A Ticket to the Circus

by Norris Church Mailer

  Benicio met me at the airport, and I soon realized the connection we somehow used to have was gone; we were virtual strangers. But he was newly single, so we commiserated and at least had that in common. He drove a nifty little sports car, and took me to his house, an elegant mansion in a new suburb, and we tried to get reacquainted. I slept with him that night, which was expected, but it felt desperately wrong. He got a call and had to go to the hospital in the middle of the night, so he left me alone, then came back late with a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken and woke me up. We ate the chicken and tried to make a little conversation, and he left me to clean up the bones while he went to bed and fell immediately into a sleep as deep as a coma, as only doctors can.

  I gingerly got in beside him and hugged the edge of the bed, wondering what I was doing there. In an act of defiance, I had taken off my wedding rings and put them in a dish on the dresser when I’d first arrived, but I crept out of bed, got them, and put them back on. In the morning, he left early for the hospital before I woke up, and I decided to write him a note and call a cab to take me to the airport—until I realized I didn’t know what the address was, or even what suburb it was! I didn’t know anything, the name of his hospital, his phone number there—nada. It was as if I had just been dropped by parachute into a strange city and wandered into a stranger’s house. I had never felt so stupid and alone.

  I sat out by the pool for a while and then poked around the house, which was decorated nicely and expensively, but it looked like a show house where nobody lived. There were no photos of friends and family, no knickknacks from vacations. No books, except medical texts and some bound sets of classics that a decorator had put on the shelves. It was the house of someone who worked all the time and just came home occasionally to sleep. I didn’t wonder that the girlfriend had left. I was hungry, but the fridge, an expensive Sub-Zero, had only a couple of bottles of white wine and a wedge of Brie. Nothing else. I was even scared to turn on the TV. It was a huge system with surround speakers, a gigantic screen, and a whole row of clickers. So I sat and read a book I had brought, while my stomach growled. I remembered how Benicio had been at the hospital almost around the clock when we’d first met. His beeper was constantly going off. I could never live with someone who worked so much—not that he was asking me to live with him, but I had been there for more than a day and we still hadn’t really had a conversation. He’d talked about his practice and his patients, and didn’t seem terribly interested in my dismal little tale of woe. As soon as he got back, I had him take me to the airport, saying I had to get back for the kids. I don’t think he minded at all.

  The visit had been a mistake, but at least it gave me a bit of drama to tell Norman about. That was the real reason I did it, I realized, to tell Norman and hurt him. I wanted him to know that someone else wanted me, that I had other options. Not that I hadn’t had chances over the years. There was a long list of men who had come on to me, men who were famous and rich, and I could have had any number of affairs, but I didn’t. Now a part of me wished I had said yes to at least some of them. Maybe one of the movie stars. Or the billionaire (although he might have been just a multimillionaire).

  Why had I been so consumed by this old, fat, bombastic, lying little dynamo? I obviously wasn’t the only one who’d been consumed by him, since I was wife number six. Six! Not to mention the legions of girlfriends. What was I thinking? Didn’t I know he was going to do it to me, too? Why did I think I was different than all the rest of them? Why did I think I was the one who was going to “tame the tiger,” as reporters were fond of saying in news stories? Nothing would tame that particular tiger except old age, and I strongly suspected that was one of the key elements coming into play with this situation; it was the reason he’d allowed me to find out the details. He could no longer keep up the pace and he wanted Mommy to end it all for him. But would I? Could I stay in this marriage? I had some self-respect left. At least some.

  John and Matt were there with Norman when I arrived at the apartment, and we were all happy to see one another. I hugged the boys as if I would never let them go. They were full of stories of the skiing trip, how Dad had taken a pad and pen along in his pocket. “In case you got an idea on the slope?” I asked, incredulously, and he sheepishly nodded. Of course he had taken a hard fall and the pen had jammed into his rib cage, badly bruising or maybe even cracking some ribs. He’d been so disheartened by the deterioration of his skiing abilities and his obvious aging—and I’m sure angry at the fact that I had gone off on a trip, and angry at our whole sorry state of affairs—that he’d been in a foul mood the whole time and had yelled at the boys for every little thing they did. On the way home, when Stephen got lost trying to find the way to Danielle’s house, where they were going to spend the night, Norman turned the air blue with invectives against Stephen and John’s incompetence, grabbed the map out of their hands, and got out of the car to read it in the glow of the headlights. John said he and Stephen looked at each other and debated whether or not Stephen should let his foot slip off the brake and run Norman over, but they decided not to. It was a merry return on the surface; pictures were taken that night, and I can look at them and tell that both of us were smiling on the outside but devastated inside. It was the hardest thing I’d ever done, but I’d made my decision. I was going to tell Norman I was leaving him. We went out to dinner to talk, and the boys ordered pizza.

  Us, just before the big talk.

