Naked in the Promised Land (40 page)

"
Oy, Gott,
what should we do?" my mother cried.

I ran to the window, but not before my aunt said, "If anything happened, we'll kill ourselves, both together. Okay?"

"Yes, okay!" my mother agreed.

In the middle of my second year at UCLA, Mr. Bergman, that gentle soul, died. He was eighty-three. "Mendel!" my aunt shrieked over his open coffin, and the other mourners sighed their pity for her widow's grief. She gripped the black rim of the big lacquered box where Mr. Bergman lay, as though woe had made her too weak to stand on her own feet, and her blue eyes were long lakes of tears. It was the first time I'd ever heard her call him by his Yiddish name. "Don't leave, Mendel," she sobbed.

After the funeral his oldest daughter, Rosalie, invited all the mourners back to her house, where a big spread of cold cuts and bottles of sweet heavy wine were waiting in the dining room. "Papa said we shouldn't neglect you when he was gone," Rosalie said to my aunt, placing a bejeweled hand on her shoulder, "and we won't."

My aunt nodded politely.

I'd been standing at her side. "That's so nice," I whispered to her after Rosalie turned to talk to someone else.

But the next day, when Rosalie called to say she was inviting Rae to lunch on Sunday and all Mr. Bergman's children and grandchildren would be there and Rosalie's husband would be happy to drive from Brentwood to pick her up, my aunt refused to go. I'd brought a stack of books to Rae's apartment so I could keep her company while I studied, and I sat across the kitchen table from her as she spoke to Rosalie on the phone. When I gathered what the call was about, I signaled her to tell Rosalie
yes,
but she shook her head vehemently
no.
"What do I have to do with them?" she mumbled when she hung up. "Let them live and be well, but I don't need them."

"But they're family to you," I urged.

"I don't need to make believe I have them for family," she declared, waving a hand that dismissed them to eternity. She was still wearing mourning black, but her funeral-day fragility had vanished. She took the upright vacuum cleaner from the little hall closet and busied herself with house-cleaning. "I only have two people in my family now. God willing, someday I'll have more," she bellowed over her shoulder toward the table where I sat.

That night, as I gathered my books to leave, my aunt said, "Stay. I'll make up for you the couch in the living room, like we used to. To keep me company," she added. I looked up, surprised. She'd beseeched me plenty through the years, but always for something that was supposed to be for my own good. This was different: She was asking for something for herself.

"Sure," I said. How lonely the little apartment must have felt now. She'd lived with Mr. Bergman for fifteen years.

She brought sheets and blankets from a closet and we put them on the couch. Then she plopped onto the green armchair, and I stood gazing at her with tender feeling, waiting for her to open her heart to me. "If you need to study some more, go ahead. I won't stop you," she said. "You can lay in bed and study. That way you'll rest more."

"We can talk if you like. I'd rather."

She pursed her lips together and said nothing.

"Do you remember how Mr. Bergman used to leave my mother five dollars for me when you came to visit on Dundas Street?" I said, smiling.

"Study, study. I know you have to study." She popped up and went to the kitchen, eluding me. She wanted my presence, but it was clear she wasn't going to let sentiment make her vulnerable. I sat on the chair she'd left and kept my book closed at my side. I didn't want to study now. I felt cheated of what I'd hoped was a chance to show my love for her.

Minutes later, she returned with a tray. "What is, is, and what isn't, isn't. We can only ask God for what's possible," she said, placing a plate of macaroons on my knees and a glass of warm milk on the little table near my chair. "Now is the present and tomorrow is the future," she added. I sighed, resigned. I would get nothing out of my aunt except
cookies, milk, and
bon mots
that were either simple-minded and signified nothing or quite beyond my ability to decipher. "The past is past and we got to forget it," she concluded.

Though I'd been earning a decent salary as a teaching assistant since the start of the school year and could easily afford the rent, I gave up my apartment at the end of the month and moved in with my aunt. "She's lonely," I told my frowning mother. ("I'm lonesome too," she grumped, as I knew she would. "Why can't you move in with me?"). I slept in Mr. Bergman's old bed, three feet from Rae's. The first nights, as she breathed emphatically in sleep, I lay there on my side for a long while, watching in the dark the small hump of her form under her bedcovers, thinking how I would have luxuriated in this proximity to My Rae when I was a kid; how she'd been my only model of sanity, a sturdy anchor against the terrible waves of my mother's craziness.

