Parachutes & Kisses

(It is, of course, impossible to judge what course evolution would take after human extinction, but the past record strongly suggests that the reappearance of man is not one of the possibilities. Evolution has brought forth an amazing variety of creatures, but there is no evidence that any species, once extinguished, has ever evolved again.)

Once the wrenching pain of the first separated month is past, she runs around madly, as if that way she could outrun her despair. Nobody, she thinks at first, is as good in bed as Josh. And now that she’s flush (though she never believes it) and famous (though she never believes that either), impotent men seem to be everywhere! Why didn’t anyone tell us that if women got strong, men would get doubly weak—as if in spite? But still, she diverts herself—with a drugged-out disc jockey from Hartford (her Connecticut Yankee Mellors-the-Gamekeeper), a cuddly Jewish banker from New York, a blue-eyed Southern writer from New Orleans, a cute Swedish real-estate developer who owns (and is ruining) numerous islands in the Caribbean, a lapsed rabbi who wants her to be his congregation, an antiques dealer who drives a Rolls and never graduated from Erasmus Hall High, a brilliant, astoundingly well-hung, twenty-six-year-old medical student who can get Valium, Librium, quaaludes, and Sonoma County sinsemilla in abundance (and in his spare time is discovering a cure for cancer), a plastic surgeon from New York who’s into oral sex, and so many others she’s practically lost track.

Everyone is into oral sex, it seems. Everyone has discovered the clitoris. In the ten years since she took off from Bennett Wing and ran (briefly) away with Adrian Goodlove (then wrote a book about it that gave women everywhere permission to do the same), the world has certainly changed. For one thing, there is more oral sex. For another, more impotence. For a third, sex is ubiquitous and yet also somehow devoid of its full charge of mystery. For a fourth, the world is definitely lurching to its end.

Isadora’s generation is middle-aged. Those irrepressible baby-boomers, who thought they would never sag, bald, or die, are now sagging, balding, and dying at an appalling rate. A lot of them have ex-spouses in abundance, children on alternate weekends, houses in the Hamptons, houses in the fabled counties of Fairfield or Dutchess, co-ops or brownstones in town. Some even have stocks, bonds, money-market funds, lawyers, accountants, business managers, and hemorrhoids. (These things apparently go together.)

They are the older generation now. They know it because they sign the checks. They know it because their parents are starting to die. They know it because their grandparents stare down at them from uneasy chairs in the clouds. (And the living are beginning to seem almost as glassy-eyed as the dead.) They have reached the age where they meet their new lovers at A.A.; the age where some of their friends are addicts, some of their friends are bankrupt, and some of their friends are dead; where their children want real horses, not toy ones, and where they no longer worry about their own pregnancies but about their daughters‘. They have reached the age, in short, where they know they are going to die.

Isadora now lives in Rocky Ridge, Connecticut. Having left her native Manhattan for “the Coast,” having done her time in Malibu, she has now completed the triangular path her kind is duty-bound to traverse: Manhattan, Malibu, New England (sometimes in that order, sometimes in reverse). But still, it’s as inevitable a hegira for “successful” writers, actors, and media types, as the triangular trade route—England, the coast of Africa, the Sugar Isles—was for eighteenth-century “pyrates.”

Isadora thinks of herself as an eighteenth-century type: a sort of pyrate of the heart. She’s every bit as much a survivor as Moll Flanders or Fanny Hill. She left her self-pity somewhere back in the seventies. At the age of thirty-nine, she is almost convinced that all the pain one gets in life is somehow for the best, that one never gets more than one can cope with, that life is a process of tempering the spirit—so that when at last it flees the mortal body, it knows a little better which way to go than it did the first time around. She knows that her life is a journey toward self-reliance. She knows that she has always lived with her heart on her sleeve. She knows she has paid the price for that, but also reaped the rewards. When one follows the path with heart, one often bleeds. (But what is the alternative—a cauterized core?)

At times she is seized with a sadness so profound no tears can release it. Being separated in Connecticut requires so much driving! Sometimes she’ll drive an hour on the Merritt Parkway just to get laid. Marriage is so much more convenient. She knows the parkway exits by heart—up to New Haven and down to New York —and sometimes she wonders what a girl from Manhattan is doing at three in the morning, driving stoned down the desolate Merritt, past Shelton, Orange, Milford, Fairfield, listening to “easy listening” on the radio—a late-night habit she’d never publicly confess to, and feeling her soul empty as a thrown-away beer can that suddenly explodes your tire.

