With the dream sitting on me like a gray wool shawl, I went to your studio to see if I could find a clue as to why I can’t seem to get a handle on this. I know it was underhanded, but I feel like I’m fighting for my life, and you did give me the key, knowing full well I would use it. Your studio is such chaos that a systematic search would have been difficult, so I just looked through your desk drawer. Lots of interesting things in that drawer. Actually, I never found the letters from April that I had hoped would enlighten me to the intensity of your relationship, or anything that mentioned April at all, but I did find a Christmas gift, a copy of one of those fat little prehistoric women, with a card from “Your Willendorf Goddess,” Rita*, and then a note dated over a year ago from Linda* promising not to ask Norman Mailer for more money until March of 1990, but if you give her a thousand dollars she will love you. Have you been giving her money for sex, or just because she’s a “poor kid struggling to make it as a writer in the big tough world” as you once told me when I asked you why you were doing so many interviews with her? There was also a cute card with a row of women showing their butts, and a note thanking you for “One for the road,” from somebody in Florida, and a sex poem (one really can’t call it a love poem) from Pixie* in Washington. What in the world is THAT? Have I really been such a bad wife these last few years that you have turned away from me searching for a woman who can be all things to you? Or several that can be a little bit each? How have you had the energy? You’ve hardly lagged in that department with me. Well, maybe a little. At this point I am a very confused woman.
After more than sixteen years I feel like I’m living with a stranger. Incredibly, insanely, the sex has been better with you these last two weeks than it has ever been, and I’m remembering the early years. You are all consuming to me now. I only want, more than anything, to go on with you in the life we have. I want us to continue to love our children and have the home life we perhaps have taken for granted all these years. But if you truly are dissatisfied—even a small part of you—and you really need other women in your life to make you complete, then I won’t stay with you. I don’t want to end up a bitter wife, searching phone bills and Visa receipts for clues of infidelity, dying inside when you take a trip; not believing you when you say in that flat voice, “I love you.” I deserve better than that. I’ve given you my youth, but I’m not yet old, and I can still find happiness elsewhere.
Don’t call me right way. Use these next few days to think about what I’ve said. Sort out your feelings. For the first time, be honest with me. If you decide to go on with me, I want to know the extent of your affairs. Have the courage to tell me. Did you take someone to Paris that time you went to see Jean? Did you arrange to meet women at your lectures? Have you had women to our house in Provincetown all those weeks I thought you were there alone writing? If you can tell me the truth, all of it, I really believe I can come to terms with it, but I have to have the air cleared before I can start over and begin a new life with you—assuming you want to begin a new life with me, and you may not because to me, that means fidelity. For both of us. Talk to me. If in your heart of hearts you don’t want to give up other women, then get your balls together and tell me. Trust me. It’s not so difficult. My Alpha, at least, is a very understanding soul. And I do love you, it seems. I can’t help myself. We can have one of the great loves of this century, or you can finally, truly be free and alone—in Paris—if that’s your choice.
I’m not like my mother now. I’m not weeping. I’m dead serious. I won’t go on like this, so you have to do some hard thinking and make a decision.
Still your wife,
Norris
I faxed the letter to him in Provincetown, and within ten minutes the phone was ringing.
“Hello.”
“That was some letter. You really are a writer.”
“Are you trying to flatter me?”
“I’m trying.”
“You didn’t have to call. I told you to wait and think about it.”
“I don’t need to. I want to be with you.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’ve never been more sure.”
“Then I think you’d better come home.”
“I think I had.”
HE ARRIVED IN BROOKLYN that night. He kissed the kids and then said we were going out for dinner. Instead, we went over to my studio, where I sat on the couch and he pulled up a chair to face me. Then he started to confess. He had been working on Harlot’s Ghost, his book about the CIA, for several years and it was due to come out soon. He said his double life started when he began researching that book, and I suppose it could even be true. The timing was about right. All the clandestine talking on pay phones, making secret plans, hiding and sneaking around, were perfect spy maneuvers. He said he needed to live that kind of double life, to know what his characters were going through. (It was an imaginative excuse. I do give him credit for that.)
