Parachutes and Kisses (19 page)

“Shall I do an article for
Cosmo
called ‘The Lady Chatterley Complex'?” Isadora asked Renata Loomis, when they were arranging weekend plans one Tuesday morning.

“I think what you have is the Stella Kowalski Complex,” Renata said drolly. And it was true. Sometimes weeks went by without Isadora going out with anyone who could pick up the dinner tab —or who even
owned
a suit. She listened patiently to other divorced women tell her tales of woe about how they never met any men, and she tried to explain to them that they
did,
they did meet
plenty
of men, but they just weren't
looking.
Or they were looking in the wrong place—at the man's wallet, when they should have been looking steadily and only at his cock (and of course at his heart—for a big cock is no good without a generous heart).

It was Isadora's theory that given the fact that men were not going to support women anymore (since women had opted to support themselves, and quite often their kids), women might as well get the one thing men were really good for—sex. Or perhaps the two things they were really good for: sex and protectiveness.

“We'll all become like lionesses eventually,” Isadora theorized to Renata. “We'll feed the cubs and take care of the lair and basically choose our lions for their potency and their fierceness in defending the pride.”

“Then liberation leads right back to the cave?” Renata asked. “I think you have an article there.”

“Yeah, for the
National Review,”
said Isadora.

Renata laughed. “No, it's more one of those self-righteous Lance Morrow fulminations for
Time
magazine—the kind with a portentous title like ‘Does Liberation Lead Back to the Cave?' and a scolding tone which implies that the author has cornered the market on morality.”

“Let's write it,” Isadora said, and then, in pear-shaped tones, she chanted: “
‘Women today are facing a terrible truth. Having liberated themselves right off their pedestals and out of the Küche and Kirche,

they now wonder who will support the Kinder?‘
Of course, the article will imply that it serves us all right, that if only we obeyed our biological imperative to stay home and crochet doilies, none of this would ever have happened.“

“So who's the lucky man this weekend?” Renata asked.

Isadora was perplexed. Errol was the most
gemütlich
stud of all —but she could hardly stand Errol for a whole weekend. Roland would get her so stoned, her brain cells would atrophy forever (he had psilocybin mushrooms “on hold” in his freezer awaiting some catatonic country weekend), and the rabbi would just depress the hell out of her with his bow ties and bon mots. Maybe she should leave the weekend open and see what turned up (to coin a phrase). Or maybe she should make an insurance date that could be hastily canceled if something better came along. The one thing to be avoided like the plague was being alone after the sun went down. Oh, she could stand her house in the daylight hours, but at night it was horrendously lonely.

“I don't know, Renata, maybe we should put off the weekend decision ‘til Wednesday ...” (Was it true—or did it only seem so, that separated and divorced people spent ninety percent of their time arranging to get laid, while coupled people had time to work?)

Just then, little red-headed Mandy skipped into Renata's office. Mandy was three; a drop of drool still trembled on her lower lip, though her vocabulary sometimes made you think she was five. At that point, Mandy was entranced with the myth of Sleeping Beauty. She had Isadora read it over and over again, night after night. Against all Isadora's feminist wishes, Mandy loved best of all the place in the story where the Prince kisses the sleeping girl and she awakens.

“Read ‘Sleeping Beauty,' Mama, read ‘Sleeping Beauty,' read ‘Sleeping Beauty' ...” Mandy said, unable, like her mother, to say anything just once.

“Darting—we're working,” Isadora said. (She said this because she and Renata were in the office, though she knew perfectly well they were not really working at all. What
were
they doing? Trying to tread water emotionally, trying to preserve Isadora's sanity until the next book came along, trying to banish the headaches, the fears, the loneliness, while Isadora waited to become a functioning professional writer again?)

“Read ‘Sleeping Beauty,' Mama,” Amanda insisted, in that insistent way three-year-olds have—and Isadora, knowing she wasn't really working, and probably wouldn't today—and adoring her daughter above all others, allowed the little girl to drag her by the hand into her playroom, where she produced, in her fat little hands, the gorgeously illustrated Walt Disney version of “Sleeping Beauty.”

