Parachutes and Kisses (17 page)

“How about dinner, doll?” says Ralph.

“I can‘t,” says Isadora. “A previous engagement.” The engagement with her dead grandfather, of course.

“Don't say I never asked,” says Ralph, clearly offended.

“Ralph, I'd
love
to see you—but I just can't tonight.”

“Okay, babe, catch you again.”

When this phone call is over, Isadora is thrown back on her own resources. She reads the beginning of her book over and over, but through the white sheet all she can see is the accident. Here she is, alone—but for Dogstoyevsky—in the house she and Josh bought to be their ivory tower, their retreat from the world, their castle. It is a beautiful house, but haunted.

The sky has changed from the blinding blue of October to the grayish autumnal color of November. The light begins to fade by four. Having decided to go it alone tonight and devote herself to her book and her ghosts, Isadora is suddenly devastated by loneliness. Her child is with Josh and his girl friend. Her sweet Bichon Frisé only seems to remind her of the other dog she lost. In her heart, there is an emptiness so deep, it seems bottomless.

What a damnably lonely profession writing is! In order to do it, one must banish the world, and having banished it, one feels cosmically alone. Unless there is a mate who comes home at night-fall, a fellow artist to struggle with, a café to commingle in, one is alone with one's house and one's ghosts and the treacherous feeling that one does not really exist at all.

When the work goes well, one straddles the stars, leaps around the house as if the very lines of poetry or prose were tightropes and the writer a sort of rope dancer, a clown, an acrobat, working without a net and loving it. But when the work stops dead, there is only this loneliness. The writer is a vessel for the muse, and when nothing fills the vessel, the vessel wonders whether it exists at all.

Unable to write, Isadora polishes off the white wine. This only plummets her further into despair. She wanders around her own home like a lost soul, feeling abandoned, unwanted, unloved. Ten men could call her and she would still feel unloved when she put down the phone. Why is she so needy and lost? Can't she get through a night alone without a man? Or is it the country dusk, the wan autumnal light? Or is it the house she used to share with Josh?

Suddenly the phone rings again, and Isadora races to it, as if it were a life raft.

“I had a feelin' about you, lady,” says Errol, “a feelin' that you shouldn't be alone.” Damn, thinks Isadora—that Errol. A poet in his soul, which links with hers. Belatedly, she blurts out the whole story of the accident, and Errol, as sensitive to human needs as anyone she knows, insists that he will come over to hold her hand. This time Isadora is too spooked to resist.

She leaves the study, turning over the sheaf of scrawled pages, goes downstairs to let Dogstoyevsky into the dog run, and then wanders into her own bathroom to make her pre-erotic ablutions. They are elaborate: a diaphragm and jelly
over
the IUD she now wears (the former being a herpes and VD preventative; the latter having been installed after Mandy's birth in the hopes that it would be removed a year or so later so that the little one could have a sibling—but then, of course, the marriage was in the process of self-destructing). After putting in the diaphragm and jelly, she runs a bath with Opium bath silk and soaks in it to remove all taste of the jelly, and scent her thighs and cunt and breasts (Josh had, for years, refused to go down on her unless she'd washed elaborately and Isadora is still undoing Josh's various bad mag icks). After that, she douses herself with Opium—thighs, knees, elbows, neck, even the mundane dab-behind-the-ears, creams her legs with more Erno Lazlo goo, and makes up her face meticulously. Oh, let the diehards say that makeup is a compromise with feminist truth—Isadora loves it anyway. She's a born vagabond, a performer, a believer in appearance as well as essence—and even though she's never longed to strut the boards, she knows she's the star in the play of her life—that tragic-comedy, that mock epick, that
meiseh.

She dresses carefully—black lace underwear up—everything is designed to be ripped off later. For Errol's sake she wears a black T-shirt with rhinestones, black jeans, black cowboy boots with silver studs, black fringed cowboy jacket. She switches on the hot tub, puts more white wine in the fridge, tequila (his favorite booze) in the freezer, and bowls of taco chips on the dining-room table. (Her nod to his plebeian tastes.) Then she lights a fire in the dining-room fireplace, puts scented French candles around the living room and bedroom and goes to make a bowl of guacamole —his favorite hors d‘oeuvre.

