Parachutes and Kisses (29 page)

Isadora was mildly besieged at this party, despite the dim lights and the demonic trappings. A young journalist made lascivious advances; then an old mogul; then a middle-aged lawyer. Brokenhearted promiscuity breeds brokenhearted promiscuity. During this brief (yet seemingly interminable) period of her life, Isadora was so promiscuous that she had a why-the-hell-not attitude toward every male she met——and boy, could they tell! She'd try almost anyone
once.
But she was likely not to return their calls after that. She went through men as if she were going through the yellow pages, trying everyone's number, then hanging up without concluding a deal, so to speak. She thought herself fickle, heartless. Not true at all. She was merely heartsick, heart-weary, heart-worn. She wanted her heart never to get involved in fucking again —merely her cunt—though she knew in her sane moments that the best fucking comes when heart and cunt are one.

The old friend was the antidote to all this poisonous promiscuity. He approached her through a crowd of would-be suitors and he said, without novelty:

“Do you remember me?”

She did. Remembered the face, but not the name. It was a nice face, the face of an androgynous angel painted by Bronzino: golden skin, soulful hazel eyes, tousled salt-and-pepper hair which boyishly covered his forehead. He was small and wiry, and nattily dressed in a white tux of the thirties, and on his head he wore a pair of devilish red horns. They were made of long, slender extrusions of foam rubber and were attached to his forehead with spirit gum. From under his white tuxedo jacket projected a wicked red velvet tail. The outfit was riveting. The horns swayed in the breeze.

“My name is Kevin Karnofsky,” he said. “We went to high school together. I took you to hear Leadbelly in the Village during Christmas vacation in 1958.

Suddenly, she remembered. She remembered a slight fellow who used to hang around her parents' living room, never daring to make a pass. She remembered a guy who took her out several times and never even kissed her. She remembered no fumbling in the dark.

Now, even in the fifties, dear younger readers, there
was
sex. But Kevin had not discovered it. Or else he could only “do it” with low-class girls from the outlying boroughs. Isadora was too posh a princess, too much the Marjorie Morningstar in her family's triplex full of Oriental antiques and family art to be fumbled (or fumble-able) by the likes of Kevin Karnofsky from Brooklyn.

“Do you remember?” he asked again.

“I certainly do,” Isadora said, as hundreds of high-school memories flooded her brain. What a comforting idea—to go back to high school! To start all over, as it were, with a boy who represented a path not taken. To start all over and maybe get it right this time.

Banished were her first husband, her second husband, her third husband. Gone were all the fumblers in the dark of her parents' living room. Gone was Steve Applebaum who, when she was thirteen, had taught her the subtle art of mutual masturbation and unwittingly induced a massive case of
anorexia nervosa.
Gone was Ron Perkoff (whom she and her best friend, Pia, naturally called Jerkoff). Gone were the assorted Florentines of her twenty-third summer. Gone was Charlie Fielding, the conductor who loved his baton. Gone was Adrian Goodlove, the demonic lover of her Viennese summer (who had proved not only callous and cruel but impotent). Gone were the analysts she messed around with during her analytic phase. Gone was the despairing promiscuity of this past year. She would start again. She would, like Queen Victoria, be good.

“I remember that concert well,” Isadora said, “as if it were yesterday.”

He looked at her intently with those hazel eyes and something in her melted. What she had missed most that fall was a sense of family, a
mishpocheh
—and Kevin, though dimly remembered, represented that. No more strange beds, strange locutions, strange smells. She would go back to Music and Art and start again.

Ah, high school, when all possibility is trembling on the brink! Isadora remembered herself in high school—brash, talented, dying to stand out in a crowd, but also terrified and covering her terror with bravado—just like today! (Do we never grow up—not even at thirty-nine?) She suddenly felt an irrepressible desire to leave the party with Kevin, to drive him up to Connecticut and pamper him all weekend. Once on her own home turf, she was an expert seductress, but making the initial move still scared her. Besides, she had already committed herself to go home (or at least
out)
with the lascivious young journalist. What the hell, she thought. Life's too short to be ruined by such casual commitments. She excused herself from the crowd of would-be suitors, signaled to Kevin that she would return momentarily, and headed for the ladies' room.

