A Ticket to the Circus

by Norris Church Mailer

  Chuck and I agreed to meet at the Riviera restaurant in Greenwich Village. He was wiry with a wispy goatee, protruding ears, and dark, longish curly hair. He seemed to know a lot about everything, had gone to school in Texas and could do a credible Texas accent. We got along. I agreed to show him the novel, and we talked about what kind of pieces I might do for a magazine.

  In the middle of dinner, I began to feel a bit sick and strange, and I couldn’t quite get any of the food down. I went to the bathroom and discovered I had started to bleed. I sat on the toilet for quite a while—oblivious to people knocking on the door—feeling a little faint, listening to trickles. When I got up, the bowl was filled with blood. There was a dark clot in the middle of it. I knew it was the baby. He had heard me and decided to go back and wait for a better time. I said, “Thank you, God. Thank you, baby.” I cried, washed my face, and came back out and told Chuck I wasn’t feeling so well. He got me a cab to go home. He did become my agent, and later, after I had been modeling for a year and more, I wrote a piece for Cosmopolitan magazine called “Getting My Book Together” about what is involved in becoming a model. Chuck and I have been friends ever since, and that piece was the inspiration for my second novel, Cheap Diamonds, which came out more than thirty years later.

  Two years after this, in 1977, I did indeed become pregnant with our son John Buffalo, and Norman and I were thrilled about it. I used to tell John when he was little that he had been up in heaven, manipulating the situation so his father and I would meet each other so we could have him.

  “Can you imagine the trouble you had to go through, John,” I used to say. “You had to make sure I forgot to send in that Book-of-the-Month card saying I didn’t want Marilyn. Then you had to arrange Dad’s schedule so he would be in Arkansas right at that time. You had to get the film animation artist to come to Tech on the day Dad was there, get Van to invite me to bring my class, and then make me crash the party for Dad and pick out those tight jeans to wear!”

  What I left out was that he had also kindly waited for two years before he came back, and this time, his timing was perfect.

  Twenty

  SEPTEMBER 12, 1975

  Darling,

  It’s storming here now and my sailboat is bucking up and down on its mooring like a horse in a steeplechase. I took the kayak out a little while ago to ride the waves, and tried it for awhile close to shore (chicken to have to swim back in this water from too far out) and finally miscalculated and tipped. It felt good.

  Listen, I’ve wanted to tell you my side of the week, for it’s stayed with me in force, as if I’d been steeped in tea. Indeed my feeling for you is almost that hue. Sometimes when we’re fucking, or even when just holding you, I can close my eyes and feel you as a rich red presence in my arms, and of course I don’t mean just your hair but your aura. It’s as if orange and red and fine rose-red waves come off your heart, and at such times I see into your emotions and feel a little awe at what we are getting into for it’s a true woman I’m holding then, as big as her heat and her love for me could grow to be as strong as fire and as wrathful if I ever betray it. But what a marvelous love is that woman in you, big girl, the woman who is just beginning to emerge, and I feel cool in the center of this fire, nice and strong and cool as if my emotions are made of some kind of steel and it’s fire I need to give them a better shape.

  I can be walking through the woods up here and think suddenly of you and me kissing in that cab as if we had invented the embrace and discovered the taste of flesh and fruit. Your lips have changed so much since I have known you. Sometimes I feel all of the woman in you coming to me through your mouth even as your soul is shaking like a leaf in the sweet eye of your sex where the come begins to free itself like wet wings stirring up to fly, and then I’m nicely at sea and floating up to your fuck storm. It’s like fucking in sunlight, and all the tender red of your heart comes through my closed eyes and it’s a fall into all the sweet choices—do we fuck, or lay in that funny heaven of being half asleep for hours and glued each to the other’s spine?

