He was ordered, as a result of how hard I fought to protect my children, more visitation than he’d ever had before: ten consecutive days a month, every month.
Forget the history: not recent.
Forget the violence: not relevant.
Ten days a month: uninterrupted, unsupervised.
TINSELTOWN
Liam didn’t give up on me, even if he was still living in Mississippi. He hired PIs to follow me and go through my trash. He contacted my landlord, an old Portuguese man who lived across the street from me, and convinced him I was a “lesbian whore” who had left my husband for another woman and stole the children and run off to California. (Eventually, the landlord evicted us, and I was too depleted and too broke to bother fighting it in court.) Now you see my reasons for avoiding dating girls. For these reasons, I kept my relationship with Buffalo secret. There were other reasons, too.
In my mind, I heard Liam’s oft-repeated words: No one but me will ever want you or put up with you.
Buffalo was young and terribly, heartbreakingly handsome.
He had written a book, The Big Empty, with his father.
Buffalo was one of People’s Sexiest Men Alive.
Buffalo was literary, worldly, an actor, everything Liam wasn’t.
Those were the “good reasons” to keep him a secret.
There were “bad reasons,” too: Buffalo had an open history of girls, drugs, sex, and running with criminals. One of his best friends was an international opium dealer who’d spent time in federal prison. He was the former senior editor of High Times magazine. Any one of those things could put my custody in danger. Sometimes I wondered what I was doing. Sometimes he did. But he’d pursued me, and it’d worked; I was in love.
Probably would have been easier to just date a nice girl.
It’s what a part of me really wanted, but the great fear inside me couldn’t allow. The fear of that Mississippi courtroom had a lock on my heart.
But most of our time together was spent somewhere other than my place. One Thursday, I left the kids with Mama and flew down for a long weekend to meet Buffalo, Norris, and Norman in LA, where Norman and Buffalo were giving a talk at the Disney Center. The Mailers had swiftly become my family.
A car picked me up at the airport and delivered me to a chic downtown hotel. I left my bags at the front desk, and Buffalo came down to meet me.
“Hello, my love,” he said, leaning in for a kiss. Every time he kissed me, I broke open into galaxies, places I had closed down exploded into shining darkmatter of planets and stars. I never remembered being this in love with Liam. The thing about divorcing Liam was that, by the time it happened, I had been so beaten down for so many years that I no longer loved him. There was only escape, only relief, only fear and fury and the need to never be at the other end of a knife again. Heartache was never part of the equation.
With Buffalo, it was all heart. A kind of wildness.
We rode the elevator up to a penthouse room, and Norman and Norris were there at a long table with another friend, Lawrence Schiller. Norris stood and embraced me, her thin limbs fragile as a gilded cage, her auburn hair aflame. I kissed Norman on the cheek and top of his head. Lawrence stood and shook my hand, and that’s when the photographs caught my eye.
“Oh, good Lord.”
Spread out across the long glass table were at least thirty glossy photos of Marilyn Monroe I’d never seen before. Most next to a pool, looking natural and luminous, happy. The world was about to see them, too.
“Who took these?” I asked, astonished.
Everyone laughed. I got the feeling they got a kick out of my cluelessness from time to time. I’d been in Mississippi a long time.
“I did, my dear,” Lawrence said, “and I must say you strike a little resemblance.”
“Oh, good Lord, you are too kind. These are astonishing.”
“Alice, you must be wanting to freshen up before dinner,” Norris said. “We’re going to meet downstairs in about an hour.”
“Oh, an hour? I’d better get changed!” Norris always looked exquisite, even now, when she’s melted away to nearly nothing. Just last week, she’d e-mailed me photos from British Vogue, who’d come to take photos of her for a piece they’d done about her new book.
“It was very nice meeting you, Mr. Schiller.”
“Call me Lawrence.”
