Parachutes and Kisses (30 page)

“Would you like a drink?” Isadora asked Kevin. “Then possibly a hot tub?”

“First let's dance,” said Kevin, gathering her into his arms and singing along with “Nat,” who was halfway through “Mona Lisa.”

Sweet Kevin had a nice voice and an even nicer touch.

“Am I the lady with the secret smile?” Isadora asked.

“Not so secret,” Kevin said.

They drank, smoked dope, tubbed, and went, predictably, to bed. The stars had been very clear above the hot tub, and the hemlock branches swayed to reveal a gibbous moon. In the hot tub, Kevin revealed a prodigious erection. They were already nude and stoned, so why not go to bed? That was why dope and divorce went together so invariably. You never knew who you'd have to sleep with—so it was good to have dope on hand lest he proved unappealing. Oh, this was a world we could not have predicted in high school!

Once in bed, Isadora panicked slightly about the possibility of having a relapse of her pounding headaches, or of discovering Kevin to be, like so many of her early suitors, impotent.

He was nervous, too. Whoever supposed that the so-called “sexual revolution” would so change human nature as to eliminate nervousness?

“Do you like my body?” he suddenly asked.

She wondered if he was joking—the vulnerability of the remark was so unexpected.

“Of course,” she said. He had a nice body—hairy, muscular, with a long thin cock that stood up at a respectable angle. “Your body is lovely,” she said.

He made love slowly and gently, trying desperately to satisfy her —but not enough to satisfy himself. His mind appeared to be working overtime as well as his body. And in fact that was his problem, for he seemed, after hours of fucking, to be unable to come. She had the distinct feeling that he was laboring over her rather than pleasuring her.

Vaguely, because she was so stoned, Isadora wondered if
she
was doing something wrong. Going to bed with new men was never quite what it was touted to be.

“It's not you,” Kevin said, shaking that silvery mop of hair. “I just can't give myself the pleasure of coming.”

“Are you sure I'm not doing anything that upsets you?” she asked.

“No, no. I promise you. It's
my
problem.”

So they fucked and fucked and Isadora came and came, but Kevin seemed to arrive just at the point of coming and then stop himself.

“Next time will be better,” she said, reassuringly, like a man comforting a girl who can't come.

Well, add this one to
The Divorced Woman's Book of Etiquette,
Isadora thought. What's the proper thing to say to a man who can't come? What do you say, for that matter, to a man who can't get it up (but whom you wish to encourage)? This was certainly Isadora's year for learning about strange situations that required an entire new lexicon of social behavior. Actually it intrigued her. Always, because of the books she had written, people had presumed her to be extremely knowledgeable about men, but, in truth, her experiences, prior to this
Wanderjahr,
had been rather limited. (Or else they were the experiences of adolescent and young womanhood rather than the experiences of womanhood). At long last she was
really
beginning to understand the varieties of sexual experiences, the fears of the male sex, the way that every man sees his daddy's penis, looming, as it were, over his head as he goes to bed with a new woman.

“You're a wonderful lover, Kevin,” she said to the gentle face in the waterbed next to her, and she meant it. “You care so much. Maybe you care too much ... that's the trouble. You should just let go and be an
animal.”

“Grr,” he growled, but with far too much restraint.

“Grrrrrrrrrr,” she growled emphatically. “Really let it out and
growl.”

“Grrrr ...” he went.

“Louder,” she urged.

“Grrrrrrr,” Kevin growled.

“You're holding back.”

“Grrrrrr.”

“You know what the trouble with you is, Kevin?”

“No, what?”

“If you
really
let out all the growls in you, women all over the isle of Manhattan would keel over from sheer ecstasy.”

Kevin laughed. “Do you really think so?”

“I
know
it. Just let it all out and
growl.”

“Grr. Grr. Grrr,” Kevin went spasmodically.

“You know what, Kevin?”

“What?”

“You should be a male chauvinist pig and just fuck your brains out for your own pleasure. Don't worry about me. Be
in
considerate. Make love like a gorilla. Like John Wayne. Like Superman before he had his consciousness raised. Forget about my pleasure and just be a
beast.”

“I'm going to report you to
Ms.
magazine,” he said.

 

Kevin didn't manage to let out all his grrs that weekend, but they had a wonderful time anyway. They danced to old Nat “King” Cole records, reminisced about the fatal fifties, drove verbal stakes through their ex-spouses' hearts.

There was something so
cozy
about their budding relationship. They made eggs together in the kitchen as though they had been doing it for decades. They were so considerate of each other. Both wounded by the divorce Olympics, both wondering how on earth they got to be adolescents again at nearly forty, they handled each other with overabundant generosity and kindness.

Isadora had come to believe, anyway, that kindness was the oil that made the gears of life move smoothly: that every human thing that went well in this world did so only because of kindness, that kindness prevailed and conquered where psychoanalytic interpretations were just irritants.

Of course, it was important to
know thyself
(to know one's friends and lovers, too), but, when all was said and done, kindness went much farther than anything in keeping the human race civilized. “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you” seemed as good a way to run your life as any.

Were these the lessons of middle age? Probably. Mellowness was the great unexpected blessing of middle age. Not that Isadora was
always
mellow. She still suffered from superabundant
spilkes.
(She often thought, in fact, that she would call her autobiography
Spilkes: The Story of My Life.)
She could never leave well enough alone. If she was happy, she wondered
why;
if she was unhappy, she sought to blame and change and rearrange. She sometimes thought she didn't so much live as
gobble
her way through the world. She could do nothing by halves. She loved desperately and hated desperately. She was wildly horny, wildly hungry, wildly extravagant, wildly workaholic. She loved her child to distraction, her men to the point of obsession. When she wrote, she wanted to write all the time. When she fucked, she wanted to fuck all the time. Moderation was the only thing she couldn't seem to master.

