Parachutes & Kisses

NOVEMBER in Connecticut. The flaming leaves of October are just beginning to succumb to the bareness of winter. Orange and yellow and nutmeg brown (this is, after all, “the Nutmeg State”—though who knows why?)—they line the gutters of the winding country roads, slippery as greased lightning after a heavy rain and just as lethal.

Isadora is once again driving QUIM, rushing away from her house so as not to be there when Josh and his girl friend come to pick up Amanda. Let the nanny open the door and deliver Mandy. Isadora finds she can’t bear the sight of the other woman in Josh’s car even though Josh parks so that she can only see the back of her head.

The girl is definitely called Wendy, or Wanda, but Josh won’t tell her which it is. Though Josh wants Isadora to confide in him about her love life, the formerly hang-loose, free-spirit Josh has suddenly become cagy as hell about his. Wanda or Wendy No-Name. Wanda-Wendy Emanon is how Isadora thinks of her. Nor is Isadora allowed to have her phone number—though Josh spends several nights each week with her in New York and Isadora would like to know where he is in the unlikely event that some emergency should arise with Mandy.

Wanda-Wendy E. is a computer programmer and an old high school classmate of Josh’s. She has dirty blond hair which straggles down her back, and a pug nose. (Isadora has seen her profile in the car and to the untrained eye she seems like a homely version of Isadora.) Josh never goes very far afield to get laid. After all, his parents actually delivered Isadora into his arms, and the other ladies in his life either worked in the health-food store he frequented, typed for him, or were found at yoga classes, Zen meditation sessions, or class reunions. Josh wants everything delivered straight to his lap—UPS, as it were.

So Isadora is racing away from her own home to avoid him. She is so fragile and shaky these days that it never occurs to her to just brazen it out. Why should she be driven out of her own house? She doesn’t even think to ask the question. Somewhere deep inside she believes that if she is “nice” to Josh, if she atones for her power and success by annihilating herself in some way, then he will come back. It is the old female love-work dilemma, the dilemma Isadora thought she’d solved years ago, now come back to haunt her in a new form: (It is Isadora’s conviction that we never shed our neurotic dilemmas totally. We merely solve them in one guise, but they return to bedevil us in another.)

She races QUlM’S motor. Up the hill she goes and around the serpentine curve that gives its name to the road she lives on: Serpentine Hill Road. She remembers how much the name meant to her when she bought the house, she a lover of S-shaped curves, an aficionado of Hogarth’s theory that the S-curve is the essence of beauty. She remembers how lucky she thought the address—11 Serpentine Hill Road—lucky eleven and the Hogarthian ring of “serpentine.” Not to mention the Serpentine in London, one of Isadora’s favorite haunts.

Then, later, when Isadora became a devotee of the Great Mother Goddess, she realized that the snake was the Mother’s symbol, the embodiment of the Great Goddess’ power in the ancient world, transformed into a devilish serpent by the misogynis tic patriarchs who wrote the Old Testament. The address seemed doubly lucky then—like the double serpents the Cretan priestess holds aloft in beautiful blue Knossos (or is it the Heracleon Museum?). At any rate, serpents were lucky. Serpents were powerful. Serpents represented Goddess power. Serpents represented the power Isadora has felt utterly stripped of since Josh moved out.

She is scattered in a million different pieces. Her head is like a phrenologist’s chart of worries and stresses. In one box, there is Mandy and “Worry About Motherhood.” In another box, Men and “Worry About Getting Laid.” In another box, Money and “Worry About Making Money.” And nowhere does there seem to be any room at all for writing—for the kind of full-blast concentration that writing requires and that has always been Isadora’s center, her salvation, her solace, even her livelihood.

The funny part of it all is that Isadora really knows of no other way to make money than to write her heart out. And to write she must find her center. But her center is so drowned in worries that she cannot locate it. She is rushing around madly instead of staying home and waiting for her calm center to claim her. The meditative peace she has always found in her yellow legal pads now eludes her totally and she is looking everywhere for solace outside herself when she knows perfectly well that solace can only be found within. “Happiness is difficult to find within, impossible to find elsewhere,” said someone called Sebasti6n Chamfort, who knew.

So she rushes down Serpentine Hill Road, taking the S-curve much too fast, and, as she does, some demon within causes her to look down at her odometer to set the mileage (suddenly she feels she must know the mileage from her house to town)—whereupon the car veers into the leaf-choked shoulder of the road, hits the skiddy mass of wet leaves—orange, yellow, red, and brown as the owls of Dylan Thomas—screeches out of control madly, and seems to fly across forty feet of leaf-greased macadam until it climbs a little Robert Frost stone fence (allegedly making for good New England neighbors) and stops dead, with a heart-contracting shudder, its three-pointed Nazi star looking heavenward, its grille unscathed, but its undercarriage hooked, locked, barnacled upon the three-foot stone wall.

