Naked in the Promised Land (30 page)

Mark returned about six forty-five, his eyes unfocused, his mouth slack. Gilbert's arm was around his waist, keeping him upright, and Vera's hand was at his shoulder, steering him through the dressing room door. I wanted to hide my husband, spirit him off, so my mother and Rae wouldn't see him this way.

"
Oy,
God in heaven," my mother shrieked and grasped the windowsill.

"Coffee," Gilbert mouthed to me. He and Vera maneuvered Mark to a chair and helped him sag onto it.

My aunt shoved Gilbert and Vera aside and pounced on Mark. "What's going on?" the foghorn blared. "How you can disappear like that, with the rabbi waiting, and Lilly, your wife?"

"Rae, stop it, please," I implored, trying to pull her away. She stood
planted, breathing hard, glaring at him, but said nothing more. I rushed to get coffee from the big samovar in the hall. "Leave him alone!" I shouted over my shoulder.

I galloped back with the steaming black brew, ignoring the curious eyes of the wedding guests, and I placed it to Mark's lips. "It's okay, just drink, drink," I encouraged him.

"Red-dy," Mark slurred now. "I'm in fine father ... feather. Look!" and he rose to his feet, shrugging off Vera's steadying hand. He swayed toward me, arm extended. " 's get married," he said.

"
Oy, Gott!
" my mother shrieked again.

"What kind of lousy friends are you to go get him drunk!" my aunt hollered in Vera's face. "Skunks!"

"Stop!" I shouted at my aunt. "It's okay now. We're starting." There was nothing for it but to go ahead. I turned to Mark, keeping my voice steady: "Can you walk?" I took his arm with a steely hand, ready to hold him up if necessary.

"Yep." His mouth pursed in concentration and he put a foot forward.

"He had a lot, but he didn't seem drunk until he stood up," Gilbert lamented to the air.

I was supposed to walk to the canopy holding Mr. Bergman's arm, and Mark was supposed to be standing there to greet me. But I couldn't be concerned with such formalities now. I guided my husband down the aisle. We passed Denny first, in his powder-blue tuxedo and pink ruffled shirt. He blinked with astonishment. As Mark and I stumbled in tandem I caught quick glimpses of other faces. They mirrored Denny's. Nobody could mistake Mark for sober.

When the sour-faced rabbi saw us coming, he jumped to his feet and took his place under the blue and white velvet canopy. Would we make it there? Without Mark's falling down? The walk seemed interminable. The rabbi waited, his expression blank, for us to halt in front of him. Finally he uttered the few words that would make us man and wife under the law of ancient Israel. That done, he placed the wrapped glass near Mark's shoe and told him he must smash it. Mark lifted his foot gingerly and crunched. Then he screwed up his face and bawled like a baby.

"
Mazel tov!
" the guests shouted dutifully, as though nothing at all unusual had happened, and there was a patter of applause.

O
UR LIFE TOGETHER
is a dream and a nightmare.

Mark takes me to San Francisco, a long weekend—to
Aïda
at the opera, to
Anastasia
at the Curran Theater, to the Top of the Mark and the penthouse restaurant at the top of the Sir Francis Drake. In between he expounds—on Maria Callas, Ingmar Bergman, Rosa Parks, the 1957 Civil Rights Act. He's eloquent, ardent, and I eat it all up, along with the caviar on toast points, the tournedos, the crème brulée. We visit all the gay places, Gordon's, the Paper Doll, the Black Cat. "That cute one with the curly blond hair, over at the bar, he's cruising you," I say to Mark. "There's a Barbara Stanwyck look-alike in the booth behind you, and she's sizing you up," he leans across the table to whisper. He smiles at the cute blond; I turn around and, with my eyes, flirt in the direction of Barbara Stanwyck. But Mark and I go back to our hotel together, slightly tipsy and very contented, holding each other around the waist.

