Parachutes and Kisses (35 page)

“It's okay to be affectionate,” Kevin said. “I promise you.”

Isadora was not convinced.

What a ragtag melancholy family they made! One heartbroken child, one panicky mommy, and one daddy who was not with the child he longed for. Isadora kept thinking back to Christmas of last year when Josh had bought her diamond earrings in an attempt to return some sparkle to their love. They were in the midst of their crisis over their supposed open marriage, his failed expectations, her successes, and all the deaths that had attended their passage through the previous year. If only—Isadora now thought —they had tried a little harder and been a little less inclined to indulge their
spilkes.
Isadora often thought that her tragic flaw in life was her Arien impatience. Perhaps all these problems with Josh could have been solved with just a little waiting.
Warten
—Kafka supposedly had hanging over his desk—
Wait.
It was profound. Many problems in writing are solved just by waiting and allowing the unconscious to do its invisible work—and many problems in life are solved that way, too.

She thought that, and then she thought—was she
crazy?
Just a few days ago, Josh had stomped out of her house in a blizzard and a blackout, leaving her to cope with baby, house, and snowstorm without even the loan of a car which he didn't need at all—but which, in spite, he had chosen to lend to one of his girlfriends. How could she be so self-hating as to long for a man who treated her that way? Surely, she deserved better. But deep down inside, she did not
believe
she deserved better. Maybe she even believed she deserved worse.
There
was the crux of the problem: until she could really believe in her right to be well treated, she would never be well treated—or not for long.

 

Mandy went to bed after endless delaying and interrogations about Santa Claus (whose milk and cookies had been duly laid out).

When Kevin and Isadora were alone finally, they sat down to the Christmas Eve dinner Isadora had prepared—roast turkey with chestnut dressing, turnip purée, sweet potatoes, two kinds of wine, Perrier Jouët champagne, and a chocolate fondue with fresh fruit. At dinner, by the roaring fire, to the tune of Nat “King” Cole, they discussed high school, as if to obliterate all the experiences that separated them and put them somehow on common ground.

They played Did You Know? and Do You Remember? They remembered some of the same characters from high school, but not nearly enough of them to prolong this game.

In the rosy firelight, with the snow outside and the music inside, they should have been far more entranced with the scene (and each other) than they were. Oh, they were comforted by each other, fed by each other, amused by each other. But Isadora had the sense that Kevin had somewhere been so wounded in his vitals that he could never quite give himself again, whereas she—she was in the process of giving up romance—but when she gave that up, what on earth would come to take its place?

Romance, passion, the quest for the fiery demon lover who obliterated all reason, the quest for the magic spindle—these things had marked her life. Yes, she had lived to write, had applied herself to her writing with ferocious discipline—but even more than living to write, she had lived to love. Even the books that provided her with her livelihood all chronicled females questing for love. Without her quest for love, she would also have nothing to write about; it was what linked her to other women, what stirred her vitals not only to sex but also to poetry, what made her—despite her oddness in being famous and affluent—exactly like other women, exactly like her friends, her sisters, her readers.

And now she was looking at a life without love. She was looking at Kevin, whom she
almost
loved, and thinking that a man like this spelled the end of passion. Oh, she could easily enough live with him. She could probably even write with him around—but what on earth would she have to write
about?
To settle for Kevin would be like settling for middle age. And yet she could not go on being buffeted by love as she had been for her first thirty-nine years. It was just too tough. She had loved Josh too completely, too finally —and his departure had left her too bereft.

“What are you thinking?” Kevin asked.

“Just that I've lived my life being buffeted by love,” Isadora said.
“Buffeted by Love-there's
another title for my autobiography.”

“Yes,” said Kevin, taking her hand and looking into her eyes with his big hazel eyes. “Yes. But you'll never do that again.”

Isadora shuddered with fear when he said that. Despite her fantasies of total self-reliance, of living in Connecticut alone and resetting her own furnace, she knew of no other emotional life than the ups and downs of romantic passion. What a dilemma! She might be as independent as Jane Eyre, but she was still in search of her Rochester.

“You see,” Kevin said, “when we fall in love this time, at this age, we'll fall in love with real people, not fantasies. In the past, we always fell in love with fantasies.”

