Parachutes and Kisses (52 page)

Oh, she didn't really believe any of this was permanent. Happiness is fleeting, pain unforgettable. But life was not permanent either. Better to live in the present than to fret about the future or rehearse the past.

There are times in life when the curse seems lifted, when existence seems as pure and uncomplicated as a drop of spring water dangling at the end of a crystal mixing rod, when great suffering has suddenly fled, leaving in its wake only great joy: this was one of these times.

“My mothball fleet,” Isadora said, embracing Bean.

“My baby, my bounce, my darling,” he said, hugging her.

She called him her “mothball fleet' because his clothes always smelled vaguely of camphor—in true old-WASP family fashion. He called her ”bounce“ because of her bouncy, loping walk. ”Loping de Vega“ he also called her, after the most prolific (and happiest ?) writer in human history. Oh, they were mad for each other, mad for San Francisco, mad for the hills, the Bay, the dope, the champagne, the food, and each other's bodies. They devoured each other in bed, gazed into each other's eyes until it seemed they would drown in their mutual blues, ate and drank and smoked together until all of life seemed suffused with sweet sensation.

Isadora, who had felt so much pain for so long, who had lived the last eight months with an aching hole in her heart, was strangely filled by this love, this sensation. It was not just sex (as if such sex can ever be “just”)—it was also protection, caring, concern. Bean had a sweetness she had never known in any man, a tenderness (for all his passionate roughness in bed). He wanted to protect her. She felt his protectiveness as a force around her body. She felt the force of his manhood, the tang of his sex. He was the first man she had ever met who did not confuse sweetness with being a wimp. He was tender, but there was no question he was a man.

The conference itself was a gas. Run by a large mustachioed brunette (with enormous pendulous tits) who called herself Lisa Goddess-Priestess (or Lisa G-P for short), the conference was full of feminist witches, hippie agriculturists (who were growing sinsemilla in the hills of Humboldt County), hippie animal hus banders (who were raising unicorns that looked suspiciously like one-horned goats), hippie children costumed for Arcady—or a northern California production of A
Midsummer Night's Dream.
Isadora was hugely amused by it all (and also very glad she'd brought Bean). Nuts abounded at the conference and each and every one had a bone to pick with Isadora. One stopped her to declare that
Tintoretto's Daughter
was a sexist book. “Why didn't you call it
Marietta's Father?”
a very bellicose Goddess-person demanded.

“Because no one would have known which Marietta I meant.”

“But naming it after Tintoretto panders to the very patriarchy you are criticizing.”

“Not really. Anyone who
reads
the book
knows
I'm not on the side of patriarchy.”

“Well—I would have called it
Marietta's Father,”
the Goddess-person said.

“Then,” said Isadora (more kindly than she felt), “maybe you should write your
own
book and call it that.”

Bean was furious at the wholesale hostility that greeted Isadora from some of the very people who'd invited her.

“Why'd they ask you here if all they wanted was to assault you?”

“Oh, darling,” said Isadora, “that's my
function
as a writer—to be a lightning rod for people's fantasies, their fears, their feuds with the world. I'm used to it.”

“I'm not,” said Bean. “You need protection. Someday, you're going to walk outside your door and find that the same thing happens to you as happened to John Lennon. But not while I'm around. I'd lay down my life for you.”

Isadora could see he really meant it.

Bean was still young and innocent enough to believe that fame meant honor rather than a complex combination of attention and attack. Isadora privately congratulated herself on having brought along her own ally so that she could enjoy the trip.

