A Ticket to the Circus

by Norris Church Mailer

  Thirty-nine

  We traveled a lot in the late eighties, going to Europe and the Soviet Union several times. The trips were some of the best times for us. We loved walking, poking into little courtyards, and having coffee in small cafés. I didn’t speak a foreign language—my horizons in Atkins were somewhat limited—but Norman spoke passable French, and later, when he started working on the book about Lee Harvey Oswald, he went to Berlitz to learn Russian. It was not a huge success. One time, when he returned from a trip, I accidentally washed his passport in his shirt pocket. We put paper towels between the pages to try to dry it out, but it looked like a weird, fluffy blue biscuit. The next time he went back to Russia, the boy at immigration glanced at it and told him it was no good. “Nyet,” he said, shoving it back across the desk. Norman tried to explain that the date was perfectly valid, that it had gone through the washer, but he didn’t have the words in Russian for “washing machine,” so he attempted to tell the officer he’d fallen into a river. I think what he said was that he jumped into a fish, or maybe the passport was a fish, and the boy was so confused he just shook his head and stamped it.

  I loved Russia. Maybe it was because Norman had never taken any of his other wives there and each new experience in Russia was our own. In other places, like the south of France, or Paris, I would be aglow with delight about how wonderful everything was, and Norman would say, “Ah, that’s nothing. You should have been here in 1948 when I was here with Bea. It was really great then.” Or, “It was so much better back in 1956 when I was here with Adele. It’s really gone downhill.” Finally, at Oxford, I got heartily sick of it. We were looking at the beautiful old buildings, and out behind one was a lovely pasture with brown-and-white cows grazing.

  I said, “Oh, how beautiful, just like a John Constable.”

  He said, “Hm. I do believe this is the same cow pasture I was at with Beverly in 1965, but it was much more beautiful then. The cows were better.”

  I turned on him. “Do you know why it was always better in the old days?” I snarled. “It was because you were young!” That shut him up. And it had the added advantage of being true.

  But Russia was all my own. I went there the first time in 1984, and then in 1989, Gorbachev invited us to a conference on glasnost. There were several other famous Americans there, such as Gregory Peck and Gore Vidal. We hadn’t seen Gore since the night of the PEN reading, when he and Norman had been courteous but stiff, and I was a little nervous about what would happen, but as compatriots often are in a foreign country, we were all quite friendly. Gore and I had always liked each other, and enough time had passed that he and Norman were ready to make an uneasy peace. I don’t think either of them ever mentioned the feud again, for which I was grateful.

  Norman and Gore Vidal at the Supreme Soviet in Russia.

  EDIE VONNEGUT AND I had to give up the painting studio we shared, which saddened me. We’d had a lot of fun together there, and it was the most productive time of my painting life because she was so serious. We would go to the coffee shop on the corner every morning and come back with two cups each and paint like we were in some kind of religious frenzy all day. She did Renaissance-like paintings of angels but in modern-day settings, like an angel riding the subway, or selling her wings on the street. My own style was more realistic. I used old snapshots for reference, making huge pictures of rather sinister children riding tricycles or playing on the beach with their grandparents in old-fashioned bathing suits with skirts and white rubber bathing caps, everyone maniacally smiling for the camera, some shadow of doom over them all. At least that was the way my work was described in one of the reviews. I never consciously put shadows of doom over my protagonists, but I did like to play with shadows. I did commissioned portraits, too, and had a nice list of well-known people as clients, including my friend Pat Lawford, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Roy Cohn, Arthur Schlesinger, and Henry Luce, II.

  After Edie and I had to give up the space, Norman and I bought a small studio for me near our apartment in Brooklyn, where I went nearly every day to paint and write. The studio served another purpose as well. Norman paid me long, languid visits there on the occasional afternoon. It felt almost illicit, and those were great times. Afterward, I would go home first, and start to cook dinner, then he would come in, like nothing had happened, but we would share a little secret glance, or he would kiss me on the neck while I stirred the pot.

