Naked in the Promised Land (28 page)

"I'd say we make as elegant a couple as anyone here," Mark whispered out of the side of his mouth and grinned as though he were enjoying himself hugely. We stood in the lobby bar, daiquiris in hand. He was even more good-looking than I'd remembered, with his black curls tumbling over his forehead and his dark eyes. I liked the audacity, the
chutzpah,
of his red bow tie and the matching red lining of the black cape he wore over a black tuxedo. Before the buzzer rang, he ordered a second daiquiri and tossed it off, then offered me his arm. We walked to our seats down a red-carpeted aisle. I loved our masquerade. Here we were, passing as a straight couple among all these worldly concertgoers. It was a delicious secret between us.

My own secrets I didn't share with him. What would he think if he knew everything about me?

In our second-row seats I copied Mark, applauding spiritedly when two men followed the orchestra onto the stage. "The short one's Rubinstein," Mark whispered. "Artur" was the first name of the dapper little man with crinkly gray hair who now took his seat on the piano bench with a flourish, tossing the swallowtails of his coat out behind him, his bearing straight as a rapier; already I was enchanted by the diminutive, charming figure. "Brahms's D-minor Concerto," Mark whispered in my ear. I nodded and let myself be transported, at first by Rubinstein's look of intense pleasure at what he was producing, and then, slowly, by the flow and the passion of the music. I found myself living inside each note as it sounded, bouncing rapturously with the pianist when he hit the great chords along with the orchestra, pulling deep into myself in the soulful measures when he closed his eyes. I'd never known that sound could be as sensual as touch. How deprived I'd been. At a pause I joined with great energy the smattering of claps around me, puzzled that there wasn't thunderous applause. "Don't they like him?" I whispered to Mark.

"Generally, you don't applaud between the pauses, 'movements' they're called," he whispered back.

He told me more about being a child psychologist at Children's Hospital as we watched the waiters at Lawry's bustle about, carving after-theater prime ribs on big silver carts. He'd gotten a Ph.D. in psychology
at Claremont Men's College, had been working at the hospital for three years, lived with Genghis and Khan, his two Siamese cats, in the Los Feliz Hills. Alone.

"But Alfredo?" I sat far back in the red-upholstered booth, sipping at a glass of velvety burgundy that Mark had ordered.

"Oh, I put him through the Otis Art Institute. We still do things together, but now he's working for a hotshot designer and wants to live on his own." Mark ran a light finger absent-mindedly around the rim of his glass. "The truth is, we had two great years and then a lousy one. You get 'em young and worshipful, show 'em the world, and then they change." He shaped his lips to look comically rueful. "He says he doesn't need a papa anymore. He's twenty-three and thinks I'm an old man. Do I look like an old man to you?" Mark laughed.

"Of course not. How old are you?" As soon as the question left my mouth, I worried that now he'd ask the same of me.

"Thirty-four. And you?"

I'd take the risk. I wanted a friendship with him in which I didn't have to hide everything. "'Bout half that." I spilled the words out quickly.

"That's terrific," he said with a laugh. "I love it! You handle yourself like a mature woman. So you live with your parents? I thought you and Nicky lived together."

"I live with my mother and stepfather. They're a bit unusual." I'd risk more, but how much? "They speak mostly Yiddish," I began.

"You're Jewish!" Mark exclaimed. "Well, we have that in common. I was adopted by gentiles, but I'm a Jew through my mother. See?" He took off his bow tie and opened his shirt collar, exposing a gold Star of David that hung in the dense, curly hairs on his chest.

"Come to dinner on Saturday," Mark said when he dropped me off in front of the Fountain Avenue Court Bungalows.

"Nicky too?" My guilt had kicked in ... and besides, I'd never been to a man's house alone.

"Play hooky," he laughed. "I'll pick you up at seven." It would be okay, I told myself, like with Eddy or Denny or Wendell.

***

"I have a date tonight with a Jewish doctor," I called my aunt to announce on Saturday afternoon. Albert heard "doctor" all the way from the living room, where I stood at the telephone, to the kitchen table, where he sat playing cards. "A doctor?" he asked my mother, pronouncing the word with reverence, as was his wont. "What kind of doctor?" As I dressed that evening, I could hear him again telling my mother, who still hadn't figured out what her husband did for a living, about "my boss, Dr. Nathan Friedman, the world-famous pathologist."

