Parachutes and Kisses (54 page)

 

Taking off from San Francisco, watching the peninsula and the Bay recede beneath them, Isadora knew that something had shifted irrevocably in her life as a result of this trip, taken almost by accident. It was as if cylinders in a combination lock had accidentally fallen into alignment and she was open to Bean in a way she never would have been had they stayed home in Connecticut or had she chanced to go with Kevin or Hope. It was more than a sexual obsession, she knew—far more than that.

Bean was revealed to her in San Francisco, and what was revealed—despite all her misgivings, all the scar tissue that covered her heart—was somebody who really loved her and would fiercely protect her no matter how quixotically. He wanted to be her Lancelot and he adamantly refused to take no for an answer. He understood that underneath her peculiar notoriety (which Josh had finally found so intimidating) there was only a woman who wanted and needed loyalty and love. He was not put off by her fame, did not see her as either a forbidding fortress or a potential acquisition. He saw her only as a person, strong, yet vulnerable.

“If they are really together,” Bean said, “really partners, a man and a woman make the most invincible force in the universe.”

“Do you really think so?” asked Isadora, still burned enough by Josh to think the notion of a man and a woman as partners was a pleasant fiction, which could last three years motivated by passion alone, seven years motivated by passion and sadomasochism.

“I really think so,” said Bean, “but I don't expect you to. Not yet. But I'm damned persistent. Just give me the requisite seven years. You'll see.”

Make no mistake. Everything in the mind is in rat's country. It doesn't die. They are merely carried, these disparate memories, back and forth in the desert of a billion neurons, set down, picked up, and dropped again by mental pack rats. Nothing perishes, it is merely lost till a surgeon‘s electrode starts the music of an old player piano whose scrolls are dust. Or you yourself do it, tossing in the restless nights, or even in the day on a strange street when a hurdy-gurdy plays. Nothing is lost, but it can never be again as it was. You will only find the bits and cry out because they were yourself.

—LOREN EISLEY

No one but a fool trips on what's behind him.

—YIDDISH PROVERB

SO he said—yet when they got home and resumed their anarchic affair, it was more maddening than ever. He had somehow become indispensable to her and the days without him dragged by interminably. She only managed to get through them by writing poems to him and she sat waiting for the phone to ring like an adolescent having her first fierce attack of puppy love. The fact that Connecticut had exploded in a riot of spring hardly made things any better. The very breeze was sexual—flowers bursting out all over the place: crocuses triumphing over snow, daffodils and jonquils trumpeting over the muddy fields, followed by the fluttery pink blossoms on the weeping cherries, and the white confetti of the apple blossoms.

Three robin's eggs appeared in a nest cradled in the crotch of the weeping cherry outside the rectangular stairwell window of the house on Serpentine Hill Road. While the tree bloomed, dropped blossoms, came alive with livid green leaves, the mother bird busily prepared for her babies' arrival. Whenever Isadora opened her front door, the mother flew from the nest and perched on her door lintel; a moment after the door shut, she flapped back to the nest and settled upon her triumvirate of bluish eggs.

When at last the babies poked out—all starving beaks and pulsating red throats, Isadora took it as another omen that all three hatched and all three survived. From their staircase, she and Mandy had a perfect view of the feeding frenzies of the young and the dutifulness of the mother. Hand in hand they stood and watched while mama-bird poked fat worms down the babies' desperate red gullets.

“Look, Mama,” Mandy would say, “she's feeding the babies.” Yes, thought Isadora, so she is, and so am I, so am I.

Nor was this the only omen of hope. Two of the little fruit trees (which Isadora had given up for dead during the long winter)

actually bloomed. And a diseased oak-maple (which Isadora's tree man had given up for dead last fall but allowed the grace of one more spring) suddenly began to burst forth with new branches and masses of new leaves. Isadora felt that she also had allowed herself the grace of one more spring. Nearly dead last fall—here she was improbably blooming at forty. Even the branches of the ficus in the living room seemed to leap up and almost scrape the double-height ceiling. And Dogstoyevsky (that waggish fellow) knocked up a neighbor's dog. Spring was certainly bustin' out all over.

