A Ticket to the Circus (51 page)

So one Friday night at a dinner at our house in Ptown, I was sitting next to our friend John Taylor “Ike” Williams, who is a literary agent, and I told him I was writing a book. He of course asked to read it. I was a little nervous, but I gave him the pages and he said he would read it over the weekend and call me on Monday to let me know what he thought. The phone rang at eleven that same night. It was Ike. “Norris. I’m signing you to a contract. Get back to work and finish this book!” I jumped and screamed, and Norman thought I’d lost my mind. I had to tell him then about the book. I think he was a little hurt that I had kept it a secret from him, but he didn’t say much.

The two of us worked companionably in our studios in the attic in Provincetown, side by side, and a year or two later the book was done and Ike sold it to Random House in 1998. I was happy to be able to say I sold my book before I turned fifty, which I did the following January. Up until this point, Norman hadn’t asked to read it, but when the page proofs arrived, he said, “I think it is about time I read this book.” I said, “Okay,” thinking that the book was finished and there was nothing he could do about it. I was wrong. He took it upstairs, and about an hour later he called me to come up. “Here,” he said, holding out a stack of pages to me, “you start putting in these changes and I’ll work ahead of you.”

“What? You’re
editing
my book?” I couldn’t believe it, but there, on the pages, were his marks. “No. You can’t edit this book. I have to be able to say that I wrote the whole thing myself. I don’t want you to edit it. You know we don’t get along, our styles are too different.”

“I’m just helping you. I’ll make it better. If I can’t make marks on the page, I can’t read it.”

“Fine. Then you’ll either read it when it comes out or you won’t read it.” Without a word he handed me back the rest of the manuscript. I never even looked at what he had done. I know there were a lot of people who would have given three years of their lives if Norman Mailer would have edited their manuscripts, but I was not one of them. I had let him work on the story I’d done for
Cosmopolitan
back in the seventies, and I can still pick out every single word he changed or added. We were just too different.

When the book came out, several people asked me if he had helped me with it. (Anyone who had read any of his work or mine, I might add, never asked that.) I would answer, “No. I did it all by myself.” Then they would say, “Are you
sure
?” I guess that is one thing every younger wife of a famous man comes across sooner or later. People somehow think he must have married her for only one reason, and she has nothing to offer except youth, beauty, and sex. Why would an intelligent man marry a woman who was brainless, no matter how good she was in the sack? There are only so many hours in a day you can spend in bed, and then you have to have a conversation sooner or later. Although, come to think of it, Norman used to say we didn’t have a fight for the first three years we were together because we didn’t understand each other’s accents. Maybe there’s something to that after all.

P
art of my book
Windchill Summer
was set in Vietnam, and in 1997 Norman and I went to Thailand and Vietnam with Jason Epstein and his wife, Judy Miller. Norman had been invited to speak at the South East Asia Writers Conference, so it was a free trip and a chance for me to do a little research. I had stayed away from anything dealing with Vietnam after Larry returned in 1971. I didn’t go see
Apocalypse Now
or any of the other movies set there, and I didn’t read anything about it if I could help it. It was a frightening place to me, one that had stolen so many kids’ lives and hopes, and for no reason at all. It had just been old men posturing and playing politics. Now, beginning my book again, which I’d set in the same period as the first one, 1969, I found myself fascinated by the war and everything connected to it. I had been too close to it in the beginning; it was still happening. Larry was in Vietnam when I’d started to write that book. Now, almost thirty years later, I had some distance from it, but it was still a huge part of my life, my first husband’s life, my generation’s life, and I wanted to write about it.

Vietnam was a big part of Norman’s life, too. He had wanted to go as a journalist during the war, but when he went to see Abe Rosenthal, the editor of
The New York Times
, about doing a series of pieces for them, Abe told him he shouldn’t, because he would be killed. By whom Abe didn’t specify, but Norman had done his share of protesting, which hadn’t endeared him to the hawkish element of America, and he had written
The Armies of the Night
, after all, a book about protesting the war, which had won the Pulitzer Prize. Norman took Abe’s advice seriously enough that he didn’t go. He had six little kids and didn’t need to make them orphans. But he had always somehow felt cowardly about it.

