Free Parachutes and Kisses by Erica Jong Page B

Shirley reminds her.
    â€œI know,” Isadora says, “but mine don’t count. They’re just office temps. His do.”
    â€œIsadora,” scolds Shirley in her funny Brooklyn accent, her huge antique amethyst earrings shaking. “I want you to talk about your father now. I want you to figure out why this ‘other lady’ matters so. Because if I know Joshua Ace—and I do —I’d stake my life on the fact that she’s mousy, uninteresting, no great shakes, and that the only real value she has to him is that he knows she makes you crazy.”
    Shirley certainly did know Josh. Josh and Isadora had, in fact, consulted Shirley for “marital therapy.” Josh had gone into a deep depression just around the time Isadora’s book was coming out. He had plunged into despair—despair over his work, his trapped feeling in the marriage, his sense that he was playing house husband to Isadora’s career, his anger at being younger, “second fiddle” (as he put it), and constantly upstaged by her.
    Never mind that they had both signed on for all of this seven years ago. Never mind that he had met her at the very height of her fame, that he had convinced her—over her misgivings—that he “could handle it”; that he wanted desperately to be with her despite all this; that he claimed to love baking bread and playing with the baby; that nobody ever made him do the house-husband number full time anyway (there were nannies and housekeepers galore); and that he claimed to share her dreams for her work as if they were his own. But all of that proved to be a trendy delusion. The dream of the “new sensitive male” of the seventies had given way to the old insensitive male of the eighties, and Josh now wanted for himself the career Isadora had built. The contract had changed, as marital therapists say, and Isadora was left reeling.
    â€œI married him and had a baby and now he simply says: ‘I’ve changed.’ How dare he?” Isadora says. “There’s Mandy to think about. He can’t just ‘change.’ ”
    â€œThat’s life, kiddo,” says Shirley. “Do you think you’re the first woman in history to be left with a child to raise? Do you think you’re the first woman in history to have a husband who throws tantrums like a three-year-old? Do you want to torment yourself about it for the next seven years or do you want to get on with the only life you’ve got?” A sobering thought. “The only trouble with you, Isadora, is that you never get angry at Josh—you turn all your rage against yourself. If you’d only rage a little at baby Josh, you’d feel a hell of a lot better.”
    What could Isadora say to counter that? That their love had been so special, their rapport so great that for the first five years they felt they could solve any problem? What did it matter that Isadora was older, more successful? Josh was a free spirit; he was beyond mere money matters, beyond conventional morality. He and Isadora often used to talk about the fact that most people lived their lives like lemmings racing to the sea. They did what their neighbors did. They shunned what their neighbors shunned. They justified their slavery with talk of duty. They claimed that economic necessity enforced their conformity, or that the fragility of wives impelled them to chronic lying. Or that the jealousy of husbands made secrecy and deception necessary. In fact, they did not know that secrecy and deception excited them; that lying came more naturally than telling the truth; that economic necessity and duty were abstractions invented by humankind for the express purpose of not enjoying life.
    â€œPeople are more afraid of happiness than of anything,” Josh had said to Isadora that first night in bed at the Beverly Hills Hotel. “They will give up anything sooner than they will give up their suffering. All