Parachutes and Kisses (43 page)

“What can I do to dissuade you?”

“Nothing,” she said, standing up and reeling slightly from the wine. “I swear it. Nothing.”

Bean looked suddenly like a very tall Holden Caulfield. He seemed fifteen, not twenty-five. His upper lip trembled as if he were about to cry. His enormous blue eyes grew watery. Suddenly, Isadora
could
imagine him killing himself. He had already told her that he owned a revolver and knew how to use it. He had also told her that he used cars as lethal weapons—and the roads were certainly treacherous. Ought she ask him to sleep in the guest room?

No. Impossible. Impossible to have so sexual a presence in the house and not fuck him. Well—if he was so self-destructive—it was his problem, she thought. She was tired of taking care of the whole world. She was tired of taking care of young men. Josh, Roland, Bean—they would all have to fend for themselves. But were old men much better? Apparently she had taken better care of Mel Botkin than he had taken of her.

“I think you should go home,” Isadora said. She held onto her chairback for support. She could feel the cramps in her belly dragging her downward and she was wondering whether the last Tampax was beginning to seep. In about a minute, trickles of menstrual blood would begin inching down her thighs.

“I loved tonight,” Isadora said, “but I really think you should go home.”

Why
she was so determined not to sleep with him she didn't really know. After all, she had slept with plenty of men she liked less. Maybe she sensed the hold he might come to have over her; maybe she really
knew
what a formidable presence he might become in her life. When a woman is powerfully attracted to a new man, sometimes that is just the moment she chooses to flee. But when a man is just so much chopped liver—she can bed him and go her way unhooked.

“Let me at least give you some autographed books,” Isadora said to the misty-eyed Bean. It was the old ploy: books not bed. Or books as a prelude to bed—she wasn't sure which. At fifteen, she had written poems to men instead of bedding them. At twenty-five, she had done the same. At twenty-eight, she had written a whole novel just because of a man she could not have (for he was impotent with her out of spite)—and when, in her thirty-first year, the novel was published, the world became hers for the asking, but still not that man. At thirty-nine, she had substituted bed for books, and always come home dry-eyed and emptyhearted. What was the final solution to the book-bed dilemma? Was there one? Did she only love the unattainable man, the man under the bed, the impossible object—finally Daddy?

“Come upstairs,” she said, leading Bean to her tree-house study. She walked carefully, rubbing her thighs together in her jeans, to keep the blood at bay.

They mounted the spiral staircase that led to her studio. Up there, in her gray-carpeted sanctuary, lined with her books, she could see his astonishment at the quantity of volumes she had produced. He saw her as a woman, not a book machine—but clearly she was also a book machine. She had laid waste forests on sundry continents to proliferate her words in a multitude of languages.

“French, Spanish, German, Italian, and what else?” he asked, amazed.

“Japanese, Hebrew, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian—and even Serbo-Croat and Macedonian—but not Swahili,” she said drunkenly. Why was she so proud of her foreign editions? She had no way of knowing if their texts even remotely resembled anything she had written. Well, in the French and Italian and German, she had
some
way of knowing, but the other languages were all Greek to her. And yet, there was such a gap between intention and effect anyway, that her books were never quite what she intended, even in her own native tongue. It was as if she meant to draw a unicorn, but produced somehow a goat with a pasted-on horn. The result was always so far from what she intended that she could derive little pleasure from it. The best part was the writing itself—the flow of words on the page, the joy she found in covering her yellow legal pads with multicolored inks. Let other authors stare at video screens. She needed the visceral feel of paper and ink; she needed the sheer physicality of writing.

But the end product? That was not for her to enjoy or even to judge. It was artifact to her: the process was all. Surely all authors must feel this way; surely they must feel the painful gap between intention and effect, and even when the readers raved, one wanted to say: No, no—life is much more interesting, complex, and rich than prose can ever be.

“Here,” she said, grabbing a hard-cover copy of
Tintoretto's Daughter.
She began to inscribe it for Bean.

