***
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 bac
k 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.
My dorm room was on the ground floor, with a screenless window that overlooked an alley. During the school week, D’Or would scratch at the glass at about ten o’clock in the evening. I’d drop my book and pen and slide the window open so she could climb into the room and hurl herself wordlessly into my arms. Moments later, never loosening our barnacle grip on each other, we’d collapse onto the bed and unglue only long enough for me to pull at her clothes, to fling them on the floor.
In the morning I’d leave her in bed—though to separate from her, even briefly, felt as painful as pulling off a limb—and I’d go to my classes, galloping always so that I wouldn’t be late; I’d waited until the last possible minute to go. When the sound of voices stopped in the dorm, by midmorning usually, she’d leave too and go to the hospital and sit with her father.
To explain my absences on Saturdays and Sundays, I told her that I was a bathing suit model. She didn’t ask for details.
Then her father was put on a respirator in Cedars of Lebanon’s intensive care unit. “The doctor thinks it won’t be more than a few weeks,” D’Or sighed, sagging onto my bed, a delicate, sweet wraith. I sank down beside her, kissed her, nestled her head on my breast, held her.
We both jumped when the phone rang. “It could be for me,” D’Or cried as I reached for it.
“I need to speak to Shirley Ann Goldstein.” It was a woman with a New York accent.
“I think you have the wrong number,” I said, ready to hang up.
“Is it for me?” D’Or grabbed the black receiver from my hand. “When?” she shrieked. Her face crumpled like a little girl’s before she sank again onto my bed, and I took her back into my arms.
To be near her I went to the funeral, a Jewish funeral at Mount Sinai Memorial Park. She didn’t introduce me to her weeping, red-nosed mother or any of the other black-clad, prosperous-looking mourners. In the cold marble chapel I lost myself in the crowd, but I never stopped watching her. She sat in the front row, hemmed in between her stiff, stern-faced brother and another man. The rabbi talked about Isaac Goldstein—a good Jew, a generous contributor to the Etz Jacob Synagogue, the founder of the Goldenrod dress shops of Beverly Hills, Brentwood, and Palm Springs. D’Or kept her head down, and her shoulders shook. Then we all filed out into the April winds and made our way up a little grassy hill, her mother and brother and the other relatives, then the friends and business acquaintances. But D’Or walked alone, trailing behind them all, and I trailed behind her. She wore black pants, her black turtleneck sweater, a black leather jacket that flapped noisily in the wind. How utterly alone she looked. I loved her more tenderly than ever, and I stood as close to her as I dared while we watched Mr. Goldstein being lowered into the ground.
For weeks D’Or lives hidden in my dorm room and I sneak enough food in for us both. When I’m in class or the library, I can’t stop worrying about her. Her plaintive voice sounds in my ears over my professors’ lectures. Her pale, satiny skin slides incessantly between my eyes and the pages I read. It’s nothing short of a miracle that I manage to end the spring semester clutching three A’s and two B’s.
“Compulsive disorder.” D’Or used the words for the first time the day we were supposed to meet for lunch at Colby’s Diner and she didn’t show up. I almost missed my afternoon Experimental Psych final, because I waited for more than an hour and then ran to the dorm to look for her.
“I can’t help it.” She shrugged casually, but I saw torment in her face.
“What happens?” I asked, my fear mixing with determination. She’s like my mother used to be! But this time I won’t fail.
“I count things—books, pencils, shoes…” In halting sentences she told me the extent of it. She kept things—like newspapers and magazines. She couldn’t throw them away until she’d read every word. And she had to scrub her hands often, very often. And she had a horrible fear of losing things, couldn’t leave a place without searching thoroughly to make sure she’d left nothing behind.
I will love her enough to cure her! She will love me enough to be cured, I thought.
“Come back with me to San Francisco,” D’Or whispered that evening when I held her on my bed. “I kept my apartment there.”
“Your job too?” I murmured, my lips on her curls. If leaving her for a few hours felt like severing a limb, how could I part with her forever?
“My father … used to send me…” When she pronounced father I could feel her thin shoulders shudder in a noiseless sob. “…a hundred and fifty dollars a month.”
A hundred and fifty dollars a month. Couldn’t I earn that much in San Francisco while I went to college, to Berkeley?
“Mark and I are going to live in San Francisco,” I told my mother and Rae. “He’s getting a good job there in a few months, at a big hospital. I’ll stay with a friend of his until he can join me.” I ended the tale with a tone of finality. What could they say anyway? I was nineteen and a married woman.
“Come back to live on Fountain Avenue,” my mother pleaded. “You got some college already. You’ll get a good job.”
“What kind of husband … a no-good schicker, a drunk, who leaves you alone,” said Rae. “A thunder should strike him. A fire should burn him!”
In the living room of D’Or’s apartment on Washington Street in San Francisco were innumerable brown paper sacks, bulging from the sides but folded over neatly at the top and lined up precisely against the walls. The bed was there too. In the dining room was a plastic-topped red table with two chairs and a refrigerator. The kitchen was empty except for an ancient and long-unused gas stove and balls of dust that had gathered in the corners. D’Or asked me not to go into the two bedrooms, though much later I peeked. They had nothing in them but more brown sacks lining the walls and yellowed newspapers stacked in high piles.
But the apartment was filled with the wonderful music she played on her phonograph—Der Rosenkavalier, The Magic Flute, La Bohème, Tristan und Isolde. From the dining room window you could see the gleaming white city
and the Bay Bridge and an expanse of water that changed with the hours from battleship gray to sapphire. All summer long the front rooms were flooded with sunshine. In this magical place, with a beautiful woman who needed me and belonged to me, how could I not be flooded with hope?
She let me see her writing that first night as we sat together on the dining room floor. The first story she showed me was about a fey young girl with an arcane smile who disguises herself as a boy in red velvet knickers and a golden cap and runs around London in the 1890s with Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley. D’Or’s prose was rich, dark, delicately jeweled, filigreed in twisting images. I read on and on, enchanted. Brilliant, I thought with a shiver, This wonderful woman is absolutely brilliant. When I finished, I placed the neatly typed pages in a little pile on the floor, marveling still, impatient to begin the next story. “No!” D’Or cried, snatching the desecrated pages up from the scuffed hardwood, clutching them to her breast.
“Oh, God, sorry!” I uttered, chagrined at my gross indelicacy. I made sure to keep the pages of the second story on my lap. That one was about a sadistic mother who joins forces with her cold, ambitious son to torment the daughter of the family, a girl who is sensitive, delicate, imaginative, and is failed even by the father she loves who is always away on business. The mother and brother were caricatures of cruelty and the plot was thin, but in this story too there was such craft and polish in her style. “Let me read more,” I begged.
“That’s all I’ve written. Writing requires a certain frame of mind I seldom have the luxury to enjoy. Can’t you see why from ‘The Mother’?” she cried, grabbing me by the shoulders, peering into my eyes as though she had to be certain I understood and believed her. “Can you imagine a sensitive child who is always the scapegoat, living with people who care about nothing but making money and Goldenrod?” Her lovely lips sneered at the corporate name, and I nodded in sympathy.
Naked in the Promised Land Page 26
