A Ticket to the Circus

by Norris Church Mailer

  Will you drop me a line right away—don’t be like me!—and let me know how this strikes your beautiful auburn red head.

  Cheers,

  Norman

  I wrote back immediately, YES, I’d love for him to stop off in Little Rock! I didn’t worry about any of my concerns at all. (P.S. He’d sent back the poem, copyedited in red pencil. That should have been a clue, but I was too happy to care. Besides, it was a secondhand poem anyhow, so I figured we were even.)

  A few days later, I ran into Francis at the Kroger store. After a few minutes of chitchat, I asked him if he had heard from Norman. He looked at me with a little pitying smirk—at least I imagined it was pitying—and said that yes, Norman had written him, but he hadn’t mentioned me, so I shouldn’t get my hopes up that I would ever hear from him again. Which, Francis said, to his mind was good, since I would have gotten in way over my head. He continued on in that vein for a while, how Norman was a busy, famous man, little girl, and just because he spent one evening with you doesn’t mean he will ever call you again. He has dozens of beautiful, sophisticated women all over the place, all over the world. Why would he be interested in a girl from the sticks of Arkansas? The bottom line was that he (Francis) was just trying to protect me, he didn’t want me to get hurt, on and on, yackety, yackety. I just nodded, never once letting on that I had plans to meet up with Norman in just a couple of days. So Norman really hadn’t told him. I smiled and said, “Thank you, Francis. I totally understand. You’re absolutely right. I know you’re just looking out for my welfare, and I promise not to worry anymore. I’m just glad I got to meet him.”

  He smiled and patted my hand, as if to his mind that little incident was over and done with.

  Norman came off the plane from Colorado—where he had been rafting on the Dolores River with his two boys, Michael and Stephen—carrying a big white stuffed dog that was dressed in denim overalls and a red shirt. He handed it to me with a grin, and it’s fair to say I was speechless. I turned it over, and on its behind he had drawn a heart, in the middle of which he had printed our initials—NM + BN. It was so ridiculous and sweet I had to laugh. I discovered then and there that for the rest of my life I would never know what to expect from him.

  We got his suitcase and went out to my yellow Volkswagen. He insisted on driving. It’s a man thing some guys have, and I didn’t argue, although it was the tiniest bit annoying, like having someone borrow your favorite pair of shoes. You know they are going to put their print on them somehow. It took him a few minutes to get the hang of the car, adjust the seat, which I was going to have to readjust, and we lurched out of the parking lot, our heads jerking, as he stepped on the clutch, gas, then the brake, trying to shift the grinding gears.

  “You’re not used to driving a stick shift, are you?” I blurted.

  He got a little huffy and said, in his best Harvard accent, “I’m used to driving a Porsche.”

  A naughty part of me thought, “And I would bet money you drive it just like this.” He had driven Francis’s car kind of jerkily, too, the night we’d met, and Francis’s car had an automatic transmission. He was one of those guys who have nervous feet on the pedals, he just couldn’t help it. (He indeed did drive the Porsche like that, although he would violently disagree. When I first saw it, the poor thing was riddled with dents and rusty scrapes and bumps covered with pieces of silver duct tape; we had an ongoing dispute during the next thirty years over who was the better driver. [I could write a whole chapter on his driving peccadilloes, like the time he wanted to get a closer look at a motorcycle and ran the guy off the road, but that would be dirty pool.] It was only near the end of his life one day, years after he had stopped driving and I had just finished the long trip to New York from Provincetown for the umpteenth time, with a few hairy moments like having to swerve to avoid a car wreck, that he told me he thought I was an excellent driver and he always had. It surprisingly made me cry to have him say that.)

  Norman at the Little Rock airport.

