Parachutes and Kisses (16 page)

Isadora's desk appeared a random mess, but, like a novel-in-progress, it had an inner logic apparent only to its begetter. Stacks of books stood upon it, unfinished poems, notes and jottings about the various and sundry men she'd bedded and their peculiarities in speech or in the sack. Buried somewhere in this morass was the book Isadora had begun about her grandfather, the book she'd promised herself to write next, the book she'd been working on ever since Papa died, the book she was working on when the crisis between her and Josh stopped all work cold. This book haunted her, like an unpleasant dream. This book blocked her way. She knew she had to write it to get to the next book, and the next, and the next. She knew it was the labyrinth she had to first traverse to lay to rest—once and for all—that Minotaur, her grandfather. Oh, there were other books she'd
rather
write next—many, many of them. Her notebook was full of ideas, outlines, and false starts (for Isadora usually started three novels for every one she brought to completion). But contrary to what most people think, writers do not choose their subjects; their subjects choose them. Just as God (or Goddess) picks us out to parent some babe, who is never the child we
dreamed
we'd raise, so too the Muse chooses us to parent some book and we become Her conduit.

The grandfather book was next. That much Isadora knew. The pile of papers which formed the compost heap out of which this novel would—not so miraculously—spring was labeled
Dreamwork
or “Papa novel.” If
Candida Confesses
was her “Mama novel,” this was her “Papa novel.” Yet the voice for the book stuck in her craw. She didn't really want to write it. She wasn't sure, she really knew
how
to write it. And that was a great pity, too, because the book already had an arresting beginning:

These paragraphs were to be set in italics. They were to represent dream material, which the novel itself would later flesh out. Below them in the pile of stuff for “Papa novel” was the memoir she'd read at the funeral, all the poems she'd written about him through the years (including the elegy that had caused her such grief at the funeral), and rough notes and jottings for the novel's plot.

Isadora looked through this mass of material and wondered. Was she ready to write the Papa novel? What did she really know about her grandfather's life? The chasm between a poor Jewish man born in Russia in 1883 and an affluent American girl born in New York in 1942 was enormous. Could one bridge it? To imagine 16th-century Venice seemed somehow easier. Would it help to go to Russia? She had a friend who was fluent in Russian and who might accompany her. But the more she tried to imagine her grandfather, at fourteen, leaving Odessa to walk across Europe, the more astounding it seemed to her. The details of daily life in Russia circa 1890 she could re-create through research—that she knew. Having written one historical novel, she knew that it was not so hard to reconstruct a vanished world—if you were a diligent researcher—and she was. She loved the
process
of research. She adored reading and adored wallowing in library stacks. She had done all her own research for
Tintoretto's Daughter
and had enjoyed it immensely.

But it was Papa's
consciousness
she was not sure she could re-create. The paradox of his fearful Jewishness, his evil-eye mentality—yet the astounding gut courage of a fourteen-year-old boy who was driven to leave home and family without a kopeck in his pocket—seemed like the toughest task she had ever contemplated as a novelist. Could she capture his mind-set, his point of view? That was the dilemma. Isadora knew that it was relatively easy to discover the clothes people wore in different periods, the way they took a crap, how they rode (or walked) to work—but it was the
Zeitgeist
that was so hard to evoke. Because people's minds do change from era to era and when they do, they leave imperfect prints of themselves, partial residues—in books, in music, in paintings.

The phone rang. Saved by the bell—that enemy and yet great reliever of writers—the telephone!

Oy, it was the rabbi.

“Isadora—Ronald Gutweiler here. How
are
you?”

“Terrible. I just nearly killed myself.”

“Should I drive right up? I have the car this weekend.” (Ronald-the-ex-rabbi shared a car with his ex-wife, Sheila-the-ex-rebbitsin, and they alternated weekends with it, since their seven daughters were too grown to alternate weekends. Oh, the strange divorce arrangements people had nowadays!)

“No, thank you, Ronald sweetie,” said Isadora. “I'm writing.”

“Are you sure?”

“No writer is ever sure she's writing.”

“I mean are you sure I shouldn't come up?”

