A Ticket to the Circus (50 page)

The food in the restaurants, however, was another matter. You could get a meal for a dollar and a quarter, and it was worth about
seventy cents. The potatoes were burned, greasy, and raw all at the same time. The meat was gristly and fatty. The cabbage salad was limp and warm. There was not enough money to buy a good meal in the whole city, and we tried most of the restaurants.

We went to one place in a nice hotel, and the first thing I noticed was the beautiful girls, all with perfect legs from years of studying ballet, all with long, long hair and short, short skirts. One girl I saw with a certain man was back a while later with a different one. Larry pointed out that they were prostitutes, and I was so upset that these elegant women had to do that.

We went to the ballet to see
The Nutcracker
, and while the theater was a little threadbare, the show was magic. I was wearing my Anna Karenina outfit, as Norman called it, a black shearling coat and a black fox fur hat. When Murat drove us home afterward, there were a dozen or so boys standing outside. Norman knew them. They were teenagers who lived in our building, and they were all drunk. There was not a lot else for teenagers in Minsk to do at night. They stood to one side as we walked to the door, and I was a little uneasy, but Norman said, “They’re okay.” They were definitely curious about me. Norman said “Good evening” in Russian, and then presented me. “My wife,” he said, which sounded something like
“Moy jhene.”
The oldest and boldest one of the group, who looked a little like Michael J. Pollard, stepped up with wonder in his eyes.
“Ve jhene?”
he asked. “This is your
wife
?” Then the group broke out in applause, for Norman, for having the good taste to have me for a wife, I guess. I did a little curtsy for them.

We were in a good mood when we went inside, and for the first time since I’d gotten there, maybe for the first time since we had started the marital war, the ice began to melt and we began to come back to each other. We did love each other. We wanted to be together, not just for the family, not just for the apartment and the house, but for us. I knew I was going to be with him the rest of my life, and I think he felt the same way. It wasn’t always easy after that. We of course fought, bitterly at times, and once in a while the scab on the old wound would be picked, but this time in Minsk was the beginning of the healing.

When I got back to New York, I went to my friend’s apartment and told him I couldn’t see him again, that I was going to stay with
Norman. He wasn’t surprised. “I always knew you were never going to leave Norman,” he said. But it was okay. I’m not sorry we had our little fling. It made me see that I really loved Norman, for better or for worse. Maybe it just took a little more for Norman to find this out for himself.

W
e started spending more time in Provincetown. John went to Andover in the fall of 1994, and there was no reason to stay in New York on the school schedule. Matt was still living at home, but he had graduated from NYU film school and was making a feature version of his award-winning senior thesis film,
The Money Shot.
I was so proud of him. He had worked twice as hard as everyone else to get where he was because he was dyslexic. Reading was harder for him, math was almost impossible, and yet he had gotten to the top of his class and was now working as a movie director.

Norman had always loved working in the Provincetown house. It had a calm ambiance that was conducive to writing. He loved the solitude and being on the sea, and frankly, by then he was ready for a break from our hectic social life. He was also tired and burned out from the last few contentious years. He wanted a quieter life, to refocus on his work. He felt age rounding his shoulders.

The summers in Provincetown were always a madhouse. The five bedrooms were packed for three solid months with kids and friends, sometimes the couches as well, but in the fall things quieted down. The days came down gray and crisp, and smoke from fireplaces scented the east end of town. Ducks and geese and wayward swans stopped and swam in the bay on their trips south, gorging on the schools of minnows. We had few friends who lived there all year, and many evenings were spent alone, watching TV, reading, working late. We rediscovered each other in those years. We became like two old friends who knew everything about each other and liked each other anyhow.

