Parachutes and Kisses (21 page)

Josh stood up, looking as cold and impassive as he could, his eyes glassy.

“Your needs are no longer my problem,” he said, “Your needs are your own problem now. We are no longer a couple.” And he strode out of the room, leaving Isadora in the study filled with her success trophies and able to do nothing but crumble in a heap on the floor, and cry her eyes out on the very same carpet where she had, not so long ago, made love to Errol.

Dimly, through her sobs, she heard Josh's car pull out of her driveway.

“We are no longer a couple,” echoed again and again in her head. The very phrase seemed more piercing to her flesh than if he had shot her with arrows throughout her whole body like St. Sebastian.

“Better get used to it, girl,” she muttered to herself as she lay on the floor. But the fact was that she no longer wanted to live. If it were not for Mandy, she would have found a way to check out. Ah, children, she thought, they eat up our lives, but they also sustain them—a paradox, like most things that are true in this world. Amen.

The strong odor of sex is ... really the aroma of birth; it is disagreeable or repulsive only to those who fail to recognize its significance.

—HENRY MILLER

What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.

—MURIEL RUKEYSER

MANDY
was born when Isadora was thirty-six. She was born after protracted labor, protracted ambivalence about getting pregnant, and protracted worry about whether or not having a baby would interfere with writing. Well-of course it did. And of course it didn't. What on earth would you write about if you insulated yourself from all of life? And if you had the good fortune (and in some ways the bad fortune) to be born in a woman's body, having a baby was one of the experiences you simply had to have.

Isadora goes back in her mind to the self that became pregnant with Mandy. It seems she was a different person then—before pregnancy doubled her, birth halved her, and motherhood turned her into Everywoman. Without that experience, who would she be? Another literary lady who thought literature would always come before life? Another neurasthenic Emily or Virginia —barren yet womb-ridden, moon-ridden. No—Isadora is convinced that though there are indeed women who know for sure they don't want children (and therefore ought not to have them) those who long for children—even ambivalently—have to do the dirty deed and be done with it.

For her it was a necessary metamorphosis—tike tadpole into frog—to go from maiden into mother; not that Isadora had been a maiden for years; her maidenhood had succumbed to finger-fucking at age thirteen. But in some ways, she felt she had been a maiden up until the time of Mandy's birth. She had lived for literature, not life. She had not confronted her own mortality. All these metamorphoses children bring about, and then, when they have taught us to put them before all else, they moor us to life when our will to live gets shaky.

Josh and Isadora were in Paris on a book tour when the sperm and egg that were meant to be Mandy met. In retrospect, it seems fated. At the time, the event was far from certain. Isadora and Josh had been trying to get pregnant for a year, had been at any rate toying with the idea. They had stopped using contraception —which at that juncture was Isadora's diaphragm. But Isadora was just uncertain enough about the decision to do this ambivalently, too. She would leave off the diaphragm for days and days and days—and then suddenly use it again once or twice, and then be crestfallen (and also oddly relieved) when her period came yet again. Sometimes she would use the diaphragm without jelly and then take it right out much too soon. Sometimes she would leave it off altogether, and on odd occasions, she would leave it in. It was as if she felt that this was a decision for God to make, not she, a decision beyond her humble human powers, a decision for that Demeter-Persephone who dwells in the diaphragm.

By the time Isadora and Josh got to Paris, this shilly-shallying had been abandoned. Isadora quite definitely left her diaphragm in a bathroom drawer in Connecticut, and departed for Paris with the intention of doing a week of interviews and getting pregnant at the same time.

She remembers the night it happened, remembers it as if she were the heroine of
The Rose Tattoo,
it was that dramatic an occurrence. She and Josh were staying in a little hotel on the Left Bank, not far from the boulevard St. Germain. The hotel was a refurbished town house—a real
hôtel
in the French sense of the term. Their suite had been decorated so that it had a sleeping platform above the living room.

They had made love, made love twice in a row in that frenzied, not entirely pleasurable way couples do when they are trying to make a baby. They had done it wordlessly, tired as they were after a day of interviews and overfeeding—fancy publishers' lunches and dinners having bloated their guts and too much wine having made their temples throb.

The first fuck was an ordinary one—missionary position, deep penetration, a decent enough orgasm for each. But then, oddly, the flesh had stirred again, and they turned to each other with desperate need, like two strangers who had just met in a bar or like a sixteenth-century witch copulating with the Grandmaster she believes to be the devil—the mating was that passionate and charged. And then, as Josh came and his semen pumped deep into her still-pulsing cunt, Isadora had the sense that her orgasm began again, or that it had, in fact, never stopped, and she had an image, an image out of
200I,
an image such as portends great earth-shaking changes, comets or meteorite showers, or even whole solar systems being sucked into black holes in space. She saw a giant, glowing planet surrounded by wriggling tadpolelike sperms. And one of these tadpoles pierced the planet, making it glow all the brighter—and Isadora knew, knew beyond any doubt that she had just become pregnant.

She and Josh were not married then. They had procured a wedding license two months earlier, procured it because Isadora blamed her “bourgeois ovaries” for her inability to get pregnant. She felt terribly insecure about getting pregnant without being married—although, now she wonders whether she did not just feel insecure about getting pregnant with Josh, knowing what a baby he was. Once, on a previous trip to Paris, she had dreamed about herself and Josh, dreamed a dream that predicted all this present grief with him. Oddly enough, Isadora had written it all down, too, though despite her years and years of analysis, she did not usually write down her dreams.

