Parachutes and Kisses (47 page)

So she did. She put a Manhattan Transfer tape on the tape deck and sang along with “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.” Oh, she could chart the passage of her post-separation crisis through the music she selected. At the worst point in pain over Josh, she listened obsessively to Billie Holiday's bluesy maunder ings over mean men. That was her “Ain't Nobody's Business If I Do” period. Then, as things got a little cheerier, she moved into the bittersweet Berkeley-Woodstock world of Michael Franks—“Popsicle Toes” for good days and “Burchfield Nines” for melancholy ones. She knew she was really on the comeback trail when the music on the tape deck switched to the Manhattan Transfer. “Twilight Zone,” “Spies in the Night,” and “A Nightingale Sang” represented considerable emotional progress over Billie Holiday and her songs of female masochism. “I swear I won't call no copper if I'm beat up by my poppa” was some fine lyric for an avowed feminist to be listening to (and with such an approving heart!). And yet that was the essential female paradox, wasn't it? It was precisely the most passionately
independent
woman who longed most to be mastered by men. Aphra Behn, Mary Wollstonecraft, Colette—they'd all had more than their share of beastly male chauvinists for whom they'd lusted and suffered. Intelligence in a woman did not necessarily translate to her emotional life. In fact, it so often seemed to work the other way around: the more intelligent the woman, the more of a dummy she was in her dealings with men. Yeats had got it exactly right in “A Prayer for My Daughter”:

Amen.

Once in New York, Isadora parked in a garage on Fifty-seventh Street and began making her appointed rounds.

First, she saw a bald, chubby business manager named Hillel Marantz, who wasn't much interested in what Mel Botkin had done or not done, but promised, if she made him her trusted adviser, to do “everything but marry her.”

“And maybe that, too,” he said with a wink. He'd invest her money (what might be left of it), deal with audits, mortgages, insurance, reinsurance, bills, and bank balances.

“I can promise you everything but stud service,” he said with another wink—this one even more loathsome than the first. Isadora thanked him and went on.

Next she saw a tall, skinny Dickensian lawyer-CPA named Marcus Marcus, who was as bellicose and litigious as they come and who said:

“Sock the widow with a lawsuit—and do it now before the corpse is cold or you'll never get a penny—mark my words.”

“I mark them, Marcus Marcus,” Isadora wanted to say, but she thought better of it and went on to:

Lionel Lowry—a very distinguished, silver-haired business manager with very plushy offices on a very high floor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza—offices festooned with glossies of rock stars. He implied (politely, but clearly) that Isadora (and indeed anyone with an income of less than a million a year) was too small a fish for him to fry, so Isadora thanked him sweetly and went on to:

Oliver Glascock, Jr., a WASP CPA—whom she mistrusted for that very reason: What sort of peculiar WASP mother encourages her son to become a
CPA?

Her final consultation was with Seymour Wolitsky, of Wolitsky, Werfel, and Ruben. Seymour was a bearded fellow with an ample belly, who unhelpfully implied that if only she'd come to him years ago, she'd be rich and secure today.

By five o‘clock, her head was swimming. She'd have to give these decisions a little time, and see other advisers in the coming weeks, but meanwhile, should she call Bean for solace, or should she call Hope? Bean first, she decided (he would not be in); then Hope. With a pounding heart, she tried Bean's number, hoping indeed that he wouldn't be home. The phone rang and rang. Just as she was happily about to give up, he picked up the phone.

“Lady,” he said. “I thought you'd never call. I've been sitting here debating whether or not to jerk off—or whether to save it all for you.”

“Will you buy me a drink?”

“Of
course
—why don't you come and meet me at my humble dump—or, as I'd rather call it, my dumble hump.”

“Gadzooks, sir—come to a man's apartment? Surely, you would not wish my vartue to be compromised thus?”

“My lady, you do me a great disservice to assume that I would even try the vartue of one so pure as you. Or is't ‘thee'?”

