Parachutes & Kisses

“IF Papa hadn’t died, if Chekarf hadn’t died, if Tintoretto’s Daughter hadn’t been a full selection while Josh’s last book wasn’t even an alternate, do you think we’d still be together?” Isadora asks her therapist, mischievous, roly-poly Shirley Frumkin, who wears Norma Kamali sweatshirts, voluminous cotton knickers, and antique junk jewelry. Shirley is one of those ladies the French call jolie laide. The nose is bulbous, the eyes too crinkly, the figure too ample, but nonetheless she possesses an oddball kind of beauty, and sexuality so strong at seventy that it does Isadora’s heart good just to be with her.

Isadora has “progressed” from wild hilarity and fucking her brains out to crying almost nonstop, having migraines that last for days, blood pressure that shoots up whenever she talks to Josh on the phone. What has brought about this change? The knowledge that he’s seeing another lady—a lady he spends weekends with.

“Isadora,” scolds Shirley in her funny Brooklyn accent, her huge antique amethyst earrings shaking. “I want you to talk about your father now. I want you to figure out why this ‘other lady’ matters so. Because if I know Joshua Ace—and I do—I’d stake my life on the fact that she’s mousy, uninteresting, no great shakes, and that the only real value she has to him is that he knows she makes you crazy.”

Shirley certainly did know Josh. Josh and Isadora had, in fact, consulted Shirley for “marital therapy.” Josh had gone into a deep depression just around the time Isadora’s book was coming out. He had plunged into despair—despair over his work, his trapped feeling in the marriage, his sense that he was playing house husband to Isadora’s career, his anger at being younger, “second fiddle” (as he put it), and constantly upstaged by her.

Never mind that they had both signed on for all of this seven years ago. Never mind that he had met her at the very height of her fame, that he had convinced her—over her misgivings—that he “could handle it”; that he wanted desperately to be with her despite all this; that he claimed to love baking bread and playing with the baby; that nobody ever made him do the house-husband number full time anyway (there were nannies and housekeepers galore); and that he claimed to share her dreams for her work as if they were his own. But all of that proved to be a trendy delusion. The dream of the “new sensitive male” of the seventies had given way to the old insensitive male of the eighties, and Josh now wanted for himself the career Isadora had built. The contract had changed, as marital therapists say, and Isadora was left reeling.

“That’s life, kiddo,” says Shirley. “Do you think you’re the first woman in history to be left with a child to raise? Do you think you’re the first woman in history to have a husband who throws tantrums like a three-year-old? Do you want to torment yourself about it for the next seven years or do you want to get on with the only life you’ve got?” A sobering thought. “The only trouble with you, Isadora, is that you never get angry at Josh—you turn all your rage against yourself. If you’d only rage a little at baby Josh, you’d feel a hell of a lot better.”

What could Isadora say to counter that? That their love had been so special, their rapport so great that for the first five years they felt they could solve any problem? What did it matter that Isadora was older, more successful? Josh was a free spirit; he was beyond mere money matters, beyond conventional morality. He and Isadora often used to talk about the fact that most people lived their lives like lemmings racing to the sea. They did what their neighbors did. They shunned what their neighbors shunned. They justified their slavery with talk of duty. They claimed that economic necessity enforced their conformity, or that the fragility of wives impelled them to chronic lying. Or that the jealousy of husbands made secrecy and deception necessary. In fact, they did not know that secrecy and deception excited them; that lying came more naturally than telling the truth; that economic necessity and duty were abstractions invented by humankind for the express purpose of not enjoying life.

“People are more afraid of happiness than of anything,” Josh had said to Isadora that first night in bed at the Beverly Hills Hotel. “They will give up anything sooner than they will give up their suffering. All the great sages have known this. They have said it again and again—in Chinese, Greek, Hindi, English, Hebrew, Arabic, Egyptian ... but no one listens.”

