Parachutes and Kisses (31 page)

Kevin smiled apologetically, but did not restrain his kid. Instead, he flapped his jacket lapels open and closed in a compulsive gesture and cleared his throat.

“Andrew,” he said unconvincingly, “If you don't stop that, I'm going to
make
you stop.”

“No you won‘t,” Andrew said. “Mommy says you're a wimp.”

Ah, divorce! One of its great unsung joys belongs to the kids alone—the joy of manipulating each parent in perfect freedom from the other's scrutiny!

Kevin looked as if he were about to cry when his kid said that, but he quickly mastered himself and scowled.

“Mommy never said that,” he said.

“Oh, yes she does. She says you are a wimp in business and a wimp in bed.”

The air inside the car suddenly fell silent. How to redeem this situation, Isadora wondered, or was it even her responsibility to redeem the situation? Fortunately, Amanda didn't understand what was going on—or did she?

When in doubt, say nothing at all, Isadora thought. Learn from the WASPs, dummy; if you've learned nothing else from living in Fairfield County, it should at least be that: the best response is frozen silence.

Isadora drove home to Rocky Ridge seemingly ignorant of the fact that in the backseat of the car Andrew and Amanda were still bashing each other cordially and calling each other “Knockhead.” Amanda was three, so you really couldn't expect otherwise, but Andrew should have known better.

“How are you, pussycat?” Kevin asked Isadora, all mellowness. How could
anyone
be so mellow with kids screaming?

“Oh, I'm fine,” said Isadora, her neck beginning to go into spasm and her head beginning to pound.

“How
lovely
to have you both up for the weekend,” said Isadora mechanically.

“Yes,” said Kevin. “How lovely.”

Well, it was another one for
The Divorced Woman's Book of Etiquette,
all right. What to do when his kid and your kid detest each other? Do you stop seeing the man? Kill both kids, or kill yourself?

Once home, Isadora began fussing like a maniac, hoping to get the kids settled, finding fresh sheets for all and sundry, fixing martinis for Kevin, and dispatching Nurse Librium to bathe Andrew and Amanda and get them, if only momentarily, out of Kevin's hair—and hers.

“Oh, don't worry, Miz Izzydorry, I'll take care of the kids,” Nurse Librium said, attempting to herd this ill-mated pair of juveniles upstairs. “Now you kids be nice and go along upstairs fer yer bath,” Nurse Librium said, shuffling along behind them.

“She's a
baby;
I don't want to play with her,” screamed Andrew.

“I
hate
boys that I don't know,” said Amanda.

“Well—which boys
do
you like?” asked Kevin, trying to conciliate.

“My
daddy
is the only boy I like,” Amanda said.

“Well, of course,” said Kevin, “of course you love your daddy.”

“I hate you,” Amanda spat again. “You're
not
my daddy.”

“Take them away!” Isadora directed Nurse Librium.

“Oh, I'll take care of them, Miz Izzydorry, don't let it bother youse none.” And she laughed her nervous laugh which concealed god only knows what sort of malice.

“Maybe this wasn't such a good idea,” said Kevin, as the shrieks and shouts issued from upstairs while they attempted to drink their martinis.

“Maybe not,” conceded Isadora, her mind a million miles away. She wished she were in Venice, being rowed along the Grand Canal with a handsome young lover. She wished she were anywhere but here.

Instead, she fussed over Kevin. The parting from Josh had left her in some ways so insecure about men that she did what she had never really done before in her life: she became overwhelmingly domestic. She cooked for them, she mixed drinks fastidiously, she made sure they never had to lift a finger. Men loved it—but Isadora was left wondering about herself. Is
this
where liberation leads? To be doing a man's job and a woman's job and wearing black lace underwear (or white lace underwear) through it all?