It is three A.M. on what used to be called a “crisp” October night. Since the heavens have poured with rain for two whole days, the sky is suddenly clear and winking with stars which look like pin-pricks in black oaktag shining through some remembered grade-school window. Isadora has reached the age of nostalgia—her dreaded fortieth year. She races toward that birthday from a lengthy tryst with her drugged-out disc jockey, a man more into pleasuring women than any she has ever met—despite the fact that he is only intermittently hard. He’s the Count of Cunnilingus, the Lord of Licks, the Viceroy of Vaginas. He’s the only man she’s ever met—including Josh—who knows the rhythm of a woman’s coming and doesn’t stop just as the throbs begin. What’s more, he adores her, has worshiped her and her writing from afar (one never can worship very long up close), and Isadora means to see it stays that way. She rations herself to him one night a week to make the pleasure last. And she often wonders if, unstoned, she’d find him interesting at all.

She still loves Josh, who moved out three months past after a year of unspeakable pain, upheaval, and guilt. Their seventh year. All the body cells change every seven years, she read somewhere —perhaps in Science News. Inseparable for seven years, they finally came to blows—over money, sex, competing for the love of the three-year-old daughter they both adore—all the usual shit couples come to blows over. Their intelligence did not spare them, nor their passion, nor the fact that they are linked forever in some Dantean sphere or other. They still love each other, but they can’t live together—at least not for now.

“I will never come back—find someone else,” Josh keeps saying. But Isadora doesn’t quite believe it. She has purposely chosen lovers she can’t take seriously. She is waiting for Josh to grow up. He’s thirty-three—Christ’s age on the cross. Dante’s age when he descended into hell. Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita. The Middle of life—a dangerous age for a man. Or a woman, for that matter. At thirty-two she bolted from her second marriage, left Bennett for Josh. Now it’s her turn to be left. Though she was the one who threw him out—after a year of listening to him say he wanted to leave. He provoked her into the decision so he could blame her. But the decision was more his than hers.

As for Josh, he thinks she’s his noose, his albatross, the box he can’t unlock. He’s lonely in his rented house the next town over from Rocky Ridge. He lives in Southton, the low-rent district—which, in these parts, means the houses cost a mere $100,000 instead of $300,000. He’s lonely, but he won’t come back. Won’t and can’t. Nor will he take a penny from her. Out to prove it on his own. Writing novels, too, he is—and with some success, though her absurd renown dwarfs it. What can they do? They love their daughter and each other, but they can’t write under the same roof. So they shuttle Mandy back and forth. Amanda Ace, their gorgeous three-year-old treasure—and they make do as best they can.

Now she is hurtling down the Merritt at three A.M. while the radio plays a sleazy rendition of “Stardust”—all tinny strings and soupy nasal horns. She only listens to “easy listening” when her mind is already gone, when it’s so late that hard rock or jazz or baroque would tax the gray cells beyond endurance. She loves to drive. In her twenties both driving and flying terrified her; now she adores them both. Big planes, small planes, Pilgrim Airlines to Boston on what she calls “a de Havilland double rubber band.” Private planes to Catalina Island whenever she gets the chance. (She has a friend in Los Angeles who flies a Cessna.) The Concorde if a foreign publisher’s paying. Jumbo jets, Learjets, Hawker—de Havillands, helicopters. Her fear of flying has flipped over into love—and isn’t fear sometimes just the flip side of love, the reverse of mad desire?

And cars. She adores cars. She wishes she could collect vintage cars—but her nature is too conservative for such lavish extravagance. She has just two cars: an old Mercedes and a new—which is a silver turbo diesel with vanity plates in Middle English. QUIM slipped like butter past the Connecticut censors. The Motor Vehicle Department in Norwalk would have balked at cunt—but QUIM, with its Chaucerian lilt, went right by the computer’s scrutiny.

