Naked in the Promised Land (49 page)

Her eyes widened, then narrowed. For an instant I wished I could take back my words. Then I didn't. "Get out," she said evenly. She leaped from the bed, towered over me. "You've never really lived here anyway," she yelled, "so now get out!"

From the Topsy room I called Yellow Cab. Binky slammed the bedroom door behind her when she heard me on the phone. As I waited, alone, I looked out the window to the backyard, to the abandoned, rickety cottage in which I never wrote a single word.

The taxi drove me to the Greyhound bus station in Hollywood, where, for the third time in my life, I bought a one-way ticket. Then I leaned against a wall, staring into space for a couple of hours, until a canned voice announced over a loudspeaker: "The Bakersfield–Fresno bus will depart in fifteen minutes."

The very pregnant blond woman next to me on the bus tried to scoot over when I sat down, and we both smiled at how little space she could make. Then she closed her eyes and kept them shut through most of the trip, which was fine because I needed time to think.

How could two people who start out in such easy tandem pull so far apart? Once wed finished our book, nothing between us had gone right, but what wed shared the first couple of years had seemed so wonderful that it kept us hobbled together for the next five or six, even when we knew that it wasn't working, that we'd be better off going in opposite directions. Finally we were like ball-and-chain convicts—snarling, resentful, but stuck with each other. I was sick about it now. The tiresome discord we'd made ourselves live through. Maybe I wasn't cut out for love relationships.

The bus crawled over the mountains and zoomed toward the Valley and the pregnant woman dozed, her fingers laced over her aquamarine polyester stretch pants, sheltering her belly protectively. She wore no ring on her left hand, and whatever she was dreaming made a little smile play around her lips. Her face looked young and relaxed in sleep. What had been so shameful and brutally hard for a woman in 1940 seemed a lot simpler in the 1970s.

By the time the bus left Bakersfield I'd made a plan. I'd find a doctor who did artificial insemination. Then I'd send my mother the picture
that Roger and I had taken at Dottie's party three years earlier. I'd make a copy for Rae.
He's gotten a job as a sociology professor in Pittsburgh, but we're in love, so we got married,
I'd tell them, because although the world had changed, they hadn't. Then I'd buy a house, a nest for me and my baby, and I'd hire a girl to care for her while I worked. If the young woman next to me could take a six-hour bus trip though she looked ready to deliver momentarily, why couldn't I sit behind a desk until the last minute? They couldn't fire me. I was a tenured full professor. And in this day and age they'd be ashamed to fire a pregnant lady anyhow.

The fertility specialist I found was a thin-lipped, serious man. On his office wall was a large portrait of a smiling wife and three teenage daughters, all with sleek, long blond hair. "If you want a child, why don't you just get married?" he asked as I sat opposite him in his office, but he seemed more curious than disapproving.

I'd rehearsed the right answer the week before as the bus was pulling into Fresno. Now I looked Dr. Rich directly in the eye—a guileless professional woman who had no inkling about men, who unwittingly scared off all potential suitors—and I answered with unadorned fact: "If you're thirty-three years old and have a Ph.D. and you're an assistant vice president at a university, it's not easy to find a husband."

Dr. Rich understood what men liked and didn't like in 1974. "Yes, I see," he nodded, then ushered me into the examination room. My feet in stirrups, nervous and vulnerable, I stared at the ceiling while he probed my body.
What if I've waited too long? I would be the end of the line.
I was a prisoner, helpless in a matter that was life-or-death to me now, awaiting the judge's verdict.
Would the verdict be death?

"Everything looks fine," Dr. Rich finally said from between my feet, "but since you're already thirty-three, I think we'll do an endometrial biopsy to be sure you're ovulating regularly. And if you're not, we'll help nature along a little by giving you a fertility drug, Clomid."

His promise drew the air from my lungs. I was doing it. It would happen!

"We'll need to chart your temperature," he said after I'd dressed in an ecstasy of relief.
I hadn't waited too long!
"And when we have it all figured out we'll do the insemination three times—at the start of your cycle, then in the middle, then at the end."
They would live, into the next generation.

