Parachutes and Kisses (18 page)

“Earthling Isadora, my goddess,” he moans, with closed eyes.

I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and really being good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.

—Oscar WILDE
The Importance of Being Earnest

Do we not say: “Go get yourself a fuck!” Strange locution. As if one could possibly get a fuck without giving one. Even in this basic realm of communion, the notion prevails that a fuck is to get, not give.

—HENRY MILLER

Every woman is at heart a rake.

—ALEXANDER POPE

IN
the month that followed the accident, Isadora disproved Oscar Wilde's maxim that “anybody can be good in the country.” Despite the fact that she lived deep in the country, that she was the most concerned and responsible of mothers, that she had a book to write, a house to run—Isadora devoted herself, dedicated herself, to being bad.

Novel-writing was impossibly lonely for someone as fragile and as fragmented as she found herself at this juncture of her life. She admitted it and abandoned the Papa novel—at least for the moment. Her life as a celebrity and public figure whirled on, almost as it had begun, without her. It was a communal creation, a fiction born of all the half-truths and untruths published about her; it was in most ways more fiction than her fictions. It did not really require that she be a writer or even a real person; it only required that she impersonate someone called “Isadora Wing”—whoever she was. This personage, construct, fiction—for she was hardly human—was fearless, unflappable, indefatigably sexual. An artist must be first a
mensh,
a person of integrity, a human being of substance, before she can have anything to say to the rest of the world, but a celebrity must be just the reverse: a hollow core. The suggestion that there are contradictions beneath the skin only confuses that lowly sector of the press that feeds off celebrities. Celebrities must be one- or two-dimensional, while the best artists, the best humans, the true
menshes
of the human race, exist in at least three dimensions—preferably four or five. But such five-dimensional living takes guts, courage, grit. To dream on the page, one must be grounded in real life, in real nurturance, real love. Isadora had lost her grounding. Her whole life was a dream of sex and booze and dope—so how could she dream on the page? Her grounding was gone. Her days were more packed with more improbable incident and excess than those of any of her heroines. So she abandoned herself to the sordid novel of her life which featured someone called “Isadora Wing”—a blond lady nearly out of her fourth decade, who somehow (perhaps because she had never lost the damnable vulnerability of girlhood) had the bounc iness and succulence of youth.

Isadora discovered that she was indeed what Hope had once dubbed her: “the universal honeypot.” Once the word was truly out that she was at liberty, calls began pouring in from everywhere. Every recently separated man in Fairfield County tried to date (and bed) her. In fact many married men of the ridiculous region—some toying with the idea of divorce and some just toying with the idea of diversion—put in their calls for “lunch,” “brunch,” “dinner” (i.e., help, rescue, head).

Isadora's secretary—a serenely wise and beautiful gray-haired lady in her fifties (who, before Isadora, had organized the life and opus of a famous female gossip columnist)—ceased almost entirely to be a literary secretary and became, as she and Isadora both quipped, “a sexual secretary.” For all three phone lines buzzed, bleated, and brrred continuously with social invitations, veiled sexual offers, offers to “speak,” offers to “read,” offers to “guest-host” or merely just “guest” on TV shows, offers to sit at New York dinner tables beside “eligible” single men.

The “eligible” men were the worst, Isadora soon found out. “Eligible” meant simply that in a world gone increasingly “gay”—if you believed the conundrum that people were either “gay” or “straight” (which Isadora didn't)—this particular dinner partner was a
bona fide
heterosexual. Bona
fide
by whom? Isadora often wondered. The hostess? Had she sampled him? Even if she had, that did not mean he did not have
other
problems—far worse than the dark compulsion to pork males. Oh, no. The “eligible” man at a swell New York dinner party was likely to be a terminal neurotic, so wounded by one, two, three, or four ex-wives that he was unlikely to ever trust a person of the female persuasion again; and so burdened with insouciant adolescents, outrageous debts, or labyrinthine legal and tax problems, that he had little time for the “ideal woman” he claimed to be seeking even in the unlikely event that she might cross his path. Or else he was apt to be another Ralph Plotkin, rich as Croesus and paranoid as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth put together.

