Parachutes and Kisses (4 page)

Did her troubles begin when that newfound success alienated her husband, Josh (who, to his chagrin, was still publishing invisible novels), and caused him to abandon her and their daughter, Amanda, to sit za-zen in a chilly monastery in Kyoto? Did they begin when the nanny—that hearty English one with big tits—ran over her dog in her own driveway? Good old Chekarf, their beloved Bichon Frisé (named for Isadora's grandfather's favorite short-story writer—and hers), was, in a way, the first child of their marriage. When he went, so did something between Josh and Isadora. Shortly thereafter Josh departed for Japan, leaving her to contemplate her success and the chaos it had wrought, the marble urn containing Chekarf's ashes (with his old dog collar draped around the neck), and the ruins of her life. Women want work and love just like everyone else; why does having one always lead to banishing the other?

Did her troubles begin when Josh came back from Japan and proposed that the answer to all their woes was living apart three days a week, maintaining separate “spaces,” fucking their brains out with other people, then telling each other about it as a turn-on? Did they begin when Isadora got involved in an affair with her investment counselor—a preppy fellow named Lowell Strathmore, with his white boxer shorts, his Turnbull and Asser shirts, his Savile Row suits, his mansion in Southport, his heiress wife with thrice the requisite number of teeth, and his fourteen-year-old daughter with the $100,000 horse? Or did they begin when she fell for a poet from Bethel—a guilt-ridden lapsed Catholic who could almost never get it up with her, but wrote her the most beautiful poems? Or did it begin the day she walked into her husband's other studio, just down the road—and found him—oh, cliché of clichés—fondling one of his part-time typists, a brain-damaged blonde dressed up in gold lame Frederick's of Hollywood lingerie (for Josh was not only a Zen Buddhist, but an underwear freak)? No. She could have endured all that. Her hands shake when she contemplates Josh's abandonments, but a shaky hand may steady itself on a stout heart. She thinks her troubles really began in earnest on the day of her grandfather's funeral, when she read as the eulogy, the memoir of him she scrawled as he lay dying, and the rabbi turned green to hear such words—spoken by a woman yet—in the house of the Father God.

 

It was a freezing day in January. One of those days when the filth of New York is frozen in week-old snow, congealed to ice; when even the dogshit, which steams briefly before freezing, is odorless; when winds punish the corners of Riverside Drive, and the funeral directors at the Riverside are doing such a flourishing business you'd swear they had revolving walls like an old stage set.

“Pick up your coats at the elevator, not in the family room,” they say as they press the mourners forward. And suddenly the bereaved relatives realize that their coatrack has been moved to the elevator alcove, so another group of mourners can now occupy the family room, murmuring and sympathizing.

Isadora arrived with Josh and her youngest sister Chloe (Randy, the oldest, being still in the Middle East, and Lahlah-who by now lived on the Last Commune in Oregon with her quintuplets-not having the bread to come east for the funeral).

“It's like a scene from
The Loved One,”
Chloe said, looking around at the relatives.

And it was true. Isadora had to giggle. Her mother and aunt were saying their tentative, paranoid hellos, not having spoken for nearly thirty years prior to her grandfather's final illness. The trouble with them was that they were two peas in a pod, similar enough to be twins, though two years apart. They looked alike, talked alike, both were endowed with immense talent to paint, which the old man had sat upon—with their neurotic consent. Isadora's aunt was gay, her mother straight, but the two sisters were identical for all of that. Her aunt had a talent for being trod upon by her lovers quite as successfully as Isadora's mother was trod upon by her father. Her father, the Tsatske King, her father, the legendary Nat White, whose baffling paternal wisdom to her was: “Never follow a dog act” and “You know you're on the skids when you play yourself in the film version of your autobiography.” Her father, who, all through her childhood, had wheeled and dealed, flown back and forth to Japan as some people commute to Paramus, and who now at seventy, wanted nothing more than the affection of the children he had always half ignored before. Her father, the dynamo, the seducer, the charismatic manipulator. Her father, who began life in “Bronzeville” as Nathan Weiss, translated himself to White when he hit the Catskills as a comedian in the thirties, became a band leader in Manhattan
boîtes
shortly after that, and finally gave up art for commerce in the forties, deciding that the latter was, after all, a surer thing than the former. But Isadora's being an artist was profoundly important to him. His second daughter was the arrow from his loins which hit the mark that he himself could not. He crowed over her success as if it were his own—which indeed in some ways it was.