“To Berkeley Sproul III. May you live to see the IVth and Vth and (even) VIth. And may you fall in love in Venice someday—as Marietta Robusti did—but not have to die for it. With much affection, Isadora Wing.”

She handed him the book. He read the inscription, and looked even more misty-eyed. Then he grabbed her suddenly and hugged her very tight. She could feel his hard-on under his jeans, and she could feel his very large, very gentle hands cupping her ass and then moving up along her back, fondling her as if he wanted to press her body into his. But it was the way he touched the back of her neck and her hair that astounded her. His fingers found the very place on her neck that always caused her the most pain when she had her terrible tension headaches and they began to massage it with infinite tenderness. How did his fingers know just where to go? It was uncanny. One hand remained on her neck, and the other moved up to her head and rubbed it with such gentleness and love that she might have been a child again, having her head rubbed by her grandfather as she fell asleep.

Now she was really panic-stricken. No man (except her grandfather) had ever found those parts of her body before; no man had ever known to rub her neck and head that way. If he knew that—what other, more volatile knowledge of her body might he have? She was afraid to find out.

“You have to go home,” she said to Bean, breaking away. “You really do.”

He nodded sadly. She took his hand and led him down the spiral stairs, wondering, Was she
mad
to let him go, or was she sane? No more love, she had promised herself, no more beguiling young men whose hearts are “wax to receive and marble to retain” (as Byron says).

“That's right—throw me back in the gutter, where vagabonds belong,” Bean said histrionically.

Downstairs in the foyer Isadora handed him his long red scarf and his fisherman's sweater. She even found an old ski cap of Josh's to offer him, but he refused.

“No thanks,” he said, “I'd rather freeze to death if I can't have you. I'd rather die in the gutter.”

“‘We are
all
in the gutter,”' Isadora said. “‘But some of us are looking at the stars.”' She opened the heavy front door and snow swirled in.

“That's from
Lady Windermere's Fan,”
said Bean. “Now let me quote you something even more relevant from
The Importance of Being Earnest.”
He walked out onto the snowy flagstone path, flung the red scarf dramatically around his neck and declaimed: “ ‘I
hope
you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and really being good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.' ”

“Touché,”
said Isadora. “Now go!”

Though she was wearing only a sweater over her jeans, she walked out to the van with him, reveling in the pinky, snowy night, which was really not very cold after all.

“Careful,” he said, “don't slip.” He held her arm with great tenderness.

When they reached his flamboyant van (which was lightly dusted with snow), he opened the door and looked at her again sadly.

“Go home,” she said, hugging him briefly. He leaned down, took her in his arms again, and kissed her on the mouth with a tongue that knew the inside of her soul. He might have been kissing her cunt not her mouth for the excitement that it generated in her. His tongue knew everything about her mouth, as his fingers had found the sensitive place on her neck. She felt she could come just kissing him.

“Go home,” she said again, breaking away. She was wondering why she was so determined to get rid of him. What we all want most is to be
known,
and Bean certainly knew her. Was that why he had to go? She stood on tiptoes and playfully stuck her tongue in his ear. “Go home,” she reiterated.

Without a word, he got into the van, revved the motor, and began to back up. She waved, and walked back to the house, feeling that she had just narrowly escaped with her life, her freedom, her soul.

Thank Goddess, she said to herself, deeply relieved to hear his engine roaring up the driveway.

Inside, she stripped off her clothes, changed her Tampax (just in time to avert a bloody disaster), and put on an old flannel granny gown. She lathered up her face with black soap, enriching the estate of Dr. Lazlo—wherever he might be—in heaven, perhaps, doing deals with Mel Botkin?

Bean's arrival in her life had cheered her immeasurably. What the hell if I'm broke, she thought. I'll make it again as I made it the first time. She felt reckless, enterprising, fearless, exuberant. She felt that her life was beginning again—all the more so perhaps because she had to start from scratch. She would declare bankruptcy, sell her possessions, simplify her life. The classic car would go—maybe
both
cars would go—and so would the diamond earrings Josh had bought her. She would be perfectly happy with a smaller house and smaller car—even no house or car at all. Writing was what mattered, not money, not fame—writing and Amanda. And what about love? No. It wasn't time for love yet. Good thing she had sent Bean home. He was a real threat to her resolve to stay free, a real threat.