Here at last was a man after her own heart, a man dedicated to art and happiness, a real hedonist. How could she know that a scant seven years later, they would be mired in the same jealousies and resentments as the rest of the lemmings, that they would be suffering from all the predictable miseries: sexual jealousy, professional jealousy, lust, avarice, greed, and all those other boring deadly sins?

They began as sinlessly as anyone. They wanted nothing but each other because neither of them had ever had it so good. Great sex, immediate understanding with a look, a glance, a word. They could go to a dull dinner party, listen to some fatuous speech by the host, merely glance at each other, and understand at once what the other thought, because it was the same as what the first one thought. They were that similar—or so they believed. It was Plato’s dream, the two halves reunited, the cosmic joke undone, the wholeness reasserted, the potter and the pot made one (and who was who?—ah, both were potters and both were pots!)

In most loves, there is a lover and a beloved. The lover creates the beloved as the potter creates the pot—out of his own clay. But here they were both creators and creations. It was impossible to say who loved the more. Except. Except. She was the older, the better known, the twice married. He was twenty-six when she met him, and his whole life had been plagued by being the younger brother. His older sister was her age exactly—and she looked like her—blond and small. Moreover, he was the son of a legendary father, a screenwriter father who had faced down the blacklist, gone to jail, and come away a martyr, forever wearing a crown of thorns, surmounted by a slightly tarnished halo.

Like Isadora’s father, he was a man who had almost forgotten he had children when he was young, but who now required that they be the succor of his old age. But unlike Isadora’s father, he could not let his children go. When Josh hooked up with Isadora he got the older sister and the father in one, at first alluring, package—a living legend, an older sister, the works. In time, as the allure faded, the package seemed more and more tightly wrapped and he seemed to be wrapped within it.

The pounding on the coffin lid was slow to start. At first, he adored her, looked up to her age, her fame, her work, like a loving disciple. (And we know that one out of twelve disciples is a Judas.) Nothing she did on paper was less than a miracle. Nothing she said was less than brilliant, witty, and wise. She’s here to testify that one can get very used to that—especially a person as mercilessly self-critical as she. It helps to have a good friend in court when one is constantly sentencing oneself to death.

But then, as their problems progressed, as his reputation remained modest and hers exploded, he began, bit by bit, to believe that she was the one and only problem in his life. (Why do people blame the ones they love when things go wrong in their lives? This is the serpent in the garden of Eden: the propensity to blame the one you claim to love.)

Josh’s books were always reviewed under the rubric “husband of” or “son of.” “It’s hard to live one’s life in a parenthesis,” a friend of Isadora’s sagely said. Moreover, they were rarely left alone to love each other. Journalists picked at their relationship as if it were a scab, and eventually it grew infected. Were they competitive? Did they think—at breakfast—about who was more famous? Did they criticize each other’s work? If so, what did they say? Was she afraid he’d leave her as she aged? Was he afraid she’d find a rich old man? And so on, and so on, prying, picking, praying to discover that their evident delight in each other was only an illusion, that they were as wretched as everyone else and as unforgiving—and eventually, the prophecy came true.

Does “open” marriage kill a relationship? Or do people determine upon “open” marriage when they know their relationship is dying? It is the chicken/egg dilemma writ in bloodstains on bed-sheets. “What is the worst year of a marriage?” some wag once asked. “The last year,” another wag replied.

They only started screwing around in the seventh year. A natural itch, more natural still to scratch. They had never sworn fidelity; whoever, in honesty, could? But, except for two wholly irrelevant flying fucks in the first year (one his, one hers), they never took the freedom the other granted.

They didn’t want it. Life was complicated enough without that. Isadora would not have so much as looked at another man because she felt that a fellow who is unfortunate enough to have a famous wife cannot take another single blow to his self-esteem; and he would not have looked at another woman because he was too honorable, and too honest to lie, and too kind and considerate to tell the truth.