"Put on a nice dress before Mark gets here," I'd begged my mother, but Albert and I still weren't talking, so I couldn't make sartorial requests of him. He'd gotten sloppy-looking; his shirts and pants didn't fit anymore because of my mother's heavy cooking, and he wore a grease-stained hat that he never took off until he went to bed at night. I hated the thought of Mark's seeing him. Albert was sitting at the kitchen table with his solitaire deck when Mark rang the bell, and just as I was about to whisper to my mother to please close the kitchen door, Albert jumped up and closed it himself.

Mark wore gray wool pants and an off-white cable-knit ski sweater, a bold design with a black stripe that started at the shoulders and ran down the sleeves. I thought he looked stunningly handsome. "This is Dr. Mark Letson," I said, introducing him to my mother.

He smiled charmingly. "I noticed your beautiful mezuzah," he said, touching with respectful fingers the silver-plated object on the inside doorpost. "From Israel?"

My mother had put on lipstick and high heels for the occasion, but now I noticed the inch of gray and brown roots that peeked out from her dyed black hair. Why hadn't I asked her to go to the beauty parlor?

She was at my heels when I went to my room to get a jacket. "Lilly, such a handsome gentleman!" she squealed and clasped her hands and looked as though I'd presented her with a mink coat. "Drive careful with Lilly," she instructed Mark as we were leaving.

"What a sweet lady," he said, holding open the door of his white convertible for me. "I can see you're really loved."

A cedar-scented fire crackled in the fireplace, and Mark had prepared a pitcher of martinis for us. "Let me show you my sanctum," he offered. I
followed him about, a long-stemmed glass in hand, the stuffed green olive sloshing in gin and vermouth. Genghis and Khan shadowed us, winding their tan and brown bodies around my feet whenever we stopped and brushing against my legs. "They like you." Mark smiled. "They're not always that friendly to strangers."

The five rooms of the house overflowed with objects—big vases that looked as if they were made of lapis and jade, small elephants of crystal. "This is Quan Yin, goddess of mercy," he said, lifting from a marble shelf a two-foot statue that was carved entirely of ivory and caressing it with gentle fingers. "I picked her up in Hong Kong." Lithographs crowded the walls—Chagall, Kollwitz, Miró—Mark mentioned names I'd never heard before. An open armoire contained nothing but neatly arranged record albums—Classical, Opera, Cabaret Music, Broadway Musicals, he'd labeled the collections. What would it be like to live in the midst of all this, I wondered, letting the fantasy carry me to some not-too-distant time when I, a psychologist like him maybe ... a lawyer or writer ... could dwell with such fascinating objects, such artifacts of beauty and fine taste.

We dined at a white-linen-covered table lit with white candles in bright silver candlesticks. Mark served paella in celadon dishes and sangria that he poured from a cut-crystal pitcher. "Bolero" alternated with Marlene Dietrich's throaty tones and Yma Sumac's eerie chanting about virgin maidens, and Mark told me about saffron and Seville oranges and the Spanish Civil War and the evils of Franco. I listened to all of it scarcely daring to breathe, searching my brain for appropriate comments. "Sounds like the Spanish Civil War was a prologue to World War Two," I said.

"Exactly." He beamed, like a teacher with an A student. "The fascists saw what Franco could get away with, and then there was no stopping them."

Mark calls every evening. I grapple with physics homework, bored, wishing my high school career at an end, and the phone rings. I hope it's Mark. I'm flattered that someone like him thinks I'm interesting enough to bother with. My mother knocks at my door. "It's Mark." She pronounces his name with reverence.

I don't say much in our telephone conversations, but he loves to tell stories,
to teach. He has all the knowledge in the universe to share, and he's discovered what a willing pupil I am, how awed I am by the range of what he knows, his passions, his convictions.

He comes to take me to dinner; to a coffeehouse just opened on the Sunset Strip, where beatniks go; to the Huntington Theater to see
Long Day's Journey into Night.
At a late supper I tell him I did a scene from
Anna Christie
when I studied at Geller's. He draws me out, wants to hear all about my life, listens, nods sagely at everything, even the stories about the Silent Film Star, about Jan. His eyes tear when I tell him about my mother's dead brother and sisters, her stories of the shtetl, our life in Fast L.A. "Obsessive-compulsive."He gives me a free psychological evaluation of my mother's past anguish. We go to the Club Laurel again, and though I still want to put my lips on Beverly Shaw's belly and slowly travel south, I like sitting next to Mark while she sings to us. Do people think we're straight tourists?

