Free Parachutes and Kisses by Erica Jong Page A

the brink of blowing ourselves up, how can we worry about paper conservation? If only the human race survives, we know that some mortal will rise from her knees and paint the side of a cave with reindeer and horned dancers. That is inevitable. The urge to cover walls with our likenesses, to make image magic with brush and paint, is programmed into our genes, if only those genes survive. Who that artist is—or what her name may be—matters less than that she rise from her knees and wield a brush (or a stone, or a fragment of charcoal, or a bleeding berry). For our very humanity is in our urge to make magic with images. All that Isadora wishes for Sappho- Vigée-Amanda (and for herself) is a race that survives its own self-destructiveness, so that somewhere, somehow, the dance and dancers, the feast of colors, the chanting of poems, may begin again.
    Then, why, as she shovels the earth over her grandfather’s coffin, then why, as she embraces Chloe and weeps in her arms, then why, as she limps from the snowy grave on her father’s arm, is she thinking that the only proper tribute she can pay her grandfather is to recover that lost great painting of horses, or failing that, to assemble an exhibition of his works, or failing that, to write a long novel about him, and thereby to make for him posthumously the reputation he never made for himself in life—and to make for herself the ancestor she should have had?
    Yes, she thinks, as she leaves the cemetery—I will exhume my grandfather’s bones through art, either his or mine. But she does not know what a long picaresque journey that will require or where it will take her both inside and outside herself.

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    Dangerous Acquaintances
    How characteristic of your perverse heart that longs only for what is out of reach.
    -CHODERLOS DE LACLOS Les Liaisons Dangereuses
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Marriage was regarded as an expedient, love as a sort of comic and undignified disaster, the spiritual equivalent of slipping on a banana skin.
    â€”P. W. K. STONE (Introduction to the Penguin edition of Les Liaisons Dangereuses)
    â€œIF Papa hadn’t died, if Chekarf hadn’t died, if Tintoretto’s Daughter hadn’t been a full selection while Josh’s last book wasn’t even an alternate, do you think we’d still be together?” Isadora asks her therapist, mischievous, roly-poly Shirley Frumkin, who wears Norma Kamali sweatshirts, voluminous cotton knickers, and antique junk jewelry. Shirley is one of those ladies the French call jolie laide. The nose is bulbous, the eyes too crinkly, the figure too ample, but nonetheless she possesses an oddball kind of beauty, and sexuality so strong at seventy that it does Isadora’s heart good just to be with her.
    â€œNo, no, no,” says Shirley. “Stop what-iffing. Josh changed. It wasn’t your fault.”
    Isadora has “progressed” from wild hilarity and fucking her brains out to crying almost nonstop, having migraines that last for days, blood pressure that shoots up whenever she talks to Josh on the phone. What has brought about this change? The knowledge that he’s seeing another lady—a lady he spends weekends with.
    â€œIsadora—you threw him out,” her therapist reminds her. “You were sick to death of his rages, his attacking you all the time, his sabotaging your work, his passive-aggressive sexual manipulations.”
    â€œI know,” she sobs, halfway through a box of Kleenex. (Why do therapists always have Kleenex on hand? Is it a hint that they want nothing less than the homage of our tears?)
    Shirley’s apartment faces east and the little heliport in the East Thirties is right below them. From time to time, a chopper takes off, leaving Isadora feeling as leaden as a dead body dangling from a helicopter in a body bag (her private image of the Viet Nam War).
    â€œWhy does another lady change anything? You have at least a dozen other men,”