“Then meet me at a Publick House, sirrah, and not your scurvy batchelor quarters.”

“Milady—I swear, upon my Honour...”

“What Honour?”

“The Honour I shall acquire for thee, if thou wilt but inspire it. Come but briefly here. We'll out anon.”

“A likely story.”

She was finally persuaded, but swore in her heart not to let him take her to bed. Women—surely some sage has remarked—have this curious magical belief that if they let a man take them to bed once but not twice, twice but not thrice, thrice but not four times, it will prevent their becoming enthralled. Three, after all, is a charm, and Isadora had often felt that if she succumbed only once or twice to a beguiling man, then she would be safe from his emotional clutches. Three or more times meant danger. Three or more and you were deeper in than you wished to be.

Bean's fifth-floor walk-up in the East Twenties was a revelation of his character, like his van. It was also a revelation of his status —not quite single; a woman's shoes and makeup, mail and photographs were everywhere. (Isadora was actually glad of this—she would rather be the mysterious mistress than the live-in lady.)

He greeted her passionately at the door to his digs. Clothes were flung on every available surface. A double bed with leopard-printed sheets lay unmade. The kitchen was in the center of the living room and greasy pots were ubiquitous. It was the apartment of a college kid, a prep-school boy. Barbells and jock straps supplied the decor. Improving literature and trashy tabloids; roaches; the smell of old grease and new sinsemilla; a few pieces of old family furniture festooned with dirty clothes.

Taking it all in (while Bean was embracing her), Isadora thought: How nice, how nice, how nice. I keep starting life again and yet again. One of the great pleasures of having new lovers, young lovers, was that she kept getting the chance to start over—over and over again. For the first time since the separation, she saw the upheavals in her life as positive rather than negative. She was almost jubilant. It was as if she kept going back to her twenties and beginning again. Would she possibly get it right this time?

She and Bean kissed and kissed. His kisses made her stomach turn to mush and her cunt drip. Before she could protest, before she could rationalize or even speak, he tore off her clothes and fucked her madly on the unmade bed. She had wanted to believe that their perfect fit last night was only a mirage, a delusion, a passing fancy—but that was not the case. Their fit was astounding, incredible, whether they merely lay in each other's arms or fucked like animals gone wild.

Nor did their sex ever seem to have a beginning, a middle, an end. They helped each other to deep-purple portions of sex, portions that seemed to begin anywhere and end nowhere. After they finished, they would begin again. There was never a moment when it was over and ecstasy succumbed to interrogation (“Was it good for you, too?”). They never had to ask. It was clear that their link was cosmic, enormous, deep as the reaches of space. They seemed to give off blue light as they fucked, the blue light Wilhelm Reich claimed he could see around copulating couples. If there was such a thing as orgone energy,
kundalini
energy, they had discovered it. All the cares of the world were as nothing as compared to this force, this fire they made with their bodies. It was unstoppable, irresistible, the pulse of the cosmos. Lost as she was in this tornado that had overtaken her life, Isadora didn't care about tax troubles, money troubles, Josh troubles. All troubles were suspended as she lay in Bean's arms. Dimly, a disembodied voice (her own?) came to her as she floated out of her body.
It will be all right,
the voice kept saying.
It will be all right.

She and Bean had dinner afterward at a Japanese restaurant in Murray Hill. They sat together on the floor of a small private room with paper walls and couldn't keep their hands off each other, or their eyes off each other.

“I adore you. I adore you. I adore you,” he kept saying between bites of sushi.

Some demon seized hold of her sanity and she was led to do mad things like putting sushi in her cunt, and making him retrieve it before the demure kimonoed waitress reappeared. They laughed so loudly that even the party of Japanese businessmen in the adjacent paper room tried to peek in when the waitress slid their paper door ajar. Gold teeth aglint, cameras dangling from their necks, they tittered before the paper door slid shut again.