She drives like an ace—which, of course, she is. Isadora White Stollerman Wing Ace—Isadora Wing to the world. Growing up in Manhattan, she never learned to drive in her teens, but she has made up for that now. She accelerates out of curves like a racing car driver, the Stirling Moss of lady novelists, the female Paul Newman of Connecticut. In her old 280SL, she’s even jazzier.

Rocky Ridge and Southton coming up. Exit 43A. The exit is hard to find at night. Many times, she’s missed it. She brakes, hearing the good German squeak of the Silver Nazi’s strong disc brakes. She bought this car with German royalties on her first best seller—a book intensely critical of Germans. Some revenge! The Nazis had their good points, though. They build the best cars and crematoria. And what with the world being full of multinational conglomerates, who’s to tell where the money goes anyway? The Germans, the Arabs, the Japanese ... it’s impossible nowadays to keep your money out of the wrong pockets the way her parents thought they could. And what are the wrong pockets, anyway? The world was more morally intelligible in the forties—the decade of her birth. Now it’s a mess. Heroes and villains all mixed up. Who can tell the potter from the pot, or the dancer from the dance? Isadora often wishes she had been born in her parents’ generation—when Nazis were Nazis and good Americans were Good Americans, when the intellectuals still thought socialism could save the world. When capitalism was seen as the only evil (rather than human, or rather inhuman, nature) and when sexual freedom hadn’t yet been widely tried and was, therefore, still seen as some sort of panacea—at least by Provincetown bohemians of her parents’ generation.

Sometimes, in fact, she even envied her grandparents’ generation, who could call a war a name as naïve and hopeful as “The Great War,” as if there could be only one. It was given to her luckless generation to know that that particular war was only the dress rehearsal for World War II, while the Korean War and Vietnam were mere showcases for the race’s flaming talent for self-destruction-with the Main Event, of course, still to come. That her grandfather’s generation could even talk about a “war to end all wars” bespoke a chasm between her and them that was almost mind-boggling.

Damn. She misses the exit, zooms down to Westport thinking how dangerous it is for her, a mother of a three-year-old daughter who is totally dependent on her, to be driving stoned. A hippie at thirty-nine-how embarrassing. Though she looks perhaps thirty-three. Far prettier than she was at thirty-three, everyone tells her. She’s thinner, for one thing, and pregnancy gave her a bloom and cheekbones she never had before. Money also helps: facials at Arden, sixty-dollar haircuts, health spas every winter, and designer clothes never hurt a woman’s looks. She’s as blond and open-eyed as in her teens, though the forehead furrows—her worry lines—keep deepening. It’s Josh who looks thirty-nine-with his balding bean, his laugh lines, his eye-crinkles.

“Fuck other men, go ahead,” he said last week with that maddening mock-indifference of his. And she does. She does and enjoys it mightily, too—having come to the age where, unimpeded by any pleasure inhibition, and knowing full well that she was born to die, her orgasms grasp at the emptiness of certain death with unaccustomed ferocity. But sometimes the pain of loss, the loss of family, the loss of cuddly evenings in bed reading aloud from Dickens or watching old movies (they were thus ensconced when labor began three years ago and Mandy burst forth upon the scene) is too much to bear. She remembers the couple they were when they first moved to Connecticut, he writing in one room, she in another, one bouncy dog between them (a Bichon Frisé named Chekarf); no baby, no blasted nanny invading their lives, time to fuck at odd hours of the day or night, weekend dinner parties for New York friends for whom they both cooked, both served, both cleaned up, then fell into bed bone-tired and giggled like slumber-party chums before they fell asleep, whether they fucked or not.

The house bloomed with plants, with life, with sunshine on the barnboard walls. They adopted a shaggy old mutt with mange from a local pound and cured her with their love, their life-giving sunny home, their rooms which reeked of good sex and home-baked bread, their home where typewriters clacked and unlikely people fell in love at their famous brunches, their home which danced with orgone energy, with life-force-for what else could it have been?

