Parachutes and Kisses (9 page)

Does “open” marriage kill a relationship? Or do people determine upon “open” marriage when they know their relationship is dying? It is the chicken/egg dilemma writ in bloodstains on bed-sheets. “What is the worst year of a marriage?” some wag once asked. “The last year,” another wag replied.

They only started screwing around in the seventh year. A natural itch, more natural still to scratch. They had never sworn fidelity; whoever, in honesty, could? But, except for two wholly irrelevant flying fucks in the first year (one his, one hers), they never took the freedom the other granted.

They didn't want it. Life was complicated enough without that. Isadora would not have so much as looked at another man because she felt that a fellow who is unfortunate enough to have a famous wife cannot take another single blow to his self-esteem; and he would not have looked at another woman because he was too honorable, and too honest to lie, and too kind and considerate to tell the truth.

So they had a Mexican standoff. They always suspected the problem would rear its head, but they couldn't plan for its solution, so why think about it? When it rose up and whinnied, it did not look like a horse at all; it looked instead like their dear friend Sophia Kurtzweiler Washington. Sophia, the
second
most famous feminist of the sixties (but for Gloria, Germaine, Kate, Phyllis, and Betty), Sophia with her shaggy bangs, her astounding Amazonian stature (nearly six feet), and her trademark black harlequin glasses —Sophia the six-foot-tall operatic, big-breasted, histrionic mama of sexual politics.

She was in love with Isadora. Josh was in love with her tits. (How simple these postmortems are—because the body is already dead and doesn't move.)

She came to spend a weekend with them when her own marriage—to a famous black activist—was dying, and like the good comforters they were, they took her to bed.

Sophia had a generous nature. She could never be brief about anything. If you asked her how she was, she'd heave a long Semitic sigh (in which the history of the race was told) and say: “Where can I begin? The world is crumbling to its ruin. I have no money, no lovers, no nursemaid for my twins, no contract for my new book—and where is it written the human condition should be any better?”

If you had asked her about the weather, she would have doubtless heaved the same sigh and said: “Some astronomers believe we are on the verge of a new ice age, and some that we are on the verge of a tropical period, hospitable only to dinosaurs and giant reptiles—but as for me, I'd be happy if I could find someone to fuck me regularly, watch the babies, and pay the rent.”

Sophia believed the world owed her a living. In 1970 she'd written a trendy best seller, a sort of feminist
Greening of America
called
The Feminization of America,
which theorized that all our social woes came from maleness, and that all we needed to do to turn the world back into Eden was to put women in charge of everything.

The book was badly written, but brilliantly timed. It made a small fortune, of which Sophia spent half and lost the rest—most of it in a disorganized but idealistic attempt to set up the first all-female film studio. Sophia became a celebrity (someone who, as Isadora's mother says, “is famous for being famous”)—a rough-rider on the talk-show circuit, a video Voltaire, a radio La Roche foucauld, and an interview junkie. Unless some humble journalist was kneeling before her plugging in a Sony cassette recorder, she felt unheard and unheeded. Her natural mode of speech was the polemic. Unfortunately, after
The Feminization of America,
she had nothing much left to say. Perhaps as a desperate publicity ploy, she married her black activist (they'd met on the Phil Donahue show) and promptly had not one but two mulatto babies: Martin Luther King Washington and Billie Holiday Washington. Both the marriage and the babies got her another round of talk shows and new “issues” to talk about. Now she was not only an expert on women, but also on blacks, interracial marriages, and the rearing of twins. Publicity, alas, did not prove a lasting marital glue and the union fell apart.

Left with these two adorable moppets to raise, Sophia became more hysterical than ever. Times changed, but Sophia still had to eat. She owed books to half a dozen publishers, and grew outraged when they asked for their money back. She hosted her own late-night interview show, but quit the network because they refused to bend FCC regulations for her and let her use four-letter words on the air.

