Parachutes and Kisses (39 page)

“I don't care what you think of me and my life,” Isadora said to Librium, “it is not your job to give my child instruction in
your
religious theories.”

“Oh—I would never do that, Miz Izzydorry,” said Librium. “I would never in a million
years
do that.”

“Well—see that you don‘t,” Isadora said menacingly.

And she went upstairs to Renata's office to begin—again—the long search for the perfect nanny. Or at least for a relatively imperfect one who would stay.

Between phone calls to employment agencies, friends who had Swedish
au pairs
(who had other friends in Sweden), friends who had Danish
au pairs
(who had other friends in Denmark), and friends who had Finnish
au pairs
(who had other friends in Finland), Renata buzzed Isadora with some news that might make the whole question of nannies academic forever.

“Call Mel Botkin,” Renata said. “It's important. Something about a tax audit ...”

Is there a phrase in the English language more fraught with menace than
a tax audit?
If there is, it is probably,
Is it in?
or
malignant neoplasm.
In fact, there are few phrases as ominous as tax
audit
—unless they are the sort you see on medical charts at Memorial Hospital.

“God,” said Isadora, “Mel Botkin. What on earth would lead Mel Botkin to intimate the existence of a problem on the phone?”

“A big problem,” Renata said, “shall I get him for you?” “Mm-hm,” said Isadora, imagining an eighteenth-century debtors prison (a Newgate straight out of
The Beggar's Opera)
where she and Mandy and Dogstoyevsky would live out their productive years cadging food and favors from the avaricious turnkey, who only granted them same because he lusted for the now nubile Amanda and her aging—but still peppy—Mom.

 

Mel Botkin was Isadora's business manager. A bouncy rotund Jewish CPA whose ancestors came from that town in the Ukraine where a whole generation of Jewish grandmothers must have been raped by Tartars, he had slitty Asiatic eyes, high cheekbones (like an obese Pan), a huge Afro of curly black hair (which he called an “Isro”), a wife in Long Island, a mistress in SoHo, and dozens of show-business clients who depended on him as slavishly as they depended on their analysts.

Isadora had come to Mel at a time in her life when her affairs were in a total mess. To her astonishment, she had just begun earning large sums of money and she hadn't the faintest idea what to do with it. She had no receipts for anything, no canceled checks, could not read a ledger, and certainly was not equipped to deal with those densely printed little pamphlets the IRS seems to issue every other day. It is a paradox that in the country of self-reliance, Poor Richard's Almanack, not to mention the puritan forefathers (and foremothers), our government has managed to reduce all but her totally destitute citizens to utter dependence on their CPAs. And we call that democracy!

Mel Botkin was Super-CPA. His clients were a Who's Who of neurotic Jewish show-business types (with a few neurotic WASPs thrown in for good measure). Ham Garland was perhaps his biggest client, his ur-client. Ham Garland, né Herman Grabowsky, was a little, skinny, redheaded nightclub comedian turned movie-maker. By dint of sheer wit and force of personality, he had managed to parlay his pasty-faced, freckled geekiness into sex appeal (in a country where fame translates into sex appeal for even the ugliest man—though it does not necessarily do the same for the ugliest woman). Ham Garland was in some ways pure genius and in other ways pure asshole. It was he who had managed to make a silent movie one of the biggest box-office hits of the seventies. It was he who managed to get great reviews in
The New Yorker
and also keep the
National Enquirer
guessing about which Swedish sex symbol was currently living in his “gracious” West Village town-house. It was he who had perfected to a high art the trick of spurning Hollywood while taking its money.

But Ham Garland was the perfect client for Mel Botkin. Ham Garland didn't want to know from money and Mel Botkin was great at the “don‘t-worry-your-pretty-little-head-about-it” (or, in Ham's case, “your-balding-little-head-about-it”) school of money management. Ham Garland was renowned for never carrying even a dime to make a phone call. His chauffeur (who trailed him down the streets of New York in a black Jensen-Healey with plates that said—God help us—AUTEUR), carried dimes the way Queen Elizabeth's ladies-in-waiting carry
her
shillings and pence. Isadora was often in Mel's office when Ham's secretary called from various points abroad to ask that money be transferred to Venice or Paris or Rome. Sometimes she sneaked a peek at Ham's ledger and was amazed to see that in one year he had earned fourteen million dollars. Now—
there
were tax problems compared to which Isadora's were small potatoes.