“But
all
romantic love is fantasy,” Isadora said. “Once the person is tamed and domesticated, something goes out of the love.”

“Not necessarily,” said Kevin, picking up another piece of sweet potato on his fork. “Couldn't life be peaceful, just like this?”

Was this a proposal? Isadora couldn't believe her ears.

“Yes,” she said, “very peaceful, but I don't know if I'm ready for such peace.”

“But are you ready for more pain? Of the sort you had with Josh?”

“No. But the peace seems somehow deathlike. I long for it, but —dare I say it?—it seems boring.”

“That's because you haven't got your head together yet,” Kevin said, patting her cheek. “There will come a time, I promise you, when it will seem attractive ... a nice fire, a nice meal, a nice little
shtup
after dinner ...”

Which is exactly what they had. But as they were having it, Isadora thought, There is something essentially wrong with any
shtup
that can be described as “nice” and “little.”

Kevin's favorite adjectives were
nice
and
little.
His life was nice and little, his aspirations nice and little, even what he desired for Isadora was nice and little. But she, burned as she was by the attempt to live without a net, to live by her wits and by her passions, could not settle for nice and little. No, she did not want to get hurt again, but neither did she want a life without risk. Every time she had opted for what seemed like risklessness, it had proved to have its own pains. She had alternated between wildness and safety in choosing her men, and who could tell which was better, which was worse? Brian Stollermann had been a madman; Bennett Wing had been a staid doctor; Josh Ace had been a “younger man” (in the benighted days—the midseventies—when six years younger was thought to be of some consequence). Now Kevin was the safe “old school friend,” the antidote to the hurt and torment of the last year. Who was next? Given her history, a demon lover was next on the agenda. And would there (after that) be an antidote to
him,
and then an antidote to the antidote, and so on until she died? No. She was about to be forty. This
couldn't
go on forever.

Would forty spell the end of love and its derangements? Would she slide peacefully into her slippers (puffing on her metaphorical pipe) and nod by the fire for the next forty years? (For she came from a very long-lived family.) Would she take to writing vague philosophical essays with no men and no women in them but only grand abstractions and long latinate words? Would she stop wearing her crazy designer clothes of lavender velvet and fuchsia silk and begin to dress out of the redoutable catalogs of Bean and Bauer? Would she trade in her soft contact lenses and outsize sunglasses for tortoiseshell Ben Franklins or bifocals? Would she start knitting in lieu of fucking? Would she take up gentlewom anly crafts like making pictures of dried, pressed flowers or baking madeleines to sell them for outrageous tariffs at the local gourmet shop? Would forty mean the end of love—and if so, what on earth would she write about?

“What are you thinking?” Kevin asked when they had finished making love.

“I don't even know how to put it into words,” Isadora lied. How could she tell him what she was thinking? He had comforted her, helped her, healed her; was she so ungrateful as to reject these not inconsiderable gifts?

“I feel,” Isadora said, “as if I've been set adrift, as if all the givens of my life have suddenly changed, and I don't know what assumptions will come to replace them.”

Well, this was true—though perhaps a little vague. As she approached forty, Isadora felt that a great shifting of gears was occurring in her life. But whether she would fly downhill after this —or laboriously climb uphill for the rest of her days, she did not know. Probably neither. Probably she would find some new way of living, halfway between self-reliance and endless love (which always, alas, ends). But was there a halfway point between those two? And what on earth would
it feel
like?

She had always adored those eighteenth-century novels in which the hero and heroine wind up, in the closing scene, cultivating their garden. That was what she craved, and yet she seemed as far from it as ever.

“What do you want most,” Kevin asked, “for the next half of your life?”

“To cultivate my garden,” said Isadora, “to flower again, to root myself in earth and flower again ...”

“Then you will,” said Kevin. “The ground is only temporarily frozen—so you're adrift—if I may mix a metaphor. But when the spring thaw comes, you'll root again and flower. That I promise you.”

“Thank you,” said Isadora, really touched. “I love you for saying that. Good-night.”

And they fell asleep in the undulating waterbed with their arms around each other.

Would she and Kevin still be sleeping in each other's arms when the spring thaw came?