When we're home, Mark sometimes cooks for us—bouillabaisse, quiche lorraine, osso bucco—succulent dishes I'd never even heard of before; and I'm his awed little sous-chef, chopping, dicing, cracking eggs. Often we go out, to the Ginza where I learn to eat with chopsticks, to La Chic Parisienne where he orders for both of us because only he can read the menu. We have cocktails and wines and liqueurs, and by the time we get home it's ten o'clock or eleven. That's when I begin my homework—Latin, trig, physics, advanced comp. I get four or five hours' sleep most nights, and, though I know they're lying on their pillows in a corner of the kitchen, sometimes I see Genghis and Khan slinking around the living room as I sit on the white leather couch and study. Sleep deprivation
makes me hallucinate, but I don't care because we had a marvelous evening.

When I take the SAT, early on a Saturday morning after four hours of sleep, I see Genghis and Khan parading up and down the aisles of the auditorium, and I put my pencil down to watch them. "Time!" the monitor calls, and I'm horrified.

One Saturday we went back to the Sea Lion. We giggled all the way home about an officious waiter with a red toupee who began every sentence, "Well, my dear sir and madam," and we stumbled through the front door together, still silly, leaning against each other for strength. Then Mark stood upright and looked at me seriously. "Oh, my dear Lil," he said. "I'm so happy you're here," and we held each other tightly.

"I love you," I told him.

"I know you do," Mark said, still holding me, and then after what seemed to be a long time, "but only like your brother, I guess."

I never had a brother. I wouldn't know what it felt like. "No," I answered slowly, my hand on his cheek now. "Like you're really my husband." That night we made love.

I'm not at all frightened or repelled as I always thought I would be with a man, nor is it as it was with Jan, nor as I'd lived it so intensely in my imagination with Beverly Shaw. No volcanoes erupt. I feel no overwhelming lust in him or for him, but I love to hold him afterward, and I love the smell of his men's cologne and his shampoo and the feel of his strong back under my hands and his tight, muscled buttocks. When I'm sitting up late with my homework and he's gone to bed, I'm tantalized by the urge to wrap around him so that we are like two spoons, or to curl my fingers in the lush black hairs of his chest. I never loved a man before, and it feels bizarre. But how could I not love Mark? Mornings when I wake up before he does I study his face—his long, thick lashes, the strong cleft in his chin, the delicate pink of his lips. I touch his cheek, gently, so he won't awaken. I love his face.
This is the face I adore,
I tell myself.

But Mark drinks. He can drink and drink and still be fine, just as in the days before the wedding. Then he has the one sip that makes too many, and in a fingersnap "fine" slips into dead drunk. Nowadays he's not as careful as he used to be to stop short of that one sip.

If we're in a restaurant, I sometimes have to wrestle him before I can grab
the car key from his tight fist and sit on it or drop it down my blouse; but I don't know how to drive. "Please call a cab!" I beg the waiter by mouthed words and urgent looks, please help me lead my husband out and settle him into the waiting taxi. If the waiter takes his arm, he'll pretend for a few minutes to be less drunk than he is and make himself stay on his feet. I can't handle his dead weight by myself. I hate the wobbly-legged, slack-jawed creature that's taken over Mark.

If that one sip too many comes when we're at home, it's worse. From the cupboard Mark grabs each and every wineglass, martini glass, whiskey sour glass—every vessel that will break—and he hurls them one by one against the kitchen wall, possessed, sobbing as though his heart has shattered into shards along with the crystal.

"Stop!" I cry the first time. I try to restrain his pitching hand, and he pulls back and slugs me in the eye by accident. I'm too baffled and scared to try again. When the glass smashing starts, I skitter to the bathroom and lock the door; I sit on the edge of the bathtub, rocking myself, until it's done. Who is this stranger going crazy outside the door? Then when the noise stops, I dart out and slip soundlessly into bed, but I can't close my eyes. I stare into the darkness, apprehensive. When I feel his side of the mattress sagging, I turn to the wall.

In the morning the other Mark is back. He sweeps all the bits of crystal into a dustpan and deposits them in the kitchen garbage pail. "Guess I really acted out last night. Sorry," he says, sheepish, after a while.

