Free Parachutes and Kisses by Erica Jong

level she was pissed. Why did he stubbornly refuse to see how much her grandfather’s death meant to her? Was it because of his own refusal to confront his father’s eventual demise?
    She drove with a vengeance, thinking of her vaguely blasphemous license plate blazing through the Jewish cemetery’s gates. Both Josh and Isadora were name nuts. Their dogs were named for writers; their cars for sexual organs; and their child narrowly escaped being named after the greatest woman poet of antiquity—Sappho—or else Vigée after Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, the infinitely skillful court painter to Marie Antoinette.
    Isadora’s mother had also debated among the names of all the great women artists when she named her second daughter. She might have been Marietta after Marietta Robusti, Tintoretto’s offspring, or Judith after Judith Leyster, Frans Hals’s contemporary, or Sarah after Sarah Peale, or Constance-Marie after Constance-Marie Charpentier, or Rosa after Rosa Bonheur, or Angelica after Angelica Kauffman. Thank heavens her mother never considered Sofonisba after Sofonisba Angussola, but merely—merely!—sad dled her with Isadora Zelda—after Duncan and Fitzgerald.
    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