Parachutes and Kisses (11 page)

The fantasy of the masked-men exhibition is elaborate. It extends to the opening itself—which, like
Vaginal Flowers,
gets a vast amount of ambivalent publicity, both very bad and very good. Scandal clings to Isadora even in her fantasy of herself as painter. In the days following the opening, Isadora-the-Artist lurks around the gallery in dark glasses and a babushka so she can see the reactions of her audience.

Women come into the gallery with a perplexed look on their faces and then—after they have examined three or four of the canvases—a sly smile begins to manifest at the corners of their mouths, the aha of recognition, followed usually by a gasp or a chuckle.

If they are with female companions, there is much elbowing, pointing, and conspiratorial laughter. But if they are with men, they look sheepish or else become soberly expository, desperately trying to explain to their escorts why the paintings are funny, but encountering the very same mask the paintings seek to unmask. Men visitors, on the other hand, shrug, not knowing why the paintings “matter”; some are openly hostile; some drag their ladies bodily from the gallery and shout at them on Madison Avenue.

This whole fantasy of her secret life as an artist pleases Isadora immensely. Never does she feel more truly “successful” as a writer than when she sees what passions her works arouse in people. One writes alone in blissful, or paranoid, solitude. One feels vaguely masturbatory about one's work; and if one is a woman, the whole world conspires to reinforce that notion, calling one “narcissistic,” “self-absorbed,” “self-obsessed” (as if Picasso were not, as if James Joyce were not, as if all artists were not maddened narcissi falling into their own reflections—the drowning in self being one of the conditions for transcending the self). So one always feels guilty, somehow, about closing the door to work. There are: the child that needs mothering, the nanny that needs scolding, the petty-cash box that needs filling, the husband or lover who needs care and feeding lest he sulk and run off to fuck one's friends, the dogs that need heartworm pills, cuddling, brushing, dinner! One fights so hard for a bit of narcissistic reflection. So, to see actual fellow humans being moved to laughter, tears, and argument by one's work—that is the true vindication. One is a good social being after all—a good
woman.
That solitary paranoia has a function. What a relief! One can return to one's reflecting pool restored, one's face validated by the eyes of others.

An exhibition of masked men—what a fantasy! Isadora has by now been a professional writer so long that in her fantasy life, she chooses other roles: painter, actress, rock singer. In
Tintoretto's Daughter,
she imagined herself as a 15th century lady painter. Her grandfather became Tintoretto; her mother and father, aunts and uncles masqueraded as courtesans and doges. But whatever profession Isadora chooses for herself, one thing remains the same: her sexuality. It is the sap that through the green fuse drives the flower, the cosmic juice of her being.

One reason Isadora has always loved sex (once she can get past her awful transitional-generation shyness about enunciating her yeses too clearly) is that during sex one has a man's undivided attention. For a little while, at least, he drops the mask along with his pants. Of course he is usually pretty quick to put it back on. Just as there are men who are mad showerers, and Keystone Kops dressers, there are men who can put the mask back on within a half-hour of orgasm. But usually there's that half-hour of grace, that honeymoon period (like the first hundred days of a presidency), that blessed interval of naked face.

Lowell Strathmore was the swiftest dresser Isadora ever bedded down with. He could shower and throw on his preppy white boxer shorts faster than you could say Dow-Jones (let alone Standard and Poor). But there was always that enchanted hour or so (longer if he had come more than once) when he shed the mansion in Southport, the membership in the hunt club, his wife's teeth, his daughter's horse, his paranoia about Discovery—and behaved as if he were actually human (as if he were a woman, that is).

It was never easy to meet Lowell. Weeks would go by between phone calls and months between trysts. (In the intervals, they used to have strangely formal, strained conversations about Isadora's portfolio—which, in his guilt about not screwing her, he was managing better and better all the time.) Whenever they finally met in Fort Lee, he'd say: “I don't think I'm very sexy,” and then he'd take her in his arms.

“Well, I do, and I'm supposed to be the expert,” she'd say. They'd screw like mad for an hour, he'd drop his mask for an hour, and then he'd disappear for months at a time.

It was hardly what anyone would call a satisfying affair. Between his elusiveness and Josh‘s, Isadora often felt she had less than no one—two men adding up to minus two.