“How are you, my lovely?” he asked, embracing Isadora like a lover and hardly looking at Chloe, as usual.

“Fine, Dad.” Isadora had only recently begun calling her father “Dad” and it still felt funny to her. All through her childhood he was “Nat” and her mother “Jude.” Her grandfather and grandmother, with whom they lived, were “Papa” and “Mama.”
They
were the true parents; Nat and Jude were siblings of sorts—albeit strange ones.

“Let me look at you,” her father said. That was what he
always
said.

“You look great. You're keeping your weight down. That's the ticket. Exercise, exercise, exercise.” Isadora couldn't help thinking that if they hadn't been at a funeral, he might have begun doing calisthenics in place. Her father frequently burst into little spasms of indoor exercise. He was vain of looking fifty at seventy. By dint of regular workouts, the genetic accident of having all his hair, he looked as attractive at seventy as most men look in their prime. And
wasn't
he still in his prime? His prime went on forever, it seemed. Was this because he'd had a sauna and gym installed in his office long before such things were commonplace? Or because he had read
Prevention
magazine since the forties (so he could alternate eating sunflower seeds and yogurt with drinking triple martinis and eating beef Wellington)? He was so weight-conscious that he noticed every pound Isadora put on even before she did. Sometimes she felt she gained weight just to plague him and to thwart their oedipal connection. He adored her and at times had seemed indifferent to her sisters. That was her sisters' problem, and hers.

But Isadora was not just his fantasy lover; she was also his fantasy son. Isadora's current therapist, a bouncy grayhaired lady named Shirley Frumkin, maintained that Isadora's parents had instructed her to be “the daughter you are and the son we never had.”

“No wonder you were confused,” said Shirley. “Nobody can be both those things.”

And it was true. Isadora knew herself as a projection of her parents' dreams. All their own thwarted artistic ambitions—her father's as a musician, her mother's as a painter—poured into her. She had to be a successful artist of some sort, more successful in the world outside than any son. But she also had to be a girl, a lover, a wife, a mother. Finally, with Amanda's birth, and the publication of
Tintoretto's
Daughter (a novel in which—ironically— she imagined herself as a Renaissance painter), she had brought all these expectations together. She had it all, she thought. Whereupon her marriage cracked and Josh moved out.

A year of deaths and losses. Great success followed by unprecedented disasters. Every woman's greatest nightmare: to win success only to lose the one man she ever really loved.

Her grandfather's funeral was the turning point, his death the death knell of the marriage. Some deaths mark the end of relationships; others the beginning. The spirit of the deceased lives on to mock the living and to test their attachments. And Isadora's Grandfather Stoloff was nothing if not a mocker. Even in death, he held the whole family captive. Even in death, he set them against each other as he had done in life.

Since the old man Stoloff had not decided he wanted a rabbi at the funeral until the very last moment, he naturally knew no rabbis, or, rather, no rabbis knew him. That left Isadora's family with rent-a-rabbi: whatever sorry synagogueless specimen the funeral directors happened to have on tap. Isadora, for one, resented this —resented her grandfather both for being a devout atheist and godless Marxist most of his adult life and then for making an irritating deathbed reversion to Judaism. If only he'd had the foresight to revert a year or two
before
his death, some rabbi might have known what to say about him. But no. He decided to be a proper Jew only during his last delirium. So there they were, Isadora, her mother, father, aunt, and one sister, all squeezed into a tiny rabbi-roomlet at the Riverside, trying to tell a total stranger about their maddeningly complex patriarch, a man with more contradictions and ambiguities than his ninety-seven years, a man who could scarcely be summed up in a year of talk, let alone the five minutes allotted them before the ceremony. (O ye who are about to die—coach your clergyman!)

