Parachutes and Kisses (14 page)

“Damn, damn, damn,” she says as the steel band tightens around her head, and the imaginary drill bit enters the fontanel, and the arrows behind the eyes seem to sharpen themselves on her bony sockets.

“Damn.”

“What?” asks Roland (who is beneath her, moaning in pleasure as she rotates herself on the maypole of his prick).

“The headache has come back,” she says, slumping into his arms.

“I love you, Isadora,” he says, weeping with the wonder of his own three orgasms, and her pain, which she has entrusted to him.

“I love you. I love you. I love you. I'd fight off cancer for you and search out cell nuclei in the dark ... Is that better?”

“Much better, darling boy,” she says, through her blinding pain.

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

—OSCAR WILDE

Facing me from the other side of the looking glass, in that mysterious reflected room, is the image of “a woman of letters who has turned out badly....” That is what I must remain for everyone, I who no longer write, who deny myself the pleasure, the luxury of writing.

—COLETTE

NOVEMBER in Connecticut. The flaming leaves of October are just beginning to succumb to the bareness of winter. Orange and yellow and nutmeg brown (this is, after all, “the Nutmeg State”—though who knows why?)—they line the gutters of the winding country roads, slippery as greased lightning after a heavy rain and just as lethal.

Isadora is once again driving QUIM, rushing away from her house so as not to be there when Josh and his girl friend come to pick up Amanda. Let the nanny open the door and deliver Mandy. Isadora finds she can't bear the sight of the other woman in Josh's car even though Josh parks so that she can only see the back of her head.

The girl is definitely called Wendy, or Wanda, but Josh won't tell her which it is. Though Josh wants Isadora to confide in him about
her
love life, the formerly hang-loose, free-spirit Josh has suddenly become cagy as hell about
his.
Wanda or Wendy No-Name. Wanda-Wendy Emanon is how Isadora thinks of her. Nor is Isadora allowed to have her phone number—though Josh spends several nights each week with her in New York and Isadora would like to know where he is in the unlikely event that some emergency should arise with Mandy.

Wanda-Wendy E. is a computer programmer and an old high school classmate of Josh's. She has dirty blond hair which straggles down her back, and a pug nose. (Isadora has seen her profile in the car and to the untrained eye she seems like a homely version of Isadora.) Josh never goes very far afield to get laid. After all, his parents actually delivered Isadora into his arms, and the other ladies in his life either worked in the health-food store he frequented, typed for him, or were found at yoga classes, Zen meditation sessions, or class reunions. Josh wants everything delivered straight to his lap—UPS, as it were.

So Isadora is racing away from her own home to avoid him. She is so fragile and shaky these days that it never occurs to her to just brazen it out. Why should she be driven out of her own house? She doesn't even think to ask the question. Somewhere deep inside she believes that if she is “nice” to Josh, if she atones for her power and success by annihilating herself in some way, then he will come back. It is the old female love-work dilemma, the dilemma Isadora thought she'd solved years ago, now come back to haunt her in a new form: (It is Isadora's conviction that we never shed our neurotic dilemmas totally. We merely solve them in one guise, but they return to bedevil us in another.)

She races QUlM'S motor. Up the hill she goes and around the serpentine curve that gives its name to the road she lives on: Serpentine Hill Road. She remembers how much the name meant to her when she bought the house, she a lover of S-shaped curves, an aficionado of Hogarth's theory that the S-curve is the essence of beauty. She remembers how lucky she thought the address—11 Serpentine Hill Road—lucky eleven and the Hogarthian ring of “serpentine.” Not to mention the Serpentine in London, one of Isadora's favorite haunts.

Then, later, when Isadora became a devotee of the Great Mother Goddess, she realized that the snake was the Mother's symbol, the embodiment of the Great Goddess' power in the ancient world, transformed into a devilish serpent by the misogynis tic patriarchs who wrote the Old Testament. The address seemed doubly lucky then—like the double serpents the Cretan priestess holds aloft in beautiful blue Knossos (or is it the Heracleon Museum?). At any rate, serpents were lucky. Serpents were powerful. Serpents represented Goddess power. Serpents represented the power Isadora has felt utterly stripped of since Josh moved out.