Mel—in his kindly, avuncular way—never really demanded that his clients become simpering infants in his care, but his practice was structured in such a way that it was hard not to. Mel had teams and teams of little gremlinlike sub-CPAs, and hand-holding secretaries whose main function was to make you leave it all to them and feel good about it. Did you have a deadline on a book, a film to edit, a play in rehearsal? They would pay your bills, file your taxes, invest your money, argue with your landlord, buy you that car you needed (get the vanity plates for it, have it insured, even have it custom-striped at a special place Mel alone knew about). Were you moving to the Coast for six months? They'd find you the house, sublet your apartment, make all the travel arrangements, and even get your dog crated and shipped without letting the airlines kill her in the process. There was no way that busy, neurotic, absorbed, obsessed, creative types wouldn't have been seduced by the range of services Mel offered. He was nothing less than Sugar Daddy or God. After a while you got so used to saying to your spouse, or secretary, or lover, “Send the bill to Mel” that you began to think Mel was
making
the money for you and kindly permitting you to live high off his hog.

Not that Mel ever did anything to dispel this illusion. On the contrary, he promoted it. Charming, chatty, with a wonderful bedside (audit-side?) manner, he always had time for his clients—time to come to Connecticut and spend the whole day talking about whether or not you should put in a hot tub, time to go house hunting on West Tenth Street if you decided you had to have an historic brownstone, time to plan your vacation in Venice with you, time to help you shop for a Rolls or a Jensen-Healey—or even a Ferrari.

It was years before Isadora understood the psychology of Mel's practice, and by then it was too late. Creative people—to use that terribly belabored phrase—cannot really see what they produce in relation to money (let alone in relation to densely printed IRS pamphlets) because they do not produce it
for
money. It comes to them as pure gift and they give it out as a tree gives leaves. They cannot, in truth, hold it back—whether there is money for it or not. Just as Shaker artists used to call themselves “instruments,” anyone who has ever had the experience of a poem or a song or a play coming through her fingers knows that the gift is not really hers to sell. It is passed along, given out, given back to the stream of creation from which it comes. Of course, one has to eat and pay the rent, landlords notoriously refusing to take poems and songs instead of checks, but the artist's relation to money is always queer because the production of art is not
for
money; one would do it even if one got paid nothing at all. (Isadora, for example, wrote poems and novels long before she had any expectation of selling them to publishers and she still values most the work she does without pay, without contract, without advance: her poems in particular). Because of this paradox of art as gift in a money society, it is not surprising that many artists feel the need of an intermediary to deal with the world of money for which they feel so ill equipped. And in Isadora's case that intermediary was Mel. He was like the
Shabbes goy
who lights the fires for the religious Jew on the day of prayer. He dirtied his hands with money so that she did not have to. His fingers alone touched the till. His fingers alone were in the till.

Well, what did you expect? Did you expect to get a Jewish
Shabbes goy
for nothing? Just as you wrote the books because you had to (and never expected to make a nickel off them), you were like a child when the money began pouring in—and what
else
would you do but find a daddy to give it all to?

Besides, Mel was wonderful about money—as free and open-handed with money as poets are with words. It
was he
who really taught Isadora how to enjoy money, how to
live.
“Why fly tourist” he'd say, “when Uncle Sam picks up half when you fly first class?” “Why not buy that designer dress for two thousand dollars—your image on TV demands it.” “Sixty bucks for a haircut—why not? After all you're a ‘personality.' ” All the things Isadora felt guilty about spending money on—namely her own
Pleasure-Mel
absolved her of guilt for, saying it was important to her work, her image, her peace of mind. He was instant cure for the Protestant ethic. He was Mr. Generosity—with her money. Whenever Isadora called him up in a panic asking, can I afford this or that, Mel would say, “We can afford it.” Isadora figured that as long as Mel said “we,” everything was okay. When he started saying “you”—as in “you can't afford it,” she'd know she was in big trouble.

