Vietnam was a big part of Norman’s life, too. He had wanted to go as a journalist during the war, but when he went to see Abe Rosenthal, the editor of The New York Times, about doing a series of pieces for them, Abe told him he shouldn’t, because he would be killed. By whom Abe didn’t specify, but Norman had done his share of protesting, which hadn’t endeared him to the hawkish element of America, and he had written The Armies of the Night, after all, a book about protesting the war, which had won the Pulitzer Prize. Norman took Abe’s advice seriously enough that he didn’t go. He had six little kids and didn’t need to make them orphans. But he had always somehow felt cowardly about it.
We arrived in Bangkok and stayed at the famous Oriental Hotel. We tried to do a little sightseeing, but the traffic was so terrible that it took us an hour to go three blocks, so we went back to the hotel. Norman’s ability to walk had diminished to the point where he could hardly do so at all anymore. He used two canes, and was in constant pain. His vanity usually wouldn’t allow him to use a wheelchair at the airport, but this time he asked for one, so I knew he was really hurting. We did take a boat tour down the canals, and went to a few easily accessible places, but he couldn’t go to the palace or walk the streets like we used to love to do in a foreign city. He couldn’t lift the luggage, either, and I found myself hoisting heavy suitcases up to and down from airplane racks and off baggage trolleys, dragging them when necessary.
The writers conference was a nice dinner, as those things always are. The royal prince was there, and it was a fine perk that the Oriental had named one of their suites after Norman, but it was Vietnam that we had come to see. When we got off the plane, I swear I felt something heavy in the air left over from the spirits of all the Americans who had landed there, a kind of dank miasma. It clung to us like a bad smell, like the thick syrup of the air in the moments before a tornado passes through.
On the ride in from the airport, I tried to shake off the feeling, but as soon as we got to the Hotel Continental and unpacked, we went outside to look around and were swarmed by a pack of children who were professional beggars. One of them was a girl of about ten or eleven holding a dead baby. I wanted to scream, to run away, to get back on the plane and leave again, but the doorman of the hotel just chased them away. There was no escaping the beggars that week. One especially, a coarse little girl who might have been anywhere between six and twelve, was persistent. She was small in stature but as tough as shoe leather, and if one of the other children came over while she was trying to get money out of someone, she would snap, “This one’s mine, bitch.” They were all afraid of her, and I was, too, a little. I bought copies of Graham Greene’s book The Quiet American, copied badly and stapled together, or fans and small trinkets, from her and the others, but the more I bought, the more they persisted. I dreaded going out the door. (Norman never passed a beggar without giving him money, and John Buffalo is the same way.)
Once we got into our pedicabs outside the hotel, though, it was thrilling; we were right out in the flow of traffic. Scooters and cars swerved around us, like speedboats around a log drifting downriver. Girls rode motor scooters in immaculate ao dais, the beautiful long silk dresses, and high heels. They wore sunglasses and hats and long gloves; matching scarves covered their noses and mouths to keep out the exhaust fumes. It rained every afternoon, and even in a rainstorm, the girls were clean and spotless; a girl would gracefully lean down and take out a plastic poncho from under her bike seat and put it on as she zoomed down the street. The entire community flowed by on scooters or bicycles. Whole families would perch precariously on a single bicycle, father, mother, and two or three kids. They would haul groceries or building materials or whatever they needed to transport. I once saw a family of four carrying a whole double-hung window on a bicycle. I have no idea how the thing kept its balance. They could have been in the circus.
We went to the war museum, where they had a copy of Robert S. McNamara’s book In Retrospect in a glass case under a spotlight. It was his attempt at an apology of sorts, and they at least had that small artifact to show that someone in power had recognized how wrong that war was, even though it was too little too late. The photographs on the walls were graphic, showing atrocities committed by American boys, most of whom were not long out of their teens, if they were indeed out of them at all. That was one of the things I tried to address in my book—what kind of circumstance would it take to make a boy who had been drinking milk shakes at a drive-in with his friends kill women and children three months later in a situation like My Lai? It was a sobering museum. Obviously, there were no pictures of what the Vietcong had done to our boys, but you can bet it was just as bad. There were exhibits of booby traps the Vietcong had used, some of which I featured in my book. In cages around the grounds were sad, dusty, live bears.
We went to Cu Chi, the center of the underground tunnels the Vietcong had started building in the fifties when they’d been at war with the French. We saw movies of the tunnels, and then we actually went into one. It was a tunnel made for tourists. It had been dug much bigger, and lights were installed along the way, but it still gave the oppressive feeling of being underground. One of my characters in Windchill Summer was named Bean, a tunnel rat, one of those bravest and craziest of American soldiers who crawled through the tunnels in search of the enemy. I got to feel the soil and smell the air in the tunnels, and it made my book better. I think Norman got some kind of peace from it, too, although he couldn’t get down and crawl through the tunnel. I have to admit I didn’t make it all the way. When I got out of sight of the entrance, I was so claustrophobic I had to turn back. Interestingly, most of the other tourists were Vietnam vets and their families. Our guide was a former Vietcong tunnel fighter himself, and he joked and laughed with the vets like they were old buddies.