  Those were good years; it seemed like whatever distance Norman had had during the movie filming was in the past. Our date book was full of dinners and theater and lunches and cocktail parties. We entertained at home a lot, too; occasionally, we’d have a big party, but more often we’d have small dinners for the family, or for friends. I would do the cooking, good old Southern/Jewish dishes such as roast chicken, meat loaf, or pot roast, or fried chicken, fried okra, mashed potatoes, and corn bread. But my favorite nights were the ones when I snuggled on the couch with the boys and watched reruns of Star Trek and The Twilight Zone, and we ordered Fascati pizza and ate Pillsbury slice-and-bake cookies or popcorn.

  The kids were growing up, getting married, finding their own careers, and I loved the people they married. Not one of them ever had a drug or alcohol problem, and I’m proud of all of them.

  I was happy painting and having a show every year or two, and working at the Actors Studio. I even did a little modeling again. The Elite agency had started an “older” models group. Among other things, I did fur coats (I guess I was destined to be the fur coat girl forever) with my old friend Robert Belott for Lear’s, a new magazine aimed at the older woman (over forty) that Norman Lear’s ex-wife Frances had started with her divorce settlement, and it was a nice ego boost, although I didn’t do it for long. There were things I’d rather do than track around New York with my portfolio on go-sees like a young girl and take all that rejection again.

  My portraits of Pat Lawford, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Norman.

  Fur again, in Lear’s magazine.

  I was also working one day a week doing art therapy for Very Special Arts at NYU Hospital, with kids who had cancer or other acute diseases. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, and one of the best, but after two years, I just couldn’t do it anymore. I began to dread going in, with that false cheery attitude, not knowing who would be gone when I got there, who would be too sick to come to the art room. It takes a special person to be able to care for kids who might not be there the following week, and while I’m in awe of the doctors and nurses and therapists who do it, I ultimately didn’t have what it takes. But I think it prepared me for when I got cancer myself ten years later, and I like to think I gave some of those kids a little break from the misery of their treatments.

  Life was good. Once in a while I would look up at the moon in the night sky and thank God for giving me this life. Then in the late summer of 1991, Norman took a trip to California, I can’t remember what for. He traveled a lot in those days. He had to lecture quite a bit to earn extra money to support all the kids in schools, not to mention the alimonies and the expense of having a second house on the beach and two studios. By the late eighties, I had pretty much stopped going with him on speaking engagements. I always had so much to do in New York, and frankly, it was no longer exciting for me to trail around after him. I’d been bumped too many times by photographers and shoved out of the way by adoring fans. But on this trip, things were just a little strange. He called me at two in the morning once, and it was upsetting that he was calling so late. When I questioned him about where he had been, he was vague and defensive and had obviously been drinking. He also told me not to call him, that he was going to be staying with Warren Beatty as his houseguest, which he had done before, and he didn’t want me to bother Warren and Annette, so I didn’t call.

  Still, it was peculiar. I was having those dreams again, the ones where he left me for another woman, and the woman in the dreams was always someone who wasn’t a great beauty. In fact, she was always rather plain. When he g
ot back to Provincetown, I asked him some pointed questions about the trip, and somehow he seemed different. Evasive. He didn’t want to talk about it and got so angry that I had to let it go. Then the credit card bill came in. I always paid the bills, checking them for odd charges, as anybody does, and this time there were charges in Chicago. A lot of them. From the restaurant amounts, he was obviously paying for dinners for two.

  “Sweetie, there were several charges in Chicago this month. I thought you went to Los Angeles.”

  “Oh, I did, but I didn’t tell you I had to make a stop in Chicago to see Saul Bellow about a project we might do.”

