Parachutes and Kisses (38 page)

The snow was still high and deep everywhere—though the driveway had been plowed and sanded not once but several times. Josh drove down the driveway in the Land Cruiser as before, but his demeanor when he entered the house was quite different. In tears, looking as if his legs could barely support his own weight, he threw his arms around Isadora, and wept. His body shook with great sobs.

“Is she okay?” he asked. “Is she okay?”

“I think she'll be
fine,
Isadora said, comforting him, comforting this man who had tried to kill her in her motherhood, kill her in her art, kill her in her womanhood. All right then, she
would
comfort him. He felt guilty enough. She would not twist the knife.

“We did everything we could for the finger,” Isadora said. “The tendons and nerves have been repaired. I think it should heal well.”

“You made the right decisions,” he said. “I can't fault any of the decisions you made.”

“Thanks for saying that, Josh. It means a lot. It really does.”

“Were you very angry at me for not being there?” he asked. “I started back the minute I heard.”

“Not really,” she said. “More sad than angry. After all, the accident was no one's fault.”

He began to sob and hold her again, and she had the distinct impression that he had been cruel to her not out of strength but out of weakness—and that everything she had suffered from him was the tyranny of his weakness. A stronger man would not have had to leave her. A stronger man would not have been threatened by the things that threatened him. He was a big, overgrown, balding child. His parents' killing legacy to him was utter infantiliza tion.
They
needed him to be a baby and he had obliged by never growing up. That did not make him a bad person, it only made him a weak one. And Isadora's curse was that she was strong. The strong got to bear the greatest burdens—that was the way of nature. She did not hate Josh; she merely saw him—perhaps for the first time. His weakness was only a criminal failing because Mandy was involved. Had he merely sinned against Isadora, it could have been borne.

But would she want to bear it? Would she want him back now, if he wanted to come back? For once she couldn't really answer that question affirmatively. She didn't know. She was beginning to think she'd be better off alone. She had no fantasies of a different kind of man. For the first time in her life, her fantasies did not involve a man at all; they involved herself, merely herself. That was a lot.

It was the dour, dull week after Christmas, when the relief of the holiday being over almost compensates for the drabness of the weather. Christmas has been removed from one's chest like a hundred-pound weight in the
peine fort et dur-that
charming medieval torture imposed upon accused witches in merry olde sixteenth-century Germany. Oh, there is still the horror of New Year's Eve to come—another medieval torture—but soon all the dread pseudo-gaiety will be behind one, and life will begin again in all its ordinary wonderfulness.

Isadora often thought that something in her inner core was attuned to the solstices and equinoxes (perhaps all sensitive people were this way—or perhaps she was really a witch) because she grew depressed right before Christmas when the sun was farthest from the earth, and she cheered up after Christmas when the sun began its gradual return (or rather the earth's elliptical migration brought it closer to its nourishing, life-giving star). The day after Mandy's accident, Isadora's best friend, Hope, sent her a basket of spring flowers with a card that read “Spring is ever near.” Isadora was almost beginning to believe that spring would come again. Mandy's hand would get better. The snow would—eventually—melt. Isadora's driveway would be passable again and all would be—if not right with the world—at least brighter.

She would welcome spring by getting healthy, she decided. If she couldn't really write again yet, she would get into shape for it the way a boxer gets into shape for a fight. For writing, she knew, was physical labor. Not just the mind, but the body had to be in trim.

In celebration of Christmas being over and Mandy's hand healing, Isadora went on a fruit-and-vegetable purification regime and she resolved to join a health club and attend it regularly. Le Chaim —to Life! she thought. So a few days after Christmas, she accepted the offer of a friend of hers to take her to a Nautilus club in one of the nearby towns and teach her how to use the machines.

It was a spiffy Connecticut club—futt of thin-lipped WASP ladies who were getting in shape for love affairs they would never have, tennis matches they would lose, Caribbean vacations that would only reveal how empty and silent their marriages were.

