Parachutes and Kisses (61 page)

 

What would Venice be like this time? To go back to Venice, that unearthly paradise, with a demon lover and find—what? Ah, that was the nature of Venice, as changeable as the I Ching and just as much the mirror of one's moods. One never knew with Venice—that shimmering chimera on the lagoon of memory.

Isadora turned and looked into Bean's eyes as the plane was whizzing up the landing strip. The skin around his eyes crinkled at the corners and his irises were very liquid, very azure in this light; his pupils were large and dark enough to drown in. It had taken Bean to teach Isadora about eyes and how to read them. Bean had often told her that in his years of whoring around he finally came to know which women were dangerous and hurtful through looking closely at their eyes. “You can always tell a
snake,”
Bean said. “Her eyes are cold and there is a kind of blankness or impassivity about them. I see the same thing in your photographs of Josh. His eyes look dead.”

Isadora had been slow to recognize that—seven years slow, in fact—but when she did, she knew Bean was right. Josh
did
seem to have dead eyes. It wasn't that his eyes were calculating, it was just that some flicker of feeling had been turned off; the ray of life had been intercepted. There were so many things Josh did not want to look at—perhaps that was why. He did not want to look at his relationship with his father, his relationship with Isadora, his relationship with himself. And so he had shut himself off, shut off some vital receptors in his brain, which showed in his eyes.

Isadora knew his eyes had not always been dead. When she and he had first met, when he was hopeful about his life and their love, his eyes had had a sweetness about them, a willingness to see. Then he began to seal himself off; he grew blind and cold. She was sure this change had occurred—but
why
it had occurred, she did not know. Life ought to open people, not close them, make them less frightened and more accessible, make them more loving. Sometimes it does the reverse. You cannot really predict who will improve with age and who will deteriorate, though often failure and disappointment in oneself make for a tightening of the heart that never loosens.

 

And so they had the impudence to visit Venice. At sunset, weary from their travels, weary from their mad longing for each other, weary from their insane six-month courtship severed by Russia, united by Russia, they saw Venice together as if for the first time.

Their luggage was heaped into a
motoscafo,
the boatman took the helm, and with their arms around each other, they puttered into that watery apparition which is the lagoon of Venice at sunset. They rode and rode under a wide gray sky, seagulls weaving and dipping to greet them. They passed the buoys, the markers, the causeways. Suddenly, they entered the glittering dark snake of the Grand Canal.

The palaces wobbled downward into their greeny reflected images; the sun was caught in the waters and drowned. Isadora looked at the seawall of crumbling
palazzi
and rejoiced. Venice was still here. The waters might be rising (rather than the city sinking —as some maintained), but Venice was still here: they had not struck the set.

Bean was seeing it all for the first time. And she was seeing it
as
if for the first time because of him. This was a magic but a melancholy place, a place of cats as much as a place of people; a city where all the spirits of the past now inhabited the bodies of animals and darted through the alleyways in pursuit of other metamorphosed spirits. Bean, who was a cat person, instinctively understood this about Venice. Isadora had never quite understood before—before coming here with him—that Venice's long history of empire and long decline of revelry had left her walls alive with ghosts in a way other cities were not. “You cannot draw blood biting a ghost,” goes an old Taoist saying—yet in Venice you could. The ghosts of Venice were bloody. The ghosts of Venice wanted no less than sex and death.

And Bean and Isadora gave it to them. Ensconced in a mirrored suite at the Cipriani, they astounded themselves by fucking so madly and so often that they were too sore to sightsee. Once, twice, three times, four, five, and six times a day was not enough. They'd fuck away the mornings, feast on croissants and omelettes in their garden, swim a little, and go back to bed. Their desire seemed boundless, insatiable—as if all the revelry of Venice's carnivals and masquerades, all the sexual madness of Casanova's Venice, Byron's Venice, went into their passionate lovemaking. A sexual odor rose from the canals and rotting palaces and came to claim them in their huge bed at the Cipriani. In this city where revelry and vice were once de
rigueur,
where a woman married at sixteen and by seventeen took a lover, a
cicisbeo,
a
cavalier servente;
in this city where gondolas plied the dark canals and love was made under the gondola's black hood on the water, or in little hideaways on canals not even other Venetians knew about; in this city where the lovely lapping of the brackish waters suggests sex even to the celibate, suggests death even to the young and healthy, they made love with all the stored energy of centuries of lust, centuries of thwarted love.

They made the love that Ruskin and his Effie could not make, the love that Byron and his Marianna Segati only dreamed about, that Byron and La Guiccioli began to make, but shied away from out of fear that the conflagration would consume them.

“How do you spend the evenings?” Byron had asked his friend, Tom Moore, when he was growing rather bored with La Guiccioli. What a dismal (and revealing) sentiment for a lover! Bean and Isadora spent their evenings exploring the dark byways of Venice.

A city of sex, a city of death; “a fairy city of the heart,” Byron had called it. Ah—it was the city where he had written that all-betraying line: “The sword outwears its sheath,” to be followed immediately by another all-betraying line: “and the soul outwears the breast.”

What were
they
wearing out—Bean and Isadora—in their passionate lovemaking? Were they creating a foundation for a life to come, or merely burning up the passion they'd begun one snowy night in frozen Connecticut?

Isadora didn't know. She no longer believed the
amor vincit omnias
of her youth. And yet she did not believe in cynicism either. It was true that the plots of all lives—and all novels—had somehow been invalidated by the imminent nuclear threat, but still Clarissa Cornfeld's cynicism had nothing to teach her. Constant naysaying was not the answer. One must look, but one must also leap. One
must
go a-roving late into the night.

Bean and Isadora were sensation-seekers; they would feast on life to bursting, and when death came, well then, they'd feast on death. But neither one would die of unlived life.

