Parachutes and Kisses (20 page)

So big deal. You could fuck anyone. But you did not really feel like
fusing
with just anyone. You did not necessarily
like
just anyone's smell. Nor his voice, nor his touch. Everyone of the male persuasion had by now figured out that the clitoris was top priority, but not one man in ten knew how to touch it—neither flail ingly nor ticklishly, neither too hard, nor too soft. The over-fifties were the worst, usually. Raised in an age when the mere maintenance of an erection was presumed to be enough, they now made random feints at the clitoris, thanks to the consciousness-raising of feminist literature—or more likely thanks to the charge of the sex-therapy brigade (led, of course, by Roland's warrior mother). They flicked, but they did not caress. They licked, but they did not really
mean
it—and Isadora could tell. The poor rabbi was a perfect example of this. He went down on Isadora as if he were sampling a veritable thousand-year-old egg at a banquet on the Great Wall of China, attended, perhaps, by Henry Kissinger. He went down in a spastic panic—as if he were about to enter a world devoid of oxygen; you wanted to proffer a scuba-diving suit and oxygen tanks—that was how panicky he seemed.

Eyes closed in dread, tongue stuck out in a point (as if hoping to avoid hair), he took the plunge, licked a little (thirty seconds' worth, by some imaginary stopwatch), and hastily came up for air, opening his eyes, and asking: “Was that enough?”

There should have been a
broche
one could say before eating pussy, or a pertinent quote from the Talmud—for Isadora would have quoted them both.
Baruch, atoi, adonai,
pussy
melech Hair‘lochim.
In the name of the mother, the son, and the holy sepulcher. By the Rock of Ages (which was really a phallic symbol), I now pronounce you sexually liberated.

Well, at least Isadora had learned not to let herself be defrocked ever again by clergymen—whether frocked or de-, clergymen are lecherous all right, but they haven't had much practice. Like psychiatrists, they can so intimidate by their robes that they
need
no technique—until, of course, the frocks come off and the fucking begins.

The Nobel Laureate was just as bad—though superficially his technique was more studied. He had this charming habit of dropping the names of other famous women he'd fucked just before he and Isadora went to bed, but in bed he was doggedly determined and inclined to the use of the most clinical verbiage. Now, the English language is curiously limited where sex is concerned. It seems to be divided between latinate, medical terms like
vagina
or
cunnilingus
and AngIo-Saxonisms. Sure, there are people whose puritanical brainwashing makes them wince at the mere mention of such four-letter words—but at least these words represent the language of
feeling,
the language of powerful emotion, while the latinate words smell of disinfectant. If—as a certain German writer maintains—language is the universal whore that has to be made into a virgin, then
fuck
and
cunt
can be virginified (or perhaps one should say “gentrified”) by an able writer, an able talker. Besides, if these words were good enough for Chaucer and Shakespeare and Joyce, then they're
certainly
good enough for Isadora.

But not for the Laureate. A little ferret-faced man with a long white beard, twinkly gray eyes, rosy cheeks, a mop of woolly white hair (which he sought, vainly, to drape over a bright pink bald pate), the Laureate embarked on foreplay as if he expected to win the Nobel Prize for that, too. Ah, but he lacked dynamite! His kisses were premeditated; his touch lacking in spontaneity; his fingers fumbling. He approached a female body as if it were a scholarly paper to be annotated and the footnotes festooned with
vides, ibids,
and
op. cits.
Even Roland Rabinowitz, clinical as he was, seemed touched with the spirit of Venus compared to the Laureate.

The Laureate was five foot two and like the rabbi, a fop. But his foppishness was of a different order: flowing scarves rather than bow ties, collarless shirts rather than elegant English ones, and (astoundingly) red bikini underwear—his one concession to stylishness and sex. Watching the Laureate undress, Isadora wondered if a girl friend or an ex-wife had bought this rubicund underwear. “My mother,” the Laureate declared. Oh, what oedipal depths lurked in that confession! The Laureate (whose actual name was Gower Grodofsky) had a barrel chest covered with white fuzz, and legs that were bowed and simian. His cock was pink and a perfectly ordinary
Homo sapiens
specimen.