So they had a Mexican standoff. They always suspected the problem would rear its head, but they couldn’t plan for its solution, so why think about it? When it rose up and whinnied, it did not look like a horse at all; it looked instead like their dear friend Sophia Kurtzweiler Washington. Sophia, the second most famous feminist of the sixties (but for Gloria, Germaine, Kate, Phyllis, and Betty), Sophia with her shaggy bangs, her astounding Amazonian stature (nearly six feet), and her trademark black harlequin glasses —Sophia the six-foot-tall operatic, big-breasted, histrionic mama of sexual politics.

Sophia had a generous nature. She could never be brief about anything. If you asked her how she was, she’d heave a long Semitic sigh (in which the history of the race was told) and say: “Where can I begin? The world is crumbling to its ruin. I have no money, no lovers, no nursemaid for my twins, no contract for my new book—and where is it written the human condition should be any better?”

If you had asked her about the weather, she would have doubtless heaved the same sigh and said: “Some astronomers believe we are on the verge of a new ice age, and some that we are on the verge of a tropical period, hospitable only to dinosaurs and giant reptiles—but as for me, I’d be happy if I could find someone to fuck me regularly, watch the babies, and pay the rent.”

Sophia believed the world owed her a living. In 1970 she’d written a trendy best seller, a sort of feminist Greening of America called The Feminization of America, which theorized that all our social woes came from maleness, and that all we needed to do to turn the world back into Eden was to put women in charge of everything.

The book was badly written, but brilliantly timed. It made a small fortune, of which Sophia spent half and lost the rest—most of it in a disorganized but idealistic attempt to set up the first all-female film studio. Sophia became a celebrity (someone who, as Isadora’s mother says, “is famous for being famous”)—a rough-rider on the talk-show circuit, a video Voltaire, a radio La Roche foucauld, and an interview junkie. Unless some humble journalist was kneeling before her plugging in a Sony cassette recorder, she felt unheard and unheeded. Her natural mode of speech was the polemic. Unfortunately, after The Feminization of America, she had nothing much left to say. Perhaps as a desperate publicity ploy, she married her black activist (they’d met on the Phil Donahue show) and promptly had not one but two mulatto babies: Martin Luther King Washington and Billie Holiday Washington. Both the marriage and the babies got her another round of talk shows and new “issues” to talk about. Now she was not only an expert on women, but also on blacks, interracial marriages, and the rearing of twins. Publicity, alas, did not prove a lasting marital glue and the union fell apart.

Left with these two adorable moppets to raise, Sophia became more hysterical than ever. Times changed, but Sophia still had to eat. She owed books to half a dozen publishers, and grew outraged when they asked for their money back. She hosted her own late-night interview show, but quit the network because they refused to bend FCC regulations for her and let her use four-letter words on the air.

Sophia was an unforgettable weekend guest. She would arrive at your house with bags of special organic foods, sprawl on the couch waiting for you to cook them, leave you to diaper both babies, wash their clothes, change their sheets, then disappear into your bathroom to use up all your Opium bath silk, deposit her wet towels on the floor, and borrow all your cosmetics. After having Sophia for a weekend, the novel you were in the midst of reading was missing from your nightstand, your favorite shawl departed in her suitcase, and your bathtub was ringed with her dirt.

On the weekend in question, somewhere toward the beginning of the end of Josh and Isadora, Sophia arrived sans babies. She was baby enough. Taking care of Sophia would have been a full-time job for a saint. (She had, however, brought her favorite cat—Mary Wollstonecraft Washington, who roamed the property killing shrews and field mice.)

After dinner, Sophia, Josh, and Isadora were all three bemoaning the state of the world and smoking a little dope. From which they progressed into one of those discussions of “open” marriage which is clearly a come-on. Since Isadora could see Josh eyeing Sophia’s tits with undisguised yearning, and since Josh was in a deep depression following the publication of a book that was ignored, and since Isadora believed she could sooner keep him by holding him loosely than by trying to bind to herself his joy (to steal a metaphor from Blake), she didn’t protest when Josh maneuvered them all to the waterbed.

