A Ticket to the Circus

by Norris Church Mailer

  The Prisoner of Sex struck me as humorous, but he didn’t write it that way. “Those feminist bitches have destroyed my credibility with women,” he said. I could see how people could take a lot of what he said in a bad way, as he never thought of the consequences. He just said what he thought was the truth at the time. To me, the humor and irony was inherent, but you can’t transfer the twinkle in the eye to the page, so a lot of people treated everything he said as perfectly serious, like his famous comment that women should be kept in cages. Who would think he was serious about that? But feminists saw it as him making fun of them. He didn’t help his own cause a lot of the time. I always told him I was a feminist. I had run across gender abuse myself, and was certainly for a woman’s right to have the same salary as a man and all the rest of it—rights he supported, as well—but he never accepted that he had to be serious with the subject. He didn’t couch his language at all; he threw it out there with force. I could understand his frustration.

  Once I overheard two women talking about him in the bathroom of a theater where we were watching a play, and they were calling him a sexist pig and a misogynist and other bad things. I usually just ignored things like this, but they were right in my face, putting on lipstick, so I interrupted them and said, “Do you know Norman Mailer?” They said no. “Have you ever read anything he’s written?” I asked. Again they said no. I said, “Well, I’m married to him, and if you are going to call someone names like that, you should at least know what you’re talking about.” They just stared at me, and I walked away, I was so angry.

  After we were married, Gloria Steinem said in print that anybody who would marry Norman Mailer couldn’t be healthy, well adjusted, conscious, or aware, because for such a woman Norman was unmarriable, which I totally resented, since she knew nothing about me and had, in fact, been friends with him. Close friends. Germaine Greer, who almost had an affair with him (I’m a little fuzzy on the details), and who was his nemesis in the famous debate at town hall, was quite nice to me the one time we met in London, and even gave me a copy of her book about women painters, as I was a painter. I sympathized with the fact that these painters had never gotten any credit, but it didn’t make them more interesting to read about. “She was a decent painter, even a good painter; she was ignored; she died.” End of story.

  Some of Norman’s political writings I frankly skimmed, and while I thought they were brilliant, it was just too much to take in all at once. An American Dream was disturbing, in light of the incident with his second wife, Adele, and his violent history with Lady Jeanne, his third wife. I found The Deer Park unbelievable. I didn’t like any of the characters; they didn’t seem real to me; every woman was, or wanted to be, a prostitute. I found Why Are We in Vietnam? to be just about unreadable, although it had some beautiful writing about Alaska and a lovely passage about a long train ride in it. I never thought dialogue was his strong suit. I once pointed out that people didn’t talk like he wrote, and he said they did, so we were at an impasse. I do believe that no one else can write like him, sentence for sentence, with brilliant passages such as the descriptions of Provincetown and Maine in Tough Guys Don’t Dance and Harlot’s Ghost. And no one can say he doesn’t use wonderful, unusual metaphors, but we had long arguments about the need for plot. “There’s no need for a plot,” he would argue. “Life doesn’t have a plot. Life is existential. You never know from one minute to the next what is going to happen, and there are no clear endings.”

  “That’s exactly why a book needs a plot,” I would answer. “Nobody wants to read a book to get real life. You want to escape from real life when you read. You want to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. You want there to be a conclusion, where the guy gets the girl, or the house is sold, or the murderer is caught.” But he was unmoved by my arguments.

  Slowly over the years I’ve reread the volumes, and they seem like entirely different books from that first green reading. I’ve come to have more respect for his work. One of the reasons Norman was attracted to me—or so he once believed—was that I had never read his work when I met him, and I liked him for himself. As I used to tell him, I would have fallen for him if he had been a truck driver. He would ask, “But would you have married me?” And I’d say, “Of course not. The hours are too long, and you would be away too much. There would be too much temptation on the road to cheat.” He liked the dishonesty of that.

  The first time I met Ethel Kennedy, the first thing she asked was, “Would you be with him if he weren’t Norman Mailer?”