Bean and Isadora drank sake and stared into each other's eyes —which were, astoundingly, the same color: cornflower blue with yellow flecks.

“Bean—you are the sweetest man I've ever known,” Isadora said.

“Impossible,” he said. “I'm just a man. Maybe you've just never had one before. I hardly deserve you. If there weren't so many wimps and nerds in the world, I wouldn't have even had a crack at you.”

“A what?”

“A crack,” he said reaching his hand under her skirt and finding the object in question.

“A crack, a quim, a quente, a bottomless pit, a honeypot, a slit, a gash, a gravy giver, a boy in a boat ...”

“How do you know those terms?”

“I love sexual slang—especially the sexual slang of Shakespeare's day. I studied it in grad school.”

“How astounding—so did I. I nearly did my master's thesis on Shakespeare's sexual slang, but then I switched to eighteenth-century lit.”

“Extraordinary,” said Bean. “Listen, lady, we are linked in more ways than you dream—even though I am a guiltless WASP and you a guilty Jew.”

“Not guilty at all with you.”

“That's why you need me. I'll teach you guiltlessness—if you'll teach me guilt. Is it a deal?”

“Why should anyone want guilt—the curse of the Jews?”

“Because all artists need a healthy dose of it to give a finer point to their suffering and their art. My race of guiltless WASPs is dying out. We have nothing else to tell the world—or nothing that they want to hear.”

“And what do the Jews have to tell the world? Guilt?”

“The world has never needed guilt more. Or conscience, as I'd rather call it. And Jews—in case you haven't noticed—are the conscience of the world. That's why they're so hated. Since we met, I've longed to be one. Listen, lady, if they were lining up the Jews to march them into the ovens again, I'd sooner go with you than walk this world without you by my side. I love you, lady. I've decided I can't live without you.”

Isadora looked at him quizzically. “It's awfully soon to fall in love,” she said.

“Not soon enough,” said Bean, holding a forgotten piece of sushi aloft in his right hand. “I fell in love the moment I saw you in the health club. Last night only awakened my lust and told me what I never knew before—that lust and love can sleep in the same bed.”

“I think I love you, too,” Isadora heard herself saying in a voice that seemed not to be her own. “It's either love or vagabondage—but one way or the other, there's no turning back now—damn it...”

“Because falling in love is the first step toward heartbreak.”

“I swear I'll never break your heart,” he said. “I'm here to heal it.”

“So they all say—at first.”

“Oh, you are cynical, aren't you? What makes you so cynical anyway?”

“Living on planet earth. Three marriages. Four decades.”

“And you believe that cynicism is truer than hope, do you?”

“That observation would seem to be borne out by experience.”

“Only if you write the end of every story and then live your own creation to the bitter end.”

“Slick. Very slick. I wish I could triumph over cynicism—but I would not want to be a fool again.”

“And when were you a fool before?”

“With Josh. Because I loved him so totally.”

“And is that bad?”

“Not bad, but pretty excruciating when it ends.”

“And so you'll never begin, and that way never have to end. What a solution for a hero! What a solution for the most courageous woman of your generation!”

“Don't goad me—especially not with flattery.”

Bean looked genuinely penitent. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I know it's hard to trust again when you've been badly hurt. But promise me one thing—it's all I ask ...”

“What?”

“You'll give me time. I'll prove to you how much I love you—no matter how long it takes. I only want the time. Is it a deal?”

“I have to think about it,” said Isadora.

“Okay—think,” he said and kissed her until the paper door slid open and then slid closed at once as the waitress realized her intrusion and went away in a rustle of silk and straw.

Oh, what a dear ravishing thing is the beginning of an amour.

—APHRA BEHN

From outrage (matrimony) to outrage (adultery) there arose nought but outrage (copulation) yet the matrimonial violator of the matrimonially violated had not been outraged by the adulterous violator of the adulterously violated.