It has all happened so fast—the curve, the odometer, the skid, the wall—that Isadora, who is wearing no seat belt and yet is utterly unscathed and unscarred, can only sit bolt upright in the car shaking like the autumn leaves above her and rerun the accident again and again in her brain. Her hands sweat on the steering wheel; the blood has drained from her face; she is amazed her bowels have not let go. Quaking, she opens the door on the driver’s side, astounded that she can still remember how to manipulate the latch. Every motion her body makes seems astonishing and new as if she were a toddler learning these simple operations for the first time. How to open a door. How to step out of a car. How to remove an ignition key. It is as though she is new-made by the accident, suddenly aware that her nerves and eyes and ears function, that the world, so lately in danger of being annihilated, is still present, and her muse, her guardian, her Goddess, holds her in the palm of her ample hand, saying: Not yet, the time is not yet ripe to go.

The car is perched three feet above the sodden, leafy ground, like a sloop run upon rocks. Shaking as if after an orgasm, Isadora hops down into the leaf mulch, blessing the wet of it, blessing the world, the stone fence, herself—but blessing and blaming both. For she has nearly annihilated the wet, wonderful, leafy world merely for the lack of love of one man—and her politics rebel though her heart (for one hideous minute) did not want to beat without Josh’s.

What to do? QUIM is hooked on the stone wall. Isadora looks madly around for help, slams the car door, runs into the road, leaving handbag, keys, coat in the car. No one in sight. Just the leaves falling and the road gleaming with an almost sexual wetness. Sex and death—the twin poles of our being, and somehow allied. She thinks of animals killed in the road, of her own dog, Chekarf, not yet one year gone, of her grandfather eating the earth, of her own hungry mouth so voracious that it would rather do the same than close around air. The air she swallows is redolent of Josh’s absence. Without a man’s tongue in her mouth, would she rather eat earth? No, she says. But her heart betrays her. Why did she look down at that odometer, and why was that stone wall there? Why did she walk away unscathed? Saved by the Silver Nazi? Oh, the Jews’ revenge on Hitler! To be saved by one’s own Mercedes—bought with the royalties of books castigating the whole Teutonic race? How astounding to be thirty-nine and to see the curious circles that life completes.

How many times has Isadora nearly done herself in and been saved by the protection of the Goddess? Or whomever. She won’t insist on the gender. It’s the protection she’s sure of. The leg she broke in Zürs following Bennett Wing down an icy slope. The riding accident at Fort Sam Houston which could easily have made her a paraplegic (her spine thrown against an outcropping of rock). The car accident on a corniche road in Sicily (between Pa lermo and Messina). And so on. Isadora used to think she could read her life story in her scars as accurately as in her poems. Each scar was, in fact, a sort of poem. But this accident would be different. No scars at all. Only the blinding recognition that she had nearly killed herself for want of Josh. And that sooner or later this stuff would have to stop.

She runs down the road to a white colonial farmhouse which bears a plaque on the side: ETHAN WHEATWORTH HOUSE, 1701. The hills are full of ‘em. Old colonial WASP shrines. What is a Jewish girl like Isadora White Stollerman Wing Ace—though now estranged from husband number three—doing in this WASPy historic part of the world? And driving a Silver Nazi? Should she have stayed on West Seventy-seventh Street where her kind belongs? Are the dangers fewer there? Merely muggings and murders and suffocation by immersion in trendy boutiques selling art deco tsatskes?

She rings the bell of Wheatworth’s old manse. Commotion within. The sounds of kids and slippers. Typically enough, old Ethan’s house is now inhabited by an echt Connecticut “family”—new style. The husband—a nice-looking fortyish b!ond—is called “Murph” by the kids, who are clearly not his biological kin (except possibly the youngest). The wife, a toothsome brunette whose babes these three urchins are, comes down the stairs wrapped in a pink towel, with another pink towel turban-wise on her head.

At some point in this exchange, the Murphys recognize her. Isadora knows just when this happens, for their voices change audibly, and their friendliness, honest enough before, now becomes truly cloying. Isadora can always tell the very moment when this happens. The gazes penetrate deeper. The voices become more lyrical and somehow higher. Like her own voice, filled with the fear of having come so near to self-destruction.

The amazing thing about being a well-known writer is that your name is well known, but your face, reinterpreted through so many distorting book-jacket photos, is not. (In Italy the publicity photos make you look Italian; in Japan, vaguely Japanese; in France, French; in Germany, German; und so weiter.) But when people see the name—exactly like in those American Express ads, they gasp. “You? The writer? I read your book.” “Which one?” you ask at first, chip on shoulder about the other seven. But, after a while you mellow. How lucky, after all, to have even one book like a shot fired around the world, a guided missile, a contagion, a whisper round a whispering gallery, a shared dream, a chain letter, a fable told and told again in different tongues. “Thank you,” you learn to say simply. “Thank you.”

Which Isadora does. The Browning-Murphys stare, as if she were an extraterrestrial dropped from an orbiting saucer. This shaken woman—so small and vulnerable-looking-is really a Famous Personage. They can’t make sense of it, and Isadora is too agitated to help them make sense of it; she wants someone to help her make sense of her life—which is suddenly so unmanageable, so insane, so inexplicable: to have all that the world desires, yet also to have nothing, and to be able to think of nothing but to call Josh.