  I really can’t reconstruct all the dialogue, but I told him about seeing Benicio, which hurt him just as I’d hoped, although hurting him didn’t give me the pleasure I’d thought it would, and then I told him that I was leaving him. Not because of Benicio—I wouldn’t be seeing him again—but because I deserved to find someone who would be better to me. I wasn’t crying. He hated it when I cried, and it always made him angry, so I tried not to. I was perfectly rational and said we needed to work out arrangements, where we were going to live, who John would live with, all the other details of ending a marriage; he had done it enough times before to know the drill. Then he panicked. “No,” he said, slapping the table. “No, no, no, no, no. We are not breaking up!” People in the restaurant were beginning to stare.

  “Please keep your voice down,” I said. I didn’t really want to break up, either. I loved my family, I loved his sister and her family, I loved our apartment in Brooklyn and our house in Ptown and our friends. I loved our life. I even loved him. I just couldn’t live anymore with a man who had so little respect for me, and who I couldn’t trust. I couldn’t live with a man who at nearly seventy needed to have sex with so many other women. My biggest regret was for John. He had been the only child who’d gotten to grow up with Norman, the only one who had lived with him past the age of six, and now that he was a young teenager, it would be the hardest on him, but that was Norman’s choice.

  Norman began to talk then. He used all his talents and abilities and charm, which were considerable. Somehow—I still don’t quite know how—before the dinner was over, he made me believe that he did love me and that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with me. He was ready to give it all up, all the other women, everything. Maybe I was still naïve; maybe it was just that neither one of us wanted to have to go out and find another apartment. No matter; we went home intending to stay together and somehow make it work.

  * Not her real name.

  * Not her real name.

  Forty

  My favorite quote of Norman’s is from The Deer Park: “There is that law of life, so cruel and so just—that one must grow, or else pay more for remaining the same.” I think we both did a lot of growing in those next years, and it wasn’t easy. Things kept popping up that flicked the scab off the healing wound, like the old girlfriend who kept calling and causing trouble, who made sure the story of their affair was printed over and over in newspapers and magazines. Any time something like that appeared, it was painful for me. But miraculously, the kids seemed to be okay with everything and we were con
tinuing our lives. We had family dinners at Barbara’s or our house, we saw the grandchildren, went to the kids’ plays and art shows. Everyone was just thrilled we had dodged the bullet and had not broken up the family again. But after all the months of confessions and recriminations and anger, I somehow had taken a step away from Norman in my heart, and I thought that was a good thing. It was the only way I could go on living with him, because if I was still so in love with him, so raw and trusting, I would just be hurt again. I had no real faith that he was going to actually give all the women up. I thought he might try, but sooner or later, he would be on a trip and temptation would be too strong. He would just go back to being more careful, and he would have to, now that I knew the signs. I told him if I caught him cheating one more time, that was it, and I meant it. No, it was better to be that little bit less in love and not care quite as much.

  Harlot’s Ghost made the bestseller list, then dropped out of sight. In spite of the last line in the book, “To Be Continued,” and a halfhearted effort to research the next volume, Norman never really wanted to finish that book. His fascination with the CIA had played itself out, and as he said, he didn’t know how to end the exciting story he had started.

  There were several themes that ran through Norman’s life and his work. Now in his seventies, he had written about most of them, but there were still others on the list: President Kennedy’s assassination, God and the devil, religion and Hitler, all of which he would end up writing about before his life was over. Now he started working on Oswald’s Tale, about Lee Harvey Oswald. This necessitated more travel—trips to Moscow and Minsk, and Dallas.

  Larry Schiller was back in the picture on this book. He had worked his Schiller magic and gotten the KGB, in the one open moment in its history, to agree to sell him some of the files they had developed on Oswald while he’d lived in Minsk. Norman and Larry had to go to Minsk and Moscow many times, and I don’t know all the fine points of the negotiation, but the papers were obtained. The picture they presented was one of a nutty American kid with more guts than brains who had somehow managed to defect to Russia, find a job, and marry a pretty Russian girl. Then, when he realized he wasn’t going to be a rock star just because he was an American, that the Russians weren’t going to give him some big job in the government and a fancy place to live, he wanted to go back home. He was pretty shrewd, though, in the way he played the establishment, to get them to pay for his travel. Among the papers Larry and Norman received were over two hundred pages of conversations between Lee and his wife, Marina, from a microphone planted in their apartment. Their dialogue could have been between any couple anywhere.

  “You never wash the kitchen floor,” he complains.

  “Yes, I do. I wash it more than you. I have washed the kitchen floor seventeen times and you have washed it none.” Marina was not happy with Lee’s habit of lying around reading children’s comics and “fouling the air with gasses.” Lee was not happy with his job in a factory, assembling radios in Minsk. But as banal as some of the dialogue was, it was still rich stuff for a writer because the man who had assassinated the president was speaking the banalities.

  Larry and Norman interviewed several high-ranking officers and KGB people who knew Lee, co-workers and friends, and they discovered an interesting phenomenon—everyone seemed to have crystal clear memories of him. It might have been because after President Kennedy’s assassination anyone who knew Lee was ordered not to talk about him, even to their families, so the memories hadn’t been adulterated by discussion, but the material Larry and Norman were getting was fresh and good. Oswald’s Tale is, in fact, one of my favorites of Norman’s books.