Sophia was an unforgettable weekend guest. She would arrive at your house with bags of special organic foods, sprawl on the couch waiting for you to cook them, leave you to diaper both babies, wash their clothes, change their sheets, then disappear into your bathroom to use up all your Opium bath silk, deposit her wet towels on the floor, and borrow all your cosmetics. After having Sophia for a weekend, the novel you were in the midst of reading was missing from your nightstand, your favorite shawl departed in her suitcase, and your bathtub was ringed with her dirt.

Isadora thought that perhaps
she
had an even more generous nature than Sophia—because she invited her back several times.

On the weekend in question, somewhere toward the beginning of the end of Josh and Isadora, Sophia arrived sans babies. She was baby enough. Taking care of Sophia would have been a full-time job for a saint. (She had, however, brought her favorite cat—Mary Wollstonecraft Washington, who roamed the property killing shrews and field mice.)

After dinner, Sophia, Josh, and Isadora were all three bemoaning the state of the world and smoking a little dope. From which they progressed into one of those discussions of “open” marriage which is clearly a come-on. Since Isadora could see Josh eyeing Sophia's tits with undisguised yearning, and since Josh was in a deep depression following the publication of a book that was ignored, and since Isadora believed she could sooner keep him by holding him loosely than by trying to bind to herself his joy (to steal a metaphor from Blake), she didn't protest when Josh maneuvered them all to the waterbed.

“Let's watch TV in bed,” he said. (There was a big projection TV in the bedroom opposite the waterbed.)

With many giggles, Sophia got in the middle (her famous black harlequin glasses perched on her nose) and they all cuddled, watching
Tale of Two Cities
on TV. (Why were they always involved in
that
epic at critical moments in their lives?) Inevitably, Josh began fondling Sophia's tits. Inevitably, Sophia began fondling Isadora's. Before long, they were into one of those curious tangles of limbs, in which it is impossible to tell whose are whose.

“It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done,” came the booming voice from the video tape machine, but they were all too far gone to care. Josh was eating Sophia's generous cunt; Isadora was sucking at her generous tits; and that fourth person in the room, who always watches when we break a sexual taboo, was sitting back amazed that she was not even mildly shocked.

That fourth person was Isadora, too, of course. That fourth person believed that since Josh had the multiple handicaps of famous father, famous wife, a book that had not gone as well as he hoped, a lifework that was not going as well as he hoped, she should make it up to him by letting him screw her friends. Better that than have him screw her enemies out of spite. As she watched Josh pump away at Sophia, trying vainly to make her come, Isadora thought how noble she was, how unjealous, how generous, how
mature,
to understand his needs like that. (Was it portent that when these three ill-assorted lovers awoke in the morning, they discovered that Mary Wollstonecraft Washington had left a bloody trophy—a dead shrew—at the foot of the waterbed? It was, but they all preferred to ignore it.)

Perhaps Isadora insulted Josh more by coddling him like this than she might have done by telling him to get his own girl friends —and get out. For the more she gave him, the more depressed he became, yet the more powerless she was to stop giving. It was as if she were desperate to make up the disparity between them—the disparity in ages, incomes, and power.

Because, here is the problem when the woman has more power in the marriage than the man. He doesn't like it, and neither does she. She feels guilty about it, and he feels cheated, and sooner or later the truth comes out in bed.

But they didn't know that then. They talked a lot after that evening with Sophia and both declared that it had brought them closer. Closer to the end, Isadora now knows. At the time, they thought they'd struck a blow for honesty.

Fuck honesty. More relationships founder on the shoals of honesty than sink in the depths of mendacity—a word Isadora can never use without thinking of Big Daddy in
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
A phony word—phony to the core, and so too is the concept of saving marriage through sexual confession. Is lying better? Isadora wonders. Lying also corrodes the heart. Perhaps the answer is to make no marriage until one is past forty and ready for moderation, or else to be wheeled up to the mate of one's dreams in an old-age home, when one is ready to consummate it bodilessly, as the angels do. (But how then would we get our children, who, after all, give us more undiluted joy than romantic love ever does?)