With that, Buffalo and I went down to our room to get ready for dinner. The room was small but luxurious, with patterned walls and heavy drapes overlooking the Pacific. The bed was high and piled with down and luxe pillows. The floor was covered in carpet so thick the only sound was the beating of the sea. There was champagne waiting on the little mirrored desk next to the bed, and two highball glasses. Buffalo poured us two glasses and pushed me down onto the bed, in my bra and panties.
I didn’t bother to protest.
He bit my lip, hard, and gathered my hair at the back of my neck in his hand, looking me in the eye. “I got an e-mail today.”
“You did, did you?”
“I did.”
“What did it say?”
“We got the house in Carroll Gardens.”
We’d put a deposit down on a big, rambling four-bedroom house the last time I was in Brooklyn.
“We did? Well, hallelujah.”
“That’s not the right answer.”
“It’s not?” I said, and I kissed him again.
“I thought you were a nice, Southern girl.”
“You know I am.”
“You want to live with a half-Southern, half-Jewish New Yorker in sin?” His eyes smiled at me.
All at once, things became real to me, and everything crashed in on me in pounding waves. Of course I couldn’t live with him.
I couldn’t live with anyone.
I couldn’t be with someone like Buffalo.
I couldn’t date someone with his history.
I couldn’t move my children in with someone who edited High Times.
It was like that luxury hotel room morphed into FEMA Courtroom A in my mind in an instant.
Buffalo could see it happen.
“You’re thinking about him, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“What are you scared of?”
“Everything.”
“What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know. I want to be with you, but I’m afraid of losing my children.”
“What can we do to make sure that doesn’t happen?”
“We could kill him.”
Buffalo kissed me hard then, harder and harder. I thought my lip would bleed.
Finally, he stopped, leaned back, pulled something from behind the pillow under my head, a tiny black box. “Or, we could get married.”
STORMÉ WEATHER
Liam’s visitation progressed from ten days to ten weeks in a row that summer. I didn’t think I’d survive it. Worse yet, the ten weeks were prior to the final trial date. I was sure he’d pull some kind of trick. He was to have the kids with him all summer, and I was to pick them up when I came to Mississippi for the trial.
It felt like death.
A trick.
I was in a panic.
Norris and I had a daily e-mail exchange by that time that rivaled any letter-writing exchange I’d had in days gone by; we were up to five or six e-mails back and forth a day.
Norman and Norris paid what I would have made in salary teaching adjunct classes that summer and bought me a ticket to New York. It was in many ways the best and worst summer of my life.
Buffalo had started a new gig with BlackBook and was busy. We went out to Provincetown on the weekends. I spent my weekdays writing at Poets House or seeing friends.
Even after I arrived, Norris and I still e-mailed every day.
Once I discovered it, we ate nearly every night at a Cuban joint with ocean-green tiled walls and music spilling into the street. Every night, they played my favorite song, “Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps,” and the owner wo
uld come and dance me up and down the sidewalk while I sang and Buffalo clapped and laughed. Usually, at some point, my cell would ring with my court-ordered “phone visitation” with the kids. I’d run, sprinting down the street as far as I could get, as fast as I could get there.
Liam made the kids call me on speakerphone, because he wanted to hear our conversations. My biggest fear—that he would discover not only that I was in New York and not Sacramento, and that I was with Buffalo Mailer—I couldn’t let come to pass. Buffalo and I talked about it almost daily, made sure not be photographed together or mentioned online. I was, for the moment, his secret fiancée. I knew if Liam discovered I was engaged to be married to one of the Mailer clan, he’d drag it all into court.
Buffalo had written several pieces about his “experiments” with drugs. It didn’t matter that I’d never smoked a joint or for that matter partook of any drugs at all: it was a storm I couldn’t afford to bring to my impending final trial date back on the Mississippi coast.
So I would run to the corner, flip open the phone, and speak to the kids, upholding the farce that I was home alone in Sacramento, waiting in terror, alone, for the coming trial.
