A decade after her first appearance in
the bestselling Fear of Flying, Isadora Wing is
back, and she's trying to have it all: career, baby,
liberated love life. In Parachutes & Kisses,
times have changed since Isadora first took off. The
dreams of the Sixties have been brought down to earth by
the grim but rollicking realities of the Eighties.
Married (again) and divorced (again), Isadora's a single
parent now, with an adorable daughter, an irritating
ex-husband, and a motley crew of suitors. Besieged by
"eligible" men, Isadora discovers that love and
sex in the Eighties requires a whole new etiquette.
A deliciously wry look at love and sex
in the Eighties, Parachutes & Kisses brings
"liberation" up-to-the-minute -- and beyond. It
is a novel about a woman's search for her ancestors and
for love that satisfies the soul and (maybe) lasts.
Excerpt:
Chapter One: We Are the
Older Generation or Baby Boom Grows Up
I am delirious because I am dying so fast
--Henry Miller
It is, of course, impossible to judge what course evolution would
take after human extinction, but the past record strongly suggests
that the reappearance of man is not one of the possibilities.
Evolution has brought forth an amazing variety of creatures, but
there is no evidence that any species, once extinguished, has ever
evolved again.)
--Jonathan Schell
Isadora, separated from Josh, is like a kid in her twenties. Only
like the kid she never was in her twenties--almost carefree. At
thirty-nine, she finds herself possessed of a demoniacal
sexuality--which has no need to justify itself with love.
Once the wrenching pain of the first separated month is past, she
runs around madly, as if that way she could outrun her despair.
Nobody, she thinks at first, is as good in bed as Josh. And now that
she's flush (though she never believes it) and famous (though she
never believes that either), impotent men seem to be everywhere! Why
didn't anyone tell us that if women got strong, men would get doubly
weak--as if in spite? But still, she diverts herself--with a
drugged-out disc jockey from Hartford (her Connecticut Yankee Mellors-the-Gamekeeper),
a cuddly Jewish banker from New York, a blue-eyed Southern writer from
New Orleans, a cute Swedish real-estate developer who owns (and is
ruining) numerous islands in the Caribbean, a lapsed rabbi who wants
her to be his congregation, an antiques dealer who drives a Rolls and
never graduated from Erasmus Hall High, a brilliant, astoundingly
well-hung, twenty-six-year-old medical student who can get Valium,
Librium, Quaaludes, and Sonoma County sinsemilla in abundance (and in
his spare times is discovering a cure for cancer), a plastic surgeon
from New York who's into oral sex, and so many others she's
practically lost track.
Everyone is into oral sex, it seems. Everyone has discovered the
clitoris. In the ten years since she took off from Bennett Wing and
ran (briefly) away with Adrian Goodlove (then wrote a book about it
that gave women everywhere permission to do the same), the world has
certainly changed. For one thing, there is more oral sex. For another,
more impotence. For a third, sex is ubiquitous and yet also somehow
devoid of its full charge of mystery. For a fourth, the world is
definitely lurching to its end.
Isadora's generation is middle-aged. Those irrepressible
baby-boomers, who thought they would never sag, bald, or die, are now
sagging, balding, and dying at an appalling rate. A lot of them have
ex-spouses in abundance, children on alternate weekends, houses in the
Hamptons, houses in the fabled counties of Fairfield or Dutchess,
co-ops or brownstones in town. Some even have stocks, bonds,
money-market funds, lawyers, accountants, business managers, and
hemorrhoids. (These things apparently go together.)
They are the older generation now. They know it because they sign
the checks. They know it because their parents are starting to die.
They know it because their grandparents stare down at them from uneasy
chairs in the clouds. (And the living are beginning to seem almost as
glassy-eyed as the dead.) They have reached the age where they meet
their new lovers at A.A.; the age where some of their friends are
addicts, some of their friends are bankrupt, and some of their friends
are dead; where their children want real horses, not toy ones, and
where they no longer worry about their own pregnancies but about their
daughters'. They have reached the age, in short, where they know they
are going to die.
Parachutes and Kisses
New American Library 1984
405 pages; hardcover
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