A Ticket to the Circus

by Norris Church Mailer

  My father had a man-to-man talk with him alone, along the lines of, “She’s a lot younger than you are. She might get up there and meet someone younger and leave you.” And then he had a talk with me and said, “Norman is even older than I am. One of these days he will be an old man and you will have to be his nurse. Are you prepared for that?” I don’t think either Norman or I were thinking much past bedtime then, but many years later, as I was nursing my elderly husband, my father’s words kept creeping back into my head. At the time, I said, “Daddy, we love each other, and yes, there’s a big age difference, but do we pass up twenty or thirty years of happiness just because he is going to get old? I might die first. You never know.” When I was diagnosed with cancer twenty-five years later, those words came back to haunt me as well.

  You never know what life is going to hand you, but if I had it all to do over, I would do it all again. Norman would have, too. I know that because just weeks before he passed away, I asked him if he would do it all again, and he said yes. He reached out and got my hand; with a little difficulty, he took my ring off and then put it on my finger again, saying, “With this ring, I thee wed.” A lot had happened in the almost thirty-three years we had spent together, but for better or for worse, the love was real, and it was always there.

  When we got back to New York after the Christmas visit, Matthew took one look at Norman’s apartment with big eyes, then ran and climbed up the ladder as fast as he could, like a little monkey. The ropes and ladders and the small upstairs rooms were a perfect little boy’s playhouse, once I got over the fear he was going to fall.

  Almost as soon as we got back home, Norman left for Stockbridge, to spend Christmas with Carol and face the difficult task of telling her he was leaving her. He took my Italian photographs to show her, which I thought was not necessarily the best thing to do, but he did it. Norman was a young fifty-two, vigorous, full of ideas and energy. He was setting fires and jumping across roofs to escape the flames, and he needed someone young and a little wild to hold his hand and jump across with him. I wasn’t as wild as I let him think I was, but I was young and ready to jump.

  Beverly was so far back in his history that I hardly thought of her as his wife at all, even though they were still legally married. I think part of her was secretly glad when he left Carol for me, as they understandably weren’t friends, and I’m sure Beverly thought I was just one more girlfriend who would soon be gone. The other wives were buried even deeper in the layers of paleontology, and it was hard to even think of them as having been married to Norman, it had been such a long time ago. That was a different man from the one I knew.

  As far as Annette went, I never met her, but Norman had told me stories about her, how tough she was, how she fancied herself as his bodyguard, and she had once gotten into a fight with Elaine Kaufman in Elaine’s restaurant. When the six months of their separation were up, he told her he had met someone totally new that he was living with and he wouldn’t be seeing her again. In answer, she sent him a message through his then secretary, Molly, that she had a gun and was going to kill us both. He took her seriously enough to change the locks on the apartment door, as she had keys. I can’t imagine why it was such a shock to her. If a man tells you he wants six months of no contact with you, that is a clue he doesn’t want to be with you. Or at least it would have been to me.

  I did take Matt to FAO Schwarz for Christmas and loaded up on toys. Norman got him a complicated Erector set that was way too advanced for a four-year-old, but Matt kept it under his bed, and years later he put it together. Fanny took a liking to Matt as she had to me, and didn’t mind babysitting him. He was a good little boy, inventive and quiet, with a full life going on inside his head.

  From the time he was small, he imagined complete scenarios, lined up his little soldiers in rows, and played all the parts of both sides in a war. It was entertaining to watch him obliviously talking and moving his soldiers around, crashing planes and rushing ambulances to the crash sites. It was almost as if he had been in a real war in a past life and was reenacting it. He could draw really well, too, precocious for his age, and he drew German soldiers with insignia on their uniforms that looked remarkably like the real ones I looked up in books. I always believed he had been either a German soldier or a Jew in the last war; sometimes he had nightmares about things he would or should never have known about. He would wake up screaming, saying he was being put into an oven. I’m a total believer in reincarnation, and often young children still retain remnants of memories of their last lives. I was in awe of him, and so glad he was here with me, safe. I enrolled him in nursery school at Open House, not far from our apartment, and every day when we walked home, we would stop and get an ice cream cone at Baskin-Robbins or a small toy at the drugstore. He particularly liked Boney Benny, a rubber skeleton, and had several of those. If anything, I worried at his enthusiasm for horror movies—he loved Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Wolfman, as well as all the superheroes. From the time he was able to think in those terms, he wanted to make movies.

