Parachutes and Kisses (13 page)

In sex, as in life's other activities, the participants are not often after the same things. They come together for a time because certain of their needs mesh, but in a short while it becomes painfully obvious that not
enough
of those needs mesh for the connection to endure. Isadora had known many kinds of connections in her time—a marriage of passionate adolescent puppy love (Brian Stollermann), a marriage of convenience and the Delusion of Rescue (Bennett Wing), a demonic affair with an Unsuitable Object (Adrian Goodlove), a marriage of True Minds—and bodies—(Josh Ace). When even
that
had not worked, she felt all loved out, dry as a bone in the love department, spent.

“Spare me from love,” she told Hope in the bitter days after Josh moved out, when they were still having screaming fights on the phone at midnight, and all their love seemed to have festered into hate.

“You'll find it again,” Hope said. “But a different kind of love, a better kind of love.”

“Never,” said Isadora. “After Josh, never.” For she was truly disillusioned. She had almost begun to believe the polemics of her novelist friend Regina Lynch, who wrote bitter best sellers about the impossibility of love between the sexes, and who, on the occasion of Isadora's splitting with Josh, had sent her a case of Perrier-Jouet Fleur de Champagne with a card that read: “I congratulate those who aren‘t, not those who are.” (Oh only the greatest of romantics can possibly become so bitterly cynical of love!)

But Isadora, alas, couldn't fully share Regina's cynicism—even in her bitterest moments. Isadora
liked
men. She liked their saltiness—the tang of yang on yin, their smells, their hairiness, their bulk. What a bore the world would be without two opposing sexes. Besides, Isadora saw men's vulnerabilities so clearly. She knew they worried about their erections, their prostates, their performances, their bank accounts, their tax audits, their hearts. She also knew that a lot of them were big babies—as immature at forty as they had been at four—but she couldn't find it in her heart to hate the whole sex. It was just as it had been in grade school. The girls were more mature than the boys. She remembered sixth-grade graduation at P.S. 87—the girls with their budding breasts and “training” bras, the boys still apple-cheeked and peach-fuzzed.

Things were tougher now, however, because the girls had more things to do, heavier responsibilities. Babies to raise
and
incomes to provide. Isadora's generation of affluent Jewish girls from Central Park West had liberated themselves, she often thought, right into being as burdened as the black women who took care of them in Central Park when they were kids. They had to earn the bread, bear the babies, and at the same time pretend to their wandering studs that they were merely courtesans, hungry for love. The songs of Billie Holiday took on new meaning. The men hopped from flower to flower, and the women, having insisted on their right to be superwoman, now had that right firmly thrust up their asses (or upon their breaking backs). How much smarter their mother's generation was—playing canasta, and having their nails done while their husbands brought home the bacon—though Isadora's mother hardly fit the description.

I am just like Yolanda Worthington now, Isadora often thought during the last couple of years of her marriage to Josh. She was thinking of the wiry West Indian woman who took care of her and her three sisters when they were little—a tough Trinidadian with six children of her own and an errant, erring husband she both adored and raged against. Now all the white men were free to do the same—wander from woman to woman—while Isadora's generation turned as matriarchal as the black women who'd raised them.

Was Yolanda Worthington my role model? Isadora often wondered. For Yolanda was hardly a bad role model. She was a survivor, a worker, full of guts and spirit. Was that, after all, better than being a dependent wife, shopping at Bergdorf's to appease one's sense of powerlessness? Maybe. At least Isadora knew how strong she was—as Yolanda had also known. The gift of strength is a great gift, though the price is eternal exhaustion.

“Let me undress you,” Roland says, trying to be sensual for Isadora's sake.

“I've worn my sexy underwear for you,” Isadora says. And, indeed, since the separation, she had not only gone to exercise class regularly, but she'd laid in a lavish supply of silk teddies, bikini underwear, lacy bras, silk slips, and lacy body suits. Josh liked these things—and maybe Isadora was still, on some level, hoping for his return (on the underwear level?). But consciously, she was merely playing courtesan.