This was the state things were in when Isadora's grandfather died. She and Josh were together, yet not together. Her beloved dog had died. (Why do our dogs always die when relationships are ending?) Lowell had not called in weeks. Isadora felt empty, desperate, and devoid of ideas following her last successful book. (That it had been praised was somehow more daunting than the attacks and pickets she had braved at the start of her career.) Papa's deterioration in the waning months of his life had done her in. She felt that her marriage had died as her grandfather had died. She was depressed, unable to work, unable to pick up the phone and call for help; she was at wit's end.

 

“And still,” said Shirley, after Isadora had filled up her whole session with these musings over the end of her marriage, “you haven't really talked about your father and you haven't raged
at all
at Josh. If you did, your headaches would magically disappear.”

“I hate the fuckin' shithead bastard!” Isadora pretends to scream, watching a helicopter take off over the East River. But she lacks conviction. Somewhere deep inside, she still believes that the ending of the marriage was “her fault.” That if only she'd been more giving, more patient, and less successful, everything would be okay.

“Don't you know there was
nothing
at all you could have done?” Shirley shouts. “Oh, Isadora—I'd dearly like to shake you. If you treated another person as badly as you treat yourself, you'd think yourself a horrible sadist; your heart would bleed for the poor victim. So will you please show a little
rachmones
toward
yoursel?
Will you please? Boy—do we still have a lot of work to do on your head!”

And then—as usual—the hour was up.

A dream of well-filled hose.

—JAMES JOYCE
Ulysses

ISADORA drives up to Columbia to meet her medical student. She parks at a meter on Broadway and 105th, wondering whether her car will be towed or the tires slashed while she is with Roland Rabinowitz, who has the dubious distinction of being the very youngest of her lovers.

She started to screw Roland as a lark, or for revenge—she's not sure which. Roland is the same age Josh was when she met him—twenty-six—and his mother is also Isadora's friend (as Josh's parents were when she met and fell in love with Josh). Roland's redoubtable mother, Sylvia Sydenheim-Rabinowitz, is a sex therapist —one of the most famous sex therapists in America (but for Masters and Johnson). She's a tiny, platinum-blond, green-eyed woman with a professorial air, a Zsa Zsa Gabor nose (and accent to match), a penchant for spike-heeled designer shoes, Chanel suits, and enormous diamond earrings (bought for her by her many lovers—most of whom are rich, vulgar, and former patients). Once she has cured them of premature ejaculation, she lets them practice their newfound skills on her.

Sylvia is a curious combination of shrewdness and vulnerability, a lady who escaped the Nazis in Hungary an indeterminate number of years ago, a savvy Hungarian temptress (with gorgeous skin), a power broker, and a horny woman—not exactly in that order.

Isadora adores her, admires her, and mistrusts her. Or rather, she mistrusts her motives. Though Sylvia has always been very good to Isadora, Isadora wonders whether Sylvia loves her for her fame or her own sweet self. Sylvia is also something of a voyeur; she delights in arranging sexual scenes (allegedly for therapeutic purposes). Since Isadora and Josh have parted, Sylvia has fixed Josh up with various ladies, and has fixed Isadora up with her Rolls-Royce illiterate antiques dealer—“I don't have to read your books, I can
smell
them,” said he—a drapehead par excellence, who not only draped his bald spot, but actually
sprayed
the hair (this must be a new subcategory, Isadora thinks, the sprayed drapehead) so that when Isadora mussed it in bed—that was during her early fuck-everyone phase—it felt tacky to the touch, just like its owner.

But more to the point, mischievous, blond Sylvia has fixed Isadora up with her very own son, Roland, of the huge cock, and the equally huge pharmacopoeia.

“It vud be good for you to go to bed viz Isadora
vunce,”
Sylvia instructed her son, “but no more zan zat. She vudn't be good for you.” (Sylvia not only wants to matchmake, she wants to control the
duration
of the match, and Isadora rather resents this.) Roland, instructed to fuck her once, promptly rebelled against his mother and fell in love with Isadora—although with Roland, it's hard to tell about love because he expresses himself in bed like something out of one of his mother's best-selling sex manuals. To wit: “Are you tumescent enough or shall I give you more head?” “Should I assume the missionary position, or would you rather assume the female superior position?” “Do you require more foreplay, or shall I enter you?”

