Parachutes and Kisses (28 page)

“If it weren't for Carl's wife,” she sniveled, “Carl's wife.”

“What on earth are you talking about?” Isadora demanded.

“She won't give him a divorce,” Cicely whimpered. “She won't.”

Was this her explanation for running over Chekarf? Dear God and Goddess—was Chekarf the sacrificial lamb to propitiate Cicely's prospective nuptials?

“What are you talking about?” Isadora asked again—but of course she knew.

“Carl and I are lovers,” Cicely said primly, “and we wish to be married. We thought you'd disapprove.”

So you ran over my dog, Isadora thought, but she was too kind, however, to actually say this to the miserable girl. After all,
anyone
can run over a small dog—or can they? Especially when a marriage is coming apart. Oh, especially then. That is when the animals always get it.

That night, it poured. A huge March rainstorm with sheets of water cascading down the plate-glass windows, drumming on the roof. It was the sort of night Chekarf hated to be out in, and Isadora thought she heard him scratching at the doors, as was his habit, streaking across the redwood decks from door to door until somebody heard his scratching and let him in.

“Poor Chekarf,” she said to Josh as they drifted off that night.

“Chekarf's gone to a better place,” said Josh. “Poor us.”

And it was true that the death of the dog was the harbinger of the death of the marriage. Could they already have known it then? It was in the air like fallout; it was in the wind.

All that weekend, as they mourned their dog, they seemed to see him in all his favorite corners of the house. They went to a movie to get their minds off their grief and happened to pick a movie in which a dog died. They left in tears. They both felt haunted, spooked. First Papa, then Chekarf. Would God take Amanda next? No—just her parents' marriage. That was death enough.

Josh moved out in late July, but Cicely stayed on, taking ever greater and greater liberties with Carl in Isadora's house. In those days, Isadora was not wise to the importance of disciplining nannies and keeping aloof from “the help.” In her disorder and sadness, she let Carl and Cicely take over as if they were the master and mistress of the house. And they moved right in. They began using the hot tub and sauna while Isadora was out for dinner, and even at times when she was home. Perhaps they were even fucking in the playroom when Mandy was asleep. If she lives to be a hundred, Isadora will never forget the sight of red-headed Cicely flouncing sauna-ward through the house wearing nothing but one of Isadora's own monogrammed bath sheets (
IWA
they all said in red letters).
The Naked Nanny,
Isadora thought. What a title for a porno film.

Every night Cicely made Carl dinner and set it before him in the dining room, and Isadora skulked off to her bedroom, dispossessed by her own “help.” It was as if, having punished herself once by losing Josh, she was now punishing herself over and over again in various ways. Having shed Josh, she now had Carl as a pseudo-husband.

He was no prize. He stomped into the house smoking a cigar and carrying a six-pack. He sat down to his special meals of sirloin steak and french fries (he would not eat the veggies and brown rice that prevailed in the Wing-Ace household). Cicely waited on him, wearing the same flannel nightgown she had worn while wooing him with coffee. Better take off that nightgown, girl, Isadora thought. It was cute once, when it was novel, but now that you're an unwed wife, he'll tire of blue flannel.

Carl was already criticizing Cicely's cooking, criticizing her clothes and her figure, and thinking up new reasons daily why he needed money (to fix his truck, to pay for his kids' teeth, to take a room somewhere, and move out of the wife's). Cicely, who had no green card yet (it was being obtained, at great expense, by an immigration lawyer Isadora had hired), was paid in cold cash. Since she had no social-security number, she couldn't even put it in a bank account, so all her money was literally in her shoe box—where it was ever more and more available to Carl.

He spent it freely enough. He also amused himself on the construction site by singing the praises of Cicely in bed. Once, while Cee was at the beach with the baby, Isadora wandered into the half-built studio just in time to hear Carl boasting to his young assistant that he couldn't wait to “pump a load into” his “bitch” that night.

“Her tits stand way up—like marshmallows,” the poetic fellow said. “Ya know when they stand up like that—even when the bitch is lyin' down?”

