A Ticket to the Circus (17 page)

I loved those letters. It was like having him there with me, as I read them over and over with a cup of coffee in the morning, the ink fresh and immediate from a pen in his strong, square hand. His handwriting was sometimes hard to read, but he made an effort to make it as legible
as possible. At any rate, soon he sent me a ticket to New York. Norman liked to tell the story of the first time he got off the plane in Berlin, how he took a deep breath and got a hard-on. That’s metaphorically what happened to me in New York. I got off the plane, and immediately I knew this was my town. I had never fallen in love with a place so quickly before. Even the dense air at the airport and the energy of the crowd in the dingy buildings were exciting. Norman was waiting at the gate, and when we got into the taxi, he grabbed me and gave me a kiss that lasted all the way to the front door of his apartment in Brooklyn. We talked about the Taxicab Kiss for years. It was the most astonishing kiss I ever had or ever will have. I think he would have agreed.

Norman had been regaling me with descriptions of the magnificent apartment he had there (it sounded like the Taj Mahal), with its soaring glass skylight, the view of the skyline of lower Manhattan, the harbor, and the Statue of Liberty. How from the roof deck you could see New Jersey and Staten Island and the Brooklyn Bridge, as well as the Manhattan and Verrazano bridges, and how he had decorated it like a ship, so it felt like an enormous yacht. I was so excited. I couldn’t wait to see the wonder of this place. I missed most of the scenery coming in from the airport because of the kiss, but the few glimpses I had weren’t so spectacular. It looked like a bunch of dirty row houses in some slum, graffiti on the walls of the buildings closest to the highway. But I knew we were going to a great neighborhood with tree-lined streets and this palatial apartment.

The neighborhood was sweet, with trees and rows of nineteenth-century brownstone houses. We carried my bags up a set of brownstone steps into the house, and then up three long flights of stairs. The hallway was painted dark green and the carpet was a dusty midnight-blue wool. The last flight of stairs leading to the top floor, Norman’s palace, was carpeted in red. “Of course,” I thought. Red. It was fitting for the king. The door was painted a rather ugly flat blue, and as I stood there panting, trying to catch my breath from the climb, Norman opened it and stepped back with a flourish—ta-da!

The first thing to hit me in the face was the heat. The ceiling over half the apartment was an enormous A-frame skylight through which the sun was beating as if the window was a magnifying glass. The windows had all been shut for weeks, and all the oxygen had been burned
out of the room. I could hardly draw breath. He rushed around opening the door to the little terrace and climbing a ladder (a ladder!) to reach the second level to open the skylight windows. I stood there and tried to take it all in. The view was as spectacular as promised, but the Taj Mahal, the apartment wasn’t. It was much smaller than I had anticipated. Much. I was used to living in a sprawling three-bedroom two-bathroom house with a dining room, living room, den, laundry room, and big yard, and this was the top floor of a New York brownstone. Not a bad size for an apartment in the city, but for someone used to space, it was tiny.

Aside from the soaring skylight, the apartment was basically one big open room with two small separate bedrooms in the back, a teeny galley kitchen with white metal cabinets and orange walls on one side, and on the other, a bathroom with dark blue tiles that was smaller than most coat closets, just large enough to squeeze in a small black sink, a five-foot tub, and a toilet. There were nets everywhere. Old fisherman’s nets (that still carried a whiff of the sea) hung from the ceiling around a bed in a corner of the living room, and one entire wall was bookcases crammed with books. Books were in piles on the floor, on chairs, on tables. The furniture was, to put it kindly, dusty and worn, and the place was filled with odd things, like strange dried fish heads hanging on the walls, or a grimy, slowly disintegrating sculpture made from black stockings that was hung from a hook in the ceiling. A quarter of the living room was filled with an enormous red, white, yellow, and blue LEGO sculpture (also terribly dusty, as was everything in the place) cordoned off by a low fence.

There was an open area between the bathroom and kitchen that was like a jungle gym; a trapeze was suspended from a beam in the middle of the space under the peak of the skylight, with a hammock slung across the abyss above it, two stories up. A tightrope was stretched at knee height on metal legs that were screwed into brass plates set into the hardwood floor. There was a climbing rope and a ship’s ladder that folded down so one could climb up to a little room over the living room, and above the kitchen there was an open loft with two beds that folded into the wall, like ship’s bunks. Another ladder went up to yet a third level, a crow’s nest that was in the high peak of the roof, and you
had to walk an exposed plank that stretched across two open stories to reach it.