  Ah, darling, I’ve never felt more confident that we won’t use each other for too little. We may fuck up, we may get into storms with each other, we may yet disagree profoundly on what we want the other to be, but that’s ahead and we will live in it and find our arts living in it. I feel optimism thinking of you and a little scared at the possibilities that I’m in true good fortune and have a woman equal to me, as bad, as good, as brave, as dumb, as full of sugar and don’t we love to turn the lights down low and let the fire come up. Bitch, you don’t need this letter, but I’ll come to collect for it before too long.

  I love you,

  Norman

  Hey, read the Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence. Skim it till you find the passage about the passionate bridegroom who gives a different night entire to each separate part of his beloved’s torso, limbs and feet.

  Summer was finally over and Norman brought the family back from Maine for the kids to go to school, and told Carol about me. He didn’t have a choice. She called the house one day and I picked up the phone. I know she was in shock over it, since she knew about the other woman Norman had been seeing, Annette, and I’m sure she knew of several others. But “Barbara” was somebody brand-new. I was relieved on the one hand that she finally knew, but the woman side of me felt bad (only a little, but it was real) for her.

  Carol and I have had a tumultuous relationship over the years. There were times when we would have cheerfully thrown each other under the moving wheels of a Mack truck, but there was also something inexplicable in each of us that kind of liked the other. When I had John, she called me in the hospital and we talked for an hour, for the first time, like old dear friends. It was a short-lived hiatus then, but today, we are old dear friends, two survivors, members of a small club, if you will. Not the only members. There were four others, after all, but the only ones who like and understand each other. I’m not going to spend time talking about Norman’s ex-wives. They are women who gave birth to the children I love. They have their good points and their bad ones, as do I, and whatever their relationships were with Norman, they were different from mine. I’m not going to talk about the numerous girlfriends, either, but you know who you are, and there are many more of you than you think.

  One night, not long after Norman had moved in with me for good, the phone rang at three in the morning. I jumped up out of a dead sleep and ran to the living room to answer it, instantly awake. A strange female voice demanded, “Let me speak to Norman.”

  “He’s sleeping,” I said sweetly, like the nice Southern girl I was brought up to be.

  “Well, wake him up. He will be very glad to hear from me.”

  “Honey, if he was that glad to hear from you, you would be here instead of me.” And I put down the phone and went back to bed.

  So here was Carol, having yet another woman in Norman’s life shoved in her face. But at least it was finally out in the open. The one thing Norman kept saying he wanted to do was clean up his life and stop sneaking around, stop lying, stop living in guilt. He was tired of juggling a lot of women, sick of all the time-consuming deceit. He was in his fifties and felt he had wasted a lot of his prime years when he could have written more books. He wanted to get serious about his work, and he wanted to try monogamy, something he had never done. He wanted to see how deep a relationship could go when there were no others, no cheating, no deceit. He wanted to try it with me. Until they had moved back from Maine, he hadn’t told the family about me, and was still spending half the time in Stockbridge with Carol. But after she found out, there was no reason not to tell the kids, no reason not to spend more time in New York, so he began to gradually introduce them.

  Betsy was the first one I met. She was sixteen. Norman sent me alone to the apartment she shared with her mother, Adele, his second wife, who thoughtfully (or whatever) was out. Betsy was exotic, with a head of fabulous curly dark hair like her father’s, and a sweet smile. She was sophisticated for
her years and didn’t seem to mind that here was another of her father’s girlfriends, this one not that much older than she was. She showed me some of her poetry, we talked about her boyfriend, and we’ve been great friends ever since.

  Kate was the second child I met, thirteen at the time. I went to her apartment on Seventy-second street in Manhattan, again by myself, on a day when she’d had a small growth removed from her neck. Her hair had gotten caught up and tangled in the bandage, and I took it off and put a new one on for her. She looked like a perfect mix of her mother and father. She was well mannered and sweet, with a creamy British complexion, at that wonderful age in a girl’s life when everything is poised to bloom.

