Parachutes and Kisses (3 page)

QUIM, the Silver Nazi, shudders to a stop (not unlike her own most recent orgasm). The house lights are on. The replacement Bichon, Dogstoyevsky, who came into their lives when the next-to-last nanny—an insufferably bossy English girl—ran over Chekarf, yips and yaps from the rectangular stairwell window. Isadora loved Chekarf better, she's ashamed to admit. He had something of the mutt in him, and a Russian-Jewish soul. Dogstoyevsky is a Fairfield County goy, despite his hopeful name. Maybe she should have replaced Chekarf with an Airedale, or a German Shepherd, or—what Mandy wants most in all this world (except her daddy back)—a “Labradog.”

She opens the huge hand-hewn door with its rustic heart-shaped hardware and Dogstoyevsky jumps on her. What do separated people do without dogs? “Comfort me with Bichons,” she used to say to Josh in happier times.

She puts down her bag, throws off her big pink and magenta sweater (bought in Stockholm on a book tour), pulls off her purple cowboy boots, and starts her nightly ablutions. She is almost used to having the bedroom to herself, though it still spooks her sometimes, late at night. It took five weeks before she moved her evening gowns into the closet he vacated, six weeks before she moved her cosmetics to his sink, seven weeks before she dared to use the hot tub with another man (late one night when Mandy was asleep), and still she sleeps on her side of the waterbed, as if to leave room for him. She wants him back. But maybe not just yet. And not the way he is now—depressed, rejecting, seething with unspoken rage.

“Black
soap?” Woody Allen asked in
Annie Hall.
Isadora uses it, too—Dr. Lazlo's famous formula. Sea Mud soap at thirteen dollars a cake. Thorstein Veblen must be giggling in his grave. And what in heaven's name is “Sea Mud”? Primal ooze? The muck that trapped the dinosaurs? Beauty goop from the La Brea tar pits? Whatever it is, it has certainly helped her skin. Or maybe Errol has. After a night with him, she looks so
healthy
and her nipples tingle with hickies for days after.

But Errol could get to be a problem. Already, he is starting to say “I love you,” at odd moments in bed. Or does she delude herself? Errol is such a consummate cocksman that all the endearments he whispers in bed seem oddly
generalized-as
if applicable to
anyone:
to wit: “You're so beautiful.” “Your skin is so soft.” “I love your pussy.” “I love you wrapped around me.” “Oooo what you do to me.” “I can't get enough of you.”

Errol is a Connecticut legend. Long, lanky, with one brown eye and one blue, and dressed like the proverbial rhinestone cowboy, Errol's fame extends from Hartford to Old Greenwich. Isadora shares him with a friend—an unlikely friend to share a cock with, but then, truth is indeed always stranger than fiction. She shares him with Lola Birk Harvey—a Connecticut heiress from Greenwich, who lives on an immense estate on the Sound with her venture-capitalist husband, a stuffed shirt named Bruce.

Lola's hobby is adultery. She is a literary agent by profession, but never has had more than a few clients because her avocation is so time-consuming. Lola grew up in New York in the neighborhood of the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, within shouting distance of Le Cirque and the Sailboat Pond. Her father before her was a literary agent, Foster Birk—but she has run his business nearly into the ground because she doesn't care enough about making money. (On her mother's side, she inherited a bundle—and her husband is awfully rich, too.)

What Lola cares about is the art of adultery and she
knows
things Isadora never even
dreamed
about. Like how to meet men in Merritt Parkway commuter parking lots. Like how to require that they use rented cars. Like how to keep a collection of wigs in different colors so as never to be recognized. Like how to have a handbag big enough for wine and cheese and sexy underwear. Like how to keep a corkscrew and plastic champagne glasses secreted in the car.

Lola does things with style, even sex. She knows that sex is an art, not a science. She uses her prim and proper heiress exterior to great advantage. Nobody
thinks
Lola fucks, so Lola can always stalk her prey in her own sweet time. She has a long “lead time” (as they say in the magazine biz): lunches, dinners, brunches, cocktail dates in New York or Greenwich. And then, just when the guy is beginning to wonder why this cool, angular blonde keeps calling him, just when he starts to think she wants him to write the Great American Novel (an apparently universal fantasy in this country), blue-eyed Lola (who is forty, but looks thirty-five) leans over the cocktail table, touches her hand to his, and says, “Did I ever tell you how much you turn me on?”

