Parachutes and Kisses (50 page)

The fact was: she didn't
want
to be promiscuous anymore. What was the point? She was a loyal person, and she had found her sexual mate. She did not want to be in bed with Lowell screaming “Bean!” or in bed with Kevin, dreaming of Bean, or in bed with Roland or Errol making up excuses that sounded like recipes out of a wok cookery book. Enough was enough.

But Bean made her crazy. He appeared and disappeared with utmost unpredictability. He lived with another woman to whom his weekends were promised (though at times this, too, seemed unpredictable). He was often unreachable by telephone because he pulled his phone out of the wall and left it that way for hours and hours. Sometimes it seemed they met by sheerest accident. She would have a meeting in New York, and the meeting would get canceled—and then, by happenstance, she'd run into him on the street, whereupon they'd sneak off to his lair to lose hours in bed.

They both began canceling everything for each other—meetings, auditions, work commitments of every description. When they were together, they never wanted to part. When they parted, they feared they'd never see each other again.

Isadora kept up the semblance of her old life—Kevin, Roland, Errol—because she still felt that Bean was an invention of her imagination, not a real person. The way he abruptly arrived and vanished and her difficulty in reaching him gave him the air of a dybbuk or a faerie person (in the lovely old-fashioned sense of the term). When he disappeared, where did he go? Into an earthen hollow? Did he slip behind the hedgerows? Between the rain-drops ? Did he fall into a purple shadow between snowbanks?

But whatever was happening to him (and whether or not she had invented him), he was gradually giving her back her will to live and her belief that she could love again. After Josh left, she had all but stopped writing. The first night she met Bean, she told him that she expected never to write again and she meant it. He took her hand, squeezed it, and said, “Of course you'll write again.” But she was still convinced that she was finished. Why write, she thought, if writing only loses you the one you love? For Isadora no longer believed that art was more important than life. She did not believe that artists who made their families miserable were justified if their books were great enough. She felt that it was incumbent upon one to be a good human being first, an artist second. She had not felt that way in her twenties; perhaps she had not felt that way before having a child humanized her; but she certainly felt that way now. The demands of life are nearly always antithetical to the demands of art. The crying baby does not exactly enhance the daydreaming state needed for writing poems. The trip to the vet or the pediatrician does not exactly prepare one for writing a chapter describing
palazzi
in sixteenth-century Venice. Or
does
it? They had cats and dogs and babies in those sixteenth-century
palazzi.
And doubtless they felt about them the way we feel about our cats and dogs and babies. Even the most unexpected occurrence at the pediatrician's or the vet's turns out to fuel the book one is writing. The look of an animal in pain. The
feel
of a wet baby. How can any artist believe that by excluding the clutter and commotion of life he is somehow enhancing his art? Women artists don't believe it. They know that the crying baby somehow has to be accommodated with the manuscript that cries out not to be left. For whatever one loses of concentration, one gains immeasurably in the richness of observation. The force of life is with one—the everyday, the ordinary miraculousness of life.

Isadora had truly believed she would never write again, but Bean became her Muse. She had also believed she could never love again after Josh, but slowly she was starting to see that loving was a capacity, not necessarily an exclusive club. As she tentatively came to love Bean, always denouncing herself for loving him, doubting herself, doubting her sincerity, his sincerity, the pain over Josh began to lessen and fade. Perhaps she and Josh were not as fated as she had thought. Or perhaps they had been fated for a time. Perhaps, in lives that compressed many lifetimes into one, it was necessary to have many mates. Oh, what a blasphemous thought! And yet maybe it was true.

Bean came like a breath of fresh air to a shut-in, like Mr. Browning to Miss Barrett, like a cataract operation to an old woman getting blinder and blinder every year. The fuse of life is passed along through human flesh. We are plugged into the world of spirit through our decaying, dying flesh. Sex is the motor. Skin makes the electrical connection. Those who scoff at sex, who laugh at flesh (perhaps because it is not permanent?), do not know that it is not permanence that determines whether something is real or unreal. Molecules change patterns, rearrange themselves—but still the dance of life goes on. Through our skins, we become messengers to each others' molecules. As long as those molecules move, we are alive.

One night, lying in Bean's arms, she had a dream which marked how far she had come. The dream was elaborate: in color, with music. The stage was set for a musical of the thirties or forties. A brass band on stage was tuning up. Isadora was pulling on her costume and tap shoes.

Suddenly she mounted a Plexiglas staircase festooned with red neon lights. She wore a white top hat and carried a Plexiglas cane. Her white tailcoat flapped in the breeze and her little white satin boxer shorts gleamed. Her tap shoes were red patent leather. As she broke into her song and dance, the band played with her.

She sang Vera's mock-plaintive lines from
Pal Joey.

Bean, Josh, and Josh's no longer nameless lady, Wendy, were in the audience. Bean applauded wildly. Josh looked stunned and tentative (as he often did in life). And Ms. Emanon rushed up to the stage like a rabid dog and bit Isadora on the wrist.

Isadora laughed as Ms. Emanon's big buck teeth sank into her wrist.

“If they asked me, I could write a book ...” she sang. And then the dream faded.

She woke up in Bean's arms with the most wonderful sense of relief. She was actually laughing.

“Darting—what is it?” he asked, stroking her hair.

“I'm almost free of him,” she said, “almost. And what a blessed relief it is.” She was euphoric. Bean held her very close and she smelled his delicious smell. She loved the smell of his sweat, the taste of his semen, the taste of his tears.

“I love you,” she said. “After that dream, I can love you even better.”

So what, if it lasts or does not last? she thought. This is what we have now. Life is only now—not then, not when. We delude ourselves in thinking that past and future really exist.

“What dream?” Bean asked.

