A Ticket to the Circus (33 page)

After twelve hours of climbing, we finally staggered to our car and drove back to the hotel in the dark. The next morning, every muscle in my body was so sore that simply getting out of bed was a monumental task. I had to stop this pretending to be a jock. I was pregnant, and I hated physical activity. I would tell Norman the truth. But it could wait. He thought I was heroic, a real mother courage, and I didn’t want to dispel that image. And next summer was a long time away.

S
omewhere in the back of my mind was the prediction Jean Jewell’s friend had made that Norman was going to die in 1978. Here it was, close to the end of 1977, and the baby was due to be born in April of ’78. It began to weigh on me. We had a friend named Al Morrison, an astrologer and a psychic who published a little pamphlet every month called an ephemeris, which was the “void of course” moon schedule. I’m not sure exactly how it works, but there are days when the moon wobbles slightly off its course, which can be predicted, and those are the days that nothing goes right. You drop your egg on the floor in the morning and mash your finger in the car door, you are late and get scolded, or have a fight with your husband; if everything in your day goes wrong, look at this pamphlet, and nine times out of ten you say, “Of course. The moon is out of phase.” I made an appointment with Al. I think he charged twenty-five dollars at the time. I wanted to ask him only one question. He lived in a cluttered walk-up in the Village, as I remember it—or maybe it was the West Side—full of books and years of papers and magazines. There was one chair available, and as I walked through the door toward it, he said, “You’re pregnant.” It was not a question.

“How did you know that?” I was a little shaken. Only a few weeks along, I wasn’t showing yet at all, and nobody outside the family knew.

“Because you have two auras.” Oh. If he’d wanted to impress me, I was impressed. I told him about the prediction the other astrologer had made two years previously, and he looked in some books, took his time, and said, “It’s possible.” My heart sank. I’m sure the misery wafted off my two auras, and I started to cry. He continued: “But just because it is possible doesn’t mean it is fated to happen. The signs that point to death also indicate financial reversal, and our fates aren’t written in stone anyhow. We can always change them. There is such a thing as our will, too. We aren’t simply the pawns of some uncaring force in the universe.”

“But it’s possible.”

“Anything is possible.” I gave him the twenty-five dollars and left, not comforted at all, but not desolate, either. I had a will, and I would will Norman to live, no matter what happened. I would watch him like a hawk and be ready to throw him out of the way of a car on Broadway if it was bearing down on him. I would watch his health, cook good meals, and make him go to the doctor if anything at all was wrong. I would never tell him about the prediction.

Soon after, I had a talk with Wilhelmina and told her I was pregnant. She knew I wasn’t that serious about the career. I booked out for two months every summer and numerous times during the year to go do things with Norman, so I don’t think she was surprised at all, and probably was relieved that she didn’t have to let me go. We parted on a friendly note, and a couple of years later, she called me to have lunch and I agreed to do an occasional job here and there on a special basis, but for now I had only a few more bookings and then I would be done.

One was for Ben Kahn furs, and although I was only a couple of months pregnant, I had gained enough weight to make inaccurate the measurements they had previously taken, and they were not pleased with me at all. I thought they were going to refuse to work with me, but they didn’t, and the pictures turned out fine. I loved the coats, but none of them was as great as my red fox.

Then I had a booking with Robert Belott for an album cover. I already had the beginnings of a little belly but was wearing a loose-fitting dress, and it didn’t show in the pictures. Norman stopped by the studio to pick me up. I can’t remember what the circumstance was, but Robert asked him if he would take a few shots with me, and the winds must have been blowing right, because he said yes. Those pictures are the best ones we have, great moody shots in sepia and black-and-white. In one, Norman is blowing a bubble, with a bored look on his face. I can’t remember why he was chewing bubble gum; he never chewed gum. Maybe Robert gave it to him. In others I’m sitting on Norman’s lap, oozing sex, my burgeoning boobs right in his face. I was nearly three months pregnant at the time, and my belly was just beginning to bloom. We hung several of them on the wall, where they have been for the past thirty years. As a favor to me, Robert took pictures of Fanny as well, beautiful head shots that are treasures and are also on our wall of family photos.

Me, three months pregnant, and Norman.

Robert was also a painter, his style more hard-edge design than my realistic one, and he’d started a painting of three women who were joined together by a black-and-white stripe motif, but he couldn’t seem to do the faces. He asked me if I would do them, and it was great fun to paint again. There was one teensy little problem with it. He had done his part in acrylic and I did mine in oils. I repositioned the arm he had done, and I realized that after a while the oil was going to turn transparent and the acrylic arm would—pentimento, ghostlike—show through. I tried to fix it so it wouldn’t, but I have no idea what it looks like today. (We sold that painting to Billy Friedkin, the movie director, in my first show. I’m sorry, Billy, if the girl in your painting now has three arms.)

I couldn’t model anymore and knew I would have to find something
else to occupy my time and to make some money, so this was a good way to transition back into painting, with my easel set up on a chair in the kitchen. I still loved to write, too, and returned to the novel I’d started in B. C. Hall’s creative writing class. I had written about three hundred pages longhand in a spiral-bound notebook, but was afraid to show it to Norman. He kept asking to read it, though, and finally I typed up about a hundred pages and gave it to him. He took it downstairs to the small office while I paced the floor, waiting. When he came back up, he was slightly disturbed. “Well,” I said, “what did you think?”