  Marina’s aunt Valya still lived in Minsk, and Larry hired her to be their cook. Larry gave her money to shop for better food on the black market, and several nights a week they went to Valya’s house for dinner. She was a good cook, and an important part of the story as well. Larry was amazing at getting things done. I’ve always marveled at his ingenuity, and I do to this day. He found Norman an apartment in a workers’ building in Minsk—a little two-bedroom in a building made of poured concrete that was five years old but looked fifty—where he stayed for weeks at a time. Then Norman would return to New York and be with us before going back again. I was having a hard time with the separation. I, of course, imagined he was schtupping fat, old, ugly Russian women in babushkas, but tried to go on and live my life as if things were fine. I tried to keep that little step away from him in my heart.

  One night at a dinner party, I was seated next to a friend I had known socially for many years, and he began to question me on where Norman was and why I was always alone. He, of course, had seen the stories in the papers about our troubles and had heard the gossip. I found myself confiding in him, and he was a most attentive listener. He gave me a ride home in his car, invited me to dinner the following evening, and I went. That began a brief affair, one that showed me there was a possibility I could have another life if I wanted to. I’m sure he was teasing, but at one point he said, “If you will divorce Norman, I’ll marry you.” I lightly answered, “You’re going to have to stop saying things like that to girls. One of them will take you up on it, and then you’ll be in big trouble.” We laughed, and nothing was said again about marriage or divorce, but I think we both thought about it. I was terribly fond of him, and still am happy when I see him, but my life was bound up with that crazy wild man who was in Minsk. I wondered what he was up to, and I knew that if I left him I would wonder the rest of my life what he was up to, and be sorry I wasn’t with him.

  Norman invited me to come spend a couple of weeks with him in Minsk. It was winter, and the city was as dreary as anyplace I had ever been. The yellow mud froze in ruts along the roads, and the snow was piled high, geologically layered in various shades of dirt. The apartment had worn linoleum on the floor, a rug on the wall, and wooden furniture of an angular style that was popular in America in the fifties. The door to the apartment was padded leather, and the first day I was there, at seven in the morning, someone stood in the hallway pounding on it, yelling in Russian. I had no idea what they were saying, it might have been “The building is on fire” or “Can you help me pull my car out of the mud?” or anything else. Norman didn’t know, either, so he just rolled over and went back to sleep. I did, too, figuring if the building was on fire we would soon know all about it.

  The kitchen had a stove with four burners and a tiny oven, and a small fridge that smelled of cabbage. Beside the sink was a strange-looking gray cardboard box of dishwashing soap that looked like ashes with bits of bone or something ghastly mixed in it. All the products and foods were fascinating to me—the egg shampoo that was the bright yellow of yolks, and the real, small hard eggs that came in a plastic sack of twenty, eggs squeezed from the butts of sturdy little chickens that continually pecked the frozen ground in search of an insect or worm, scratching out a living like everybody else.

  We had a car, an old beat-up Russian Lada, with a driver named Murat who looked like Ratso Rizzo and who protected Norman with his life. I stayed in the apartment and worked on a new play I was writing for the Actors Studio while Norman and Larry went out to do interviews, but after a couple of days I needed to get out, so they got me a driver of my own named Sasha, a young, sweet boy who took me shopping and sightseeing. The stores were poor, indeed, but if there is something to be found in a store, you can trust I will find it. Sasha wanted to take me to the few fancy Western stores that had Revlon cosmetics and more modern-style clothes, but I insisted on going to the real old Russian stores. He couldn’t understand why, until I told him I could get Revlon in New York but I couldn’t get a good wool coat made in Latvia or a hand-crocheted tablecloth made by a little old lady for twenty dollars.

  In one store, I tried on several coats, to the delight of the salesgirls, modeling them like I used to do on the New York runways, and when I bought a purple wool coat, they all clapped and cheered. “Nobody from New York has ever bought anything in here
,” one of them said, tears practically running down her cheeks. I paid ten dollars cash for it, and they lovingly wrapped it in brown paper and string. It was a nice, warm coat that I wore for many years.

  Sasha took me to the market, a huge building that once must have been an airplane hangar, where all the farmers from the countryside came in with their produce and set up little stalls. There was fresh-churned butter, cut into chunks and wrapped in newspaper; chickens that had been killed and plucked that same morning, poor little things that I was embarrassed for, their breasts were so small. I wanted to avert my eyes. It was almost obscene, the way they were lying there, their skinny legs splayed. Little boys rushed around selling lemons, and one came up to me and scratched the yellow skin and stuck it under my nose. I bought it for a dollar, and he presented it to me as though it were a precious jewel. A woman stood with her arms outstretched, a human clothes rack, her knitted scarves and shawls hung up and down her arms. I watched her for several minutes, and she never flinched, never seemed to get tired. I bought a soft brown shawl that felt like a cloud, just to give her a break, I think. It’s a comfort blanket. I still wrap my feet in it in bed on cold winter nights. Men in butcher stalls would chop off a piece of meat and roll it in newspapers for you, and women minded baskets of cabbages and beets and carrots, dirt still clinging to them. I didn’t want to remember that we were not all that far from Chernobyl, and bought what we needed for dinner.