Parachutes and Kisses (8 page)

Actually, Isadora could sympathize with her mother's desire to name her after a great woman artist. (Her mother had also considered merely flamboyant names like Olympia—after Greece—and Justine—after Sade.) Nor would Angelica Kauffman have been a bad “role model”—to use a phrase she detested. Kauffman was a contemporary of Sir Joshua Reynolds who became one of the best and most successful painters of her time. Famous, rich, revered by the people in Rome (where she finally settled), nonetheless her story is pretty much the story of every woman artist: a life of great productivity and outward success, coupled with the inner bitterness of never being taken quite seriously; of being gossipped about as a slut for connections with male artists that would have seemed plausible and just had she been a man; the inevitable eclipse of her reputation after her death, with the concomitant attribution of the best of her oeuvre to better-known male painters of her time.

Did Isadora's mother wish this on her daughter? Hardly. No more than Isadora wished Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun's fugitive life in revolutionary France on her daughter (at that time in her pregnancy when she was fixated on Vigée as the name for the baby who became, indelibly, Amanda Ace). But they had a sense of tradition, Isadora and her mother, they believed in a torch being passed, in the matriarchal, matrilineal passage of talent. Angelica Kauffman has a lovely allegorical self-portrait which shows her hesitating between the muses of painting and music. This proved prophetic, for Isadora hesitated at first between writing and painting, until writing won. (Even then, she had a sixth sense that competing directly with her mother and grandfather would have stunted her eternally.) But she wonders how Vigée (had Amanda
been
Vigée) would have taken after her namesake. Isadora did not wish on her child a wastrel husband, a reputation for seducing her subjects, or the rumors of catfights with other women artists that have plagued Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun's posthumous reputation, but when she thought of how that woman could paint, her fear dissolved. She would have her daughter know the joy of covering a canvas with light, even if the canvas later crumbled, and with it her immortal fame.

What is immortality, after all, but vanity? In a universe that is not
itself
immortal, how dare we vainly demand the preservation of our canvases? When Isadora was sixteen, she worried about preserving her poems and drawings; she was obsessed with paper conservation, acid-free stocks, indelible inks. Now, even though her work was
really
valuable, she found all the pains artists take to preserve their papers silly and vainglorious. On the brink of blowing ourselves up, how can we worry about paper conservation? If only the human race survives, we know that some mortal will rise from her knees and paint the side of a cave with reindeer and horned dancers. That is inevitable. The urge to cover walls with our likenesses, to make image magic with brush and paint, is programmed into our genes, if only those genes survive. Who that artist is—or what her name may be—matters less than that she rise from her knees and wield a brush (or a stone, or a fragment of charcoal, or a bleeding berry). For our very humanity is in our urge to make magic with images. All that Isadora wishes for Sappho- Vigée-Amanda (and for herself) is a race that survives its own self-destructiveness, so that somewhere, somehow, the dance and dancers, the feast of colors, the chanting of poems, may begin again.

Then, why, as she shovels the earth over her grandfather's coffin, then why, as she embraces Chloe and weeps in her arms, then why, as she limps from the snowy grave on her father's arm, is she thinking that the only proper tribute she can pay her grandfather is to recover that lost great painting of horses, or failing that, to assemble an exhibition of his works, or failing that, to write a long novel about him, and thereby to make for him posthumously the reputation he never made for himself in life—and to make for herself the ancestor she
should
have had?

Yes, she thinks, as she leaves the cemetery—I will exhume my grandfather's bones through art, either his or mine. But she does not know what a long picaresque journey that will require or where it will take her both inside and outside herself.

How characteristic of your perverse heart that longs only for what is out of reach.

-CHODERLOS DE LACLOS
Les Liaisons Dangereuses

Marriage was regarded as an expedient, love as a sort of comic and undignified disaster, the spiritual equivalent of slipping on a banana skin.

