Parachutes and Kisses (60 page)

As the plane ascended over Moscow, all the Italians (and Isadora) let out a burst of applause. Her heart became lighter with every minute that carried her away from the baleful influence of Russia.

What
was
it about that country? It was as if an invisible gas invaded your bones, making you paranoid, suspicious, wary of any false step. You didn't feel it at first, but little by little it crept up on you; little by little it took over; little by little it invaded your consciousness. After two weeks in Russia, Isadora understood Kafka's
The Castle
and Nabokov's
Bend Sinister.
She understood Orwell's
1984.
She could
feel
the principle of the police state in her fingers and toes, in her gut and lungs.

As the plane moved on its way out of Soviet air space, Isadora began to grow less paranoid, more rational again. Was it
possible
that she had given up her Papa novel just because the notebooks were stolen? That was absurd! She was a diligent researcher. One false lead had never stopped her in the past. The first trip to Russia was clearly only a beginning. She would go home, learn Russian, get the names and addresses again, and return as soon as she could. She would really prepare herself this time—prepare herself properly (she'd even
memorize
the names and addresses as Nadezhda Mandelstam memorized Osip's poems)—and then she'd be back. She swore it. Now at least she knew where Papa's fearful consciousness had come from; she knew that Eastern Europe was heavy with death, chockablock with corpses in a way the American soil wasn‘t—not yet—and that these layers of death, histories of death, had affected Papa's consciousness, made him negative where she was positive, made him mournful where she was cheery, made him defeatist where she was intent on victory.

But would she really go back? For all its sublime natural beauty, Russia was the most unpleasant country she had ever visited—unpleasant in a way you couldn't even put your finger on. It was unpleasant in a way she would probably scarcely even be able to
remember
once she left there. The invisible gas would fade and only the beautiful sights would remain.

Not quite. The fearful consciousness would remain with her forever. Papa's fearfulness. His terror of risk-taking-and yet his great gamble in walking across Europe at fourteen. Without that gamble, she would not exist, nor Amanda. She owed her life to his paradoxical fear, his paradoxical courage. She
would
write his story after all.

The plane rose higher. They were over Romania, then Austria, then blessed, beautiful Italy. As the Adriatic coast appeared, the Italians cheered. And so did Isadora. Never was she so glad to be revisiting her spiritual home—
Italia.

 

Would Bean be in Milan? Centuries ago, they had made these plans, centuries ago in Kiev, she had called him to tell him to hang in, to wait, to trust that the Russians would let her out. Nothing seemed certain. She might even be arrested for throwing away rubles. As the time of descent approached, she was less and less sure he'd be there.

The airport in Milan was a mess—as Italian airports tend to be during prime vacation time in August. Mobs of Italians flowed out over the barriers, pushing, shouting, shoving. The nice thing was: Bean was taller than everyone. Isadora looked longingly for his tousled mop of dirty-blond hair, his blazing blue eyes, his incandescent smile. Nowhere to be found.

She had her heavy book bag
and
her large suitcase (which had come off the plane in record time—the first instance of Aeroflot efficiency she had seen to date), so she was greatly encumbered. She pushed through the barricade, dragging both suitcases, looking for Bean. No Bean in sight. And here she'd been so sure he'd be waiting for her, waving madly on her arrival.