  Her mother was Lady Jeanne Campbell, Norman’s third wife, the granddaughter of the newspaper magnate Lord Beaverbrook. Jeanne’s brother Ian was the Scottish duke of Argyll and lived in a castle in Inverness. Kate showed me a picture of it on a postcard, with a small arrow pointing to a window, in the vast rows of windows, where she stayed when she went to visit. She had drawn a balloon above it that said, “My room.” Jeannie was striking, with erect posture and a smile that could be welcoming but at the same time brought to mind a cat with feathers caught between its teeth. She had the most incredible voice, a beautiful, aristocratic English accent. I am weak before good upper-class British accents, and hers was the best, not a hint of Scottish in it. I’ve been to Scotland only once, but I could hardly understand anything they said. (I’m sure they thought the same about my thick Southern American accent.)

  Jeannie got married again after she and Norman divorced, and she had another daughter, a beautiful dark-haired girl named Cusi, who was eight when I met her. Cusi was wise beyond her years, and was balancing her mother’s checkbook when I arrived, which they said she did all the time. Jeannie rather enjoyed the fact that Norman had a young girlfriend, I think, and invited me to Thanksgiving dinner that year while he would be in Stockbridge. I said yes, and I so appreciated it. I still had few friends in town and was alone most of the time while Norman was away. But Jeannie also had a wicked streak, and told Norman that she had invited several attractive single men to Thanksgiving as well, so he should be careful, he might lose me. He said he wasn’t the least bit worried, pompous man that he was. I liked her enormously, but we never got to be real friends. It just wasn’t in the game plan. But Kate is one of my best friends today, as is Cusi, as are all of the kids.

  Betsy, me, Danielle, and Kate.

  I went to Provincetown to meet Michael and Stephen on a cold November evening in 1975. I’d taken the bus from New York and Norman had driven from Stockbridge, where he had spent Thanksgiving. As the bus topped the hill on Route 6, I had a view of the curve of the town around the bay in the setting sun; I gasped and fell in love with Provincetown at first sight. I had never seen another town remotely like it. The salt air was clean and invigorating with a hint of fish, and the muted voice of the foghorn was comforting at night. It sounded like music when it mixed with the sound of waves washing the beach. No one ever sleeps better than they do their first night in Provincetown. In summer the population of the town swells to seventy thousand or more, but in winter only about three thousand diehards dig in for the long, dull evenings that start in the middle of the afternoon. The most poetic and eerie description of it I know is in Tough Guys Don’t Dance, which Norman wrote in 1983.

  …the land I inhabited—that long curving spit of shrub and dune that curves in upon itself in a spiral at the tip of the Cape—had only been formed by wind and sea over the last ten thousand years.… Conceived at night (for one would swear it was created in the course of one dark storm) its sand flats still glistened in the dawn with the moist primeval innocence of land exposing itself to the sun for the first time… artists came to paint the light of Provincetown… but then the summer ended and most of the painters left, and the long, dingy undergarment of the gray New England winter, gray as my mood, came down to visit. One remembered then that the land was only ten thousand years old, and one’s ghosts had no roots.… no, there was nothing to domicile our specters who careened with the wind down the two long streets of our town which curved together around the bay like two spinsters on their promenade to church.

  Provincetown was indeed spooky and bone-chilling in the winter wind. We would spend part of every summer there for the next thirty-three years (Norman had come originally with his first wife, Bea, in 1943), and we would live there year-round the last ten years of his life, but the first time I came was magic. Of course it was magic. We were newly in love and everything was magic. We rented a small attic apartment with yellow painted floors, blue walls, and a view of the bay. Across the road was Ciro’s, an Italian restaurant situated in the basement of an old house, which had warm lighting and low ceilings that just escaped being claustrophobic.

