Parachutes and Kisses (15 page)

Which Isadora does. The Browning-Murphys stare, as if she were an extraterrestrial dropped from an orbiting saucer. This shaken woman—so small and vulnerable-looking-is really a Famous Personage. They can't make sense of it, and Isadora is too agitated to help them make sense of it; she wants someone to help her make sense of her life—which is suddenly so unmanageable, so insane, so inexplicable: to have all that the world desires, yet also to have nothing, and to be able to think of nothing but to call Josh.

But Josh is not home; he's on his way to Isadora's. She tries and tries, getting only the chilly recorded message on the answering machine she bought him last Christmas.

“Who are you calling?” asks Lena Browning-Murphy.

“My ex-husband,” says Isadora, feeling the word strange on her tongue, for he is still more husband than ex. “Now I'll try AAA.”

She does, gives them the site of the accident, meanwhile replaying the tape of it again and again in her head. Her limbs still tremble as if with the aftershock of an earthquake. She keeps dialing Josh's number, then her own, spasmodically. Finally, she reaches Josh at her own house.

“I crashed the car,” she says, half apologetically, half defiantly, still apparently thinking he will feel guilty enough to say: “I'm coming back; all is forgiven.” But does she really
want
that? She doesn't know.

She knows, however, that Josh's reaction makes her feel more abandoned than ever. He is, frankly, pissed off. His voice is cold, unforgiving, furious to be disturbed in his plans by her boring suicidal impulses. His mandate to protect her has lapsed. She had too much—success, a baby, all the womanly things as well as the manly ones—and now, by god, she'll have to give up something. She'll have to pay. She'll pay with the loss of her lover, the father of her child. (“You have everything”—he'd said on the phone one night after they'd separated—“except me.” Except my life, she thought, except my life.)

Josh arrives alone in his Toyota Land Cruiser. He is furious. Furious at Isadora for nearly killing herself and furious for having been called in to witness it. The neediness and panic in Isadora run deep. Will I never get over this? she wonders. Will nothing appease it—not fame, nor money, nor a child? She longs for Josh to cradle her in his arms and protect her—but he is merely outraged. His mouth looks cruel. He has cut his hair very short, in a sort of Teutonic style. His beard is close-cropped, and through it one can see that he has a smallish chin. A wen has grown on the back of his neck—and in his characteristic stubbornness, he will do nothing about it. Still, she desires him. His arrival brings a tumult to her innards. Her heart races; her cunt moistens. What funny creatures women are, to fixate as we do, upon particular cocks. No one else Isadora has slept with since Josh feels quite right to her. The bodies are unfamiliar, the cocks strange; she can never bear to spend the whole night. She wants the man astrally transported out of her arms by three A.M.—so she allows no one to stay with her all night, no one. She has even made men leave through the dog run at three A.M. Her home is her castle, her body still Josh's garden. Why does he refuse to understand?

“The car is fine,” Josh says gruffly. “At least I mean it goes. I drove it off the wall. The undercarriage may be wrecked—but it can be driven to the Mercedes place. Okay? I'm leaving.”

“Wait a minute,” says Isadora.

“Why?” barks Josh. (Is he compelled to cruelty by residual love for her? Was Oscar Wilde right in saying that “each man kills the thing he loves”?)

The Browning-Murphys stare. But Isadora is too gone with grief to give a damn. She races out the door after Josh, who has pulled the Silver Nazi up to the Browning-Murphys' door and is now climbing back into the Land Cruiser.

“Don't go,” she pleads. The Silver Nazi trails wires and metal wreckage from underneath like a disemboweled warrior, but clearly Josh had driven it to where it now stands, so the damage cannot be lethal. Not so with her heart, which aches like a mortally wounded thing.

She runs to the Toyota as Josh slams the door. She opens it.

“Please stay,” she whimpers.

“I have to meet Wendy,” he says, twisting the knife. (Well, at least she knows the girl's name now.)

“Please,” she begs.

“No—”
he thunders, starting the motor.

Suddenly, and with no thought at all, Isadora runs in front of the Land Cruiser and throws herself down on the pavement. Whereupon Josh swerves around her and begins to drive off.