We took a boat down the river and stopped at a house to have tea with a family who played a little music for tourists, and we bought a few souvenirs. I got a pointed straw hat for sixty cents that I wound up leaving behind. Jason was a big crossword puzzle fanatic, and I think he missed the entire tour. His nose was firmly stuck the whole time in his crossword puzzle. He even walked down the path through the jungle doing the puzzle. Judy, on the other hand, was a fearless New York Times reporter, and she never missed a thing. She would escape from the three of us and go adventuring on her own; we never knew where she was. She was definitely the hare to the three of us tortoises, as Norman could walk only with great difficulty by then.
IN SEPTEMBER 1999, I had a hysterectomy for a prolapsed uterus, which got markedly worse after we came back from Vietnam. (I don’t think all that baggage hefting did me any good at all.) The surgery was a weird experience. I loved and trusted my doctor, whom I had been with for more than twenty years (he delivered John Buffalo), but he was in his eighties, and I think I should have given the surgery a little more thought and maybe gotten a second opinion from someone younger. He treated it as though it were going to be no worse than a root canal. The doctor told Norman I’d be in the OR for an hour or an hour and a half, but it was closer to five hours. Norman, out in the waiting room alone, began to panic. But the doctor was casual about it.
“Well, there was a little more there than I’d expected,” he told me later. “You had a hernia, and I couldn’t get your fallopian tube out, so I left it in.” Wait a minute. Why couldn’t he get the fallopian tube out? He was vague and said it was no big deal. It was bleeding and I had been under anesthetic too long already. My body would absorb it. I thought that was strange, but if he didn’t think it was a big deal, then neither did I. I trusted him that much.
I had more or less recovered from the surgery when I took a nasty fall on the icy brick steps in Provincetown just before Norman was scheduled to have hip replacement surgery, and my back was in real pain. I went and got an X-ray, which the doctor said was fine, no broken bones, but the pain in my back seemed to be getting worse.
Norman had been having more and more trouble walking. He star
ted using a cane in the mid-nineties and moved rapidly to two canes. Two, he said, helped his balance. He tried to walk a half mile a day, but he began doing it on the deck in Provincetown, making laps back and forth, rather than venturing too far from the house, in case he couldn’t get back. He needed his knees replaced, but even more, his hip required it, so he checked into Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston to get the procedure. I was going to sleep in the room with him. It was too far to drive every day to Provincetown, and he wanted me with him. They had given us one of the nicer rooms on the “celebrity” floor, which had a pullout couch, but it was desperately uncomfortable, and my back was killing me. I got up in the middle of the night and piled the sofa cushions onto the floor, trying to make a softer bed and find some relief, but there was none.
The next morning, Norman went into surgery. He was semi-awake during the procedure and said it was like lying in a sweet stupor, listening to someone over in the corner sawing and hammering, making a fire cabinet or something. When he was back in the room for a bit, still groggy on Percocet, he announced he was going to the bathroom. I was alone with him and tried to tell him he had a catheter, that he had just had hip replacement and couldn’t get out of bed, but he was out of his head and unreasonable. He started to get out of bed, and I tried to hold him down. He was strong and fought me, then pulled back his fist to hit me and I started yelling for the nurse. I couldn’t stop him. He got out of bed and walked several steps toward the bathroom on that freshly cut hip. It was a miracle it didn’t pull the new hip right out of socket. It took three nurses to get him back into bed, and they had to tie him down.
Dick and Doris Goodwin came to visit that night, and by that time Norman was awake, but still on the Percocet, and he had never been more garrulous and funny. He told us that if we took the elevator down to the first floor, we would be in Miami, and then if we crossed the courtyard to the right, we would be in London. At one of the tables at the outdoor café, there would be a couple of Nazi agents in uniforms, we’d have no trouble recognizing them. He wanted us to go up to them and explain that Nazism was bad, and what they were doing was a really bad thing. Somehow he had Dan Quayle involved in it, too, and the more we laughed, the more entertaining he thought he was being, so he laughed along with us, having no idea he wasn’t making perfect sense, and thinking he was at his most charming. I was almost sorry when he got off the Percocet, he was so much fun.
He went into hip rehab for a couple of weeks, and I went back to Provincetown, where the pain in my back got worse. I went to see my local doctor, Brian O’malley. He sent me to Hyannis to a specialist who looked like he was about twenty years old, and he was most eager to do an exploratory surgery because he had never seen anything like what I had. I wanted someone who had seen what I had. So I got a referral to Doris and Dick Goodwin’s doctor at MGH, who examined me and sent me straightaway to see Arlan Fuller, their top man in gynecological cancer surgery.
Arlan was the kind of doctor who inspired confidence in you the minute you met him. He was about fifty, had the most intense blue eyes outside of Norman or Paul Newman, and he radiated kindness and intelligence. He said he thought there was a good possibility it wasn’t cancer. It could be that the fallopian tube that was left in was infected, and he told me not to worry about that until he found out for sure. I checked in for a day surgery. Danielle had come up to be with me and drive me home. If I had known what was going to happen, I never would have allowed her to come alone. Of course it was cancer, and she was all by herself when he came out to tell her. It was so upsetting for her. I remember waking up and seeing Arlan’s blue eyes looking at me with compassion, and him saying, “It’s cancer.” I was so out of it I could hardly speak, but I asked, “Is it terminal?” and he said, “No.”
