Parachutes and Kisses (32 page)

Kevin came back into the bedroom full of apologies.

“Don't apologize to me,” Isadora said. “Apologize to yourself. You're the injured party. Poor baby—Andrew got you right in the middle of a great come. Here—have a glass of wine.”

And she poured for him, then fed him a luscious strawberry to go with it.

Kevin took the wine, sipped it, and joined her on the bed.

“Kill the kid, I say,” Isadora laughed, but even as she made this comment, she worried if she was right to risk it.

Aha. Kevin looked slightly offended.

“Of course I'm kidding,” she said. “But
really,
darling, you shouldn't let him gobble up your life like that; it's not even good for him.”

“But I love him so much,” Kevin said, “and I see how he's suffering.”

“He'd suffer much less if you'd take less shit from him,” Isadora said. “I mean, who the hell am I to advise anyone about child-rearing? I'm scarcely what you'd call an infallible mother—but I
do
know from my own experience that we all tend to spoil the hell out of them because we're guilty about the divorces—and our guilt doesn't do them a damned bit of good.”

They didn't get into sex again that night, but they slept peacefully in each other's arms. They slept an almost marital sleep—without benefit of any anodyne other than a little wine.

They had left the bedroom curtains open, and in the morning Isadora opened her eyes to see the hemlock branches peacefully rustling at the windows in the dazzling sunlight. Isadora had always loved her house, had felt it a refuge from all the things in life she could not deal with—her notoriety, her detractors, fans who thought she was a long-lost mother—and now with Kevin there in bed with her, that feeling was restored. Not that she had not felt peaceful, at times, without the presence of a man. She had lain in bed on many mornings and been grateful for her solitude, grateful that the swain of the night before had left at dawn (or even that there had not
been
a swain of the night before)—but on this particular morning, the sense of coziness and peace was so great that Isadora could have given the sleeping man a kiss and gone upstairs to her office to confront the demons of her troublesome Papa novel.

She did, in fact, kiss him, and he stirred and wrapped his arms around her. And his legs. She could feel his erection against her, nudging her navel, seeking lower to find her cunt, and it seemed to her that he was more turned on than he had ever been, and so, suddenly, was she.

“My old flame,” he muttered. “Do you have any idea how I worshiped you in high school?”

“Worship me now,” she whispered.

“I do, I will,” he said, entering her.

They began to fuck slowly and gently with a kind of rocking motion that echoed through the waterbed. It was such sweet fucking—lacking in violence, but not in passion.

“You're yummy,” Isadora said, holding him.

“So are you,” said Kevin, giving himself totally to what was happening.

Suddenly, there was a crash in one of the rooms above them and the sounds of shrieking children.

“What's that?” Isadora asked, rolling out of Kevin's arms and leaping out of bed.

“Your daughter murdering my son,” said Kevin automatically.

Isadora really resented that. She saw blood behind her eyeballs. But, for the moment, she said nothing. Instead, she threw on her caftan, threw open the bedroom door, and charged up the stairs. There on the first landing she saw a sight she would never forget. She saw her little three-year-old Mandy sitting on bad-hat Andrew and trying to pummel him with her tiny fists.

Andrew was half amused by this, half annoyed. But Mandy was shrieking with real anger—and Mandy was not an angry child.

“What happened?” Isadora asked. “What on earth happened?”

“He hurted my camel,” Amanda screamed.

“I did not touch her camel,” yelled Andrew.

“Camelia—he hurted Camelia,” Mandy cried. Whereupon she ran into her mother's arms.

“Did you take Mandy's camel?” Isadora asked.

“I did not!” shouted Andrews.

“He taked it! He taked it!” protested Amanda.

“Did you, Andrew?”

“I did not!” the kid screamed.

Now Isadora was really livid. Of all the “aminals” Amanda possessed, Camelia was the most meaningful. She was the toy Amanda carried back and forth to Daddy's house, the toy she slept with, the toy whose job it was to get her through the divorce. She was her amulet (her camulet?), her guardian, her protector.