Now she veers around the exit, thinking of the evening she has spent in bed with her disc jockey (or Dick Jockey, as her best friend calls him). Five hours in the Ho Hum Motel (a name that always makes her think of the Seven Dwarfs)—a local hot pillow, where no one ever arrives with luggage; the desk clerk would no doubt have a heart attack if anyone ever did. “Velvet tunnels,” she had muttered somewhere into the fourth stoned hour, the eighth stoned orgasm—amazing as that seems in retrospect—and he was beguiled. A poetic type. Errol Dickinson from Hartford (named for Flynn, not Emily). The sort of guy who reads Beowulf and Harold Robbins with equal enthusiasm. A cocksman par excellence, but also enough the cavalier servente to know that women respond as much to sweet words as soft licks. Errol is a genius in the sack, but he can say (and maybe even mean) things like, “I’d fight off Grendel for you and go search for the Third Ring.” He writes poetry, too, but thus far has had the courtesy not to bring it to their trysts. The time may come when he does. What then? Will she flee in the night? Isadora has been famous long enough to know that often when one wants simply to get laid, one gets unpublished manuscripts instead. And he is nice, poetic, decent, almost lovable—too nice to offend. She doesn’t fuck mean men anymore, ever. That went out with her twenties, thank Goddess.

She zooms out of the exit, home along country roads. Her headlights on high beam (there is so little traffic), she does sixty, hoping her disc brakes will come to the rescue if an animal darts out. Her car bears a sticker from the Friends of Animals, which reads: I BRAKE FOR ANIMALS. A silly slogan. Should vegetarians have I BRAKE FOR VEGETABLES on their bumpers? “Why are you a vegetarian,” someone once asked our utterly deserving Nobel laureate, I. B. Singer, “for health reasons?” “The health of the animals,” the wry old Jew replied. Isadora loves animals, too, and won’t wear fur coats or own stock in automated farms. But last winter, it dawned on her as she snuggled smugly into her goosedown parka that they kill the geese, too. What a downer. She might as well mink it, if mink didn’t make her think of Jewish grandmothers. It is an index of her middle-agedness which fast approacheth that most of her women friends have minks. Some of the men, too. Help.

Home, home, home. Her steep and curving driveway (which ices over in winter) is such a welcome sight. Never does she zoom down it without thinking of that scene in Garp where Garp’s wife bites off her lover’s penis and the kid gets killed. Literary overkill. In real life nothing is so full of ironies. (Or else the ironies take years to iron out.) Still she likes Irving, with his feisty little wrestler’s style, his nice wife he went and left, his damped-down sexuality, his sat-upon violence, the Smollett of contemporary novelists. No realist—but then, is she? Is anyone in a world where three-year-old babies like her own stomp around the living room chanting “Sadat got shot! Sadat got shot!” without knowing either who Sadat is or what it means to “got shot.”

QUIM, the Silver Nazi, shudders to a stop (not unlike her own most recent orgasm). The house lights are on. The replacement Bichon, Dogstoyevsky, who came into their lives when the next-to-last nanny—an insufferably bossy English girl—ran over Chekarf, yips and yaps from the rectangular stairwell window. Isadora loved Chekarf better, she’s ashamed to admit. He had something of the mutt in him, and a Russian-Jewish soul. Dogstoyevsky is a Fairfield County goy, despite his hopeful name. Maybe she should have replaced Chekarf with an Airedale, or a German Shepherd, or—what Mandy wants most in all this world (except her daddy back)—a “Labradog.”

She puts down her bag, throws off her big pink and magenta sweater (bought in Stockholm on a book tour), pulls off her purple cowboy boots, and starts her nightly ablutions. She is almost used to having the bedroom to herself, though it still spooks her sometimes, late at night. It took five weeks before she moved her evening gowns into the closet he vacated, six weeks before she moved her cosmetics to his sink, seven weeks before she dared to use the hot tub with another man (late one night when Mandy was asleep), and still she sleeps on her side of the waterbed, as if to leave room for him. She wants him back. But maybe not just yet. And not the way he is now—depressed, rejecting, seething with unspoken rage.

“Black soap?” Woody Allen asked in Annie Hall. Isadora uses it, too—Dr. Lazlo’s famous formula. Sea Mud soap at thirteen dollars a cake. Thorstein Veblen must be giggling in his grave. And what in heaven’s name is “Sea Mud”? Primal ooze? The muck that trapped the dinosaurs? Beauty goop from the La Brea tar pits? Whatever it is, it has certainly helped her skin. Or maybe Errol has. After a night with him, she looks so healthy and her nipples tingle with hickies for days after.

