Parachutes and Kisses (34 page)

Reluctantly, she got up from her snow-chaise, admired the wingless angel print her body had left in the snow, and went inside to find a copy of
Dubliners.

She turned to the last paragraph of “The Dead” and read that dazzling concluding passage.

She felt her scalp prickle as the White Goddess passed over her head, and she felt her heart race. This was the true test of literature and suddenly she wanted to be whole again so that she could experience it once more. It occurred to her then that she had not even been able to read a book since Josh's departure. Her concentration had been that fragmented, that frantic, and now this blizzard had given books back to her.

“Thank you for this,” she said to the Goddess above, knowing that without this snowstorm, she would not have confronted Josh's defection, nor her own inability to let go. If she could truly let go of him and take hold of herself and her work again, then even this pain would not have been useless.

“Thank you,” she said again with a nod toward that pinkly swirling sky.

The swamis and the gurus tell us that we draw to ourselves the lessons our souls require, and maybe the ending of this marriage was indeed a lesson she had drawn to herself to teach her soul to grow.

Tonight I am going to read a book, she said to herself resolutely. And she did. She reread
Dubliners.
She had come through another phase of the separation. She could read again.

 

Christmas arrived in due course, and Kevin announced that he wanted to spend it with her. (What had happened to the other girl friend, she did not know, nor did she inquire. Ironically enough, she and Kevin did not have the sort of intimacy which permitted her to inquire.)

The weather was cold and bitter on Christmas Eve and Kevin arrived in Westport with a large shopping bag of gifts, on a battered Conrail train where all the emerging passengers had large shopping bags of gifts.

The roads were so icy that Isadora skidded even in the Saab. Going to the station, she had just avoided plowing into a mailbox on Serpentine Hill Road. Returning to the house, she alternately slid on ice, skidded on sand—all the way home. She hated the icy roads more than anything. They made her feel so out of control and helpless about her life. She had fantasies of moving back to New York, the city of her birth—New York, where the traffic noises invaded her writing; New York, where the telephone rang nonstop; New York, where you wrote all day in a claustrophobic apartment and partied all night; New York, the city of overcom mitment and creative chaos; New York, where the air was always bubbling with ideas and inventions but where you were usually too pressed to sit down at a desk and do anything about them. In New York, Isadora had never been able to hear herself think. But since she wasn't writing much anyway, maybe she might as well go back to New York and have fun. It would have been easier to endure this year in New York than in freezing, solitary Connecticut, in the same house she and Josh had lived in together, with the sun going down at four o‘clock, and every beam, floorboard, and piece of furniture reminding her of Josh.

“How's New York?” she asked Kevin as they skidded along the roads, heading back to her house.

“Frantic,” he said. “It's good to be here. You know New York on Christmas Eve—the traffic doesn't move at all. The subways are jammed. Everything has an air of menace. At least here, it's peaceful.”

“I don't know whether you love me or love my house,” Isadora said.

That was a risky thing to say, because she and Kevin had never yet uttered the word
love
—even in bed.

“I love you,” Kevin said. “No contest.”

“I love you, too,” said Isadora.

They held hands and absorbed this news for a while as the car continued to skid all over the road.

“Love is skiddy,” said Isadora.

 

Back at the house, the Christmas tree in the dining room awaited decoration and Mandy was skipping about, hugging the healed Camelia. Nurse Librium had put on a record of Christmas carols and was singing along in a demented voice. (It was the first time in Isadora's memory that Librium had taken the initiative to do anything as social as put on a record. Usually, if asked to perform such an act, she would whine, “Now, I forgot. Where's that button that you push?” Nurse Librium avoided the simplest tasks by appearing brain-damaged and idiotic—but Isadora suspected her of being crazy like a fox. She had, for example, managed to procure autographed first editions of all Isadora's books for her relatives—though, she, herself, never read a line of anything—unless it was the
National Enquirer
or the
Star
—which really couldn't be called reading. Isadora loved these publications, though, and stole them from Librium to read on the can. They were perfect toilet reading—absolutely guaranteed to keep your brain in beta while your anus did the thinking.)

While Kevin unpacked (to the tune of Mandy ceaselessly repeating “I hate him—he's not my daddy”), Isadora made martinis.

What a middle-aged drink, she thought while mixing them. Her parents drank martinis and Gibsons; she was more inclined to vodka and fresh grapefruit juice or white wine. But still, since Kevin had reappeared in her life, she had gotten good at mixing them. She'd make a gin martini for him—straight up, heavy on the vermouth, for that was how he liked it, and a vodka martini on the rocks for herself, with almost no vermouth. She could live without vermouth. The only time she liked vermouth was in that e. e. cummings poem where he praises some girl's vermouth-colored hair. How she had puzzled over
that
one. Was it supposed to be white vermouth or red? What an intriguing hair color to have!

Let's see. Who was the girl? It was Marjorie, of course ...

“A tiny sunset of vermouth-colour. Hair.” Oh, how sentimental cummings was! There is no sunset in vermouth—and the metaphor doesn't quite work, but the “moist mistake” of mouth more than makes up for it. No one, not even a cummings heroine, has vermouth-colored hair. But how delicious of him to yearn for such a girl and in his yearning to make her real.

Isadora wandered into her bathroom, where Kevin was changing into jeans. She presented him with the martini.

“Merry Christmas,” she said. “Let's get looped.”