It was a demonic ladies' room, done in smoked mirrors and flame-red silken drapes. In it, several hardworking ladies from the publishing world were powdering their shiny noses. This party was work, not fun, for most of the invitees—perhaps for Isadora, too.

After peeing and washing up, reapplying makeup and brushing her mane of blond hair, Isadora extracted one of her business cards from her purse (they were engraved Tiffany ones—ordered shortly after Isadora had made the fatal error of going to Tokyo on a lecture tour
without
business cards) and wrote upon it:

“Kevin, dear—if you can possibly have a drink with me after this fiasco, please stay and I'll try to shake the goon I'm promised to. If not, please swear you'll call me tomorrow? Love, Isadora White.” (She deliberately used her maiden name to trigger his nostalgia.)

Then she scrawled her phone number across the bottom of the card (which only bore her name and address), and hastened out of the ladies' lair to look for Kevin in the demonic gloom.

Since her metamorphosis into a “free woman,” these business cards had come in handier than they would have
even
in Tokyo. She would often go to a party with one man, meet someone else who interested her, and leave a little note for the new man on her engraved card. She had become brazen about it, scrawling such things as “You are beautiful—call me!” or “You, of all people, must have my unlisted number” or “Let's collaborate.” In her younger days, Isadora never would have dared so brash a stratagem. But by now she had a clear sense that her notoriety might be off-putting to men, and thirty-nine years of wooing and warring with the opposite sex had taught her so much about their vulnerabilities that she knew there wasn't a man in the world who didn't need encouragement—and plenty of it. If you could live without men—fine. You need never stoop to stratagems like this. You could be haughty and pure as you went to the movies with women friends and hugged your vibrator at night. But Isadora liked men, found them indispensable in the sack, and at thirty-nine she was resigned to treating them like the fragile sex—because she knew what all wise women know: they
are.

She spotted Kevin, sidled up to him, and slipped the scrawled card in his breast pocket.

This maneuver delighted her, titillated her, even amazed her, almost as though she were a character in one of those old romantic comedies where Cary Grant dispatches the waiter across the restaurant with a rose and a note and a magnum of vintage champagne.

Kevin was delighted, too. (Any guy who wore a “retro” tux would
have
to be.) He extracted the note from his pocket, perused it, looked at her, and beamed. His horns quaked.

He stuck one thumb up and gestured to her in that ancient Roman signal meaning: “Spare the gladiator.” She nodded, smiled, and went off to inform the young journalist about a sudden medical emergency that had arisen (her dog? her kid?) in frozen Connecticut.

She and Kevin met at the cloakroom and beat a hasty retreat. While they were walking down windy Third Avenue, in their black, white, and red getups, he turned to her and said:

“You're as beautiful as you were in high school—and you don't look much older either.”

Then he touched her cheek with the flat of his hand—in a gesture that was halfway between pat and stroke.

She felt protected, taken care of—all the things she had not felt with any of the men she had known this past fall.

“Do you want to pretend to deliberate by having a drink?” she asked. “Or do you want to come right home with me?”

“How do you suppose I'd answer that question?” Kevin asked. “My old love from high school inviting me home ... do you suppose I'd say no?”

“Well, good—because my kid is with her father this weekend ...”

“And my kid happens to be with his mother ...”

“So our weekends are already synchronized,” Isadora said. “Do you suppose that's an omen?” For she had often wondered at what point in a relationship between two divorced people they decided to synchronize their alternate weekends. What a great statement of commitment that was! She and Kevin would never have to make that awesome decision. They were
already
synchronized.

Isadora led the way to the stygian New York garage where she had QUlM parked.

She cashed in her ticket and was told “Twenny dollars” by a rather stoned-looking black garage attendant with one hoop earring in his left ear and a large scythe-shaped scar on his left cheek.

“Is that for the whole car, or just the hubcaps?” she asked.

