Parachutes and Kisses (45 page)

She bounded out of the waterbed and into the bathroom, where (like Lowell Strathmore impersonating a Keystone Kop before running home to his wife), she began to wash up. She found a Tampax, inserted it, washed her legs and belly with a cloth, splashed cold water on her face, sprayed Opium all over her, brushed her hair, dabbed on some makeup, and ran back to the waterbed to shake the sleeping stranger who had somehow landed there.

“Darling,” he muttered, “darling.”

“You have to go,” she said. “My kid may wake up at any minute.” She was in a sweat, a panic—whether from the dream or from the bacchic exertions of the night before, she did not know. All she knew was that she had to get rid of him—and fast, fast.

“Please, Bean, please,” she said, shaking him.

He opened his eyes sleepily and reached for her to kiss.

“Excuse my dragon breath,” he said.

“No problem,” she said, kissing him tenderly. Then she broke away, saying: “You really must go.” She went and got his clothes for him. Lazily, lazily, like a man underwater, he put them on.

“Is this the bum's rush,” he asked, half hurt and half amused.

“My kid's going to wake up any minute,” she blurted out. “I had a great time last night—you're wonderful—but what am I going to do when Amanda toddles in here?”

She held open the door to the dog run, where little Bichon-Frisé turds lay twinkling under the new-fallen snow.

“Oh, god—the van,” she said.

“I'll push it,” he said. “I'm good at manual labor—don't worry. Lady—I
adore
you. Will you please remember that?”

He bounded into the dog run, flinging the red scarf around him.

“Out amongst the turds where I belong!” he said merrily, skipping over the frozen dogshit.

She watched as he sprinted up the driveway, found his van (which was gleaming kaleidoscopically in a snowbank), and began to push it back onto the road. It looked like an impossible task— but either his strength was so great or the power of the Goddess who had first stuck him, then unstuck him, was so strong, that in a minute or two he was able to push the van a few feet closer to the road.

He trudged over to Isadora's sand barrel, picked up the banjo shovel which was poised priapically there, and began to spread sand and salt under the wheels of the van. Then he got into the outrageously painted vehicle, revved the motor, and began rocking back and forth, trying to get a hold on the road. Even the way he drove was sexual! Goddamn, Isadora thought, this man is going to be a distraction. She couldn't wait for the sand to take hold and for his wheels to skid him out of her life forever.

When that happened, she almost burst into a solitary round of applause. Out, out, out, out of my life forever, she thought—like the mirage, the demon, the dybbuk you are! But even as she saw his van take off up the road, she was singing. She was singing love songs to herself as she stepped into the shower. “I've ne-ver been in love before ...” she sang, and then she laughed at herself, lathering blood and come out of her pubic hair, and watching it turn the shower water rusty as it whirled, whirled, whirled down the drain.

A novel about love cannot be written while making love.

—COLETTE

O thou blyssed Lady, Hyde hem that flen unto the for helpe & that be vagabonde dyscoure hem nat.

—JOHN LYDGATE Déguileville's
Pilgrimage of the Life of Man

As luck would have it, neither Mandy nor Danae awakened until eight o‘clock. Isadora, although exhausted, was humming happily as she made oatmeal in the kitchen, stoked up the fire in the dining room, and generally awaited the new disasters the day might bring.

What next? No nanny, no money, no Botkin, and no Bean. He had vanished from her life as precipitously as he had come, leaving skid marks in her icy driveway, blood all over her sheets (she'd already bundled them into the washer), and indelible marks on her heart. (Well—she
thought
it was her heart—though, admittedly, our heroine had a bit of a problem distinguishing between her heart and her cunt.) Her midnight and morning visitor had taken off, leaving her unsure that he even existed—so much an apparition did he seem. Nor could she really make sense of his character. On one level, he seemed a rake, a bounder, a madman; on another a sweet knight from a vanished age of chivalry, valiant in bed and in battle, ready to bleed for lady fair (as she for him). All she knew was that he had left her singing—a sure sign of
some
thing, possibly love—whatever
that
was.