“The guy is always amazed,” Lola reports. “Here I am—prim and proper Lola Harvey—seeming to make a pass. They never believe it. Never. Whereupon I continue with the line ‘When can we be alone together?' And then I stroke his thigh under the table —and, if it's dark enough—take the measure of his hard-on. Listen, Isadora, if he hasn't got one by now, forget it. And if he has, then I can decide whether or not it's worth it to set up a tryst.”

Isadora is amazed. Lola knows things about seducing men un-dreamt of in Isadora's supposedly sensual youth (“Hot Youth” as Byron called it). What on earth did she know then? Nothing. Sex at thirty-nine is better than ever. The only trouble is finding partners. Hah. Partners who aren't scared of famous women, aren't fame fuckers, or gold diggers, or daddy figures (who want to save you from yourself). How many times has Isadora heard the line “You've been my sexual fantasy for seven years—ever since I read ‘that book of yours,' ” and then gotten into bed only to discover the guy couldn't get it up? Who
wants
to be a sexual fantasy for seven years, Isadora thinks. How can sexual fantasy do other than disappoint?

“That book of hers” haunts her. Haunts her and blesses her both. On the one hand,
Candida Confesses
made her a “household word”—like Ajax or Vaseline. On the other, it bestowed upon her unsuspecting youth a strange sort of sexual smirch. Many people could see her only as the nymphomaniac of the literary world—when she is really (as her friends all know) a nice,
hamish
Jewish girl from Central Park West at heart.

And so she is home. She makes her reverse toilette, à la Dr. Lazlo, throws on a red flannel Lanz nightgown—a granny gown suitable only for manless nights—and tiptoes upstairs to see her daughter.

In a room as cluttered with stuffed animals (or “aminals,” as Amanda still says) as a toy store, a room full of exotic unicorns and dragons and dromedaries—as well as the more normal Poohs and Paddingtons and Miss Piggys—Amanda sleeps in a bright red toddler's bed, sleeps clutching her “transitional object,” a smallish stuffed camel she has named Camelia.

Camelia Camel was given to Amanda by one of Isadora's dearest friends in the world, her fairy godmother, Hope—Hope of the steel-gray hair, the voluminous tits, the melting voice, the gentle guidance in a world without guidelines. Hope, who midwifed Isadora's first book of poems almost a dozen years ago, is nearly sixty now. “It just gets better, darling,” she always tells Isadora when she expresses her fear of aging. “There are presents still to unwrap under the tree. It gets less frantic, darling—and you know what?”

“What?” Isadora asks.

“You stop thinking about sex all the time,” Hope says with a sly smile.

Somehow, Amanda knew at once that Hope was her fairy godmother, too. Given Hope's gift, she clutched the caramel-colored camel to her breast, dubbed her Camelia at once, and hasn't let go of her since. Oh, Amanda is one alliterative kid—a lover of language for language's sake just like her mom and dad, a maker of names, of portmanteau words like
Labradog.
Apparently she, too, was born under the Scribbling Star.

Goddess forbid, Isadora thinks—feeling that life is hard enough, and mother-daughter grief is grievous enough without both pursuing the same muse.

Her mother painted, still does in fact. So Isadora abandoned her brush for quill at age eighteen and never once looked back. Sometimes she longs to do a watercolor. She promises herself that when her novel-writing days are done, she'll break her pens, throw out her legal pads (no word processor for eighteenth-century Isadora, though she rents one for her secretary), and spend her dotage doing watercolors—like her old friend and mentor Kurt Hammer (once Guru of Big Sur, now mischievously haunting her from Writers' Heaven).

Amanda sleeps, Camelia in her arms. Amanda at three lives entirely in the moment, and worries not at all about whether she'll be a writer or painter—or even actress—which every actress and director Isadora knows has, in fact, predicted. She sleeps, her eyelids periwinkle blue, shading off to lavender-pink over the domes of her sight. Tendrils of red hair swirl about her cheeks; her strawberry bangs cling dewily to her high forehead; her cheeks are flushed with three-year-old dreams—dreams of dromedaries drowsily traversing dream deserts, dreams of “La bradogs” and dream dragons, of oneiric “aminals,” unicorns, griffins, Eeyores, Poohs, Kermit Frogs, and Mickey Mouses.