  “Saul Bellow? No, you didn’t tell me.” He tried to make up some kind of story on the spot, but it became more and more outlandish, then he got stuck in the quicksand and saw I wasn’t buying it, so he said, “Okay, I’ll confess. I stopped off to see an old girlfriend.” (I’ll call her April.) I’ll spare you the rest of the painful dialogue, but it was all phony anyhow. She had written to him, he said, out of a clear blue sky. He swore it was the first time he had ever done anything like that, it would never happen again, and on and on and on. I was, of course, crushed. I finally discovered why they call it a broken heart. There is actual physical pain in the heart when you are betrayed by someone you trusted. My wonderful life was falling apart. Nothing made sense; his story kept changing. First he said he couldn’t perform in bed with April, then he said he did but it was terrible, then he said he did and it was better than he thought it would be, so he felt guilty. He kept adding details and changing details. I was totally confused, and the more I questioned him, the angrier he got.

  I became obsessed with finding out the truth. I started going over the phone bills, which listed every long-distance call, and found a lot of calls to Chicago, going back months and months. There were calls to California, too, and other odd calls, to Washington, to Florida. He continued to maintain that this was a onetime thing and it was me he loved and it would never happen again, but I didn’t believe him. Small things that had happened over the previous few years came back to me, like the time he helped the daughter of an old girlfriend get into the Actors Studio, and when she hugged him to thank him, right in front of me, she said something about what a nice surprise it had been when she’d seen him in her mother’s living room in California the year before. At the time, he explained it away somehow that sort of made sense, and I let it drop. Now I remembered all the comments he had made to actresses about being in his film; his invitation to Kathleen Turner for lunch; all the trips to California he had made without me when he was making the movie; the time he went to Telluride for the film festival with Tom Luddy and said they wouldn’t pay for me and we couldn’t afford my ticket; the time he went to Paris to see his old friend Jean Malaquais and didn’t want me to go because he wanted some alone time with Jean. It all made sense now. I had been a complete and total fool. For years.

  We fought and hashed it out for the next two weeks, me crying and getting so angry I physically attacked him a time or two, hitting him with my fists like a child, him promising again and again that it was a onetime thing that was over. It was the end of the summer and I had to go back to Brooklyn to put John, who was thirteen at the time, back in school, and Matt had to start NYU. Norman said he needed a few days alone, so the plan was for the kids and me to go back, and he would stay on for another couple of weeks and write and get his head together. Then he would join us. I saw this as ominous now, too, especially as we were in the middle of such a difficult time. Suddenly all the times he had come to Provincetown by himself to write began to be suspicious. Had he really been alone working? Who could have been with him? Who was this April person? He wouldn’t tell me anything about her, but I recognized the name from her picture in a book of photographs we had. If it was the same woman, she was about Norman’s age, and not a great beauty, but then in my dreams the woman wasn’t, either. Norman refused to talk about her or answer any of my questions. He just wanted it all to go away and for me to “rise above it.”

  It was extremely hard to go on as if nothing was wrong in front of the kids, but at first they didn’t seem to notice anything different. Eventually I had to confide in Danielle, Betsy, and Kate. They were too sensitive to me; they knew something was up. The first time Danielle called and I picked up the phone and said “Hello,” she said, “What’s wrong?” She could hear it in my voice. They were on my side; they had been through this with their father before—ironically, the last time with me—but they had hoped it would never happen again.

  Oddly, when we were packing the car, Norman put a small box of books in the trunk and handed me the keys to his studio. He wanted me to take them over there for him, which was way out of character for him. I never went to his studio, ever, not even to clean it. It was in about the same shape our apartment had been in when I’d first seen it. He simply didn’t want anyone in his space; even Myrtle didn’t go to clean it. I had been there only a handful of times, but I took the keys without question and said I would deliver the box.

  I waited a couple of days after we got home, getting up my courage, and then I took the books, walked the long block to his studio, and went in, up the four flights of stairs. The place was filthy, of course, and I marveled again that he could work in such surroundings. Every surface was laden with books and papers and stacks of stuff. Dirty coffee cups and teacups filled the sink. But something else was different as well. Things were missing. He used to keep one of the nude pictures of me I’d given him for Christmas a few years back on his desk, and that was gone, as was a large funny nude drawing I had done of myself for him that used to hang in the bedroom. All traces of me were gone.