She checked out the arrivals-and-departures board. His Alitalia flight from New York had long since come in. (Her flight number, however, was nowhere posted—par for the course.) Well, maybe he had never
taken
the plane from New York. Maybe something had come up. He'd met some girl, gotten stoned, taken off to fuck away three days and nights—as in the early days with her. He was just as rotten and unreliable as she'd always feared—another Adrian Goodlove (pure cad masked by a winning smile); or else he was another Brian Stollerman (a madman who could make
anything
sound convincing, even phony commitment); or else he was another Josh Ace (sweet-seeming younger man with the soul of a user). She'd been had again. He'd probably even cashed in the plane ticket and used the money on some tootsie—or, more likely, on cocaine or sinsemilla (probably both). She was a pure idiot where men were concerned. Oh
why
couldn't she learn to like the eligibles—the men in their fifties who bought you life insurance; the men in their forties who paid
your
bills instead of you paying
theirs;
the men in their sixties with mansions in Palm Springs and money (not to mention liver spots) to burn! “I'd rather be an old man's darling than a young man's slave,” her mother used to quote to her when she was little. (It sure hadn't worked, had it?) All her life, she'd done the opposite of what her mother said. “Don't wear your heart on your sleeve,” her mother had always said—and she knew nothing else but bleeding heart on dripping sleeve (not to mention dripping cunt, and bleeding pocketbook—for her men, in addition to everything else, always left her poorer than before—and usually cleaned out most of the furniture, video and sound equipment into the bargain).

So, she'd done it again—found another heartless bastard to justify her incurable masochism. Forty more years of analysis! She'd go to the
grave
still in analysis! “Next time I'll try Lourdes,” says Woody Allen in
Annie Hall.
Maybe she ought to try Lourdes, too. She'd tried everything else—including Woody Allen's analyst. Maybe she could convert to Catholicism like Graham Greene. Ah —
there
was something she hadn't tried.

Suddenly, she spotted Bean.

He was waving madly and flashing those blue eyes like beacons. He struggled through a crowd of Italians and clasped her in his arms.

“Darling, darling, darling,” he said, weeping. “I never thought I'd see you again.”

She was crying, too—overcome with the relief of being out of Russia, still alive, back in what she now knew really
was
the free world. Or at least, the freer.

“I never thought I'd see
you
again either,” she said.

They wept and hugged, hugged and wept. Since they had three hours to wait before their flight to Venice, they decided to go at once to the airport hotel.

In their room—a boxy modern one like a futuristic cell or a pullman compartment on a spaceship—they stripped naked and showered madly. Isadora didn't know what she wanted more—a Western-style shower that worked, or Bean's arms (and legs) around her.

Both, she guessed.

Clean and still somewhat wet, they fell onto the bed. He held her face between his two palms.

“I had such a sense I'd never see you again,” he said. “I was half mad without you. I wrote you reams of letters which I couldn't send—you never would have gotten them.”

“Where
are
they?” Isadora asked, always one for preserving the word, the word, lest the flesh should flee—or fail.

“I'll give them to you later,” said Bean.

“Oh god—I'm glad to see you,” Isadora said, the tiredness and despair and fear melting away, the paranoia of Russia dissolving with the touch of his body.

“I love you with all my heart,” she said. “I never want us to be parted again.” (What had she said? What had she promised—she who had sworn off promises?)

“I know now that I can't get along without you,” he said, weeping.

“Oh—I have so much to tell you,” she said. “So much, so much ... I don't know where to begin.”

“Did you find your grandfather?” he asked.

“Well, yes and no,” she said. “But yes, yes I did!”

They made love in that careful way lovers do after a long separation, relearning each other's bodies, relearning love itself, retracing their steps along each other's skins.

It is death that propels us to these dangerous promises, these dangerous commitments, Isadora thought, as they were making love. If we thought, like adolescents, that we'd never die, then we could go on from lover to lover never confessing ourselves wholly for love, never committing to love, never pledging ourselves. But death's proximity gives love its value. Life is too short to spend it in shallowness, in avoidances, in fear of flying, falling, catching fire. Isadora had felt the full history of death in Russia; in Odessa, by the Black Sea, in Kiev, by that sea of spirits which is the sealed-up gulch called Babi Yar. And she knew that what Auden had written (in a poem she loved in college long ago) was true: “We must love one another or die.” (Though, of course, we love one another
and
die anyway. But do we die in spirit, too? No. Not if we love. That is what Papa's Russian ghost had taught her.) When the deathmakers and deathmongers had had their way with the planet; when they had annihilated every living thing—even grasses and insects—would the poems of our extinguished species still orbit around the globe in the irradiated ethers? Isadora liked to think so.