In
La Naissance du Jour,
Colette writes, “Love, one of the great commonplaces of existence, is slowly leaving mine. The maternal instinct is another great commonplace. Once we've left these behind, we find that all the rest is gay and varied, and that there is plenty of it.” So she wrote, and then hooked up with a man sixteen years her junior. But Isadora
really
plans to give up love anon—and before she does, she means to do it right: silk underwear, vintage champagne, rare dope, young lovers. And then? And then? Then she will become—what?—a nun, and devote the remainder of her life to literature alone.
“Hah.
Not so fast, Aber nathy,” Isadora can almost imagine Hope saying.

Roland begins unbuttoning her white silk blouse, then unzips her black velvet jeans. He is clumsy but determined. Underneath everything he finds a white lace teddy, with white embroidery coyly covering pubic bush and nipples.

He pulls down one strap, then the other, and takes her right breast in his mouth, sucking on it, like the baby he is. Isadora's mind, time-tripping on sinsemilla, wanders, while her cunt grows, undeniably, wet. She remembers what Sylvia Sydenheim-Rabinowitz said to her shortly after Josh moved out. “He's haffing a veening tantrum, Isadora—merely zat. Baby chimps haff it ven ze're taken off za breast. At sree, Roland used to pee in za fruit bowl, to try to stop me from zeeing patients. I used to tell him, ‘Roland, pee all you like, I'm still vurking. He ztopped peeing zoon enough.”

And now, here was baby Roland, sucking her nipple. Thrown out by one mommy, another takes him in—the story of the male sex.

“Are you lubricating yet?” Roland asks.

“If I was, a remark like that sure would stop it.”

“I don't know what you mean, Isadora.”

“God, Roland, sometimes I think you've never made love to a woman who said anything to you other than—‘a little higher, a little lower, no not there,
there ...'
Can't you whisper sweet nothings?”

“I think such things are absurd,” Roland says.

“So do I—but they work better than ‘are you lubricating.' ”

“What words would be appropriate under the circumstances?” asks Roland.

Isadora suddenly recalls her disc jockey with great fondness.

“How about, ‘I'd fight off Grendel for you and go search for the Third Ring'?”

“I don't know the literary allusion,” says Roland, unzipping to reveal a tall, thick, erect cock, which he has already told her is “an inch longer than the national average.” Ever the scientist, Roland has measured it in all stages of tumescence and detumescence. Roland should be a “member” (as it were) of the Star Studs, an arcane sex club in California whose “President-at-Very-Large” often writes to Isadora describing the cocks of his colleagues (not to mention his own) and inviting Isadora to orgies. (Her secretary puts letters like these in a box marked “Crazy Mail.” Isadora long ago discovered that it is perilous to answer them.)

“You have a great cock, Roland,” says Isadora.

“It's an inch longer than the national average,” he says humorlessly.

“I know—you've already told me,” Isadora says.

“You have a great cock” is not exactly a line she hasn't used before either—though Isadora reserves the compliment for special cocks—not the common or garden-variety zucchini. Roland is exceptionally well endowed; indeed, it is his chief charm other than his hypertrophied brain.

Now Roland begins to make love to Isadora in the slow, deliberate manner made famous by Masters and Johnson (and his mother). Sensate Focus is the name of the game. One is supposed to pleasure (and be pleasured by) one's partner with no concern for performance. The touching, the feel of skin on skin is supposed to be an end in itself. For the truth is, that even when sex is supposedly “free,” we wily humans have ways of fettering it with our fettered minds.

Roland, however, has not quite got the Masters and Johnson message. He bends to Isadora's body as if to his microscope or exam bluebook. She feels as if he has outlined the erogenous zones of her body with eyebrow pencil, so that he can find them more easily. First he stimulates her nipples with his fingertips, then he proceeds to her thighs. Then he sucks on her nipples while he grazes her clitoris with his practiced fingers. She responds (she nearly
always
responds) but her overwhelming impulse is to giggle. She thinks of that early Brian De Palma movie,
Greetings,
in which a Kennedy-assassination nut of the late sixties is drawing entry and exit wounds on his girlfriend's naked body. Roland's lovemaking seems oddly cerebral—despite the pot, the music, the excellent technique. What is sex when feeling is removed?
This,
thinks Isadora. Even Errol with his corny poetry has more of the
idea
of sex than Roland.