Dutifully, Isadora read. She read of the spinning wheel, the curse, the slumber.

“Where are the dwarfs?” Mandy asked, having confused the legend of Sleeping Beauty with the legend of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. (Isadora confused them herself—for the elements in both stories were astonishingly similar: hexed by an aging hag in one case—and an aging beauty in another—the lovely, pubescent innocent slumbered, awaiting release by a prince who recognized her dormant charms. Are women most beautiful when they are asleep—like children?)

Mandy listened, rapt, while her mother read this most ancient of tales. The girl slept, in all her unconscious beauty—as a three-year-old, her lip trembling with spittle, is unconscious of her own transcendent mauve-lidded splendor. Mandy sucked on one dawn-colored finger. Her eyes downcast beneath those opalescent lids, she dreamed of that absent prince—Daddy?—who would come to her and awaken her passions. Ah—the absent male! How we women, three and thirty, five and fifty, long for him to come and make all things right! As Isadora read, she thought of her sexual escapades of the last few months—the yearning for the Prince underlying all that random promiscuity. And who is that Prince? Daddy? For we know that no one will come and make the world all right. Princes are temporary; we have ourselves and our own souls for good and all.

And so she had reached the final paragraph:

Mandy absorbed it and sat and thought. Her purple eyelids flickered as the intelligent blue-gray eyes moved beneath them. She took in the myth, the memories, the mother-daughter flashes that passed between them. Isadora had the sense that she would like to impart to Mandy all that she had learned about men and herself in four decades—but she knew it was impossible. Even if she
herself
had been clear about her life—and her life, it sometimes seemed, had never been more murky—she knew that she could not impart that putative clarity to Mandy. “A woman of great clarity,” the Laureate had called her. Hah. She was as ruled by her cunt as she'd ever been, as subject to the whims of the chthonic deities as Medea. Oh, to be Athena, not Aphrodite! Oh, to be cool and passionless, mathematical, not ruled by her raging blood.

Mandy looks up, fixes her mother in her blue-gray gaze and says, with perfect clarity:

“Mama—what if the Prince
doesn't
come?”

Isadora thought and thought. She knew that this line would be her mother-daughter epitaph. Mandy would remember it on the analyst's couch—if they still had those in 1998—and she herself would remember it forever and ever, even perhaps in the afterlife to come.

“Well then, darling, she just kisses herself and wakes
herself
up.”

Mandy seems astonished, but she believes.

“That's right, my darling. If no one's there to hug her, she hugs herself, and then she gets up and goes back to work.”

Whereupon Isadora hugged her daughter and went back to work—or at least back into her office to arrange the rest of her princeless week.

If there were no princes, then Isadora would just sop up her princelessness with sex. She would try every spindle in the kingdom! She would try and try until, at last, she found the magic one or the lethal one, or the one that caused forgetfulness, unless perhaps those three were all really the same.

Why is there no fairy tale about the search for the magic spindle? Isadora lived that quest during the month following the accident. She would vow to work, vow to put nose to grindstone, pen to paper—but as dusk fell over Serpentine Hill Road, she found the melancholy overwhelming and she found herself flipping through her datebook for even the most hastily scrawled male phone numbers. Inevitably, she'd invite someone for drinks, or dinner, or she would drive on out, down the winding country road, to meet some swain at a dive in Westport, a diner in Norwalk, or a railway-depot joint somewhere along Conrail's bumpy, unreliable route.

