Parachutes and Kisses by Erica Jong

organize the Balkans—but I know how vulnerable she is.”
    â€œCome to bed,” Isadora said. She was thinking of pixieish Leona, whom she knew as a neighbor—Leona of the jet-black Dutch-girl coif, the china-blue eyes, the nose with a razor’s edge, and hipbones to match. A man could be impaled on Leona’s hips; a woman on her merciless tongue. She was the sort of person who never invited you to dinner, let alone telephoned you, unless she wanted something: a contribution to her favorite charity, a free speech at the Hunt Club Ladies’ Auxiliary Lunch, an original manuscript to raffle off, an old hat for her “celebrity auction,” other famous people’s unlisted phone numbers, the name of your caterer, or your cleaning lady. How many marriages survive because “she’d fall apart”? Leona would no sooner fall apart than Mt. Rushmore. She was in truth a beautiful woman, but the hardness of her face made you forget it.
    Lowell Strathmore finally came to bed. And Lowell Strathmore was such a surprise in bed. You’d have thought—if you were a late-fifties Music and Arter like Isadora—that a WASP stockbroker, a hunt-club member, a person who managed discretionary accounts measuring in the tens of millions, would make love like a stiff—or an Englishman—but no: this seemed to be the one area of his life where he could really be free. Jews have been sold a bill of goods about WASPs, Isadora often thinks. According to Jewish myth, made up, naturally, by Jewish men, to keep their women out of the clutches of WASP men, WASP men are supposed to be bloodless and passionless. The truth about WASPs, Isadora now knows, is that they can be absolute priapic maniacs in bed—freer in the sack for all their starchiness out of it.
    This was certainly the case with Lowell. He nibbled and licked and giggled. He talked dirty. He whispered things like “titties” and “pussy” and other words parents did not particularly send their children to Andover to learn. Like his language, his whole face softened during sex. Perhaps it was just the effect of taking off those glasses—those glasses that seemed to organize his lumbering tallness and give it point—or maybe it was true relaxation. This poor, slouching giant of a man—who lived his life in an ill-fitting straightjacket, sewn for him by a wife he feared, lined with her money, tied with his fears—coutd only relax when he had fucked a woman he wasn’t wedded to. For one halcyon hour, he unmasked, and then, the anxiety, the fear, the straightjacket, the horse shows of his daughter returned.
    Isadora notices that it isn’t fashionable to write too much about sex anymore. In the seventies, post-Portnoy, you couldn’t pick up a novel, it seemed, without getting sperm on your hands. Not only the hacksters and fucksters, but literary writers, good writers, had to chart the interiors of vaginas as if they were the caves of Lascaux (and all primordial truth were writ therein). Women were discovering the poetry of penises; men were unmasking before the Great Goddess Cunt.
    But then the hacksters got hold of sex and ruined it for everyone—tike condominium developers ruining Florida. They took the license to explore Lascaux as a license to kill little girls; they turned the poetry of the penis into stag films so loathsome they made you want to become a nun. Before long, the puritans were howling—“See! We told you how awful sex is! You should have listened to us! We were right about censorship! Put the mask back on!”
    And all the poetry of the penis, the sweet sexuality that peeked out of the fly of the Brooks Brothers pants for a brief decade, was in danger of being covered up again.
    Even Philip Roth has recently published a book in which he cuts away from every sex scene. And Isadora’s old buddies, the feminists, are passing out leaflets on street corners