  I thought for a minute. “Well, I know a whole lot of people who aren’t Norman Mailer, and I’m not with any of them, so I guess not.”

  It’s a silly question. If I had weighed three hundred pounds, or had looked like Groucho Marx, would Norman have been with me? If he hadn’t been the writer-celebrity and personality he was, he would have been someone else entirely, and I might have been attracted to him, but probably not. Interesting puzzle. In my memory, that’s where Ethel’s and my conversation stopped. There was nothing else to say. So funny, how women reacted to me when I first came to New York. Lizzie Hardwick, a writer who had been married to Robert Lowell, took me aside when we were first introduced and, with that croaky little giggle she had, said, “Now, don’t let that man make you pregnant!” Bella Abzug gave me her home phone number and told me to call her, at any hour of the night, if I needed to get away from him, and she would come and get me. I just stared at them. I had no idea what they were talking about.

  Before I met Norman, I had been toying with the idea of going back to school to get my MFA in art and teach in college, preferably at Arkansas Tech. My ambition at the time was such that I didn’t want to move away. I just wanted to be able to work more seriously with older students and have more pay. I loved living in Russellville with my son, I loved my little house with the murals on the walls, my water bed, my orange shag carpet, my parents and my friends, but for some inexplicable reason, I checked out schools in the East. I had written to the Rhode Island School of Design and MassArt in Boston for applications to their MFA programs. I had filled some parts out but hadn’t yet sent the applications off. I was also thinking of going to the University of Arkansas, which made a lot more sense, but that would have been my last choice. I was drawn to go east. If I did go to one of the Eastern schools, I would have to get loans and scholarships or a working fellowship, and find a place to live for myself and Matthew, day care for him. It was a huge undertaking. I, of course, discussed it with Norman.

  Well, gorgeous, I read your letter, studied it, thought about it, have dipped into new ink, and present my first thoughts.

  The idea of you being in Massachusetts is exciting as hell. It’s also easy for me to welcome you and disruptive for you. Nonetheless, I think you ought to start working at it—applications, so forth. If you want, wait till you see New York, or maybe even fly back to Boston with me for a day and you can see how you like it, and how you like the school. How you like the East.

  I think that’s important. The feeling I have about you and me is that we will beat the odds against us only if we fulfill the innermost idea of love—which is that we continue to be good for each other, and feed each other our strength and our talent and our warmth and our wit. Nothing can break us if we do the thing so few people can do for each other—which is: each give fire to the other’s courage. (So often one finds love, and then looks for a cave where one can feast on it—soon such love grows stale.) I’ve always believed that people don’t find happy love if they’re looking for it to solve their problems—they just find an intensification of their problems. We find our good love about the time we deserve it. I like to think we may each have arrived at that place (took me twice as long as you) where we deserve each other. That would be great if it is true. It is going to put, however, every demand on us—because, for once, I want to be in love without guilt, and want a woman to love me without guilt. I want us only if we succeed with each other (not every instant, of course, but ove
r the whole). I don’t want us ever to be loyal out of duty. I want us, rather, to be loyal to the best idea we can have of each other.

  You see, I ask you for feats, bit by bit. But I don’t think you would have been drawn to me if that was not what you wanted. So I think you should come East with the full hope that it brings us together and the full awareness that you are prepared to live it alone if you and me become less grand than we are at this instant.

  What a joke. There I’ll be probably slaving away in Stockbridge working my dull axe (my pencil) while you’re the new beauty of Boston.

  God bless you, love. Days are getting nearer. Ain’t you nifty, ain’t you sweet.

  The thought of talking to you soon is half as exciting as the thought of fucking you, and that means it’s very exciting.

  Yeah,

  Norman

  P.S. I can’t remember who took the pictures. It was on the lecture tour, I think, and then mailed to me. Anyway, they’re recent and date from last winter or spring.

  P.P.S. It’s cloudy out, but I find it a fine morning.