Phyllis presented me with two new state-of-the-art thermometers, "in case one breaks," she said. Every morning before I left the bed she brought me one, waited by my side, scrutinized the numbers, passed the thermometer back to me to scrutinize, and we noted on the chart the minute variations from 97.8 to 98.9, that secret code to longed-for treasure.

"I match the sperm donor's profile with the patient's," Dr. Rich explained at my cycle's beginning the next month. "For you I've got a donor from the East with a medical degree, mesomorphic type, light complexion, Jewish," he said, reading from a file after comparing its number with the one on a small tube he took from a small refrigerator. "Hold this while I get things ready," he said, his thin lips forming his only smile of our brief association.

Inside the tube he'd handed me was white viscous fluid. I held the cold glass in my palm carefully, lovingly, overwhelmed with gratitude to it, to what the mesomorphic, light-complected, Jewish doctor from the East was giving me.

My feet in the stirrups again, I started when I felt Dr. Rich insert something cold and metallic in me. I stared up at the ceiling and held my breath. "It's best to keep still for a few minutes," he advised before leaving me alone in the room.

I knew for certain I was pregnant several weeks later as I sat in a meeting of the deans and the vice president and a sharp ray of heat radiated from my nipple outward to my breast, like a bright white star. I glanced over at Phyllis, who'd been watching me from the other side of the room. My face must have revealed that something had happened, because now I could see it on her face, as though she'd felt it in her breast too.

"Come live with me on the ranch now," Phyllis said when we left Dr. Rich's office. The tests confirmed what I already knew. The wonder of it! "Come, please," she said again, pulling me back from my euphoria.
Live with her. How could I live with her? Three times I'd tried to make a life with someone, and each time it had ended in my boarding a Greyhound bus alone. "We'll be a family," she said.

"I can't," I told her gently. I couldn't spend the energy I'd need for my child on another love affair that would last a few years and then fail. "If it doesn't work, it would hurt not just you and me but the baby too." She was loving and present and ardent, but so had Mark been in the beginning. So had D'Or and Binky been. What I felt now for her, I had once felt for them too.
Oh, where do they go, lost loves and lost passions? Into what forlorn graveyard do they sink?
"I can't," I said again.

"I'm really grateful for everything you've done," I told her when she dropped me off at my apartment, and I kissed her cheek. "I hope you know that."

"I'm not going to stop," she said, smiling.

I closed the apartment door behind me and laced my fingers around my belly, protecting what was inside. I was going to have a baby! I'd done it. For myself and for them. I'd be like that woman on the bus from L.A., alone, with the baby inside her, strong.

"I'm looking for a three-bedroom house in a good school district," I called a real estate agent to say. Phyllis and I could see each other from time to time, but mostly I'd be a mother and an assistant vice president for Academic Affairs.

I bought a house in a manicured area of Fresno, with a graceful backyard that looked like a park designed by a Japanese landscape architect. Behind a discreet fence was a small orchard of gigantic oranges and bright yellow globes of grapefruit. Inside the house you could fit ten of Fanny's furnished rooms. Maybe twenty. Property in Fresno cost a fraction of what it did in Los Angeles.

"Lilly, a palace!" my mother exclaimed at my dwelling, worthy in her mind of Duke Boyer.

"Dr. Leelee, where do you get so much money to buy such a house?" Albert asked, his ingenuous old eyes big beneath his horn-rimmed glasses.

"All alone with a baby coming, in so many rooms," Rae complained,
wandering through the maze of my mansion. "You're not afraid?"

"A baby! A baby!" my mother said for the hundredth time. "Albert, you hear? Lilly's going to have a baby!"

"
Mazel tov!
" he shouted again.

"
Mazel tov!
" Rae shouted too. "When is your husband coming back?"

I took them to Phyllis's ranch for dinner so they'd see what nice friends I had in Fresno, so they'd know that the baby and I wouldn't be all alone, even if "Roger" never returned. Just as I steered my car onto her long gravel driveway, Phyllis came from the barn in her jodhpurs. Rae, sitting beside me, peered over the big mauve plastic purse she held on her lap. "
Oy!
" She adjusted her glasses. "She looks just like that Binky. Where do you get them?"