Best not to ask that question, but just to live this winter one day at a time, as the A.A. folk say.

I would like to step out of my heart & go walking beneath the enormous sky.

—RAINIER MARIA RILKE

ON Christmas morning, it was snowing again. Each flake struck terror into Isadora's heart, because the snow, in Rocky Ridge, meant isolation. Isadora had invited an ill-assorted group of lonely friends and acquaintances to spend Christmas with her and Kevin and Mandy, but they were not due to come until three o‘clock, and by then the roads might be impassible.

It was seven when Mandy pounded on Isadora's door, waking her and Kevin and summoning them out of bed to confront the presents beneath the tree.

Kevin groaned and rolled over in the waterbed. It was not his child who summoned, after all, and Isadora thought it just as well to let him sleep while she opened Mandy's presents alone with her.

“Go back to sleep, darling,” she said to Kevin. “I'll wake you at a more civilized hour.”

He seemed happy enough to do this, so she put on a warm bathrobe and followed Mandy out to the tree, where a cornucopia of gifts awaited her. (Oh, how we indulge our children that first Christmas after a separation, hoping to make up with material possessions for the one gift that they desire most and that we cannot give them—two parents to open presents with.) Of the many things one takes for granted in a marriage, a partner to share the present-ritual with seems fairly trifling—until it is taken away.

Isadora and Mandy sat beneath the tree and began searching for boxes bearing Mandy's name. Mandy was happy enough to tear off the paper and embrace each new stuffed animal, each toy, each game—but Isadora was totally desolate. All she could do was remember back to Christmases past. She seemed incapable of centering herself in the present moment and enjoying what was going on. She could not stop thinking that Mandy was only three and already half fatherless. A man the little one could barely tolerate was sleeping in the waterbed, not even getting up to see her glowing face as she pillaged her presents.

Isadora put on a record of Christmas carols, as if that would infuse cheer into the cheerless scene. She put it on low so that Kevin would not be awakened. She and Mandy sang along erratically as they searched through the presents, and Isadora was charmed by Mandy's interpretations of the lyrics. “Good nightings we bring to you and your friends,” she sang tunelessly, “good nightings for Christmas and a Happy New Year.”

At least I have Mandy, Isadora thought—that should be a great comfort to me. And of course it was. If Mandy were to be taken from her, she would have nothing to live for. But still, something precious had been lost: the ability to share Mandy with the one person in the world whose investment in her was as great as her own. It was an immense loss and Isadora did not yet know what gains would come to replace it, if any.

The party that afternoon was a sad affair. Lola Birk Harvey turned up in her red Cherokee, with husband, Bruce, and lover Errol Dickinson, the Rhinestone Cowboy. What a curious—if unwitting—
ménage à trois
they made. Sylvia Sydenheim-Rabinowitz came escorted by son Roland. Isadora's parents also turned up, as did her sister Chloe, with kids in tow. Other than that there were a variety of lost souls: one eccentric woman writer who lived in Ridgefield with seventeen stray dogs and twelve cats (the dogs were in a kennel; the cats roamed the house); an elderly gentleman writer who did books on lexicography and was definitely a little weird; a lesbian couple in their seventies who bred borzois; the widow of a famous playwright; the widow of a famous actor; the widow of a famous producer; the widow of a famous poet. Oh, Connecticut was a great state for widows. Isadora felt a little like one herself. This odd assortment of people embraced, unwrapped presents, and got roaring drunk at once—as if to block out the possibility that they'd all be snowed in together as if in some venerable Agatha Christie melodrama. Were they due to be murdered one by one? The afternoon had that feel about it. Several of the people there had slept with other people there—though Isadora was the only one who knew it (save for Lola Harvey, who knew nearly as much as Isadora and was hugely titillated by it). Lola was glowing, animated, turned on. She loved the fact that she and Isadora shared Errol and that she was there with her husband while Isadora was there with her old school friend. But Errol, what did
Errol
think? Errol was so stoned .his unmatched eyes were glazed, and Roland was equally stoned. All of these people—who were connected only by Isadora—milled around in her living room and made merry. They simulated family feeling. They did a pantomime of yuletide joy—or did Isadora only feel that way because she was so depressed? Perhaps the others were having a splendid time.