“Good morning, Danae!” Isadora said as a disheveled Danae came skipping down the stairs, with a brushed and washed Amanda behind her.

“Well, aren't
we
cheery this morning, luv,” Danae said. Had she been eavesdropping all night—or had she seen the vagabond depart at dawn?

Isadora kept mum, sang dumb. The nanny and baby rooms were far from her bedroom and a floor above. There was no reason to assume they could have heard the wild blood-fucking transpiring in her bedroom.

“Mommy, Mommy, Mommy!” sang Amanda.

Isadora was never more relieved that Bean was gone.

She fed Danae and Amanda their breakfasts, wondering whether Bean had made it home alive, whether he actually existed or whether he was really a character she had invented, a projection of her own need for an ecstatic release from the troubles besetting her—Botkin's death, the tax troubles, the nanny troubles.

Whenever she was left alone in her isolated snowbound house without a nanny for Amanda, she felt a sense of primal abandonment and panic—as if someone had socked her in the gut. It was hard enough to mother a baby
with
a father around, but without one, and without another mother helping to mother
you,
it was well-nigh impossible. True, one did not need a man to raise a child, but one did very much need a network of
women
—mothers to mother the mothers who mothered the babes, mothers to refill you as you emptied, mothers to stroke you as you stroked the fevered head of your child.

Isadora could well imagine an ancient matriarchal age. She could well imagine networks of mothers and grandmothers and aunts mothering each other. But we were as far from this in our isolated single-parent households as we were from the moon. Isadora's mother was in New York; her sisters were scattered around the globe. Her friends with children were mostly married—or else their children were much older, for they had begun bearing sooner—so their problems were hardly the same as hers. Few of her friends wrote novels; fewer still wrote novels and bore babies at the same time—and fewer still were breadwinners. This might be the common lot of women today, but her friends seemed to have avoided it. Also, when she had moved to Connecticut seven years ago it was with a man she was madly in love with; they had bought their house specifically
for
its isolation from the outside world. Poised on a cliff above a river valley, down the steepest of driveways, it was the sort of house two lovers bought when they were (or
thought
they were) self-sufficient in
their folie à deux.
It was also a hell of a house for kids—steps and balconies everywhere, decks poised above a steep ravine. At that point in her life, Isadora had needed such a house in which to research, then write
Tintoretto's Daughter.
She had needed to close off the outside world and live within her own dreams and fantasies of sixteenth-century Venice. Poring over her maps of canals, her floor plans of
palazzi,
she had been able to re-create Venice in her head—in part because of the isolation of her Connecticut house. When she needed more stimulation, she flew off to the real Venice, or drove up to Yale to molder amid rare books in the Beinecke Library. She wanted none of the world which, to her kind, New York represented. She wanted no part of the media gossip, the fund-raisers, the benefits, the posh parties, the screenings, the gallery openings, the opening nights. She had had her fill of these dubious pleasures after her first novel was published. She had had her fill of being cultivated by people who had previously scorned her, of having to explain herself to people who never had to explain themselves, of having to be witty in the face of dullness, thick-skinned in the face of gratuitous cruelty. For Isadora had been through the whole celebrity cycle—adulation followed by attack, wholesale demolition followed by cautious reconstruction—and it wearied her. She was too sensitive a plant not to run from it. And she had run to Connecticut—that nourishing “nutmeg” state—that state of colonial charm with eighties kink underneath, that state of winter emergency (power, snow, flood), that verdant summer Eden, that blessed retreat from Gotham's grinding cares.

But alone with a three-year-old child in winter, that same house which had previously been such a refuge became a trap. One was dependent on one's household help to a degree that made them arrogant. One's boilerman and snowplow driver held the keys to one's kingdom—with a vengeance. And snow tires, four-wheel drive, and wood stoves became more important than bread, wine, and love.