With many giggles, Sophia got in the middle (her famous black harlequin glasses perched on her nose) and they all cuddled, watching Tale of Two Cities on TV. (Why were they always involved in that epic at critical moments in their lives?) Inevitably, Josh began fondling Sophia’s tits. Inevitably, Sophia began fondling Isadora’s. Before long, they were into one of those curious tangles of limbs, in which it is impossible to tell whose are whose.

“It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done,” came the booming voice from the video tape machine, but they were all too far gone to care. Josh was eating Sophia’s generous cunt; Isadora was sucking at her generous tits; and that fourth person in the room, who always watches when we break a sexual taboo, was sitting back amazed that she was not even mildly shocked.

That fourth person was Isadora, too, of course. That fourth person believed that since Josh had the multiple handicaps of famous father, famous wife, a book that had not gone as well as he hoped, a lifework that was not going as well as he hoped, she should make it up to him by letting him screw her friends. Better that than have him screw her enemies out of spite. As she watched Josh pump away at Sophia, trying vainly to make her come, Isadora thought how noble she was, how unjealous, how generous, how mature, to understand his needs like that. (Was it portent that when these three ill-assorted lovers awoke in the morning, they discovered that Mary Wollstonecraft Washington had left a bloody trophy—a dead shrew—at the foot of the waterbed? It was, but they all preferred to ignore it.)

Perhaps Isadora insulted Josh more by coddling him like this than she might have done by telling him to get his own girl friends —and get out. For the more she gave him, the more depressed he became, yet the more powerless she was to stop giving. It was as if she were desperate to make up the disparity between them—the disparity in ages, incomes, and power.

Fuck honesty. More relationships founder on the shoals of honesty than sink in the depths of mendacity—a word Isadora can never use without thinking of Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. A phony word—phony to the core, and so too is the concept of saving marriage through sexual confession. Is lying better? Isadora wonders. Lying also corrodes the heart. Perhaps the answer is to make no marriage until one is past forty and ready for moderation, or else to be wheeled up to the mate of one’s dreams in an old-age home, when one is ready to consummate it bodilessly, as the angels do. (But how then would we get our children, who, after all, give us more undiluted joy than romantic love ever does?)

Sophia and Josh soon began an intermittent affair—although neither really wanted the other. They both wanted Isadora—either to have her or to get her riled. Sophia wanted her fame, her calm (compared to Sophia, anyone is calm), her income, and Josh wanted to make her miserable—though he was too nice a person to think he did. Whenever he was feeling particularly depressed, particularly dissatisfied, he’d announce to Isadora that he was going off to see Sophia (and the twins and the sixteen cats), and she would stay home seething with jealousy. (The only thing worse than jealousy, she discovered, is pretending not to be jealous when you are.)

“I wish you’d screw other men, too,” Josh would say (departing for the East Village, where Sophia lived, in sixties-style hippie squalor) . “It turns me on, it really does.” Why was it Isadora could never believe that? Oh, maybe she was as guilty as he for all these banal attempts at Liaisons Dangereuses. She had often complained to Josh that she was a member of the transitional generation—too old to screw around without guilt, too young not to envy those who had. Josh graduated from college in ‘seventy—the class for whom sex was more available even than dope (and often simultaneous) —and before he graduated, he had screwed more women than had ever attended the entire Ivy League before the advent of coeducation.

Isadora tried, in fact, to tell Josh about sex with other men (for she was finally driven into the arms of Lowell Strathmore, her investment guy, and those of Wilson Donohue, a hapless Connecticut poet). But here was the rub: she didn’t believe Josh wanted to know all the physical details. He wanted to make sure that the guy was neither more famous than he (fame made him jealous) nor a friend of his (a perfectly reasonable request). Other than that he wanted to know all—and to fuck Isadora while she told.