So she told him. And the amazing thing was that he understood.

“Your life is just beginning, not ending,” he said. “At forty, you'll shift gears and be launched into a whole new phase of your life.”

“How can you know that?”

“I can't. It's just that I do know it because we're linked. I can't tell you how.”

And indeed, as February wore icily on, there were murmurs of spring in the air. Isadora found a new business manager and lawyer to deal with the IRS mess and slowly they began to unravel Mel Botkin's tangled skeins. The law is sometimes just, but never swift. Meanwhile, invitations arrived. Invitations to speak in San Francisco, and other points west; invitations to travel to Russia that summer to partake of “cultural exchange”—whatever
that
was. Struggling as she was with the Papa novel, there was no question that she would go to Russia. (The invitation even coincided with the very month Mandy was going to stay with Josh—so surely she was meant to go.) She had been interviewing relatives about their memories of Papa, memories of Russia; she had been trying to track down that great lost painting presumed to be in that mysterious Midwestern warehouse. But the invitation to go to Russia was just too fortuitous; of course she would go. She would travel to Odessa and try to find her grandfather there.

Meanwhile spring
was
ever near. February in Connecticut was as treacherous and icy as ever, but on odd days, another wind blew from the Sound: a warmer wind, a wind that promised the blessed seasonal return of mud and all things that squirm under it. Roots, worms, tubers, and runners would aerate the mud of Connecticut. Connecticut itself would heave out from under its shroud of ice and once again Persephone would return from the underworld and her rejoicing mother would make things grow again.

In truth, there is no place in the world where spring does not come again. Even Malibu (where Isadora lived for one fateful year) has seasons—though at first they are not visible to the easterner. But the tides on the Pacific shift; whales migrate; phosphorescent organisms tint the water neon blue and pelicans dip and dive-bomb into these shining waves. When that happens even the gray and beaten-down screenwriters who earn millions a year (but dream of novels they will never write) and the stoned and sun-streaked surfer boys and girls look up and acknowledge the birth of a new season.

Spring comes to the desert with a rush of mustard flowers on the dusty slopes of the arroyos. Spring comes to the ocean with a change in waterlife and a change in the air. Spring comes to frozen Connecticut even in February, when the ice looms more menacing than ever. By March, when the winds blow and the rains begin to soften the winter mantle of prehistoric ice, even the thickest snowstorm cannot deny the crocuses pushing up below.

Papa had survived almost two winters underground; it was time to write his story and get on with it. She and Josh were through as lovers (would they someday become friends?—oh, it was too soon to tell), and she and Bean were just beginning. Isadora had somehow to find the courage to follow all these paths to the places where they led. So she cut her losses. She stopped arguing with Josh over whether or not he would support Mandy. She decided she would support Mandy—and be grateful she was working again. That was the example she would set for her daughter. Josh's childishness was Ms. Emanon's problem now, not hers. And good riddance.

From time to time she had an absolutely clear vision of him as her enemy, and that was helpful to her. He had undercut the two things dearest to her in life: her child and her writing. Not that she still did not
wish
to be friends with the father of her child (that dream never dies), but she did not expect it. She expected nothing from him but trouble. Already that was a help.

Once she ceased expecting, she ceased being angry—for anger is really disappointed hope. She hoped for nothing from him but a little civility. And even if that did not come, she would not be surprised.

She and Josh had long phone conversations about Mandy, but they tended to avoid each other in the flesh. Still, one day in March, as her fortieth birthday was approaching and she was trying to come to terms with the news that her life was half over, they happened to confront each other in Westport.

The stuffing fell out of the hole in her heart. She went weak in the knees. He had a laundry bag slung over his shoulder and was on his way to the laundromat. She was carrying an antique lamp she wanted to have rewired.

The lady with the lamp met the man with the bag.

“Want to have a cup of coffee?” she asked.

(Mandy was at the Blue Tree School till two that day and it was only noon.)

“Sure,” he said.

They went into a Westport dive that they had often frequented when they were together. It was called Gone Fishin' and it was a seafood place decorated in a tacky nautical motif—fisherman's nets, blown-glass balls—that kind of cutesy stuff.

The lady with the lamp put down her lamp. The man with the bag put down his bag. A helpful hatcheck person checked these unwieldy items. The man and the lady thanked her rather too kindly. (They were nervous in each other's presence.)

“So?” he said.

“How about lunch?” she said, aware that people were looking at them, recognizing them, wondering if this was the great reconciliation scene she (and they?) had dreamed about so many times.

Josh looked very bald to her after Bean, very bald and somewhat silly. He was not comfortable in his skin—that much she knew. And she also knew that she was beginning to be comfortable in hers. Not in the old way—because she had a man tucked away somewhere—but in a new way, a radical way—at least for her. She was comfortable just because she was who she was and centered in her soul. She had gone to hell (like Persephone) and come back up into the light of day. She was ready to flower again just as Bean had predicted.

They made small talk.

Josh loved gadgets and talked about the new decoder dish he had bought to intercept cable TV programs, the new telescope he had, the new word processor.

She realized that he was as thrilled about these things as a boy of ten would be thrilled. He wasn't even in adolescence; he was in latency! The idea of helping to support Mandy was not only alien to him—it scarcely even struck him as his responsibility. He was like a bonsai tree his parents had carefully cultivated and grown. They needed to remain the parents so they stunted him accordingly—for their benefit, not his. And he had obligingly remained a little boy. Still, there was always some woman ready and waiting to take care of the most infantile boy-man.

But here was the amazing thing: he did not protest. He only protested Isadora's attempts to free him from his little root-bound pot, not his parents' attempts to keep him there. It was amazing; he would go on tinkering with his gadgets forever, but she would get on with her life.

“So? How are things?” she asked.