Naked in the Promised Land (34 page)

My dorm room was on the ground floor, with a screenless window that overlooked an alley. During the school week, D'Or would scratch at the glass at about ten o'clock in the evening. I'd drop my book and pen and slide the window open so she could climb into the room and hurl herself wordlessly into my arms. Moments later, never loosening our barnacle grip on each other, we'd collapse onto the bed and unglue only long enough for me to pull at her clothes, to fling them on the floor.

In the morning I'd leave her in bed—though to separate from her, even briefly, felt as painful as pulling off a limb—and I'd go to my classes, galloping always so that I wouldn't be late; I'd waited until the last possible minute to go. When the sound of voices stopped in the dorm, by midmorning usually, she'd leave too and go to the hospital and sit with her father.

To explain my absences on Saturdays and Sundays, I told her that I was a bathing suit model. She didn't ask for details.

Then her father was put on a respirator in Cedars of Lebanon's intensive care unit. "The doctor thinks it won't be more than a few weeks," D'Or sighed, sagging onto my bed, a delicate, sweet wraith. I sank down beside her, kissed her, nestled her head on my breast, held her.

We both jumped when the phone rang. "It could be for me," D'Or cried as I reached for it.

"I need to speak to Shirley Ann Goldstein." It was a woman with a New York accent.

"I think you have the wrong number," I said, ready to hang up.

"Is it for me?" D'Or grabbed the black receiver from my hand. "When?" she shrieked. Her face crumpled like a little girl's before she sank again onto my bed, and I took her back into my arms.

To be near her I went to the funeral, a Jewish funeral at Mount Sinai Memorial Park. She didn't introduce me to her weeping, red-nosed mother or any of the other black-clad, prosperous-looking mourners. In the cold marble chapel I lost myself in the crowd, but I never stopped watching her. She sat in the front row, hemmed in between her stiff, stern-faced brother and another man. The rabbi talked about Isaac Goldstein—a good Jew, a generous contributor to the Etz Jacob Synagogue, the founder of the Goldenrod dress shops of Beverly Hills, Brentwood, and Palm Springs. D'Or kept her head down, and her shoulders shook. Then we all filed out into the April winds and made our way up a little grassy hill, her mother and brother and the other relatives, then the friends and business acquaintances. But D'Or walked alone, trailing behind them all, and I trailed behind her. She wore black pants, her black turtleneck sweater, a black leather jacket that flapped noisily in the wind. How utterly alone she looked. I loved her more tenderly than ever, and I stood as close to her as I dared while we watched Mr. Goldstein being lowered into the ground.

For weeks D'Or lives hidden in my dorm room and I sneak enough food in for us both. When I'm in class or the library, I can't stop worrying about her. Her plaintive voice sounds in my ears over my professors' lectures. Her pale, satiny
skin slides incessantly between my eyes and the pages I read. It's nothing short of a miracle that I manage to end the spring semester clutching three A's and two B's.

"Compulsive disorder." D'Or used the words for the first time the day we were supposed to meet for lunch at Colby's Diner and she didn't show up. I almost missed my afternoon Experimental Psych final, because I waited for more than an hour and then ran to the dorm to look for her.

"I can't help it." She shrugged casually, but I saw torment in her face.

"What happens?" I asked, my fear mixing with determination.
She's like my mother used to be! But this time I won't fail.

"I count things—books, pencils, shoes..." In halting sentences she told me the extent of it. She kept things—like newspapers and magazines. She couldn't throw them away until she'd read every word. And she had to scrub her hands often, very often. And she had a horrible fear of losing things, couldn't leave a place without searching thoroughly to make sure she'd left nothing behind.

I will love her enough to cure her! She will love me enough to be cured,
I thought.

"Come back with me to San Francisco," D'Or whispered that evening when I held her on my bed. "I kept my apartment there."

"Your job too?" I murmured, my lips on her curls. If leaving her for a few hours felt like severing a limb, how could I part with her forever?

"My father ... used to send me..." When she pronounced
father
I could feel her thin shoulders shudder in a noiseless sob. "...a hundred and fifty dollars a month."

A hundred and fifty dollars a month. Couldn't I earn that much in San Francisco while I went to college, to Berkeley?