It turned out that the fallopian tube the other doctor couldn’t remove had a sarcoma in it, and there was another small one as well. Dr. Fuller had just done a laparoscopic biopsy, so we set a date for a larger surgery. There’s nothing more boring than having someone recount their surgeries to you, but it was a big deal in my life and I have to go into it a bit. You can skip this part if you want to. The prognosis for the kind of sarcoma I have, GI stromal tumor, was not good. Most people didn’t live more than a year or two after being diagnosed. (I don’t recommend Googling your illness, by the way.) I don’t know why, but for some reason I was never afraid of dying, but the family was certainly distraught. Every one of them came to Boston for my surgery. Barbara; her husband, Al; and her son, Peter; all the kids and in-laws and grandchildren crowded around my bed at five in the morning and walked me down to the elevator as far as they could go with me. I felt like the luckiest woman in the world to have a family like that. They were determined I was going to be all right, and that gave me a lot of courage. I had my first book coming out in a couple of months. I had to go on a book tour. I couldn’t have cancer!
Arlan took out the tumors, I began chemo and radiation, and I finished the treatments in June, just in time to go on the book tour for Windchill Summer. My hair, of course, fell out, and while I was in the hospital, my friend Diane Fisher found the best wig place in New York (Bitz-n-Pieces on Columbus Circle, ask for Gwen) and she sent me a wig that looked just exactly like my hair, only better. Plus, she wouldn’t let me pay for it. How’s that for a good friend?
I set out on the tour, twelve cities, in the wig, determined that I was going to be one of those who beat the dismal statistic of this disease. I soon learned that touring for an unknown’s first novel is not the same as touring for a Norman Mailer novel. He always had crowds lined up out the door to hear him, and I was lucky if I had four people in the audience. Once, in Kansas City, they booked me into a big church and there was nobody there at all except the people from the bookstore, who were so embarrassed. I sat on the edge of the stage and talked to them and read, and we had a good time anyhow. I looked upon it as practice—I’d discovered I was good at reading. All those years of acting had given me a stage voice, and I was funny. The book was set in Arkansas in 1969, so I got to do all the accents, which I loved.
In Atlanta, I was in the hotel elevator when two cute young girls got on. They were nudging each other and whispering. I thought they were talking about me, which made me uncomfortable, when one of them said, “Excuse me, but we just wanted to tell you how beautiful your hair is. I bet you never had a bad hair day in your life.” I grinned. I wanted so badly to grab the wig and whisk it off, but I knew they would faint (I was not a lovely bald woman, although Norman said I looked like a beautiful alien), so I just said, “Oh, I can assure you I’ve had a few bad hair days. But thank you.” Like my home ec teacher, Mrs. Gay, used to tell me, “When you get a compliment, all you have to say is thank you. Otherwise, you insult their taste.”
It has been ten years since I had that first surgery, and I’m still here. I beat the odds—up to now, anyhow. I’ve had seven more major surgeries and too many small procedures to count. I’ve had 40 percent of my small intestine removed because of radiation damage, I’ve worn a colostomy bag and a nephrostomy bag, and I still have an internal stent in my kidney. I have lost so much weight that my former model’s weight looks chubby, but I’m still here. Three times, a doctor has told me that there is nothing they can do for me and it will be just a matter of time. I don’t know why I keep on going, but I’m not questioning it. Maybe it is all the prayers my family and friends have prayed. I don’t know how much longer I have to live, but then none of us does. If I go tomorrow, I will still be ahead. I’m living on borrowed time, but borrowed time is sweet. I don’t want to go, I’m having too good a life this time out, but I do believe that we get another chance, maybe a lot more chances, to live life here, and the price of our admission is to learn lessons. I think I’ve learned a few this go-around; I know I’ve learned a lot from having cancer. I think I’m more compassionate, more patient. (“That’s why they call us patients!” I said to someone once when we were being made to wait too long for some proced
ure.) I’ve given up on my vanity. I’m just happy if I can get up, get dressed, and throw on some makeup. I don’t have to be glamorous anymore. If I’d had only my own cancer to battle, and it is a battle, that would have been quite enough to give me an abundance of lessons, but there was more in store.
I DID PRETTY WELL for a couple of years after the first surgery and the treatments. Norman and I went to Wales for the Hay-on-Wye book fair. I got to read from my book and be on a panel of writers, and for the first time I was part of it all as a writer, not just as Norman’s wife. Some of my ancestors are Welsh, and it meant a lot for me to go there. I did feel a kinship with the people and kept seeing my relatives in the faces of the local population. My hair grew back in and was dark—almost black—thick and curly. I had been told it might be totally different from my real hair, and I was sort of hoping it would come in snow-white, like my novel’s character, Cherry, but it gradually turned chestnut-auburn again and regained its straighter wave.
A Ticket to the Circus Page 37