"Mark, what happened? Tell me why,"I implore.

Instead of answering, he drives to Beverly Hills to buy more glasses from which we'll have our wine and cocktails until the next time he has one sip too many and snaps again.

What's the cause of the terrible anguish that pours out with such violence when he's drunk? He will not tell me.

"I don't understand," I said wearily one morning as he swept up shards after another Saturday explosion. Still Mark said nothing.

But later, when I sat with
The Aeneid
on my lap, straining to concentrate on my translation of Dido's speech, Mark slouched in the white leather armchair across from me and said, as though continuing a dialogue, "Did I ever tell you when I found out I was adopted? I was eighteen—the day I was leaving for the navy—and that bitch who called
herself my mother all my life says to me, 'I have to tell you that you weren't born into this family.' Just like that!" He grabbed a Kent out of the pack on the coffee table, struck a match, inhaled with fury. "Just before I have to go off to fight a war. Can you imagine that?"

"Oh, Mark," I cried, forcing aside the anger I'd felt all day. I closed Virgil, went to perch on the arm of his chair, to kiss the top of his head and nuzzle him to my chest. He sat, still weighted with outrage. "Do you know anything about your real parents?" I asked, feeling the pain with him now as vividly as if his adoptive mother's betrayal had happened that morning.

"Only that my mother was a Jew, a whore," he said, his mouth working as it had the night before when the cocktail shaker hit the wall.

I was accepted only at UCLA, with a small scholarship, just enough to pay for books and the $108 tuition. Nothing would be left over, not even for lunches on campus. I was disappointed but not worried yet, because Maury Colwell had told me that Hollywood High would probably give me a good alma mater scholarship since I'd been a public speaking star for two years. June 14, 1958—I sat in white cap and gown, nervous but hopeful, under the hot sun at the Hollywood Bowl, where the school held its graduation ceremony: Before we filed up to the stage to get our diplomas, the vice principal called out the names of one scholarship recipient after another, more than a dozen of them, and each one leapt up to energetic applause as he announced through the microphone what they'd done for the school. Their accomplishments boomed out to the audience of five or six hundred and echoed on the thousands of vacant seats beyond. My name was not called.

"You're married already. Why do you want to go to college?" Miss Brooks, my advanced composition teacher, had said when I'd told her weeks before that I'd been admitted to UCLA. Was she serious? I could see no trace of teasing on her thin lips.

Angry tears had stung my eyes, as though she'd accused me of wrongdoing. "What does my being married have to do with whether I go to college?" I'd managed to say. Early in the semester she'd given me an A+ on my essay on
Jude the Obscure;
she said it wasn't a grade she gave
lightly, that I ought to be an English major in college. But probably, when it had been time to decide who'd get the alma mater scholarships, all the teachers thought what Miss Brooks said: I was a married woman now, and married women had no reason to go to college.

It's okay,
I told myself there at the Hollywood Bowl. I'd be a UCLA student in the fall anyway. Though I couldn't bear to ask Mark for spending money, I wouldn't have to worry about room and board at least, and I could get a part-time job. It would be fine.

We left for Mexico the next week, after we took Genghis and Khan to the Pollacks and most of my clothes and Mark's books and records and some miscellaneous boxes to my old room at the Fountain Avenue Court Bungalows. ("So far away! She's never been so far away!" my mother cried to Mark.)

"Why can't we just leave everything here?" I'd asked him the night before, puzzled when he began wrapping crystal brandy snifters in old newspapers and said we had to store whatever we weren't taking to Mexico.

"It's silly to pay rent while we're gone," he said. "We'll find a new place when we get back."

"But ... don't you own this house?" As I pulled glasses from the shelf along with him, I searched my mind, confused now, trying to remember why I'd thought the house belonged to him.

"No, of course not. I've been renting."

"Well ... but the furniture..."

"The place came furnished," he said a little impatiently, as though I'd missed the obvious.