A Ticket to the Circus (18 page)

The surprising, wonderful thing was how warm and close and normal a family they all were. I immediately liked them, and I think they liked me. Barbara was a good cook. She had made pot roast, and Norman’s mother promised to teach me how to do it. I’m sure they had a lot of questions, but refrained from asking them, and I played my part as Francis’s dutiful niece who also was a schoolteacher. I could tell Norman was happy, though, that we got along so well. They didn’t seem to think it was strange that he was there with me, and no one mentioned his wife. None of Norman’s kids were there that night, but there would be time enough to meet them. I kept telling myself this was just a visit. I would be going home in a couple of days, and might never be back. But we both knew better. We had gotten even closer during the week; it had been nonstop fun, going out to restaurants and getting to know New York, and long hot nights in bed. As the time came for me to go back, neither one of us wanted it to end. By the last couple of days, we stopped pretending.

“Why don’t you move here and try it for a while?” Norman said. “You can always go back to school later. Stay here in the apartment until you figure out what you want to do. You might decide to try
modeling, or if you want to teach or write or paint, you can do that.”

I hadn’t thought about modeling since I had sent my pictures to Eileen Ford when I was eighteen. After the divorce, I thought I was too old, and obviously with a child it would have been impossible to come to New York and try it, but everywhere I went people kept mistaking me for a model. On the street in Manhattan, a photographer came up to me and asked me who I was with, and I didn’t know what he was talking about. He handed me his card and told me I should think about modeling. He wasn’t the first one, and actually being in New York, the idea began to take root once again.

Norman and I were walking down Fifth Avenue when I told him I had to stop and buy a pair of flip-flops or something because I had a wicked blister on my foot from my shoe, so we went into Saks Fifth Avenue, where I got a pair of sandals. A pushy saleswoman took one look at him, smelled a live one, and descended on us. He wound up buying me two dresses, a beautiful Diane von Furstenberg black knit dress in a lotus pattern, and a Saks label long evening dress in a dark blue velvet print. The saleswoman was beside herself, bringing things out for me to try on, and he loved the fashion show I did for him. We drew a little crowd. (It was embarrassing when I went into the dressing room, though, because I hadn’t worn any underwear, and the woman insisted on coming in with me. That was the last time I made that mistake—either not wearing underwear to shop in or letting the saleswoman into the dressing room.)

“You should be a model,” the saleswoman said as I was sashaying around in my new outfits. Norman agreed with her, and he decided then and there to take me down the street to see an old friend of his, Amy Greene, who ran a business out of Henri Bendel’s called Beauty Checkers, which taught a woman how to put on makeup. Amy was in her forties, at the peak of her beauty, and had been a model when she was young. She was married to Milton Greene, one of the most famous photographers in the business. They had befriended Marilyn Monroe when she’d come to New York to study at the Actors Studio, and Marilyn had lived with Milton and Amy for a time in their house in Greenwich, Connecticut. Norman wrote about them in
Marilyn.
I knew Milton’s photographs from the book, and the idea of my meeting Amy and maybe actually becoming a model was exciting for both Norman and me. We had lunch with Amy, who is nothing if not honest. “Kiddo,” she said, “you’re beautiful. Your skin is to die for, but you’re three years too old, so you’ll have to lie, and you need to lose fifteen pounds. I wouldn’t let you go see Wilhelmina like you are. She would just turn you down.”

Oh. That was honest. I weighed about 130, but I was five feet ten, so it wasn’t like I was obese. Still, I took her at her word. Models were
skinny. Wilhelmina was one of the two biggest model agents in New York, the other one being Eileen Ford, who had turned me down when I’d sent those pictures years ago, so I knew it would have been pointless to try her again. I told Amy I’d go back home and lose the weight. I thought as long as I was there at Beauty Checkers, I might as well get some pointers, so Amy did my makeup while Norman waited. I thought I was pretty good with makeup, but Amy wanted to do something different from the browns I used. She chose odd colors of yellow and purple eye shadow, which were not my colors at all. I didn’t want to say anything, since she was Norman’s friend and all, but it was kind of appalling. My eyes looked like two pansies. Norman wasn’t as nice about it. He took one look at it and growled, “Could you please wash your face and put your regular makeup back on? My reputation is bad enough in this town without people thinking I beat you up and gave you two black eyes!”

Amy took it with good grace, we redid the makeup, and when the time came, she called Wilhelmina for me and made an appointment, but I’m getting ahead of myself. First, I had to face my parents, my son, and the town of Russellville and tell them I was moving to New York City.

I
t was about what you would expect. “How can you do this to us, after all we have done for you?” my parents said. “How are you going to live? Who is this man? Isn’t he married? How can you take Matthew off so far away from us?” And many variations of those questions. I didn’t know the answers myself, but the thing I did know was that I was either going to move to New York to be with Norman or die. I didn’t care how much of a sinner I was. I had seen my future with him and I wanted to be there, in the middle of all that excitement, no matter what. I planned to sell my car and house and to cash in my teacher’s retirement, which would give me about five thousand dollars—enough, I figured, to last until I got a job. I had no idea what ultimately would happen with Norman. He had made me no promises and I had asked him for none, but he was as anxious as I was for me to come and live there. Of course, I knew he was unhappy in his present marital situation, but he never said straight and plain he was going to leave Carol, who was in Stockbridge, waiting for him to come back and take the family to Maine for the rest of the summer.

