A Ticket to the Circus (20 page)

N
orman had strong ideas about birth control. He thought the pill was absolute poison for women. Maybe that was why he had so many kids. (You think?) I don’t know that he was wrong. It certainly has been under the microscope, and anything powerful enough to alter a woman’s ability to conceive has got to do strange things to her system. Not that he totally influenced me. If I had wanted to be on the pill, I would have been, but I’d been on and off it for years—on it when I met him—and it wasn’t good for me. It made me bloat and gain weight. So when I went on the diet to get ready to meet Wilhelmina, I got off the pill and we tried using other methods, none of which we liked. After I lost the weight, I went back on the pill, thinking I would just work harder and keep on eating less. That didn’t work so well, so I got off it again, at his suggestion, to dire consequences.

It was madness, but the week he arrived for the second time in New York, I got pregnant. I was terrified. Here I was, fresh off the boat, so to speak, all alone and nobody to confide in except his mother or sister, whom I obviously couldn’t tell. He couldn’t just up and leave the family in Maine and come and be with me. It would have been too disruptive for everyone. So it was a tough time for both of us, me not
knowing if he was really going to be with me or what, and him worried about and wanting to be with me while having to be the consummate dad—hiking and sailing and pretending everything was normal. He swore to me he was going to leave Carol, but it wasn’t something he could do overnight in the middle of summer vacation. We discussed it and decided that whatever happened with the baby, he would split his time between New York and Maine—then Stockbridge—until after Christmas, and then on the first of the year he would come and live with me full-time, and we would go back to Arkansas and bring Matthew to live with us. What would make it bearable was that we had two big trips to tide us over until he moved. In September, there was the Muhammad Ali boxing match in the Philippines—the Thrilla in Manila—and then we were going to Rome for a month in October and November because he was writing a movie script for Sergio Leone, based on a book called
The Hoods
, that Leone was calling
Once Upon a Time in America.
Our life together was just beginning; we were like two excited kids. And then I got pregnant.

He called a few friends, among them Amy Greene, who had also become a friend to me (and is to this day), and José Torres, a boxer who had been the light heavyweight champion of the world, to tell them I was there alone and needed a friend, but not that I was pregnant. No one knew that. Of course, Norman and I talked on the phone every day and continued to write letters. Again, I pretended to be stronger than I was. I had learned that tears had little effect on Norman, and in fact were repugnant to him. So I did my crying when I was alone, and brazened out a kind of humorous cheerfulness on the phone and in letters to him.

Then one day something odd happened. It sounds like a twisted fairy tale, but I swear it was real. It was the middle of a hot early September afternoon, and I had just lain down to take a nap on the bed in the living room. It’s possible I might have dreamed it, but it didn’t seem like a dream. A small blue fairy-like thing flitted in and out of the edge of my vision, twinkling like a little bell. “It must be a bluebird,” I thought, and I sat up in bed, thinking it had flown in through the open door to the balcony. I peered around the room, but couldn’t see it anywhere. Then I lay back down and it popped up again, flitting just around the periphery of my vision, over my head, never close enough
for me to see clearly what it was. When I tried to look at it directly, it disappeared.

The sun set and the light faded into twilight, the magic hour, and the bluebird glowed brighter. All of a sudden, I simply knew. It wasn’t a bird; it was the baby. It was trying to decide whether to come into me or not. I lay there, and tears flowed from my eyes. I prayed to God. I couldn’t ask Him for forgiveness—I didn’t want to be forgiven. That would mean I would have to forsake my sin and leave Norman, and I wanted desperately to stay with him—and yes, one day have his baby, but I knew that now wasn’t the time. I selfishly wanted to take the trips, I wanted to be a model, I wanted to have some time to get to know Norman, for us to be out in the open about our relationship, to get married and make a life together.

I began to talk to the baby and tell him (I knew it was a boy) that I loved him and wanted him so much, just not right now. I went back and forth between talking to the baby and talking to God. All I could ask for was the wisdom to make the right decision, whatever it had to be. I asked God to help me, to have mercy on me, and to let it all work out. I knew it was greedy of me to want a man who already had seven children and such a tangled past, but I also knew without question that it was right for us. We both knew it, as if it had always been inevitable. I slipped into a deep sleep then, and woke to the doorbell ringing.