Sophia and Josh soon began an intermittent affair—although neither really wanted the other. They both wanted Isadora—either to have her or to get her riled. Sophia wanted her fame, her calm (compared to Sophia,
anyone
is calm), her income, and Josh wanted to make her miserable—though he was too nice a person to
think
he did. Whenever he was feeling particularly depressed, particularly dissatisfied, he'd announce to Isadora that he was going off to see Sophia
(and
the twins
and
the sixteen cats), and she would stay home seething with jealousy. (The only thing worse than jealousy, she discovered, is pretending not to be jealous when you are.)

“I wish you'd screw other men, too,” Josh would say (departing for the East Village, where Sophia lived, in sixties-style hippie squalor) . “It turns me on, it really does.” Why was it Isadora could never believe that? Oh, maybe she was as guilty as he for all these banal attempts at
Liaisons Dangereuses.
She had often complained to Josh that she was a member of the transitional generation—too old to screw around without guilt, too young not to envy those who had. Josh graduated from college in ‘seventy—the class for whom sex was more available even than dope (and often simultaneous) —and before he graduated, he had screwed more women than had ever attended the entire Ivy League before the advent of coeducation.

Isadora tried, in fact, to tell Josh about sex with other men (for she was finally driven into the arms of Lowell Strathmore, her investment guy, and those of Wilson Donohue, a hapless Connecticut poet). But here was the rub: she didn't
believe
Josh wanted to know all the physical details. He wanted to make sure that the guy was neither more famous than he (fame made him jealous) nor a friend of his (a perfectly reasonable request). Other than that he wanted to know all—and to fuck Isadora while she told.

Now, it is absolutely impossible to describe sex without describing the person in question. Sex, after all, is a bore from the strictly plumbing point of view. Nor does the plumbing differ that much from person to person. What differs is the talk, the texture, the train of thought, the passion, the poetry. What differs is not so much the fucking as the fantasy.

Isadora had known Lowell Strathmore for about four years. One of the most amazing things about him was how much he looked like Josh. But a preppy version of Josh. (Isadora has a theory, by the way, that when one is pushed to adultery by sheer misery, cosmic loneliness, and the irrefutable sixth sense that tells you your beloved is pulling away from you—you always pick someone who looks like your beloved. Perhaps it seems less adulterous that way, or perhaps you really want only one lover and are being driven to two by your partner's restlessness, not yours. Since every long-standing relationship is, in part,
a folie à deux,
how are you to know whether it is
his
lust or your own that drives you?)

Lowell Strathmore was big and hairy like Josh. He was, in truth, a little taller (six foot four while Josh was six foot one). He was as clean-cut as Josh was shaggy: the Savile Row suits; the boxer shorts; the pink, scrubbed cheeks to Josh's red beard and balding bean; the thinning red hair parted amidships in the Wall Street manner (Isadora has often noticed that Wall Street men are either drapeheads—concealing bald spots—or middle-parters, and she wonders whether some French philosopher—or even Susan Son-tag trailing them in her Swedish sneakers—could write a phenomenological essay on this); and little tortoiseshell Ben Franklin glasses to make you trust him with your money.

He wore midnight-blue pinstriped suits and all his shirts were baby blue. His socks were silk and had clocks up the side. He had no ties that weren't from Turnbull and Asser (while Josh had no ties at all).

Isadora had met him in 1978 when she was heavily pregnant with Sappho- Vigée-Mandy. They were immediately attracted, but it seemed obscene to do anything about it then, and besides, she was happily married. Anyway, he was only after her money. Despite the fact that Isadora had a bouncy Jewish business manager named Mel Botkin who did most of this stuff for her, Lowell wanted to put together a portfolio of investments for her kid—and right after Mandy's birth, she gave him the chance. She set aside a hunk of money in her daughter's name, and established a trust for Mandy which Lowell invested.

He had done well with it before the market bottomed in eighty-one—buying her high-technology stocks (she wanted no oil, no radioactive minerals, no companies with assets in South Africa, no animal factories, and no environmental blights—so she was not an easy client. But still, despite these limitations, he managed to do a fairly respectable job).