Now, it is absolutely impossible to describe sex without describing the person in question. Sex, after all, is a bore from the strictly plumbing point of view. Nor does the plumbing differ that much from person to person. What differs is the talk, the texture, the train of thought, the passion, the poetry. What differs is not so much the fucking as the fantasy.

Isadora had known Lowell Strathmore for about four years. One of the most amazing things about him was how much he looked like Josh. But a preppy version of Josh. (Isadora has a theory, by the way, that when one is pushed to adultery by sheer misery, cosmic loneliness, and the irrefutable sixth sense that tells you your beloved is pulling away from you—you always pick someone who looks like your beloved. Perhaps it seems less adulterous that way, or perhaps you really want only one lover and are being driven to two by your partner’s restlessness, not yours. Since every long-standing relationship is, in part, a folie à deux, how are you to know whether it is his lust or your own that drives you?)

Lowell Strathmore was big and hairy like Josh. He was, in truth, a little taller (six foot four while Josh was six foot one). He was as clean-cut as Josh was shaggy: the Savile Row suits; the boxer shorts; the pink, scrubbed cheeks to Josh’s red beard and balding bean; the thinning red hair parted amidships in the Wall Street manner (Isadora has often noticed that Wall Street men are either drapeheads—concealing bald spots—or middle-parters, and she wonders whether some French philosopher—or even Susan Son-tag trailing them in her Swedish sneakers—could write a phenomenological essay on this); and little tortoiseshell Ben Franklin glasses to make you trust him with your money.

Isadora had met him in 1978 when she was heavily pregnant with Sappho- Vigée-Mandy. They were immediately attracted, but it seemed obscene to do anything about it then, and besides, she was happily married. Anyway, he was only after her money. Despite the fact that Isadora had a bouncy Jewish business manager named Mel Botkin who did most of this stuff for her, Lowell wanted to put together a portfolio of investments for her kid—and right after Mandy’s birth, she gave him the chance. She set aside a hunk of money in her daughter’s name, and established a trust for Mandy which Lowell invested.

He had done well with it before the market bottomed in eighty-one—buying her high-technology stocks (she wanted no oil, no radioactive minerals, no companies with assets in South Africa, no animal factories, and no environmental blights—so she was not an easy client. But still, despite these limitations, he managed to do a fairly respectable job).

She ran into him in Europe the fall before her grandfather died. Josh was depressed, was screwing Sophia in desperation, and Isadora was in desperation, too. She knew Josh didn’t love Sophia and did love her; she knew he was trying to drive her away, as if that would solve his problems, and she refused to let herself be driven away. The trouble was: she loved Josh and she knew he was terribly unhappy. She did not really blame him. Trapped, desperate, trying to outrun his shadow, he was screwing Sophia because he didn’t know what else to do (except to rage at Isadora, which he did often enough). There is an old French proverb, “Don’t fart above your asshole.” (Il ne faut pas peter plus haut de son cul.) And that was more Josh’s problem than sex.

So, she’d cook for him—gorgeous gourmet meals—but it didn’t seem to help much. Nothing she did seemed to help much. He was as depressed as ever, only now Isadora was resentful. She had a baby, a household to run, books to write. She could cook with the best of them when she wanted to, but cooking was never fun if it was compulsory. And she felt she was burdened enough without having to pretend to be Pollyanna-housewife to assuage Josh’s ego.

Shortly thereafter she was in Munich alone on a book tour. She had almost forgotten that she’d told Lowell Strathmore about it at lunch one day—but, astonishingly enough, there he was at the same hotel. (He had to be in Munich on business, and with his photographic memory—he could quote stock prices and dates the way little boys can quote batting averages—he’d recalled the hotel she’d booked and even the dates of her stay.)

The German publishers were throwing a cocktail party for her one night in the ballroom of the Goldener Hirsch. God, Lowell looked good to her in that smoky room full of German avant garde types in leather jackets. Three hundred hip-looking Nazis putting the make on her and she goes home with Mr. Prep from her own home state. It was only to be expected. Whenever she’s in Germany, she expects deportation to Auschwitz momentarily—and Lowell made her feel intensely safe.

