Parachutes and Kisses (53 page)

“Then it's magic,” said Bean. “That sign's been waiting for you for years.” Somehow the discovery of her name on a signpost seemed a good omen, but then everything seemed a good omen during those days in San Francisco. Bean and Isadora never stumbled over each other in their hotel room, never got in each other's hair in restaurants, in bars, in cars. He never complained if they took a wrong turn, nor razzed her if she stopped to pee too often. He was nothing at all like the other men she'd known: not peevish, not controlling, not fretful.

“What's wrong with us?” Isadora wondered aloud. “We get along so well.”

“You'll see,” said Bean. “You'll see. There's nothing at all wrong with us. And sometimes perfection is harder to take than imperfection, and love is harder to take than heartbreak.”

 

And yet there was also chaos and anarchy in Isadora's idyll with Bean—a sense that Pan the prankster was ever near and that Whirl was king.

On a cablecar in San Francisco, Isadora had her wallet picked—three hundred dollars in cash, credit cards, driver's license, everything. The wallet vanished in part because she and Bean were kissing and not paying attention to the world around them. She had to call home and have Renata cancel all the cards and wire money to the hotel—and the incident gave Isadora a pang of doubt about this wildly world-obliterating love and where it might be leading her.

Later that night, when they were madly fucking in their hotel room, Bean nibbled off one of Isadora's earrings—diamond studs her mother had bought her for her fortieth birthday. Either he swallowed the stud, or it fell into a crevice of the bed and they could never find it, though they searched all over for it. Again she felt a pang of demon doubt. Not that she cared a hoot for cash, or credit cards, or diamonds, compared to Bean—but from time to time the bourgeois demon of her childhood would come to haunt her, perching on her shoulder and calling her a bad girl, a bad mother, an irresponsible hedonist, a wild woman, a tramp, a trollop, a tart—predicting financial ruin, venereal disease—all the things that happen to bad girls who seduce and support younger men.

She'd feel a stab of longing for Amanda then (Amanda who she knew was perfectly well looked after for these three days she was away), but in her childhood world, mothers did not go away even for three days (though her mother surely had) and they certainly did not go away with men who were fourteen years younger.

Sometimes, when she and Bean were making love, Isadora would think gloomily that their idyll was doomed: she would be fifty when he was thirty-six; her allure would be fading; he would be in his prime. They were passing each other on the escalators of their ages—she going down toward menopause, he climbing to the prime of manhood. The explosiveness of their lovemaking had something frightening about it—frightening and evanescent. Part witchery, part fantasy, it seemed to belong to that class of things which must perforce vanish—like the Banks children's idyll in the Royal Doulton plate or the twelve dancing princesses' wild nights in faeryland.

Their lovemaking surely had something of the realm of faery about it, but also it was the product of the immense changes in the world of sex that had occurred in the fourteen years that separated them. In fourteen years, the mores had changed just enough so that a man of Bean's generation had perhaps never had a woman as accepting, as open to his loving as Isadora. He was of that generation—raised to manhood on
her
books—that expected women to throw fits (and their partners out of bed) if they didn't have three orgasms in rapid fire before the man even began to think of his own pleasure. And she—despite her public reputation (or perhaps
because
of it)—was just enough a child of the fifties to think that cosseting a man, pleasing a man, nurturing a man was more important than her own immediate pleasure. Consequently, she must have struck him as the most obliging woman he had ever known in bed, and he certainly struck her as the most obliging man. As she had discovered with Roland, men born in the fifties were so used to young women who seemed like traffic cops in bed that a woman in her thirties or forties seemed like a revelation in old-fashioned femininity.

None of which prevented Isadora from sometimes feeling like an old bawd, the Wife of Bath, or a dirty old woman. Certainly she was not that estimable but somewhat intimidating creature “a good woman.”

Not long ago she overheard—from a friend of a friend of a friend—her ex-mother-in-law's judgment of Josh's new lady friend, Ms. Emanon.

“She's not beautiful, god knows,” Josh's mother had said, “but at least she's a good woman.”

What a withering judgment—annihilating
two
daughters-in-law with one economical blow! Implying, of course, that Isadora had
not
been a good woman, that she had been too career-obsessed, too passionate about writing to be anything
resembling
a good woman. A good woman was one who squelched her own career in favor of her husband's (even if she was the breadwinner—wet! then, she worked in
secret
so as not to make him feel bad about it). A good woman was one who killed her own creativity rather than ever threaten her man (even if she was the more talented of the two). A good woman was one who set her daughter the example that women always curb and prune their talents, make themselves into half-living bonsai trees—for the love of a man.

Of course this was what Josh's mother had done, what nearly all gifted women of her generation had done—no matter how large their talents. A splendid pianist, who'd studied with the most legendary teachers and had a great concert career predicted for her, she'd shucked it to coddle Josh's father, nurse him through his plays and screenplays, even become his collaborator at the typewriter, sneaking to that other keyboard only when he wasn't around (which was almost never, writers being a notoriously homebound lot), for he would invariably develop a blinding headache whenever she played. And she had accepted this as her fate—to indulge and pamper an artist less gifted than herself only because
he
had the prick. Eventually, she'd become his writing partner, rather than practice an art that took her from him. Naturally she disapproved of Isadora for not being able to do the same—for not being, in short, “a good woman.”

