A Ticket to the Circus (48 page)

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 roadside 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.

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.