Isadora began a panicky search for Camelia, with a whimpering Amanda trailing behind her. While Andrew ran downstairs to seek refuge in his daddy, Isadora searched Mandy's room, finding four Paddington Bears (all sizes), two Miss Piggies, a Pooh Bear, a Garfield the Cat, a Tigger, a Piglet, a Basic Brown Bear, a giant Steif lion from F.A.O. Schwarz, any number of white mice, yellow chicks, pink pigs; a variety of unicorns in all sizes (dressed in doll clothes, for that was the way Amanda loved to play with them), a vast collection of Barbies—
The World According to Barbie,
Isadora called it—and horses for all the Barbies to ride—but absolutely no Camelia.

“Let's go up to the playroom,” Isadora said to Mandy.

“Carry me, Mama, carry me,” cried Mandy.

Isadora scooped the little girl up in her arms, covered her face with kisses, and started up the narrow steps to the playroom.

The playroom was a very special room to Isadora because when she had first bought the house, it had been her study. It was where she had written
Tintoretto's Daughter
while she was pregnant with Mandy, and it had low sloping eaves, punctured with bubble skylights, large picture windows at the sides, built-in desks and bookshelves, and carpeted platforms to sprawl on. All Isadora's books on sixteenth-century Venice were still up there—as were her old poetry books from college, her collection of Shakespeare, Chaucer, Marlowe, Donne, Ben Jonson, Shelley, Keats, and her very favorite nineteenth-century muse, that classical romanticist, that contradiction in terms—Byron. But scattered all over the floor were Mandy's toys, and Isadora's former desk was now covered with finger paints, oaktag, crayons, watercolors, and gaudy stickers of every sort imaginable. Isadora had long since moved to her tree-house studio. But she still liked this room better—its warmth, its coziness, the sweet memories of what she now considered the very best time in her life—the time she was carrying
Tintoretto's Daughter
in her brain and Amanda in her belly.

She looked down at the whimpering child in her arms. Amanda's beautiful face was contorted with grief as if she already knew the story of what had happened to Camelia.

“He hurted Camelia, Mommy. He hurted Camelia.”

“Where is Camelia, Amanda? Do you know?”

The child shook her head.

“Do you know, Amanda—answer me?” Isadora said this with all the urgency she might have felt if it were Chekarf who lay bleeding in a corner somewhere and he had to be found and rushed to the vet's.

“The playhouse,” Amanda conceded.

A yellow plastic playhouse stood in the middle of the room. It had clear vinyl windows, a green flap for a front door, and green vines climbing its plastic sides. Pink morning glories ascended to an imaginary sky above them. Inside the playhouse was a veritable Babi Yar of stuffed animals, thrown in at random as if into a mass grave. This was not Andrew's doing—but clearly what Isadora's eyes next beheld
was
his doing. Camelia had been disemboweled and now lay on the top of the pile of animals, spilling stuffing from her belly.

Isadora clutched the wounded Camelia to her bosom, feeling as wronged and as vulnerable as she had when she carried the mortally wounded Chekarf. Mandy was sobbing.

“Darling—we can sew Camelia up,” said Isadora. “We really can.” It occurred to her that this was something she could not have done for Chekarf.

“Let's go get the sewing box and sew Camelia up.”

Andrew and Kevin appeared in the playroom.

“Did you do this, Andrew?” Isadora asked.

The kid shifted from foot to foot and did not deny it.

“Say you're sorry, Andrew,” Kevin directed.

“I'm sorry,” said Andrew—but somehow that scarcely sufficed.

Isadora led the parade downstairs to the guest room, where the sewing box reposed, and sitting on the big brass guest bed (with Amanda beside her) she carefully put Camelia's innards back in place and began to stitch up her belly. Isadora was thinking of that recurrent scene in
Catch-
22
where Yossarian discovers the dark secret of the spilling guts, and she felt a little godlike to be able to make such magic for Amanda.

“See,” she said, “good as new.”

She was not an expert seamstress but Amanda didn't seem to care.

Kevin applauded as Isadora presented the amazingly healed camel to Amanda, but even as he did so, he and Isadora exchanged a look that said:
no more weekends with kids.

Andrew just stamped a sneakered foot and looked unrepentant. (There was still all of Sunday to be endured.)

Sunday proved exhausting but mayhem-free, and later that night, when Isadora and Mandy had driven Kevin and Andrew to the station for the end-of-weekend train back to the city, they had a bath, a story, and then their bedtime chat in Mandy's room.