  I loved those letters. It was like having him there with me, as I read them over and over with a cup of coffee in the morning, the ink fresh and immediate from a pen in his strong, square hand. His handwriting was sometimes hard to read, but he made an effort to make it as legible as possible. At any rate, soon he sent me a ticket to New York. Norman liked to tell the story of the first time he got off the plane in Berlin, how he took a deep breath and got a hard-on. That’s metaphorically what happened to me in New York. I got off the plane, and immediately I knew this was my town. I had never fallen in love with a place so quickly before. Even the dense air at the airport and the energy of the crowd in the dingy buildings were exciting. Norman was waiting at the gate, and when we got into the taxi, he grabbed me and gave me a kiss that lasted all the way to the front door of his apartment in Brooklyn. We talked about the Taxicab Kiss for years. It was the most astonishing kiss I ever had or ever will have. I think he would have agreed.

  Norman had been regaling me with descriptions of the magnificent apartment he had there (it sounded like the Taj Mahal), with its soaring glass skylight, the view of the skyline of lower Manhattan, the harbor, and the Statue of Liberty. How from the roof deck you could see New Jersey and Staten Island and the Brooklyn Bridge, as well as the Manhattan and Verrazano bridges, and how he had decorated it like a ship, so it felt like an enormous yacht. I was so excited. I couldn’t wait to see the wonder of this place. I missed most of the scenery coming in from the airport because of the kiss, but the few glimpses I had weren’t so spectacular. It looked like a bunch of dirty row houses in some slum, graffiti on the walls of the buildings closest to the highway. But I knew we were going to a great neighborhood with tree-lined streets and this palatial apartment.

  The neighborhood was sweet, with trees and rows of nineteenth-century brownstone houses. We carried my bags up a set of brownstone steps into the house, and then up three long flights of stairs. The hallway was painted dark green and the carpet was a dusty midnight-blue wool. The last flight of stairs leading to the top floor, Norman’s palace, was carpeted in red. “Of course,” I thought. Red. It was fitting for the king. The door was painted a rather ugly flat blue, and as I stood there panting, trying to catch my breath from the climb, Norman opened it and stepped back with a flourish—ta-da!

  The first thing to hit me in the face was the heat. The ceiling over half the apartment was an enormous A-frame skylight through which the sun was beating as if the window was a magnifying glass. The windows had all been shut for weeks, and all the oxygen had been burned out of the room. I could hardly draw breath. He rushed around opening the door to the little terrace and climbing a ladder (a ladder!) to reach the second level to open the skylight windows. I stood there and tried to take it all in. The view was as spectacular as promised, but the Taj Mahal, the apartment wasn’t. It was much smaller than I had anticipated. Much. I was used to living in a sprawling three-bedroom two-bathroom house with a dining room, living room, den, laundry room, and big yard, and this was the top floor of a New York brownstone. Not a bad size for an apartment in the city, but for someone used to space, it was tiny.

  Aside from the soaring skylight, the apartment was basically one big open room with two small separate bedrooms in the back, a teeny galley kitchen with white metal cabinets and orange walls on one side, and on the other, a bathroom with dark blue tiles that was smaller than most coat closets, just large enough to squeeze in a small black sink, a five-foot tub, and a toilet. There were nets everywhere. Old fisherman’s nets (that still carried a whiff of the sea) hung from the ceiling around a bed in a corner of the living room, and one entire wall was bookcases crammed with books. Books were in piles on the floor, on chairs, on tables. The furniture was, to put it kindly, dusty and worn, and the place was filled with odd things, like strange dried fish heads hanging on the walls, or a grimy, slowly disintegrating sculpture made from black stockings that was hung from a hook in the ceiling. A quarter of the living room was filled with an enormous red, white, yellow, and blue LEGO sculpture (also terribly dusty, as was everything in the place) cordoned off by a low fence.

  There was an open area between the bathroom and kitchen that was like a jungle gym; a trapeze was suspended from a beam in the middle of the space under the peak of the skylight, with a hammock slung across the abyss above it, two stories up. A tightrope was stretched at knee height on metal legs that were screwed into brass plates set into the hardwood floor. There was a climbing rope and a ship’s ladder that folded down so one could climb up to a little room over the living room, and above the kitchen there was an open loft with two beds that folded into the wall, like ship’s bunks. Another ladder went up to yet a third level, a crow’s nest that was in the high peak of the roof, and you had to walk an exposed plank that stretched across two open stories to reach it.

