A Ticket to the Circus (13 page)

As we drove, we were chatting, getting to know each other, and Norman asked me when my birthday was.

“January thirty-first,” I said, “1949,” which made me twenty-six. He got all excited and started pounding on Fig’s arm.

“Fig! Fig! When’s my birthday?”

“Well, Norman, don’t you know?” Fig drawled in a voice that indicated he thought Norman might have had one drink too many.

“It’s January thirty-first! We have the same birthday!” He was beside himself. It turned out that we’d also been born within one minute of each other, he at 7:04 and me at 7:05
A.M.
I later checked it with his mother. A mother always remembers exactly when her child was born. He was also fifty-two, precisely twice my age, the only time that phenomenon would occur in our lifetimes. It seemed like some big portent had just been swooped in and dropped onto us by twittering birds.

Van and Ginnie’s house was built over a brook, and as soon as we got there, Norman and I went out onto the porch to take a look. The woods, with the brook gurgling underneath our feet, were magical. It was so beautiful and peaceful. The air was sweet and fresh with the smell of pines, and dragonflies flitted under the little stone waterfalls in the brook like fairies.

We were at first shy with each other, and I still had those monster shoes on, but it didn’t seem to matter to Norman. He rather liked it that I was tall, and years later he would make me put on high heels if I tried to go out in flats.

“Put on your big shoes. I’m not going to have people towering over you!” he would say.

The rest of the lucky dinner guests were milling around in the kitchen, which had a beautiful stone fireplace, watching us through the window, waiting for him to come in and talk to them. But Norman was in no hurry, and neither was I. I had wanted an intellectual man who would talk to me, and I finally got one. Norman could go on for hours on almost any subject, and this time it was one of my favorites—me. He rhapsodized about my eyes, my hair, my skin, my nose. Finally it got to be a touch too much, even for me. I had to cut him off.

“Well, you really know how to deliver a good line, Mr. Mailer,” I said with an exaggerated Southern accent. “But that’s all right. I’ve always bought a good line, well presented.”

He roared with laughter, hugged me, and told me how marvelous I was. I had the passing thought that with that one remark, I had, perhaps, made a not necessarily small impression on him.

I did have to bring up the marriage thing, though. I wasn’t going to get tangled up with a married man. (Little did I know just what a tangle I would find myself in.) He presented himself as separated from his wife, which was technically true, and it was only later in the evening that I learned he was separated from his fourth wife, Beverly, but not quite separated from his present companion, Carol, and they had a daughter, Maggie, who had just turned four, six months older than Matthew. Since I thought I would never see him again anyhow, separated from a legal wife was good enough for a flirt, especially such an enjoyable one.

Finally, someone tentatively came to the door and asked us if we wanted any pizza. There were only a couple of leathery cold pieces left by that time, so we went in and ate them, and he talked to the rest of the patient group. It got to be nine-thirty, and I told Van I had to leave to go pick up Matthew, who was at his father’s house, by ten. My plan was for Van to drive me to Francis and Ecey’s. I would get my car, pick up Matthew, and go home. I’m sure by this time everyone wished me gone. I’d monopolized the guest of honor much too long for their taste, especially Francis’s. But Norman had other ideas. His plan was for him to drive me to Larry’s, pick up Matthew, and come back to the party.

He drove, and I sat across the bench seat next to the door, not too close to him. We pulled into Larry’s yard, and I went to the door to get Matthew, who was sound asleep. I carried him to the car, and Norman got out and took him, holding him while I drove, since he didn’t know his way around those country roads in the dark. Watching him hold my sleeping boy touched me.

We went back to Van and Ginnie’s, and I put Matthew to bed in the guest room. I don’t remember how it came up, but someone there knew how to do tai chi, so we all did it. I was my usual clumsy self, which Norman thought was endearing. That night, it seemed I could do no wrong.

Finally we left, Matt still completely snozzed out, and Norman asked Fig and Ecey if he could drop them off, borrow their car, and follow me home. I think at this point they were both beginning to worry a bit, about whom I’m not quite sure, but they had to say yes.

I’d never before had a man over while Matthew was in the house. I put Matt to bed and then we went into the living room, where I offered Norman a glass of Boone’s Farm’s finest apple wine (I think it was a bottle, but it might have been a box), which I’m sure appalled him, but I didn’t know that then. We talked for another hour or more, about my desire to write, my marriage, and my divorce, and then he began to tell me about his life, his five wives and seven children. (He referred to Carol, his present companion, as his wife. They had been living together for five years, and had a child, after all.)

He told me how he hadn’t lied to me when he’d said he was separated, but he was in a place where he was being pulled in a lot of different directions. He then told me about another woman—I’ll call her Annette—with whom he had been having a serious affair for several years and who was pressuring him to leave Carol for her. He didn’t want to live with Annette, and in fact really wanted to break it off with her, but he didn’t want to hurt her, so he had suggested that they not see each other for six months while he had time to think things through. He felt he was already half separated from Carol, living two weeks in New York in an apartment in Brooklyn, which he used as a writing studio, seeing Annette and various other “other” women, and then spending two weeks with Carol and Maggie in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. He’d been continuously married or living with five women in succession, each waiting in the wings to take over from her predecessor, since he was twenty years old—something else we had in common, our marriages at twenty.