Bean and Isadora met in New York to amble through Central Park amid blossoms, or else they drove around Connecticut in her vintage Mercedes with the top down. By the Sound, they got stoned and ate cracked crab and drank white wine. They lolled in her hot tub late at night or danced until the wee hours in tacky Post Road discos where even Bean seemed too old for the rest of the crowd.

“Let's get physical—physical ...” went the inane lyrics, but they needed no urging. They fucked the nights away as if fucking had just been invented and might soon be taken away as quickly as it was given.

She felt that he had given her back her life—and yet her life seemed just beginning. She was like a child in her fretting over this love, a child who knows that if Mommy and Daddy go away, all is lost. She had no doubt that loving and being loved were the most important things on earth—far more important than the vanities of art.

Sometimes it struck her as ironic that after having fought so hard for feminism, she had come to this—the humbling acceptance of love as the only life-giver. Not that she expected it to last. She expected her child and her work to last and this love to go the way of all loves. And yet she knew that without this renewal nothing was worthwhile. Let cynics doubt it. Let the antisex league denounce it, this linkage of lovers alone defeated hopelessness, defeated death, defeated defeatism.

Spring whirled on in a rush of blossoms and wild fucks. Isadora was still researching the Papa novel, dealing with the tax and legal mess, trying to position herself to absorb the blow of her indebtedness to Uncle Sam whenever it came. But she was not hysterical anymore—merely determined. This was a challenge, a problem to be solved; in some strange way, having come so close to utter breakdown and disaster, she was able to put something as trivial as money problems in proper perspective.

Roland and Errol were pretty much out of her life by now; Kevin was there but more and more as a friend. She and Josh were behaving in a relatively civilized manner for Mandy's sake, and Bean was as unpredictable as ever. It was not even a year since her breakup with Josh, and from time to time she still wondered whether they mightn't wind up together. But less and less. His bitter resentment of her seemed now a fact of life and her escape from it seemed providential—a reprieve. The dream of reunion was not wholly gone, but Isadora had come to accept it as just that —a dream. She thought it would be good when a full year had passed, as if the turning of a year would mean she was that much closer to healing.

By the time that fateful anniversary arrived, she was in Russia, home of her ancestors.

 

Everyone had warned her against going off to Russia in search of her ancestors.

“Papa is not to be found there,” her French publisher—a very wise and beautiful lady with a long red braid down her back and a tendency to chain-smoke-had said. “You are writing about the Russia of the heart, not the beastly Russia of the
aparatchiks.”
But Isadora did not want to hear this. She
had
to go to Russia if only to discover that the Russia of her grandfather no longer existed.

Mandy was with her daddy for the requisite month the separation papers required. Bean was house-sitting for her in Connecticut and it was he who drove her to the airport in QUIM. The night before, he had presented her with a notebook for her to record all her impressions of the trip. “The Pink Notebook,” he had waggishly written in the front flap. It was in homage to Doris Lessing, whose
Golden Notebook
he knew she loved above all contemporary novels about women. She loved it because it had the anarchy and chaos of life itself. She loved it because it took a heroine of “middle years” and approached her as a real person (though everyone knew that women of “middle years” were over the hill, finished, not worth writing about). She loved it because it was crammed-to-bursting with the contrariness of experience—which no mere book can ever really reduce to “order.”

She was traveling to Russia with a delegation of American writers, who had been invited by their Soviet counterparts to a conference in Kiev. The American delegation included a three-hundred-pound lady poet who wrote anemic haiku, a fiercely intellectual woman essayist who wrote for
Commentary
(and who cultivated a disdainful attitude toward absolutely everything—as if disdain must, of necessity, be more true than praise), a courtly silver-haired historian of the Second World War, a popular historical novelist whose books were translated into all the Soviet languages, a waggish novelist of manners (whose books were not), an amiable critic of contemporary mores who also played the balalaika. Typically enough, all the women were traveling alone; the men were married and accompanied by useful, note-taking, camera-toting wives. The delegates had been told that they could not bring companions who were not legal spouses—Russia being a notoriously puritanical country—so Isadora was traveling solo as were the other women. (Ah, why were the women writers all spouseless and the men amply spoused? Was writing an unforgivable “sin” punished with loneliness only in women?)