But Errol could get to be a problem. Already, he is starting to say “I love you,” at odd moments in bed. Or does she delude herself? Errol is such a consummate cocksman that all the endearments he whispers in bed seem oddly generalized-as if applicable to anyone: to wit: “You’re so beautiful.” “Your skin is so soft.” “I love your pussy.” “I love you wrapped around me.” “Oooo what you do to me.” “I can’t get enough of you.”

Errol is a Connecticut legend. Long, lanky, with one brown eye and one blue, and dressed like the proverbial rhinestone cowboy, Errol’s fame extends from Hartford to Old Greenwich. Isadora shares him with a friend—an unlikely friend to share a cock with, but then, truth is indeed always stranger than fiction. She shares him with Lola Birk Harvey—a Connecticut heiress from Greenwich, who lives on an immense estate on the Sound with her venture-capitalist husband, a stuffed shirt named Bruce.

Lola’s hobby is adultery. She is a literary agent by profession, but never has had more than a few clients because her avocation is so time-consuming. Lola grew up in New York in the neighborhood of the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, within shouting distance of Le Cirque and the Sailboat Pond. Her father before her was a literary agent, Foster Birk—but she has run his business nearly into the ground because she doesn’t care enough about making money. (On her mother’s side, she inherited a bundle—and her husband is awfully rich, too.)

What Lola cares about is the art of adultery and she knows things Isadora never even dreamed about. Like how to meet men in Merritt Parkway commuter parking lots. Like how to require that they use rented cars. Like how to keep a collection of wigs in different colors so as never to be recognized. Like how to have a handbag big enough for wine and cheese and sexy underwear. Like how to keep a corkscrew and plastic champagne glasses secreted in the car.

Lola does things with style, even sex. She knows that sex is an art, not a science. She uses her prim and proper heiress exterior to great advantage. Nobody thinks Lola fucks, so Lola can always stalk her prey in her own sweet time. She has a long “lead time” (as they say in the magazine biz): lunches, dinners, brunches, cocktail dates in New York or Greenwich. And then, just when the guy is beginning to wonder why this cool, angular blonde keeps calling him, just when he starts to think she wants him to write the Great American Novel (an apparently universal fantasy in this country), blue-eyed Lola (who is forty, but looks thirty-five) leans over the cocktail table, touches her hand to his, and says, “Did I ever tell you how much you turn me on?”

“The guy is always amazed,” Lola reports. “Here I am—prim and proper Lola Harvey—seeming to make a pass. They never believe it. Never. Whereupon I continue with the line ‘When can we be alone together?’ And then I stroke his thigh under the table —and, if it’s dark enough—take the measure of his hard-on. Listen, Isadora, if he hasn’t got one by now, forget it. And if he has, then I can decide whether or not it’s worth it to set up a tryst.”

Isadora is amazed. Lola knows things about seducing men un-dreamt of in Isadora’s supposedly sensual youth (“Hot Youth” as Byron called it). What on earth did she know then? Nothing. Sex at thirty-nine is better than ever. The only trouble is finding partners. Hah. Partners who aren’t scared of famous women, aren’t fame fuckers, or gold diggers, or daddy figures (who want to save you from yourself). How many times has Isadora heard the line “You’ve been my sexual fantasy for seven years—ever since I read ‘that book of yours,’ ” and then gotten into bed only to discover the guy couldn’t get it up? Who wants to be a sexual fantasy for seven years, Isadora thinks. How can sexual fantasy do other than disappoint?

“That book of hers” haunts her. Haunts her and blesses her both. On the one hand, Candida Confesses made her a “household word”—like Ajax or Vaseline. On the other, it bestowed upon her unsuspecting youth a strange sort of sexual smirch. Many people could see her only as the nymphomaniac of the literary world—when she is really (as her friends all know) a nice, hamish Jewish girl from Central Park West at heart.

In a room as cluttered with stuffed animals (or “aminals,” as Amanda still says) as a toy store, a room full of exotic unicorns and dragons and dromedaries—as well as the more normal Poohs and Paddingtons and Miss Piggys—Amanda sleeps in a bright red toddler’s bed, sleeps clutching her “transitional object,” a smallish stuffed camel she has named Camelia.