“Have you no pride?” he screams out the window—and with a roar and screech of tires, he is gone.

None, she thinks, lying on the cool pavement, none at all. The Browning-Murphys have watched this scene from their colonial driveway, but Isadora doesn't care at all. She's like a crazy person, the madwoman of Rocky Ridge, Connecticut, a beast that wants reason, pride, self-consciousness.

Why do men always mention pride? she thinks, still lying on the pavement. What is pride compared to love? What is pride compared to motherhood? What is pride compared to poetry? Pride is an invention of the devil, of the male ego, of the male demons. “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall,” it says in Proverbs. “From pride, vainglory, and hypocrisy; from envy, hatred, and malice, and all uncharitableness, good Lord deliver us,” it says in
The Book of Common Prayer.
And yet men always speak of pride when a love affair is ending. Christ and Buddha were not concerned with pride. Women are not concerned with pride. Demeter and Persephone were not concerned with pride. Nor am I, Nor am I, Nor am I, thinks Isadora.

Just then Murph comes out of his house and helps her up.

“Thanks,” says Isadora. “Thanks a lot.” She wonders why she cares so little at having humbled her supposedly famous self before these total strangers, but truly, she does not give a damn. There are times in life—great illness and pain, childbirth, the end of love, madness—when one simply does not give a hoot how the outside world perceives one.

Let them think me insane, Isadora muses. They probably do anyway. If people think writers crazy, might as well not disappoint. Besides, there is some freedom, after all, in having a scandalous reputation, no matter how ill deserved. “If your reputation is ruined—might as well have fun,” goes an old German proverb. If you can call throwing yourself in front of your ex-husband's car fun!

For years Isadora used to anguish about the disequilibrium between her reputation and her life. Now she's come to see a bizarre sort of liberty in it. Where is it written that we are meant to be understood in this world, except perhaps by a few close friends? Where is it written that true interpretation of our characters is our birthright? If we can count even half a dozen people who love and understand us, then we are truly blessed. For seven years Isadora had thought Josh to be chief among this half-dozen. She thought he knew that her extraordinary
mazel
still did not make her immune to pain; she thought he knew how much she needed him and the intimacy of family life—especially in the light of being notorious to the outside world. But alas, it turned out that even
he
envied her and saw her as invulnerable. She wanted the protection of his love, and he thought she needed no protection. Now, with a child to raise, she needed it more than ever. And now was when he elected to cop out for good.

(Had he
always
been this way—or had he changed? Had the birth of the baby made him petulant and perverse, moody and melancholic? She no longer knew. She no longer knew anything it seemed.)

Isadora climbs into her wounded QUlM, waves good-bye to the Browning-Murphys, and starts the car. The shattered chariot coughs and shudders as it starts up, but it runs. The Germans build amazingly invulnerable machines. If only they'd built
her.
I could use a little more invulnerability, Isadora thinks, driving back up Serpentine Hill Road to her house, passing Josh and Wendy and little carrot-topped Amanda on one of the curves.

“There's Mama!” Mandy shouts out the window as the cars pass each other.

Amanda is sitting on Wendy's lap, and Wendy is indeed a homely (and skinny) version of Isadora.

Isadora's heart contracts again. To be left for one's lesser, not one's better, is indeed a strange form of tribute. And to see one's child fondled by one's husband's girl friend is the final
coup de grâce.
Isadora had thought the child would forge a final and unbreakable link between them. Having delayed bearing for so long, she put a great symbolic weight upon that act. It was Isadora's proof of commitment, her proof of love, her statement of faith in family, her statement of faith in continuance. Now here was Josh, not even two whole seasons gone from the nest, mocking her with a pallid clone of herself: another small-nosed blonde, but this one not—thank god—a writer, nor notorious, nor even very pretty.

It always comes as a shock to accomplished women that their men leave them for
un
accomplished ones. They assume—wrongly —that what holds true for men will also hold true for them: that accomplishment will bring with it fame, fortune, and beautiful lovers (to paraphrase Freud). But alas, we often get just the reverse. All our accomplishment buys us in the love department is threatened men, soft cocks, abandonment. And we reel backward wondering why we worked so hard for professional glory, when personal happiness is the forfeiture we have to pay.

