A Ticket to the Circus (15 page)

I
t turned out to be Chicago. I had never been on an airplane before, and on top of that, I had to lie to my parents and tell them I was going with Jean to work at an arts and crafts festival. I hated to lie to them, but the plan was to wait until I got there and then call and tell them the truth—one, because I would already be there and they couldn’t cry me into not going, and two… well, one is enough. But they had to know where I was in case something happened with Matthew. I was a conflicted, nervous, guilty, excited mess. I had again promised Norman not to tell Fig and Ecey that he and I were seeing each other. I think Norman really had Fig pegged as far as the jealousy thing went, but I just couldn’t keep a trip as big as this to myself.

I was at the beginning of summer classes, taking an American literature course at Tech to complete my English degree, and we were reading
Moby-Dick.
My teacher, Ruth, wasn’t much older than I was, and I had to tell her I would be missing a couple of classes and ask her if I could make up a test. I didn’t want to tell her where I would be, but a part of me was just bursting to tell, so I hinted that I was going on a big trip to meet someone, and she weaseled out of me who it was. Of course, I made her swear that she wouldn’t tell Francis or Ecey or anybody else, but the first thing Ruth did was call Ecey and ask her if they had spoken to Norman or me lately. When Ecey said no, Ruth said she thought she needed to talk to me. How Christian of her, to keep to the letter of the promise while doing the most damage. I don’t think Francis ever got over what he saw as our betrayal. But for now, I couldn’t worry too much about Francis and Ecey or
Moby-Dick
and Ruth. I was on my way to Chicago!

The closet in the back of my mind where I was cramming all the sinful things I was doing was pretty jammed, but there’s always room for more. I couldn’t even in good conscience pray for God to not let the plane crash, since I was on my way to commit adultery, but I did hope it wouldn’t. It was hard to understand how something that heavy could float up in the air like that. I tried not to grip the seat arms too tightly,
or gasp when there was some unexplained noise, so no one would know I had never flown before. This was in the days when people were allowed to smoke in the back rows, and I was in the row just in front of the smokers. The smoke made me sick, and the food was like an overcooked TV dinner, but I was too excited to really care. It was thrilling when the plane left the ground and headed, nose up, toward the sky, when the cars on the freeway became like chocolate sprinkles, and the Arkansas River a snake across a patchwork of farmland. I had a window seat and watched every mile of ground we flew over.

Norman was in Chicago doing publicity for
Playboy
, which was publishing an excerpt of his about-to-be-published book
The Fight.
He had to do a radio show just at the hour I arrived, but he had given me the address of the Blackstone hotel and told me to take a cab—which I had never done, either—and wait for him in the room. I was trying to pretend I wasn’t a total rube as the cabdriver threw my bag into the car and I gave him the address, although there was no hiding my accent. He took off with a screech, and I fell back into the seat like I had been launched from a bean flip. I wasn’t too interested in the scenery of Chicago—I was too intent on the erratic way the cabbie was driving—but I got an impression of tall dark buildings, which made the streets seem narrow and canyon-like. I didn’t know about tipping, and didn’t give him one, so he nearly ran over my foot when I got out. I went into the hotel and asked at the desk for a key to Norman’s room, as he had told me to do. The clerk wouldn’t give it to me.

“Who are you, Miss? I don’t have any instructions to let you go up to Mr. Mailer’s room.”

I was so humiliated. I guessed there were dozens of crazy women who tried to get into famous men’s hotel rooms all the time, and he just assumed I was one more, but I was well dressed, not like a floozy or anything. I was wearing a big straw cartwheel hat and a nice beige pants suit and tall wedge-heeled sandals. I tried nicely talking him into it, but he wouldn’t budge and became rude. I wasn’t used to being treated like that. It made me feel like I was nobody, like some hooker or something, and it was all I could do to keep from crying. There was nothing I could do except sit in the lobby with my suitcase and wait for Norman. The air around my chair was thick with the ice I was sending over to the desk clerk, who ignored me.

“What are you doing out here?” Norman asked, an hour later.

“
He
wouldn’t let me go up to the room,” I answered, glaring at the clerk, who promptly called for someone to help me with my suitcase. Norman was embarrassed he hadn’t told the clerk I was coming. He hadn’t thought there would be any problem. I was so happy to see him, though, it didn’t matter, and he shortly made up for it.

I had brought along an African dashiki—a kind of batik short robe—that I’d bought in Mrs. Marshall’s art shop, and when Norman saw it, for some reason he said, “Is this for me?” I, of course, had to say yes, and he put it on and wore it. I admit he did look cute in it. He had good legs, nicely muscled, if a little short and a tad bowed, and good posture. Cute little butt and a round belly I was particularly fond of—not too fat at all, nicely firm, like a soccer ball. I’ve always liked guys with little bellies, rather than those hard six-pack stomach things. Who wants to hug someone you bounce off like a brick wall? He was hairy, front and back, which I have always loved, too, and he walked with a kind of bearlike swagger, hands on his hips, which I thought was sexy. My own teddy bear. I was sorry to see the dashiki go, however, and I never saw it again. I have no idea what happened to it, but if he had come home to me from a trip with such a garment in his suitcase, I would have probably pitched a fit and then thrown it away.

Chicago was good practice, the hors d’oeuvres for New York, which came a few weeks later. It was a big city that wasn’t too overwhelming but full of wonderful things I had never seen before. We went to fancy restaurants with flowers on linen tablecloths and maître d’s in tuxedos, and I loved how the staff treated us like stars, seating us at the best tables, hovering around and offering us little treats as gifts from the chef. Norman knew a lot about wine, of which I was completely ignorant, and I discovered it was a totally different beverage than the sweet soda pop wine I had been drinking in Arkansas. “You don’t have to get the most expensive French wine on the list. In fact, those are sometimes the most sour. Get a good medium-priced California wine. Merlot is good. Get a good merlot, or a chardonnay if you want a sweeter white wine. You never drink red wine with fish, you know, or white wine with meat.”