Isadora's secretary had, comfortingly enough, been through all this once herself, having been divorced years ago, and she found it hugely amusing. Renata Loomis—for that was the lady's name —had never, by definite choice, remarried, but she knew far better than the much-married Isadora how to negotiate the treacherous shoals of the suddenly single.

“We should write
The Divorced Woman's Book of Etiquette,”
Isadora often said when phone number one, phone number two, and phone number three all began fervently ringing at (nearly) the same time. For the dating mores of the divorced person of the eighties were far more complicated than anything Isadora had known in her adolescence. First of all, everyone seemed to be balancing the complexities of children on alternate weekends, city homes, country homes, elaborate careers, and at least two, three, or more liaisons. Most of the divorced men Isadora dated seemed to have various other ladies to fall back on—as if, having been wounded in the wars of marriage and of divorce, they would never again put all their eggs in one basket. This meant that everyone was always shooting for the main chance, juggling lovers, and hoping eternally to “trade up.” Isadora sometimes had the sense that when she accepted a date, two other ladies were displaced and rearranged; similarly, she herself—though normally scrupulously honest—got very good at social white-lying, canceling dates at the drop of a hat if something better came along. Of course, it also worked the other way. There were men she knew who were never free on, say, Wednesday and Friday nights—but only on Thursdays and Saturdays. Obviously there was a regular Wednesday or Friday lady or perhaps a Wednesday
and
Friday lady—though the man, of course, never admitted to her existence. Sometimes, when Isadora suspected a regular Wednesday night lady, she deliberately claimed only to be free on Wednesdays, just to “test” the man in question and see if he'd cancel the other lady for her. How wicked!

All these complexities were dealt with through numerous phone calls. To her amazement, Isadora got good at hastily making excuses if a juicier invitation was proffered. It was dog eat dog, every man for himself, all's fair in love and war. It was also completely out of character for mostly monogamous Isadora. But it did, at least, distract her from her pain over Josh. Fortunately, one had enough real excuses-what with a child, a career, a home to run —to rearrange dates with impunity. The basic law of divorced dating seemed to be “no strings,” and if you made an excuse, however flimsy, it was never questioned.

The worst dates, Isadora soon found out, were the “fix-ups.” Isadora's well-meaning friends had decided that the problem with Josh and Isadora was their age difference and their difference in status—so they all tried to fix Isadora up with “substantial” men in their forties and fifties—“eligibles,” in short. Thus it happened that one evening in late November, Isadora found herself dining out at an overpriced East Side Chinese restaurant in New York with a swarthy little lawyer named Melvin Lebow—a kind of anti-semite's parody of a Jew—who had deliberately requested that Isadora meet him at his home so she could witness his Central Park South apartment (with its wraparound terrace and panoramic views), his eight-year-old daughter-in-the-Brearley-School-uniform, his Scottish nanny, his Puerto Rican housekeeper, and his selection of vintage wines.

The preliminary conversation over wine, in the drearily over-decorated flat (it had black walls and spotlights on fuchsia silk furniture), was punctuated by little Clarissa Lebow's endearing hops upon Daddy's lap while Daddy discoursed on her education, her nanny's qualifications, her charming sayings of the last week. (Clarissa—little minx—preened and pranced while Daddy quoted her, angling for toys and treats, if she suitably impressed his “date.”) Father and daughter appeared to have done this whole routine many, many times before—and their
folie à
deux did not seem to admit the intrusion of a third party. They were the marriage—Daddy with his proud “custody” and daughter with Daddy securely wrapped around her little finger.

Later, at the restaurant, Isadora had the impression that she was being interviewed preliminary to a merger rather than being looked upon as a future lover. Melvin Lebow, whose nose seemed fixed and whose chin seemed lifted, fixed Isadora in his shit-brown gaze, and asked (almost as if taking a deposition) how many acres her house had around it, how many cars she possessed, who managed her investments, where she summered, where she wintered, and where her daughter went to school. Isadora's daughter, at that time, went to an “alternative” nursery school in Westport called the Blue Tree School, where the male teachers had shoulder-length hair, the female teachers sometimes married other female teachers, and the main course of study seemed to be the baking of granola cookies. This was hardly “sandbox chic.”