She knows, however, that Josh’s reaction makes her feel more abandoned than ever. He is, frankly, pissed off. His voice is cold, unforgiving, furious to be disturbed in his plans by her boring suicidal impulses. His mandate to protect her has lapsed. She had too much—success, a baby, all the womanly things as well as the manly ones—and now, by god, she’ll have to give up something. She’ll have to pay. She’ll pay with the loss of her lover, the father of her child. (“You have everything”—he’d said on the phone one night after they’d separated—“except me.” Except my life, she thought, except my life.)

Josh arrives alone in his Toyota Land Cruiser. He is furious. Furious at Isadora for nearly killing herself and furious for having been called in to witness it. The neediness and panic in Isadora run deep. Will I never get over this? she wonders. Will nothing appease it—not fame, nor money, nor a child? She longs for Josh to cradle her in his arms and protect her—but he is merely outraged. His mouth looks cruel. He has cut his hair very short, in a sort of Teutonic style. His beard is close-cropped, and through it one can see that he has a smallish chin. A wen has grown on the back of his neck—and in his characteristic stubbornness, he will do nothing about it. Still, she desires him. His arrival brings a tumult to her innards. Her heart races; her cunt moistens. What funny creatures women are, to fixate as we do, upon particular cocks. No one else Isadora has slept with since Josh feels quite right to her. The bodies are unfamiliar, the cocks strange; she can never bear to spend the whole night. She wants the man astrally transported out of her arms by three A.M.—so she allows no one to stay with her all night, no one. She has even made men leave through the dog run at three A.M. Her home is her castle, her body still Josh’s garden. Why does he refuse to understand?

Why do men always mention pride? she thinks, still lying on the pavement. What is pride compared to love? What is pride compared to motherhood? What is pride compared to poetry? Pride is an invention of the devil, of the male ego, of the male demons. “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall,” it says in Proverbs. “From pride, vainglory, and hypocrisy; from envy, hatred, and malice, and all uncharitableness, good Lord deliver us,” it says in The Book of Common Prayer. And yet men always speak of pride when a love affair is ending. Christ and Buddha were not concerned with pride. Women are not concerned with pride. Demeter and Persephone were not concerned with pride. Nor am I, Nor am I, Nor am I, thinks Isadora.

“Thanks,” says Isadora. “Thanks a lot.” She wonders why she cares so little at having humbled her supposedly famous self before these total strangers, but truly, she does not give a damn. There are times in life—great illness and pain, childbirth, the end of love, madness—when one simply does not give a hoot how the outside world perceives one.

Let them think me insane, Isadora muses. They probably do anyway. If people think writers crazy, might as well not disappoint. Besides, there is some freedom, after all, in having a scandalous reputation, no matter how ill deserved. “If your reputation is ruined—might as well have fun,” goes an old German proverb. If you can call throwing yourself in front of your ex-husband’s car fun!

For years Isadora used to anguish about the disequilibrium between her reputation and her life. Now she’s come to see a bizarre sort of liberty in it. Where is it written that we are meant to be understood in this world, except perhaps by a few close friends? Where is it written that true interpretation of our characters is our birthright? If we can count even half a dozen people who love and understand us, then we are truly blessed. For seven years Isadora had thought Josh to be chief among this half-dozen. She thought he knew that her extraordinary mazel still did not make her immune to pain; she thought he knew how much she needed him and the intimacy of family life—especially in the light of being notorious to the outside world. But alas, it turned out that even he envied her and saw her as invulnerable. She wanted the protection of his love, and he thought she needed no protection. Now, with a child to raise, she needed it more than ever. And now was when he elected to cop out for good.

Isadora climbs into her wounded QUlM, waves good-bye to the Browning-Murphys, and starts the car. The shattered chariot coughs and shudders as it starts up, but it runs. The Germans build amazingly invulnerable machines. If only they’d built her. I could use a little more invulnerability, Isadora thinks, driving back up Serpentine Hill Road to her house, passing Josh and Wendy and little carrot-topped Amanda on one of the curves.

Isadora’s heart contracts again. To be left for one’s lesser, not one’s better, is indeed a strange form of tribute. And to see one’s child fondled by one’s husband’s girl friend is the final coup de grâce. Isadora had thought the child would forge a final and unbreakable link between them. Having delayed bearing for so long, she put a great symbolic weight upon that act. It was Isadora’s proof of commitment, her proof of love, her statement of faith in family, her statement of faith in continuance. Now here was Josh, not even two whole seasons gone from the nest, mocking her with a pallid clone of herself: another small-nosed blonde, but this one not—thank god—a writer, nor notorious, nor even very pretty.

It always comes as a shock to accomplished women that their men leave them for unaccomplished ones. They assume—wrongly —that what holds true for men will also hold true for them: that accomplishment will bring with it fame, fortune, and beautiful lovers (to paraphrase Freud). But alas, we often get just the reverse. All our accomplishment buys us in the love department is threatened men, soft cocks, abandonment. And we reel backward wondering why we worked so hard for professional glory, when personal happiness is the forfeiture we have to pay.

