Naked in the Promised Land (27 page)

"Let's go in," Wendell nudged at my back, but I couldn't stop looking at the picture. Was this really a lesbian?

Once inside, I was sure Wendell had made a mistake—this couldn't be a lesbian bar. There were straight-looking couples sitting in the black upholstered booths and at the sleek white piano bar. There were a lot of women with other women too, but almost all of them wore tailored dresses and high heels and makeup, and to my untutored eye they all appeared to be executives or lawyers or journalists. "Are these people gay?" I whispered in Wendell's ear.

"I promise you," he laughed at my open-mouthed bumpkin look. "Maybe a few are straight tourists who like to watch the scene, but trust me, there's mostly gay girls here." I felt the way my mother must have at the Café de Paris when she'd sighed, "Take it all in." I was drunk—with Beverly Shaw, the elegance of the Club Laurel, the beautiful lesbians in beautiful clothes! I could see that Nicky too was having a fine time, her cheeks pink with pleasure, gazing in wonderment.

"
I love youuu, for sentimental reee-sons,
" Beverly Shaw sang. She sat on top of the piano bar, as in her picture, crooning a caress to the microphone. The songs were the ones my mother and I used to hear on "Your Hit Parade," and Beverly Shaw now seemed to be looking right at me as her lips formed each entrancing word. Her voice was low and sultry. The rest of the world dropped away as she held me in the palm of her splendid, manicured hand. I felt her to the root of my spine. I studied the tanned skin on her neck and felt my lips there, then at her breast. I would kiss her belly, worshipfully; I would go down farther to feast on all her secret places. I'd never done that to anyone before. To touch her like that, to taste her, to devour her—would that break open for me the secret of her magical force?

I tried to listen to her singing, to pay a little attention to Nicky and
Wendell, but my fantasies spun themselves out, beyond my control. After each number Nicky banged her hands together happily, like a kid watching a fabulous high-wire act. My eyes couldn't keep away from Beverly Shaw's legs.

"We'll take a little break now. Don't go 'way," Beverly Shaw said to the crowd.

"Never," I whispered to her myself. "Never." I'd had a glorious epiphany. This was the kind of woman I wanted for a lover—one who looked commanding, in control of life, nothing like Nicky or me. And more than that, this was the kind of woman I wanted to become.

"That's Mark!" Wendell broke into my reverie. I looked where he pointed—to a man I'd noticed earlier because he'd seemed as enthralled with Beverly Shaw as I, hanging on to her every note. I'd wondered if he was straight. He had black curly hair and wore a pearl-colored tie and a dark suit that I could tell was expensive, even across the distance of the piano bar. A gentleman—a real one, I'd thought. Now Wendell said he'd met him the summer before, in Mazatlán, at O'Brien's, a bar where Americans hung out. "And that's Alfredo, his boyfriend." I hadn't noticed earlier the slight boy with a wavy black pompadour and a lugubrious expression. Wendell got up and took me and Nicky with him. Mark turned when Wendell tapped him on the shoulder and rose to his feet. They hugged and laughed about meeting once again in a bar, this one a thousand miles from O'Brien's. Then Alfredo stood up, and he and Wendell shook hands formally, and Wendell introduced me and Nicky. "My buddies," he called us.

"Have you ever been to Mazatlán?" Mark turned to me with a bright smile.

"Hey, you two look alike," Nicky piped up from nowhere.

"Yeah, you could be brother and sister!" Wendell grinned.

Mark peered at me. "I'm not that pretty," he said.

When Beverly Shaw came back for her next set, I was torn about where to put my eyes. Mark and I really did look alike. It was like staring into a mirror and seeing an older, polished, masculine version of myself. We'd all moved to a booth, and Mark had ordered a bottle of Mumm's and paid the waitress with a twenty-dollar bill. "
Salud, l'chaim, à votre
santé,
" he said, clicking my glass first. Alfredo didn't toast with us. When the champagne came, he got up and went to the men's room, but Mark seemed not to notice that he was gone.