“What was Mr. Stoler like?” asked the rabbi, wearing a homburg, and taking notes on a three-by-five card like a schoolteacher.

“Stoloff,” said Isadora's mother, looking pained. She was wearing a black Chanel suit and masses of pearls which she fingered like worry beads. Why is it always so excruciating when they mis pronounce the name of someone you love when he is dead or dying?

“Ah, Stoloff,” said the rabbi, looking pink and scrubbed as a pig. Couldn't they at least have provided a bearded rabbi? “Yes, where was Mr. Stoloff born?”

Blank looks all around.

“It wasn't Odessa,” Isadora's mother said, “though he grew up there.”

“Diatlovo, in the Government of Grodno,” Isadora said.

“How do you know?” Her father was amazed.

“He told me a few days before he died.”

“I never asked,” her Aunt Gilda said, her Mexican silver earrings flashing. She was dressed in a black cashmere shawl and black velvet dirndl. Velvety black suede boots clung to her slender legs. She was not of that recent school of lesbians who dress gro tesquely as a political statement. Rather, she harked back to the stylish days of Vita, Virginia, and Djuna. Both she and Isadora's mother looked gorgeous in their grief.

“And his Jewish name?” asked the rabbi.

“Schmuel,” said her mother. “He was Samuel, but everyone called him ‘Stoloff.‘ ”

“His wife?” asked the rabbi.

“She died twelve years ago,” my sister said. “Her name was Malke-Mary in English.”

“And his age?”

“Ninety-seven,” they all said in unison.

“Ah—a very long-lived man.”

From the way he said “long-lived” (he added two syllables above the usual number like a rabbi out of Philip Roth), Isadora knew with foreboding and horror that they could all look forward to an oration upon the theme of Methuselah and the blessings of a long life. She had been to enough Jewish funerals to foretell this with horrid certainty.

Before leaving Connecticut that morning, Isadora had crammed into her handbag the scrawled remembrance of her grandfather's death and dying which she had written at a white heat, her pen propelled by the winds of his passing. While he lay expiring in a grim nursing home in Spring Valley, she was scribbling about him, as if by her scribbling she could make him stay. Now she was trembling with desire and fear—desire to read this memoir to the assembled relatives and friends, and fear that it would horribly offend them, for it was hardly a conventional eulogy. She had told her father and mother about it on the phone, and her father, as usual, sensing a good media event, wanted her to read it, while her mother wasn't sure.

“Rabbi,” said her father, “this is Mr. Stoloff's granddaughter, my daughter, Isadora Wing.” He waited for the aha of recognition. It never came.

“She is the well-known author,” said Isadora's father, ever the promoter, ever the
tummler.
Isadora squirmed with embarrassment. Apparently her reputation had not penetrated the
shuls
of mid-Manhattan.

“You probably know her
Vaginal
Flowers, or perhaps her most recent best seller,
Tintoretto's Daughter,”
her father went on.

“Dad,”
she squirmed. Isadora actually blushed. The word
vaginal
never sounded dirtier than it did there in that Rabbi-roomlet.

Her father charged blithely ahead. “Well, not many people know that she is a poet as well as a novelist, and it is the wish of the entire family ...” (her mother and aunt did not seem so sure) “that she read her memoir and an elegy to Mr. Stoloff in lieu of a eulogy.”

“Certainly, certainly,” said the rabbi, looking a little disappointed not to be able to do his Methuselah number. “Surely a member of the family who knew and loved him is preferable to a total stranger ...” One could not help feeling the rabbi was annoyed to be preempted.

“But we do want all the proper prayers in Hebrew, before and after,” Isadora's mother said—her mother, who had probably never in her life heard Hebrew prayers except at funerals and bar mitzvahs. “He would have wanted that,” she added.

“And what about the Kaddish? Who will say the Kaddish?” the rabbi asked. “I can arrange for some
yeshiva bucher
to say Kaddish.”

Yes! Yes! Isadora thought. Do it right. Speed his passing. But her mother said no. Isadora was crestfallen.

“My daughter will read her memoir and a poem,” Jude said resolutely, “and then you will close with a prayer.”