Isadora parks QUIM in her driveway, and goes into her house to cancel the tow truck. She is still shaking with fear and the accident still keeps replaying in her brain. After calling AAA again, she gives in to her tremors and pops a Valium from her much-reduced Divorce Pharmacopoeia. She’d smoke a joint if she had one—but Errol and Roland are her sources of supply and she’d just as soon contact neither of them. With all the men in her life, there isn’t even one she’d really like to talk to now. But dope—dope is what she’d like to have. Instead, she goes to the fridge and pours herself a big glass of California white wine—a lovely Free-mark Abbey chardonnay she buys by the case.

Isadora hardly remembers a time in her life when she did so much drugs and booze. It seems her head is always a bit scrambled from dope, a bit woozy with booze. She seems to live in a time-trip of drugs, booze, and sex—in which she can hardly remember what she actually did, what she dreamed, and what she wrote once in a book. If I don’t stop this, I’m going to become an alcoholic, Isadora thinks, gulping, not sipping, the white wine. (She can gulp the wine without a disapproving audience, because the nanny, having delivered Amanda to Josh, has been given the night off.)

Isadora herself disapproves of the drinking and drugs she’s been doing—she who hitherto seemed to live long stretches of her life only to write—she, the arch-workaholic of the Western world. Many mornings, since splitting from Josh, Isadora has awakened after a motel night with Errol, or a random fuck with some man she had to get rid of at three A.M., and felt she was in the wrong novel—a novel not written by her, but by her friend Lola Benson, who has chronicled her own alcohol and drug addiction in several of her books.

And then she’d wonder whether this constant intoxication was to blot out the pain of divorce, or was a sort of midlife crisis she was having, a midcareer mind-fart, or else some insidious loss of drive triggered by the fact that her two greatest successes in life—Mandy’s birth and the publication of Tintoretto’s Daughter (a far better book than the one that had made her a “household word”) —had brought her, inexorably, the loss of Josh’s love. Why bother to write beautiful books if you will only have to pay by losing the man you love? Oh, she was really in a bad way—turning forty, losing Josh, and having to face writing a book about her grandfather—all in the same rotten year.

To write, she thinks, oh to write. To cover a page with memories and dreams—even with scribble scrabble-that would bring a temporary truce between body and soul. To dream upon a page is in some sense to steel oneself against the blows the world deals. It is its own reward, and brings the blessings of peace even to the most troubled spirit. So upstairs she goes to her beautiful tree-house writing studio—the one she designed herself and had built with the royalties from Tintoretto’s Daughter—and sits down at her immense oak desk to contemplate the mess of papers that litters it.

“Writing a novel does not become easier with practice,” Graham Greene says somewhere in his prefaces. And nothing could be more true. With each passing year, with each book and with growing reputation, comes greater and greater inhibition, not greater and greater freedom. One becomes more perfectionistic—and perfectionism is the enemy of art. Since art is essentially divine play, not dogged work, it often happens that as one becomes more professionally driven one also becomes less capriciously playful. Also, one becomes more cynical about the capacity of art to effect change. In hot youth, every writer believes that the word changes the world, but as the writer grows older, it becomes apparent that the world sometimes fails even to read the word, or if it reads, it deliberately fails to understand. Young writers believe that writing is a form of communication, but the middle-aged ones know that writing is merely a catalyst for people’s reactions, and that these reactions, like reactions to drugs, are often paradoxical—not at all what one intended. Books do change the world, but in an indirect, not direct way. The whole creative process comes to seem more and more complex as the writer continues on her journey. One no longer writes with the gusto born of “I’ll show them!” One writes instead for one’s own intimate pleasures: the pleasure of getting some subtle state of mind on paper, the pleasure of using one’s gifts with language, the pleasure of finding a shape for the amor phousness of life.

Isadora’s desk appeared a random mess, but, like a novel-in-progress, it had an inner logic apparent only to its begetter. Stacks of books stood upon it, unfinished poems, notes and jottings about the various and sundry men she’d bedded and their peculiarities in speech or in the sack. Buried somewhere in this morass was the book Isadora had begun about her grandfather, the book she’d promised herself to write next, the book she’d been working on ever since Papa died, the book she was working on when the crisis between her and Josh stopped all work cold. This book haunted her, like an unpleasant dream. This book blocked her way. She knew she had to write it to get to the next book, and the next, and the next. She knew it was the labyrinth she had to first traverse to lay to rest—once and for all—that Minotaur, her grandfather. Oh, there were other books she’d rather write next—many, many of them. Her notebook was full of ideas, outlines, and false starts (for Isadora usually started three novels for every one she brought to completion). But contrary to what most people think, writers do not choose their subjects; their subjects choose them. Just as God (or Goddess) picks us out to parent some babe, who is never the child we dreamed we’d raise, so too the Muse chooses us to parent some book and we become Her conduit.