  Norman came home to Brooklyn on New Year’s eve. It was snowing, and we went to Gage and Tollner on Fulton Street in Brooklyn—a restaurant that had opened at the turn of the century and still retained its Victorian flavor—to celebrate, just the two of us. Although I had never been happier, and he seemed to be just as happy and relieved to have finally made the decision, it must have been a little bittersweet for him. Now Maggie would begin the ritual of coming to visit, just as the other children did. He had left them all, the wives and the seven children. I should have been worried that I, too, would be next in line for heartbreak, but I wasn’t. He so totally convinced me that I was the love of his life, that I was the one he wanted to be with, that it never entered my mind he would do the same thing to me.

  As naïve as it was, as farfetched as it seems looking back now, I was right. He never left me, in spite of some heartbreak along the way. Whatever qualities I had, they were something he needed, and for whatever reasons, I was the one he stayed with. A lot of people have tried to figure that one out, it was such an unlikely pairing. Some have said that I have a calm centered quality that appealed to and balanced his fiery personality, or that I was his Marilyn Monroe (although Marilyn and I were nothing alike in any way I could see). I do know that I ran his life like a tidy ship—I took care of the kids, the bookkeeping, and bill paying, and got the insurance we needed. I looked after his mother and his children, keeping in touch with them by phone when they weren’t with us, making sure we all got together from time to time for dinners or outings, and organized the summers. I shopped and cooked and saw that he always had clean clothes in his closet and a car full of gas. I hung pictures, painted rooms, and did minor repairs on the house. I rewired lamps and did other small jobs. I put in bookshelves. I dealt with the workmen who did things that were beyond me. He was always grateful and said that I allowed him to write and not have to deal with life, and that’s certainly true.

  Once, early in the relationship, when he was at work (he didn’t have a phone in his studio), I needed him for something. I forget what now, but at the time I thought it was important, so I went and knocked on his door. He was not pleased. He said, “When I’m writing, pretend I have gone to South America. What would you do if I was in South America? You have a brain. You can deal with whatever comes up.” I apologized and said, “Okay,” and I never knocked on his door again.

  I realized then that he would never be a partner for me, like a lot of marriages were, but in truth, I enjoyed taking care of everything. I would not have liked to be married to someone who made me depend on him. We agreed on most things such as politics and religion; he liked my taste in decorating, he was generous, and he seldom questioned any purchase I made. His mother said I was down-to-earth and levelheaded, like she was. (He told friends I had more common sense than anyone he’d ever known besides his mother, and I equaled her.) Fanny said I knew when to overlook things (or as Norman used to say when he had done somet
hing particularly egregious, “Rise above it!”) and not fight, although Norman loved fighting better than anything, which I never truly enjoyed. He would say that I did like fighting, and we certainly fought a lot. I’m sure our friends were exhausted by all the fighting, the repartee, the one-upmanship we engaged in all the time.

  When we were alone, we got along fine for the most part, but if we were out with friends, or at a dinner party, it was a game we invariably played, one of us making a comment, the other one topping it. People’s heads would swivel back and forth, as if they were watching a tennis match. Sometimes I did enjoy the back-and-forth, especially if I won, but I did get terribly weary of his bad-boy behavior, like the time he invited an old girlfriend to dinner when I had a fever and he expected me to entertain her. I cooked a nice meal and tried to be gracious to her and the girlfriend she had brought along for protection, but she was flirty with him, snarky to me, and when Norman mentioned I hadn’t been feeling well, she said “Oh, I hope it’s not cancer” in a tone of voice that indicated that was exactly what she was hoping for.