He said he had been totally true to me, except for one or two tiny one-night stands with old girlfriends when he was on lecture tours, for eight years after we got together, which might even be mostly true. It was his grand experiment in monogamy, and I had believed him. While it could hardly be said the experiment was a total success, it was the longest he had ever been true (more or less) to a woman in his life. His nature was to be a philanderer. Still, if he was (more or less) true for the first eight years of our relationship, that left the last eight years in which he was totally, blindingly, a cheat.
“Why didn’t I know?” I said, incredulously. “How could I have been so ignorant all this time?”
“It’s not hard to fool someone who loves you and trusts you,” he said, with perfect sincerity. No. I guess it’s not. I sat there silently and thought about that. “I’m going to tell you everything,” he continued, “but there will be no divorce. I don’t want this to break us up. You are my life, and I will not let you leave me.”
“You tell me everything and then we’ll talk about it,” I said. “I’m not promising anything now.” So he began, and the more he told, the angrier I got. Detail after detail, woman after woman. Once he began, it was like he was vomiting up a bad meal and had to get it all out. At one point, I started screaming at him, then I was on my feet, hitting him and scratching him, trying to really hurt him. He just buttoned up and let me do it, protecting himself as best he could. He never hit me back once. When I was exhausted, I fell back down on the couch and he continued. I couldn’t believe how much he had to tell me, how blind and stupid I had been. It went on until I could take no more, and then we went back to the apartment, where we went to bed, totally exhausted, fell into each other’s arms, and had wild sex. Go figure.
Great sex aside, my life was in tatters. Now that he had begun, every day brought more revelations, and in the midst of all this Sturm und Drang, our life somehow went on. We accepted social dates, we had family dinners, we became adept at showing one face to everyone and another to ourselves, although I’m sure we weren’t fooling anyone. Alone, I was scathing to him. He was brutal to me.
I remember once we were going to have dinner with Jason Epstein, Norman’s editor, and his wife, Judy Miller. On the way up in the elevator, Norman said something that made me so angry I reached out and scratched his face, just before I rang the doorbell. I couldn’t help it. It was a reflex, like my hand had taken on a life of its own. Three long, red marks appeared on his cheek. As the door opened, I smiled brightly and said, “Jason! How wonderful to see you!” He looked startled as Norman fumbled in his pocket for his handkerchief, and mumbled, “Oh, the cat got me, ha, ha.” I swept into the room, Jason following behind me looking confused, and nothing else was said about it.
It wasn’t the first time I attacked him. I couldn’t control myself, and he couldn’t stop confessing, giving me detail after detail, trying to explain why he had done all the things he had, over and over and over again. We might be in the back of a taxi, going to a black-tie dinner, and he would suddenly remembe
r someone else he had slept with that he had forgotten to tell me about. I would dramatically tell the driver to pull over, and I’d get out, either going on to the dinner in another car or making Norman get out and chase after me. It went on for weeks, his confession and my rage.
Then Harlot’s Ghost came out and publicity started for the book. To my horror, one of the girlfriends, Linda, the author of the note asking for a thousand dollars, a woman he had been giving money to for nine years, came to the book party. She was shockingly brazen, bringing photographers over to take her picture with Norman, standing close to him, looking in my direction as if daring me to come and do something about it. I ignored her. Finally, she came directly up to me, photographer in tow, and taunted me while he took pictures. Norman stood silently a few feet away, drinking, trying to ignore the whole thing. I was about to explode but refused to get into a fight with her, which was exactly what she wanted, a big hair-pulling fight that would land her in the newspapers. So I just told her in a low voice to enjoy the party, that she had gotten the last nickel she was going to get out of Norman, and I walked away. I could feel my insides roiling into a knot. This nightmare was never going to end. How could I continue to live with a man who would have a relationship with such a woman?