The grandfather book was next. That much Isadora knew. The pile of papers which formed the compost heap out of which this novel would—not so miraculously—spring was labeled Dreamwork or “Papa novel.” If Candida Confesses was her “Mama novel,” this was her “Papa novel.” Yet the voice for the book stuck in her craw. She didn’t really want to write it. She wasn’t sure, she really knew how to write it. And that was a great pity, too, because the book already had an arresting beginning:

Dreamwork

He walked across Europe at a time when Europe was much larger than it is now. I can see him carrying a knapsack all the way from Russia—a knapsack filled to bursting with paints, books, all the grandchildren and great-grandchildren he would have, all their houses and apartments, their toys, sleds, cars, their lovers, husbands, wives.

But of course it was not like that. He was a boy of fifteen, unencumbered by great-grandchildren, hardly thinking of children—and with virtually no possessions. What he carried in his head and his groin would seed my life. His dreams, his protoplasm are still the very marrow of my bones, the juice between the tissues, and the tissues themselves.

He walked and walked. He raced toward this moment as if in seven-league boots; he raced there, not realizing until the end that he was racing toward his death.

These paragraphs were to be set in italics. They were to represent dream material, which the novel itself would later flesh out. Below them in the pile of stuff for “Papa novel” was the memoir she’d read at the funeral, all the poems she’d written about him through the years (including the elegy that had caused her such grief at the funeral), and rough notes and jottings for the novel’s plot.

Isadora looked through this mass of material and wondered. Was she ready to write the Papa novel? What did she really know about her grandfather’s life? The chasm between a poor Jewish man born in Russia in 1883 and an affluent American girl born in New York in 1942 was enormous. Could one bridge it? To imagine 16th-century Venice seemed somehow easier. Would it help to go to Russia? She had a friend who was fluent in Russian and who might accompany her. But the more she tried to imagine her grandfather, at fourteen, leaving Odessa to walk across Europe, the more astounding it seemed to her. The details of daily life in Russia circa 1890 she could re-create through research—that she knew. Having written one historical novel, she knew that it was not so hard to reconstruct a vanished world—if you were a diligent researcher—and she was. She loved the process of research. She adored reading and adored wallowing in library stacks. She had done all her own research for Tintoretto’s Daughter and had enjoyed it immensely.

But it was Papa’s consciousness she was not sure she could re-create. The paradox of his fearful Jewishness, his evil-eye mentality—yet the astounding gut courage of a fourteen-year-old boy who was driven to leave home and family without a kopeck in his pocket—seemed like the toughest task she had ever contemplated as a novelist. Could she capture his mind-set, his point of view? That was the dilemma. Isadora knew that it was relatively easy to discover the clothes people wore in different periods, the way they took a crap, how they rode (or walked) to work—but it was the Zeitgeist that was so hard to evoke. Because people’s minds do change from era to era and when they do, they leave imperfect prints of themselves, partial residues—in books, in music, in paintings.

“I’m sure,” said Isadora. (The rabbi was about as good in bed as a knish—a cold knish at that. Oh certainly there were other things in life than sex, but the rabbi seemed to think he was devastating to women, and the prospect of having to fight him off did not cheer Isadora. It was Isadora’s curse—or blessing—that nearly all her one-night stands fell in love and proposed permanence. Where were these divorced men who were fearful of commitment? Isadora seemed to meet nothing but desperate lonelies who couldn’t wait to get hitched again—and hitched to her. Was that only because she wanted none of them, because her heart still belonged to Josh? Or was it because men nowadays took sex far more seriously than women did? At least older men seemed to. They now seemed for all the world like the vanished good girls of the fifties where sex was concerned. After one fuck, they proposed!)

“Some day, you’ll come to your senses and marry me,” the rabbi said, rabbinically. And Isadora, though wretched, could hardly hold back a guffaw. The rabbi was a nice-looking, balding, mustachioed man who wore English suits and sported bow ties and red silk handkerchiefs; he doused himself in Penhaligon cologne—yet somehow the thought of more than a brief lunch with him seemed like a life sentence. Chicago-born like some Saul Bellow hero, educated in Israel and England, he was a dandy with his bow ties and boutonnieres, and he could not see what a figure of fun he was. (Why do men who wear bow ties have so little self-knowledge?) He came to her house and criticized her gin (“You must buy Bombay, not Beefeater‘s”), her vodka (“Polska, not Finlan dia”), her daughter’s manners (which, admittedly, were those of a well-entrenched South American dictator), and then he expected to be adored in return.

“Hi, Roland,” said Isadora, sipping her wine. “How goes it, sweetheart?” Isadora liked Roland a lot better than she liked the rabbi and not only because he was better in bed. In his flat-footed, naïve way, Roland was good-hearted and loving, while the rabbi was a con man. (Isadora had learned from knowing the rabbi that perhaps the secret of being a clergyman—of any faith—was being a con man, and also that rabbis, as a group, definitely did not believe in God.)

“How are you, Isadora?” Roland asked with genuine, if slurred, concern. And Isadora had to relate the whole story of the accident again—embellishing the details somewhat to make it more lurid. (This was one of the problems with having so many lovers—having to tell the daily events of your life over and over again, and never remembering what you had told whom.)

