Parachutes and Kisses (40 page)

“How soon do we have to have this little talk?” Isadora asked.

“Oh—any time would be okay,” Mel said, as casually as possible —“but the sooner the better. Are you coming to New York tomorrow?”

“I will,” Isadora said, “it it's that important.” (She was secretly relieved that Mel had not insisted on coming to her; if he had, it would probably have meant the problem was even worse.)

Great. She had to go to New York the next day—go to New York and leave the child with a woman who was telling her hellfire stories. Isadora thought about it for a while and then decided that it was impossible to keep Alva Libbey one more day. The damage had already been done to Amanda's psyche, perhaps, but keeping her another day with full knowledge of the hellfire tales was something her motherhood could not countenance. If need be, she would quit work cold and take care of Mandy herself till she found a decent replacement. In the meantime, she would make do with temporary part-time sitters—of whom there were a few in the neighborhood.

Alva was astounded to be fired—“I dint do nothin' wrong, Miz Izzydorry,” she said. Isadora contemplated bringing up the hellfire question once again and then decided it would do no good. She packed Alva off as soon as possible—to the tune of Mandy screaming, “I don't
want
a new nanny! ... I don't want a new nanny!” (had the kid been brainwashed?)—and got in feckless, redheaded Danae as the temporary sitter so she could go off to New York and see Mel.

Danae was the sort of character you only find hanging around towns like Malibu or Venice, California, Woodstock, New York, or Rocky Ridge, Connecticut. She was a beautiful, slightly loony En glishwoman (from the North—Lancashire, to be exact) who waited tables in various health-food joints, catered dinner parties, baby-sat, did gorgeous needlepoint, taught yoga, and passed bad checks. She was only thirty-five, but had four grown kids from various unions (the kids were as lovely as the unions apparently hadn't been), and she seemed to float from one odd job to another, from one man to another, from one house-sitting stint to another. She had no visible means of support and yet she seemed, somehow, to keep afloat. Kids adored her—she was, after all, Lady Madonna—and Amanda was no exception. She had been a part-time baby-sitter for Amanda since her infancy. So Isadora left Mandy in Danae's somewhat chaotic (but basically sound) care and drove off to New York to see Mel.

 

Mel's office had always reassured Isadora that he must be, at bottom, honest. If he were a crook, would he have had such a modest office? Here was no Hollywood money manager with chrome strips on the art deco walls and chairs that cost $7,000 in the D and D Building (or at the West Coast Design Center). Here was no fantasy out of
Architectural Digest.
Comfortingly enough, Mel had no sauna, no device for hanging upside down, no brown suede couches, no cactus garden under spotlights, no “collectibles” (like antique quilts) staring at you in the waiting room. No—his office smelled of old cigar smoke and looked like a set for
The Producers.
(And, of course, you remember that the last scene in that movie takes place in
jail?)

The one couch Mel had was an old, saggy brown leather affair with springs that had come untied many tax seasons ago; the chairs were 1930 vintage walnut office chairs that squeaked when you tried to lean back in them; and the filing cabinets were army khaki. Old copies of
Variety
and
The Hollywood Reporter
were strewn around (with a few
Wall Street Journals
thrown in). The receptionist chewed gum and had a green stripe in her hair. Since so little was done for show at the offices of Botkin and Son (oh yes, Mel Botkin had a son he treated like a lackey and never allowed to have any contact with the clients) you had to assume that basically sound and sensible things were being done with your money.

Isadora was ushered into Mel's inner sanctum. As usual, he seemed to have all the time in the world for her and absolutely nothing of a business nature to discuss.

“So how's the gay divorcée?” he asked, getting up to give her a great bear hug. Bear hugs were Mel's specialty. He had a big belly that got in the way, but that only made him more of a Poppa bear.

“So-so,” said Isadora, “slowly getting my sealegs back.”