But it got worse. I went with him on the publicity tour for Harlot’s Ghost. He wanted me to. He insisted upon it. One of the first stops was Chicago. As we landed at O’Hare, he told me that the woman who was meeting us, the one who was to be our guide, driving us to the radio shows and appearances, was the woman he had been having the affair with. He had gotten her the job. But her name wasn’t April. He had made that up. I’ll call her Helen.
I was a wreck as we came off the plane. It was like a scene out of Fellini as she came to meet us at the airport gate. She was his age if not older; she wore a gray wig, was about five feet tall, and must have weighed two hundred and fifty pounds or more. She was nervous, of course. How could she not be? I felt sorry for her; it was awkward in the extreme. Later, when I asked Norman what had attracted him to her, he said that sometimes he needed to be the good-looking one, and that he didn’t want to have someone who was competition for me. My head was swimming. It was so cruel to her, as well as to me, and she obviously adored him. I found myself chatting with her, trying to put her at ease, and once when Norman introduced her by the wrong name, I cringed. What was I doing? The world had turned upside down.
We went on to San Francisco and Los Angeles, where there was another old girlfriend in the audience, also around his age. Again, it was awkward; again I was polite to her. I saw a pattern here, and wasn’t sure what to make of it. All of the women he had been seeing were older than I was; some were older than he was. But it didn’t make me feel any better that they weren’t young, nubile beauties. Did he think that made it all right? These women took over my life. I couldn’t think of anything else; we couldn’t seem to talk about anything else.
At night I prayed. Was I being punished for taking Norman away from his last wife (even though I’d known he wasn’t going to stay with her anyhow)? I went over in my head all the things I had done wrong through the years, all the sins that were on the sin list, and there were a lot. I methodically asked God to forgive me. But I didn’t feel better. In fact, I felt foolish for being so witless as to believe this was God’s punishment for drinking wine or playing cards or having that misbegotten little affair while I was married to Larry, or the few nights I’d spent with Benicio. What kind of a God would punish someone for stuff like that? Still, part of me wondered—would I be better off if I was still married to Larry and trying to play by the rules laid down by the Freewill Baptist Church? And part of me answered, Who was I trying to kid, God or myself? We both knew better. And who had elected Norman to punish me for my sins anyhow? According to the sin list, he was waaaay ahead of me in that department. Why wasn’t he being punished? I began to think I was going crazy.
Sam Donaldson of ABC News came to the apartment with a TV crew to interview Norman, and he wanted to do a little side interview with me on camera. I wasn’t anxious to talk about my husband’s wonderful book. (Some of our worst fights had been over that book. I—as well as his editor, his assistant Judith, and others—had begged him to continue the exciting spy story with which he had begun the book, but instead he went off on tangents in Uruguay and Cuba that had nothing to do with the story he had started, and then he ended the 1,310-page book with “To Be Continued.”) Now that I knew so much from his endless confessions, there were many references in the book that I recognized as being about the other women, and those raised my ire and made me dislike the book even more. But I didn’t want to make a big deal of it to Sam Donaldson and take the chance our troubles would come to light on network TV, so I agreed. The soundman clipped the microphone onto my blouse, and Sam and I chatted for a minute. I looked into his eyes, which had the strangest pupils; they were not round but rectangles, like a goat’s eyes, and with his rather pointed eyebrows, it gave him a devilish air. But I liked him; we were teasing and having a bit of fun.
I said, “So, what do you want from me? I’ll answer any question you have, except for one: ‘What’s it like to live with Norman Mailer?’ Everyone always asks that. It’s the kind of question that requires 5 percent from the interviewer and 95 percent from the interviewee, and it’s boring. I know you can come up with a better question.” He laughed and agreed, and when the camera started rolling, the first thing he asked, with a twinkle in his goat eyes, was “What’s it like to live with Norman Mailer?”