“Shall I come right up and stay with you?” Roland asked. Isadora didn’t think Roland could even negotiate Grand Central Station and find Conrail, let alone drive a car, so she thanked him for his concern, promised to call him later (Roland was terrific at marathon midnight conversations—like a teen-ager)—and buzzed off.

Why do men with high-school-equivalency degrees make love so much better than intellectuals? Is it because “failures” have devoted all their time to learning lovemaking? Or because they are freer and less cerebral? Isadora fucked her “blue-collar stud” (as she thought of him) the way intellectual men, for centuries, fucked bimbos. She enjoyed the hell out of him, but she then heard herself saying things like: “I can’t make any permanent commitments right now” or “I can only see you Wednesdays because I’m afraid I’ll get too involved” or “of course, I adore you, but I’m deep into my book.” She kept Errol away from her friends, her kid, her parents. If he ever came to her house, he arrived after ten P.M. and left before six A.M., when Amanda stirred. He had never ever laid eyes on Amanda, except in photographs—though he adored her by proxy and sent her tickets to circuses and kiddie films, and plied her with Barbie dolls!

Isadora knew that Errol was much nicer than most of the high-class men she knew, not to mention much better in bed. But he embarrassed her in public (because he so stirred her sexually?) and if pressed for an escort, she’d sooner take Roland, “her psychopharmacology expert”—or the rabbi, with his bow ties, boutonnieres, and references to Roland Barthes. Why was that? Errol was smooth enough in public—though he possessed no dress pants that weren’t polyester.

“Lady, I love you,” he now said on the phone—and much as Isadora longed for him, she was determined to stick this night out alone with her book and the ghost of her grandfather. So, she thanked him for his concern and went back to her compost heap of pages, leafing through it dully, and sipping her large glass of wine.

But the phone wasn’t through with her; it kept ringing, as if possessed. Now it was—amazingly enough—the antiques dealer, the Rolls-Roycer, the sprayed drapehead—whose name was Ralph Plotkin. Ralph, Roland, Ronald, Errol. The Plotkin curse without the Plotkin diamond, thinks Isadora, hugely amused by her almost adolescent popularity—even though none of the suitors satisfies.

“You truly have the gift of gab, Ralph,” says Isadora, with an irony utterly lost on him. (Isadora has observed through the years that men named Ralph are almost always assholes. Why is that? Does the name create the assholery or does the assholery create the name? Do men named Ralph have mothers who unconsciously—or even consciously—want their sons to be assholes so no other woman will ever claim them? A big question.) Sylvia Sydenheim-Rabinowitz, Roland’s redoubtable mother, has pronounced Ralph Plotkin “terribly vulnerable and zensitive,” but then, she finds anyone with twenty million dollars “zensitive.”

Ralph is perhaps the least sensitive and vulnerable person Isadora has ever met. Also, he hardly seems about to share his money with anyone. The single time he took Isadora to dinner, he plied her with booze, hamburgers, and fries at a railway-station joint in Westport. Oh, he parked his Rolls ostentatiously in front of her house, but then proposed the cheapest eateries in the area. Rich men are generally so paranoid about divorced women wanting their money that they take them to dives and hint on the first date that if they ever remarry, they will require elaborate antenuptial agreements. So why, Isadora wonders, does anyone bother with them—unless they’re charming, which few are—the full-time pursuit of Mammon never making for much charm in either sex. No sir. Liberty for men may be the right not to lie, but for women it is an ample bankroll, earned with one’s own hand, skill, art, craft. If pressed to the wall for a husband or live-in lover, Isadora would sooner take Errol, her blue-collar stud, who would at least be grateful and loving. For a while.

When this phone call is over, Isadora is thrown back on her own resources. She reads the beginning of her book over and over, but through the white sheet all she can see is the accident. Here she is, alone—but for Dogstoyevsky—in the house she and Josh bought to be their ivory tower, their retreat from the world, their castle. It is a beautiful house, but haunted.

The sky has changed from the blinding blue of October to the grayish autumnal color of November. The light begins to fade by four. Having decided to go it alone tonight and devote herself to her book and her ghosts, Isadora is suddenly devastated by loneliness. Her child is with Josh and his girl friend. Her sweet Bichon Frisé only seems to remind her of the other dog she lost. In her heart, there is an emptiness so deep, it seems bottomless.

What a damnably lonely profession writing is! In order to do it, one must banish the world, and having banished it, one feels cosmically alone. Unless there is a mate who comes home at night-fall, a fellow artist to struggle with, a café to commingle in, one is alone with one’s house and one’s ghosts and the treacherous feeling that one does not really exist at all.

When the work goes well, one straddles the stars, leaps around the house as if the very lines of poetry or prose were tightropes and the writer a sort of rope dancer, a clown, an acrobat, working without a net and loving it. But when the work stops dead, there is only this loneliness. The writer is a vessel for the muse, and when nothing fills the vessel, the vessel wonders whether it exists at all.