  After she left, I complained bitterly, and he told me for the umpteenth time to “rise above it.” I said that he should marry an angel—if he could find one that would have him—that I had no wings with which to “rise above it.” At times like those, the fights were real. He did things like that purely for the novelistic curiosity of seeing what would happen, I think. Although I would prefer to believe that he was a curious novelist than to think he was just an insensitive clod.

  Clod or angel, there are many reasons we lasted for thirty-three years, aside from the physical passion, which was as intense decades into the marriage as it was at the beginning, if not as frequent. As trite as it sounds, I think we stayed together because we really loved each other, we loved our kids, we loved our life, and we were comfortable together. We had each found someone whose quirks and habits we could live with, like a key in a lock. Besides, if I had left him, as I seriously considered only once, I would have always wondered what he was up to, and would have been miserable in my curiosity.

  Twenty-five

  Even though I was in a big agency, getting work as a model wasn’t automatic. I had to go to appointments called go-sees with photographers, sometimes four or five in a day, to try to get them to give me work or tests, which are photographic sessions in which the photographers try out lighting and new ideas, perhaps discover the next big talent, and models get pictures for their books. I had the pictures from Italy and the ones from Milton Greene, which I showed to everyone, but I had no tear sheets, which are magazine pages from real work, and I didn’t have a variety of looks, no fashion shots at all, only beauty, or head shots.

  Most of the models were younger than I, all of course beautiful, single for the most part, and the photographers, with few exceptions, were all youngish men. I was at a disadvantage before I even knew it because I couldn’t date the photographers and get them to take my picture, and I didn’t go to the parties that were being given every night, or go out to the clubs and network. The name of the game was hooking up, and I had Norman and Matt and the family. Wilhelmina and her husband, Bruce Cooper, had parties at their house almost every weekend, and I didn’t go to those, either, for the same reasons.

  Wilhelmina called me into the office early on and told me I needed to move to Paris for a year of seasoning. It was traditional. A new girl would go to Paris, a rich playboy would meet her at the airport in a limousine with a bottle of champagne, and the girl would spend a year working for French magazines, which were much easier to break into than American ones. The girls would have a ball with all the men, and then come back to New York with sophistication, experience, and a book full of beautiful tear sheets. I told Willie it was impossible for me to move to Paris. I wasn’t going to leave Matt again, and I knew if I left Norman for a year, he would find someone else.

  So I just trudged around New York with my few pictures, doing a lot of testing and getting small ads for things like bras for A&S or sunglasses for Gloria Vanderbilt, a little work for Clairol, but no big jobs. I was making sixty dollars an hour, the beginning rate, and when I started working more, I would be raised to seventy-five dollars an hour. It seemed like a lot when they first told me how much I would be making, but when you get only one or two hours a week of real work—if that—minus your taxes, commission, and expenses, it isn’t so much. I had to start taking money from Norman, as much as I hated to.

  In the beginning I pretended it was a loan I would pay back, but he just laughed and said don’t worry about it. That was one thing about Norman, he was generous to a fault. Not only with me but with all the kids and exes. Any old friend who was down on their luck and needed a hundred bucks could come and get it from him. His attitude about money was, “Money is cabbage; it will always come when you need it,” and for him, somehow it always did. Not that he didn’t work hard for it. In the years when the writing wasn’t enough to support the enormous family, when we had as many as six children in college and private school, he also went on the road and lectured, sometimes doing as many as twenty lectures a year at colleges and other venues. He wrote magazine pieces and did anything he could to make an extra buck.