“It's a tough transition,” Mel said, never having made it himself —since he had a wife of thirty years and a mistress of ten. But he was all empathy and warmth, and truly Isadora felt warmed and happy to be here, sitting in his office. He had called her in, supposedly, to talk about a tax audit, but all he seemed to want to do was chew the fat about other, more pleasant matters. Since Isadora had a reputation for having written books that were said to be racy, Mel always wanted to poll her about phenomena like sex clubs, massage parlors, soft-core cable TV, the latest racy books. Today he wanted to report a visit to New York's most famous sex club—Eros Anonymous—which he had apparently made with his mistress. (Mel never alluded to his mistress directly, but there was a special phone under his desk that he answered in a tone reserved for someone who elicited all his erotic yearnings. Isadora thought of this as the “mistress phone.” And she knew from Mel's various winks and leers when he answered it, that there must be a secret companion he took to all the places that Florence Botkin of Ce darhurst, L.I., wouldn't be caught dead in.) Actually,
Isadora
wouldn't be caught dead in a mattress club either. She had gone once (out of a sense of duty as a cultural reporter)—when Eros Anonymous had just opened—and her distinct impression was that religious orders ought to send monks there in order to help enforce their vows of chastity. The place, in short, had made her want to give up sex. She and Josh quickly found that they couldn't even make it with each
other
—whereupon they fled into the night. But Mel adored Eros A. He had taken some Japanese businessmen there with girls from an escort service, and they had all had, apparently, a jolly old time.

“Did the businessmen bring their cameras?” Isadora wanted to know. (She could just imagine two diminutive Japanese in three-piece suits, clicking away, while two naked mile-high chorus girls loitered on their arms.)

“No,” said Mel, laughing merrily. “I don't think they allow pictures.”

“When I was there,” Isadora said, “I kept thinking I'd catch athlete's foot. Athlete's foot
all over
my body.”

“And to think that you invented it—” Mel said.

“Invented athlete's foot?”

“No—I mean sex,” said Mel.

“Invented sex? God—you flatter me.”

“No—I mean, weren't you the one who first coined the term
the unzippered fuck?”

“Zipless,” said Isadora. “And lived to regret it. On my tombstone it will probably say: ‘Here lies one who first said Zipless Fuck' —and all the poems and novels will be so many stones thrown into the water.”

“I doubt it,” said Mel.

“Guess I'm just still depressed,” Isadora said. “Okay, Mel—what's this tax-audit thing?”

“Well,” said Mel, “it's nothing
very
bad ... or nothing that can't be fixed, most likely ... Remember that investment called Lotus Limited?”

“No,” said Isadora, “sounds like a Chinese restaurant.”

“Well, I'm sure I told you about the investment. It was basically a straddle.”

“What's a straddle?”

“It's basically a sort of hedge,” said Mel.

“What's a hedge?”

“Well, you take a position on both sides of a transaction, go long and short at the same time ... It's rather complicated—but if you want, I'll give you all the prospectuses to read. They're immensely long and totally baffling, but ...”

Here Mel produced several heavy Xeroxed tomes that had what seemed to be hundreds of pages bound in clear plastic covers.

“So—what happened?”

“Well, you had quite a lot of money invested in Lotus Limited ... and you see, most of the money ... well, due to poor management, the shelter ...”

“This was a tax shelter?”

“Yes ... Well, due to things in the management which we couldn't control, most of the original investment has been ... well ... dissipated.”

“You mean I lost a lot of money. How much?”

“Well, you can't really look at it as a loss, because you got a huge tax write-off ...”

Isadora's head was swimming. Here was Daddy, Poppa Bear, who was supposed to protect her, announcing to her that he had lost all her money.

“How much, Mel?”

“Well—the original investment was only two hundred thousand dollars, but if the investment is disallowed, you could owe as much as a million in back taxes ...”

“I could
owe—what?”

This was a nightmare out of Kafka. She could wind up owing more than she'd ever known she had.

“Do I have the money to pay the back taxes?”