Isadora was wearing a black and fuchsia harlequin-style leotard and gray sweat pants with fuchsia stars printed on them. She felt good in her body the way one does on a fruit-and-veggie binge. She had her period, too, but it felt like a cleansing rather than a loss—as periods sometimes do. She had dropped seven or eight pounds since Christmas and she walked with a bounce, glad to be alive, glad Christmas was over, glad Mandy's right hand would function, glad she could get through a day without thinking of Josh. Josh was not entirely gone from her thoughts—but she no longer made all her decisions with reference to him, and she was beginning to enjoy her independence mightily. As she tried the machines in the health club, she was looking over all the attractive sweating men and thinking that she could choose this one or that, spend a weekend with whomever she pleased—or even spend a weekend alone if she chose. She was beginning to feel strong enough even for
that.
Her sap was beginning to run again; her life-force was coming back. Her bravado—so long in abeyance—was starting to return.

The friend who took her through the club was a good man, a good pal—a handsome black-bearded journalist named Steve Ri naldi whom she had met and become friends with when both he and she were married to other people. They had flirted with the idea of having an affair but never really got past preliminary fumblings. It was not meant to be, perhaps—or not yet. They had retreated gratefully into platonic friendship, having dinner together at Westport dives, sitting up all night before the fire, drinking wine and speaking of poetry. They were really fond of each other. They confided in each other about the post-divorce crazies each was going through. They talked on the phone late at night (oh, how would we get through divorces without the telephone?), but they were determined
not
to be lovers. Lovers were a dime a dozen in the days after divorce; it was friends that were rare.

Steve showed Isadora how to use all the machines. They worked up a good sweat together, then sauna-ed, hot-tubbed, and were preparing to go out to lunch—when they were stopped at the door by a very tall young man whose name Isadora didn't quite catch at first. But she did catch his blinding blue eyes which had a look that was both slightly mad and very vulnerable.

“Isadora—this is Bean,” Steve said.

“Bean?”

“Berkeley Sproul the Third,” said the young man. “ ‘Bean' is what I got stuck with, a corruption of my baby name—that's the trouble with giving kids ancestral names ... Berkeley was my mother's maiden name—like the square where the nightingale sang ...”

A nightingale was singing to Isadora, too—a very Keatsian nightingale who was making her heart ache and a drowsy numbness pain her sense. What was this opiate she tasted? Was it LAFS —or Lust at First Sight? Was it an earthquake or was it merely a shock? Was it the real turtle soup, or was it merely the mock? Was it Keats—or was it merely (merely!) Cole Porter?

Bean had dirty-blond hair, as tousled and flyaway as a kid‘s, and he had an utterly dazzling smile. Isadora looked at him and had one thought and one thought alone: how to get his phone number. Drat. She didn't even have her engraved business cards with her.

“Bean's an actor,” Steve said.

“Oh—what a coincidence,” said Isadora, “my sister happens to be a casting director. She's always looking for new faces.”

Now, Isadora's youngest sister, Chloe, had, it is true, worked as a casting director for a few years, but she had long since gone into another line of endeavor—and was studying to be a psychotherapist—but Bean didn't have to know that.

Steve stood there amazed while Isadora and Bean fixed each other in their blinding blue gaze. Their eyes were exactly the same color—navy blue with yellow flecks. They locked eye-beams as in some metaphysical poem by John Donne. (In that scene in bodice-ripper romances where the vulnerable heroine meets the rakehell hero, this is the moment when she notices that his eyes are gray and his lower lip “curls”—meaning, one supposes, that he sneers slightly, due to years of debauchery and the lack of the love of a good woman or “one true love” to set him—and his lip—straight. But Bean's lip curled only in delight, not cynicism.)

“I didn't get your name,” he said.

“Isadora W ...” Steve started to say, but in his confusion over being in the midst of this electric embrace of auras—if not of arms —he mumbled the last name.

“What an unusual name,” Bean said.

“I might say the same to you,” said Isadora.

“Do you have a piece of paper?” Bean asked Steve. “I want to give this lady my phone number—for her sister, of course ...” He looked at Isadora, beaming gleefully.