He put the drink down and wrapped his arms around her. He kissed her with a very gentle, very wet, openmouthed kiss. This was no moist mistake. His kisses were lovely, but rather thin, not full-bodied, and in the background, the undertaste, the subtext as it were, there was the faint taste of rot, of death beginning to take him before he had really done much of anything with his life.

What was it about Kevin? There was a sadness about him underneath all his sweetness. A sadness and a sweetness both together—like some dated perfume of the twenties. He looked young and handsome, yet somewhere inside he was
old;
he was lacking in energy, in
élan vital.
It was as if his face had stayed young but his spirit had aged—like Dorian Gray, as if (in reverse of most people) his soul had grown old while his flesh remained young.

“I love you,” Kevin said, drawing back a little and holding Isadora's face between his hands.

“I love you, too,” Isadora said.

But even saying this, she did not think she would wind up with him. She did not think she would “wind up” with anyone ever again.

They pretended they were a family and decorated the Christmas tree. Kevin pined for not-very-merry Andrew, who was with his mother that weekend. And Isadora secretly pined for Josh.

She and Mandy and Kevin decorated the tree together, but that did not make them a family.

“Where does the angel go?” Kevin asked, referring to a silly-looking gold-foil angel that Isadora and Josh had received one year from an artist friend of theirs in Denmark. If Kevin had really been her husband, he would have known.

“She perches on the top of the tree,” Isadora said.

“And where does the New Year's baby go?” Kevin asked. He referred to a dangling porcelain baby, dressed in a diaper that said “Happy New Year.”

“She goes here—Knockhead,” said Amanda, seizing the baby and letting her fall to the floor before she could be snagged upon a branch. The baby shattered on the oak floorboards—just as Isadora always worried Amanda might do.

Amanda began to cry. “Are you mad, Mommy?” she asked.

“No, no,” said Isadora, “not as long as you didn't do it on purpose.”

“I'm sorry,” Amanda said, running to her arms.

Isadora gathered her up and kissed her. What a sad Christmas this is, she thought. What a sad Christmas.

The little New Year's baby had been a gift on Amanda's very first Christmas. She had come attached to a package that bore a romper suit, long since outgrown. Sometimes Isadora saw all the clothes Mandy had outgrown stretching out behind her as if in some symbolic collage of corporeality and the metamorphoses it imposes upon us on the long voyage toward death. Mandy had been an infant, three months big, then six, then nine. Then she wore one-year sizes, then two, then three, then four, then five. At three, she wore size-five clothes. Next year, it would be six. As she outgrew all these clothes, some phantom child walked behind her picking up and wearing her worn-out garments. This phantom child was death, wearer of hand-me-downs. Clothes, flesh—it was all the same. None of them fits after a while. We finally walk clad in nothing but spirit.

Not so the Christmas tree, which is festooned with lights and ornaments for a time, then drops everything, including its needles, and succumbs to the fire. When the fire takes its carcass, does its soul return to the primal woods? Oh, what melancholy thoughts were in Isadora's head this Christmas Eve!

“Do you want the Thanksgiving turkey on the tree?” Kevin asked.

“What an alarming statement,” said Isadora. Then she remembered the ornament he was referring to.

It was a very campy roast Thanksgiving turkey, made of baked Play-Doh, then painted in the appropriate roast-turkey colors with acrylic paints.

The Christmas Isadora was pregnant, the Christmas she and Josh got married, she had bought this ornament and a host of others made by a neighborhood woman who specialized in fake cookie-dough ornaments. She had bought dozens and dozens of them—Christmas wreaths, reindeer, Santas, angels—and the cookie-dough lady had, as a gift, made her two special ornaments depicting her two dogs—Chekarf and Virginia Woof. The miniature pets were still there in the Christmas ornament box, nesting in red tissue paper—though both of the dogs were gone. Virginia Woof had moved out with Josh, and Chekarf of course had moved out with death. The whole little family they had been then—the dogs, Mandy
in utero
—was no more. Mandy would never again be that close to her, and the dogs were either divorced or dead. Virginia Woof sometimes came over to visit with Josh, but she sniffed Isadora like an alien creature, almost as if she did not remember that Isadora had rescued her from the pound and nursed her back to health from near-extinction.

Isadora took the roast-turkey ornament from Kevin and hung it on an upper branch of the tree. Then, tenderly, she took the little effigies of Chekarf and Virginia Woof out of the box and hung them, too.

“Someday I have to tell you about my dogs,” Isadora said to Kevin. “I loved those two dogs so. I feel that I'll never love any dogs that deeply again.” Or any man, she wanted to add, but she didn't.

“What happened?” Kevin asked.

“It's a long story,” said Isadora, though of couse, if he were really her husband, he would know.

“Woof, woof, woof, woof,” said Mandy, getting down on the floor and impersonating a dog. She was bored with tree trimming, and besides, she had already massed about thirty ornaments on the few low branches she could reach. The branches were so weighted down that all the ornaments threatened to slide off and break.

“You're the sweetest dog I've ever had,” Isadora said to Mandy.

“Why can't Daddy be here?” Mandy asked out of the blue. And Isadora suddenly began to cry.

“Because Mommy and Daddy don't live together anymore,” said Isadora.

“Why?” asked Mandy.

“I don't really know why,” said Isadora.

Kevin put his arms around Isadora to comfort her, and Isadora panicked. Every time Kevin tried to embrace her while Mandy was around, Isadora froze, imagining custody suits.

“Don't hug Mommy,” Mandy said.

But Kevin ignored both Mandy's directive and Isadora's panic.