It was July of ‘seventy-six and Josh and Isadora were in Paris, staying in the boulevard St. Germain apartment of two sex-therapist friends named Hans and Kirstin—those amiable orgy-organizers and erotic-art collectors, those writers of books on the subject of sex and society. They had introduced Isadora and Josh to the art of orgy once, a long time ago, and their apartment in Paris seemed to be designed, above all, for the conduct of same—the chairs, the tables, the hassocks, all turned into fuck furniture at the flick of a finger.

Isadora and Josh were there alone—Hans and Kirstin having departed for the States to visit friends—and Isadora was profoundly spooked. She was spooked by the fuck furniture, spooked by the plethora of Parisian roaches, who actively shared the apartment with them, and spooked by the fact that her idyll with Josh seemed to be curdling into grief. (Had she fallen in love with Josh just to leave Bennett? There is always that danger when one falls passionately in love with fresh flesh in order to leave a rotting marriage.) As so often is the case in life, the dream said to the sleeping Isadora all the things the waking Isadora could not say to herself.

That was the dream and accompanying journal notation from the year before Isadora became pregnant with Mandy—her thirty-fifth year, when the urge to make a baby was growing stronger and stronger within her and she was trying to sort out all the complexities of the decision.

She knows now that there is no proper way, perhaps no conscious way, to make that awesome decision. In a sense it is all in the hands of the Goddess. Isadora vacillated and vacillated about becoming pregnant. When the pregnancy was finally confirmed, she tortured herself by toying with the idea of an abortion—though she had very negative feelings about abortion and in fact had never let herself become pregnant accidentally so as never to be faced with the horrible “choice” of killing a part of herself. (Politically, she was
for
reproductive freedom; personally, she would have found abortion akin to the amputation of a hand or an eye.)

She remembers the day she discovered she was pregnant as if it were today. She had gone into New York on the train to see an ob-gyn man—a certain Dr. Remsen, a small, white-haired, pink-cheeked man who had an office on Fifth Avenue in the Sixties. She had gone to him after not having had a pelvic exam for at least a year, because a friend recommended him. She was newly settled in Connecticut and knew no doctors there.

As she spread her legs in the stirrups for this elfin, white-haired doctor, Isadora had a flash that she had always deliberately distanced pelvic exams from sexual feelings, but that
if
she were to submit to her sense of arousal, she could, in fact, become aroused even here with those cold, gloved fingers probing her.

“Your uterus is slightly enlarged,” the doctor said.

Her heart leapt at these words—leapt with fear and excitement both. Then the doctor drew a blood sample from her arm, and so as to let her have the answer to her question on that very day, he suggested that she carry the blood to the lab herself and call later to see what the verdict was.

It was a very cold day in early January. (Isadora and Josh had finally succumbed to “bourgeois ovaries” and married secretly on Christmas Eve.) Now, as she trudged up Madison Avenue, clutching her test tube of blood, she thought how strange it was not knowing whether she was pregnant, even though she had the answer in her pocket.

Blood into blood, flesh into flesh, dust into dust. She had not bled that month, and she suspected she knew the reason. Yet even as she wished for this phallic-shaped phial of blood to tell her she was indeed with child, she also wished for her period to begin so that her life would not, could not, change.

Oh, how we fear the metamorphoses through which we become truly fledged humans, real
menshes
of the species
Homo sapiens.
Yet even if we do not willingly undergo them, changes pursue us just the same. The woman who never bears a child metamorphoses in different ways. We may dig our heels in and dare life never to change, but, all the same it changes under our feet like sand under the heels of a sea gazer as the tide runs out. Life is forever undermining us. Life is forever washing away our castles, reminding us they were, after all, only sand and seawater.

Sand and seawater. Seawater and blood. Salty both and the stuff of life—the nutrient stew from which the world began. Isadora clutched her little phial of blood and trudged up the cold avenue —past art galleries and designer boutiques, past the Whitney Museum and the Carlyle with its Bemelmans Bar. She hardly suspected that four years hence she would be reading
Madeline
(a book she loved as a child) to a little girl whose only present trace was in this phial of blood in her pocket.

Change, change, change. Change in the blood portending pregnancy or cancer. Change in the air; change in the ozone layer; change in everything we say or do. We think our families are immutable, or our pasts—but even as we watch them they transform themselves like backlighted scrims in a play, changing as the lights change. The mother we knew at twenty is not the mother we know at forty. Has
she
changed or have we? And the womb: even if it never bears, it changes. Bears cysts, bears fibroids; sheds blood month after month; sheds invisible eggs whose loss the mind mourns—if only in dreams.

Isadora dropped off the phial of blood at the lab. She dropped it off almost nonchalantly, as if it did not portend her entire future. The Puerto Rican girl at the reception desk there checked off “pregnancy test” as if it were a matter of the slightest indifference to her that the whole galaxy was about to shift a little when Isadora gave birth. And of course it
was
a matter of indifference to her. It was not
her
galaxy. But Isadora was glad to give up that phial of hot blood which had seemed to be burning a hole in her pocket as she trudged down the cold street. It was almost too torrid to handle—contraband of sorts. Cosmic come—an explosive substance no mortal should carry.