Naked in the Promised Land (33 page)

"Rae, look," I said. "He hasn't gotten paid yet. Could you lend me the money for a dorm room?"

"What do you mean, dorm room?" my mother said. "You stay here till he comes back. You have your own room and everything here."

"No way, no way! I need to live near the campus. I can't get to UCLA from here without wasting precious hours on the bus every day."

"Why do you have to go to college when you have a husband?" my mother yelled.

"What kind of a husband is that? A carrot should grow from his ear!" Rae shook her fist at my absent husband and grabbed her purse. "Come to the Bank of America with me," she said.

My spirits are leaden one minute, soaring the next. My marriage has failed, but isn't a wonderful new chapter of my life about to begin? With my scholarship money I buy my schoolbooks. Introduction to Humanities
—The Oresteia, The Odyssey, The Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, Hamlet, Paradise Lost, Madame Bovary,
books about the failures and triumphs of men, things I'd never even thought about before, words set down hundreds of years ago, so vivid they could be happening today: The miracle of it, I think, worshipful even of the printed pages, to me like sacred text. Elementary French—the heavy, grainy-green cover feels significant with promise: I'll learn to understand people who speak no English, to read their ideas; someday I'll even go to France. Introduction to Psychology—I'll know what Mark knows; this is the first step. I daydream of a Dr. Faderman whose astuteness and wisdom will cure the obsessive, the agoraphobic, the compulsive, the paranoid. The books will be my key to a new life. Nothing will be impossible—they will make me a new person, the person I want to be.

I have a week before classes start. I line the books up neatly on the shelf in my room at Rudi Hall, then I take them down, one by one, and pore over them, ravenous. I am a college student. A UCLA scholar. I've escaped from furnished rooms in the Bronx and East L.A., from nude modeling jobs and the Open Door, from all the forces that have worked to keep me down—the bastard who
was my father, Fanny who'd told me what a poor girl couldn't do, Mr. Mann and Falix and Carlos and Jan—all of them. Already I feel like a success.

As we'd stood in line together at the Bank of America I told my aunt: "Of course Mark is sending me money for food. He just didn't have enough this month for a whole semester's dorm rent." But how would I eat? Now, just before the start of classes, I found thumbtacked to a wall of the common room at Rudi Hall a printed sign that said
JOBS
and under it handwritten white index cards: Baby Sitter Wanted, Part-time File Clerk, Student Library Assistant.

I spent four hours a day during the first week of classes wheeling loaded carts up and down the stacks of the UCLA library, searching for Dewey decimal numbers, putting books back on the shelves, envying students with the leisure to sit and actually read those books in the beautiful, old wood-paneled, high-ceilinged room. At the end of the week, I stood in line at an office in the bowels of the library in order to pick up a little brown pay envelope. Inside I found a check for $23.25.

It wasn't a decision I struggled over. Being exploited as a student library assistant wasn't much more pleasant than being exploited as a pinup model, and the pay was a lot worse for a lot more hours. Why shouldn't I use all the gifts I had, every one of them, to get where I needed to go? "Andy," I cried into the first public telephone I could find, "it's Gigi Frost. Remember me? I'd like to come back to work."

"Hey, the hourglass girl who doesn't own a bra." Andy laughed. "So what happened? Your boyfriend run off and leave you?"

"Something like that," I said. "Say, look, can I work on weekends in group shoots?" Four hours on Saturdays, four hours on Sundays, and I'd go back to the dorm with forty dollars in my pocket. It felt different to me now than it had two years earlier: I wasn't worried anymore about the photographers and where they might tempt me to go. Now I knew where I was going. Now I was sure I wouldn't let anything stop me from getting there. If I quit the library job and modeled on the weekend, I'd have twelve extra hours a week in which to study.

***

I loved my cubbyhole of a dorm room—the good, strong reading lamp, the scarred old desk and sturdy chair that nameless other students had used in the past. Before long, the nooks of the room were crammed with volumes that I read for pleasure in my idle time: Muriel Rukeyser, James Baldwin, Upton Sinclair. I could brew a strong cup of coffee on the hot plate I kept in my room (against the rules), slouch luxuriously with my stockinged feet on the desk, forget everything bad and sad—my worries about what my mother wanted from me, what Rae wanted from me—and feast on a book.