“Excuse me,” Isadora said, as if she'd heard nothing, but Carl looked at her and his eyes said he knew she knew.

Carl could see that Isadora was distraught now that Josh was gone, and that she needed Cee more than ever. Instead of responding to the situation with kindness, Carl and Cee became ever more surly and demanding.

Every morning, Cee would peremptorily demand of Isadora: “Are you going to be in or out tonight?” Often Isadora didn't know—the vagaries of her social life were such that she couldn't really plan ahead—but it soon became a battle between Isadora and the nanny as to who was going out that night. Cicely pressured constantly for more nights off and Isadora, stranded far out in the country, without a husband or a support system of mothers, friends, acquaintances, was afraid to lose yet another nanny—so she gave in. She knew the girl was tyrannizing her, but she was too vulnerable at that point to draw the line, and Cicely moved right in to press her advantage. Oh, the vulnerability one has to people who take care of one's child even in the best of times! Oh, the hazards of being a single parent!

The showdown came one night when Cicely had been promised an extra weekend off. She was to leave on a Saturday after putting the baby to bed and return on the following Monday night. Her precious Carl from Canoga Park wanted to go hunting in the back woods of Vermont (Amanda called it “Termont”) so he could kill animals with some of his loutish friends.

He arrived at Isadora's house about an hour early, parking his truck assertively in the driveway (making sure that it blocked all the other cars). He sauntered into the kitchen clutching a six-pack, smoking a foul cigarillo, and muttering that he wanted his “bitch.”

“Where's that fat English girl?” he said angrily to Isadora. “Where the hell is she! We're supposed to leave for Vermont.”

“She's supposed to get the baby in bed before she goes,” Isadora said. “That was the deal we made.”

“Oh yeah?” said Carl. “Well, you work that girl to death and I'm
sick
of it—sick of it—do you hear?”

He strode to the stairwell and called up it.

“Cicely! Cicely! If you don't come this minute, I'm leaving without you!”

Now, Cicely had the baby in the bath, but she had heard her master's voice, so she ran to the stair railing and called down, in her sweetest and most English tones.

“I'm coming, darling. Just give me a moment, darling.”

“God damn it,” Carl said. “If you don't come now, I'm coming after you.”

Carl climbed the stairs, stomped into the bathroom, and demanded that Cicely come at once.

Amanda sat there stunned, as the nanny begged and pleaded for more time and the boyfriend insisted that she go at once.

“I promised Isadora I'd get the baby ready for bed,” she said.

“God damn it to hell,” Carl said. “I'm sick of hearing what you promised Isadora. I'm sick of Isadora. I'm going without you.”

And Cicely, torn between her hormones and her British sense of duty, got up, left the baby in the bathwater, and ran downstairs behind Carl (as Mary Poppins would
never
have done).

Seeing them come down, Isadora bolted upstairs to rescue her baby. Halfway there, she turned and said to them (with controlled fury):

“If you leave now, you can bloody well never come back.”

“My pleasure,
Ms.
Wing,” Carl said, with melodramatic irony. “I don't want to return to a house built with the royalties on dirty books.”

So, he was a literary critic, too—this total illiterate. Isadora did not dignify his attack with a response. She merely continued up the stairs to find her daughter.

Amanda sat in the bath looking for all the world as Chekarf had when he waited on the pavement for Isadora to scoop him up.

“Where Cee gone? Where Cee gone?” Amanda asked.

“Cee has gone on her day off, darling,” Isadora said, choking on the words. Although she would have dearly loved to cry and scream, she put the whole effort of her being, all her concentration, into staying in one piece for Amanda, drying her, powdering her, reading her a story, doing the whole bedtime ritual. But Amanda was bewildered. “Where Cee gone?” she kept saying.

“Cee had a fight with Mommy and she left,” Isadora said.

“Like Daddy?” asked Amanda.

Isadora didn't know how to answer that one. She never wanted to lie to Amanda, but she did conceive it to be her duty to soften the blows.

“Darling, Cee had to go hunting with Carl. She misses you a lot, I know.”