—P. W. K. STONE (Introduction to the Penguin edition of
Les Liaisons Dangereuses)

“IF Papa hadn't died, if Chekarf hadn't died, if
Tintoretto's Daughter
hadn't been a full selection while Josh's last book wasn't even an alternate, do you think we'd still be together?” Isadora asks her therapist, mischievous, roly-poly Shirley Frumkin, who wears Norma Kamali sweatshirts, voluminous cotton knickers, and antique junk jewelry. Shirley is one of those ladies the French call
jolie laide.
The nose is bulbous, the eyes too crinkly, the figure too ample, but nonetheless she possesses an oddball kind of beauty, and sexuality so strong at seventy that it does Isadora's heart good just to be with her.

“No, no, no,” says Shirley. “Stop what-iffing. Josh changed. It wasn't your fault.”

Isadora has “progressed” from wild hilarity and fucking her brains out to crying almost nonstop, having migraines that last for days, blood pressure that shoots up whenever she talks to Josh on the phone. What has brought about this change? The knowledge that he's seeing another lady—a lady he spends weekends with.

“Isadora—you threw him out,” her therapist reminds her. “You were sick to death of his rages, his attacking you all the time, his sabotaging your work, his passive-aggressive sexual manipulations.”

“I know,” she sobs, halfway through a box of Kleenex. (Why do therapists always have Kleenex on hand? Is it a hint that they want nothing less than the homage of our tears?)

Shirley's apartment faces east and the little heliport in the East Thirties is right below them. From time to time, a chopper takes off, leaving Isadora feeling as leaden as a dead body dangling from a helicopter in a body bag (her private image of the Viet Nam War).

“Why does another lady change anything? You have at least a dozen other men,” Shirley reminds her.

“I know,” Isadora says, “but mine don't count. They're just office temps. His do.”

“Isadora,” scolds Shirley in her funny Brooklyn accent, her huge antique amethyst earrings shaking. “I want you to talk about your father now. I want you to figure out why this ‘other lady' matters so. Because if I know Joshua Ace—and I
do
—I'd stake my life on the fact that she's mousy, uninteresting, no great shakes, and that the only real value she has to him is that he knows she makes you crazy.”

Shirley certainly did know Josh. Josh and Isadora had, in fact, consulted Shirley for “marital therapy.” Josh had gone into a deep depression just around the time Isadora's book was coming out. He had plunged into despair—despair over his work, his trapped feeling in the marriage, his sense that he was playing house husband to Isadora's career, his anger at being younger, “second fiddle” (as he put it), and constantly upstaged by her.

Never mind that they had both signed on for all of this seven years ago. Never mind that he had met her at the very height of her fame, that he had
convinced
her—over
her
misgivings—that he “could handle it”; that he wanted desperately to be with her despite all this; that he claimed to love baking bread and playing with the baby; that nobody ever made him do the house-husband number full time anyway (there were nannies and housekeepers galore); and that he claimed to share her dreams for her work as if they were his own. But all of that proved to be a trendy delusion. The dream of the “new sensitive male” of the seventies had given way to the old insensitive male of the eighties, and Josh now wanted for
himself
the career Isadora had built. The contract had changed, as marital therapists say, and Isadora was left reeling.

“I married him and had a baby and now he simply says: ‘I've changed.' How
dare
he?” Isadora says. “There's Mandy to think about. He can't just ‘change.' ”

“That's life, kiddo,” says Shirley. “Do you think you're the first woman in history to be left with a child to raise? Do you think you're the first woman in history to have a husband who throws tantrums like a three-year-old? Do you want to torment yourself about it for the next seven years or do you want to get on with the only life you've got?” A sobering thought. “The only trouble with you, Isadora, is that you never get angry at Josh—you turn all your rage against yourself. If you'd only rage a little at baby Josh, you'd feel a hell of a lot better.”