I loved the campus too—the rolling greenery and the grand old buildings, even the drab auditoriums that were the freshman classrooms. I sat in the great rooms, stunned all over again by the wonder of it: Lilly from East L.A. at one of the best universities in the world. When a student to my right or left looked bored I was puzzled, offended even. The classrooms were to me sacred places those first weeks, holier by far than any synagogue.

Yet my reverence was often mixed with something else—something in which I perversely reveled, an angry resolve. Someone like me wasn't supposed to be the beneficiary of the knowledge being dispensed here—but they'd have to pass it on to me! They couldn't deny me.

On Saturdays and Sundays, I spent the four hours in Andy's studio and left with plenty of money in my pocket for the week's meals. And before that, on Friday evenings, I took two buses across town early enough to watch my mother kerchief her head to light the Sabbath candles and say the Hebrew prayers she'd never said at Fanny's because she hadn't been the lady of the house there. Then I'd eat the Sabbath dinner with her and Albert before I took another bus to go and drink tea and be stuffed with cinnamon
rugelach
by Rae. "A young girl doesn't travel alone on the bus late at night," my aunt would grumble over my perfunctory protests when I rose to leave about nine o'clock, and Mr. Bergman would help her turn the plastic-covered, flowered-print couch into a snug bed for me until Saturday morning. It was a simple comfort to be near my mother and Rae, to know that even though they didn't have the slightest notion of what it meant to be a UCLA student and could not share my new world, they loved me and would love me no
matter what. And it was another comfort to know that before too many hours I'd be leaving them to return to that world they knew nothing about, where I was learning to find my own way. So I had everything I needed to keep me going.

But sometimes I was lonely. I was close to no one except my mother and Rae. I never heard from Mark again. He just disappeared in Mexico City, and our months together seemed now like another life. What had we been to each other?

When I poured the champale into the long-stemmed cocktail glass the waitress placed in front of me, the old fear shook my hand. Would I be kicked out of UCLA if I were caught in a raid? But Beverly Shaw came to perch on the bar in her tailored white suit and high-heeled shoes, and she winked right at me—she remembered me after all that time! Every nerve of me sat rapt in voluptuous attention.

It was only at the end of the set, when she whispered, "Don't go 'way" into the mike and slinked off, that I glanced over at the woman in a black turtleneck who sat at the long bar. Her eyes were large—gray, I later saw—and her dark hair curled softly around her forehead and ears. She was alone. I watched her for a long time. She looked nothing like the intimidatingly majestic Beverly Shaw. There was something vulnerable in the set of her thin shoulders, her pale, pale skin. She was Mark's age perhaps, maybe a couple of years younger. Who did she remind me of? I picked over the silver screen images still lodged in my mind: Sylvia Sidney, the Jewish actress with fragile, heartbreaking beauty, the one my mother had loved so much.

I wouldn't hesitate. But how to do it? Not like Jan, no. Like William Holden, maybe. "I'd like to send that woman at the end of the bar a champale," I told the cocktail waitress with all the suavity I could muster, plunking down on her tray two dollars of Andy's money. Then I stared at the dark curls until she looked over at me and stared back, but only for a moment before she lowered her eyes shyly—and that made me braver. I stared at her, unblinking.

The waitress placed a glass and a Champale bottle in front of her, nodding in my direction and whispering something. The woman raised
her eyes again to me, and I held my own glass up, smiling boldly, sexily I hoped, despite the crazy tattoo pounding in my ears. I would do this—what I'd never done before. I watched her neat breasts move under her sweater as she shifted her body to face the bar. She sipped at her drink with eyes lowered again, then glanced up. Our eyes locked.

"My name is Lillian," I said in an actress-sultry voice when I went to stand next to her at the bar. Her perfume was lightly spiced, not at all like the dark, heavy musk I'd loved before.

"Door," I thought she said. "My name is Door."

"Excuse me?"

"D-apostrophe-O-R. It's French. It means 'of gold.' Sabina's my first name, but I like D'Or better." As she spoke I noticed her small, well-shaped ears, her delicate chin. And Beverly Shaw disappeared forever from my head. It was no longer Beverly Shaw I desired—it was to
be
her. How would Beverly Shaw pick up Sabina D'Or? What would she say? How would she make love to a woman?