She is scattered in a million different pieces. Her head is like a phrenologist's chart of worries and stresses. In one box, there is Mandy and “Worry About Motherhood.” In another box, Men and “Worry About Getting Laid.” In another box, Money and “Worry About Making Money.” And nowhere does there seem to be any room at all for writing—for the kind of full-blast concentration that writing requires and that has always been Isadora's center, her salvation, her solace, even her livelihood.

The funny part of it all is that Isadora really knows of no other way to make money than to write her heart out. And to write she must find her center. But her center is so drowned in worries that she cannot locate it. She is rushing around madly instead of staying home and waiting for her calm center to claim her. The meditative peace she has always found in her yellow legal pads now eludes her totally and she is looking everywhere for solace outside herself when she knows perfectly well that solace can only be found within. “Happiness is difficult to find within, impossible to find elsewhere,” said someone called Sebasti6n Chamfort, who knew.

So she rushes down Serpentine Hill Road, taking the S-curve much too fast, and, as she does, some demon within causes her to look down at her odometer to set the mileage (suddenly she feels she must know the mileage from her house to town)—whereupon the car veers into the leaf-choked shoulder of the road, hits the skiddy mass of wet leaves—orange, yellow, red, and brown as the owls of Dylan Thomas—screeches out of control madly, and seems to fly across forty feet of leaf-greased macadam until it climbs a little Robert Frost stone fence (allegedly making for good New England neighbors) and stops dead, with a heart-contracting shudder, its three-pointed Nazi star looking heavenward, its grille unscathed, but its undercarriage hooked, locked, barnacled upon the three-foot stone wall.

It has all happened so fast—the curve, the odometer, the skid, the wall—that Isadora, who is wearing no seat belt and yet is utterly unscathed and unscarred, can only sit bolt upright in the car shaking like the autumn leaves above her and rerun the accident again and again in her brain. Her hands sweat on the steering wheel; the blood has drained from her face; she is amazed her bowels have not let go. Quaking, she opens the door on the driver's side, astounded that she can still remember how to manipulate the latch. Every motion her body makes seems astonishing and new as if she were a toddler learning these simple operations for the first time. How to open a door. How to step out of a car. How to remove an ignition key. It is as though she is new-made by the accident, suddenly aware that her nerves and eyes and ears function, that the world, so lately in danger of being annihilated, is still present, and her muse, her guardian, her Goddess, holds her in the palm of her ample hand, saying: Not yet, the time is not yet ripe to go.

The car is perched three feet above the sodden, leafy ground, like a sloop run upon rocks. Shaking as if after an orgasm, Isadora hops down into the leaf mulch, blessing the wet of it, blessing the world, the stone fence, herself—but blessing and blaming both. For she has nearly annihilated the wet, wonderful, leafy world merely for the lack of love of one man—and her politics rebel though her heart (for one hideous minute) did not want to beat without Josh's.

What to do? QUIM is hooked on the stone wall. Isadora looks madly around for help, slams the car door, runs into the road, leaving handbag, keys, coat in the car. No one in sight. Just the leaves falling and the road gleaming with an almost sexual wetness. Sex and death—the twin poles of our being, and somehow allied. She thinks of animals killed in the road, of her own dog, Chekarf, not yet one year gone, of her grandfather eating the earth, of her own hungry mouth so voracious that it would rather do the same than close around air. The air she swallows is redolent of Josh's absence. Without a man's tongue in her mouth, would she rather eat earth? No, she says. But her heart betrays her. Why did she look down at that odometer, and why was that stone wall there? Why did she walk away unscathed? Saved by the Silver Nazi? Oh, the Jews' revenge on Hitler! To be saved by one's own Mercedes—bought with the royalties of books castigating the whole Teutonic race? How astounding to be thirty-nine and to see the curious circles that life completes.

Her parents wouldn't drive a Mercedes and only bought Cadil lacs (until just lately when Nat indulged himself in a huge Lincoln Continental, as if to spite the gas crisis. Spite or deny it.) Yet if she had been in one of those American deathtraps, she'd probably be a goner or a cripple by now.