 

The two hours in the hotel flew by. Washed and dressed in clean clothes, they took off for Venice.

“You're not going to believe Venice,” Isadora said.

“If you can exist, then so can Venice,” said Bean, hugging her.

They arrived at Marco Polo Airport as the sun was slanting across the lagoon in its final daily descent.

The sense of freedom and fantasy, the sheer euphoria of being in Italy alive and reunited with Bean was so great that Isadora wondered at the last minute whether Venice would be a disappointment. She had been to Venice many, many times—the first time at nineteen (when she had come alone from Florence and stayed in the student hostel on the Isola del Giudecca for two dollars a night). On that occasion, she had wandered through the city with a copy of
Childe Harold
in her hand and she had sat in the Piazzetta reading and dreaming of a Byronic lover to come and take her—if not away (for what was Venice if not the very essence of “away”?), then at least to
take
her.

“ ‘I stood in Venice on the Bridge of Sighs,' ” she read. “ ‘A palace and a prison on each hand.' ”

Sitting in the Piazzetta, nubile and nineteen, hunched over her cappuccino and its sweetened foam, she muttered those lines from Canto the Fourth aloud (for Byron cries out to be read aloud—the essence and the test of poetry):

And a Byronic lover, as if bidden by the poetry itself (and the Muse contained within it), arrived.

He was a young, slender Chinese doctor from Australia, tall, handsome, the harbinger of the slender Chinese-American doctor she would someday meet and marry. (Was it really true, or did Isadora only imagine it, that every one of the major men in her life had had an antecedent, a harbinger, a forerunner? First one met the forerunner, or one wrote him into a book, then one met the real man—as if there were indeed
two
of every man, the real man and the man of dreams. These phrases
real man
and
man of dreams
were not so idle after all, then, were they? Women still wrote home: “I've met a real man” or “I've met the man of my dreams.” Unfortunately, Isadora tended to invent the characters the epic of her life demanded—and then to be disappointed when the character she imagined and the person she had met did not coincide. All writers did this: it was partly why their marital histories were so entertaining and expensive—entertaining, that is, if you didn't have to live through them. Writers fell in love with characters and characters do not necessarily make good mates.)

The Chinese doctor she had met at nineteen had walked with her through the Doge's palace, had bought her violets on the Piazzetta, had recited poetry to her over spumanti at Florian's. She had not slept with him. It was 1961 and in 1961 you did not sleep with everyone (besides, she was staying in a hostel), but the encounter was all the more romantic for that. Innocent kisses were exchanged, and addresses, too (though, in fact, they never wrote). I wonder where he is now, Isadora idly thought, as the DC-9 carrying her and Bean began its descent into Venice. (She flew DC-9s but not DC-10s—though after Aeroflot, she figured she'd fly
any
thing at all and be grateful.)

The next trip to Venice had been with Pia—her old school friend—and they had stayed in a fleabag near San Marco and fought like blood sisters. The next time, she went once to Venice with Bennett Wing (during their Heidelberg years) and Bennett, of course, had sulked the whole time, reading and rereading
Death in Venice
and making grim and depressing psychoanalytic interpretations. The following trip was with Josh on the crest of
Candida Confesses;
they'd had a suite at the Gritti and
papparazzi
in hot pursuit. (This time
Josh
had sulked because the
papparazzi
were not in hot pursuit of
him.)
After that whenever she returned to Venice, she'd been alone, a researcher on the trail of Marietta Robusti and her famous father. Oh, Venice was full of memories for Isadora—her own memories and her characters' memories. Her own memories and her alter ego‘s—for, of course, Marietta was as much an alter ego as Candida (though the world naturally did not see it, being easily fooled by surfaces, by petticoats and panniers, bodices and ruffs, wigs and masks). A novelist's memories are perhaps more layered than other people's. There are her own memories and then the memories of her character (which sometimes coincide with hers but sometimes not—or sometimes are like her own memories but with strange refractions, like the
palazzi
mirrored in the Grand Canal).