But from time to time, she would have an inkling of the moderation middle age brings with it, and she loved this feeling. From time to time, she would stand back from herself and laugh. She would count her blessings instead of her curses. She would glimpse true detachment as the Zen masters know it.

Kevin inspired this feeling in her more than anyone. He seemed to have the power to make her feel calm. Oh, clearly he had his own problems. He was stalled in his life, stalled in his career. He was jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none-now doing voiceovers for commercials, now selling advertising time, now trying to promote his own paintings, now giving up painting and wanting to start an art gallery. But, though his life had its setbacks, he was able to nurture other people's lives to an extraordinary degree. He was generous; he was kind—with everybody but himself—and Isadora was determined (like that Mailer hero in “The Time of Her Time”) to make him come. We certainly have come a long way since the fifties, Isadora thought—a longer way than just three decades would seem to justify. In the fifties, the women couldn't come; in the eighties—Goddess help us—it's the
men!

Almost immediately, Isadora and Kevin fell into a comfortable relationship. They talked on the phone every night before bed. They compared notes about the atrocities of their ex-es. They commiserated about fights over childcare, over money, over the division of property. They supported each other. They analyzed and rationalized. They felt almost married, yet clearly they were not married. They were friends and they also were lovers. The lovely thing about middle age was that you could easily be both.

The following weekend, Kevin arrived with his son. This was the acid test—bringing the kids together.

Isadora was really nervous as she drove to the Westport station on Friday evening with Amanda in the backseat of the Mercedes. Amanda had insisted on going to the train station; she was curious about the weekend guests. She clearly knew something was up, because Isadora had never
had
weekend guests with Amanda around before.

It was Christmas time—the loneliest time of the year for divorced people. Main Street in Westport was strung with tacky lights. The bars near the railroad station were full of weary was sailers who dreaded going home. What a town this was to be divorced in! The men went to the city all day and the women shopped. Alcoholism and genteel drug addiction were rampant. People were too idle, too rich, and yet at the same time much too pressured. They lived their lives under hideous stress. But not the stress of fighting saber-toothed tigers or slaying fire-breathing dragons. Rather, it was the stress of having not
enough
dragons to slay—or else the dragons of tax audits and adulterous discoveries, the dragons of anorexic children, alcoholic wives—modern dragons lacking in any kind of magic.

Isadora pulled up at the train station about ten minutes before the train came in. She had always loved this Friday-night ritual, loved watching people come off the train and trying to figure out who belonged to whom and what their stories were. That young man—was he the son of that woman, or her lover? That gray-faced, jowly older party—was he in deep shit with the IRS or merely suffering from “gasid indigestion” as the admen so charmingly put it. That lady with too much rouge and spike heels she can hardly walk in—is she somebody's sluttish maiden aunt, the Blanche du Bois of Darien, or is she the new nanny, who will soon be found to have a drinking habit and will have to go?

But this time, as Isadora circled the station, she saw a sight that made her blood run cold: she saw Josh in his Datsun waiting for the same train.

Fortunately, she spotted him before Amanda did (or before he spotted her, for that matter). She stepped on the gas and floored it, then tore away to the very end of the railroad platform, where she screeched on the brakes and sat trembling, waiting for the train to come.

The sight of Josh still made her quake all over—with longing and with rage. She was that connected to him, that connected to the marriage. Their little bundle of DNA sat babbling in the backseat—and there they were in different cars, waiting for different lovers. It made no sense. They were man and wife, one flesh, one dream. What on earth were they doing this for? What were they trying to prove? What contemporary myth were they enacting? What contemporary torment?

The commuter train arrived like a noisy cyclops, lancing the station with its beam. It stopped and began disgorging passengers onto the platform. Isadora was waiting so far down that she couldn't see
her
passengers because she was so intent on not seeing Josh's. It was probably the old school friend—Ms. Emanon—but Isadora wanted to neither see nor be seen.

The station ritual is a brief one: the cars draw up for a little while, hover expectantly, then drive off one by one carrying their human cargoes. The cargoes are pink in this part of the world and wear trenchcoats. In other continents they are black, or ocher or yellow or brown. But probably the ritual is the same. Waiting for the train, one wonders. One wonders about the person one is waiting for. Is he
worth
waiting for? Is he as nice-looking as one remembers, or is he a beast? Is he really good-hearted, or only pretending to be? Could one be better spending one's time doing something else?

The cars had pulled away by now and Isadora was still down at the very end of the platform. She swung QUIM around and headed back, sure that the black Datsun must be gone by now.

Suddenly she saw Kevin waving his arms and followed by a very small boy of seven or eight who had a hateful expression on his face and carried a fluorescent backpack and a
Star Wars
sleeping bag.

“Oh, those must be your new friends, Andrew and Kevin,” Isadora said to Amanda, pointing out the little boy and his father. Amanda didn't seem convinced. Neither was Isadora.

You could tell at almost first glance that the kid was, as Bemel man's Madeline so quaintly puts it: a bad hat. He had a sour expression and his face was sallow and mean. He looked like the kind of kid who tears the wings off dragonflies and the limbs off daddy longlegses. His father's face was as smily as his face was sour. Kevin looked as if he were sunnier than usual to compensate for the sullenness of Andrew.

“Hello! Hello!” he said, waving a brown Borsalino hat and carrying an attaché case which bulged with extra shirts and extra socks. “This must be Amanda.”

“I hate him,” Amanda said, at once, pointing to Kevin. “He's
not
my daddy.”

 

That was how the weekend began and that was how the weekend progressed. The kids hated each other at first sight. Andrew greeted Amanda by bashing her on the head with his fluorescent backpack, and Amanda responded, appropriately, by saying, “I hate you.”