Meanwhile, Isadora is playing with Roland's cock, teasing it with her fingers, contemplating its bigness filling her up. She takes it in her mouth eventually, twirling and tonguing it, feeling pride in her own skill at this, and in his moans and sighs. How delicious for a woman of thirty-nine to have a twenty-six-year-old lover; no wonder men did this for so many years—still do, in fact. The delights of playing mentor, the ego trip of being wanted by youth itself (“I am youth, I am joy!” cries Peter Pan), the pleasures of playing Pygmalion—all these are not inconsiderable—and they can be enjoyed if one knows enough not to take the liaison too seriously.

“Why don't you come inside me?” says Isadora.

“Not yet,” Roland demurs. “I want to give you a few orgasms through cunnilingus first.” And he bends to her cunt, licking her clitoris with a clever tongue, flicking the right side, then the left, playing trills down the middle. He looks up momentarily, shakes his ponytail, and asks: “Do you prefer the right side of your clitoris to be licked, or the left?”

“I never thought about it before,” says Isadora, who, in the last two months has experienced refinements in lovemaking unknown to her during the long winter's night of marriage. It was, sexually, a very gratifying marriage—but still, what variety there is out here in the brave new world of sex!

“Roland, really, you
can
come inside me.”

“Not yet,” he says, “I can only come once—so I want to wait until you've come five or six times and then we can climax together the last time.”

“What makes you think you can only come once?” says Isadora, rising, as it were, to the challenge.

“I know,” says Roland. “I know my own capacity.”

“Your capacity is only what you
think
your capacity is.”

“Nonsense,” says Roland. “Even when I was fifteen, I could only come once.”

That's all Isadora needs to hear.

“You must have had very uninspired partners,” she says. Then as the music throbs, as the sinsemilla turns her brain to flowering fireworks, memories, dreams, reflections, she turns on all her charm and sexual determination for an amazed Roland Rabinowitz, playing acrobat on the high wire of his cock, astounding him by making him come once, twice, three times, in a night that seems endless because they are both so stoned.

“This is amazing,” Roland keeps saying, with slurred tongue. “I've never done this before. I never imagined ...” And Isadora feels wonderful, smug almost, to be the tutor to his innocence, the mentor to this
idiot savant
of sex who thought he knew everything (and
did
know it—but only by the book). She is his
practicum,
his lab course, the frog he must dissect to pass the test.

Oh, Isadora's brain is full of the most irreverent recollections: her own truncated medical career, quashed when she could not dissect a frog in Zoo:1—2 without shredding its internal organs; the Mt. Sinai gynecologist a friend of hers is fucking—a student of the famous crazy twins—who screws around a lot but always takes a smear from his cock after making it with a new woman. Does he have slides by the bed and a magnifying glass secreted in the bathroom linen closet? What insane sexual habits people have nowadays! Who would ever dream ... In two months as a single woman she's discovered that one longtime friend is, astoundingly, into rubber diving suits; another into “Greek culture”; and still another into voyeurism. He wants to take her to Las Vegas and watch her get fucked by three black studs. If he's a voyeur, is the other a
diveur?
And what of the third?
Assineur?

Everybody does
something
with his genitals, a shrink friend of Bennett's once said—if only the old flying fist. Sex is a great commonplace. Considering how common, why such secrecy? Might as well be secret about our livers or our noses. We all have them. Sex can be merely hydraulic; or an ego trip; or a cosmic merging with the other—as, oh god, it sometimes was with Josh, her husband, the father of her child, her love, her love. She begins to come, thinking how like Josh's cock Roland's is, and now her attraction to Roland is suddenly explained, as the spasms start and just at the crucial moment, she sees Josh's face, sweet as in the first days of their love (before his mouth turned cruel), and she is suddenly blinded by pain between the eyes—as if Cupid himself had shot his arrows there.