“How's your separation,” Melvin then wanted to know, “is it amicable?”

Now, Isadora feels, felt even then, that no sooner do you confess over dinner that your separation is “amicable” than your ex-husband immediately calls and begins screaming insults in the night. It seems to be an unwritten law of separation and divorce that just as a plane is a comfortable living room that can turn into a blazing inferno at a moment's notice, so too is an “amicable separation.”

“What's ‘amicable'?” Isadora asks.

Melvin finds this very funny. In fact, Melvin seems to find everything Isadora says very funny. He gazes into her eyes and confesses that she's been his sexual fantasy for seven years—ever since he read “that book of hers.” Apparently she has enough acreage and enough assets to be a take-over prospect worthy of his attentions. She feels she's just become what investment analysts term “a special situation.”

But Isadora has heard the magic words—“my sexual fantasy for seven years”—the magic words that almost infallibly predict impotence, premature ejaculation, and other sorts of sexual disaster too smarmy to contemplate. So Isadora excuses herself from the Szechuan beef with scallions and the scampi with garlic and she sprints to the telephone to call her daughter's nanny and check in on the home front. The baby is fine, she learns. The house is fine. The dog is fine.

She returns to the table and with many apologies announces to Melvin:

“I'm going to have to head back to Connecticut early because, alas, my daughter seems to be getting a cold.”

This is real desperation. Isadora has broken the ultimate parental taboo. Lying about your kid being sick almost invariably
causes
the kid to
get
horribly sick. All the gods and goddesses of wrath frown upon this sort of lying; the chthonic deities would not be pleased. But suddenly the prospect of finishing dinner with Melvin, and having to make small talk through liqueurs and the obligatory pass, fills Isadora with dread. Earlier in the separation, Isadora would have picked up the dinner check in order to avert the obligatory pass. Now she has “progressed” to lying about her kid's health—albeit with a sinking heart, feeling for all the world that she will, for her lies, return to Connecticut to find her daughter dead of a sudden nineteenth-century “chill,” or an eighteenth-century attack of the “vapours.”

So much for “fix-ups”—the doctors, the lawyers, the Indian chiefs, the “appropriate,” the “eligible,” divorced “older” men. Among these Isadora encountered an elderly academic flasher—a professor of political science—who, during drinks in his elderly, roach-ridden West Side kitchen, whipped out his cock and discoursed to her of its thickness, its length, its propensity for satisfying pussy. (This was
another
bad sign Isadora had learned; whenever a man said: “I
worship
pussy”—the odds were excellent that he didn't. Those who can, do; those who can‘t, talk about it.)

After the academic flasher came a white-bearded Nobel Prize-winning biochemist who spoke English as if it were a second language (or as if he were reading from a bad translation—like the English instructions to some Japanese electronic toy).

When they met, he pronounced her his “adequate protagonist” —meaning that her fame and fortune made them equals. Then, when he wished to express lust, he told her she was “a vivid woman,” “a woman of great clarity,” or “a sharply etched woman.” Finally, when they bedded, he pronounced her “a woman of warmth and nuance”—perhaps because she came so readily and seemed to have so few hang-ups about sex. This was Isadora's blessing, as her extreme vulnerability was her curse. She could respond sexually to almost
anyone
—but her mind, her blasted mind, just went on racing.

She abandoned the fix-ups and the blind dates, but soon she discovered that if you were hungry enough, needy enough, and emotionally open enough, men were to be met everywhere. She could go nowhere, it seemed, without meeting
someone.
Since she had no preference for the eligible, since she almost instinctively preferred men who
weren't
seeking mergers, she found that the world was suddenly
full
of men—hot-tub men, gardeners, blue-collar studs, sons of friends, graduate students, young journalists, the starving, the poor, the restless. The romantic readiness of younger men more than made up for their inability to pick up the dinner tab.