“Come to bed,” Isadora said. She was thinking of pixieish Leona, whom she knew as a neighbor—Leona of the jet-black Dutch-girl coif, the china-blue eyes, the nose with a razor’s edge, and hipbones to match. A man could be impaled on Leona’s hips; a woman on her merciless tongue. She was the sort of person who never invited you to dinner, let alone telephoned you, unless she wanted something: a contribution to her favorite charity, a free speech at the Hunt Club Ladies’ Auxiliary Lunch, an original manuscript to raffle off, an old hat for her “celebrity auction,” other famous people’s unlisted phone numbers, the name of your caterer, or your cleaning lady. How many marriages survive because “she’d fall apart”? Leona would no sooner fall apart than Mt. Rushmore. She was in truth a beautiful woman, but the hardness of her face made you forget it.

Lowell Strathmore finally came to bed. And Lowell Strathmore was such a surprise in bed. You’d have thought—if you were a late-fifties Music and Arter like Isadora—that a WASP stockbroker, a hunt-club member, a person who managed discretionary accounts measuring in the tens of millions, would make love like a stiff—or an Englishman—but no: this seemed to be the one area of his life where he could really be free. Jews have been sold a bill of goods about WASPs, Isadora often thinks. According to Jewish myth, made up, naturally, by Jewish men, to keep their women out of the clutches of WASP men, WASP men are supposed to be bloodless and passionless. The truth about WASPs, Isadora now knows, is that they can be absolute priapic maniacs in bed—freer in the sack for all their starchiness out of it.

This was certainly the case with Lowell. He nibbled and licked and giggled. He talked dirty. He whispered things like “titties” and “pussy” and other words parents did not particularly send their children to Andover to learn. Like his language, his whole face softened during sex. Perhaps it was just the effect of taking off those glasses—those glasses that seemed to organize his lumbering tallness and give it point—or maybe it was true relaxation. This poor, slouching giant of a man—who lived his life in an ill-fitting straightjacket, sewn for him by a wife he feared, lined with her money, tied with his fears—coutd only relax when he had fucked a woman he wasn’t wedded to. For one halcyon hour, he unmasked, and then, the anxiety, the fear, the straightjacket, the horse shows of his daughter returned.

Isadora notices that it isn’t fashionable to write too much about sex anymore. In the seventies, post-Portnoy, you couldn’t pick up a novel, it seemed, without getting sperm on your hands. Not only the hacksters and fucksters, but literary writers, good writers, had to chart the interiors of vaginas as if they were the caves of Lascaux (and all primordial truth were writ therein). Women were discovering the poetry of penises; men were unmasking before the Great Goddess Cunt.

But then the hacksters got hold of sex and ruined it for everyone—tike condominium developers ruining Florida. They took the license to explore Lascaux as a license to kill little girls; they turned the poetry of the penis into stag films so loathsome they made you want to become a nun. Before long, the puritans were howling—“See! We told you how awful sex is! You should have listened to us! We were right about censorship! Put the mask back on!”

Even Philip Roth has recently published a book in which he cuts away from every sex scene. And Isadora’s old buddies, the feminists, are passing out leaflets on street corners protesting pornography, trying to make the world believe that people molest little girls because of pornography (rather than that pornography Hour ishes because people want to molest little girls), and in general doing their best to blur the distinction between sex and rage.

“There is no sex without rage!” they rage. Except sex between women, which is supposed to be pure and perfect, nonexploitive, as heavenly as heterosex is hellish. You’d think they’d never heard lesbians yell at each other, or seen them strike each other in bars. You’d think they had never known a lesbian relationship (like Isadora’s Aunt Gilda’s) where the femme is as oppressed as any fifties wife—and the butch is a female chauvinist pig. Of course, feminists don’t mean to come out on the same side as the Moral Majority when they denounce pornography, but alas they do. And sweet sex, the great unmasker, is dragged in the gutter again. If this trend continues, Isadora thinks, Mandy’s generation will have to unearth sex all over again, like a buried Sphinx.