“Goddess bless and Goddess keep,” says Isadora—who, during her pregnancy, became convinced that God must be a woman. She takes all dogmas—even feminist—with many grains of salt, but it does seem to her that God must certainly have a female aspect, and she, mother of an only daughter, would rather pray to Her than Him.

God, of course, has no gender, or all gender—if you will. Yin and Yang, Shiva and Kali, Great Mother and Horned God, Christ and Mary, Moses and ... who? Alas, only the Jews have neglected Her totally. The religion of Isadora's birth leaves out women entirely. But she will compensate—silly as she feels uttering the words “Goddess bless”—yet also somehow
safe.

She kisses Amanda's flushed pink cheek. The child turns, lets out an unintelligible syllable, and curls into an almost fetal pose. Tenderly, as mothers do, Isadora covers up her daughter's toes. Tears spring from her eyes as she thinks of her half-fatherless little girl, the griefs of womanhood Amanda now knows nothing of, the griefs she caused her mother that Amanda doubtless will cause her, the betrayals, the abandonments by men-from father on—and the long journey to sanity a woman takes from birth to middle years.

She wishes Amanda at least that: to be saner at forty than at twenty. Some women go mad at forty, go into unending depressions, kill themselves, or wind up institutionalized for alcohol or dope, untapped talent, sealed-up rage. Isadora's gone the other way, saner now than ever, despite her grief. She has her work, her child, even though she rides her moods up and down like a seesaw, or a roller coaster. So what if she has no live-in man? No resident muse to inspire her, no best-friend-in-the-world, no constant comforter? She has a variety of part-time comforters, and right now she wants no permanent one. Maybe never. Marriage, which she has tried thrice, has thrice proved impossible. And maybe marriage is impossible in a world from which ceremony and convention have fled and only the great “I want, I want” is left.

Still, she weeps for Amanda, for herself, for her mother and her grandmother, for all her sisters—three by blood and millions by book—around the world. It is both blessing and curse to be born female, as Isadora knows by now. She also knows the vanity of bringing babies into a world armed to the skies with nuclear devices, a world where presidents get shot routinely on the evening news, where nobody knows what money means, whether love lasts, or how families can stay together long enough to grow up.

“Good night, Amanda. Good night, Camelia,” Isadora says.

And then she tucks herself in bed.

Alone.

When one subtracts from life infancy (which is vegetation), sleep, eating, and swilling—buttoning and unbuttoning—how much remains of downright existence? The summer of a dormouse.

-BYRON
Letters
&
Journals

The great thing about the dead, they make space.

—John UPDIKE
Rabbit Is Rich

Patch grief with proverbs.

-MIGUEL DE CERVANTES

WHEN did their present troubles begin? Have you ever noticed that the contemporary antihero or antiheroine always asks this early in the narrative, for there can be no story without troubles.

And the troubles are always the same. Perched as we are on the very ledge of doom, two minutes on the clock before nuclear devastation, we still cry about sex and death. We still moan about loves and moneys lost. We do not cry about the coming conflagration because we cannot even comprehend it.

The wars get worse each decade. Somewhere in the world, each moment, someone is already falling off the ledge of doom. Isadora listens to eighteenth-century music while she writes so as not to think of the stopped screams in Argentina, the starving babes in Africa, the tinderbox of the Middle East, the moaning of the hordes of India, the hands and heads lopped off in Islam.

When did her present troubles begin? Did they begin with the novel she published last fall, which, at last, made even her
enemies
grudgingly admit that she was a writer to be reckoned with? Oh, she had been notorious before, noticed before, but never without condescension. She began to publish poems in the sexy sixties, was seen on the cover of
Time
in the surly seventies, but always she was seen as a dame, a broad, the Marilyn Monroe or the Barbra Streisand of the book world, not so much a creator as a
persona,
not so much an artist as a
woman
artist. Of course, she began to make her way in the world when women were all the rage—as if an entire gender could go in and out of style. She wrote a book of poems called
Vaginal
Flowers when both vaginas and flowers were “in.” She was shocking when shocking was more important than anything, trendy when trendy was all there was to know, and female when female was hot. She had been good box office since the seventies—but not until her last novel (an historical epic of Venice and Venetian painters entitled
Tintoretto's Daughter)
was there anything like
respect
for the way she could write.