As they explored the exposition site—set up as a medieval fair on the green hills of Marin (not far from Mt. Tarn)—it occurred to Isadora that ten years ago she'd been at a convention of Freudian shrinks in Vienna, and now she'd “progressed” to a convention of feminist witches and Goddess worshipers in Marin. Then, she'd been with a man eight years older; now she was with a man fourteen years younger (a man who'd been in prep school when she was gallivanting around Europe with Adrian Goodlove), a man who'd learned about lovemaking in part from reading her books! It all seemed so unreal. Her very life seemed unreal. She had created books out of her own substance and out of those books had come the outer trappings of her life—houses, cars, the means to support the child she bore—not to mention crooked business managers, crazy nannies, complex tax troubles—the lot! It was as if she'd dreamed the world and then seen it come to life. But was it a nightmare, or was it a euphoric dream? Could she choose, or was the choice thrust upon her? And was the stock market, the world of mergers and acquisitions, or the world of academe any less of a dream?

Today, it all seemed like a comic dream—a comic dream out of the mists of pre-Arthurian legend. Who were these costumed figures wandering across the greensward? Had she invented them, too, and invented the companion with whom she viewed them? They were a ragtag group—part Monty Python, part sword-and-dragon epic, with special effects. The Goddess worshipers wore filthy
shmattes
that grazed the ground; from underneath peeked orthopedic sandals. The feminist witches sported the double-bladed ax from Crete—the labyris—which they hung as amulets around their necks. And little children frolicked amongst unicorns (why spoil the Magick and call them one-horned goats?).

The conference was as tacky as it was cosmic. Vendors were busy selling everything from astrological charts to perineal prints (yes—it was indeed claimed that if you sat bare-assed upon an ink pad and then upon a sheet of rice paper, your perineum would give a print predicting your future far better than any mere palm-print!). Other medieval-looking mountebanks sold “pyradomes” —little wire pyramids to wear on the head—“to concentrate the cosmic rays and increase both inspiration and intelligence.” It didn't
seem
to have worked for the dudes who were selling them (who merely looked like your average northern California ston ers). Herbal remedies were for sale at other booths, as well as magic potions, herbs to be used in doing incantations and spells, carob-covered cookies in the shapes of zodiacal signs, and even “solar-powered” vibrators (for the ecologically minded masturba tor!). Good new neopaganism didn't seem to have resisted commerciality any more successfully than bad old Judeo-Christianity. Apparently, whether God was male or female, the pursuit of lucre was equally sacred to Him/Her. Not to mention the pursuit of sinsemilla. The sweet smell of sinsemilla was everywhere. Isadora hardly knew how much of what she was seeing was contact high and how much was “real”—whatever “real” might be.

She gave her speech on the female aspect of the deity—and it was warmly received. Like many people, Isadora tended always to concentrate on the few people who hated her rather than on the many who loved and admired her. In truth, most of the audience was delighted to hear her—delighted and appreciative. A great rush of applause followed her speech—but even without it, she would have felt the pleasure of the listeners.

“Why am I so negativistic?” Isadora wondered aloud to Bean when her gig was over. “I always seem to anticipate criticism and to focus on that rather than on all the affirmation I receive.”

“There's probably no artist on earth who doesn‘t,” Bean said. “Except for the real fools and four-flushers. They're
never
self-critical.”

Bean came as balm to Isadora's soul. He was so supportive, so accepting. He had the wonderful optimism of youth, the optimism and innocence that betrayals and divorces and IRS audits manage to wear away in time. At forty, the true lover of humankind must be a cynic: so many hopes have been dashed. But at twenty-six, the optimism is fresh. Bean was an innocent, for all his sexual bravado. His heart—the organ that mattered most—was pure. That was why Isadora loved him so: he restored her faith in innocence, her faith that the poet's vision (not the taxman's) was the true one.

Once her gig was done, they fled the conference and headed for Muir Woods. Drunk with their new love, intoxicated with San Francisco, with weed and wine, they drove to the Muir Woods and reveled in its green.

A light rain misted their faces as they walked the pathways between the ancient redwoods. Rejoicing in the green, imbibing the green, absorbing the green through their pores, they both felt reborn, renewed, reconnected to life. Love is green (as Shakespeare knew). The lovers' sleeves are green (as the Elizabethans sang).

From time to time the rain would grow heavy and they would run for cover under the towering trees. The tree trunks were kissed with moss; the rocks were as wet and slippery as lovers' thighs; the sky was obscured by the monumental trees.