Sometimes, I admit, it gave me an inexplicable secret thrill that Liam didn’t know what I was up to. And after living under his sanitary and overwhelming thumb for the last nine years, my afternoons with Norman Mailer were a balm to my very soul. It was like the old me, the real me, had reappeared. For all the years it took for Liam to erase my true identity, being embraced by the Mailers was an instant reboot. I was back: literary, fearless, funny, wild. One afternoon, Norman pulled The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry off the bookshelves of the Mailer apartment at the top of a Brooklyn Heights brownstone and handed it to me.
“I have this at home.”
“So you’re familiar with my poetry?” Norman asked, that legendary twinkle in his sharp blue eyes.
“Ummmmmm…” I smiled.
“Ha! It’s just one poem. Read it, tell me what you think. Page 183.”
I opened the book and read Norman’s poem. Then I read it again, not looking up from the book. I felt like I was staring at that book for an hour.
“Well? Let’s hear it! What do you think of Norman Mailer, poet?”
There was a long silence.
“You want to know what I think of Norman Mailer, poet?”
“That’s what I said, isn’t it?”
I took a deep breath.
“Norman Mailer. Poet. Fucking sucks.”
That uproarious Norman Mailer laugh then, booming through the room.
“Thank you!” He laughed, his hand on my head now, in that tender Norman way that only his close friends and family knew.
“For telling you your poetry sucks?”
“For having the balls to be honest.”
“You’re welcome?” I asked, smiling.
“Well, aren’t you going to ask me?”
“Ask you what?” I asked, genuinely confused.
“What I thought of your poems.” He smiled.
“Oh, God,” I moaned, feeling set up. “Okay, let me have it.”
“Alice Anderson, poet. Fucking brilliant!”
We laughed then, and he gave me a hug and I reached up and hugged him back, my hands on his thick fleece jacket resting on the increasing frailty of his shoulders.
“You make a fine future daughter-in-law, Alice Anderson.”
“Why, thank you, Mugga Fugga.”
* * *
Sometimes Buffalo’d have to socialize for work and I’d tag along. One night there was a big party happening out in the Hamptons. Somehow, instead of feeling hopeful and celebratory, I felt panicked and blue. Apart from the trial, Norris was fast disappearing from cancer every day. I just didn’t have it in me to celebrate. I wanted to be with friends, not in a crowd.
Although his pitch was quite enticing, I decided not to go with Buffalo to the BlackBook magazine party in the Hamptons. Despite the temptation of a tranquil pool and requisite sunset, despite cocktails and minor celebrities and more time with my love, I said no. I had a feeling. Sometimes my intuition is pretty damn good.
Instead I met Kate West at East of Eighth, our regular Chelsea watering hole, the basement-level bar a few steps from the Chelsea Hotel. We’d been meeting about once a week that summer. I walked through the falling light of Chelsea in a sheer white T-shirt dress, my heavy black boots stomping the pavement, weaving my quick way through the throngs of New Yorkers heading into whatever their evenings held. When I arrived, I could see through the low, golden window that Kate was already there, had already ordered our regular two pizzas from big-muscled Jimmy at the bar, already had my glass of wine ready and waiting, next to hers.
Every time I saw Kate West, I thought back to our grad school days at Sarah Lawrence, and a relief—the kind of relief you find when you recognize an instant friend, a true friend, someone who’ll cut through the bullshit (especially MFA program bullshit) and just be who you need them to be, and let you be who you are—came over me. I thought back to the way she and her dad were the only ones who came to my graduation, smiling from the audience like family when mine were nowhere to be found.
So when Kate West texted me, East of 8th tonight? first thing that morning, despite the promise of the Hamptons BlackBook party, a party that was important to Buffalo, I texted back, Yes.
I’d been to East of Eighth so many times that summer, and every time Kate West would say, “You just missed Stormé” or “Stormé was here earlier.” The pull to Stormé was stronger than a swanky party in the Hamptons. Because even though I loved John, the call to the true me sang out to me. Liam was my exception, and John was, too. Being with queer folk was who I wanted to be, and feeling like I couldn’t do that was one more thing that the Mississippi courts was taking from me. It was like I was shoved in the closet all over again. Every time I heard Stormé’s name, I knew I needed to meet her. That’s the thing about my intuition—I don’t give up on it.