  I’d made a reservation at the Sheraton, and we dropped our bags off, then went out to lunch. He didn’t know Little Rock, so I took him to a place I thought he would enjoy, the old Marriott Hotel, where the legislators and important people in town ate, near the capitol. The food wasn’t that memorable. I think we each had a piece of bland fish with new potatoes and broccoli that was boiled gray, and I didn’t recognize anybody well known—except for a man sitting across the room who saw us, got up, and marched right over to our table. I could see Norman going into celebrity mode, bracing to be assaulted by either a fan or a crazy person. Instead, totally ignoring Norman, the man turned on me and said, “Where were you last night? I waited for an hour at the studio for you!” Urps. He was one of the local TV weathermen, whom I had been out with a couple of times. (He was one of the never-slept-withs.) We’d had a dinner date for the previous night, which I had completely forgotten about in the excitement of Norman’s arriving. There was nothing I could do except say that I was so sorry, I’d gotten my dates mixed up, and introduce the two of them.

  They politely shook hands, then the weatherman walked away shaking his head, maybe a little impressed in spite of himself, but frankly more annoyed. Needless to say, he never called me again; ask me if I cared. The weatherman was shorter than I was, but unlike Norman, he didn’t handle it well and made me take off my shoes and dance barefoot the one time we went dancing. He also liked me to pick him up at the studio after he did the six o’clock weather, and he wore his TV makeup when we went out, which I found to be a little pretentious. I guess he would have just had to put it back on for the ten o’clock weather, but still, how weird is that, to kiss someone and get makeup on my face that wasn’t my shade? Norman found the whole thing amusing, as he seemed to find everything about me and my life.

  After lunch, we drove around Little Rock and I showed him the sights, such as they were, the most important being General Douglas MacArthur’s birthplace, a house preserved as it had been in 1880, now situated in the middle of MacArthur Park. There was a legend that during the Civil War, a group of runaway slaves took refuge in a room dug out underneath the park, and they all got diphtheria or something and died. People said if you walked across a certain area in the park, you could feel a chill, but I never found it. Nor did we that day, although we walked around, trying to feel the cold.

  In the park was also the Arkansas Arts Center. The Arts Center was run by a man named Townsend Wolfe, who knew me well, or at least well enough, but he had never really given me the time of day, speaking down to me from his lofty artistic perch. This time, however, when I walked in with Norman Mailer, his eyes lit up and he was suddenly my oldest and dearest friend. He gave Norman a personal tour of the place and couldn’t have been nicer to me.

  There was a show of handmade silver jewelry going on, and a smooth silver ring with a moonstone that reminded me of a whale’s eye caught mine. I pointed it out to Norman, and asked him if he didn’t think it looked like a whale’s eye. He studied it for a minute and then told Townsend, who had been hovering, that he wanted to buy it for me. I was aghast. I would never have admired it to him if I’d thought he would buy it! I didn’t want him to think I was a gold digger who hinted for a man to buy her things. I protested. But Townsend took it out of the case and urged me to try it on. It fit the middle finger of my right hand like it had been made just for it. I was lost. But it cost eighty dollars. That was more than my monthly mortgage.

  “No, really, Norman, you are sweet to offer, but no thank you.” I took off the ring and firmly handed it back to Townsend. Norman could have gracefully backed out at that point, but he didn’t want to. He really wanted to buy it for me. My father never bought my mother and me gifts at all when I was growing up, except for Christmas, and when we went shopping, we had to sneak our packages into the house so he wouldn’t know we had bought things, or they would have a fight. I remember one horrible fight they had over a new shower curtain!

  My father was a chil
d of the Depression and had strict ideas about what one needed and didn’t need, which was anything that wasn’t replacing something totally falling-apart worn-out. Mom and Dad had those fights often, as she and I both loved clothes and things for the house. It got better when she opened the beauty shop and started earning her own money, and I began babysitting when I was eleven, but I never quite got over the feeling that buying things was bad. (I remember with the first money I earned, eleven dollars, I bought a watch, as my mother said I should get something I could keep forever to remember it. I have no idea where it is now.)

  Even after Norman and I had been married for many years, I still sneaked my packages into the house, although he was always generous and couldn’t have cared less. If I wore something different that he liked and he asked if it was new, I would say, “Oh, you’ve seen this before. It’s been hanging in the closet for ages.” I wonder what a psychologist would say about that? The poor man must have thought he was going crazy to forget so many of my outfits. Or perhaps he knew and just indulged me.