“Do you have any sad thoughts or glad thoughts you want to share with me before you go to bed?” Isadora asked Amanda, who was clutching the miraculously healed Camelia.

Amanda lifted her hands to her eyes and said, “Bad dreams on both channels, Mommy.”

This was Amanda's shorthand for communicating fear when she woke up with scary dreams in the night.

“I know it, honey bunny,” her mother said. “But I think the bad dreams are going to go away now. And after all, you have Camelia a to protect you.”

There was a long pause.

“I hate Kevin,” Amanda finally said, “he's not my daddy.”

“Of course, he's not your daddy,” Isadora said, “And you don't have to love him—but you cannot say you hate him to his face, because it hurts his feelings.”

“He hurted
my
feelings,” said Amanda. Then she paused a minute, thought, clutched her camel, and said, “Can I say I hate him when he's not in the room?”

Isadora didn't know what to answer to that one. “I guess you can, darling, but not to his face.”

“Oh,” said Amanda, “I see.”

Isadora was not quite sure
she
did. But if Amanda understood this Alice-in-Wonderland logic, she supposed she understood it, too.

“I love you, I love you, I love you,” Isadora said.

“Leave my door cracked, Mommy,” said Amanda, clutching her camel.

“Okay,” said Isadora, getting up and starting to leave.

“I'll be in my office working, darling. Call if you need me. I'll come back and kiss you when you're asleep.”

But Amanda's shallow breathing revealed that she was already dropping off to sleep, so Isadora went back and kissed her right away.

The little girl, half into a dream, rolled her eyeballs upward under purplish lids and muttered, “Mommy.” Then she turned, kicked off her blankets, stuck her tush up into the air, and settled into a deep sleep. Isadora covered her again. She kicked off the blankets again. Isadora kissed her on her upraised tush, murmured her prayer to the Mother Goddess, and left the room. “Goddess bless and Goddess keep,” she said again. Then she added: “Help us make it through the winter and I promise I'll never ask for anything again.”

No answer was forthcoming from that moon-faced Mommy wearing her white wimple up above. She just sailed through the Connecticut skies in her eerie radiance, smiling benignly or sinis- terty—depending on your point of view.

“I take that back,” Isadora said, walking down the hall to her study. “I probably
will
ask for lots of things.”

Oh, she could tell she was definitely getting better.

Where are the snows of yester-year?

—FRANÇOIS VILLON
“Ballad
of
Old-Time
Ladies”

The way a crow Shook down on me The dust of snow From a hemlock tree Has given my heart A change of mood And saved some part Of a day I had rued.

—ROBERT FROST
“Dust of Snow”

BY Christmas, they had already had three major blizzards that year. Pipes froze. The driveway iced over. Many mornings, Isadora would look out at the deck and find the hot-tub lid piled high with snow and the hemlock branches dangling icicles. Great gobs of snow slid off the skylights. The furnace conked out and the telephones went on the blink with great regularity.

It was a tribute to the depths of connection between Isadora and Kevin that they kept on seeing each other through this siege. Sometimes he would come up on a Friday night despite the fact that the trains were late or canceled, and Isadora had to call the local driver service to get a jeep to fetch him at the train because she could not get up her driveway.

Her driveway was, anyway, a nightmare. It seemed to have a life (and a
Geist)
of its own. It was possessed. It had, after all, taken Chekarf's life. And it seemed to want more blood. Whenever Nurse Librium drove Mandy to school, Isadora worried that the driveway, not being content with Chekarf as a sacrifice, would try to take Mandy, too. She had suffered so many losses in the last year—Papa, Chekarf, Josh—that she could not believe there were not more to come. If she had been a horror novelist, she would have written a novel about her driveway and how it got to be so bloodthirsty. Was it something in the asphalt perhaps, some dark ingredient—like the bones of an unavenged murdered innocent? Was it the karmic legacy of the builder, who had had the poor judgment to perch this house on a ledge of rock overlooking a beautiful river valley, but then had not even bothered to face the upper-story windows onto the view? Only the lower floors faced the view, and Isadora was always dreaming of building picture windows in the playroom and transforming it into her bedroom.