We arrived in Bangkok and stayed at the famous Oriental Hotel. We tried to do a little sightseeing, but the traffic was so terrible that it took us an hour to go three blocks, so we went back to the hotel. Norman’s ability to walk had diminished to the point where he could
hardly do so at all anymore. He used two canes, and was in constant pain. His vanity usually wouldn’t allow him to use a wheelchair at the airport, but this time he asked for one, so I knew he was really hurting. We did take a boat tour down the canals, and went to a few easily accessible places, but he couldn’t go to the palace or walk the streets like we used to love to do in a foreign city. He couldn’t lift the luggage, either, and I found myself hoisting heavy suitcases up to and down from airplane racks and off baggage trolleys, dragging them when necessary.

The writers conference was a nice dinner, as those things always are. The royal prince was there, and it was a fine perk that the Oriental had named one of their suites after Norman, but it was Vietnam that we had come to see. When we got off the plane, I swear I felt something heavy in the air left over from the spirits of all the Americans who had landed there, a kind of dank miasma. It clung to us like a bad smell, like the thick syrup of the air in the moments before a tornado passes through.

On the ride in from the airport, I tried to shake off the feeling, but as soon as we got to the Hotel Continental and unpacked, we went outside to look around and were swarmed by a pack of children who were professional beggars. One of them was a girl of about ten or eleven holding a dead baby. I wanted to scream, to run away, to get back on the plane and leave again, but the doorman of the hotel just chased them away. There was no escaping the beggars that week. One especially, a coarse little girl who might have been anywhere between six and twelve, was persistent. She was small in stature but as tough as shoe leather, and if one of the other children came over while she was trying to get money out of someone, she would snap, “This one’s mine, bitch.” They were all afraid of her, and I was, too, a little. I bought copies of Graham Greene’s book
The Quiet American
, copied badly and stapled together, or fans and small trinkets, from her and the others, but the more I bought, the more they persisted. I dreaded going out the door. (Norman never passed a beggar without giving him money, and John Buffalo is the same way.)

Once we got into our pedicabs outside the hotel, though, it was thrilling; we were right out in the flow of traffic. Scooters and cars swerved around us, like speedboats around a log drifting downriver.
Girls rode motor scooters in immaculate
ao dais
, the beautiful long silk dresses, and high heels. They wore sunglasses and hats and long gloves; matching scarves covered their noses and mouths to keep out the exhaust fumes. It rained every afternoon, and even in a rainstorm, the girls were clean and spotless; a girl would gracefully lean down and take out a plastic poncho from under her bike seat and put it on as she zoomed down the street. The entire community flowed by on scooters or bicycles. Whole families would perch precariously on a single bicycle, father, mother, and two or three kids. They would haul groceries or building materials or whatever they needed to transport. I once saw a family of four carrying a whole double-hung window on a bicycle. I have no idea how the thing kept its balance. They could have been in the circus.

We went to the war museum, where they had a copy of Robert S. McNamara’s book
In Retrospect
in a glass case under a spotlight. It was his attempt at an apology of sorts, and they at least had that small artifact to show that someone in power had recognized how wrong that war was, even though it was too little too late. The photographs on the walls were graphic, showing atrocities committed by American boys, most of whom were not long out of their teens, if they were indeed out of them at all. That was one of the things I tried to address in my book—what kind of circumstance would it take to make a boy who had been drinking milk shakes at a drive-in with his friends kill women and children three months later in a situation like My Lai? It was a sobering museum. Obviously, there were no pictures of what the Vietcong had done to our boys, but you can bet it was just as bad. There were exhibits of booby traps the Vietcong had used, some of which I featured in my book. In cages around the grounds were sad, dusty, live bears.