Unable to write, Isadora polishes off the white wine. This only plummets her further into despair. She wanders around her own home like a lost soul, feeling abandoned, unwanted, unloved. Ten men could call her and she would still feel unloved when she put down the phone. Why is she so needy and lost? Can’t she get through a night alone without a man? Or is it the country dusk, the wan autumnal light? Or is it the house she used to share with Josh?

“I had a feelin’ about you, lady,” says Errol, “a feelin’ that you shouldn’t be alone.” Damn, thinks Isadora—that Errol. A poet in his soul, which links with hers. Belatedly, she blurts out the whole story of the accident, and Errol, as sensitive to human needs as anyone she knows, insists that he will come over to hold her hand. This time Isadora is too spooked to resist.

She leaves the study, turning over the sheaf of scrawled pages, goes downstairs to let Dogstoyevsky into the dog run, and then wanders into her own bathroom to make her pre-erotic ablutions. They are elaborate: a diaphragm and jelly over the IUD she now wears (the former being a herpes and VD preventative; the latter having been installed after Mandy’s birth in the hopes that it would be removed a year or so later so that the little one could have a sibling—but then, of course, the marriage was in the process of self-destructing). After putting in the diaphragm and jelly, she runs a bath with Opium bath silk and soaks in it to remove all taste of the jelly, and scent her thighs and cunt and breasts (Josh had, for years, refused to go down on her unless she’d washed elaborately and Isadora is still undoing Josh’s various bad mag icks). After that, she douses herself with Opium—thighs, knees, elbows, neck, even the mundane dab-behind-the-ears, creams her legs with more Erno Lazlo goo, and makes up her face meticulously. Oh, let the diehards say that makeup is a compromise with feminist truth—Isadora loves it anyway. She’s a born vagabond, a performer, a believer in appearance as well as essence—and even though she’s never longed to strut the boards, she knows she’s the star in the play of her life—that tragic-comedy, that mock epick, that meiseh.

She dresses carefully—black lace underwear up—everything is designed to be ripped off later. For Errol’s sake she wears a black T-shirt with rhinestones, black jeans, black cowboy boots with silver studs, black fringed cowboy jacket. She switches on the hot tub, puts more white wine in the fridge, tequila (his favorite booze) in the freezer, and bowls of taco chips on the dining-room table. (Her nod to his plebeian tastes.) Then she lights a fire in the dining-room fireplace, puts scented French candles around the living room and bedroom and goes to make a bowl of guacamole —his favorite hors d‘oeuvre.

These preparations delight her, as writing today did not. She feels womanly, erotic, wise, as if she were doing what nature intended, while, when she is writing, she is doing something vaguely sinful—not servicing men, but merely (“merely”!) her soul. This is another of Josh’s legacies. When their love went bad, her writing, which he had previously adored, became the target of his rage. How unkind! He fell in love with her in part because she was a writer, but then he began to punish her for it. And all the years that Isadora has spent, pre-Josh, unlearning the female brainwashing that one must serve men above the muse, suddenly for nought. If I, with my success, with a child to support and raise, still feel that I must choose between writing and love—then what the hell must other women feel? Isadora wonders. Will we never be free, never? Is the wound to the self-esteem that deep? And yet these “womanly” tasks delight her. Preparing for a man’s arrival proves one has a man. Isadora has several men—and yet in her center she is shaky as an unfledged sparrow in a windy nest, mouth open wide for the fat worm.

Dogstoyevsky barks. In the steep driveway, there’s the sound of Errol’s car. Isadora’s heart leaps at his arrival—which suddenly banishes the autumnal spooks, the ghostly dusk, the lonelies, the grungies, the sads. People weren’t meant to live alone, she thinks. Even in caves, they huddled. And she alone in her fifteen-room house, with all its extra wings for Josh’s work, Josh’s hobbies, Josh’s offspring.

Errol appears, wearing pale-blue polyester jeans (his “dress” jeans—they are “western” stitched), a beige ten-gallon Stetson (with feathers in the band), and a pale-blue polyester “leisure” jacket with “western” stitching. The tips of his pointy cowboy boots curl sexually skyward from under his polyester jeans. He is tall—six foot six—stoops a bit in the manner of very tall men, and his myopic eyes (one blue, one brown) seem dilated behind amber-tinted aviator glasses. Errol is a doper. He could well be stoned, but tonight he seems less stoned than usual. He is so in love with Isadora that he makes little pacts with her not to use dope between their encounters, hoping to cure one addiction with another. Isadora understands this well, being an addictive type herself. Love, junk, booze, food, sex, sex, sex. “I’m a love junkie,” Isadora says to her best friends. “That’s all there is to it.”

There is always an awkward moment with Errol when Isadora wonders what she, with her Phi Beta Kappa key, is doing with Errol and his high-school-equivalency degree—but not for long. Because pretty soon they are smoking dope, drinking tequila, and loading up a tray with guacamole, taco chips, tequila, lemon, salt and climbing the spiral stairs to Isadora’s tree-house study.