An expert and diligent lover, Roland makes love like a robot programmed by Alex Comfort. He is of that curious generation (born in the fifties, coming to adolescence in the late sixties) for whom sex was not only encouraged, but almost compulsory—yet also oddly mechanistic. Reaching puberty at the Elm-Tweedsley School (where Isadora once went herself, before Music and Art claimed her), with the children of movie stars and famous writers, Roland learned fucking at fourteen, but he never learned sensuality. That, Isadora means to teach him. She has taken him on as a little
hommage
to Colette, one of her favorite writers. And the bargain she and Roland have struck is this: he will supply her with sex and drugs, and she will give him polish and sensuality as if he were Gérard Philipe in
Devil in the Flesh.
(She is busy teaching him how to manage maître d‘s, soft lights, sweet music and how to say something in bed other than “Will you assume the female superior position?”)

Alas, Roland doesn't look like Gérard Philipe—though he does have beautiful hazel eyes, an amazing cock, and a nice body (if only he wouldn't slouch). The number of drugs he takes simultaneously astounds Isadora. Any ordinary person would be comatose. Roland takes antidepressants, Valium, quaaludes, and smokes pot so resinous and red-haired, it smells like hash. His freezer contains psilocybin mushrooms; his breast pocket a little vial of coke. Not surprisingly, Roland's speech is slurred, his coordination (everywhere but in bed) not too dependable. He's afraid to drive, for example—in any weather. But his brain—
mirabile dictu
—still functions. He is trying to figure out a way to poison cancer cells, and he can also splice genes and do all sorts of other things that Isadora finds astonishing.

“Hello?” he says through the intercom. Roland phrases nearly everything (not having to do with cell nuclei) as an interrogative.

“It's me,” says ungrammatical Isadora (who, despite her nearly constant migraine, is still superficially chipper). She must wait for Roland to come down, since the buzzer doesn't work. And when he appears—wearing a blue oxford-cloth shirt, baggy jeans, and his lank brown hair in a late-sixties ponytail—she is once again amazed. Roland is twenty-six, but looks perhaps sixteen. He also has the demeanor and the poise (or lack of it) of a sixteen-year-old (with the brain and the cock of a grown man). Isadora, who has no son—but rather wishes she had—wonders whether this is what it's like. Many of her contemporaries have sons in their teens. If, in fact, she had done what most of the class of ‘sixty-three at Barnard did, she too would have a son in his teens. But Isadora was a late breeder. She had books to gestate, places to go, men to marry, a whole odyssey to shlep through before she could go home and get knocked up.

“Hi, Roland,” says she.

“Hello?” says Roland, shaking the ponytail. “You look great?”

Up they go in the creaky old elevator—a very slow one whose smells and claustrophobic slowness remind Isadora of her Columbia graduate-school days. This separation from Josh keeps hurtling her back in time. She is an adolescent again, a college student, a graduate student—except that she has the uncanny sense she sees it all through the semitransparent scrims of her age and experience. She knows too much. Knows and understands. Roland is, in some ways, like herself as a college student. She feels incredible empathy for him—the empathy she never felt for her own young self. Is this what middle age means? Mellowness? Self-forgiveness? Seeing the world through eyes grown wise with experience? Roland is brilliant about cancer cells but stupid about life (just as she, at the same age, was learned about literature and a moron about life). Roland's “moronitude” (a word Isadora and Josh made up in a giggling fit a few years ago) takes the form of always wanting to pin everything down—as if life could ever be made secure. (Ah—the chief delusion of youth!) “Will you see me next week?” he always asks, and “What time?” “What day?” Unless the next date is pinned down, he has an anxiety attack. Isadora vainly explains that by next week they could all be dead, or in a bomb shelter or a DP camp. The Jews and intellectuals might be rounded up; the Bomb might fall; biological warfare might intervene. Isadora knows the folly of planning too far ahead—which also gives her a healthy sense that one must seize the day.
Carpe diem
cannot, she thinks, be understood by anyone under thirty-five.