My adviser, Professor Bradford Booth, is a veritable Mr. Samuel Pickwick—bald head, rimless circular spectacles, middle-age paunch; like Pickwick too, eloquent, gentlemanly, decent. "There's no point in waiting" he encourages me as we stand outside Rolfe Hall. "I think you have reason to be confident" The round spectacles twinkle in the Southern California sunlight. I'm ready to take the exams that can give me a master's degree and advance me to candidacy for a doctorate.

Now, except for the three hours on Wednesday evening that I spend in his Victorian Literature seminar and the hour from nine to ten on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings that I spend teaching my freshman English class, I'm a prisoner in the green armchair, barricaded with big volumes of thin pages and small print. I have read them all, practically memorized them, thought and thought about all the possible questions I might be asked—"Why was the eighteenth century called 'the Age of Reason'?" "How might Thomas Grey be considered a forerunner to romanticism?
" (What if I fail?) "
What explains the rise of the naturalist school of literature in the late nineteenth century?
" (Strippers don't get Ph.D.'s, habitués of the Open Door don't get Ph.D.'s, Fanny said that girls who live in furnished rooms don't get Ph.D.'s. Bastard daughters certainly don't get Ph.D.'s.) "
Discuss the influence of Walter Pater on the fin de siècle Decadents."

I study day and night. I don't get up from the green chair. "What if I fail?
"
I ask aloud to no one in particular. Rae brings me coffee with milk and sugar, Russian rye bread smeared thick with sweet butter. "So you should have energy," she says.

"More coffee, please," I call to her in the kitchen an hour later, and soon I can hear the kettle whistling, and soon she comes with a cup of coffee in one hand, a plate of buttered Russian rye in the other. "What if I fail?" I cry again.

"You won't fail. You won't fail," she says, though she has no idea what it is I must not fail.

It becomes a joke between us. "What if I fail?" I sing the self-mocking lament now. "You won't fail, you won't fail," she sings back, placing the cup in my hand, balancing the plate of buttered bread on the arm of my chair. I take a sip and a nibble and then return to formulating my explanation of James Joyce's use of Homer.

They sent me to await their verdict in the hall—Professors Booth, Durham, Longeuil, and Jorgensen. I paced, swallowed big drafts of water from a hall fountain, paced some more. The "what if I fail?" song played itself again, but the wonderful loud bellow of Rae's recitative drowned out its puny squeak. Then Bradford Booth, wearing a dignified Pickwickian smile, came out of the room where I'd answered their questions for two hours. "Phil Durham said it was the best oral he'd ever heard," he said, pumping my sweaty palm.

"I'm Master Lilly!" I called first my mother and then Rae to announce it.

"Master means a boy," my mother remembered from her moviegoing days.

"
Mazel tov,
" my aunt said, and then without stopping for new breath: "In two months you're twenty-four years old. Let that be enough studying already."

Paula and I call each other most evenings. I want to hear what she thinks of my ideas for a dissertation topic: "How about 'The Problem of Anti-Semitism in the Victorian Novel'?" Professor Booth wants me to do my dissertation on Benjamin Farjeon, a minor author in the Sadleir Collection, which he'd helped UCLA acquire. "I don't have to stay in Victorian lit. How about Langston Hughes?"

"Do you know what Ridley did her dissertation on? Chaucer. Nesbitt? Dickens." Paula cautions practicality. Then she goes on to subjects that interest her more. What do I suppose Bill Dowdy meant when he said she didn't have to bring the Coventry Patmore book he wanted to borrow to school because he lived only a few blocks away. "Do you think he wants to come over to my place? Or wants me to take the book over to his place? Do you think he's got a girlfriend? Don't you think a guy like that has them waiting in the wings?"

"I don't know," I say.

"A guy like that probably doesn't go for one whole day without getting propositioned by some woman. Don't you think?"

"You're probably right," I say.

"Do you know how long it's been since I got laid?" She sighs.

Sometimes in the evenings we go to Mario's for a pizza and split a bottle of cheap red between us. Then Paula makes me laugh and laugh by telling droll scatological stories in her musical voice about the billions of men who got away. One Friday evening we weave out of Mario's holding each other tight around the waist, guffawing still about her last brief boyfriend, Solomon Schlong. "I swear, that's his name,"she shrieks, and our laughing fits begin again.

"Oh, Paula, I love you," I say with a sigh between hiccups. (I don't mean it at all the way I'd said it to D'Or, about whom Paula knows nothing.)

She jumps away with such an exaggerated leap that I think she's clowning. "Now that's one weird place I've never gone," she declares. "I'd rather be dead than that desperate."

Paula set me up with a blind date, someone she'd met in a café in West-wood Village and had had coffee with a few times. "I'd grab him myself in a jiffy, but he already told me he likes me like a sister. A philosophy major," she said. "Jerry Proben. An Adonis."

