A Ticket to the Circus

by Norris Church Mailer

  In my second year of teaching at RHS, the kids nominated me for Outstanding Teacher of the Year, and I won. It wasn’t that I was the best teacher in the school—far from it—I just happened to teach the most fun subject. Chip tried his best to get the results thrown out, but he couldn’t, which I imagine made him gnash his teeth at night. I think the happiest moment in his life was when I walked in at the end of the school year in 1975 and announced I was leaving to move to New York.

  Eleven

  There was another man I saw a bit of that year. Oddly enough, the same friend, Toni, who had introduced me to Edmond, called me up and said she was giving a fund-raiser for an attractive young man who was running for Congress. She said I should meet him. He was twenty-seven years old, single, and named Bill Clinton. I came in late, just as he began his talk, and he later said that when he saw me walk in, he forgot his speech—and then he forgot his name. I suspected he said that same thing to quite a few women, but it’s a good line, so why not use it? He was the embodiment of charisma: when he talked to you, he had the ability to make you feel like you were the only person in the room. He looked you in the eye and never once glanced over your shoulder to see who else was there. The only other person I have met who had charisma to that extent was Jackie Kennedy.

  Bill came up to me after his speech, and after the introductions, compliments on the speech, and pleasantries, he told me I had the old-fashioned kind of beauty that should wear cameos and he was going to get me one. That never happened, but then I never thought it would. It was just party talk. I was lucky to get that much attention. I could see that everyone wanted his ear, so I just stayed for a short while and then started for the door. When he noticed that I was about to leave, he said “Wait a minute, Barbara,” walked me out to my car, and asked if he could see me again when he had more time. Why would I say no? To ensure he would remember, a day or two after we met, some of my students and I decorated one of our papier-mâché animals, a donkey, with a VOTE FOR CLINTON banner and took it to his headquarters, which greatly amused him.

  He invited me a few times to campaign with him and his group in nearby towns, handing out cards and buttons and telling people why they should vote for him and clapping and cheering when he spoke. He was usually mobbed, mostly by women, but would always find a little time somewhere in the evening to talk to me alone. I stood next to him once in a receiving line, and was amazed at his memory for names and faces. One young man shook hands with him and said, “I’m honored to meet you, Mr. Clinton.” Bill said, “I think we’ve met before.” The other guy said, “No, I don’t think so,” and Bill studied him for a minute and said, “You were at Boys State with me in 1963.” The guy was astounded; he really didn’t remember meeting him. During his speeches, Bill could pull facts and figures easily out of some file cabinet in his head.

  He also had a trick of holding and caressing my hand while carrying on a conversation with someone else in a crowd, which made me feel like I had some kind of inside track. Occasionally he would invite me to sit beside him in the car on the way to or from an event, which was a big treat, since there were so many people vying for his attention. But we were never alone. He was sorry, he said, but he had no time to take me out on a regular date. Everything was always a campaign event. “That’s okay,” I said, and really it was. I was busy enough anyhow, and just liked being in his glow once in a while. Then one night, late and unannounced, the doorbell rang. It was him.

  Years later in New York, after all the scandals broke, a man I knew socially who was in politics said, “I guess he slept with every woman in Arkansas except you, Norris.” “Sorry, Russ,” I replied, “I’m afraid he got us all.”

  He was pretty hard to resist, I must say. So I didn’t, although I stopped campaigning with him. I hated talking to strangers, handing out cards, and trying to articulate the reasons why they should vote for Bill. I had no idea what to say when people pinned me down on his policies. Still, when he happened to be near Russellville, he would call. What we had was by no stretch of the imagination a romance, with his heavy campaign schedule and his seldom being alone except in the wee hours of the morning. He didn’t have the time, and I didn’t like being part of his pack of admirers. I was still dating several other men—mainly the lawyer at this point, who later became a judge—and while I had no idea how many other women Bill was seeing, it was apparent by the number of starry-eyed followers that there were a lot of them. I liked him immensely anyhow, and had no illusion I would become anything more than a friendly warm place for him to go from time to time, and frankly I didn’t want to be more. Even then, I knew he was going to be president one day. It didn’t take a psychic to see his prowess as a speaker, his genuine concern for the people, and his huge ambition. Not to mention his love of women. And I wasn’t the girl for that gig.

  On election night, he invited me to headquarters in Fayetteville to wait for the returns, and I went with several friends. There were, of course, a lot of women there, but there was one I’d never seen before who seemed to be running things, rushing around answering phones, obviously in charge. Her name was Hillary, she wore enormous thick glasses, no makeup, and rather ugly colorless baggy clothing. Someone whispered that she was the girlfriend. I said, “Really?” surprised at first, but as the evening wore on, I could see there was something extraordinary about her. She had an intelligence that none of the prettier girls in the room had. If I ever had a pang of jealousy, it was for that, when I knew he and she must have had a relationship that was fired by intellect. I would have so liked to be able to talk to him about world affairs and politics, or art or literature, or anything, really. I had the conceit that I had a good mind, too. But we frankly never talked much. He was always exhausted and wanted to catch two or three hours of sleep, or he was dashing out the door on his way somewhere and had no time. I would have liked just once to have a leisurely dinner and sit and talk, but that never happened.