“I'm sure,” said Isadora. (The rabbi was about as good in bed as a knish—a cold knish at that. Oh certainly there were other things in life than sex, but the rabbi seemed to think he was devastating to women, and the prospect of having to fight him off did not cheer Isadora. It was Isadora's curse—or blessing—that nearly all her one-night stands fell in love and proposed permanence. Where
were
these divorced men who were fearful of commitment? Isadora seemed to meet nothing but desperate lonelies who couldn't wait to get hitched again—and hitched to her. Was that only because she wanted none of them, because her heart still belonged to Josh? Or was it because men nowadays took sex far more seriously than women did? At least older men seemed to. They now seemed for all the world like the vanished good girls of the fifties where sex was concerned. After one fuck, they proposed!)

“What happened? How did you nearly kill yourself?”

“Oh, I crashed the car on Serpentine Road. My whole body is still shaking from it.”

“Stay right there—I'm coming,” said Ronald. “I won't take no for an answer!”

“Ronald—you're a darling—but I really, really want to work. I just have to center myself with work right now—much as I'd love to see you.”

“Are you sure you're okay?”

“Absolutely. I'll call you later, when I've done ten pages, okay? If you're still home, maybe we'll have supper.”

“If you insist—but I really think I ought to come ...” his voice trailed off. (Deliver me, Oh Lord God, from rabbis, Isadora thought.)

Lonely as she was, the prospect of Ronald's comfort did not assuage her pain. But he was impenetrable, it seemed.

“Some day, you'll come to your senses and marry me,” the rabbi said, rabbinically. And Isadora, though wretched, could hardly hold back a guffaw. The rabbi was a nice-looking, balding, mustachioed man who wore English suits and sported bow ties and red silk handkerchiefs; he doused himself in Penhaligon cologne—yet somehow the thought of more than a brief lunch with him seemed like a life sentence. Chicago-born like some Saul Bellow hero, educated in Israel and England, he was a dandy with his bow ties and boutonnieres, and he could not see what a figure of fun he was. (Why do men who wear bow ties have so little self-knowledge?) He came to her house and criticized her gin (“You must buy Bombay, not Beefeater‘s”), her vodka (“Polska, not Finlan dia”), her daughter's manners (which, admittedly, were those of a well-entrenched South American dictator), and then he expected to be adored in return.

“Thanks so much for calling, Ronald,” Isadora said. “I'll call you back anon. Okay?”

“Okay—if you insist ...”

Just then, the other line rang. Isadora hurriedly said good-bye to Ronald and pressed the button for the other number.

“Hello?” came the voice at the end of the line. It was a very slurry Roland, a Roland who had apparently done so much sinsemilla, Valium, and various combinations of antidepressants that his tongue emerged from the bottom of his mouth like a frog from a quagmire.

“Hi, Roland,” said Isadora, sipping her wine. “How goes it, sweetheart?” Isadora liked Roland a lot better than she liked the rabbi and not only because he was better in bed. In his flat-footed, naïve way, Roland was good-hearted and loving, while the rabbi was a con man. (Isadora had learned from knowing the rabbi that perhaps the secret of being a clergyman—of any faith—was being a con man, and also that rabbis, as a group, definitely did not believe in God.)

“How are
you,
Isadora?” Roland asked with genuine, if slurred, concern. And Isadora had to relate the whole story of the accident again—embellishing the details somewhat to make it more lurid. (This was one of the problems with having so many lovers—having to tell the daily events of your life over and over again, and never remembering what you had told
whom.)

“Shall I come right up and stay with you?” Roland asked. Isadora didn't think Roland could even negotiate Grand Central Station and find Conrail, let alone drive a car, so she thanked him for his concern, promised to call him later (Roland was terrific at marathon midnight conversations—like a teen-ager)—and buzzed off.

Now, the other line rang.

“How are you, lovely lady?” came the husky DJ's voice of Errol Dickinson.

Isadora didn't want another offer of physical solace, so she said, weakly, “Fine” and neglected to mention the accident.