Isadora finished her Lazlo regime, turned on the light in the bedroom, and prepared to curl up in bed with a book—preferably a classic rather than the masses of importunate galleys that crowded her bedstand, seeking blurbs. “Read not the times, read the eternities,” Thoreau says, and on the eve of bankruptcy, one needed the classics more than ever. Well then, she would read Thoreau. She would reread
Walden,
as a prelude to selling the house and cars and moving even deeper into the wilderness. She could certainly face life without black soap!

American literature was upstairs in the attic, the room where she had written
Tintoretto's Daughter,
now Mandy's playroom. The adult books had not yet been moved out. Isadora put on her funny old red Eddie Bauer goosedown slippers (the ones that made her look like she had clown feet) and she padded to the main stairs and thence to the attic in search of Thoreau. Just as she passed the front door, she heard a most persistent knock.

“Isadora!” came Bean's voice. “Isadora!”

“Shit,” she muttered to herself. “I must look like holy hell.”

She threw open the front door.

Bean stood outside, teeth chattering. His hair was covered with large snowflakes. His nose dripped slightly and was very red.

“What happened?” Isadora asked.

“I slipped off the driveway and the van got stuck in a snowbank,” Bean explained. “I can't push the damned thing back onto the road.”

“A likely story,” she said.

“It's true,” said Bean. “I drove off the road and just missed plowing into a tree.”

Isadora looked at him cynically. “You drove off the road on
purpose,”
she said, immensely relieved that he was not dead, and that he had come back.

“I swear it—I did not,” Bean said. “I skidded backwards off the icy curve.”

“Sure,” said Isadora laughing. “Anyone who wants to get laid that badly must be absolutely incredible in bed.”

And she took him by the hand and led him into her bedroom.

They threw off their clothes—sweater, scarf, granny gown, goosedown slippers, jeans—and fell into each other's arms as if their whole lives had been a preparation for this moment.

Talk about the Zipless Fuck! Talk about the impossible fantasy come true! Bean took to bed as a duck to water, a polar bear to snow, a starving man to a hunk of mutton. You'd have thought—from the way he went at Isadora's body—that he'd been starved for female bodies his whole life, though clearly that was not the case. He was so hungry, so horny (yet so oddly pure in his hunger and horniness that she wanted to say, “There, there—nobody's going to take it away from you,” but she refrained, out of fear of being flippant about his prodigious sexuality). Nor did he have any kind of hang-ups about taste or smell. It was clear that he relished smells, juices, sweat, blood. He dove into her muff with great exuberance, parted it, found the white string that dangled chastely there and pulled her Tampax triumphantly out with his teeth.

“Aha! A string!” he said between clenched teeth. He chewed on the Tampax lightly, savoring its taste, then tossed it to the floor and dove in again, tongue-first. He played lusty tunes on her clitoris, plunged a practiced finger into her snatch, and reached all the way in until he found, on the anterior wall, the sweetest spot. By rubbing her expertly there, while his tongue trilled on her clit and the other hand pressed down on her belly, he brought her swiftly to the most palpitating climax she'd ever known.

She tried to close her legs to rest a while, but he forced them apart (ignoring her protestations) and rammed his cock inside her. He rocked her from side to side, touching parts of her insides she could have sworn were untouched before; then he pulled back suddenly, and rammed it in again. Now he began to pound her mercilessly. Raising himself on his arms, he went at her cunt with his ferociously hard cock as if he meant to annihilate all trace of any previous lovers. “For Josh,” he said, ramming it in, “for Bennett, for Brian, for all of them.” He pounded her so hard that she was about to come again, but just at that moment, he pulled back saying, “Not yet, baby, not yet,” forcibly turned her over, smacked her hard on her bottom, and plunged into her from behind. He drew her up on her knees, and fucked the daylights out of her while his fingers found her clit and she came and came and came, screaming and covering his cock, the sheets, the quilt, the pillows, with blackly red menstrual blood.