Quite often these encounters led to bed, bed in some fusty motel along the Post Road, or bed, once Mandy was safely asleep, in Isadora's king-size waterbed, with a man who'd be asked to leave before dawn dyed the Connecticut hills the color of fuchsined water in some recollected apothecary jar, standing in the window of some recollected Madison Avenue pharmacy of the fifties—these were now mostly vanished in the high-priced Madison Avenue of the eighties—where there were marvelous marble lunch counters, gaudy high-gloss Revlon lipstick posters, and the most luscious BLTs on earth. The hemlocks outside the picture windows seemed dark cutouts against the magenta dawn when a rather stoned and shaky Isadora got up to let the swain in question —or the questionable swain—out.
Exeunt omnes
through the sliding glass door that led from Isadora's bedroom to the redwood decks that surrounded her rustic Connecticut home. “Lanai doors,” they call them in California—which sounds for all the world like an obscene anagram.

She was always glad when the gentleman left (on the pretext, of course, of Mandy's mental health). She would run upstairs in her bare feet to check on her sleeping daughter—sleeping beauty—as if somehow the sexuality downstairs might have penetrated the girl's dream, corrupting her virginity. Then she would mutter her little prayer to the Mother Goddess—“Goddess bless and Goddess keep”—and run back downstairs to luxuriate alone in her big bed until it was time to get up and make breakfast for the sleeping princess.

During the first months of the separation, breakfast was always hot oatmeal (Irish oatmeal, if possible) and there was always a fire in the dining-room fireplace. Isadora felt that if somehow she could just hold on—keep the homefires burning, hot oatmeal in the pot, and no visible (or audible) gentlemen callers in her bedroom, then she and Mandy would make it through the winter.

Some mornings, she stomped out to the woodpile in flannel nightgown, snow boots, down parka, to shlep wood into the house before her kid and the nanny stirred. This seemed essential somehow—the fire in the hearth, the oatmeal in the pot, the dining-room table bare of any traces of the swain the night before. (No scumbled crumbs of weed, no white powder, no single-edged razor blades, no Zig-Zag nor Big Bambu.) Womanhood suddenly seemed simpler to Isadora than ever before: it was merely a matter of keeping the flame, of keeping the oatmeal hot, of toting the wood (even, on occasion, of chopping it), while her daughter slumbered serene as Princess Aurora, aka Briar Rose. (Aurora for the color of her cheeks—and briar for the hedge she would need around her roses to get through this man's world unscathed.)

And what did Isadora learn of magic spindles during this period of her life? She learned that very few provide magic or even forgetfulness, except for the littlest of whiles. She learned that not only is the Prince not coming—but often he can't even get it up. She learned that cocks differ widely from man to man—some curl seductively forward; some lean reticently back; some take the world by storm; others insinuate themselves gradually like coun terspies. Some are pink, some red, some yellow, some brown, some black. Some are veined like lunar maps; some are smooth as pink marzipan pigs; some leak before they spout, and some refuse to spout at all (because their owners are so preoccupied with the presumed demandingness of feminist pussy that they cannot squirt at all—but, alas, must stay painfully priapic forever). But despite all the variations in cock, one thing remains constant: you cannot love a cock if you do not like its owner.

Oh, you can like it well enough—well enough to spasm once or twice, before rolling over and wishing the man astrally transported out of your bedroom, but you cannot clutch it, love it, trust it with your pussy, squeeze it between your labia like a miser squeezing a gold coin, rub it against your clit like a lump of butter against a bumpy bundt pan. No—you cannot really love a cock if its owner is about to speak up momentarily and say something dumb, if he is about to dub you “a woman of warmth and nuance,” or “an adequate protagonist,” or “a woman of great clarity.” Isadora found, finally, that she could not love a cock that did not have a sense of humor, that had not read Shakespeare, that regarded pussy as a creature to be humbled—or still worse, a creature to be feared. The sorts of sexual disaster endemic to the age of (supposed) sexual liberation were far worse than any of the disasters Isadora had known in the fumbling fifties—a decade that, thanks to the absence of reliable birth control and the prevalence of puritanical social mores, had brought the art of mutual masturbation to a degree of sophistication and ingenuity unequalled in any decade since. One almost felt that kids today were
missing
something in not having to fumble so ingeniously, being, as they were, allowed to fuck fiercely from the first.