Did she never have misgivings about Mel? Of course she had misgivings. She would have had misgivings over
anyone
having power of attorney over her money. (Mel took care of everything except the trust for Mandy, which was in Lowell Strathmore's care.) But she felt sort of helpless about it. First of all, she didn't understand those IRS pamphlets. Secondly, she was always so busy writing, was always so obsessed with the next book or the next—that the IRS pamphlets seemed like flies buzzing at her ears —and Mel became her flyswatter. She was always trying to get to page 200 by Christmas, or to page 400 by July fourth. Or else she was pregnant and racing the book against the baby, trying to see if she could get at least a draft of
Tintoretto's Daughter
done before she went into labor (she couldn't). Nor did she have a husband to take over these tasks. If anything Josh was even
less
business-oriented than she, and more than happy to leave it to Mel!
Leave it to Mel
became the theme of their lives. Leave it to Mel also became a way of their never having to deal directly with the fact that she was supporting their menage. Mel paid the light bill, the gas bill, the mortgage, the school bill—not she. Mel's existence was a salve to Josh's delicate, threatened ego. If Isadora had had to sit down and write the actual checks, Josh would have floated away even sooner than he eventually did.

From time to time she had a fantasy about Mel absconding to a country from which there was no extradition. Mel was a great sailor who kept an oceangoing sloop—and Isadora often thought that one day she would arrive at his ratty little office on West Forty-fourth Street—in the kind of old theatrical office building where the doors are glass and have names lettered on them—and find that Mel Botkin had boarded up the door, left a crudely lettered sign that said, GONE FISHIN‘, and departed for Venezuela. As Isadora stood there pounding on the door, suddenly all Mel's other clients would appear—Matthew Myers, the gorgeous, green-eyed, lantern-jawed talk-show host (who also did commercials for Atari); black-haired, be-knickered Lola Thornton, that refugee of the sixties (with her rainbow of little kids and her various twenty-year-old lovers—most of whom had been drummers with her band); Hassell Frumkin, the chubby comedian who toured colleges doing imitations of Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon; Jennifer Hines and Stedman Stillman—the grand old couple of the American theater; Hilly Workman, the dwarflike screenwriter; and of course Ham Garland (who had never actually come to the office before—Mel came to
him
—but was making an exception in this case). As they all assembled there, the horrible truth would dawn:
Mel Botkin had sailed away with their money!
Then and there they would organize an expedition—“organdize an ex potition” as Pooh Bear says—to Venezuela to snag the fraudulent Mel and return him to justice (possibly with the help of Superman?) on America's shores. It would all be done as a sort of Jean-Paul Belmondo caper movie. All these various
fartootst
intellectuals and theatrical types would suddenly turn into slick French adventurers (dangling Gauloises from their mouths) or Caribbean pirates with sabers between their teeth. Off they would go on the Great Venezuelan Caper, becoming persons of action for once instead of
luftmenshen!
Great battles and great danger would intervene. Mel would be brought to justice; contrite, he would kneel before them and promise never,
never
to take their money again. Then they would sail triumphantly back through the Bermuda Triangle (having made their money
un
disappear), return to New York, and everything would be copacetic as before, a chastened Mel now doing their business honestly. Hah!

So much for fantasy—reality is always a little more unbelievable.

“Hi, Mel,” said Isadora, “what's up?”

“Nothing much,” Mel said avuncularly, “but I think we should have a little talk.”

“Why? What's the matter?”

“Well, I think we should talk about it face-to-face. Shall I come up to Connecticut or are you planning a day in New York anytime soon?”

He said this most casually, but Isadora could hear the panic underneath—but was the panic hers or Mel's?