The rain had driven away the other tourists, so it was as if they were walking in an enchanted forest, sprung up exclusively for them, more state of mind than material reality, more Brigadoon than California. They saw fantastic animal heads in the mossy fallen tree trunks and rotting roots: basilisks, griffins, green unicorns. These seemed to be the true imaginary animals, and those at the conference merely the bogus. The vegetable world here seemed in the process of metamorphosis into the animal, the mineral world in the process of metamorphosis into the vegetable.

“It's an enchanted forest, out of time,” said Bean; “it will vanish when we do.”

And so it seemed—though they both knew full well that
they
would vanish and the forest would remain. They walked on a little ledge of time above the abyss of eternity. But in their budding new love, they felt secure and strong—as if they could hold the demons at bay for a time.

“ ‘On the world island we are all castaways,' ” Bean said.

“That's beautiful,” said Isadora.

“I know—it's Loren Eisley, not me, unfortunately. But with you, for the first time in my life, I
don't
feel like a castaway. I feel I
belong...”

“Belong where?” asked Isadora.

“Belong in your arms,” said Bean, taking her and kissing her as the rain drenched them.

Their tongues intertwined and they were lost in the wet sweetness within (and the wet sweetness without). Their kiss was like a bolt of lightning in a torrential rain—fire conveyed through water. Often, when they kissed, the intensity of connection was so great that they both experienced vertigo.

“I never feel lonely with you,” said Bean when they stopped kissing. “I keep
expecting
to feel lonely or shut out or irritated, but the more we are together, the more
right
it feels, the more we seem to belong together.”

Isadora felt the same, but she feared admitting it. She feared the commitment it implied, she feared the heartbreak, the entanglement that leads to bitter loss. Bean waited for her to pledge herself to him in turn, but she remained silent through fear and the recentness of her heartbreak.

She looked up at him.

“You're beautiful,” she said.

He shook his head. “I'm just a man who loves you,” he said. “But I love you completely. You'll see. Just give me time.”

They clasped hands and walked on in the rain not caring at all that they were both drenched, that they had ruined their shoes, and that they had begun something they could not easily repudiate.

Isadora had had doubts about her relationship with Bean from the very beginning. Born in demonic passion, it seemed doomed to end as it began: suddenly. So many of their nights were booze-soaked, weed-hallucinated, that it seemed she would awaken one morning and find that it had all been a dream—as in the ending of the corniest “Twilight Zone” tale. “Was it all a dream?” the protagonist wonders—but then she finds some material remnant of the dream zone which she has somehow carried back intact. It is the oldest of literary devices: the twelve dancing princesses find their shoe leather worn out; Mary Poppins's wards, the Banks children, emerge from the world of the Royal Doulton plate on the mantel, but discover they have dropped a woolen scarf which now remains in the world of the plate, trapped forever under its glaze. An old literary trick but one which never fails to haunt. What would Isadora bring back from her sojourn in the world of fantasy with Bean? Clap? Herpes? Or a heart that healed and was somehow whole again?

Right now she didn't care. The present was so beautiful that it obliterated all fretfulness. Always accustomed to agonizing over the future and regretting the past, she released herself to be entirely in the present. She gave herself permission to enjoy San Francisco, her companion, her life.

They rode the cable cars and walked the waterfront. They slogged uphill and down; they bought silly trinkets in Chinatown boutiques; they sat at the Top of the Mark and watched the lights of the city, the boats on the Bay, the bridges, the procession of cars that seemed from this distance like tiny illuminated insects crossing a bridge of grass. They explored Marin by car, driving up the winding ways of Tiburon and Sausalito, the serpentine roads of Mill Valley. On a road somewhere they stopped and found a roadside marker that read: Isadora's Way.

“I wonder if it was named after Isadora Duncan?” asked Isadora.

“After
you,”
said Bean.

“I doubt it,” Isadora countered, never believing in her own power.