Jerry came to pick me up at my aunt's apartment and drive me to Malibu one bright afternoon. He rolled up his white trousers, and we took off our shoes and strolled near the water's edge. He really was handsome, I thought—bronze skin, big shoulders and arms, and slim hips. I could see the glistening dark hairs on his legs, little drops of water and grains of sand clinging to them.

Later we sat against a big rock as the sun dropped into the ocean. By
then I'd already decided I'd go through with it. Jerry's lips touched mine tentatively, and I kissed him back hard. He seemed startled for an instant before he gripped my shoulders and locked his mouth to mine. "Should I not have kissed you back so hard?" I dared to tease later as we drove down a dark Pacific Coast Highway looking for a restaurant.

"Oh ... Well, I guess you don't usually expect a woman to be so ... there."

"Do you want me to be more coy?" I asked, laughing, but really a bit confused. How were women supposed to be with men? I didn't know.

"No, no, not coy," Jerry answered.

What if I got pregnant? I worried. What would be worse for my mother and aunt: if I never had a baby or if I had one out of wedlock? I wasn't sure, but anyway I couldn't take a chance with my academic career. I called Paula because I didn't know anyone else to call. "Do you know a doctor who'll give me a diaphragm?" I asked her.

There was a long, eloquent pause. "Do you know how lucky you are?" Paula sighed and then put the receiver down to get her doctor's number.

Jerry is almost thirty but still lives with his parents because his father had a stroke two years before, and Jerry must help shower and dress and undress him. For these services his mother gives him one hundred dollars a month. Every Saturday night he picks me up and we go to a Chinese or a Mexican restaurant for dinner. I tell him about my dissertation problems, and he tells me about Heraclitus and Gorgias and pre-Socratic paradoxes, on which he might do his master's thesis. When the check comes Jerry takes it, adds ten percent for a tip, then calculates a fifty-fifty split. "Right down the middle" or "I'll pay the extra penny," he announces. If there's an Ingmar Bergman film or an Antonioni or Buñuel or Fellini we go to the movies first. Usually we go directly to a motel, either the Cozy Cottage or the Alpine Village or the Ocean Breeze. They all cost six dollars. I fish out three from my purse, and Jerry receives the bills in his palm. The rooms always have creaky doors and squeaky bedsprings and smell of stale cigarette smoke.

When the door closes behind us, Jerry always seems uneasy, removed for the moment, almost as if he's waiting for some distant voice to make a pronounce
ment; yet in minutes he's all there—direct, potent, agile. I don't mind making love with him. In fact, I like it. Sex is sex, I realize. Mammals are programmed to respond to the stimulation of certain nerve endings. It's only natural. And he's a good lover: He knows a woman's body as though he's studied it like apuzzle in logic, and he doesn't stop until he brings about the desired response. You can't fault Jerry for technique.

But when it's over for him, he rolls off me, sits up in bed, breathes deeply, and exhales a great gust, as though he's recovering from an athletic feat. He has poured all his prowess and potency into the game, and now he needs to rest. He closes his eyes.

Where has he gone in his head? I don't know, and it makes me uneasy that I don't know. Though he's there, right next to me on the jumbled sheets, in his head he seems to be somewhere else. I reach out to him, throw an arm around his waist, place my cheek on his chest, but he seems oblivious. Soon I roll back and drift off into myself.

Jerry gives me a lot of time to think during our year and a half together in postcoital beds. I think about everything—Jan. D'Or. Whether I'll find a job after I get my Ph.D. Love (he never says that word to me, and I never say it either). I think about the history of the English language—I spend quite a bit of time thinking about that:
Old English derives from the dialects of the Germanic inhabitants of Britain during the fifth to the eleventh centuries,
Dr. Matthews lectured. Jerry is mute, maybe asleep, as still as death now. I think about the German vocabulary I'm learning because I have to pass another language exam before I begin my dissertation:
fugen (transitive verb): to join, to connect.
Jerry slips down on the bed, hugs the pillow, curls farther away from me. I think about myself and Jerry, our lovemaking. We fuck well, I think.
Fuge, Fuck. They were probably the same word in the eleventh century. To join, to connect.
Jerry and I fuck beautifully—but we do not connect.
Something is missing, something ... ineffable.
I laugh at myself for using D'Or's word. But it's true that something is missing. His male rhythms are not mine: He fucks, then withdraws, then disappears into his head. I think about the
tap, tap, tap
of the shoes of the man who looked like Charles Boyer when he left me standing on the sidewalk with my mother. I'm not your father, he said as he withdrew and disappeared. I don't know where they go when they disappear.