When intellectuals copulate without love, they still must think of intellectual things to say afterward. And the Laureate was a big summer-upper. “That was a most satisfactory ejaculation,” he would say, to our heroine's utter astonishment. Or, on the one occasion when she gave him a great blow job, he complimented her by saying, “What a memorable arpeggio—or shall I say cadenza?”

“Why not just call it a blow job?” Isadora asked, irreverently. “A blow job by any other name is still a blow job.”

Gower looked at her as if she were the crudest of vulgarians, raised his bushy white eyebrows, pulled his white beard, and said: “You certainly are an amazing woman, a woman of warmth and nuance.”

“Let's just say I'm a good lay,” Isadora said, “and leave it at that.” And that, in fact was where they left it for all time.

No—there were certainly not many magic spindles to be had around. Sleeping Beauty would slumber for a whole millennium if she had to depend on the supply of princes available in America in the eighties. The courtiers would snore forever, the fountains dry up, the candles stand cold and unmelted, the trumpets remain silent, and the Prince and Princess never join hands to descend the grand staircase.

Merry-go-round dating and lottery sex had become so depressing that it was inevitable that nostalgia for the marriage would assert itself from time to time, despite Josh's unwarranted, and perhaps unwitting, cruelty to Isadora. After all, Josh was still the person to whom she felt bonded, the person who shared Amanda, the person with whom she had gone through labor and birth, eight years of crises, joys, and private jokes. There had been happy banter between them once, such happy banter that it seemed nothing could ever destroy it. They had talked about everything so openly, it seemed, that nothing could sever them. Now they had joined the divorce Olympics—that crazy state of running, running, running, burning torch in bleeding hand, from lover to lover, listening to all the brokenhearted songs on the radio late at night as if the lyrics had been written by Keats, Shakespeare, and Donne rolled into one; keeping the music going at all costs; and the fire blazing and the oatmeal hot.

Josh still came over from time to time on the pretext of needing to see Amanda, and Isadora let him tamper with the visitation schedule (though less and less as time went on), because it still seemed like his home, too, because she still somehow felt that only he could fix things around the house, because—she had to admit it—she wanted to see him.

She would dress and make up elaborately before he came, and then he would march in, eyes glazed, or averted, and go right to the fridge to help himself to a snack before running upstairs to Amanda's room.

“Daddy! Daddy!” the little girl would shout, thinking the separation was all a bad dream and Daddy was coming home for good.

Isadora felt that way too. Somehow his presence in the house obliterated all the random one-night stands, the stoned night drives, the depression, the suicidal thoughts. If only he would stay, she would find ways to make it all right, she thought. She would demand less of him, let him drift more, forgive him the typist, the computer programmer, the mother of Mandy's friend. She would cook for him, devote herself to him, not ever write unless he was writing too, never go off on another book tour and leave him with the baby and the sitter, never succumb to another hotel-room romp on the road, never ask him for anything at all. She would just give and give and give and give—with no return expected. After all, hadn't Josh's own father said (once when Isadora wept on the phone about missing Josh) that she should “woo him back”? But how on earth could she woo him any more than she already
had?
True, she had “kicked him out,” after years of listening to his complaints about his supposed lack of freedom, his playing “second fiddle,” his being “house husband.” But then she had immediately repented and invited him back, and he had stubbornly maintained that he was
never
coming back, had refused to continue marital therapy, had loaded on the insults and rejections until the rift was so large it had begun to resemble the Grand Canyon. She was left playing the heavy, the kicker-outer, the decision maker, the homewrecker. He was self-righteously absolved of any responsibility for the split, when of course, as in any divorce, they had both contributed to the “decision.”

Now he was here in the house again, putting Mandy to bed. She paced outside the child's room, waiting to have him to herself. She heard the sweet little girl/Daddy chatter, that delicious diction of a three-year-old who is chirping because Daddy has come home and made her universe complete.