All day they loved and fucked, talked, read poetry, exchanged love letters from Russia, swam, ate wonderful meals in bed, drank wine, and held each other. When twilight came, they ventured out into the city like nocturnal creatures, like the very cats of Venice, like the revelers of the eighteenth century in their astonishing golden masks.

Venice, for them, became a city of shadows, a city of dark alleyways, of silent gondola rides, midnight wanderings, of rovings in the night. The dowager duchesses lounged by the pool at the Cipriani as always; the elegant homosexual poets and novelists, designers and painters, met at their
conversazioni in palazzi
as always during the summer season—but Bean and Isadora were deaf to
conversazioni,
oblivious of dowager duchesses and the whole madcap social whirl of Venice. They lived inside each other's eyes and hearts and bodies. They feasted on each other; they partook of those sacraments of sex that may be the beginnings of a greater life together or maybe only ends in themselves.

She understood now, in Venice, that city of dreams, that the world
was
a dream, and that the personality of the dreamer in part created it. Papa had dreamed one world, painted, peopled it and lived it. But she was able to dream another. Always in the past, she had lived in fear of the future, had lived with the legacy of Papa's fearfulness, his mournful Russian-Jewish pessimism, his melancholia. But she refused to live that way anymore. She refused to live in fear of tax audits, failures of love, failures of life-force.

She would give herself permission to love Bean for as long as it lasted. She would give love itself permission to last. If she wanted it badly enough and Bean wanted it badly enough, it
would
last. If not, not. This much was within their power.

Venice itself was an example of something human that had lived on long after its announced demise. Isadora and Bean could rebuild their lives upon this dark lagoon of death; they could shore up the crumbling palaces; they could be together if their imaginations permitted them to be together. It was a question of courage; it was a question of living like heroes. Other dreamers were conspiring to turn the world into so much irradiated rubble, but at least they could burn up flesh as long as they still had flesh to burn.

“We have only a short amount of time to inhabit these bodies,” Bean said. “And then who knows? Why not inhabit them fully?”

“Because ‘the sword wears out the sheath ...' ” said Isadora, quoting her favorite muse.

“Well, then, let it wear out,” said Bean, taking her in his arms and beginning to make love to her again. “Let's wear it out with a vengeance!” he said.

So they went back to bed in Venice, by the sibilant waters, under the luminescent sky that only Turner knew how to paint, in the city of sex and death, of cats and lovers, of dowager duchesses and dark alleyways, of gondolas and greed, of pickpockets and poetry. They went back to bed in Venice on the brink of a day that held everything in store for them—if only their imaginations could conceive it, if only their conviction could make it stick, if only their courage could make it stay.

Falling asleep, Isadora promised herself that she would start writing the book about Papa as soon as she got home. But she really did not need to find that lost painting, if it had ever existed. She was that lost painting, she thought. She was the periscope of his death. And she was still alive.

Of course Isadora Wing is my doppelgänger. As I've said before, not everything that happened to Isadora in
Fear of Flying
and
How to Save Your Own Life
and here in
Parachutes & Kisses
happened to me, but it might as well have.
Parachutes & Kisses
is partly a dirge to divorce and a celebration of the boy toy.

They come to me in my dreams: the tall boy with brown skin in tennis whites; the boy with long hair and long fingers who quotes
Hamlet
and brings me a pink rose from his mother's garden; the long-limbed swimmer with legs that move amphibiously; the tango dancer who touches me lightly at the waist, guiding me effortlessly as if he were a passing breeze. And then there's the roar of the black leather dude who arrives on his Harley, stirring up the white pebbles in my driveway. Or the half-naked, sweating stud I meet in the health club.

We meet for a moment as he grows up and I seem to grow young. He brings me the gift of his youth, and for a little while we unite. Then we both move on. Or perhaps not. Nothing is sweeter than that innocence, that stumbling on the way to learning how to dance—or the indefatigable cock that pumps its own iron.

Elizabeth I of England had her Essex and Colette her Maurice (whom she married). Eleanor of Aquitaine fell madly in love with and married Henry II of England, eleven years her junior. Agatha Christie married an archaeologist named Max Mallowan who was born when she was already fourteen.

“An archaeologist is the best husband any woman can have; the older she gets, the more interested in her he is,” Christie famously said.

I can evoke the allure of younger men if not entirely explain it. It is the magic of youth, of juice, of bounce, of badness. Nothing is headier than that sweetness mixed with that scent of sin. No wonder Tina Turner, Susan Sarandon, and Mary Tyler Moore all cleave to their younger men.

Older powerful women have always had boy toys, but in the eighties the boy toy was democratized. Women were making money and discovering that men their own age found that threatening. Younger men did not. They had changed with the times while older men had not. Women felt they had the right to hot sex. Men felt they had the right to older women. The age difference supplied an additional frisson. Sex thrives on fantasy and what can be hotter than the Oedipal fantasy—even if you don't have a son.

Demi Moore is hardly the first to discover the incendiary combination of a man in his twenties and a woman in her forties. But it doesn't have to end in marriage. It can be, as it is for Isadora, healing after a horrible divorce.

According to the AARP, older women and younger men are the wave of the future. Isadora didn't invent this trend, but she certainly celebrated it.

I remember the younger man who lasted longest in my life. I could smell his sweatshirt and get high. The fact that he was dangerous and deceitful didn't seem to matter. It may have even increased his appeal. He was a moocher and a no-goodnik and I knew it. That was part of the fun. If I could survive him, I could survive anything. He made a woman of me. He made me strong.

A happy marriage does nothing to dispel the dream of younger men. Marriage brings serenity, but bad boys bring excitement. Everyone needs both. We may be monogamous in life, but all bets are off in dreams.

 

—Erica Jong
January 2006

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