“Well, I don't think the case will be decided for years and years and years, and by then, you'll be paying out inflated dollars which are worth less than today's dollars and meanwhile you've had the use of the money, which otherwise would have gone to the IRS.”

“I don't understand.”

“Well, you see, you have the use of the money now ...”

“But what's the good of that if the investment has been dissipated?”

“You see, you don't pay back the taxes until the case is settled and by then you're paying back in dollars that are worth much, much less ... Do you understand?”

“No ...” Isadora said. All she understood was that she was in big trouble. The eighteenth-century debtors prison loomed closer.

“Probably,” Mel said, furiously backpedaling, “none of this will ever come to pass. If the government disallows the tax shelter, we'll fight it, and if the time ever comes that you need to pay back the money, it will seem like very little ...”

Isadora was thunderstruck. The only occasions when she felt she had money were those when she went out and bought a designer dress or a new car. Her concept of money was not much different from a ghetto black's. If she couldn't
wear
it or
drive
it, she didn't believe she
had
it. All the rest was a matter of inscrutable ledgers and even more inscrutable tax regulations. That was why she had turned it over to Mel—and now she discovered that Mel had seriously fucked up. Perhaps Mel had even liquidated Mandy's trust. He had the power to—on paper. And she had been too busy with the upheavals in her life to ask.

Of course, she never thought to ask Mel the pivotal questions either: Had Mel or his company received a fee for promoting Lotus Ltd.? What
was
Lotus Ltd. anyway, and who ran it? But Isadora was so overwhelmed by a sense of panic, of being alone and exposed in the world, that she was nearly speechless. Oh, she knew full well that there were no guarantees of daddies to protect one. Josh had promised to help her raise Amanda—and he had fled. Mel had promised financial sensibility (if not total security) and now it seemed he had gone and put her money into something that sounded like a fortune-cookie factory.

That's the way the cookie crumbles ... she thought—but her very next thought was: What on earth to do? Problems have to have solutions—and this was a problem to be attacked.

“Well—what do we do next?” Isadora asked Mel.

“Nothing for now,” Mel said. “I just wanted you to know the parameters of the problem.”

“Is there anything more you're not telling me?” Isadora asked.

“Just that I couldn't be more sorry this happened,” Mel said—and he got up and gave her a big bear hug.

Isadora wandered out onto the street like a deranged waif. She had QUIM parked in a garage on Forty-sixth Street, but she wasn't even walking toward it. Instead, she walked toward Broadway, observing the bars, the bums, the cacophony of life in this sleaziest section of the city. This might as well be eighteenth-century London, and Mel a highwayman who had robbed her and left her freezing in the road, for that was how exposed she felt. She had no husband, no one to share in the support of her child, and the one thing she knew how to make money at—writing—she had not been able to do for the past year because she had been so depressed. She had felt her strength slowly returning, but now it was as if someone had rabbit-punched her in the stomach all over again. Losses, losses, losses. First Papa, then Chekarf, then Josh, then her nest egg—what would be next? Of course, she could get a job teaching again and slowly pay off her debts. She'd be five hundred and six before she paid off
this
debt on a professor's salary, but still maybe she could move to some pretty little Vermont town like Middlebury, teach poetry, live in a white farmhouse, send Mandy to public school, and eventually marry an absentminded professor who would cherish her for herself alone and not her fleeting fame or fortune. It was a pleasant fantasy. She loved teaching and truly she'd be happy to have a good man who loved her regardless of her assets and her glitter. Or maybe, she thought—wildly switching gears—she could snag a rich husband
before
the government took back everything—much as that went against the grain. Okay, old girl, she thought, why not
try
to be attracted to men in suits, men with gold watch chains, men whose angle of erection is inversely proportionate to their bank balances? Hopeless. Isadora
never
had been able to peddle her ass for security. She was too straight—in her kinky way. She cared too much about sex to pervert it into some kind of commodity exchange. Oh, she knew that she could snare a rich husband if she wanted one—but the trouble was: she'd have to love him. She was incapable of marrying
just
for money.