How many times has Isadora nearly done herself in and been saved by the protection of the Goddess? Or whomever. She won't insist on the gender. It's the protection she's sure of. The leg she broke in Zürs following Bennett Wing down an icy slope. The riding accident at Fort Sam Houston which could easily have made her a paraplegic (her spine thrown against an outcropping of rock). The car accident on a corniche road in Sicily (between Pa lermo and Messina). And so on. Isadora used to think she could read her life story in her scars as accurately as in her poems. Each scar was, in fact, a sort of poem. But this accident would be different. No scars at all. Only the blinding recognition that she had nearly killed herself for want of Josh. And that sooner or later this stuff would have to stop.

She runs down the road to a white colonial farmhouse which bears a plaque on the side: ETHAN WHEATWORTH HOUSE, 1701. The hills are full of ‘em. Old colonial WASP shrines. What is a Jewish girl like Isadora White Stollerman Wing Ace—though now estranged from husband number three—doing in this WASPy historic part of the world? And driving a Silver Nazi? Should she have stayed on West Seventy-seventh Street where her kind belongs? Are the dangers fewer there? Merely muggings and murders and suffocation by immersion in trendy boutiques selling art deco
tsatskes?

She rings the bell of Wheatworth's old manse. Commotion within. The sounds of kids and slippers. Typically enough, old Ethan's house is now inhabited by an
echt
Connecticut “family”—new style. The husband—a nice-looking fortyish b!ond—is called “Murph” by the kids, who are clearly not his biological kin (except possibly the youngest). The wife, a toothsome brunette whose babes these three urchins are, comes down the stairs wrapped in a pink towel, with another pink towel turban-wise on her head.

“We heard the screech,” she says, glistening with drops of water from her shower. “What happened?”

And Isadora, still trembling, and having almost lost the use of her voice, says in a voice gone three octaves above the usual level, “I hit the leaf mulch and skidded. I'm terribly shaken. May I use the phone to call AAA? My car's hooked on a stone wall. I can't believe I'm still alive.”

Again she has that very odd sensation of a world new-made and she a sort of female Adam, bearing witness. This is the New Family. Mom and kids and lover man (or new husband). At any rate, only the mom and kids are surely linked. The men come and go. Or is she projecting?

“Come have some coffee,” says the wife, who now introduces herself as Lena Browning-Murphy. So this is New Husband—“Murph.” Still, it may not last.

The wet, newly hatched, newly married Lena glides across the floor in bare feet to get coffee from her redone colonial kitchen. The kids, perhaps disappointed that no one has been killed, disperse.

Murph offers to go outside and assess the car damage. A man's job. That's what men are still for, even in the New Eden, though the players change from decade to decade.

“No,” says Isadora, “just let me collect myself. I'll go, too.”

“It's no trouble,” says Murph.

“Oh,
thank
you,” says Isadora, apologetically, “but there's no need—reatty.” She truly
does
feel like a troublemaker—she with no husband of her own to assess the damage.

At some point in this exchange, the Murphys recognize her. Isadora knows just when this happens, for their voices change audibly, and their friendliness, honest enough before, now becomes truly cloying. Isadora can always tell the very moment when this happens. The gazes penetrate deeper. The voices become more lyrical and somehow higher. Like her own voice, filled with the fear of having come so near to self-destruction.

The amazing thing about being a well-known writer is that your name is well known, but your face, reinterpreted through so many distorting book-jacket photos, is not. (In Italy the publicity photos make you look Italian; in Japan, vaguely Japanese; in France, French; in Germany, German;
und so weiter.)
But when people see the name—exactly like in those American Express ads, they gasp. “You? The writer? I read your book.” “Which one?” you ask at first, chip on shoulder about the other seven. But, after a while you mellow. How lucky, after all, to have even one book like a shot fired around the world, a guided missile, a contagion, a whisper round a whispering gallery, a shared dream, a chain letter, a fable told and told again in different tongues. “Thank you,” you learn to say simply. “Thank you.”