O sweet sex, Lawrentian waterfalls, Joycean rivers, Millerian springs (so black they are blue, too)—it’s you that Isadora longs for! The whole humid earth opening like the Great Mother’s thighs, the cock rising pinkly, a crystal tear at its tip, the breasts swaying as if to a ballet by Ravel—this is what she tried to write about in her notorious Vaginal Flowers. But the feminists who picketed, and the critics who sneered, and the public who bought to be turned on (but then to disown the sexuality that stirred), preferred to see it all as smut, and keep their masks on still.

How could Isadora describe sex with Lowell to Josh without describing Lowell himself? How could she ever get the flavor of it right? The cock itself was unremarkable—though ample and indefatigable enough. It was the contrast between the straightjacket and the freedom that was so amazing (and so oddly erotic). It was the whole thing—the boyish calling of the wife, the unsexy underwear, the Ben Franklin glasses coming off, the use of the word titties, the nervousness, the fear, the dropping of the mask.

Back in the States, they met from time to time. Never enough to satisfy Isadora, and never without the most elaborate plans. You’d think they were planning the invasion of Normandy rather than two hours in Fort Lee. Because the fact was that Lowell was so nervous about Discovery that they had to go to a third state. Neither Connecticut, where they both lived, nor New York, where he worked, but New Jersey—where, he maintained, his wife had never been.

Isadora had to laugh—because she knew it was quite true. She and Lowell would have to be safe at the Fort Lee Motel. Who on earth would think of looking for them there? Except that on one occasion, as they were fucking their brains out at that very same motel, there came a pounding at the door, as if the Hulk himself were loose.

How could Isadora relate such stuff to Josh? He would have loved the story, but it was basically meaningless without imagining Lowell’s reaction, and Isadora couldn’t describe Lowell because Josh knew him slightly and would have guessed who he was. The rules for revealing their “liaisons dangereuses” were impossible rules. Because sex is hardly amusing if the man remains masked. The whole point of sex is dropping the mask. This may not be true for what men want of women, but it is certainly what women want of men.

Ah, men—the inscrutable sex. What do men want? Freud should have asked, because what women want is so pathetically clear—they want unmasked men! Isadora has finally come to the conclusion that she has never really understood men. Not that she doesn’t like them, only that they are hidden from her—as if they were all wearing iron masks. Whenever she fantasizes about what her work would be like if she had become a painter instead of a writer, she imagines a whole exhibition called simply “Men.” It would be a series of paintings of masked men. In each, the man would be wearing a different kind of mask. One would have an iron mask, like the hero of the same name; another a diving helmet; another a black silk mask like one of Guardi’s Venetian gentlemen; another a wet white silk handkerchief which clung to his face, making him look (oddly) like the death mask of Keats; another a gorilla mask; another a Mickey Mouse mask; and so on.

The fantasy of the masked-men exhibition is elaborate. It extends to the opening itself—which, like Vaginal Flowers, gets a vast amount of ambivalent publicity, both very bad and very good. Scandal clings to Isadora even in her fantasy of herself as painter. In the days following the opening, Isadora-the-Artist lurks around the gallery in dark glasses and a babushka so she can see the reactions of her audience.

If they are with female companions, there is much elbowing, pointing, and conspiratorial laughter. But if they are with men, they look sheepish or else become soberly expository, desperately trying to explain to their escorts why the paintings are funny, but encountering the very same mask the paintings seek to unmask. Men visitors, on the other hand, shrug, not knowing why the paintings “matter”; some are openly hostile; some drag their ladies bodily from the gallery and shout at them on Madison Avenue.