One of the two bedrooms in the back was papered in red and held a bed, a chest, and a lovely antique dresser. The other one was papered with cartoon ships and sailors, as if for little boys, and crammed with old filing cabinets, a chair with the stuffing coming out, and assorted broken lamps and boxes of junk. The place looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in many months. Many. I wandered into the filthy kitchen. I wasn’t sure what color the floor was, but it was brownish and sticky. I opened the fridge and shut it immediately. Someone had spilled a bottle of soy sauce in there in the not so remote past and then unplugged the refrigerator. The whole thing reeked. I was speechless. Norman stood expectantly, beaming.

“Well? Isn’t it everything I said it was?”

“Oh. It is. It’s wonderful. It’s amazing. Can I go out on the terrace?” I had just about gotten my breath back, but between the smell of the fridge and the heat, I was a little sick, and sweat was pouring down my neck. I went out, and the view was indeed spectacular. I started imagining myself cleaning the place and reorganizing it, and I began to relax a bit. I am a lot like my mother, who is a total neat freak. I could see now that Norman was the furthest thing from that. It wasn’t that he was just messy. I don’t think he even
saw
the mess. He truly had no idea it wasn’t perfect just as it was. There would be a lot of work to do, and I would have to do it carefully, so as not to offend him.

I stood looking out at the city across the river, at the tall rectangular shapes of the new World Trade Center towers, the tallest buildings on the horizon. The river was so close, it seemed like we could run down to the water and swim across.

“Aren’t those two towers the ugliest things you’ve ever seen?” Norman said, coming out to join me. “They’ve totally ruined the skyline. Look at the rest of the buildings, how lovely they are, reaching up to heaven, like the points of artists’ paintbrushes, and then there’s those two Kleenex boxes stuck in the middle of it like two big buck teeth. World Trade towers. What a monument to the corporation.”

“You’re right. The older buildings are better. These new ones are so cold. All that glass and steel. I like wood and stone more.”

“Oh, definitely. Right. I made up a law about the phenomenon. I call it Mailer’s Law of Architectural Precedence. It goes, ‘If the building you are in is less agreeable than the building across the street, then the building you are in was put up later.’”

It must be said that the brownstone in Brooklyn where he lived was much more agreeable than the Kleenex box high-rises in Manhattan, and it had been built much earlier, in 1836, the same year Arkansas became a state. His apartment was the servants’ quarters then, the house a one-family dwelling, and now there were four families living in it. His furniture—an overstuffed moss-green velvet couch, a claret-colored velvet wing chair, low wood tables, and nice Oriental carpets—was worn and a little shabby, but it was all good stuff and comfortable. Now that I’d gotten over the shock, all the place needed was a good cleaning and maybe a few pictures on the walls—definitely the dried goose fish and broken lamps thrown away. Maybe a few of the chairs recovered. There were lots of possibilities. I didn’t dare plan for too much right away, as it was only my first day in the place, but I couldn’t help it. Decorating was one of my passions.

Norman took me to Montague Street, the main drag of Brooklyn Heights, for a Chinese lunch, the first time I’d ever had real Chinese food. He was so happy and excited to introduce me to new things. Brooklyn Heights was a small, sweet neighborhood with mom-and-pop shops, interesting bookstores, and friendly people. Norman had been preparing me for weeks, talking about the coldness of New York, how every woman on the street would be more beautiful and chic than I was, how intimidating I would find it, but that wasn’t the case at all. If you grow up as a self-assured, beloved person, you will be that same person no matter where you are. As far as all the beautiful women went, of course there were beautiful ones, but most were just like the women on the streets of Russellville or any other place. I never felt inferior to any of them, then or ever, and part of it was that Norman always made me feel special.

Norman’s sister, Barbara, invited us for dinner at her place in Greenwich Village, and I met his mother, Fanny, for the first time. I was astounded at how much the three of them looked alike; Barbara was a petite, pretty version of Norman, with curly salt-and-pepper hair and lively blue eyes, and his mother was an older version of them,
still energetic and bustling in the kitchen. Norman had concocted a story of how I was Francis Gwaltney’s niece who had come to New York to see if I might want to move there, but I don’t think they bought it. It was impossible not to see the sparks flying between us, and with his track record, they were no dummies. Barbara’s husband, Al Wasserman, a producer for
60 Minutes
, had snow-white sideburns, with darker hair in a comb-over on top, and told funny jokes in a Jewish accent. He had done some great documentaries, one of which had won an Academy Award.

Norman’s sister, Barbara, and Al.

The only member of the family I met who wasn’t so great was Bouncer the corgi, who did his best to bite me all night. They had to put him in the bathroom, where he had obviously been put many times before, as the door had a good-size chunk of it chewed out. They told me it wasn’t personal, he had tried to bite every one of Norman’s children, and even snapped at Norman’s sister occasionally. At one point, I forgot he was in there, went into the bathroom, and nearly got my leg taken off. They had to hold him while I used the facility, which was pretty embarrassing.