Parachutes and Kisses (10 page)

She ran into him in Europe the fall before her grandfather died. Josh was depressed, was screwing Sophia in desperation, and Isadora was in desperation, too. She knew Josh didn't love Sophia and
did
love
her;
she knew he was trying to drive her away, as if that would solve his problems, and she refused to let herself be driven away. The trouble was: she loved Josh and she knew he was terribly unhappy. She did not really blame him. Trapped, desperate, trying to outrun his shadow, he was screwing Sophia because he didn't know what else to do (except to rage at Isadora, which he did often enough). There is an old French proverb, “Don't fart above your asshole.”
(Il ne faut pas peter plus haut de son cul.)
And that was more Josh's problem than sex.

Pretty soon a new request surfaced:

“I don't want to be treated like a second-class writer in this house,” Josh announced. “I want dinner on the table; I want my work to be as important in this house as yours; I want you to take care of Mandy full-time on the nanny's day off.”

“But Josh, your work is important. Whoever doubts it? Surely, I don't.”

“You do. You act like I'm the hack and you're the artiste.”

“But I
don't.”
Or did she? Was she guilty of this without even knowing?

“Then why don't you cook my dinner?”

“Josh—I
never
cooked your dinner. We cook together or we go out. Or the housekeeper cooks. It's been like that for
years.”

“I want you to cook for me. It turns me on.” (This—from the “new sensitive man” of the ‘seventies!)

So, she'd cook for him—gorgeous gourmet meals—but it didn't seem to help much.
Nothing
she did seemed to help much. He was as depressed as ever, only now Isadora was resentful. She had a baby, a household to run, books to write. She could cook with the best of them when she wanted to, but cooking was never fun if it was compulsory. And she felt she was burdened enough without having to pretend to be Pollyanna-housewife to assuage Josh's ego.

Shortly thereafter she was in Munich alone on a book tour. She had almost forgotten that she'd told Lowell Strathmore about it at lunch one day—but, astonishingly enough, there he was at the same hotel. (He had to be in Munich on business, and with his photographic memory—he could quote stock prices and dates the way little boys can quote batting averages—he'd recalled the hotel she'd booked and even the dates of her stay.)

The German publishers were throwing a cocktail party for her one night in the ballroom of the Goldener Hirsch. God, Lowell looked good to her in that smoky room full of German avant garde types in leather jackets. Three hundred hip-looking Nazis putting the make on her and she goes home with Mr. Prep from her own home state. It was only to be expected. Whenever she's in Germany, she expects deportation to Auschwitz momentarily—and Lowell made her feel intensely
safe.

Since he was even staying at the same hotel, what could be more convenient than to hit the sack? Except that they were both terribly nervous. They had to consume two bottles of Liebfraumilch before they could get into bed—and after that, they kept getting up to pee.

(Sex is God's joke on the human race, Isadora thinks: if we didn't have sex to make us ridiculous, She would have had to think up something else instead.)

Lowell was hardly the smoothest of adulterers. Before he hopped between the sheets, he called his wife. It was midnight in Munich and dinnertime in Southport; predictably enough, his wife was out.

“There's an etiquette even of the one-night stand,” Isadora said. “It doesn't include calling one's spouse as foreplay.”

“I know,” he sighed mournfully, “please forgive me.” He put his hand over the mouthpiece of the phone to muffle her, but only the answering service was there after all.

So he checked his messages and sent lots of love for Leona—his rich wife with far too many teeth. He was so unhappy with her that he was bound to her forever. Joy makes a light linkage; but misery is the most unbreakable of shackles.

“Your wife terrifies me,” Isadora said. “It isn't just her teeth, but her nickname. How can you find a woman named Pixie less than daunting?”

“It's true,” he said, hanging his head. “She terrifies me, too. I'm a stave—and not even a happy slave, but a grumbling, complaining one.”

“Then why do you stay?”

“I've often thought of leaving. Life is too short to spend it in such acrimony. But I love her. Underneath her harshness is a poor, insecure little girl who'd be devastated if I left.”

Isadora looked at him mockingly.