I let Nicky stroke my fingers under the table until Mark offered me a cigarette. I freed my hand to take it from his pack of Kents. Nicky pulled out her lighter, but Mark had already struck a match, and I bent my head toward it awkwardly, feeling Nicky's pique without looking at her. "Bev really knows how to get a number across, like Marlene Dietrich, don't you think?" Mark whispered to me between "I Get a Kick out of You" and "Let Me Go, Lover." "Have you ever seen Dietrich in person? She was at the Palladium last month."

Alfredo never came back to the table. He was chatting animatedly with two men sitting at the bar. He waved an absent-minded good-bye when we passed with Mark, who said he'd walk us to Wendell's car. "I've got a couple of extra tickets for Rubinstein a week from Thursday," Mark said as Nicky and I were getting in. "Alfredo works Thursday nights, and I hate to go alone. Why don't you two come with me?"

"Well..." Nicky began and looked at me. I knew she wanted to say no.

"We'd love to," I said quickly, though I had no idea who Rubinstein was.

I was really worried about Nicky now. She was down to seven dollars and looking scared and haggard. "Why don't you go back to school?" I urged Maury's solution as we sat at Coffee Dan's over the coffees I'd bought us.

"With what money?" She shrugged.

"Well, you could get a part-time job to support yourself. Maybe after the first year you could even get a scholarship." But I knew as I said it that it couldn't work. In 1957 poor girls like us could seldom traverse the enormous distance to college. Even to dare the expedition you needed an owl to guide you, a tiger to protect you, and a faithful creature whispering, "No matter what, I love you." If you had all that you might make it, because it could give you power—maybe more than even a chest of gold doubloons could. Without all that, how could even gold doubloons get a girl across the scary terrain?

Nicky had nothing, not the creatures and not the gold. Something else had to be done. "Maybe it's the way you dress," I said, trying to sound as gentle as I could. "I mean, the fly-front pants, the man's shirt..."

"Okay," she said as she shredded her paper napkin into bits. "I'll do anything. What do you think I should do?" She sounded almost angry.

"Listen, maybe when you go job hunting, if you had a lady's suit to wear and high heels..." Denny knew a tall drag queen, Miss Latisha, who might lend her a skirt and pumps. "Borrow Wendell's jacket," I urged Nicky. That was the way Beverly Shaw dressed. I loved the idea.

Denny came to get me at the Speech Club meeting. He was sweating and panting, as though he'd run for blocks. "Gotta talk to you," he whispered. "It's Nicky!" I followed him into the hall, feeling my throat close in panic. It was something awful, I knew. And it was my fault, because she'd stayed in L.A. for me.

"Tell me!" I shook his shoulder.

"She said to get you..." He fought to catch his breath. "She's being arrested. Right now! Coffee Dan's."

We dashed all the way up Highland to the boulevard. When I flagged, Denny grabbed my hand and pulled. "Denny, why? Tell me," I kept shouting. "Tell me!" But he wouldn't stop to say what had happened.

Two police cars were parked in front of Coffee Dan's. Inside, a couple of policemen stood, their guns in holsters, chatting and laughing as though nobody's life was being changed. "Where's Nicky?" I cried to Denny. He shrugged and looked scared. The people in the booths and at the counter were craning their necks to stare at the policemen.

Nicky came out from the ladies' room just then, head bowed, wearing a black skirt, black pumps, Wendell's gray tweed jacket. A woman in a police matron's uniform walked behind her. When Nicky lifted her head, I could see that her face was a sickly white.

"God, they're taking her in," Denny breathed, but the police matron went to join the policemen, and Nicky saw us and ran to me. "Thank God you're here! Oh, Lil, it was so awful." Her eyes looked as though she'd been flogged, and I opened my arms to her in despair.

"You guys, go sit in that booth," whispered Sandra, the plump waitress who knew us, pointing to a table in the back. Denny held Nicky's hand to lead her and Nicky held mine, and we walked in a line that way to the booth, with curious and hostile eyes following us.