When that voice tells me to wait, I wait. When the voice tells me to go, I go.
That day, the voice said one thing: Stormé.
And so I went. And when I descended the outdoor stairs into East of Eighth, I could see two things: one, Kate West at the bar, the glasses of wine sitting in front of her; and two, the legendary Stormé DeLarverie at the corner back end of the bar, khaki-green fisherman’s hat perched askew on her head, hovered into her multi-pocketed jacket, a face lined with a life of pain and courage, looking quietly down into her beer.
“That’s her, right?” I asked, coming in for a big Kate West hug.
“That’s her, all right.” She laughed. “I can’t believe you finally get to meet her.”
I didn’t go over right away. We had a glass of wine, talked about Kate’s day at the Manhattan Chamber, my afternoon shopping with my mother-in-law-to-be. We’d been out all afternoon, trying to find the perfect outfit for the final trial date, set for one week from that day. I’d followed Norris through Saks, through Macy’s, through Barney’s, stood mostly naked in dressing rooms with Norris’s ghostly hand passing in dress after dress, most too formal, too earth-toned, too unabashedly cool. I needed something just right for the final day of trial in Jackson County Chancery Court, and even the best of New York’s finest department stores had to offer didn’t fit the bill.
It’s not as if Norris didn’t try. She did. Even though she shared the same simple Southern background as I, Norris had been in New York a very long time now.
It still amazed me every day how much she gave to me—some girl from Mississippi and Sacramento who, compared to the circles she ran in, was pretty much no one. One book of poems decades before, but she introduced me as “America’s Next Great Poet!” with enough fanfare to make it seem as if it were true. I laughed it off every time she said it.
And while we shopped, she saw me as I would someday be—back to being a writer, back to owning my own life, powerful, smart, deserving of something great. I
don’t know if what she tried to buy for me that day would have worked in court or even made a difference, but I knew I couldn’t see myself in those expensive dresses and swanky sweaters. I didn’t feel worthy yet.
After shopping for some hours, we hopped in a cab, and Norris turned to me, put her hand on my cheek, smiled, said, “Hey, I have a million beautiful things. Come over, I’ll pour us some wine, and we’ll raid my closet.”
This sounded like the best plan I’d heard in a good while.
We went back to the apartment in Brooklyn and weeded through her closet for the perfect court outfit. She was tired from the day, wasted to nearly light and bones from the cancer by then. Her wild auburn hair rose from the sharp planes of her face like fire licking at the wind, her skin so pale it was nearly translucent. She disappeared into the little galley kitchen, poured us two glasses of dark wine in big glasses, then came back and lay on her bed and watched me come out, time after time, in increasingly wrong outfits.
I mean, I started looking for things that were right, but when it became clear that Norris’s clothes were too Bohemian, too ritzy, too late-era Heart meets Ladies Who Lunch, I just gave up and played an hour of dress-up.
“Yes, Your Honor, I plan to raise these children in a fine Christian home,” I drawled as I emerged in a pair of tight embroidered bell-bottoms and a crocheted vest over a hippie-chic, long-sleeved golden tie-dye tissue T. She laughed.
I went back in to find something new.
“Your Honor, I meant no disrespect when I wrote that poem about Jesus and masturbation—the secret to good sex is old-time religion!” I intoned, walking slack-hipped across the room in a burnt umber velvet minidress and metallic pink cowgirl boots.
Norris doubled over on her side, laughing. “Oh, God, it’s not the cancer that’ll kill me, it’s you!”
I went back in for more.
“I do solemnly swear that I will never ever, not ever write another poem again—at least not a naughty one, Your Honor!” I mock-shrieked in a beaded russet-hued Bob Mackie that sparkled like a sunset galaxy.
Applause, more laughter from the bedhead redhead.
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