  He lost the election, by a smaller margin than had been expected, since his Republican opponent, John Paul Hammerschmidt, was popular and had been in office since 1963. But it was clear he was going to make it big sometime, somehow. He had the hunger. I had illustrated a little memoir called Idols and Axle Grease by my friend Francis Irby Gwaltney, and I inscribed a copy to Bill with something like, “I’ll see you in the White House.”

  By that time, I’d started to feel used. The last time he’d called at two in the morning to see if he could drop by, I’d said no. I was done, and that was probably the final time we saw each other in that way.

  He moved to Fayetteville with Hillary to teach in the law school, and we didn’t keep in touch too often, but when I decided to move to New York with Norman Mailer, I called him to say goodbye, and I don’t know how it happened—maybe he’d had to come to Russellville for another reason entirely—but he drove up into my yard just as I was walking out the door with my yellow luggage, on my way to the airport.

  “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” he asked.

  “No,” I said, and smiled, “but I’m doing it anyhow.”

  He carried my suitcases to my car, gave me a little kiss, and I drove away.

  Several years later he became governor, and we reconnected when I had a show of my paintings in a gallery in Little Rock. He and Hillary had dinner with Norman and me in a Chinese restaurant and they invited us to one of his inaugurations. (Norman wrote a speech for him, but he never used any of it. I was sorry; it really was pretty good.) Through the years, we would occasionally bump into each other at functions in New York, or he would drop a note or call just to keep in touch. Norman liked them, especially Hillary, and would have supported her in the presidential primaries if he had lived. He said she had earned it. I still consider Bill and Hillary friends, if distant ones.

  Twelve

  I debated whether or not to include this next part, but I finally decided I needed to talk about one of the worst moments in this otherwise happy time, one that has colored my life over
the years in small ways I may never be totally aware of. Maybe I just hope there is the off chance that the man in question will read this and understand, if he is capable of understanding, what kind of damage he willfully inflicted. It is something that happens to an astonishing number of women one way or another. You know what I’m talking about.

  The older brother of one of my girlfriends, who lived out of town, was home visiting his family, and my friend invited me to their house for a barbecue. I hardly knew her brother, as he was several years older than us, but it sounded like fun. I don’t know if my friend was thinking to fix us up, but I had no thought of romance with this guy. He wasn’t my type at all, and I thought of it as just a low-key dinner with their family, all of whom I’d known since I was a child. She said her brother would pick me up, which was fine.

  We had a nice time at the barbecue, although I spent hardly any time talking to the brother, and then it began to get late and I said I needed to go home. It was a Friday and Matthew was spending the night at my parents’ so I could sleep late the next morning, and the brother drove me home. I got out of the car as soon as we hit my driveway. I didn’t want to sit with him in the dark or make him think there was more to the evening than there was, but he said, “I’ll walk you to the door.” I said, in a friendly voice, “Don’t bother. I know the way,” but he got out anyhow and accompanied me, holding my elbow. It felt a little creepy all of a sudden, like I heard the music that swells in a horror movie to warn you something bad is about to happen, and I wanted to get inside quickly. I didn’t want him to try to kiss me, so I said, “Well, thanks for the nice evening. Good night,” and turned my key in the lock. Before I could turn on the light or shut the door, he shoved me hard from behind and knocked me to the floor. I was astonished; then I was confused. Then I was scared. I had always thought that if anyone tried to rape me, I could kick him in the nuts, or run, or scream, or do any number of things to protect myself. But I learned in short order that he was a lot stronger than I was and there was no way on this earth I could defend myself.

  He proceeded to rape me.

  At first I tried to reason with him. “Let’s talk about this. Let’s go sit down and talk,” I said. Then, “Please don’t do this, please,” and then I begged him to stop. In the moonlight from the open door, I could see that he had a glassy look in his eyes, and he kept repeating over and over, “I’m going to make you scream. I’m going to make you scream.” I somehow knew the worst thing I could do was scream, so I just gritted my teeth and endured. It was painful and lasted much too long, and then he left me, without a word, lying on the floor in the dark.

  I was bruised and shaken, to say the least. Big purple marks bloomed on my arms where he had held me down. I was raw and burned. I pulled myself together, locked the door, and picked up the phone, but the receiver hung in midair from my limp hand. I didn’t know who to call. I couldn’t call my parents. They would have totally freaked out and probably tried to make me go to the hospital, and then the whole town would have known. I couldn’t call the sheriff’s office. They wouldn’t have believed me. Some of them had played football with him, and nothing would have been done to him anyhow. He would just have said it was consensual, that I’d wanted it, and then they would have asked me who else I had been sleeping with and it would have turned into a trial of my morals, which at that point couldn’t really withstand scrutiny. His family was prominent in the community, and I liked them a lot. They certainly wouldn’t have believed me, and if they had happened to believe me, it would have torn the family apart and they would have wound up hating me, not him. So I told no one, not even my closest friends. I just filled the tub with the hottest water I could stand and tried to soak all traces of him away. It was a classic case of rape, like I had read about so often. Only this time it was me.