  In the middle of the first night, a nor’easter blew in with fierce howls. The electricity went off, as it tends to do often there, and the only light in town was from the glow of snowflakes as they whipped about in the air. Norman and I bundled up and took a walk from our apartment, which was almost in the middle of town, to the far end, about a mile and a half away, to the spot where the Pilgrims first landed and signed the Mayflower compact. In the dark, walking with our heads bent against the wind, we could almost believe that it was three hundred years earlier, no electric lights, no illumination except the occasional flicker of a candle in a window and the luminescence of the snow in the cold, salty air. Then we reached the big motel at the tip of land’s end, hunkered down in the dark like a great sleeping beast. That brought us back to reality. Norman used to say, in his guided tour spiel that he loved to give our guests who had never been there before, that the motel had been erected to commemorate the spot where the Pilgrims had landed, before they’d had to hotfoot it over to Plymouth because they’d killed a couple of Indians and stolen their winter cache of corn.

  We took Michael and Stephen to Ciro’s for dinner, and I remember what I was wearing, a black suit with a straight skirt, a necktie, and white shirt, and a big black hat with a wide sweeping brim. It was an outfit out of a Raymond Chandler novel, my hair swept down in a Lauren Bacall wave. I always loved hats and wore them whenever I could. Hats add drama to any situation, not that this one needed any added drama. The good-looking blond boys were nine and eleven. Michael, the older one, had startling blue eyes like his father, and Stephen’s were green with a glint of the imp. I ordered fried zucchini, which was at least close to my beloved fried squash (I so missed Arkansas cooking), and veal parmigiana, heavy on the garlic. While I tried not to slurp the spaghetti and get it on my shirt, Michael and Stephen, chesty little studlets that they were, entertained me with stories of playing baseball and football.

  After the dinner, they went home and told their mother, Beverly, Norman’s fourth wife, that Dad had this neat new friend, a tall redhead, and I’m sure she groaned. Although they hadn’t lived together for six years, he was still legally married to her, and would be for another five years until he could get the marital situation straightened out, which is too complicated to put into a sentence here. I’ll do a whole chapter about it later. Beverly and I were actually pretty friendly in the beginning, until I got pregnant. (In her bed, no less. How rude is that? At her request, we were staying with the kids in Norman’s and her house in Provincetown in the summer of 1977 while she did a play in Connecticut. One night we even piled all the kids into the car and drove up to see her, and she was really good in the role.) But then when I got pregnant and Norman pressed her for a divorce, it got ugly. However, that’s down the road. It’s hard not to get ahead of myself.

  To continue with my meeting of the kids, Susan was Norman’s oldest child, a girl only six months my junior. Her mother, Beatrice, Norman’s first wife, married a Mexican man when Susie was two, and moved to Mexico City. Sue grew up there and Spanish was her first language. I’ve never met Beatrice but have immense respect for her because after she moved to Mexico, she learned Spanish, went
to medical school, and became a doctor, a psychiatrist. Susan is a psychoanalyst and now lives in Chile. She is another one of my close friends, and the great thing about our relationship is that we feel free to totally be honest and say anything to each other without worrying about hurting the other one’s feelings. That goes back to our first meeting, which was in New York at her aunt Barbara’s, also that same November. We went out alone for lunch to get to know each other, and over soup and hot homemade bread, she said, “I feel like you’ve taken my place with my father.”

  Michael and Stephen with Dad.

  I was a little stunned by the directness of this, and said, “Well, Sue, what exactly is your place with your father?” I tried to make a joke of it, but I thought I knew what she was talking about. As the oldest, she’d had four stepmothers, not to mention several serious girlfriends to contend with, but no one had been as young as I was. Now he had someone her exact age, someone who was there with him all the time while she lived thousands of miles away and saw him once or twice a year. That was the hardest thing for her, not being around him all those years. The other kids at least saw him on a regular basis, but she was too far away. He was not good on the phone, either, so there weren’t many phone calls. I still don’t see her often enough. She married a man from Chile, Marco Colodro, who is much like her father—older, powerful, handsome, divorced with three children, and they have three of their own. (Sue is the analyst to the family. We always go to her for advice. Everyone else is in the arts somehow, so of course we all need an analyst.) That first day, we talked it out over our bowls of soup, and then went to Bloomingdale’s. There has never been any problem that couldn’t be fixed by two women bonding over shopping.