Isadora parks QUIM in her driveway, and goes into her house to cancel the tow truck. She is still shaking with fear and the accident still keeps replaying in her brain. After calling AAA again, she gives in to her tremors and pops a Valium from her much-reduced Divorce Pharmacopoeia. She'd smoke a joint if she had one—but Errol and Roland are her sources of supply and she'd just as soon contact neither of them. With all the men in her life, there isn't even one she'd really like to talk to now. But dope—dope is what she'd like to have. Instead, she goes to the fridge and pours herself a big glass of California white wine—a lovely Free-mark Abbey chardonnay she buys by the case.

Isadora hardly remembers a time in her life when she did so much drugs and booze. It seems her head is always a bit scrambled from dope, a bit woozy with booze. She seems to live in a time-trip of drugs, booze, and sex—in which she can hardly remember what she actually did, what she dreamed, and what she wrote once in a book. If I don't stop this, I'm going to become an alcoholic, Isadora thinks, gulping, not sipping, the white wine. (She can gulp the wine without a disapproving audience, because the nanny, having delivered Amanda to Josh, has been given the night off.)

Isadora herself disapproves of the drinking and drugs she's been doing—she who hitherto seemed to live long stretches of her life only to write—she, the arch-workaholic of the Western world. Many mornings, since splitting from Josh, Isadora has awakened after a motel night with Errol, or a random fuck with some man she had to get rid of at three A.M., and felt she was in the wrong novel—a novel not written by her, but by her friend Lola Benson, who has chronicled her own alcohol and drug addiction in several of her books.

“Christ—I'm in the wrong novel!” she'd say to herself, waking up. “I'm a Lola Benson character—not even one of my
own!”

And then she'd wonder whether this constant intoxication was to blot out the pain of divorce, or was a sort of midlife crisis she was having, a midcareer mind-fart, or else some insidious loss of drive triggered by the fact that her two greatest successes in life—Mandy's birth and the publication of
Tintoretto's Daughter
(a far better book than the one that had made her a “household word”) —had brought her, inexorably, the loss of Josh's love. Why bother to write beautiful books if you will only have to pay by losing the man you love? Oh, she was really in a bad way—turning forty, losing Josh, and having to face writing a book about her grandfather—all in the same rotten year.

To write, she thinks, oh to write. To cover a page with memories and dreams—even with scribble
scrabble-that
would bring a temporary truce between body and soul. To dream upon a page is in some sense to steel oneself against the blows the world deals. It is its own reward, and brings the blessings of peace even to the most troubled spirit. So upstairs she goes to her beautiful tree-house writing studio—the one she designed herself and had built with the royalties from
Tintoretto's Daughter
—and sits down at her immense oak desk to contemplate the mess of papers that litters it.

“Writing a novel does not become easier with practice,” Graham Greene says somewhere in his prefaces. And nothing could be more true. With each passing year, with each book and with growing reputation, comes greater and greater inhibition, not greater and greater freedom. One becomes more perfectionistic—and perfectionism is the enemy of art. Since art is essentially divine play, not dogged work, it often happens that as one becomes more professionally driven one also becomes less capriciously playful. Also, one becomes more cynical about the capacity of art to effect change. In hot youth, every writer believes that the word changes the world, but as the writer grows older, it becomes apparent that the world sometimes fails even to read the word, or if it reads, it deliberately fails to understand. Young writers believe that writing is a form of communication, but the middle-aged ones know that writing is merely a catalyst for people's reactions, and that these reactions, like reactions to drugs, are often paradoxical—not at all what one intended. Books do change the world, but in an indirect, not direct way. The whole creative process comes to seem more and more complex as the writer continues on her journey. One no longer writes with the gusto born of
“I'll show them!”
One writes instead for one's own intimate pleasures: the pleasure of getting some subtle state of mind on paper, the pleasure of using one's gifts with language, the pleasure of finding a shape for the amor phousness of life.