"Mark and I are going to live in San Francisco," I told my mother and Rae. "He's getting a good job there in a few months, at a big hospital. I'll stay with a friend of his until he can join me." I ended the tale with a tone of finality. What could they say anyway? I was nineteen and a married woman.

"Come back to live on Fountain Avenue," my mother pleaded. "You got some college already. You'll get a good job."

"What kind of husband ... a no-good
schicker,
a drunk, who leaves you alone," said Rae. "A thunder should strike him. A fire should burn him!"

In the living room of D'Or's apartment on Washington Street in San Francisco were innumerable brown paper sacks, bulging from the sides but folded over neatly at the top and lined up precisely against the walls. The bed was there too. In the dining room was a plastic-topped red table with two chairs and a refrigerator. The kitchen was empty except for an ancient and long-unused gas stove and balls of dust that had gathered in the corners. D'Or asked me not to go into the two bedrooms, though much later I peeked. They had nothing in them but more brown sacks lining the walls and yellowed newspapers stacked in high piles.

But the apartment was filled with the wonderful music she played on her phonograph—
Der Rosenkavalier, The Magic Flute, La Bohème, Tristan und Isolde.
From the dining room window you could see the gleaming white city and the Bay Bridge and an expanse of water that changed with the hours from battleship gray to sapphire. All summer long the front rooms were flooded with sunshine. In this magical place, with a beautiful woman who needed me and belonged to me, how could I not be flooded with hope?

She let me see her writing that first night as we sat together on the dining room floor. The first story she showed me was about a fey young girl with an arcane smile who disguises herself as a boy in red velvet knickers and a golden cap and runs around London in the 1890s with Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley. D'Or's prose was rich, dark, delicately jeweled, filigreed in twisting images. I read on and on, enchanted.
Brilliant,
I thought with a shiver,
This wonderful woman is absolutely brilliant.
When I finished, I placed the neatly typed pages in a little pile on the floor, marveling still, impatient to begin the next story. "No!" D'Or cried, snatching the desecrated pages up from the scuffed hardwood, clutching them to her breast.

"Oh, God, sorry!" I uttered, chagrined at my gross indelicacy. I
made sure to keep the pages of the second story on my lap. That one was about a sadistic mother who joins forces with her cold, ambitious son to torment the daughter of the family, a girl who is sensitive, delicate, imaginative, and is failed even by the father she loves who is always away on business. The mother and brother were caricatures of cruelty and the plot was thin, but in this story too there was such craft and polish in her style. "Let me read more," I begged.

"That's all I've written. Writing requires a certain frame of mind I seldom have the luxury to enjoy. Can't you see why from 'The Mother'?" she cried, grabbing me by the shoulders, peering into my eyes as though she had to be certain I understood and believed her. "Can you imagine a sensitive child who is always the scapegoat, living with people who care about nothing but making money and Golden-rod?" Her lovely lips sneered at the corporate name, and I nodded in sympathy.

"There's such a resonance between us," D'Or murmured one mellow morning of that first week, after we'd made love on the dining room floor. We could hear the cable cars clanging down the hill every few minutes. "Don't you feel it?"

"Yes, oh yes," I murmured. "It's so ... ineffable ... so rarefied."

"That's it!" she laughed, delighted, I knew, that her words were now in my mouth.

With her father's death, she got no more money from her family. How would we eat and pay the rent—seventy-five dollars a month? What kind of job could I get? I spent the second week in San Francisco walking into one North Beach nightclub after another, asking for the manager, saying I'd had experience in L.A.—as a waitress, hat check girl, cigarette girl. Would they call the places I said I'd worked and ask for a reference?

D'Or's lips curled as though she'd swallowed something foul when I told her that the owner of Big Al's Hotsy Totsy Club said he'd hire me as a waitress but only if I would also be the Bubble Bath Girl. "It's so tawdry!" She shuddered.

"I guess we could both get little jobs," I offered reluctantly, remembering the $1.25 an hour I'd earned at the library. "What have you worked at before?" I asked.