The ugly story poured out of Nicky in heaves. She'd gone looking for work all dressed up. She went everywhere, but there was nothing. Finally she decided just to sit in Coffee Dan's and wait for me. "This fat cop comes up out of nowhere. He's swinging a bat in his hand. Right in front of me he stands and says, 'Do you have three articles of men's clothing on you.' I swear, I didn't even know what the hell he was talking about. 'Three articles of men's clothing,' he says again. 'Don't you know there's a law against masquerading?'" Denny looked as puzzled as I was. "Don't you get it?" Nicky cried. "He thought I was a guy dressed like a woman. He says he's taking me in. 'I'm a girl,' I tell him. 'I'm a girl!' But he doesn't believe me. 'I swear I'm a girl!' I keep saying, and finally he says, 'Okay, I'm callin' a police matron, but if you're tryin' to make a fool of me, I'll see to it they throw away the key.' That SOB made me stand up against the wall until this broad arrives, and she takes me to the ladies' room, makes me open my blouse and take down my underpants ... feels me up everywhere. Oh, Lil!"

"It's okay, Nicky. You'll be okay," Denny said, hugging her to his chest, patting her back as if she were a kid who'd had a bad dream. "Lil loves you, I love you."

She broke from him and clutched my hand now with both of hers, as though she were going under. Beneath the harsh lighting her skin looked like a dead person's, and I could see that her hair was matted with sweat. I clutched back and kept saying, "You're okay, it's okay now!" though I knew it wasn't.

In the booth across from us was a man in a powder-blue polo shirt with his family. His wife wore rhinestone-framed glasses, and their three stair-step little blond girls had matching yellow barrettes in their hair. "I'm as innocent as cabbage," their round faces all proclaimed. They didn't notice us for a while, but then the woman peered through her glasses at Nicky. She must have recognized her as the one the matron had carted off, because, almost in a reflex action, she threw an arm
protectively around the daughters on either side of her, like someone warding off evil or a plague.

"Cunt," I sniggered impotently toward Denny. "What's she looking at?"

Nicky was too upset even to notice. I knew she was still back in the ladies' room with the matron who'd made her undress and touched her where she'd never even let a lover touch her. "I'm so ashamed, Lil, so ashamed," she kept saying. And I was so ashamed for her, so angry too about the injustices she'd suffered over and over—her mother first of all, then Carl, the department store interviewer, now the police.

But I was also horrified by Nicky. Why did things always go wrong for her? With all her smartness, why did she always fall prey to the beasts of the world who could tear lone females to pieces with no more conscience than a pack of wolves picking over the bones of a lamb? The kinds of cruelty they inflicted on Nicky were different from those they wanted to inflict on me, but both were deadly. What my time with her was teaching me all over again was that I absolutely had to figure out how a female could arrange her life so the beasts couldn't turn her into carrion.

T
HE BLACK DRESS,
one of those Simone had given me, with a drape that began at one shoulder and gathered in low folds at the bosom, leaving the other shoulder naked, was what I put on. Nicky said she didn't want to go, and I knew she didn't want me to either, but I'd never been to a live concert before. There were so many things to make her unhappy now, and my going to hear Rubinstein was just another one. At the start of the week, she'd gotten a job on the lipstick assembly line at Max Factor of Hollywood; she had to stand on her feet and mix vats for $1.25 an hour. By the end of her eight-hour shift, she was splotched orange and red and pink and plum from her hair to her soles. She washed, she scrubbed, but always traces remained on her skin, and strange chemical odors exuded from every pore. Nothing could get rid of them. When she pulled me close, I couldn't help wincing. "I know I smell loathsome. I'm sorry," she said, but she kissed me anyway, and I let her because I felt guilty, though I couldn't have said about what.

The lobby of the Philharmonic Auditorium was a mass of ermines and mink stoles and tuxedoes and dinner jackets. I felt as though I'd walked onto the set of a wonderfully sophisticated movie and become part of it. Wasn't that Robert Mitchum over there? Ruth Hussey? And the air was softly fragrant with perfumes, not like Emir, which I recognized now as being cheap in its crude assault on the olfactory nerves. No, these perfumes played lightly with the senses. They made you want to draw closer. They seduced you by their subtle complexity.