I had a twinkle in my own eye as I answered, right off the top of my head, “Well, Sam, it’s kind of like living in the zoo. One day Norman is a lion; the next he’s a monkey. Occasionally he’s a lamb, and a large part of the time he’s a jackass.” I don’t know where that came from. It just sprang out of my mouth. Sam laughed, but I could see he was shocked, as was Norman and the rest of the crew. I had no idea they would leave it in, but they did, and it was picked up and printed everywhere.
After the show aired, one of the calls I got was from Benicio. He said, “I saw you on TV. What’s wrong?” I broke down and told him I was thinking of leaving Norman, and he said, “You need to get away. I’ll send you an airplane ticket. Come and see me. I just broke up with Laura* [his girlfriend of many years], and it would be good to see you.” He had moved a couple of times since he had been in Little Rock, and now he was a surgeon in Atlanta.
While I declined his offer of a ticket, the idea of getting away appealed to me, so I called my parents and Aurora in Little Rock and told them I was coming. I didn’t tell my parents about the trouble we were having, just that I wanted to come down by myself, and if they thought it was odd, they were still happy. I told the kids that Aurora and I were taking a road trip to see our old friend Jean in Florida, and Norman decided to take them skiing. I flew to Arkansas and spent a nice restorative few days with my parents. They babied me and cooked all the fried dinners I could eat. We went to Wal-Mart and to Whatta Burger and drove out to the cemetery to visit the ancestors. It was so great to be with the two people in the world, besides my kids, who loved me unconditionally and were good and honest, who would never betray me. But I had never been able to talk to them about my personal problems, and that hadn’t changed. I didn’t want them to know what Norman and I were going through. They would have just said, “We told you not to marry that old man. You bring the boys and come back down here and live with us.” Their way of dealing with things would have been to pray about it, and I’m sure they did that anyhow. They could tell, I know, that something was wrong. Maybe their prayers helped.
Then I went to Little Rock, and Aurora, her husband, Phil, and I got into their car and drove to Florida to visit Jean, the third member of our Three Musketeers. Jean had gotten married for the second time to a handsome younger man named Juan and at age forty had a new baby girl, a sister for her two older sons. Phil and Aurora owned a booth in an antiques mall, so we stopped at every little roads
ide shop along the way in Tennessee and Mississippi looking for treasures, which I had never in my life done. My father, and then my husbands (both of them), had refused to stop the car for that sort of thing. Aurora had gotten a perm in her straight hair, “to make it easier to deal with on the road,” and it became a hilarious running joke as she fought the frizzy mass of hair in the heat and humidity. We stopped for the night in Foley, Alabama, at what we called the Bates Motel. I went out to the pay phone at the side of the road and called Norman, thinking how things had changed, how now I was the one on the road at the phone booth and he was at home holding down the fort. It was a tight, unhappy conversation, as all our calls seemed to be.
Everything on the trip was hilarious. I was on the brink of totally changing my life and was giddy with possibilities. We got to Florida and had a great time with Jean and her new family. On the surface I was strong and determined, but when I was alone at night, I was scared. It was so ironic. Here one of my oldest, best friends was starting out a life of happiness with a baby and new love, and my own life was breaking apart. Of course I told them everything, and as girlfriends do, they circled the wagons around me and made me feel loved and protected.
Aurora, Jean, and me in Florida.
While I was down there, I called Benicio. I couldn’t just go back to New York and say, “Okay, I’m back. I will rise above it and forget about all of this and you can go ahead and do what you want to.” I had to find myself again. I needed to have someone think I was attractive, someone who wanted me for the woman I was, not for the easy stability I had created, which I thought was the real reason Norman didn’t want to leave me. It was a comfortable life I had created for him, and it’s not easy to start over when you are nearly seventy.
A Ticket to the Circus Page 34