This whole fantasy of her secret life as an artist pleases Isadora immensely. Never does she feel more truly “successful” as a writer than when she sees what passions her works arouse in people. One writes alone in blissful, or paranoid, solitude. One feels vaguely masturbatory about one’s work; and if one is a woman, the whole world conspires to reinforce that notion, calling one “narcissistic,” “self-absorbed,” “self-obsessed” (as if Picasso were not, as if James Joyce were not, as if all artists were not maddened narcissi falling into their own reflections—the drowning in self being one of the conditions for transcending the self). So one always feels guilty, somehow, about closing the door to work. There are: the child that needs mothering, the nanny that needs scolding, the petty-cash box that needs filling, the husband or lover who needs care and feeding lest he sulk and run off to fuck one’s friends, the dogs that need heartworm pills, cuddling, brushing, dinner! One fights so hard for a bit of narcissistic reflection. So, to see actual fellow humans being moved to laughter, tears, and argument by one’s work—that is the true vindication. One is a good social being after all—a good woman. That solitary paranoia has a function. What a relief! One can return to one’s reflecting pool restored, one’s face validated by the eyes of others.

An exhibition of masked men—what a fantasy! Isadora has by now been a professional writer so long that in her fantasy life, she chooses other roles: painter, actress, rock singer. In Tintoretto’s Daughter, she imagined herself as a 15th century lady painter. Her grandfather became Tintoretto; her mother and father, aunts and uncles masqueraded as courtesans and doges. But whatever profession Isadora chooses for herself, one thing remains the same: her sexuality. It is the sap that through the green fuse drives the flower, the cosmic juice of her being.

One reason Isadora has always loved sex (once she can get past her awful transitional-generation shyness about enunciating her yeses too clearly) is that during sex one has a man’s undivided attention. For a little while, at least, he drops the mask along with his pants. Of course he is usually pretty quick to put it back on. Just as there are men who are mad showerers, and Keystone Kops dressers, there are men who can put the mask back on within a half-hour of orgasm. But usually there’s that half-hour of grace, that honeymoon period (like the first hundred days of a presidency), that blessed interval of naked face.

Lowell Strathmore was the swiftest dresser Isadora ever bedded down with. He could shower and throw on his preppy white boxer shorts faster than you could say Dow-Jones (let alone Standard and Poor). But there was always that enchanted hour or so (longer if he had come more than once) when he shed the mansion in Southport, the membership in the hunt club, his wife’s teeth, his daughter’s horse, his paranoia about Discovery—and behaved as if he were actually human (as if he were a woman, that is).

It was never easy to meet Lowell. Weeks would go by between phone calls and months between trysts. (In the intervals, they used to have strangely formal, strained conversations about Isadora’s portfolio—which, in his guilt about not screwing her, he was managing better and better all the time.) Whenever they finally met in Fort Lee, he’d say: “I don’t think I’m very sexy,” and then he’d take her in his arms.

This was the state things were in when Isadora’s grandfather died. She and Josh were together, yet not together. Her beloved dog had died. (Why do our dogs always die when relationships are ending?) Lowell had not called in weeks. Isadora felt empty, desperate, and devoid of ideas following her last successful book. (That it had been praised was somehow more daunting than the attacks and pickets she had braved at the start of her career.) Papa’s deterioration in the waning months of his life had done her in. She felt that her marriage had died as her grandfather had died. She was depressed, unable to work, unable to pick up the phone and call for help; she was at wit’s end.

“I hate the fuckin’ shithead bastard!” Isadora pretends to scream, watching a helicopter take off over the East River. But she lacks conviction. Somewhere deep inside, she still believes that the ending of the marriage was “her fault.” That if only she’d been more giving, more patient, and less successful, everything would be okay.

“Don’t you know there was nothing at all you could have done?” Shirley shouts. “Oh, Isadora—I’d dearly like to shake you. If you treated another person as badly as you treat yourself, you’d think yourself a horrible sadist; your heart would bleed for the poor victim. So will you please show a little rachmones toward yoursel? Will you please? Boy—do we still have a lot of work to do on your head!”