We began to redecorate the house, as it was still decked out in Patty Lareine’s Easter egg colors from
Tough Guys Don’t Dance
, and those cool pastels didn’t go with the cold winters. I had never liked those colors in general, but we’d just never had the time to change it. We both loved wallpaper instead of paint, it was cozy and warm, and the big house could take some warmth, with its wall of windows that stretched along the sea view. Norman enjoyed going to the wallpaper store and poring
over sample books as much as I did. The women who worked there were thrilled when he came in, and they scurried around to find things he might like. In fact, he chose most of the papers in the house, but he did it with an eye to the colors I liked, the warm colors of fall. We started out to just do the living room, but as soon as one room was done, the next one seemed to ask for it. John Golden, the meticulous man who did the papering, practically moved in with us for more than a year.

I sold my studio in Brooklyn and we renovated the kitchen with the profits. It was the closest we had been in… well, maybe the closest we’d ever been. All alone, just the two of us. No secrets. At least none I knew of. I would never totally trust him again, but I trusted him enough. And I had my own little secret in the bank, so to speak. It was good it was there. It gave me some self-esteem; it made me feel less like a poor sad victim.

I painted and showed in local galleries, we went back and forth to New York, and Norman worked on
Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery
, which came out in May 1995. It was a surprising book to a lot of people, because over the years Norman had been convinced that there had been some kind of conspiracy afloat to kill the president, and during the course of his research he came to the conclusion that the murder had indeed been done by a lone, deranged misfit, Lee Harvey Oswald, as the Warren Commission had ruled. (Well, he said he was 75 percent sure. He didn’t want to give up the conspiracy idea altogether.) It was not a conclusion he relished. He would much rather have been the one to uncover some nefarious plot, but the facts just didn’t point in that direction.

   
NORMAN READ A BOOK
by a friend of ours, Nat Brandt, called
The Congressman Who Got Away with Murder
, about Congressman Daniel Sickles, who just before the Civil War shot and killed his young wife’s lover, Philip Barton Key (son of Francis Scott Key, who wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner”). Norman thought it would make a good movie and asked me if I wanted to work on it with him.

“With you? You mean, you and me sit down and write it side by side?”

“No. I mean you do the research and write a first draft and then I’ll work on it.”

Hm. That was interesting. “I thought you didn’t like my writing that much. You didn’t like the novel.”

“You’ve gotten better since then. I attribute it to living with me and learning through osmosis. You sure can write a good letter. If you can write letters like that, you can write anything.”

Okay. I admit I was flattered. And I was at an impasse with my painting. My gallery in SoHo had closed, as did a gallery in Washington, D.C., where I’d had a show. I took my slides around to several galleries in New York, but nobody was interested. Some of the galleries were so rude, they wouldn’t even look at the slides. One man, looking as though he were smelling something bad, said, “Oh, we don’t take
amateurs
here.” I never wanted to slap anybody so badly in my life. Art is one of the most heartbreaking businesses there is, along with acting and writing, or anything creative that is judged by someone’s personal taste. Which is why nearly everyone in our family has gone into some facet of the arts, I guess. It’s the challenge.

So I started researching and began to write the script. I finished a first draft and gave it to Norman to work on. The idea was, he would mark it up and hand it back to me, and I would put in the changes, but unhappily I didn’t always agree with his changes. Then we would have a fight. The first one nearly derailed the whole project. I call it the “softly fight.” On the first page of the manuscript there is a description of soldiers at an encampment. It is evening, fires are lit, and I say, “one of the soldiers is softly playing a harmonica.” Norman hated adjectives and adverbs, so he changed the sentence to: “A soldier is playing a harmonica. Softly.” No big deal; I made the change. There were other changes that I was going to have to talk to him about, so the script was riddled with notes, but that was not one of them.

Norman had gotten up early that morning to read the second draft, and I was still in bed. It must have been around six o’clock. I woke up as the bedroom door banged open and Norman thrust the script into my face.

“I can’t work with you if you aren’t going to put my changes into the script! Why am I wasting my time with this if you won’t even do
the smallest little change?” He was yelling at the top of his voice, and I was trying to get my eyelids open and find my glasses.

“What are you talking about?”