These preparations delight her, as writing today did not. She feels womanly, erotic, wise, as if she were doing what nature intended, while, when she is writing, she is doing something vaguely sinful—not servicing men, but merely (“merely”!) her soul. This is another of Josh's legacies. When their love went bad, her writing, which he had previously adored, became the target of his rage. How unkind! He fell in love with her in part because she was a writer, but then he began to punish her for it. And all the years that Isadora has spent, pre-Josh, unlearning the female brainwashing that one must serve men above the muse, suddenly for nought. If I, with my success, with a child to support and raise, still feel that I must choose between writing and love—then what the hell must
other
women feel? Isadora wonders. Will we never be free, never? Is the wound to the self-esteem
that
deep? And yet these “womanly” tasks delight her. Preparing for a man's arrival proves one
has
a man. Isadora has several men—and yet in her center she is shaky as an unfledged sparrow in a windy nest, mouth open wide for the fat worm.

Dogstoyevsky barks. In the steep driveway, there's the sound of Errol's car. Isadora's heart leaps at his arrival—which suddenly banishes the autumnal spooks, the ghostly dusk, the lonelies, the grungies, the sads. People weren't meant to live alone, she thinks. Even in caves, they huddled. And she alone in her fifteen-room house, with all its extra wings for Josh's work, Josh's hobbies, Josh's offspring.

Errol appears, wearing pale-blue polyester jeans (his “dress” jeans—they are “western” stitched), a beige ten-gallon Stetson (with feathers in the band), and a pale-blue polyester “leisure” jacket with “western” stitching. The tips of his pointy cowboy boots curl sexually skyward from under his polyester jeans. He is tall—six foot six—stoops a bit in the manner of very tall men, and his myopic eyes (one blue, one brown) seem dilated behind amber-tinted aviator glasses. Errol is a doper. He could well be stoned, but tonight he seems less stoned than usual. He is so in love with Isadora that he makes little pacts with her not to use dope between their encounters, hoping to cure one addiction with another. Isadora understands this well, being an addictive type herself. Love, junk, booze, food, sex, sex, sex. “I'm a love junkie,” Isadora says to her best friends. “That's all there is to it.”

“Hello, lovely lady,” says lanky Errol. “I've missed you.”

And when he puts his arms around her to hug hello, Isadora can feel that his hands are shaking. Can he be afraid of me? she wonders. Of
me,
who is afraid of
everything
right now? It astounds Isadora that other people think of her as formidable and famous —when she feels so frightened inside.

“You're a goddess to me,” Errol says, looking down at five-foot-three-inch Isadora from the height of his six foot, six inches.

There is always an awkward moment with Errol when Isadora wonders what she, with her Phi Beta Kappa key, is doing with Errol and his high-school-equivalency degree—but not for long. Because pretty soon they are smoking dope, drinking tequila, and loading up a tray with guacamole, taco chips, tequila, lemon, salt and climbing the spiral stairs to Isadora's tree-house study.

There, on the pearl-gray carpeted floor, they tear off each other's clothes and begin to make love with a passion born as much of desperation and dope as of true conviction—though there is that, too. While Isadora's Papa novel lies abandoned on the desk, while foreign editions of
Tintoretto's
Daughter,
Candida Confesses,
and Isadora's other books glare gaudily down from the bookshelves that reach all the way to the thirty-foot ceiling, Errol buries his head between Isadora's legs and eats her as if all primordial truth and wisdom lay therein.

Isadora's brain, as usual, races. The accident, Josh, Amanda, her own efforts to write today, her grandfather's death, her uncertain future—all these things shift and glitter in her brain as if they were bits of glass in a shaken kaleidoscope. She sees herself making love to Errol as if from the top of the shelves where her books crouch, stalking her, predicting a future when this whole scene will
itself
be committed to a book and translated into various languages, bound in gaudy colors and sold for pesos, rupees, shekels, kroner, guilders, francs, pounds sterling, American dollars, Canadian dollars, yen, or lire. 0 book within a book! 0 self-begetting (as one scholar calls it) novel!

And yet that is not why she is here, nor yet why she is here with Errol. Isadora never does things specifically to write about them —nor does she write only about what she had done. The equation between her life and her art is far more subtle. It is as if she is constantly driven to desperate situations so as to have to prove her mettle again and again and again.
Look
—
I can work without a net
—her whole life seems to say. Here I am, a woman who has never grown scar tissue over her wound, and I exist to display the wound of womanness, or maybe just the wound of humanness, for all to see.