"Like Binky?" I laughed. Phyllis was six inches shorter and forty pounds lighter than Binky. Then I understood. Of course. All gentiles looked alike to my aunt. "No, My Rae, my darling. She looks just like you," I said.

My aunt spanked my fingers. "Don't be silly," she cackled. "I don't look like a
shiksa."

But Phyllis spoke Viennese phrases to them that sounded like Yiddish. She cooked a salmon so that Albert wouldn't have to eat anything
trayf,
unkosher. She popped up to fill water glasses and coffee cups the instant they were emptied. She was charming, darling.

"Oh, I forgot something," I announced after I settled Rae and my mother and Albert into my car at the end of the evening. I ran back to thank Phyllis in private, to kiss her and tell her I'd miss her terribly that night.

"Such a nice lady," my mother said on the drive back to my home. "The
shiksa
doesn't worry to live all alone in such a big house?" my aunt asked.

Nicky called again, when I was about five months pregnant. "Did you mean it?" she said, as though we'd talked just the day before.

"Mean what?"

"About school. About what I am."

"I meant it." She wouldn't be calling me if she had anyone else to call, I knew. "You'll breeze through the high school equivalency exam," I told her. "Then we'll get you into Fresno State. Come, Nicky. Now I can help you."

"I already shipped my stuff," she said.

"Okay," I told her. "I'm not going anywhere."

She came, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt and a genderless permed hairdo, like a lot of college students in the 1970s. She was almost a generation older than most of them, but so were many others. Drugs and jail time and everything else she'd lived through were etched on her craggy, tough-woman face. She was certainly not the coed I'd seen in the varsity movies of the early 1950s or when I arrived at Fresno State in 1967, but that vapid look was mostly history anyhow. More and more of our students were working class, and hard times showed on their faces. Even those who didn't have rough lives now eschewed the college girl look.

"That woman's going after a lot of counseling," the associate executive vice president smirked to Phyllis when he saw Nicky in my office every day. "I hope she's getting some good advice."

She must have; she graduated cum laude in two and a half years. She wrote too, John Rechy–type stories about a peripatetic butch who lives in the underbelly of lesbian life, stories that continued where "Walk With the Wind" left off.

"Is the world ready for stuff like this from a woman?" we asked each other.

It would take twenty more years, but "Walk With the Wind" would sit in bookstore windows as
A Crystal Diary.
She still calls me Lil.

By October my belly was a nice round watermelon, but I'd said nothing to anyone in the Thomas Administration Building. Did they think I'd just gotten fat?

By November it was no longer possible to ignore, but how could they believe what their eyes were seeing? It was easy to get the Pill. Hardly anyone got pregnant by accident anymore. And if they did, abortions were legal. Was it conceivable that an unmarried assistant vice
president for Academic Affairs would carry a baby inside that huge abdominal protrusion? No one asked me. When we talked, they kept their eyes trained on my face, on the wall, on the air, anywhere but down.

In bed together, Phyllis and I speculated about how the campus telephone lines must crackle and sizzle, what circumlocutions Polonius must have devised to proclaim it to the president, how the deans must buzz and chatter until they hear our steps at the meeting room door, then scurry to their seats like naughty schoolchildren.

One night Phyllis and I were asleep in her bed when the phone rang. The luminous hands of the clock said 1:10. Phyllis reached for the phone. It was our old vice president, calling from San Francisco, where some national association of university chancellors was holding an annual meeting. "Phyllis?" he slurred. I could hear him all the way over on my pillow. "I heard the craziest thing tonight about Lillian Faderman." Word had gotten out around the country.

"You should have passed the phone over to me," I murmured when she spooned herself around me again and we floated off on one boat to sweet dreams.

But their silly curiosity is of no consequence. What matters is the precious creature forming inside me. I can see it as clearly as though I've placed a periscope in the navel that once attached me to my own mother. I can see its perfect little fingers and toes, its scrunched-up face that soon will unscrunch and be beautiful, its magical little collarbone and ribs and elbows and knees.

"I hope it'll be musical," Phyllis says one evening as we dream together about who this little being will be.