Steve-the-Cupid produced a tattered piece of paper and both Bean and Isadora scrawled numbers on it. Then Bean tore it carefully in half. He took the half with Isadora's number on it and gave her the half with his. (Isadora had given him her answering-service number, not her private line—but she seriously hesitated before making that choice. Something in her head kept saying “private line, private line, private line...”)

And then they parted—as suddenly as they had met. Bean waved good-bye as he went to work out, and Steve and Isadora went to lunch.

“Who's that guy?” Isadora asked Steve as they were walking out to the parking lot.

“I don't know him very well,” Steve said, “but I run into him a lot at the health club. He's good news. I get very good vibes from him. I'm not sure why because I really hardly know him.”

“Oh—one can tell about people,” Isadora said.

And it was true, too. Isadora had great instincts about people, rare intuition, but sometimes—quite often, in fact—she let her intuition be clouded by her need. Just as she was able to create people out of whole cloth—create a demonic lover because she needed one, create a steady daddy because she needed one—she was often misled in her secondary judgments of people by her neediness—or her
spilkes.

File Berkeley Sproul under “forget,” she thought walking at Steve Rinaldi's side. The last thing you need, old girl, is another lover ... But even as she thought this, she thought of a nickname for this new friend: Bean Sprout, Bean Sprout the First.

Back at home, there was trouble—trouble right there in Rocky Ridge. There was nanny trouble to begin with—and then there was—heaven help us—tax trouble. The very last thing one needed in this period of calm after Christmas was nanny trouble, but there it was. Apparently one no sooner laid one demon to rest than another popped up. That was life in the fast lane. Or perhaps just life. Just life itself.

Isadora walked into her house at about four in the afternoon to be informed by her secretary, Renata, that they had big problems. While she was at the health club hearing nightingales sing, Alva Libbey was apparently scaring Amanda senseless with stories of hellfire and damnation.

“I couldn't help overhearing Alva saying to Mandy that she'd cut her finger as punishment for her mother's sins. ‘The sins of the mother are visited on the child,' she said. I really think we ought to be looking for a new nanny. Apparently this isn't the first time she's scared Mandy with hellfire stories.”

“How do you know?” Isadora asked.

“Because,” said Renata in her usual understated nonalarmist manner, “Mandy has come skipping in here saying, ‘Alva says I'm going to hell—what's hell?' ”

“Oh god,” said Isadora, “she wouldn't do that, would she?”

“She not only would—she
does,”
said Renata. “Not that I think Mandy knows what hell
is
—but she's certainly scared by the
tone
of this stuff. And Alva also tells her that she dare not go out and play on her swing set or kidnappers will get her. Alva's just lazy. She doesn't want to watch Mandy outside.”

Isadora trusted Renata's judgment almost completely in most matters. In the matter of children, she trusted her completely. She breathed a deep, soulful sigh. The great nanny search was on again.

Isadora couldn't fire Alva or even intimate that she was going to fire Alva until she had another nanny on the hook. So while they trod water and began the always agonizing process of going through the employment agencies, seeking the halt, the lame, the blind (why in a society that pretended to worship children did people feel that taking care of children had a status akin to being an untouchable in India?), Isadora tried to gird Mandy's loins by telling her 1) that there was no hell, 2) even if there was one, she wouldn't be going there, and 3) Alva's warnings about kidnappers were groundless.

Mandy said: “The people who steal children go to hell, right, Mommy?” Well—what could Isadora say to that?

“Wrong. There is no hell, Mandy. And no people around here are stealing children, either.”

“Oh,” said Mandy vaguely, as if she didn't know what to believe. “Can I watch the Muppets?”

It was a wonder Mandy was asking this since Alva let her watch television all day and all night apparently. Alva believed in the video-wallpaper method of baby-sitting. Why Isadora had kept Nurse Librium this long was an astonishment anyway, but maybe the answer was to be found in the preceding cavalcade of nannies. Isadora had come to believe that any elderly stable person
had
to be better than a young English chick with jangling ovaries, but in truth Alva Libbey was probably the least stable nanny of all. A virulent Catholic who read the
National Enquirer
for its prose, Alva Libbey was at once obsequious to Isadora's face and horribly judgmental behind her back.