“Here, on the first page, I changed this word and took out that adverb, and you refused to change it!” He stuck the paper under my nose. I couldn’t find my glasses, and I had to go to the bathroom, so I just pushed him aside and stormed into the bathroom. He was still ranting, and I began to think either he had lost his mind or I had. I knew I’d changed that word. I remembered it. It didn’t make any difference to me if the word was an adverb in front of the verb or in its own sentence; it was the same thing. I came back out and told him I had changed it; he said I hadn’t, and we yelled at each other for a good five minutes. Then I went into the bedroom and slammed the door. That wasn’t enough, so I slammed it some more times. Then I sat on the side of the bed and began to cry. After all that effort, it was going to be impossible to work together, after all. Why had I thought we could do it? People were right about him. He was crazy. Then there was a knock on the door. A soft one.

“Honey?”

“What?”

“Can I come in?”

“What for? So you can yell at me some more?”

“To apologize. I was reading the wrong draft.”

We laughed about that fight for a long time, and every time we started to disagree, we said, “Remember the softly fight,” which was occasionally enough to defuse it.

The script was finished, and our agent sent it to Milos Forman, who loved it and wanted to make it with Jack Nicholson. Columbia Pictures was putting up the money and Francis Ford Coppola and Zoetrope would be producing, so we would work with our old friend Tom Luddy again. Norman was working on another novel,
The Gospel According to the Son
, so I went up to Milos’s country house in Connecticut alone to work with him on the script. His house was a former barn, with a big fireplace he kept stoked with wood all day long. Between the fireplace and the cigars he chain-smoked, I smelled like a bratwurst at the end of the day. He had a sweet little guesthouse for me to stay in
that had warm flannel sheets and a motherly housekeeper to look after me. It was idyllic country life. The script got better, and we tailored it for Jack. “I can just hear Jack saying that!” Milos would laugh as we wrote some roguish bit of dialogue. Norman came to the country and worked with us for a weekend, and as far as we were concerned, the movie was a done deal.

Then Milos called Jack. Jack didn’t reply. Milos waited a few days and called him again. Jack still didn’t reply. Milos called Jack’s agent, and still Jack didn’t get in touch. Jack hadn’t read the script, so he couldn’t have disliked it. Milos was the director who was responsible for making Jack’s career with
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
It was the height of bad manners that Jack never got back to him. Finally, Jack’s agent called to say that he wasn’t interested. Then Milos called Michael Douglas, who at least got back to Milos and told him he wasn’t interested, and then after Woody Harrelson turned it down, Milos got disenchanted and went off to make
The People vs. Larry Flynt
with Woody instead. That’s Hollywood. At least we got paid.

Norman and I wrote two other scripts together, one for an Austrian producer about Empress Elisabeth of Austria, who was one of the most beautiful monarchs in history, and another for HBO based on a short story Norman wrote in the sixties about the end of the world called “The Last Night.” Ironically, in our script, which takes place around 2030, we called the 1990s “the Golden Twilight” because they were the last good years the world had, and after that everything went to hell in a handbasket. We had a young black president in our script who finally left Earth in a spaceship with a group of people bound for another planet, just as the earth was struck by a meteorite and destroyed. None of the movies got made. And finally, we fought too much to have any pleasure in the work. We were just too different in our styles of writing and squabbled over every single line of dialogue, so we never wrote another one.

After all this, I quietly started working on my novel again. Given Norman’s reaction to it the first time he’d read it so many years before, I had no intention of letting him read it this time. In fact, I didn’t even look at the last version I’d done. I started all over from page one and wrote a whole new book. I think Norman was right. I had somehow
learned to write while I was with him, through osmosis, or through reading every draft of every book he had written, or from all those books I had read over the years, but somehow I had improved. I’d written about 150 pages when my oldest friend Susan Gibson from Atkins came to visit us in Ptown and I asked her to
read it. She came in from the deck, eyes blazing, and said, “What happens next? You can’t leave me hanging there like that!” And I knew it was okay. I then had my stepdaughters, my sister-in-law, and a few more friends read it, and they all loved it.