“It's true,” he declared. “She'd fall apart. Everyone sees Leona as tough and determined, the sort of woman who could organize the Balkans—but I know how vulnerable she is.”

“Come to bed,” Isadora said. She was thinking of pixieish Leona, whom she knew as a neighbor—Leona of the jet-black Dutch-girl coif, the china-blue eyes, the nose with a razor's edge, and hipbones to match. A man could be impaled on Leona's hips; a woman on her merciless tongue. She was the sort of person who never invited you to dinner, let alone telephoned you, unless she wanted something: a contribution to her favorite charity, a free speech at the Hunt Club Ladies' Auxiliary Lunch, an original manuscript to raffle off, an old hat for her “celebrity auction,” other famous people's unlisted phone numbers, the name of your caterer, or your cleaning lady. How many marriages survive because “she'd fall apart”? Leona would no sooner fall apart than Mt. Rushmore. She was in truth a beautiful woman, but the hardness of her face made you forget it.

Lowell Strathmore finally came to bed. And Lowell Strathmore was such a
surprise
in bed. You'd have thought—if you were a late-fifties Music and Arter like Isadora—that a WASP stockbroker, a hunt-club member, a person who managed discretionary accounts measuring in the tens of millions, would make love like a stiff—or an Englishman—but no: this seemed to be the one area of his life where he could really be free. Jews have been sold a bill of goods about WASPs, Isadora often thinks. According to Jewish myth, made up, naturally, by Jewish men, to keep their women out of the clutches of WASP men, WASP men are supposed to be bloodless and passionless. The truth about WASPs, Isadora now knows, is that they can be absolute priapic maniacs in bed—freer in the sack for all their starchiness out of it.

This was certainly the case with Lowell. He nibbled and licked and giggled. He talked dirty. He whispered things like “titties” and “pussy” and other words parents did not particularly send their children to Andover to learn. Like his language, his whole face softened during sex. Perhaps it was just the effect of taking off those glasses—those glasses that seemed to organize his lumbering tallness and give it point—or maybe it was true relaxation. This poor, slouching giant of a man—who lived his life in an ill-fitting straightjacket, sewn for him by a wife he feared, lined with her money, tied with his fears—coutd only relax when he had fucked a woman he wasn't wedded to. For one halcyon hour, he unmasked, and then, the anxiety, the fear, the straightjacket, the horse shows of his daughter returned.

Isadora notices that it isn't fashionable to write too much about sex anymore. In the seventies, post-Portnoy, you couldn't pick up a novel, it seemed, without getting sperm on your hands. Not only the hacksters and fucksters, but
literary
writers, good writers, had to chart the interiors of vaginas as if they were the caves of Lascaux (and all primordial truth were writ therein). Women were discovering the poetry of penises; men were unmasking before the Great Goddess Cunt.

But then the hacksters got hold of sex and ruined it for everyone—tike condominium developers ruining Florida. They took the license to explore Lascaux as a license to kill little girls; they turned the poetry of the penis into stag films so loathsome they made you want to become a nun. Before long, the puritans were howling—“See! We told you how awful sex is! You should have listened to us! We were right about censorship! Put the mask back on!”

And all the poetry of the penis, the sweet sexuality that peeked out of the fly of the Brooks Brothers pants for a brief decade, was in danger of being covered up again.

Even Philip Roth has recently published a book in which he cuts away from every sex scene. And Isadora's old buddies, the feminists, are passing out leaflets on street corners protesting pornography, trying to make the world believe that people molest little girls
because
of pornography (rather than that pornography Hour ishes because people want to molest little girls), and in general doing their best to blur the distinction between sex and rage.

“There is no sex without rage!” they rage. Except sex between women, which is supposed to be pure and perfect, nonexploitive, as heavenly as heterosex is hellish. You'd think they'd never heard lesbians yell at each other, or seen them strike each other in bars. You'd think they had never known a lesbian relationship (like Isadora's Aunt Gilda's) where the femme is as oppressed as any fifties wife—and the butch is a female chauvinist pig. Of course, feminists don't
mean
to come out on the same side as the Moral Majority when they denounce pornography, but alas they do. And sweet sex, the great unmasker, is dragged in the gutter again. If this trend continues, Isadora thinks, Mandy's generation will have to unearth sex all over again, like a buried Sphinx.

