Parachutes and Kisses by Erica Jong Read Free Book Online

them in the kitchen sink, at five each night, by painting them against a wet block of Ivory soap; the colors swirled in the soap, merged to become a muddy brown, then drifted away down the drain, leaving the soap white again. The turpentine: a smell of trees and forests; the primal smell of nature becoming art. The golden linseed oil: its sheen on the canvas when wet, and its strange gelatinous drops when it fell upon the easel and congealed. The Windsor and Newton paints in silvery cylindrical tubes, with their poetic names: alizarin crimson, cerulean blue, rose madder, vermilion, burnt umber, zinc white.”
    Reading aloud these names of paints, Isadora suddenly became comfortable—warmed, as it were, to her cold subject (like an after-dinner speaker hearing his first round of laughter, or an actor his first round of applause). The paint names had particular resonance for her. They evoked her childhood, like the smell of turpentine. What the hell, she thought, the speech was starting to flow. For better or for worse, she was into it.
    â€œ ‘A good painter never uses black,’ Papa would say, ‘only shmearers use black.’ Since black is all the colors put together, it was an article of Papa’s faith that you made black yourself with hues of your own choosing. And you looked for the special colors in the black—the plums, the aubergines, the sea-floor greens. Black was not black, but dark violet or murky green. Nor was white white. It was ivory or eggshell or bluish or iridescent pearl. Once, when I was thirteen and already at the High School of Music and Art, Papa made me attempt a still life of eggs and onions, cut crystal and white satin, just to prove to me how many colors were in ‘white.’ It was a lesson I never forgot.‘
    â€œNor was there such a thing as ‘flesh color’—whatever my Crayola box might say. Flesh was pink or ocher, ivory or greenish blue, brownish gold with umber shadows. Caucasians might be pinkish, yellowish, greenish—but never white; and blacks (Papa would have objected to the term black not because he was a racist, but because of its color-blind inaccuracy) were brownish, creamy, even purplish where shadows were cast upon their faces. Orientals might be amber, golden, green—but never ‘yellow.’ The world of race was a world of multicolored shadows; Papa taught me about dapple long before I read Gerard Manley Hopkins.”
    Here she looked into her audience and was again seized with self-consciousness. Bennett Wing, her Chinese-American second husband, sat in the audience looking inscrutable, as usual. Seven years had elapsed since she’d seen him, but he was ageless and unchanged, immortal perhaps. Or so it seemed. More gray in his thick hair was his only sign of age; his face was as unlined as ever. Perhaps he’d die that way—the Chinese Dorian Gray. Isadora had, after all, thought her grandfather immortal and here he was mocking her with his mortality. Bennett was surely mortal, too, despite his Buddha mask. Age could not wither him. He was pickled in psychoanalysis.
    The black husband of a friend of Aunt Gilda’s also betrayed no flicker of emotion at her reference to race. Unfortunately, we were living at a time in history when any reference to race was likely to be regarded as racism and Papa was of that benighted generation which said “Negro.” Though she was only his Horatio, not the protagonist of the piece, somehow she felt guilty for his sins, charged with his debts of conscience.
    â€œIf the world was truly multicolored for him, then why was it so black? For one cannot write about Papa without chronicling his depression. A chronic and contagious depressive, he spread such gloom to his children and grandchildren that often they wished to escape him. ‘Life,’ he said, ‘was pointless’ (’till the end—when his tune changed). His philosophy, often