He handed it to me and said, “It’s not as bad as I thought it would be. But you’re nowhere near ready to show this to anyone.” Oh. I knew it wasn’t great literature on his level, but the way he said it took away any illusions I’d had that I could seriously write. I put it back in the drawer and concentrated on painting for the next twenty years. The kitchen was no space to work, but luckily, Edie Vonnegut, Kurt’s daughter, had a studio in the East Village that she wanted to sublet for a year, so I took it and had a great time getting back into painting. It was wonderful to have my own little getaway place again, too. I guess it is an only-child thing, but I need several hours a day to be alone and work, and I like to know when I put something down that it will be there when I go back to pick it up. When Edie came back, we shared the space for another two years, and I had a show at Edie’s gallery, Central Falls, in SoHo. Actually, I had three or four shows there. Edie and I had a great camaraderie, and it was the most productive time I ever had painting. I sold a lot of work and started doing commissioned portraits.

Carol and Maggie had moved to New York, and Myrtle started splitting her time between us. It was great for me, and great for Maggie, too, to be closer to Norman. At first, I didn’t really trust Myrtle. I thought she would be on Carol’s side and not like me, maybe she’d report back to Carol what went on at our house, but that proved not to be the case at all and we came to love each other. With Norman’s help, she got her own apartment in Brooklyn and brought her five children up from Honduras to live with her. I think the youngest, Ruth, was maybe twelve at the time.

Myrtle Bennett.

Beverly was living year-round in Provincetown with Michael and Stephen, but after Norman moved to Brooklyn, she sent Michael to live with us, as he and Beverly were not getting along at all. Michael was twelve, an age when a boy needs a man as a role model, and Beverly and Norman both felt Michael needed more time with his father. Then the following year, Stephen joined us, and the boys went to Saint Ann’s.

Up until this point, I hadn’t really done much to Norman’s apartment except clean it, but with the baby coming and the boys living with us, we needed more room. Michael was in the little bedroom above the living room, Stephen was in the crow’s nest, but Matt couldn’t continue to sleep in the living room, and we had no place for a crib, so one day Myrtle and I decided to clean out the second bedroom, which was crammed with old file cabinets and junk, and rearrange the apartment. Norman loved to tell a story about what happened that day.

Myrtle and I had spent all day scrubbing, rearranging furniture, throwing out the fish heads, broken lamps, old newspapers, magazines, and other detritus. (I was obviously more secure at this point and realized that Norman wasn’t really attached to the stuff; he rarely noticed
his environment at all, in fact.) We carried the file cabinets down to the basement, moved the bed from the living room into the bedroom, took down the whiffy fishnets, and generally changed the whole apartment. The place sparkled. A pot roast bubbled on the stove, and fresh flowers were on the table. At the end of the day, Myrtle left, both of us exhausted, but I was so anxious to see the expression on Norman’s face and ready to be praised for my hard work.

Just before he was due to come home, the doorbell rang and it was the cleaners, delivering one of his suits. I was about to take off the plastic covering and hang it up when I heard his key in the door, so instead, I laid it down on the bed and ran into the living room to see his first reaction. He walked in, and I stood there expectantly, waiting for my doggie bone of appreciation and love, but all he saw was the suit lying on the bed. He said, “Look at what you’ve done. That suit should have been hung up. It’s going to get all wrinkled! What do you do all day? Can’t you even hang up my suits?”

A red curtain of rage descended over my eyes, and before I could think, I hauled off and punched him in the jaw. Hard. He staggered back a couple of steps, then turned and leaned his head against the wall. I was afraid to say anything. I waited for him to hit me back or yell or something, but he did nothing except stand there pressing his head into the wall. Finally, he turned back to me and saw, as he liked to tell it, my eyes round with horror, my mouth in an O. Then he started to laugh.

“What do you think I was doing?” he said, with a not-so-nice grin. I shook my head, afraid to say anything. “I was praying,” he said, “‘God, give me the strength not to smash that beautiful girl’s face.’” I finally found my voice, now that I was pretty sure he wasn’t going to hit me back.

“I didn’t mean to do that. My hand just flew out by itself. I’m sorry. But you have no idea how hard I’ve worked all day. Just look around.”

He then noticed the candles and flowers on the table, which had been moved to a different spot, dinner cooking on the stove, the new, cozy bedroom for Matt, and realized why I had been so mad. So he apologized and we made up and had a nice dinner with the kids. As unbelievable as it was, I had to recognize that when he came home from work, he was still somewhere else, off in his head, and I stopped
expecting him to see anything that wasn’t put directly under his nose. He needed awhile to transition from work, unwind, and come back. And I also realized then that he would never hit me, no matter the provocation. I resolved never to provoke him again. If I could help it. (Of course I did provoke him again, countless times over the years, and I hit him plenty of times, too, but he never, ever hit me.)