There, on the pearl-gray carpeted floor, they tear off each other’s clothes and begin to make love with a passion born as much of desperation and dope as of true conviction—though there is that, too. While Isadora’s Papa novel lies abandoned on the desk, while foreign editions of Tintoretto’s Daughter, Candida Confesses, and Isadora’s other books glare gaudily down from the bookshelves that reach all the way to the thirty-foot ceiling, Errol buries his head between Isadora’s legs and eats her as if all primordial truth and wisdom lay therein.

Isadora’s brain, as usual, races. The accident, Josh, Amanda, her own efforts to write today, her grandfather’s death, her uncertain future—all these things shift and glitter in her brain as if they were bits of glass in a shaken kaleidoscope. She sees herself making love to Errol as if from the top of the shelves where her books crouch, stalking her, predicting a future when this whole scene will itself be committed to a book and translated into various languages, bound in gaudy colors and sold for pesos, rupees, shekels, kroner, guilders, francs, pounds sterling, American dollars, Canadian dollars, yen, or lire. 0 book within a book! 0 self-begetting (as one scholar calls it) novel!

And yet that is not why she is here, nor yet why she is here with Errol. Isadora never does things specifically to write about them —nor does she write only about what she had done. The equation between her life and her art is far more subtle. It is as if she is constantly driven to desperate situations so as to have to prove her mettle again and again and again. Look—I can work without a net—her whole life seems to say. Here I am, a woman who has never grown scar tissue over her wound, and I exist to display the wound of womanness, or maybe just the wound of humanness, for all to see.

He says this last guilt-relieving sentence because he knows that she has always balked at his “I love yous”—being too wounded by Josh, too done in, too wary of love to ever say “I love you” back. And yet, in a way, she does love him, loves his straightforward love of her, loves his lack of pretense, his blue-collar macho, his assumption of female strength, his idealization of her motherhood. Working-class men often paradoxically seem less chauvinistic to Isadora than intellectuals, the bourgeoisie, the Wall Street middle-parters with their Ben Franklin glasses, the WASPocracy with their racquet clubs and their genteel racketeering. And why? Because blue-collar men are frankly matriarchal; they honor babes and moms; they know that women work and work damned hard; they do not pretend to be anything but cavemen. A blue-collar man never says to his woman: “Go ahead, fuck other men. It turns me on.” He says instead: “I’ll kill anyone who touches you.” And there is more truth to human nature in that threat than in all the games intellectuals play. If Isadora has learned anything from this split with Josh, it is that lying to oneself about jealousy does not eradicate jealousy; it merely drives it underground, where it does more damage.

Now, in a sudden burst of playfulness, a desire to banish the ghost of Josh, the ghost of her grandfather, and the ghost of her unwritten book about him, she sticks her mischievous fingers into the guacamole bowl, covers Errol’s cock with it, and begins, tanta lizingly, to lick it off. Errol moans and arches, groaning words of love and gratitude. Despite the dope, giving him head is one way Isadora can get him almost entirely hard.

“I love you, I love you, I love you,” he moans, and Isadora, relieved of having to speak sweet nothings in return by having a mouth full of cock and avocado, wonders what, in truth, she is doing here. Does she really love giving head, or does she better love the sense of power over a man giving great head provides? Does she want to win the Academy Award for blow jobs? Or is she linked to Errol in some special way that even she does not understand ? All of the above. The sense of skin on skin, the intimacy of genitals in each other’s mouths does ease the pain of divorce, does affirm her being alive, after having come today so close to willful death. I fuck, therefore I am, thinks Isadora. I blow, therefore I am. It used to be: I write, therefore I am. But now it seems that writing only eradicates the self, and sex restores it. In midcareer, eight books on the shelf of her life, Isadora feels that each volume has been a sort of eraser that rubbed out a portion of her life. Sex brings it back; sex proves that she’s palpitatingly alive; sex is, for the moment, what she exists for—giving and receiving pleasure in this most ephemeral of ways.

“I want to be inside you,” he moans. “I have to be inside you.” And he climbs on top of her, all six foot, six inches of him, and thrusts away at her wet cunt until she weeps with pleasure. She comes once, twice, three times, says she’s done, then comes again, realizing as she does that something is missing as a result of the accident—her headache! Perhaps it is her gratitude for the absence of pain that makes her gasp, “I love you” to Errol for the first, maybe the last, time. This brings tears to his eyes and such passion to his pelvis that he goes nearly wild fucking her, groans, trembles, shakes, and comes with a scream that would wake the household—if anyone were there but Dogstoyevsky, who through an oversight has been left in the dog run for over an hour and now barks mournfully asking to be let in. In all her satiated nakedness, Isadora gets up and does this now and the little dog scampers merrily after her into her studio, where Errol still lies on the gray carpet, utterly blissed out, utterly stoned. With a mischievousness that seems to mirror his mistress, the little Bichon (who resembles nothing so much as a dust mop crossed with a poodle) scampers playfully over to her lover, sniffs his cock, and, without hesitating, licks the remainder of the avocado off it. Errol groans, sighs, and thrashes his lanky legs.