"The way you looked at me...," Sabina D'Or said later in her car. She'd offered to drive me home when I told her I'd taken a taxi to the Club Laurel. That was after I placed my hand on the small of her back and drew my head close to hers as we laughed together about a big woman in an ermine stole who'd asked the bartender in a baritone voice where the men's room was. Then I ordered another round of champale, and my hand dropped to D'Or's knee. She batted her gray eyes at me in surprise, but she didn't try to pry my clutching fingers off.

"What about the way I looked at you?" I kept my voice low, seductive. I had to sound sure, though I wasn't sure of anything just now.

"So unabashed," she smiled wryly. She seemed less fragile than she'd looked at a distance.

How would I do this? An ocean roared in my ears. I'd ask her to come in. We'd sneak into my room—probably all the girls would be gone anyway on a Saturday night, and nobody would even know she was there. And then ... I'd do the things to her that Jan had done to me. Could I make her believe I knew what I was doing when my fingers were so icy cold? I pushed them furtively under my thighs to warm them up.

***

When I awoke that morning she was still pressed next to me, breathing softly, there in my narrow dorm bed, an exotic, disturbing intrusion into my nun's life. How splendid I'd felt the night before, felt still. I relived it, silently, with D'Or nestled beside me in sleep: how I'd filled my mouth with her breasts, sucking on nipples that were pale brown, pronounced, unlike mine—like my mother's really, just as I remembered them from when I was a kid. How I'd tasted her everywhere—her neck, her belly, her smooth and crinkly hairs. Finally her juices on my tongue. The unaccustomed feel and smell of it, like seaweed, had been startling to me at first, then quickly delicious. I'd swum in the sea of her; I'd made her moan. I had really done it—brought another woman to pleasure! Now I pressed her to me tenderly. This was what I wanted. I kissed her gently, trying not to wake her. Yes, this ... for my whole life. How hadn't I known it before?

Later we strolled down Gayley Avenue to Westwood Village for brunch, our arms and fingers brushing, barely touching. Walking in broad daylight, I was back in bed with her, in the dark, mysterious night, tasting her everywhere.

"How much we say in silence." D'Or broke my reverie. "I'm so aware of you, and that means you're aware too—I know you are, or I wouldn't feel it so strongly."

"Oh, yes," I whispered fervently. I'd never seen a woman so lovely, so graceful in movement, so musical in voice. And she'd let me make love to her, and would again! The mere thought of it telegraphed sweet sensations to my groin.

She lived in San Francisco, she said over our French toast and coffee in a booth at Colby's Diner. She'd come back to L.A. to visit her parents for a few weeks, then her father had gotten sick. That was months earlier; now he was in the hospital. "It's awful." Her gray eyes clouded, and her beautiful mouth trembled. "My mother says I upset them so much that I gave my father a cancer. Can you imagine? My father gets cancer and they blame me!"

I covered her hand with mine, not to seduce now but to sympathize, and our knees pressed together under the table. "You're an island of rationality because you
listen
to me," D'Or cried. "They won't listen—they never have."

As we got up to leave she looked under our table, behind the seats of our booth, under the table again. "What did you lose, D'Or?" I asked, looking under the table with her.

"Can I help you find something, miss?" the waitress asked.

"No, nothing, it's all right," she said quickly but kept looking.

D'Or is an artist, she tells me, a writer, though she hasn't yet written much. When I say I'm a psychology major she merely nods, and I sense that she thinks psychology is a lesser pursuit, that she's a bit disappointed. I long to impress her. "Artistic types are naturally different,"she says of herself. "You're like that too. I felt it in the way you stared at me that first night ... the wonderful inappropriateness of it. It signifies the creative spirit."

D'Or loves words like
maverick, iconoclast, mad genius, self-defined original.
How can I be those things for her?

She lies naked on my dorm bed after I've made love to her. "Ours is a mystical connection, rarefied, nebulous," she murmurs, "beyond the sexual, far beyond good and interesting companionship."

"Yes." I fall to my knees and devour her hands with kisses. "Oh, yes!"

"Pageboy, my page." She sits up to anoint my head with a beloved hand. Her breasts gleam in the semidarkness, the brown nipples pronounced, erect. I kneel at her feet. I'm a page in livery, a boy in the service of my queen. "My Rosenkavalier," she sometimes calls me.