She missed Bean sorely. In the last few weeks, he had all but moved in with her and she had come to love the comfort and pleasure of going to sleep with a man and waking up with him, of living with a lover again despite all her previous protestations that she would never, never succumb to domesticity. Bean had slipped into her life, without ever really announcing that he was moving in. Suddenly one day she realized that his wet jock straps ornamented her bathroom and his barbells her bedroom floor. And she was actually glad. She was glad even to see the cap he habitually left off the toothpaste tube, because this reminded her that he was there and was coming back. She had heard her divorced women friends complain of the irritations of a resident male once they had truly become used to living alone again, but (to her amazement) she found nothing whatsoever irritating about the jock straps and barbells and toothpaste caps. On the contrary, they comforted her—as did his shaving creams and lotions, his dirty underwear, his jeans and sweatshirts. She was happy to have the chaos and disorder of Bean's presence in the house.
Life
was chaos and disorder. One found order only in the grave. Like having a child, having a man meant a certain amount of dirty laundry and disorder. She would find that final order soon enough, she figured. Meanwhile, she was still in the midst of life.

Parting from Bean at the airport was particularly hard—as parting from Amanda had been the previous day. Much as Isadora wished she were one of those asexual nuns who lived for literature alone, she had to admit that men and maternity still stirred her very vitals. What to do? Leaving Bean was like an amputation. She still felt the phantom limb. The first stage of the journey to Russia took them from New York to Copenhagen, and even that flight had a surreal feeling about it. At one point she woke up from a deep sleep and found an unknown man with his face next to hers. Thinking it Bean, she said, “I love you” and kissed him several times, then she fell back to sleep. When she woke up in the morning, she realized what she had done and was horribly embarrassed, rigid with fright. The man had one of those skull-like, Scandinavian faces—a death‘s-head with skin stretched over it. Isadora couldn't speak to him. She was mortified, silent. He shook her brusquely to awaken her when the stewardess came with orange juice—as if the somnambulistic sexual encounter gave him rights over her which turned immediately to violence. She had become so accustomed to having Bean there that she thought it
was
Bean. The confusion frightened her. Had she kissed death at some point during the night? This surreal encounter seemed to prepare her for the dreamlike quality of Russia itself. It also made her think of that crazy flight to Stockholm last September when she had necked madly with a total stranger. How the year had come full circle! But she was not quite as desperate as last September. The hideous pain of parting from Josh was gone. The constant ache in the pit of the stomach had become only an intermittent hollowness.

 

When the delegation arrived in Moscow, Isadora had the strange sense of being at home, yet also in the most alien place in the world. All the American writers were relieved of their passports and presented instead with wilted roses and little packets of worn-out rubles.

Not wanting to part with her passport, she complained to the head of the delegation that she felt identityless.

“Darling,” he said (he was the silver-haired historian and his name was Charles Cochran), “we have
all
given up our passports —the Writers' Union will take care of us.”

This didn't seem very convincing to Isadora, but what could she do? She relinquished her passport to a smiling functionary with gold teeth, never expecting to get it back or to leave Russia alive.

From that moment on, she was annexed to the group, dependent on the group and also dependent on the various guides the Russians provided. The American writers traveled through the country as if into the inner world of a dream. There was something courtly and nineteenth-century about Russia—like entering a time machine rather than a nation. Everywhere one heard the gorgeous, liquid sound of Russian (which Isadora did not understand, but which somehow sounded so familiar—tike the illegible language of books read in dreams). There were the red skies, the overarching train stations at dusk like the insides of whales, the women in babushkas, everything at once familiar and strange, like a homecoming, but also like a final departure.