“You're a goddess to me, earthling Isadora,” said Errol, and Isadora could almost feel his soft touch on her nipples, his lovely tongue on her cunt, and see his huge, unmatched eyes that would face down mythical monsters for her—Grendel, the Gorgon, basilisks, the lot.

Why do men with high-school-equivalency degrees make love so much better than intellectuals? Is it because “failures” have devoted all their time to learning lovemaking? Or because they are freer and less cerebral? Isadora fucked her “blue-collar stud” (as she thought of him) the way intellectual men, for centuries, fucked bimbos. She enjoyed the hell out of him, but she then heard herself saying things like: “I can't make any permanent commitments right now” or “I can only see you Wednesdays because I'm afraid I'll get too involved” or “of course, I adore you, but I'm deep into my book.” She kept Errol away from her friends, her kid, her parents. If he ever came to her house, he arrived after ten P.M. and left before six A.M., when Amanda stirred. He had never ever laid eyes on Amanda, except in photographs—though he adored her by proxy and sent her tickets to circuses and kiddie films, and plied her with Barbie dolls!

Isadora knew that Errol was much nicer than most of the high-class men she knew, not to mention much better in bed. But he embarrassed her in public (because he so stirred her sexually?) and if pressed for an escort, she'd sooner take Roland, “her psychopharmacology expert”—or the rabbi, with his bow ties, boutonnieres, and references to Roland Barthes. Why was that? Errol was smooth enough in public—though he possessed no dress pants that weren't polyester.

“Lady, I love you,” he now said on the phone—and much as Isadora longed for him, she was determined to stick this night out alone with her book and the ghost of her grandfather. So, she thanked him for his concern and went back to her compost heap of pages, leafing through it dully, and sipping her large glass of wine.

But the phone wasn't through with her; it kept ringing, as if possessed. Now it was—amazingly enough—the antiques dealer, the Rolls-Roycer, the sprayed drapehead—whose name was Ralph Plotkin. Ralph, Roland, Ronald, Errol. The Plotkin curse without the Plotkin diamond, thinks Isadora, hugely amused by her almost adolescent popularity—even though none of the suitors satisfies.

“Whaddya get when you cross an octopus with a nigger?” whispers Ralph Plotkin in his nasal New York accent. (Ralph is in the habit of starting phone calls without any intro, and Isadora has begun to recognize his voice).

“What?” she asks.

“A terrific shoeshine,” says Ralph, laughing uproariously.

“That's the most racist joke I've ever heard in my life,” says Isadora.

“Oh, all you parlor pinkies are alike,” says Ralph. “Ya like that —‘parlor pinkies.' I made it up.”

“You truly have the gift of gab, Ralph,” says Isadora, with an irony utterly lost on him. (Isadora has observed through the years that men named Ralph are almost always assholes. Why is that? Does the name
create
the assholery or does the assholery create the name? Do men named Ralph have mothers who unconsciously—or even consciously
—want
their sons to be assholes so no other woman will ever claim them? A big question.) Sylvia Sydenheim-Rabinowitz, Roland's redoubtable mother, has pronounced Ralph Plotkin “terribly vulnerable and zensitive,” but then, she finds anyone with twenty million dollars “zensitive.”

Ralph is perhaps the least sensitive and vulnerable person Isadora has ever met. Also, he hardly seems about to share his money with anyone. The single time he took Isadora to dinner, he plied her with booze, hamburgers, and fries at a railway-station joint in Westport. Oh, he parked his Rolls ostentatiously in front of her house, but then proposed the cheapest eateries in the area. Rich men are generally so paranoid about divorced women wanting their money that they take them to dives and hint on the first date that
if
they ever remarry, they will require elaborate antenuptial agreements. So why, Isadora wonders, does anyone bother with them—unless they're charming, which few are—the full-time pursuit of Mammon never making for much charm in either sex. No sir. Liberty for men may be the right not to lie, but for women it is an ample bankroll, earned with one's own hand, skill, art, craft. If pressed to the wall for a husband or live-in lover, Isadora would sooner take Errol, her blue-collar stud, who would at least be grateful and loving. For a while.