knew she wasn't sleeping.

"Binky," I bent to whisper, and she turned over and stared at me. "We have to talk."

She sat up quickly. "Don't tell me. They've made you president! Right?" She laughed without mirth.

"I'm having an affair with Phyllis Irwin."