Oh, many was the time that Isadora had longed to be a good woman, to be still married to a doctor (as all good girls from Central Park West are bound), to have a life in which brilliant studs did not get nibbled off by brilliant studs—but the demon of her destiny had forced her to follow a different path: the bad girl's path, the serpentine path of the artist. Good women died—in childbirth (like Marietta Robusti), of suicide (like Virginia Woolf), or else they died into marriage (like Josh's mother)—but bad girls lived entirely too long, some of them outliving even their looks, their health, their fortunes, their husbands, their lovers. Colette was a bad girl; most survivors were. Only the good girls died young. For women, the artist's calling had the highest stakes: life or death. One stunted one's gift at peril of one's very life, but even if one followed the serpentine path, one's childhood and its bourgeois teachings haunted one forever. Always, there was the nagging sense of being a freak, a trollop, a tramp—and all the mothers-in-law of the world conspired to confirm one's worst fears.

The fact that Isadora was to be paid for this gig, that she sorely needed the money, that she was committed to supporting a child and a menage, in no way lessened her guilt. When she went away from her child to work, she always felt remiss; when she took care of her child exclusively, she knew she was neglecting her work, her professional and financial responsibilities. There seemed no way out of this dilemma, and Josh and his family lost no opportunity in making it even more painful for her. Sometimes she thought that Josh's main impetus to leaving her was somehow to sabotage her work just when it was going well. She had had too much—her books and her baby—and he, seething with jealousy because his books remained obscure, wanted to place as many obstacles in her path as possible.

So he had, and, predictably enough, she had stopped working when the demands of her life and Amanda's were simply too great. Now she was getting back the lust to work, and what was she doing? Sabotaging
herself
with the good girl/bad girl dilemma!

“The hell with being a good girl!” she suddenly said to Bean, as they still crawled around on the floor, looking for the lost diamond stud.

“What the hell are you talking about?” he asked.

“All my life I've suffered about not being a good girl—regretted my marriages, my travels, even my books—because they don't conform to some silly middle-class Jewish childhood notion of what a good woman ought to do!”

“You're the best woman in the world,” Bean said, “don't you know it? You're even the best mother, setting your daughter the best possible example. What should you have done? Stayed with a man who never would have been satisfied unless you stopped writing? That would have been some hell of an example to set your daughter!”

“You're right!” Isadora said with great bravado, but in her heart, she still nourished the little worm of doubt that perhaps the naysayers were right, and that perhaps even Bean would someday betray her. Her prayer for her daughter was that Mandy would grow up without this conflict, that she would never have to choose between a man she loved and work she loved, that she would never have to stunt Herself, battle with herself, waste hours in dialogue of self and soul.

She would know her gifts and seize the fruits of them. She would be beautiful, kind, burning with talent, and full of the courage required to follow the talent to the dark place where it always leads.

Going home, Bean and Isadora nosed around the airport shop, which was amply supplied with copies of
Tintoretto's Daughter
and even Isadora's first novel,
Candida Confesses,
about which she felt properly ambivalent (as she supposed all authors
should
feel toward their maiden efforts). She had the odd experience of watching a plump elderly lady with silvery half-moon glasses and hair of a distinctly bluish hue, open
Candida,
glance desultorily at the first few pages, and put the book back, picking up in its stead a copy of
Love's Raging Tempests
by Melissa Mallow and
Scullery Days
by Rhonda O‘Toole (a modern retelling of the Cinderella tale with explicit S-M scenes between the stepsisters and Cinderella). Isadora, who supposed herself indifferent to the fate of her old book, felt a stab of rejection when the utterly unknown woman put it down, like a girl who is not asked to dance at her first college mixer. She wanted to walk over, shake the woman by the shoulders, press her own book upon her, and say,
“Here
—read
this,”
but she could also laugh at herself for feeling this way.

Since she'd become a published author, all the joy of browsing in bookstores was lost to her. Either she was pissed because her books were not in evidence, or if they were, she became absorbed in the drama of whether or not anybody wanted them. Oh, she longed for those innocent days of her adolescence when the lofty
dream
of being an author far exceeded the grubby reality!

Going through the barrier, with its metal-detector and X-ray machine, Bean was stopped. Bells went off and various attendants gathered to inspect him. Bean waved to Isadora to go on ahead, not to wait for him, but she stood riveted to the spot, suddenly terrified of losing him. ,

From a little distance, she saw him being frisked, saw the troubled expression on his face, and then saw him extract a large knife from his pants pocket and surrender it. All the attendants examined the knife. Then they called over a man in uniform who did the same. Isadora could see Bean's lips moving (but she could not hear what he was saying) as he explained his way out of this predicament. Her heart was banging in her chest, her mouth was dry, she was actually praying.

After what seemed like an interminable delay, they let him go (keeping, however, his knife).

Looking distinctly upset, Bean strode over to her.

“Why didn't you take off?” he demanded. “If I get in trouble, I want you to pretend not to know me. The last thing I want is to get you in trouble.”

Isadora looked up at him, her eyes filled with tears.

“Then why'd you bring the knife?” she asked, thinking of the lost wallet, the lost earring, and now his narrow escape from being thought a hijacker. Incipient lawlessness lurked behind Bean's sweetness. He was the sort of man who'd carry dope across the borders of barbaric countries and wind up rotting for years behind the bars of a Saudi or Turkish prison—or in a frozen Soviet stalag. But did she want to be there, sharing his fate when that happened? Not bloody likely. Then why was she with him? Why was she risking her neck? For a sexual obsession?

“Why'd you bring the knife?” she asked a second time.

“To protect you from all your admirers,” he said. “I can't let you go out into the world unarmed. You think you can write incendiary books and then walk this jungle we call the world without a bodyguard. My love, you're a sitting duck. But
I'm
not. I have no intention of letting you (or your little girl) be destroyed.”

“I don't need you to carry knives for me,” Isadora said.

“Like hell you don‘t,” said Bean, looking at her with those very blue, very tender eyes. “You think that because you're sweet, the whole world is. I may be young—but I know far more than you do about the world. You need somebody to take care of you and I don't know why there aren't more applicants for the job.”

He put his arm around her and they walked briskly to the waiting plane.