She batted her big, light eyes for an uncomfortable minute. "I've worked at election polling places," she said finally. "You know," she added when I looked blank, "checking to see that people are registered, and then giving them a ballot." But there wouldn't be another election for more than a year, I calculated. "My father was sending me money for a long time," she sniffed, and her eyes welled up.

Of course she can't hold down a regular job with her compulsive disorder. I have to take care of her. I want to!
"D'Or, if I took the job at the Hotsy Totsy Club it would just be a source of income," I argued. "There's no sexual component in that kind of thing." We agreed, finally, that I'd work there only until school started in September. We'd save up a nest egg.

"But ... you won't make it blatantly vulgar, will you?" she said at the Buena Vista over Irish whiskeys that we'd paid for with the last twenty-dollar bill I'd earned at Andy's. "It needs to be aesthetically pleasing," she lectured me. "Try for delicacy ... and grace." Her enthusiasm for the project waxed. "You can do it with balletic insinuations, with refinement."

"Yes," I said, nodding to everything she said. "Yes, I will."

"Be subtle," she said, "be classy!"

On the walls of Big Al's Hotsy Totsy Club were murals—Prohibition gangsters holding machine guns with one hand and blond molls in minks with the other and, in the background, Keystone Kops with googly eyes and giant phallic batons. The gangsters all had the face of the nightclub's owner—Big Al, as we waitresses were supposed to call him. We dressed in knee-length jazz-age red shifts with black fringe that shimmied when we moved. As soon as the nightclub filled with customers, a siren would go off as though the Prohibition police were about to burst through the door, but it was only my signal to put my tray down, pass my last order on to another waitress, and run upstairs and change into a pink see-through negligee with a black faux-fur collar and cuffs. Underneath I wore only glittering silver pasties over my nipples and a pink patch of material, a G-string, around my pubes. Downstairs,
the colored bubbles were already popping out of a machine and up through a gleaming white lion's claw bathtub in the middle of a little stage. As I walked down the stairs, I struggled to imagine refined ways of removing a see-through negligee onstage and stepping naked into a bathtub without water. I was supposed to saunter on to the tune of "Night Train," test the nonexistent bathwater with a provocatively graceful bare toe, disrobe, then slide into the bubbles and cavort charmingly for five minutes until the police siren went off again and the whole place was dark enough for me to scamper out of the tub and out of sight. A tardy pattering of applause usually followed me. For this I was paid an extra five dollars a night, which meant that, working Wednesday through Saturday, I could take back to Washington Street about a hundred dollars a week—no small sum in 1959.

I tear out of Big Al's after my last bath and run to hop a bus. Then, if I'm lucky, I make the transfer to the final cable car of the night; if not, I have to spend money on a cab that will take me up the hills. I love it when I make the cable car: I jump off at Washington and Jones and look up to our window on the third floor. She's in bed, I know, warm with sleep, and in two minutes my arms will be holding her, and her mouth will taste like bread fresh from the oven. If I felt stupid or exploited that evening or my feet or my head hurt, I've forgotten it by now. I bound up the celestial pathway of stairs.

By the close of summer, though, I was loathing the end of the afternoon, when I'd have to put mascara and rouge on my face, change from blue jeans to my sheath and high heels, and gird myself for the long trip to North Beach and the inanity of the noisy patrons to whom I carried drinks, people who could be titillated by fake gangsters in a fake speakeasy and a girl taking a fake bubble bath.

Without the Hotsy Totsy Club, would I have loved school so intensely, been so grateful for it? I perused the catalogue, craving almost every course that was offered—Cultural Anthropology, Hebrew Literature, Pottery Making, Criminal Law. Once the semester started, I felt cheated because I couldn't be part of student life outside class. Berkeley students were surrounding City Hall in San Francisco, shaking righteous fists at white-haired old men who subpoenaed public school teachers and sat in the hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee, ruining careers and lives. I remembered the marchers in Mexico City whose absorption in the cause of preventing a two-centavo bus fare hike I'd envied, and I yearned to join the students in San Francisco. But I was taking Zoology and Sociology and Abnormal Psychology and French 3 and fake bubble baths four nights a week, riding at least eight different public conveyances most days, and living with D'Or. When was there time to fight against the HUAC and the San Francisco police, who washed the students off the steps of City Hall with fire hoses?