  As far as the silver ring was concerned, never before had a man spent that kind of money on a casual gift for me. When I married Larry, I even paid for our wedding bands, as he was in school and I was the one working. I always had a strong sense of wanting to earn my own way; it was those early days of women’s liberation. After I was divorced, I earned seven thousand dollars a year as a schoolteacher—a respectable salary for the time and place—and had an excellent credit history. Still, when I bought a house, I had to get a man, in my case my father, to cosign the mortgage before the bank would give it to me. The same with a credit card. I never had a credit card of my own until I had been married to Norman for many years. Until then, they were always in his name.

  Protesting the ring got silly past a point, and I finally let Townsend write up the sale, but I was uncomfortable. Still, I loved the ring and didn’t take it off for years.

  As long as there has been literature and its naughty offspring, pornography, the sex act has been endlessly, exhaustingly described, but—like trying to describe pain or love—there are no words in any language to truly capture the phenomenon, and I am not going to try it here. Frankly, I had never been really attracted to many men in my life, even though I had slept with several. I was certainly attracted to Norman the first time I saw him, but it was as much mental and emotional as it was physical. I couldn’t wait to hear what he would say next, and talking to him made me feel more intelligent, as I rose to the occasion of bouncing off his remarks.

  Over the years, trying to one-up each other became our favorite game, much to the amusement and despair of our friends, but in the beginning that kind of verbal play was new to me. We were in the Hepburn-Tracy mold, he making slight fun of me and me turning the tables on him. Sometimes he would win, sometimes I would. For example, I had told him I was one of the champion table tennis players at church camp, so one night at a friend’s house, he skunked me in a game because he had a nasty little serve that barely cleared the net. “You were the champ of church camp, huh? That’s mighty Christian of you to let me win, then,” he’d say, and I’d reply that Christians didn’t go in for crooked cheap shots, and it would escalate from there. It all probably started with the remark I made about his driving, which just slipped out, and I got cheekier after that. To his credit, he was delighted when I got a good shot in at him, like his little protégé had done well.

  I had never met anyone like him. He was fresh and enthusiastic about every subject, politics and religion being two favorites, but he had opinions on everything from how plastic was poison (it turned out that he was right, after decades of being laughed at) to how auto pollution was killing us (again, he was right). He had run for mayor of New York with some great ideas, like Sweet Sunday, which would be one Sunday a month when no cars except taxis and emergency vehicles were allowed in the city, and he proposed a better transit system, an electric monorail that ran around Manhattan that was nonpolluting. He had other ideas that were perceived to be totally off-the-wall, such as New York City seceding from New York, and becoming the fifty-first state, and people thought he was a clown who was running for fun, but over the years a lot of the ideas have turned out to be not so crazy.

  Back to sex. As we went to the hotel, I was nervous and unsure of how compatible we would be in bed, given the last sad time on the floor in Russellville. But with all the inhibitions removed—Matthew safely at my mother and daddy’s for the night—I was more than attracted to him, and he was determined to assert his reputation as the best lover in the world. (Where had I heard that? Maybe he’d told me?) Little Rock was only the beginning, of course. Through the years, no matter the circumstances of our passions and rages, our boredoms, angers, and betrayals large and small, sex was the cord that bound us together; it was the thick wire woven from thousands of shared experiences that never broke, indeed was hardly frayed and only got stronger, no matter how the bonds of marriage were tested. Even in the worst times we had many years later, when we almost separated—somehow, inexplicably, at night we would cling to each other, drawn like powerful magnets, the familiarity of our bodies putting salve on the wounds we had inflicted during the day, until over time the warring ended and the love remained. The only thing that finally brought it to an end was old age, illness, and death itself, but that was years away from where we were then, on this first night of our life together, and was quite unimaginable to my twenty-six-year-old mind.