“Are you got a penis?” Mandy used to say to all men at that point in her life. “Are you a mommy or a daddy?” Those were the questions asked because that was all she needed to know about people, all that mattered in her three-year-old world.

Daddy was whom she wanted, Daddy was
it
—all the more because he came and went.

“Go to sleep, cupcake,” Josh said to Mandy, with a tenderness Isadora coveted for herself. Her daughter had replaced her in Josh's affections. Her daughter got the protectiveness she would have wished for herself.

“Don't go, Daddy,” Mandy said. “Read in my room, please, please, please.” Mandy had the habit of saying “please” as if the word had two syllables—so that it came out “ple-ase.” All Mandy's funny pronunciations endeared her to Isadora. Having had a child so late in her odyssey, she knew that these charming quirks of toddlerhood and little-girldom were fleeting, fleeting, fleeting —and that before she knew it, Mandy would be speaking like a grown-up and waltzing out of her life.

Josh emerged from Mandy's room, still averting his eyes.

“We made a good one,” he said, smiling.

Isadora laughed. Their shared pride in their joint creation still bonded them, perhaps it always would. She thought of Donne's lovers in “The Ecstasy,” whose hands were cemented by a “balm” —sweaty palms—never to be severed. Perhaps a child could also be such a “balm”—a natural effluence, which would cement two people and make them one.

“Would you come into my office and talk to me?” Isadora asked.

“Okay,” said Josh, clearly not wishing to. Still, he followed her into her sanctuary, with its pale-gray carpeting and purple velvet sofas, with its memorabilia from Isadora's literary career—framed magazine covers, book jackets, and posters used to advertise her work in different countries. Just coming in here was an assault on Josh's own modest career. Isadora felt guilty and apologetic for his lack of success—almost as if she had caused it and created it. But she was not
that
powerful. She did not even feel responsible for
her
success. The muse had chosen her as a medium—that was all. True, she had worked terribly hard, but all the hard work in the world did not create talent where none existed, and often Isadora felt that her best ideas, her funniest lines came aslant, came unwilled—as if the “nigger in the basement” (as Joyce called the unconscious) were working and not she herself. Being an artist is more a matter of calling than of willing. Why, then, did she feel guilty toward Josh? Perhaps because he was her man and she had been blessed (and also strangely cursed) with more success? But what was the answer to that? She needed her work
and
she needed her man—she was, after all, a woman, not a freak of nature. She merely carried her talent around in a woman's body. Why did that condemn one to eternal punishment?

Isadora sat down on one of the purple couches and looked at her man. He still averted his eyes.

“Why can't we try again?” she asked him, her gut roiling, her head beginning to ache.

“Because I don't want to,” Josh said.

Well—that was simple enough—and as sharp as he could make it. She felt his words like an arrow through her temples—like that silly arrow Steve Martin used to use in his comedy routines.

“But we can go back into marital therapy,” she said, knowing it was in vain. “We can try again—for Mandy's sake.”

“It won't work,” Josh said, as if he were God and totally omniscient. “I know it. Besides, I refuse to live my life for Mandy. My needs come first.”

Now the arrow had moved from Isadora's head into the back of her neck and she was in a rage.

“They certainly do,” Isadora said. “They certainly do.” She was beside herself with anger; she didn't know where to put it. Mandy
did
come first,
had
to come first—that was the way of nature, of the species, of the cycle of life. Isadora had put Mandy before everything, before her writing, before her earning a living, before her own sanity. How
dare
Josh do otherwise? She exploded with her fury.

“You can't just have a child and
then
decide that your own needs come first! You can‘t!” She got up now and walked to the window, turning her back so as not to be tempted to strike him.

“That's why we can't get back together,”—he said angrily—“because you never stop hocking me!”

“Hocking you?
Hocking
you! I merely remind you of your responsibilities and you call that hocking you! What the fuck do you want? You expect me to support Mandy, support the household, write, and never ask a thing of you—and if I ever point out that Mandy has needs or that I have needs, you call it hocking. What about
my
needs? What
about
them?”