“You funny, mama,” the dude said, not without a hint of menace.

Kevin laughed.

“You were always the funniest girl in high school,” he said.

“Was I?” Isadora asked incredulously. She remembered being so conscious of her various pubescent angsts that she hardly remembered her ability to make all her dates (and her girl friends) laugh uproariously. But Kevin reflected back to her all the nice things about herself that she had forgotten. The wanton humor, the emotional openhandedness. Even then she was too much of the naïf, trusting that her generosity would inspire the same in others—which it did not always accomplish. She gave and gave and gave—and often got socked in the teeth for it, but that did not make her stop giving. Was she a masochist or a poet? Or were the two interchangeable, perhaps?

“You were hilarious,” Kevin was saying just at the moment QUlM, the Silver Nazi, arrived above ground from the pit. Isadora saw Kevin's expression change slightly as he took in the fact that she drove this expensive German vehicle with vanity plates.

“Wow,” he said.

“Merely the official car of the S.S.,” she said. “Wait till you see my house. I even have crematoria.”

He laughed.

“No, not really, but I
do
have a sauna.”

They drove up to Connecticut. Or rather, Kevin drove. Isadora was still too acutely conscious of all the things Josh had accused her of—second fiddle, house husband, her supposed “domination” of him—to allow
herself
to drive a new man up to Connecticut, though she loved to drive.

Kevin drove very slowly. (Why have all the men in my life driven either too slowly or too fast? Isadora wondered. Is there no happy medium?) He also delighted in working the windows, the radio, delighted in switching the speakers from back to front, front to back, delighted in playing the tape deck.

Isadora navigated, reminisced about high school, and took in Kevin's profile and mannerisms of speech. She liked what she saw. A lovely aquiline nose with slightly flared nostrils, and a Brooklyn brogue that had a whiff of Damon Runyon about it.

Would she like sleeping with him? She didn't know. She had really taken a terrible chance inviting an unknown quantity like Kevin up for a whole weekend. How on earth would she get rid of him if he proved to be a total disaster? But somehow she wasn't worried. In the car with him, she felt rather as if they had been married for the last twenty-five years. She felt that they could move right in together and never feel the least discomfort.

“What are you thinking?” Kevin asked.

“I feel that we've been together for the last twenty-five years,” Isadora said.

“That's funny—I do, too,” said Kevin.

 

When, an hour and a half later, they arrived at the house in Connecticut, the calm feeling evaporated. There they were, alone (but for Dogstoyevsky, and one poor lonely goldfish) in Isadora's cavernous Connecticut house. There were no excuses. The kid was gone. The nanny was gone. Only Dogstoyevsky was there to express his disapproval by lifting his leg against the cedar barnboard molding and barking ferociously.

“He doesn't like new men,” Isadora said, running to get a paper towel to mop up the mess.

“How about the fish?” asked Kevin. “Does he like men?”

“Oh, yes,”, Isadora said, blotting up the floor, then getting up to feed the impossible wall-eyed creature. “But I hate him. I call him the guilt fish because he makes me feel so guilty. The damned animals are forever dying and having to be replaced before the kid gets back from school.... This fish is the legacy of the next-to-last nanny, Cicely—the same one who ran over my dog.”

“You should write a poem,” Kevin proposed, “like Browning: ‘My Last Nanny,' with apologies to Robert Browning.”

Isadora was charmed. Literary references always won her heart. Now, could he fuck?

Isadora had turned on the hot tub before leaving the house at four P.M. She also turned on the stereo now—choosing an old Nat “King” Cole record of the same vintage as her high-school years. She had actually planned to shanghai
some
one to come home with her—or else maybe even to come home alone. It was not unheard of. From time to time, she stayed alone in the isolated house, never really fearing robbers or ax murderers, but merely her own ghosts. This was her home, after all, and she felt physically safe here. Psychologically was another matter. The only danger was that the ghost of Chekarf might come to call, or the ghost of Grandpa Stoloff, or even the ghost of Josh (accompanied by the ghost of Virginia Woof, who had moved out with him).