Let go, let go, let go, she commands herself now. Stop thinking. And as she does, she starts to come, weeping tears of gratitude to Errol for having taken her away from her book, her loneliness, her wound, at least for a little while.

He holds her in his arms.

“I love you, earthling Isadora,” Errol says; “on whatever level you want it, I can handle it.”

He says this last guilt-relieving sentence because he knows that she has always balked at his “I love yous”—being too wounded by Josh, too done in, too wary of love to ever say “I love you” back. And yet, in a way, she
does
love him, loves his straightforward love of her, loves his lack of pretense, his blue-collar macho, his assumption of female strength, his idealization of her motherhood. Working-class men often paradoxically seem less chauvinistic to Isadora than intellectuals, the bourgeoisie, the Wall Street middle-parters with their Ben Franklin glasses, the WASPocracy with their racquet clubs and their genteel racketeering. And why? Because blue-collar men are frankly matriarchal; they honor babes and moms; they know that women work and work damned hard; they do not
pretend
to be anything but cavemen. A blue-collar man never says to his woman: “Go ahead, fuck other men. It turns me on.” He says instead: “I'll kill anyone who touches you.” And there is more truth to human nature in that threat than in all the games intellectuals play. If Isadora has learned anything from this split with Josh, it is that lying to oneself about jealousy does not eradicate jealousy; it merely drives it underground, where it does more damage.

Now, in a sudden burst of playfulness, a desire to banish the ghost of Josh, the ghost of her grandfather, and the ghost of her unwritten book about him, she sticks her mischievous fingers into the guacamole bowl, covers Errol's cock with it, and begins, tanta lizingly, to lick it off. Errol moans and arches, groaning words of love and gratitude. Despite the dope, giving him head is one way Isadora can get him almost entirely hard.

“I love you, I love you, I love you,” he moans, and Isadora, relieved of having to speak sweet nothings in return by having a mouth full of cock and avocado, wonders what, in truth, she is doing here.
Does
she really love giving head, or does she better love the sense of power over a man giving great head provides? Does she want to win the Academy Award for blow jobs? Or is she linked to Errol in some special way that even she does not understand ? All of the above. The sense of skin on skin, the intimacy of genitals in each other's mouths does ease the pain of divorce, does affirm her being alive, after having come today so close to willful death. I fuck, therefore I am, thinks Isadora. I blow, therefore I am. It used to be: I write, therefore I am. But now it seems that writing only eradicates the self, and sex restores it. In midcareer, eight books on the shelf of her life, Isadora feels that each volume has been a sort of eraser that rubbed out a portion of her life. Sex brings it back; sex proves that she's palpitatingly alive; sex is, for the moment, what she exists for—giving and receiving pleasure in this most ephemeral of ways.

Errol is getting really hard now—Errol who has a back injury which he thinks prevents him from getting really hard, Errol who smokes so much dope that he should never be really hard—is getting hard as a rock.

“I want to be inside you,” he moans. “I
have
to be inside you.” And he climbs on top of her, all six foot, six inches of him, and thrusts away at her wet cunt until she weeps with pleasure. She comes once, twice, three times, says she's done, then comes again, realizing as she does that something is missing as a result of the accident—her headache! Perhaps it is her gratitude for the absence of pain that makes her gasp, “I love you” to Errol for the first, maybe the last, time. This brings tears to his eyes and such passion to his pelvis that he goes nearly wild fucking her, groans, trembles, shakes, and comes with a scream that would wake the household—if anyone were there but Dogstoyevsky, who through an oversight has been left in the dog run for over an hour and now barks mournfully asking to be let in. In all her satiated nakedness, Isadora gets up and does this now and the little dog scampers merrily after her into her studio, where Errol still lies on the gray carpet, utterly blissed out, utterly stoned. With a mischievousness that seems to mirror his mistress, the little Bichon (who resembles nothing so much as a dust mop crossed with a poodle) scampers playfully over to her lover, sniffs his cock, and, without hesitating, licks the remainder of the avocado off it. Errol groans, sighs, and thrashes his lanky legs.