“Like Daddy?” Amanda asked again.

“Yes,” Isadora said. “Daddy misses you, too.”

“Is Daddy hunting, too?” Amanda asked.

“I suppose he is,” Isadora said sadly, realizing this was Saturday night and Josh probably
was
“hunting.”

“Why do grown-ups always fight?” Amanda asked.

“I don't know,” Isadora said. “Maybe they're not really grown-ups yet.”

“But they
have
to be grown-ups,” Amanda insisted.

“I know, darling,” Isadora said.

“Because I'm the kid,” said Amanda. “I'm the kid—right, Mommy?”

Cicely and Carl plighted their troth that weekend. (Had the wife suddenly given her consent?) Now that Cicely had hopes of becoming a citizen and no longer needed Isadora to get her a green card, she never apologized—though she came back, briefly, to get her shoe box of money.

In the battle between hormones and duty, Isadora sadly reflected, hormones nowadays always won. It also never failed to occur to her that she
herself
had helped to aid and abet this great validation of the female hormones. But once children arrived on the scene, the battle between hormones and duty became more intense than ever—and more imponderable. It was a true conundrum, an insoluble mystery: raging hormones sometimes led to children, and children, like it or not, led to duty.

After Cicely abdicated the nanny-for-a-year throne, Rae-from-Santa-Fe arrived. She was a disaster, leaving pots to boil over on the stove and bathtubs to overflow. She was so absentminded that Isadora feared leaving the baby with her and eventually she, too, had to be fired.

Then came Alva Libbey, the current treasure. At least Amanda knew that her mother was always there. And Isadora knew that she was Amanda's forever and ever. Whether on earth or on that cloud full of babies, Isadora and Amanda were linked forever. That was all Isadora knew. Was it enough?

And what would Amanda remember for her grandchildren? Would she remember the nannies quitting? Daddy leaving? Or would she have some totally different random stray memory—something equivalent to Grandpa Stoloff's samovar that maybe a pea got in? If so, what would it be? How could a mere mother know?

My old flame, I can't even think of his name.

—
popular song

I will be good.

—QUEEN VICTORIA

SOMETIME before Christmas of that ghastly year, Isadora met an old friend. She met him at a party in what was, that year, New York's trendiest disco—a place called Hades—whose decor featured caverns, artificial flames, and waiters dressed as lurking demons. The occasion was a party in honor of a friend's book.
The Demon Lover,
it was called, but the title evoked more dignity than the book deserved, for it was merely a trashy “Hollywood novel,” that sort of
roman à clef
in which all the noble Romans are shown to have feet of clay (or more likely, penises of clay, not to mention other glaring defects).

The party was very posh and “A” list. Lurking in the dark caverns of the disco were some of the people presumed to be in the book (who presumably wished they weren't) and other people presumed
not
to be in the book (who presumably wished they
were).

Isadora wore what was required by the invitation—“demonic attire”—though not all the other guests complied. Consequently, she was looking bewitching (and haunted) in a black velvet hooded cape, a high-necked black velvet gown with leg-o‘-mutton sleeves, and a high-peaked witch's hat. She felt a little silly in this getup, but then she always felt a little silly these days because she was brokenhearted and on the prowl. She went to
everything
—all the parties she had previously refused—because it was common wisdom that a lady bereft of spouse did not stay home and mope. So she went out and glittered. But in her heart, she moped; and those who were not insensitive to paradox could tell. In her eyes was a look as stunned and betrayed as Chekarf's, as he sat on the black asphalt of the driveway. For the truth was that Isadora had given her whole heart to Josh, as fully as a little dog gives his whole heart to his mistress (she finally knew the meaning of that old canard—to love “not wisely but too well”), and when it turned out that Josh had held back a piece of himself, many pieces of himself, in fact, she was as stunned as a struck dog. Her eyes bore the kind of pained and hunted look which only a rabbi or a Nobel laureate would be dumb enough to confuse with unbridled lust—although, it is true, there is a kind of lust which is born mainly of broken heartedness.