We shake hands warmly, fervently, at the end of every evening. "This was wonderful, I had a terrific time," we tell each other. Sometimes he pecks my cheek with chaste lips.

We are great friends, two homosexuals. We just love to be together. If we pass for a straight couple to a blind, hostile world, so much the better.

Albert and I still do not talk, but I know what will bring a bit of peace and respect to my mother: "Dad"—I force myself to utter strange words I have never used before—"this is Dr. Mark Letson. Mark, my father," and Mark offers a friendly, professional hand. Albert glows; I feel I have done a
mitzvah,
a good deed. Of course Mark knows already that this man is my mother's husband and not my real father, that I have no father. "No, not a prefrontal lobotomy," he assures me and laughs. "Trepanning, it's called. They did it a lot in primitive medicine—drilled a hole in the skull to relieve pressure on the brain."

What doesn't Mark know?

"
Yes, I'm still going out with the Jewish doctor," I tell my aunt. "He's wonderful," I gush. "Tall, dark, and handsome!"—an American expression she knows.

"
What are his intentions?" my aunt asks.

We sped down Sunset Boulevard to the Sea Lion in Malibu one evening. I was telling Mark about how unhappy Nicky was at Max Factor's, what a good writer she was, how she was wasting her talent. "How's Alfredo?" I asked him next.

"He's out of my life," Mark said, lips tight, "for good now. His idea."

I was surprised by how I felt. As though my pockets were filled with secret rubies.

The tables at the Sea Lion were lit by soft candlelight. The waves washed against the illuminated rocks below, then crashed on the windows with a scary, delightful roar. "You have to try the sand dabs," Mark said over our martinis. "They're the best in the world." He ordered for me. "And a bottle of Paul Masson chablis, very cold, please.

"Passion and domesticity don't go together," Mark opined as the waiter collected our salad plates. He signaled the waiter to remove the empty bottle from the ice bucket and ordered a second. "I lived with Raymond for six years, Alfredo for three. I don't know what the solution is." Mark frowned. "But I know that for me it just doesn't work."

I agreed with him. I couldn't imagine living with Jan ... certainly not with Nicky.

"My aunt asked the other day what your intentions were," I told him over the Baked Alaska. He could see from my expression that I thought it amusing, the way we were fooling the world. Nobody around us could guess the gay things we said together.

"Honorable, tell her." His warm brown eyes were twinkling.

In between school and going out with Mark I studied for the Scholastic Aptitude Test. Maury Colwell had said that much depended on it, and I still took his tenets seriously, even though my powerful need for his approval seemed to have dissolved in Mark's sunny friendship, and I seldom saw him now.

Some evenings, Nicky came to sit with me as I studied. "You could go to Cal at Berkeley. I hear that's a great school," she fantasized, "and we could live on a houseboat in Sausalito. I know I could really write there."

I turned my eyes up at her. "With what money?" I said. "Sweetie, I'm studying synonyms and antonyms," and I scrutinized the page again.

She pushed her chair back with a clatter and stood over me. "Look
at this." It was a small pocket calendar that she tossed right on top of my SAT booklet. "The check marks are for all the evenings you spent with me, and the
x
's are for all the evenings you spent with him ... that I know about." She flipped weeks, stabbed at days. "Look at it. Practically no check marks. Full of x's!" Her voice was high and grating. "If you have to study so much, how can you always be running around with that faggot?"

I closed the calendar, closed my SAT booklet, put them down on the floor at my feet, stared at Nicky calmly. "I'll probably marry Mark," I told her.

She looked at me as if I'd uttered gobbledygook. "But you're both gay!" she finally exclaimed.

"It would be a front marriage," I ad-libbed. I knew from the gay boys that front marriages were common in Hollywood with gay movie stars. "Look, my mother's upset because I said I'd move out when I go to college," I told Nicky. "The only way she'd accept my moving is if I get married."

It was partly true. I hadn't yet discussed moving with my mother, but I knew already what she would say if I said I needed to live in a college dorm. How could she even comprehend the idea of college? She would cry and beg me not to leave. I'd be trapped. I'd never be able to go away to college. But if I married a Jewish doctor—that she'd understand—and I could go to USC or UCLA while I lived with Mark. I couldn't imagine a future for myself if I didn't find a way to get out now.