  I occasionally went with him on the road (he did meet me when he was on a lecture tour, after all, no fool this girl!), and he was a phenomenon onstage. He came alive in the spotlight. No matter what his mood, when he got up in front of the audience, a switch turned on and his eyes were luminescent, his brain crackled with energy. He became even more articulate than normal, speaking in full paragraphs and pulling facts and figures and quotes out of his head that always astounded his audience. He spoke mostly about politics and the state of the world. Sometimes he would read from his work. He always had a great deal to say about what was wrong with this world, one thing being plastic. Plastic was poisoning the human race, and everyone just laughed when he said it, but now, by golly, they are discovering that plastic is, indeed, poison. Not to mention how it never disintegrates and is clogging the landfills.

  Another thing he spoke often about was television, and how it was making all the kids become ADD and have no attention spans because every seven minutes the program they were watching was interrupted by a commercial, so their heads were spun in a totally different direction. No wonder kids couldn’t sit for an hour in class, or read a book without having music or TV or something else to distract them. I was in total agreement with his ideas, most of them.

  A big truck of books and his stuff from Stockbridge came to the apartment soon after he moved back, most of which we put in the basement. He tried to write at his desk in the living room, but it was too distracting with the phone and Matt and me bumping around in the house, so he moved downstairs to a small room that we owned on the floor below to use as an office. It was a little claustrophobic but had a big window with a view of the city, and a teeny kitchen with a fridge, a small sink, and a four-burner stove. A person could live there, although not too comfortably. I arranged my modeling appointments so I could take Matt to nursery school and pick him up, and on the evenings we went out, he stayed with Fanny. I cooked a lot, though, and we enjoyed quiet evenings at home. We were beginning to find a rhythm to our life together.

  We still split the time between my apartment and his, more at my place since Matt had come to live with us. One day, we were set to take the afternoon train to Harvard, where Norman was lecturing, and Matt was going to spend the night with Fanny. Maggie had been in for a visit with her nana, Myrtle, and we had spent a nice few days with the kids, who were both imaginative and creative and got along well, but Myrtle and Maggie were going back to Stockbridge that morning on the bus. I’d said my goodbyes because I had to run into the city for a little modeling job in the morning, and was walking Matt to nursery school first. When we got outside, Matt said, “Oh, I forgot my lunch!” It was on the kitchen counter. I told him to wait right by the door and I’d run up and get it.

  As I approached the apartment, the mo
st god-awful noise came from inside, sort of a mix of groan and yell, one that I’d never heard before, which literally made the hair rise on the back of my neck. I fumbled with the key, got the door open, and rushed into the bathroom. It looked like the set of Psycho. Norman was standing in the tub with blood rhythmically spurting out of his hand with every pump of his heart, splattering against the wall. I grabbed a towel and wrapped it around his hand, and it was soaked in two minutes. Norman got out and sat on the floor, pressing hard on the wound, trying to no avail to staunch the bleeding. The white porcelain knob of the shower was broken; evil, bloody shards lay on the bottom of the tub. The shower knob had been rusted shut, and since I always took baths, I’d never even noticed. Norman had never taken a shower at my place, either. He had always waited until he got home. When he tried to turn it, he thought, with typical macho zeal, “If that girl can turn this thing on, I can, too,” and he strained until the porcelain knob broke and sliced a major artery in his thumb.

  “Go up to my mother’s and get some tape,” he managed to get out. “But don’t tell her I cut myself.” He was beginning to turn the color of flounder belly. I ran out the door and up the stairs. I couldn’t wait for the elevator. I knocked on his mother’s door, and trying to be cool, I said, “Um, could I borrow some tape, please, Fan? Norman cut his finger a little bit.”

  She smiled and said, “Of course, darling, but you’ll have to wait. Myrtle is in the bathroom.”

  I got hysterical. “I can’t wait! Norman’s cut his thumb half off!” I yelled, and ran through the apartment and flung open the bathroom door. Myrtle was sitting on the toilet, her eyes as big as moon pies. I started throwing everything out of the medicine cabinet onto the floor, not caring if it broke or not. Finally, I found the tape and raced out the door, Fanny hot on my heels.