afterword by Isadora Wing
I look back on my life, and all is confusion. My men, my child, my books, my flying lessons, my fears, my counterphobia, my fifteen minutes of fame. My search for serenity. In the middle of my life, I died and then was reborn.
At forty-five, you either perish or re-create yourself like a phoenix. I was chosen for the latter course.
What shall I do with this book I left behind, this husk of my old life, of the me I once was, and the other me I once was, heckling her? Is a novel a closed systemor does it open out into the world like a flower radiating fragrance, a flower that does not exist until somebody smells it?
Suppose you opened this book and a computer chip played Bessie Smith singing Any Womans Blues? Would it convince you of immortality? A novel is a strange loop. Novelist and protagonist constitute a sort of Mbius strip. Novel and reader another Mbius strip. The novelist writes because she foresees her own death. You (reader) read the book when she is dead and bring her back to life. As this book has brought me back to life. As your eyes and heart have brought me back to life (I almost wrote back to laughwhich is also true).
Whatever Caryl Fleishmann-Stanger, Ph.D., may or may not have told you about me or my last novel, I am not dead, but backI, Isadora White Stollermann Wing, alias Leila Sand, Louise Zandberg, Candida Wong, La Tintoretta, Paola Uccello, und so weiter. As another author said on another occasion: reports of my death were an exaggeration.
Peace and quiet in the South Seas didnt quite work out. Sebastian Wanderlustalias Julian Silvergave wonderful weekends and gondola trips down the Grand Canal, but he, too, being human, had a hidden agenda. When even paradise failed to cure him of civilizations afflictions, he, like Danny Doland, blamed me for it. We couldnt salvage our friendship or our marriage afterward.
Back from paradise, I decided to write only poetry, prayer, meditation, to eliminate I, to invent a new form that captures the timelessness of existence, that tries to reach beyond words to the infinite and unchanging realities that pre-dated our brutish appearance on the planet and shall long outlast us.
Thus, whether I am Leila, Isadora, Louise, Caryl, or even someone neither of us knows, is of the sheerest unimportance. All of these are merely masks that cling to my face for a while, then fall away, even as the flesh falls away beneath them. The masks are merely there to facilitate our understandingsince, from infancy onward, we learn best from a humanoid face. But masks they are, and all of wisdom is in knowing that.
Since all I plan to write henceforth is poetry and psalm, you, dear reader, may never read another one of my bookssince the most valuable words, in our joke of a literate society, tend to be the least read.
Farewell, then. I have loved our moments together. I have loved making you laugh and making you cry. Often, while writing, I have laughed or cried myself. I truly love you. I truly want to save your lives. And mine.
I will henceforth write only poetry because it is only such that, being out of time, transcends time. If I could write in invisible ink, I would. For we all write in invisible ink anyway, our words flying up to heaven like so many cinders from hell flying toward the face of God, whose radiance vaporizes them.
As Leila, as Louise, even as Isadora, I take my leave of you, asking you to love each other as well as you can, be brave, commune with your God, and try to fight against mendacity wherever it appearsin yourself first of all.
The old fiction writer I was (and still partly am) cannot resist the tropism of finishing off the story for the readers satisfaction (and my own), so here goesa tying up of the loose ends, as in an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century novel. I am too much the good-little-girl novelist to be able to leave my characters dangling.
After Isadora ceased to publish (and after her longer and longer sojourns in a Trappist monastery), Caryl Fleishmann-Stanger, Ph.D., becamebecause nature abhors a vacuumthe expert and mouthpiece on her work. She gave seminars, wrote learned papers, sent letters to the Times Book Review, appeared at the MLA, and so forth, all in the service of creating an Isadora Wing whom she never knew and who never really existed.
Sebastian, or Julian, went back to L.A., divorced the present writer by mutual consent, married a sweet young thing, and, complaining that he really wanted to write operas about the vanity of human wishes and spiritual transcendence, went on composing electronic scores for Columbia, Fox, Universal, et alia. He even wrote, produced, and scored a hugely successful movie called Papua Castaway (directed, as you remember, by Leonard Nimoy), and thereafter his price per score went to one million. Trapped by his lifestyle and his new wife (who ordered license plates for their twin Ferraris that read: EARNS and SPENDS), he goes on toiling at his synthesizer to this day, an admirable craftsman, thoroughly dismayed by his life.
Bean/Dart/Trick also wound up in area code 213, married to an older actress, dreaming of Leila/Louise/ Isadora, his one great love, and taking bit parts in Rambo V through X. He continues to spread his seed as liberally through southern California as he did through New York and Connecticut, and he curses his karma, his father, his stars, that he had not the guts to give up his Casanova complex for the only woman he ever really loved. But between men and their fathers, intention, after all, is the last thing that matters. Dart blames his wife for his lack of success and in retrospect idealizes Leila more and more with every passing year.
Emmie published her menopause book and made another small fortune, gave the term menopausal chic to the New Penguin Dictionary of Quotations, and flourished because her heart is purethough not all that pure (since she is, after all, an author). She still loves her married Greek and is happy when he sails into town.
Andr also wound up in area code 213, having sold his gallery, divorced his wife, married a twenty-two-year-old actress, and become an indie prod and a health food fanatic. It truly amazes your humble amanuensis that so many of the characters migrated to area code 213, but you know what they say about southern Californiaeverything in the United States that isnt nailed down eventually slithers there.
And what of the twins or Amanda Acea child so vital she seems doubled, twinned, squared? Following her mothers disappearance and amazing return, she, at eleven, wrote a book, which became a best-seller. A Childs Guide to Life, it was called, and it told kids of today how to center themselves and be sane, whole, and drug-free in the face of the breakdown of their parents crazy, addictive civilization.
Her literary career temporarily suspended by the advent of puberty, Mike and Ed, aka Amanda, now goes to school like any kid her age but has an agent, a business manager, and a lawyer to sift the offers (for TV shows, films, interviews, investments) that pour in weekly. It remains to be seen whether she will make it through the hormonal derby of adolescence without at least temporarily losing her sense of humor. She is, after all, her mothers daughter, and between daughters and their mothers, intention, alas, is the last thing that matters.
So now I am home. In Connecticut again. The maples blaze on my hillside as the oranges blaze in the garbage cans of New York. A lozenge of light paints the ceiling of my writing studio. A ghostly harvest moon floats over the hills. I am writing. Bessie is singing. My lovely daughter is here.