It was José Torres and four or five of his friends, stopping by to keep me company with a big bag of food. I didn’t know what Norman had told them, but I pretended I had a little stomach flu, and they stayed for quite a while, laughing and telling funny stories, playing music and cheering me up. No one could laugh like José. He slapped his knee and fell off his chair laughing, which made everyone else laugh, too. I will always have a soft spot for José, who has now passed over like so many of our old friends, bless him. He was the kind of friend who would pick up dinner and visit a person he hardly knew, just because his friend asked him to.

A few days later, I met Chuck Neighbors, who was the literary agent for B. C. Hall, my old creative writing teacher at Tech. B.C. had published several novels and some nonfiction, and he’d called Chuck to see if he might represent me as a writer, too. B.C. knew I had been working on a novel I’d started in his class when I was a senior and my
first husband, Larry, was in Vietnam. I still didn’t know if I was going to be able to model or not. Amy was trying to help me get more pictures to show Wilhelmina before she sent me up there, as she thought the ones I had brought from Arkansas weren’t good enough. Racking my brains for a way to make some money, I thought I might be able to write magazine pieces, or perhaps even get a publisher for my book, which I was calling
Little Miss Little Rock.

Chuck and I agreed to meet at the Riviera restaurant in Greenwich Village. He was wiry with a wispy goatee, protruding ears, and dark, longish curly hair. He seemed to know a lot about everything, had gone to school in Texas and could do a credible Texas accent. We got along. I agreed to show him the novel, and we talked about what kind of pieces I might do for a magazine.

In the middle of dinner, I began to feel a bit sick and strange, and I couldn’t quite get any of the food down. I went to the bathroom and discovered I had started to bleed. I sat on the toilet for quite a while—oblivious to people knocking on the door—feeling a little faint, listening to trickles. When I got up, the bowl was filled with blood. There was a dark clot in the middle of it. I knew it was the baby. He had heard me and decided to go back and wait for a better time. I said, “Thank you, God. Thank you, baby.” I cried, washed my face, and came back out and told Chuck I wasn’t feeling so well. He got me a cab to go home. He did become my agent, and later, after I had been modeling for a year and more, I wrote a piece for
Cosmopolitan
magazine called “Getting My Book Together” about what is involved in becoming a model. Chuck and I have been friends ever since, and that piece was the inspiration for my second novel,
Cheap Diamonds
, which came out more than thirty years later.

Two years after this, in 1977, I did indeed become pregnant with our son John Buffalo, and Norman and I were thrilled about it. I used to tell John when he was little that he had been up in heaven, manipulating the situation so his father and I would meet each other so we could have him.

“Can you imagine the trouble you had to go through, John,” I used to say. “You had to make sure I forgot to send in that Book-of-the-Month card saying I didn’t want
Marilyn.
Then you had to arrange Dad’s schedule so he would be in Arkansas right at that time. You had
to get the film animation artist to come to Tech on the day Dad was there, get Van to invite me to bring my class, and then make me crash the party for Dad and pick out those tight jeans to wear!”

What I left out was that he had also kindly waited for two years before he came back, and this time, his timing was perfect.

Summer was finally over and Norman brought the family back from Maine for the kids to go to school, and told Carol about me. He didn’t have a choice. She called the house one day and I picked up the phone. I know she was in shock over it, since she knew about the other woman Norman had been seeing, Annette, and I’m sure she knew of several others. But “Barbara” was somebody brand-new. I was relieved on the one hand that she finally knew, but the woman side of me felt bad (only a little, but it was real) for her.

Carol and I have had a tumultuous relationship over the years. There were times when we would have cheerfully thrown each other under the moving wheels of a Mack truck, but there was also something inexplicable in each of us that kind of liked the other. When I had John, she called me in the hospital and we talked for an hour, for the first time, like old dear friends. It was a short-lived hiatus then, but today, we
are
old dear friends, two survivors, members of a small club,
if you will. Not the only members. There were four others, after all, but the only ones who like and understand each other. I’m not going to spend time talking about Norman’s ex-wives. They are women who gave birth to the children I love. They have their good points and their bad ones, as do I, and whatever their relationships were with Norman, they were different from mine. I’m not going to talk about the numerous girlfriends, either, but you know who you are, and there are many more of you than you think.

One night, not long after Norman had moved in with me for good, the phone rang at three in the morning. I jumped up out of a dead sleep and ran to the living room to answer it, instantly awake. A strange female voice demanded, “Let me speak to Norman.”

“He’s sleeping,” I said sweetly, like the nice Southern girl I was brought up to be.

“Well, wake him up. He will be very glad to hear from me.”

“Honey, if he was that glad to hear from you,
you
would be here instead of me.” And I put down the phone and went back to bed.