  One of the two bedrooms in the back was papered in red and held a bed, a chest, and a lovely antique dresser. The other one was papered with cartoon ships and sailors, as if for little boys, and crammed with old filing cabinets, a chair with the stuffing coming out, and assorted broken lamps and boxes of junk. The place looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in many months. Many. I wandered into the filthy kitchen. I wasn’t sure what color the floor was, but it was brownish and sticky. I opened the fridge and shut it immediately. Someone had spilled a bottle of soy sauce in there in the not so remote past and then unplugged the refrigerator. The whole thing reeked. I was speechless. Norman stood expectantly, beaming.

  “Well? Isn’t it everything I said it was?”

  “Oh. It is. It’s wonderful. It’s amazing. Can I go out on the terrace?” I had just about gotten my breath back, but between the smell of the fridge and the heat, I was a little sick, and sweat was pouring down my neck. I went out, and the view was indeed spectacular. I started imagining myself cleaning the place and reorganizing it, and I began to relax a bit. I am a lot like my mother, who is a total neat freak. I could see now that Norman was the furthest thing from that. It wasn’t that he was just messy. I don’t think he even saw the mess. He truly had no idea it wasn’t perfect just as it was. There would be a lot of work to do, and I would have to do it carefully, so as not to offend him.

  I stood looking out at the city across the river, at the tall rectangular shapes of the new World Trade Center towers, the tallest buildings on the horizon. The river was so close, it seemed like we could run down to the water and swim across.

  “Aren’t those two towers the ugliest things you’ve ever seen?” Norman said, coming out to join me. “They’ve totally ruined the skyline. Look at the rest of the buildings, how lovely they are, reaching up to heaven, like the points of artists’ paintbrushes, and then there’s those two Kleenex boxes stuck in the middle of it like two big buck teeth. World Trade towers. What a monument to the corporation.”

  “You’re right. The older buildings are better. These new ones are so cold. All t
hat glass and steel. I like wood and stone more.”

  “Oh, definitely. Right. I made up a law about the phenomenon. I call it Mailer’s Law of Architectural Precedence. It goes, ‘If the building you are in is less agreeable than the building across the street, then the building you are in was put up later.’”

  It must be said that the brownstone in Brooklyn where he lived was much more agreeable than the Kleenex box high-rises in Manhattan, and it had been built much earlier, in 1836, the same year Arkansas became a state. His apartment was the servants’ quarters then, the house a one-family dwelling, and now there were four families living in it. His furniture—an overstuffed moss-green velvet couch, a claret-colored velvet wing chair, low wood tables, and nice Oriental carpets—was worn and a little shabby, but it was all good stuff and comfortable. Now that I’d gotten over the shock, all the place needed was a good cleaning and maybe a few pictures on the walls—definitely the dried goose fish and broken lamps thrown away. Maybe a few of the chairs recovered. There were lots of possibilities. I didn’t dare plan for too much right away, as it was only my first day in the place, but I couldn’t help it. Decorating was one of my passions.

  Norman took me to Montague Street, the main drag of Brooklyn Heights, for a Chinese lunch, the first time I’d ever had real Chinese food. He was so happy and excited to introduce me to new things. Brooklyn Heights was a small, sweet neighborhood with mom-and-pop shops, interesting bookstores, and friendly people. Norman had been preparing me for weeks, talking about the coldness of New York, how every woman on the street would be more beautiful and chic than I was, how intimidating I would find it, but that wasn’t the case at all. If you grow up as a self-assured, beloved person, you will be that same person no matter where you are. As far as all the beautiful women went, of course there were beautiful ones, but most were just like the women on the streets of Russellville or any other place. I never felt inferior to any of them, then or ever, and part of it was that Norman always made me feel special.