  The kicker was that two days later, a note arrived in the mail. It said, “Thank you for one of the most exciting nights of my life.” And he signed his name. I was so angry I shook as I burned it up in the kitchen sink.

  He went back to his home soon after that, and thankfully I never saw him again. I never said a word to his sister. If she spoke about him, I would just change the subject, which I’m sure she thought was strange. To this day, I would leave the room if he walked into it. He got married and had children, and I sometimes wondered what kind of husband and father he was, if this was a pattern with him, or if I had done something to make him attack me like that. I know in my heart I didn’t. I hardly even spoke to him all evening. I count myself one of the lucky ones who wasn’t affected so badly, but it took something off my confidence forever. I never got into a car alone again with someone I hardly knew without thinking of that night, and now, even after all these years, instead of my hell dreams, I sometimes have nightmares of strangers in the dark.

  Thirteen

  An English teacher at Tech named Francis Irby Gwaltney (who wrote the memoir Idols and Axle Grease that I had illustrated) was a soldier in World War II with Norman Mailer. While I never had Francis (or Fig, as Norman called him) as a teacher, I was friends with him and his wife, Ecey (E.C., short for Emma Carol), another English teacher at Tech. Along with B. C. Hall and his wife, Daphna, we all subscribed to The New Yorker magazine and considered ourselves to be intellectuals—Russellville-style, anyhow. After I started teaching at the high school, we’d all get together once in a while to have a glass of wine (Russellville was in a dry county, so drinking wine was totally avant-garde—we had to drive thirty miles to buy it) and discuss literature and The New Yorker articles. We were big Walker Percy and Eudora Welty fans.

  Often, Francis mentioned Norman. They had kept in touch after the war, and every couple of years they managed to get together. Francis became a writer after Norman published The Naked and the Dead. He said that if Norman Mailer could write, by God, he could, too. According to Norman, Fig had been a much better soldier than he had been, and Norman looked up to him. Fig was the inspiration for Wilson, one of the characters in the book.

  Sweet, innocent Norman, straight out of Harvard, had somehow been assigned to an experienced, battle-hardened Texas outfit, and he tried to play dumb and be as invisible as possible so as not to be perceived by the good ol’ boys as the Eastern Jewish intellectual he was. They were as tough as old leather, those Texans, skin burned a deep sienna from sitting around in the hot sun on the troop ship, endlessly sharpening their bowie knives on pieces of flint and painting their sores with iodine. One of them once said something about that “goddam New York Jew,” and Fig jumped to Norman’s defense.

  “Who’re you calling a goddam Jew? I’m a goddam Jew, too!”

  “You ain’t no goddam Jew, Gwaltney. You’re from Arkansas.”

  “I am too a goddam Jew,” the big, blond blue-eyed Southerner said, his chin thrust out, his fists clenched. He stood ready to jump in and fight, but the bully just said, “You a crazy sumbitch, Gwaltney,” and backed off.

  Of course Fig wasn’t Jewish, but he endeared himself to Norman that day, and they became best buddies. Norman tried his hardest to keep a low profile, but once in map-reading class, when he was daydreaming, the harried officer who had been getting nothing but “I don’t know” from the men asked him a question, and by accident, before he could think, he blurted out the correct coordinates of a position. He was busted. (Life was a little harder after that, but the officer was thrilled that he finally had someone who could read a map.)

  IT HAS BEEN said that there are no coincidences in life, and I might just believe that. It was April 1975, and I had been divorced for more than a year. Frankly, dating a lot of different guys had begun to lose its charm, but I had no interest in getting serious about anyone. I liked having my own house and doing as I pleased. No man to clutter up my closets, no man to clean up after (except my big boy, Matt, of course). No man to tell me what to do, how to spend my money, what to cook. I was close to my parents, who adored Matthew and were thrilled to babysit for me while I worked. My life was pretty great
.

  Then I got a call from my friend Van Tyson, another teacher at Tech, who was having a film animation artist come speak to his class. He wondered if I wanted to bring my senior class over to the college to sit in. I was always up for something new to do with the kids, so we went, and it was interesting. But the most interesting bit of information I got that day was that Norman Mailer was next door in Francis’s class, and Francis and Ecey were giving him a cocktail party after school. To which I had not been invited.

  Although I’ve always loved literature, books were a luxury I treated myself to sparingly, but I had been a member of the Book-of-the-Month Club for several years, getting things such as Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, or James Jones’s The Merry Month of May. But for some reason, even though Fig knew him, I had never read one of Norman Mailer’s books. Occasionally, I would forget to send in the Book-of-the-Month response card saying I didn’t want the selection that month. One such time was when Norman’s Marilyn was offered. It was twenty dollars, more than I could afford, but there it was in my mail, and I couldn’t resist opening it. After looking at the pictures and reading a few pages, I was hooked. “She was our angel, the sweet angel of sex, and the sugar of sex came up from her like a resonance of sound in the clearest grain of a violin…” Oh, my. This didn’t sound like a rowdy war novelist at all. It sounded like a man who was sensitive and understood women, and who could write like the angels themselves. I read some of the sentences over several times, just to feel the words.