“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.
“But what about me?” Nicky cried.
“What about you? I’d still see you. We’d still be like we are now. This is just…”
She flung open the door with such force that it banged against the wall and books tumbled from a shelf. She stormed out. I didn’t see her again for seventeen years.
Mark called while I could still hear Nicky’s heavy steps thundering down the walk, while I was still wrestling with the impulse to chase after her and say I was sorry. I sat on the plastic-covered orange chair in the living room while I talked to him, and I could see my mother at the kitchen table, picking up the gin rummy cards Albert had dealt. My hand that held the phone was shaking. “I guess it’s over between me and Nicky,” I told Mark. “I said the nuttiest thing, and it really upset her.” I whispered so my mother and Albert wouldn’t hear.
“What?” Mark sounded concerned.
“I don’t know why I said it,” I laughed self-consciously. “I told her you and I are getting married.”
There was a long pause at the other end of the wire. Then Mark said, “Let’s.”
I’d led him there, but why? How could I marry a man? Except for Maury Colwell, my experiences with men had been grievous. I’d call Mark back. I grabbed at the phone. I’d never even felt close to one of them; they were as alien to me as apes. Suddenly I couldn’t remember his number. I’d tell him that the comedy routine we just did was as funny as George Burns and Gracie Allen. We’d both laugh.
No. Why should I? Marrying him would solve lots of problems, and it wouldn’t be at all the way it had been with other men. First of all, we were both gay; it would be a front marriage, plain and simple. And second, Mark had none of the bad features of other men. And he had all the good ones: He knew things that were a mystery to me; he knew how to maneuver in the world. In fact, his good points were so numerous that I wondered what I had to offer a man like that. Maybe he thought that as a child psychologist he needed a wife so that people would think he was heterosexual. Okay with me! I could help him just as he was helping me with my mother and aunt. And he’d said he thought that passion and domesticity don’t go together. That must mean he didn’t want to live with a man again, so we could be companions forever.
“He proposed!” I sprang in the air as though catapulted from a sling, as though joy had made me wild. “He proposed!” I cried again, unsure myself whether the joy was contrived for my mother’s sake or real.
Albert and my mother jumped up from the kitchen table and came running, both of them. “You’ll move away?” My mother paled. “Lilly, no! When? You’re so young.”
“Mazel tov,” Albert shouted, forgetting forever the time he called me a tramp and we grappled with each other. He extended a hand of forgiveness and congratulations to his daughter who was going to marry a doctor.
Three days later I left the house in the morning as though I were going to school and waited for Mark to pick me up on the corner. “We’ll go to Tijuana. They don’t have age restrictions there.” He’d planned it out very practically. “In L.A. your mother would have to come with us or we couldn’t get a license.”
“What a lark,” I thought as we drove out of L.A., and my heart sang. But my mood turned as heavy and gray as the lowering sky before long. What was I doing? As we zoomed past oil rigs near Long Beach, I realized it was already too late to stop.
It was Rae I called afterward, collect, from a Texaco station near the
San Diego border while the attendant pumped gas into Mark’s car. Rain hit the glass phone booth in great slashing splotches, and I shivered in the damp wind and the dark. “I just married the doctor,” I told Rae, weeping real tears into the phone, wiping my nose furtively on the sleeve of my jacket. “Call my mother and tell her.”
“A dank Gott,” Rae cried, “the best thing! Now finally you’ll have a good home.”
We drove through the rain looking for the El Cortez Hotel, and Mark said softly, contemplatively now, as though he’d been thinking about it for a long time, “Ours is the kind of relationship where we reach out to each other with one hand and to other people with the other.”
I nodded. “Il va sans dire,” I answered, showing off a phrase he’d taught me. He turned to me and we grinned in complicity.
“They’ve got a good restaurant downstairs at the El Cortez,” Mark said.
I’d learn how to drive and he’d get me a car, he told me over the oysters. “From my house it’s an easy jaunt to USC or UCLA.” In a few months, when I graduated from high school, we’d go to Mexico together for the summer. He’d show me Mazatlán and Guadalajara and Acapulco. His supervisor at the hospital had told him about a summer lectureship he might apply for, in psychology, at the University of Mexico. Would I like to live in Mexico City for six weeks?
Naked in the Promised Land Page 22