We went to Cu Chi, the center of the underground tunnels the Vietcong had started building in the fifties when they’d been at war with the French. We saw movies of the
tunnels, and then we actually went into one. It was a tunnel made for tourists. It had been dug much bigger, and lights were installed along the way, but it still gave the oppressive feeling of being underground. One of my characters in
Windchill Summer
was named Bean, a tunnel rat, one of those bravest and craziest of American soldiers who crawled through the tunnels in search of the enemy. I got to feel the soil and smell the air in the tunnels, and it made my book better. I think Norman got some kind of peace from it, too, although he couldn’t get down and crawl through the tunnel. I have to admit I didn’t make it all the way. When I got out of sight of the entrance, I was so claustrophobic I had to turn back. Interestingly, most of the other tourists were Vietnam vets and their families. Our guide was a former Vietcong tunnel fighter himself, and he joked and laughed with the vets like they were old buddies.

We took a boat down the river and stopped at a house to have tea with a family who played a little music for tourists, and we bought a few souvenirs. I got a pointed straw hat for sixty cents that I wound up leaving behind. Jason was a big crossword puzzle fanatic, and I think he missed the entire tour. His nose was firmly stuck the whole time in his crossword puzzle. He even walked down the path through the jungle doing the puzzle. Judy, on the other hand, was a fearless
New York Times
reporter, and she never missed a thing. She would escape from the three of us and go adventuring on her own; we never knew where she was. She was definitely the hare to the three of us tortoises, as Norman could walk only with great difficulty by then.

   
IN SEPTEMBER 1999
, I had a hysterectomy for a prolapsed uterus, which got markedly worse after we came back from Vietnam. (I don’t think all that baggage hefting did me any good at all.) The surgery was a weird experience. I loved and trusted my doctor, whom I had been with for more than twenty years (he delivered John Buffalo), but he was in his eighties, and I think I should have given the surgery a little more
thought and maybe gotten a second opinion from someone younger. He treated it as though it were going to be no worse than a root canal. The doctor told Norman I’d be in the OR for an hour or an hour and a half, but it was closer to five hours. Norman, out in the waiting room alone, began to panic. But the doctor was casual about it.

“Well, there was a little more there than I’d expected,” he told me later. “You had a hernia, and I couldn’t get your fallopian tube out, so I left it in.” Wait a minute. Why couldn’t he get the fallopian tube out? He was vague and said it was no big deal. It was bleeding and I had been under anesthetic too long already. My body would absorb it. I thought that was strange, but if he didn’t think it was a big deal, then neither did I. I trusted him that much.

I had more or less recovered from the surgery when I took a nasty fall on the icy brick steps in Provincetown just before Norman was scheduled to have hip replacement surgery, and my back was in real pain. I went and got an X-ray, which the doctor said was fine, no broken bones, but the pain in my back seemed to be getting worse.

Norman had been having more and more trouble walking. He started using a cane in the mid-nineties and moved rapidly to two canes. Two, he said, helped his balance. He tried to walk a half mile a day, but he began doing it on the deck in Provincetown, making laps back and forth, rather than venturing too far from the house, in case he couldn’t get back. He needed his knees replaced, but even more, his hip required it, so he checked into Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston to get the procedure. I was going to sleep in the room with him. It was too far to drive every day to Provincetown, and he wanted me with him. They had given us one of the nicer rooms on the “celebrity” floor, which had a pullout couch, but it was desperately uncomfortable, and my back was killing me. I got up in the middle of the night and piled the sofa cushions onto the floor, trying to make a softer bed and find some relief, but there was none.

The next morning, Norman went into surgery. He was semi-awake during the procedure and said it was like lying in a sweet stupor, listening to someone over in the corner sawing and hammering, making a fire cabinet or something. When he was back in the room for a bit, still groggy on Percocet, he announced he was going to the bathroom. I was alone with him and tried to tell him he had a catheter, that he had just had hip replacement and couldn’t get out of bed, but he was out of his head and unreasonable. He started to get out of bed, and I tried to hold him down. He was strong and fought me, then pulled back his fist to hit me and I started yelling for the nurse. I couldn’t stop him. He got out of bed and walked several steps toward the bathroom on that freshly cut hip. It was a miracle it didn’t pull the new hip right out of socket. It took three nurses to get him back into bed, and they had to tie him down.