  He spent an extra night. For a girl who had previously never let a man who wasn’t her husband spend the night in her bed—who couldn’t, in fact, wait for them to get dressed and go home—it was something new. We woke up so entwined around each other that it was a task to disentangle ourselves in the morning. I had snuggled him against the wall, had him pinned there all night, and he was delighted. When we finally surfaced, rosy and happy, near to suppertime the next day, we went out to Cajun’s Wharf, a great fish place where you could get peel-and-eat shrimp by the bucket, and fried catfish and hush puppies. We laughed all evening long, smug in our newfound attraction, as we peeled and ate an entire bucket of shrimp. By the time he left the following day, neither of us knew quite what had happened, or how it would play out, but we both knew it wasn’t going to be a short-term thing.

  JUNE 5

  Dear Barbara,

  Just got your letter. The timing was fine. I was in just the mood you were as you wrote it. We bounce into each other like sunlight. Off of red-rock walls. The time in Little Rock keeps reflecting back into the room for me so that no matter the hour or the place there we are swimming in that red gold light and there you are smelling like cinnamon. God, you’re attractive. In Brooklyn, we used to say fucky (as in the way I used it in Marilyn). Barbara Cinnamon fucky Brown Davis Norris—there’s a moniker for you.

  I miss you in a good way. I’m dying to see you again, tomorrow if I could, but I know it’s there between us. It’ll be the same whenever we’re in a room with one another. I think something has started, I know we’ll get together in July because there’s a week when I have to do a tour for the book [The Fight] (It’s published July 21) and we’ll meet on the trip. But I want to see you before then. Maybe in New York or Chicago. Could you get away for a couple of days in the third or fourth week of June? It would probably be the middle of the week. When you answer this, put in a few pictures. The man is getting greedy about you.

  I agree about the next to last one. I’d like to be right back there again. Right through the door. Lambent is the only word for such an afternoon.

  I haven’t written to Fig yet. Hate to take him into our yard. I may just invite him up to Maine by phone. I’ll be able to tell by his voice.

  Kisses and further

  honey, Norman

  Fifteen

  It turned out to be Chicago. I had never been on an airplane before, and on top of that, I had to lie to my parents and tell them I was going with Jean to work at an arts and crafts festival. I hated to lie to them, but the pl
an was to wait until I got there and then call and tell them the truth—one, because I would already be there and they couldn’t cry me into not going, and two… well, one is enough. But they had to know where I was in case something happened with Matthew. I was a conflicted, nervous, guilty, excited mess. I had again promised Norman not to tell Fig and Ecey that he and I were seeing each other. I think Norman really had Fig pegged as far as the jealousy thing went, but I just couldn’t keep a trip as big as this to myself.

  I was at the beginning of summer classes, taking an American literature course at Tech to complete my English degree, and we were reading Moby-Dick. My teacher, Ruth, wasn’t much older than I was, and I had to tell her I would be missing a couple of classes and ask her if I could make up a test. I didn’t want to tell her where I would be, but a part of me was just bursting to tell, so I hinted that I was going on a big trip to meet someone, and she weaseled out of me who it was. Of course, I made her swear that she wouldn’t tell Francis or Ecey or anybody else, but the first thing Ruth did was call Ecey and ask her if they had spoken to Norman or me lately. When Ecey said no, Ruth said she thought she needed to talk to me. How Christian of her, to keep to the letter of the promise while doing the most damage. I don’t think Francis ever got over what he saw as our betrayal. But for now, I couldn’t worry too much about Francis and Ecey or Moby-Dick and Ruth. I was on my way to Chicago!

  The closet in the back of my mind where I was cramming all the sinful things I was doing was pretty jammed, but there’s always room for more. I couldn’t even in good conscience pray for God to not let the plane crash, since I was on my way to commit adultery, but I did hope it wouldn’t. It was hard to understand how something that heavy could float up in the air like that. I tried not to grip the seat arms too tightly, or gasp when there was some unexplained noise, so no one would know I had never flown before. This was in the days when people were allowed to smoke in the back rows, and I was in the row just in front of the smokers. The smoke made me sick, and the food was like an overcooked TV dinner, but I was too excited to really care. It was thrilling when the plane left the ground and headed, nose up, toward the sky, when the cars on the freeway became like chocolate sprinkles, and the Arkansas River a snake across a patchwork of farmland. I had a window seat and watched every mile of ground we flew over.