Camelia Camel was given to Amanda by one of Isadora’s dearest friends in the world, her fairy godmother, Hope—Hope of the steel-gray hair, the voluminous tits, the melting voice, the gentle guidance in a world without guidelines. Hope, who midwifed Isadora’s first book of poems almost a dozen years ago, is nearly sixty now. “It just gets better, darling,” she always tells Isadora when she expresses her fear of aging. “There are presents still to unwrap under the tree. It gets less frantic, darling—and you know what?”

Somehow, Amanda knew at once that Hope was her fairy godmother, too. Given Hope’s gift, she clutched the caramel-colored camel to her breast, dubbed her Camelia at once, and hasn’t let go of her since. Oh, Amanda is one alliterative kid—a lover of language for language’s sake just like her mom and dad, a maker of names, of portmanteau words like Labradog. Apparently she, too, was born under the Scribbling Star.

Her mother painted, still does in fact. So Isadora abandoned her brush for quill at age eighteen and never once looked back. Sometimes she longs to do a watercolor. She promises herself that when her novel-writing days are done, she’ll break her pens, throw out her legal pads (no word processor for eighteenth-century Isadora, though she rents one for her secretary), and spend her dotage doing watercolors—like her old friend and mentor Kurt Hammer (once Guru of Big Sur, now mischievously haunting her from Writers’ Heaven).

Amanda sleeps, Camelia in her arms. Amanda at three lives entirely in the moment, and worries not at all about whether she’ll be a writer or painter—or even actress—which every actress and director Isadora knows has, in fact, predicted. She sleeps, her eyelids periwinkle blue, shading off to lavender-pink over the domes of her sight. Tendrils of red hair swirl about her cheeks; her strawberry bangs cling dewily to her high forehead; her cheeks are flushed with three-year-old dreams—dreams of dromedaries drowsily traversing dream deserts, dreams of “La bradogs” and dream dragons, of oneiric “aminals,” unicorns, griffins, Eeyores, Poohs, Kermit Frogs, and Mickey Mouses.

“Goddess bless and Goddess keep,” says Isadora—who, during her pregnancy, became convinced that God must be a woman. She takes all dogmas—even feminist—with many grains of salt, but it does seem to her that God must certainly have a female aspect, and she, mother of an only daughter, would rather pray to Her than Him.

God, of course, has no gender, or all gender—if you will. Yin and Yang, Shiva and Kali, Great Mother and Horned God, Christ and Mary, Moses and ... who? Alas, only the Jews have neglected Her totally. The religion of Isadora’s birth leaves out women entirely. But she will compensate—silly as she feels uttering the words “Goddess bless”—yet also somehow safe.

She kisses Amanda’s flushed pink cheek. The child turns, lets out an unintelligible syllable, and curls into an almost fetal pose. Tenderly, as mothers do, Isadora covers up her daughter’s toes. Tears spring from her eyes as she thinks of her half-fatherless little girl, the griefs of womanhood Amanda now knows nothing of, the griefs she caused her mother that Amanda doubtless will cause her, the betrayals, the abandonments by men-from father on—and the long journey to sanity a woman takes from birth to middle years.

She wishes Amanda at least that: to be saner at forty than at twenty. Some women go mad at forty, go into unending depressions, kill themselves, or wind up institutionalized for alcohol or dope, untapped talent, sealed-up rage. Isadora’s gone the other way, saner now than ever, despite her grief. She has her work, her child, even though she rides her moods up and down like a seesaw, or a roller coaster. So what if she has no live-in man? No resident muse to inspire her, no best-friend-in-the-world, no constant comforter? She has a variety of part-time comforters, and right now she wants no permanent one. Maybe never. Marriage, which she has tried thrice, has thrice proved impossible. And maybe marriage is impossible in a world from which ceremony and convention have fled and only the great “I want, I want” is left.

Still, she weeps for Amanda, for herself, for her mother and her grandmother, for all her sisters—three by blood and millions by book—around the world. It is both blessing and curse to be born female, as Isadora knows by now. She also knows the vanity of bringing babies into a world armed to the skies with nuclear devices, a world where presidents get shot routinely on the evening news, where nobody knows what money means, whether love lasts, or how families can stay together long enough to grow up.