There was not much Nat “King” Cole that weekend. Every time Kevin and Isadora would get slightly mellow, and slightly looped, the kids would scream from upstairs or come tearing down with some new dispute. If it wasn't the kids, it was Dogstoyevsky fleeing Andrew in terror. Had Andrew hit him, put toothpicks under his claws, poisoned him? Isadora could tolerate a great many things in life but dog abuse was not among them. Not being Andrew's mother (but only Amanda's and Dogstoyevsky's), she couldn't really discipline Andrew correctly. What was she to say? “Lay one more finger on that dog and I'll kill you?” No. She was stuck with palliatives like: “Andrew, we must not hurt animals,” and “Andrew, Dogstoyevsky is as human as you are.” He was more human, of course, but Isadora couldn't really say that.

The kids took seemingly forever to go to bed. Kevin, who, like all divorced fathers, longed for his kid and missed him all week long, had to sit with Andrew for hours before Andrew would even pretend to go to bed (Amanda had long since dropped off). When Kevin finally came down from the attic playroom, where Andrew was laid out in his
Star Wars
sleeping bag, he was exhausted.

“What a pussycat that boy is,” Kevin said. “I love him so.” And his eyes filled with sensitive paternal tears.

Isadora was thinking that the kid was a pussycat in snake's clothing, but she could say nothing because criticizing your new lover's kid is something no sane woman would do.

“A pussycat? Well, yes, I guess he just covers it up with rambunctiousness.”
Rambunctiousness
was certainly a neutral enough word here. She was thinking that other words would be far more appropriate. Like
beastliness,
for example—though most beasts she knew were sweeter than Andrew.

“He's suffered so over the divorce,” Kevin went on, “and his mother bad-mouths me to him all the time—which puts the kid in a tough spot.”

Isadora was sympathetic. Her separation was still new enough so that sometimes she had all she could do to keep herself from bad-mouthing Josh to Mandy. Instead she tended to be overly supportive. “Oh, Daddy will
love
that picture you drew,” she would say to Amanda. Or, “Aren't you looking forward to seeing Daddy this weekend?” In her heart, she still had black malice toward Josh —and yet, and yet, she also still loved him. “I love and I hate,” says Catullus, and in no life situation is that more true than in a divorce with a young child involved. You may despise the way your ex-spouse is treating you, but still you know in your sane mind that your child must love her father to love herself—and you do want your child to love herself. The ambivalence of emotions is painful and exhausting. Sometimes it seems your whole body is a battleground on which conflicting emotions clash by night. Besides, there is no way to stop loving someone with whom you have shared pregnancy, birth, the first frantic nights of parenthood. Experiences like that bond two people forever. The bond remains, however you may wish to break it. It may not be as strong as the bond you have with your child, but it is almost as strong, almost as unbreakable. Isadora knew that a piece of her heart would always belong to Josh—and that it would bleed from time to time, whatever she did to cauterize it.

“Well,” said Kevin, “the kids are in bed; shall we be going, too?”

He walked over to where Isadora sat on the couch, took her in his arms, and began to kiss her with great gentleness. She felt herself responding to him as she had not responded to any man since Josh left. The passion was not demonic, maybe, but there was such a sense of comfort and familiarity that she was warmed to the very bottom of her being. They stood up and hugged for a long time, feeling their bodies fit together in the friendliest of ways. Isadora could feel Kevin's erection against her (they were almost exactly the same height) and she could feel herself quickening—her cunt moistening, her heart racing. They went into the bedroom and began undressing each other. Then they fell back on the velvet patchwork spread of the waterbed and wrapped their arms around each other. Isadora felt, for the first time in ages, that she could go to bed without pot, without wine, without anything. Half undressed, wearing only an unbuttoned dress shirt and no trousers, Kevin fondled her until they both became so excited that they could hardly restrain themselves. He entered her and began to move gently inside her. She felt a sensation she had not known with any of the random lotharios of the past few months: trust. And as her cunt warmed to him and her spirit warmed as well, she began to come, rather more quickly than usual, pulsing rhythmically around him and saying, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

The choice of words was strange. She had never chosen those particular words before. But she
was
grateful—for the warmth, for the trust, for restoring her belief that sex could have sentiment in it once again.

