Parachutes and Kisses by Erica Jong Page B

other and collapsed on the floor with laughter.
    â€œAre you thinking what I’m thinking?” he said.
    â€œYes,” said Isadora between giggles.
    â€œThere probably isn’t a man in this place who hasn’t lost his erection,” Lowell said, having lost his own.
    How could Isadora relate such stuff to Josh? He would have loved the story, but it was basically meaningless without imagining Lowell’s reaction, and Isadora couldn’t describe Lowell because Josh knew him slightly and would have guessed who he was. The rules for revealing their “liaisons dangereuses” were impossible rules. Because sex is hardly amusing if the man remains masked. The whole point of sex is dropping the mask. This may not be true for what men want of women, but it is certainly what women want of men.
    Ah, men—the inscrutable sex. What do men want? Freud should have asked, because what women want is so pathetically clear—they want unmasked men! Isadora has finally come to the conclusion that she has never really understood men. Not that she doesn’t like them, only that they are hidden from her—as if they were all wearing iron masks. Whenever she fantasizes about what her work would be like if she had become a painter instead of a writer, she imagines a whole exhibition called simply “Men.” It would be a series of paintings of masked men. In each, the man would be wearing a different kind of mask. One would have an iron mask, like the hero of the same name; another a diving helmet; another a black silk mask like one of Guardi’s Venetian gentlemen; another a wet white silk handkerchief which clung to his face, making him look (oddly) like the death mask of Keats; another a gorilla mask; another a Mickey Mouse mask; and so on.
    The fantasy of the masked-men exhibition is elaborate. It extends to the opening itself—which, like Vaginal Flowers, gets a vast amount of ambivalent publicity, both very bad and very good. Scandal clings to Isadora even in her fantasy of herself as painter. In the days following the opening, Isadora-the-Artist lurks around the gallery in dark glasses and a babushka so she can see the reactions of her audience.
    Women come into the gallery with a perplexed look on their faces and then—after they have examined three or four of the canvases—a sly smile begins to manifest at the corners of their mouths, the aha of recognition, followed usually by a gasp or a chuckle.
    If they are with female companions, there is much elbowing, pointing, and conspiratorial laughter. But if they are with men, they look sheepish or else become soberly expository, desperately trying to explain to their escorts why the paintings are funny, but encountering the very same mask the paintings seek to unmask. Men visitors, on the other hand, shrug, not knowing why the paintings “matter”; some are openly hostile; some drag their ladies bodily from the gallery and shout at them on Madison Avenue.
    This whole fantasy of her secret life as an artist pleases Isadora immensely. Never does she feel more truly “successful” as a writer than when she sees what passions her works arouse in people. One writes alone in blissful, or paranoid, solitude. One feels vaguely masturbatory about one’s work; and if one is a woman, the whole world conspires to reinforce that notion, calling one “narcissistic,” “self-absorbed,” “self-obsessed” (as if Picasso were not, as if James Joyce were not, as if all artists were not maddened narcissi falling into their own reflections—the drowning in self being one of the conditions for transcending the self). So one always feels guilty, somehow, about closing the door to work. There are: the child that needs mothering, the nanny that needs scolding, the petty-cash box that needs filling, the husband or lover who needs care and feeding lest he sulk and run off to fuck one’s friends, the dogs