  I went straight to his desk and opened the drawer, and then sat down. It was crammed full of letters and pictures and notes from other women, small gifts in boxes—not from just one woman but several. Notes that were indisputably love letters. I was shocked at some of them, from women who were supposed to be friends of mine. Other relationships he had explained away by saying the women were old girlfriends and he had wanted to help them out by doing an interview with them, or giving them a reference for a job, or helping out the one in California’s daughter at the Actors Studio.

  How had I been so blind? He had obviously been cheating on me for a very long time with a small army of women. I remembered women coming up to us at parties and in restaurants and saying hello in overly coy, suggestive ways, which had been odd and certainly annoying. One was an aging porn star I’d had no idea he even knew at all. She was so persistent one night at a restaurant that he had to ask her to leave. Now there was a stack of nude photographs of her in the drawer (obviously not ones taken by him; they were much older than that). He had somehow convinced me he was an innocent bystander who was being pursued by these women because of his celebrity. I’d believed him because we still had an incredible sex life, we had a great home life, and he was so sincere when he told me how much he loved me, that I was the love of his life, that he had never before had what we had, he was so happy with the family, I had given him a life with his children, and so on. And even now I think he was telling the truth, in a way. I know he did love me, I do believe I was the love of his life, and he did love the children and our family life more than anything, but nevertheless he was still able to compartmentalize this other life away from us, and to him, as he said over and over, willing me to understand, it had nothing to do with me. Except, of course, it did.

  I was shaken, so sick I had to go to the bathroom. The bathroom was as dirty as the rest of the apartment. As I sat there, trying to get my head together and figure out what I was going to do next, it dawned on me that he must have wanted me to find everything. Why else would he have given me the keys to his studio? Why had he been able to cover it up all these years, and for what reason now was he leaving clues big enough to drive a truck through?

  I got up and flushed. Something in the tank blew up, and water started jetting out of the back of the toilet. Water was begin
ning to flood the floor and pour into the studio. Soon it would be going down into the floor below. There was nobody in the building except for me. There was no phone. Norman purposely didn’t have one so he wouldn’t be bothered while he wrote. Soaked from water spurting into my face, I managed to get the lid off the toilet tank and propped the ball thingy up with a book, which I hated to do, but there was nothing else at hand, so the water stopped spouting out, at least, and then I set out to mop the floor and in the process gave the place a good cleaning. I scrubbed for a couple of hours, unleashing my anger—crying and yelling and kicking the furniture with every mop stroke. Then, exhausted, I went back home and wrote Norman a letter. As I’ve said, the written word was the only way he would understand. We had been trying to talk for the past two weeks and it hadn’t worked.

  Dear Norman,

  Over the years I’ve often wished for some kind of psychic gift. The few times any inkling of that talent has presented itself has always been in dreams. When you went to Chicago alone that first time, I had a dream that you were leaving me. But you were so adamant about your innocence, I believed you when you swore you were only doing research. The dreams seldom occur, but they’re always disturbing, and up to now have always been put aside by your love and assurances. This morning, I woke up in a panic because the dream was so vivid. You know me well enough by now to know that the passion to know is an all consuming passion with me. I really believe I could forgive you anything if I only knew what it is I’m forgiving you for, and if I can believe that it’s over. You’re asking me to forgive you now, but something is wrong. You are lying about silly insignificant things. You are getting angry when I press you. I don’t believe you are really sorry. Even though you swore you’d never see April again, there is still the feeling that you have unfinished business with her. Why else would you tell me different versions of the story? If the scenario was true that it was an uncompleted attempt, then perhaps you believe you have to sleep with her again to save your pride—not unlike the first time you and I made love, is it? Or is the scenario true that it happened and was better than you expected? Are you in a dilemma as to whether or not you will risk our marriage to feed the beast and continue the affair—one obviously just a bit more intense than you pretend?