“Why not? What difference does it make?” I really wanted to know. I could just about drink white, but red seemed beyond my capabilities.

“Red is heavier, and meat is heavier. You need the weight to wash down the meat. Besides, people will know you’re a hick if they see you drinking the wrong wine, and won’t respect you.” Ah. The old “What will people think?” That I understood. Although I was surprised that Norman would care. He seemed like he didn’t much care what people thought, but we all have our Achilles’ heels, I suppose.

I didn’t like red wine, but made myself sip it and pretend it was delicious, and after a while it got easier to tolerate. I have never liked any kind of liquor, except maybe a little rum in sweet juice punches like mai tais, or sweet amaretto over ice, and I usually put ice in my white wine. But Norman loved teaching me. He had a great time playing Henry Higgins to my Eliza Doolittle, introducing me to exotic things like escargot, which I ate enthusiastically, if with trepidation. I liked it, of course, for the garlicky butter sauce, as the snails themselves didn’t have much taste, and I felt sophisticated pulling them out of their shells with the tiny, clever forks.

At one restaurant, we ran into a nice poet named Paul Carroll, who sat with us and talked for a while about the poetry center he had started, and about Allen Ginsberg, a poet I had hardly heard of who sounded absolutely crazy. (I met him later and discovered he was indeed crazy, but in a good way.) A lot of people smiled and stared at us, and I realized they were eavesdropping on our conversation as if they were at the theater. (That was one thing that always annoyed me, the way people would unabashedly listen in to our conversations in restaurants. Norman always loved to discuss things of a personal nature, too, in his big loud voice, and no amount of shushing him could ever get him to stop it.) I tried to listen with interest to Norman and Paul’s conversation and not betray my ignorance of poetry. Norman used to say that I didn’t open my mouth for the first three years we were together, which wasn’t true at all of course, but I did subscribe to Abraham Lincoln’s old adage “Better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.” I resolved to read more poetry and try to wean myself from Rod McKuen.

After dinner, we went to hear jazz, another thing I had never done. In high school choir we had sung everything from show tunes to Russian dirges, and of course there was music at church and good old rock and roll, but I was totally ignorant of jazz and was a little nervous when
we went into the smoky, dim club. Carol, Norman’s companion at that time, had been an up-and-coming jazz singer in the fifties, and that was intimidating to me, too; I was an interloper in a world that was hers, with her man. I didn’t mention my fears to him. I just pretended I was secure and confident, and he was happy to be there with me. I was wearing a tight pair of pale gray knit pants with an off the shoulder top and high-heeled lizard sandals, and my red hair fell in waves down over my shoulders. I instinctively knew that Norman needed a strong, confident woman, and that was what I was determined to be.

In a spotlight on a small stage, a man named
Sonny Stitt was playing a saxophone, with a couple of other guys on the piano and bass. There was no beat, no dancing, just cool people sitting and drinking, nodding their heads to some rhythm I couldn’t seem to pick up. Norman ordered a white rum and tonic, with a topper of water and
lemon—
very important that it’s lemon, not lime. A rum and tonic Presbyterian, he called it. It was his drink for many years. (I later pieced together that during his turbulent earlier years, of which at this time I was more or less ignorant, his drink of choice had been bourbon. Only once did I ever see him seriously drink bourbon. It was on the campaign plane with Jimmy Carter when he was running for president, and Norman absolutely turned into someone else, as opposite from the man I knew as Mr. Hyde was from Dr. Jekyll—someone I didn’t like at all, rude and snide and argumentative, not only with me but with others as well. He was so bad, I seriously considered getting another flight and going home, and I might have if it had been in any other situation. He was contrite afterward, and said he wouldn’t drink bourbon again. He seemed to know what it did to him. They don’t call it “spirits” for nothing.)

At the jazz club, I ordered a white wine, which I sipped the rest of the evening. When the band took a break, Sonny put down his sax and came straight over to us. He and Norman embraced like old friends (he embraced me, too, a good one), although I don’t think they really knew each other well, if at all. (Celebrities are always happy to see one another; it is as if you are the only Little Person in the room and suddenly you see another one. Aha! A member of my tribe!) Sonny invited us to hang around until after the second set and then go out with him for a drink somewhere else, but Norman said that would be impossible. Sonny tried to convince him, but to no avail, so he finally had to let it be and go back and perform again. We left well before the second set was completed. I later learned that before she met him, Norman’s ex-wife (the one he was still married to) Beverly had once had a big affair with Miles Davis, so Norman wasn’t keen on history repeating itself, I suppose. All that history with the wives! Well, I vowed to make a little history myself, and try not to worry about it.

The next day, we went to the art museum. I saw paintings and sculptures I had only seen in books. At the Arkansas Arts Center, I used to pack up my high school kids to go to look at a single Andrew Wyeth painting that they’d have on loan, and here were walls full of them! Norman bought me a necklace at the gift shop, a golden filigree pendant that was copied from a Spanish piece. He said he wanted to see me wearing it and nothing else, and later that afternoon I obliged. He kept saying I smelled of cinnamon—maybe it was some perfume I was wearing—and he jokingly said if I ever became a stripper, I should call myself Cinnamon Brown. (Remember the old game we used to play as kids, where you take the name of your first pet and the name of the street on which you grew up and put them together to get your stripper name? Mine would have been Blacky St. Mary, which actually is kind of better than Cinnamon Brown. His would have been Dukie Crown, which is also a pretty good one, come to think of it.)