Kevin was really turned on now, turned on by her responsiveness, her gratitude. He began to move quickly, thrusting his penis in on an angle, managing somehow to touch her clitoris and her cunt at once—so that she began to come again and again, and as she cried out in pleasure, he began to come, too—very silently, but with an expression of utter bliss on his face.

“Daddy!” came a scream from the staircase. “Daddy!” Then there was the thud of not so little feet—and Andrew was suddenly there banging on the door and shrieking.

The expression on Kevin's face turned dismal—as if he had been interrupted midcome (which apparently he had been).

“What is it, Andrew, pussycat?” he called.

“Open up!” yelled the little tyrant.

“One minute, darling,” said Kevin.

Isadora just lay there in bed amazed. Kevin should have killed the kid, and instead he was placating him.

“Coming,” said Kevin. He threw on a bathrobe (a Japanese cotton Yukata—which, to tell the truth, had already been worn by a host of different men that fall) and flung the door open to the imperious child.

“Well ...” said Andrew challengingly.

“What happened?” asked Kevin.

“The zipper on my
Star Wars
sleeping bag got stuck! Will you fix it for me, Daddy?”

What an astounding dialogue! No wonder Kevin had trouble claiming his own pleasure. No wonder! She knew that Kevin was guilty about the divorce, felt he had abandoned his wife and child and was plagued with fantasies of losing his child forever (if his wife married her current boyfriend and moved to Hawaii)—but she truly could not believe that he would fail to discipline Andrew for so obvious a stratagem. Instead, she heard him dutifully following the kid upstairs to fix the sleeping bag's zipper—which probably wasn't even broken anyway.

After Kevin disappeared, Isadora got up, put on a velvet caftan, brushed her hair, perfumed herself, and went into the kitchen to get a bottle of wine. She prepared a beautiful polished brass tray with crystal wine goblets, a frosty bottle of Trefethen chardonnay, large strawberries still glistening with water droplets (and wearing their fey green caps), and a slice of very ripe Brie. She carried this feast into the bedroom and put the gleaming tray in the middle of the waterbed. Then she climbed onto the bed herself, eating strawberries, drinking wine, and waiting for Kevin to appear.

He was gone for about a half-hour, during which time she mulled and brooded about the strange changes that had occurred in her life in the last few months. She was living an inner picaresque—episodic, farcical, with overtones of great melancholy if not true tragedy. Perhaps a woman with a child could not hit the road as easily as a real picaresque heroine—like Candida—the horny heroine for whose sake she had become so peculiarly famous, but the picaresque continued even as one was rooted to hearth and home and woodpile. Sometimes it seemed that so many things went on in her head at once that she had the sense of a dozen movies being run simultaneously on the same screen. One was the movie of her childhood and adolescence; another the movie of her first marriage; another the movie of her second marriage; another the movie of her marriage to Josh and the birth of her daughter; another the movie of the various lovers in her life; another her family's saga; another her grandfather's life as she saw its trajectory superimposed over her own; another the life of Tintoretto's daughter as it paralleled and diverged from her own life ... All these lives were running concurrently with her own life, and her own life was composed of all these lives, commented upon all these lives; was an
exemplum,
a parable, a myth.

She had not meant it to be this way. She had not meant to lead one of those specimen lives that becomes an
exemplum
to people who read about it, but the times she was born into, the fact that relations between men and women were changing drastically in these times (and that everyone was confused about what to do with these changes), had made her fumblings with fate (which she had mischievously chronicled) assume a significance beyond themselves. Fans wrote her and said, “I am waiting for your new book so I know what step to take next in my life.” And there
she
was, so confused about what to do next, yet somehow. saddled with the responsibility of being a guru to others.

“I fumble, therefore I am,” she wanted to say. “I stumble, therefore I am.”

This strange inner picaresque that she was now leading (in her post-separation year)—would this become a sort of parable, too, when she was done with it? For it did seem that she was going through what many women she knew were going through—a time of total insanity following the breakup of a marriage.