What could Isadora say to counter that? That their love had been so special, their rapport so great that for the first five years they felt they could solve any problem? What did it matter that Isadora was older, more successful? Josh was a free spirit; he was beyond mere money matters, beyond conventional morality. He and Isadora often used to talk about the fact that most people lived their lives like lemmings racing to the sea. They did what their neighbors did. They shunned what their neighbors shunned. They justified their slavery with talk of duty. They claimed that economic necessity enforced their conformity, or that the fragility of wives impelled them to chronic lying. Or that the jealousy of husbands made secrecy and deception necessary. In fact, they did not know that secrecy and deception excited them; that lying came more naturally than telling the truth; that economic necessity and duty were abstractions invented by humankind for the express purpose of not enjoying life.

“People are more afraid of happiness than of anything,” Josh had said to Isadora that first night in bed at the Beverly Hills Hotel. “They will give up anything sooner than they will give up their suffering. All the great sages have known this. They have said it again and again—in Chinese, Greek, Hindi, English, Hebrew, Arabic, Egyptian ... but no one listens.”

Here at last was a man after her own heart, a man dedicated to art and happiness, a real hedonist. How could she know that a scant seven years later, they would be mired in the same jealousies and resentments as the rest of the lemmings, that they would be suffering from all the predictable miseries: sexual jealousy, professional jealousy, lust, avarice, greed, and all those other boring deadly sins?

 

They began as sinlessly as anyone. They wanted nothing but each other because neither of them had ever had it so good. Great sex, immediate understanding with a look, a glance, a word. They could go to a dull dinner party, listen to some fatuous speech by the host, merely glance at each other, and understand at once what the other thought, because it was the same as what the first one thought. They were that similar—or so they believed. It was Plato's dream, the two halves reunited, the cosmic joke undone, the wholeness reasserted, the potter and the pot made one (and who was who?—ah, both were potters and both were pots!)

In most loves, there is a lover and a beloved. The lover creates the beloved as the potter creates the pot—out of his own clay. But here they were
both
creators and creations. It was impossible to say who loved the more. Except. Except. She was the older, the better known, the twice married. He was twenty-six when she met him, and his whole life had been plagued by being the younger brother. His older sister was her age exactly—and she looked like her—blond and small. Moreover, he was the son of a legendary father, a screenwriter father who had faced down the blacklist, gone to jail, and come away a martyr, forever wearing a crown of thorns, surmounted by a slightly tarnished halo.

Like Isadora's father, he was a man who had almost forgotten he had children when he was young, but who now required that they be the succor of his old age. But unlike Isadora's father, he could not let his children go. When Josh hooked up with Isadora he got the older sister and the father in one, at first alluring, package—a living legend, an older sister, the works. In time, as the allure faded, the package seemed more and more tightly wrapped and he seemed to be wrapped within it.

The pounding on the coffin lid was slow to start. At first, he adored her, looked up to her age, her fame, her work, like a loving disciple. (And we know that one out of twelve disciples is a Judas.) Nothing she did on paper was less than a miracle. Nothing she said was less than brilliant, witty, and wise. She's here to testify that one can get very used to that—especially a person as mercilessly self-critical as she. It helps to have a good friend in court when one is constantly sentencing oneself to death.

But then, as their problems progressed, as his reputation remained modest and hers exploded, he began, bit by bit, to believe that she was the one and only problem in his life. (Why do people blame the ones they love when things go wrong in their lives? This is the serpent in the garden of Eden: the propensity to blame the one you claim to love.)

Josh's books were always reviewed under the rubric “husband of” or “son of.” “It's hard to live one's life in a parenthesis,” a friend of Isadora's sagely said. Moreover, they were rarely left alone to love each other. Journalists picked at their relationship as if it were a scab, and eventually it grew infected. Were they competitive? Did they think—at breakfast—about who was more famous? Did they criticize each other's work? If so, what did they say? Was she afraid he'd leave her as she aged? Was he afraid she'd find a rich old man? And so on, and so on, prying, picking, praying to discover that their evident delight in each other was only an illusion, that they were as wretched as everyone else and as unforgiving—and eventually, the prophecy came true.