She really resents this confusion of sex and rage. For her, what is great about sex is precisely the momentary
respite
from rage it grants. When even Lowell Strathmore can shed his mask, something constructive is surely at work.

O sweet sex, Lawrentian waterfalls, Joycean rivers, Millerian springs (so black they are blue, too)—it's
you
that Isadora longs for! The whole humid earth opening like the Great Mother's thighs, the cock rising pinkly, a crystal tear at its tip, the breasts swaying as if to a ballet by Ravel—
this
is what she tried to write about in her notorious
Vaginal Flowers.
But the feminists who picketed, and the critics who sneered, and the public who bought to be turned on (but then to disown the sexuality that stirred), preferred to see it all as smut, and keep their masks on still.

“One does not choose one's subject matter,” says wise old Flau bert (who apparently said everything), “one submits to it.” Amen.

How could Isadora describe sex with Lowell to Josh without describing Lowell himself? How could she ever get the
flavor
of it right? The cock itself was unremarkable—though ample and indefatigable enough. It was the contrast between the straightjacket and the freedom that was so amazing (and so oddly erotic). It was the whole thing—the boyish calling of the wife, the unsexy underwear, the Ben Franklin glasses coming off, the use of the word
titties,
the nervousness, the fear, the dropping of the mask.

Back in the States, they met from time to time. Never enough to satisfy Isadora, and never without the most elaborate plans. You'd think they were planning the invasion of Normandy rather than two hours in Fort Lee. Because the fact was that Lowell was so nervous about Discovery that they had to go to a third state. Neither Connecticut, where they both lived, nor New York, where he worked, but New Jersey—where, he maintained, his wife had never been.

“Not even across the bridge to attend some charity function or a horse show?” Isadora asked.

“My wife is not interested in anything that goes on outside Manhattan or Fairfield County—unless it happens in the Hamptons!”

Isadora had to laugh—because she knew it was quite true. She and Lowell would have to be safe at the Fort Lee Motel. Who on earth would think of looking for them there? Except that on one occasion, as they were fucking their brains out at that very same motel, there came a pounding at the door, as if the Hulk himself were loose.

“Where's my wife?” came an enraged voice. “I want my wife or I'll break down all the doors!”

Lowell and Isadora jumped apart. They raced to the door—but the madman was already gone. They heard him pounding on the next door with the same, and then the next, and the next, and the one after that. They looked at each other and collapsed on the floor with laughter.

“Are you thinking what I'm thinking?” he said.

“Yes,” said Isadora between giggles.

“There probably isn't a man in this place who hasn't lost his erection,” Lowell said, having lost his own.

How could Isadora relate such stuff to Josh? He would have loved the story, but it was basically meaningless without imagining Lowell's reaction, and Isadora couldn't describe Lowell because Josh knew him slightly and would have guessed who he was. The rules for revealing their
“liaisons dangereuses”
were impossible rules. Because sex is hardly amusing if the man remains masked. The whole point of sex is dropping the mask. This may not be true for what men want of women, but it is certainly what women want of men.

Ah, men—the inscrutable sex. What do men want? Freud should have asked, because what women want is so pathetically clear—they want unmasked men! Isadora has finally come to the conclusion that she has never really understood men. Not that she doesn't like them, only that they are hidden from her—as if they were all wearing iron masks. Whenever she fantasizes about what her work would be like if she had become a painter instead of a writer, she imagines a whole exhibition called simply “Men.” It would be a series of paintings of masked men. In each, the man would be wearing a different
kind
of mask. One would have an iron mask, like the hero of the same name; another a diving helmet; another a black silk mask like one of Guardi's Venetian gentlemen; another a wet white silk handkerchief which clung to his face, making him look (oddly) like the death mask of Keats; another a gorilla mask; another a Mickey Mouse mask; and so on.