The plan was that I would leave Matt with Mother and Daddy until I got settled and got a job, whatever it turned out to be, and then I’d come back down in a few weeks or months and bring him up to live with me. I was going to get my own apartment. I would stay with Norman for a while, but I wanted to have my own place in case for some reason it didn’t work out. That, and at least it would give Mother and Daddy the illusion that I wasn’t living in sin, although I certainly would be.

I went back to Arkansas, and the next month was a flurry of quitting my job (which gave both Chip, the principal of Russellville High School, and me enormous satisfaction), selling my house and car—my beloved yellow Volkswagen Super Beetle, which I still wish I had kept—and saying goodbye to all my friends and boyfriends. None of them could believe I was moving to New York to be with a man older than my father. Norman had talked to Francis about it by that time, and
he was quite upset, as we had feared. He and Ecey were worried for me, of course, but I think they were just as worried about him. Here he was breaking up his fifth marriage, leaving another child behind.

That was something I didn’t like to dwell too closely on. I hadn’t met any of the children yet, but of course I knew about them—all seven of them. He had broken up with every one of their mothers before any of them was older than six, and now the oldest one, Susan, was my same age, twenty-six, and the youngest was Maggie, four. I knew in my heart that if it hadn’t been me, he would have broken up that last marriage in any case. As he had told me, he was being pressured by Annette to make a choice between Carol and her, but Annette seemed to have been forgotten. (Part of their pact was to not speak for six months, either.)

In fact, for some incredible reason, I didn’t worry about anything, or any other woman. Norman made me feel that secure, that loved. As soon as I got home, all I could think about was getting back to New York and Norman. The one fun thing I did do during that month of July was go to Memphis to a Rolling Stones concert with a boy I had been dating named Bob, who had long wavy blond hair and blue eyes, because we’d had tickets for a long time, but I wouldn’t sleep with him, which was quite upsetting to him. He, too, was in shock that I had plans to move to New York. He gave me a turquoise ring and told me that he would be waiting for me when I came to my senses. But there was nothing anyone could say to stop me. I had never been so single-minded about anything in my life, or so sure of what I was doing.

So, once again, for the seventh or eighth time in four years, I moved. Without a backward glance, I gave away or sold all my furniture and clothes, keeping only a few suitcases for the trip and a few clay pots and paintings and mementos from my students and friends. The one thing Norman said about my packing was, “Don’t bring any of your Arkansas polyester clothes up here.” As if they had never heard of polyester in New York! But I had no choice because most of what I had was polyester, and frankly I liked it. It fit nicely, was easy to wash, and didn’t wrinkle. I also made a lot of my own clothes, and it was easy to sew. Even the big designers such as Oscar de la Renta used Quiana nylon and polyester in their designs. Still, I left most of the homemade things behind, aside from the pants. I never could get pants long
enough. I had no idea if I could really become a model or not, but I went to work starving myself and riding my bike, and by the time I left for New York, I weighed 115. I visited a couple of photographers, including Bill Ward and Lee Rogers, and collected a few pictures to show Wilhelmina when the time came.

I tried to explain to Matthew that I was going to go away for a while but would come back and get him and we would go to live in a big city. I don’t think he understood at all what I was saying, but he didn’t worry too much about it. He loved my parents and felt safe with them. No matter what, I didn’t intend to be without him for long. I think my mother and father thought I would get it out of my system and move back in a few weeks. At any rate, they didn’t have a choice. I was one determined girl.

The only one who wasn’t that concerned about me was me. And Norman. He was off on another adventure. He had a new willing Eliza Doolittle he was going to make into the next star, and whatever happened would be all good. He was feeding my moving frenzy with long letters and phone calls from a phone booth in Maine, where he was living for the summer with the family. They were mountain climbing, hiking, and swimming, living in an unusual house situated over a fjord with a deck that cantilevered out over the water. He told me a rite of passage for the kids was to jump off the deck into the water eighteen feet below, and how he was trying to get up the courage to dive off it. I was so jealous, wanting to be there with him. It was torture, knowing Carol was with him, sleeping in the same bed, and worrying that he would change his mind and decide he wanted to stay with her after all. But still, the letters and calls kept coming, reassuring me. I proceeded to make my plans.

He was waiting for me at the airport when I arrived in mid-August. He was going to spend a week with me until I got settled, then go back to Maine to the family for another few weeks, when I would be all alone in New York.

F
anny Mailer was under five feet tall, had maybe been five feet one at her peak, but had shrunk with age and had the dreaded arthritic widow’s hump. Still, she was capable and full of energy, and for some reason took a liking to me. She had grown up Jewish in New Jersey. Her father owned a kosher butcher shop where she and her three sisters worked hard from the time she was a small, indefatigable girl. She’d also had an older brother but didn’t mention him much; she and her sisters were the close-knit heart of the family and they did most of the work. Fanny was the youngest, but we never knew exactly how old she was, as all the sisters shaved a few years off their ages. She might have been five or more years older than we thought. Besides running the butcher shop, her father had also been a sort of unofficial rabbi, with a long flowing beard, who would take over services when the regular rabbi was away, and they’d kept a kosher home.