What problem should she tackle first this morning? The nanny-replacement marathon or the search for a new business manager (and a lawyer, perhaps to file a lawsuit against Botkin's estate)? Or should she simply sit down and write as if none of this were going on—since it was her writing, after all, that always rescued her? But life, alas (or perhaps, amen), always comes before art. And life was staring her in the face in the person of Amanda.

“I don't want a new nanny,” Amanda said. “I want Danae!”

Danae smiled blissfully with her sexy gap-toothed smile. She shook her auburn hair. Amanda had loved her since infancy, and Amanda was absolutely clear on the fact that there were two women to love in life—a mommy and a mommy-substitute, chief baby-maker and comforter and assistant baby-tender.

“I want Danae to be my nanny,” Amanda said. “Danae-nanny, Danae-nanny, Danae-nanny!”

“Well,” said Isadora to the smiling redheaded North-of-England lass (who always came down like a shower of golden rain in nanny emergencies), “would you like to stay for a week or two while I attend to some urgent business in New York?”

“Sure, luv,” said Danae. “Just let me take off and get my things.”

Isadora took charge of Amanda while Danae borrowed the Saab and sallied forth into the world in search of her suitcases, her children, her various and sundry lovers.

Of course, Isadora knew that having Danae move in—if only temporarily—would mean great cuisine and great disorder both. Sometimes Danae would take care of Amanda; sometimes her sons would; sometimes her lovers. The house would be bustling with activity, the food exotic, the music loud. Danae would either take Amanda along as she made her rounds (fulfilling her various other part-time jobs) or she would leave her boys to baby-sit Amanda. But there would be no hellfire stories—that was for sure. And Amanda would thrive under Danae's benignly neglectful care.

Isadora was exhausted by the night's exertions and her mind boggled at the day's duties. Where to
begin
to solve the mess Mel Botkin had left her heir to?

In the meantime, she would put
Sesame Disco
on the turntable, have a little morning dance with Amanda, take her to nursery school in QUIM (if the driveway got resanded in time), and then think about it all. “I'll think about it tomorrow,” Scarlett had said, but here it already
was
tomorrow!

“Want to dance, Amanda?” Isadora asked.

What a question! The kid was born to dance!

“Me lost me cookie at the disco,” Cookie Monster sang as Isadora and Amanda stomped and whirled and shook their hands in time to the music—after which they flipped past “The Happiest Street in the World” (which they both thought was nerdy) and a few other undistinguished numbers to that old favorite, “Doin' the Trash,” starring Oscar the Grouch.

Amanda danced like her mother—with natural rhythm—though she was just past toddlerhood and not awfully well coordinated. She danced—like Isadora—with the total abandon of childhood. Blue eyes flashing, pink palms slapping the air, sneakers pounding the ground, she danced like a kid who was bound to follow in her mother's footsteps—heaven help her! Taking in her daughter's unmistakable sexuality, her life-force, Isadora was thinking that she, too, would have to learn for herself all the lessons Isadora was just now
beginning
to learn. How to make demonic passion jibe with domestic responsibilities, artistic responsibilities, financial responsibilities. What a hell of a job
she
had done! What kind of model was she for her child? A model of perplexity, a model of chaos, a model of confusion! She had tried to live her life with openness to all aspects of being a woman, of being a
mensh,
and where had it led her? Here—to this perplexed passage! Three months before her fortieth birthday, she knew less than ever about where the serpentine road was leading her. She had danced the night away with a vagabond and now she danced away the morning with her daughter!

Renata arrived to find mother and daughter madly disco-ing in the foyer.

“Good morning, ladies,” she sang. Well—wasn't everyone cheery and manic this morning? Is that what death did—at least the death of a business manager? Actually, Isadora knew other people who reacted to death this way—even the deaths of loved ones. Far from making you mope, it made you manic and merry —at least for a little while—before the finality of it sank in.

The snowplow and sander followed close upon Renata's arrival, so Isadora decided to take Amanda to nursery school after all, even though it was late.