It was all rather overwhelming, but I appreciated his honesty. I told him that the last thing on my mind was getting married again, after being with the same man since I was sixteen years old, and so we understood each other. At least I thought we did. That this was just a pleasant evening, an interlude in his lecture tour, was the unspoken meaning of it all. He said I was the nicest woman he had ever met, which I thought was just more of the line, but he might have meant it, at least a little; he said it a lot over the years, sometimes behind my back.

Then he leaned over and kissed me, at first just a casual, exploratory kiss; but the kiss ignited, and I knew I was going to make love with him. He was leaving the next day, I would never see him again, and I at least wanted to be able to say I’d done
that
, even if I hadn’t been able to ask him to sign my book (which was still in the car). But I didn’t want to go to the bedroom; too close to Matthew. I didn’t want Matt to wake up and be scared by voices or strange sounds. So we did it on the living room floor. (Why did I always seem to wind up on the floor?)

It was a bit of a comedy, actually. I was jumpy and nervous trying not to make noise, listening for Matthew to wake up, and it was awkward and uncomfortable. I wouldn’t fully undress or allow him to, as Matthew might walk in, and I was getting rug burns on my back. Finally, it wasn’t that great. How could it have been? But then there are few great ones on the first try. Most guys never get
near
to great under any circumstance. Afterward, I was sorry we had done it, and I think he was, too. It was a slight downer to a magical evening for both of us, but he held me sweetly, and I felt close to him. As he was getting ready to leave, I thought once more about asking him if he would sign my
Marilyn
book, but after what had just happened, I couldn’t. It would have been tacky. I’m glad I waited. It wasn’t until the next February, when I was living with him in New York, that he finally signed it. The inscription read:

I
couldn’t wait to tell Jean Jewell, my earth mother friend who lived down the street, that I’d made love (what a strange expression for an intimate act with someone you hardly know!) with Norman Mailer. She was thrilled and wanted details, which I gladly supplied, and what particularly interested her was the fact that Norman and I had the same birthday, down to almost the same minute. She had a friend who did astrological charts, and immediately after she hung up with me she called the friend to get our charts done.

Among other things, the friend told her that Norman was going to die in 1978. This, as you remember, was 1975. That’s why I have been leery of astrologers and seers and psychics ever since. I don’t want to hear bad news. I was, of course, aghast at the prediction and didn’t know whether I believed it or not. I read my horoscopes in the newspapers every day but had never taken them seriously. We tend to remember only the ones that come true. Still, even a stopped clock is right twice a day. I decided to forget it, but that was not to be so easy. Especially when 1978 rolled around. But that was three years away.

Norman had given me an address to write to, a post office box, which made me feel kind of sleazy. I was sure I wasn’t the only woman writing to that box number. I worried over whether I should write to him at all, given his entanglements, but I didn’t feel like I was breaking up a marriage. I didn’t even know which marriage was there to be broken up, but whichever one (or two) it was, he made it clear it was broken before I came on the scene and wouldn’t last whether I was in the picture or not. The bigger problem was that I didn’t want to be just one of the harem, like with Bill Clinton, although it was way too soon to be thinking of being part of a harem or part of anything with Norman.

So between not wanting to tell him I had told Jean about our encounter (who then told some astrologist, who predicted he would be dead in three years) and trying not to assume a relationship where none existed, although still wanting to have some kind of one, I frankly didn’t know what to say to him. “Thanks for a lovely evening”? “Glad
to have met you”? “My rug burns have healed”? But he was easily the most interesting man I had ever met, and in spite of his age and his convoluted personal life, I did want to get to know him better, no matter where it led, if anywhere.

I finally decided to send him a little poem I had written, one that I thought said nicely that he was great but I understood ours was a romance that was not to be. I’d actually written the poem for John Cool, who used to write me poetry, but what the heck. It
was
the seventies, and I was much influenced by Rod McKuen. And why waste a perfectly good poem? It’s so bad that I blush with embarrassment to recount it here, but it’s a part of our history, so please be kind.

O
DE TO A
F
IRST
E
NCOUNTER

What was I
thinking
? Obviously, I wasn’t.

But he wrote back to me:

I wrote back immediately, YES, I’d love for him to stop off in Little Rock! I didn’t worry about any of my concerns at all. (P.S. He’d sent back the poem, copyedited in red pencil. That should have been a clue, but I was too happy to care. Besides, it was a secondhand poem anyhow, so I figured we were even.)

A few days later, I ran into Francis at the Kroger store. After a few
minutes of chitchat, I asked him if he had heard from Norman. He looked at me with a little pitying smirk—at least I imagined it was pitying—and said that yes, Norman had written him, but he hadn’t mentioned me, so I shouldn’t get my hopes up that I would ever hear from him again. Which, Francis said, to his mind was good, since I would have gotten in
way
over my head. He continued on in that vein for a while, how Norman was a busy,
famous
man, little girl, and just because he spent one evening with you doesn’t mean he will ever call you again. He has
dozens
of beautiful, sophisticated women all over the place, all over the
world.
Why would he be interested in a girl from the sticks of Arkansas? The bottom line was that he (Francis) was just trying to protect me, he didn’t want me to get hurt, on and on, yackety, yackety. I just nodded, never once letting on that I had plans to meet up with Norman in just a couple of days. So Norman really hadn’t told him. I smiled and said, “Thank you, Francis. I totally understand. You’re absolutely right. I know you’re just looking out for my welfare, and I promise not to worry anymore. I’m just glad I got to meet him.”