Twenty-four

Just before Christmas, we went to Arkansas to get Matt. Norman called Fig and asked if we could stay with them because my parents wouldn’t let us sleep in the same bed, and Norman wasn’t about to sleep on the couch. Fig and Ecey were still a little sore that we had deceived them and sneaked off together, as they saw it, but they said yes. What else could they do? I dreaded confronting my parents, but it turned out they were so happy to see me that nothing else mattered. They met us at the airport, and Matthew came running up to me and hugged my legs. “I knew you would come to get me!” he said. Poor little guy. I’m sure there were moments when he wasn’t sure I was going to come back, but we were together again, and he stuck to me like a cocklebur all the way home in the car.

Norman was cordial to my parents, as they were to him. He told them we were in love and were going to be married when he could get his personal life straightened out, but it was complicated. I’m not sure if they knew exactly what the complicated personal life entailed, and he didn’t go into details, but they knew he was married and had seven children.

My father had a man-to-man talk with him alone, along the lines of, “She’s a lot younger than you are. She might get up there and meet someone younger and leave you.” And then he had a talk with me and said, “Norman is even older than I am. One of these days he will be an old man and you will have to be his nurse. Are you prepared for that?” I don’t think either Norman or I were thinking much past bedtime then, but many years later, as I was nursing my elderly husband, my father’s words kept creeping back into my head. At the time, I said, “Daddy, we love each other, and yes, there’s a big age difference, but do we pass up twenty or thirty years of happiness just because he is going to get old? I might die first. You never know.” When I was diagnosed with cancer twenty-five years later, those words came back to haunt me as well.

You never know what life is going to hand you, but if I had it all to do over, I would do it all again. Norman would have, too. I know that because just weeks before he passed away, I asked him if he would do it all again, and he said yes. He reached out and got my hand; with a little difficulty, he took my ring off and then put it on my finger again, saying, “With this ring, I thee wed.” A lot had happened in the almost thirty-three years we had spent together, but for better or for worse, the love was real, and it was always there.

When we got back to New York after the Christmas visit, Matthew took one look at Norman’s apartment with big eyes, then ran and climbed up the ladder as fast as he could, like a little monkey. The ropes and ladders and the small upstairs rooms were a perfect little boy’s playhouse, once I got over the fear he was going to fall.

Almost as soon as we got back home, Norman left for Stockbridge, to spend Christmas with Carol and face the difficult task of telling her he was leaving her. He took my Italian photographs to show her, which I thought was not necessarily the best thing to do, but he did it. Norman was a young fifty-two, vigorous, full of ideas and energy. He was setting fires and jumping across roofs to escape the flames, and he needed someone young and a little wild to hold his hand and jump across with him. I wasn’t as wild as I let him think I was, but I was young and ready to jump.

Beverly was so far back in his history that I hardly thought of her as his wife at all, even though they were still legally married. I think part of her was secretly glad when he left Carol for me, as they understandably weren’t friends, and I’m sure Beverly thought I was just one more girlfriend who would soon be gone. The other wives were buried even deeper in the layers of paleontology, and it was hard to even think of them as having been married to Norman, it had been such a long time ago. That was a different man from the one I knew.

As far as Annette went, I never met her, but Norman had told me stories about her, how tough she was, how she fancied herself as his bodyguard, and she had once gotten into a fight with Elaine Kaufman in Elaine’s restaurant. When the six months of their separation were up, he told her he had met someone totally new that he was living with and he wouldn’t be seeing her again. In answer, she sent him a message through his then secretary, Molly, that she had a gun and was going to kill us both. He took her seriously enough to change the locks on the apartment door, as she had keys. I can’t imagine why it was such a shock to her. If a man tells you he wants six months of no contact with you, that is a clue he doesn’t want to be with you. Or at least it would have been to me.

I did take Matt to FAO Schwarz for Christmas and loaded up on toys. Norman got him a complicated Erector set that was way too advanced for a four-year-old, but Matt kept it under his bed, and years later he put it together. Fanny took a liking to Matt as she had to me, and didn’t mind babysitting him. He was a good little boy, inventive and quiet, with a full life going on inside his head.

From the time he was small, he imagined complete scenarios, lined up his little soldiers in rows, and played all the parts of both sides in a war. It was entertaining to watch him obliviously talking and moving his soldiers around, crashing planes and rushing ambulances to the crash sites. It was almost as if he had been in a real war in a past life and was reenacting it. He could draw really well, too, precocious for his age, and he drew German soldiers with insignia on their uniforms that looked remarkably like the real ones I looked up in books. I always believed he had been either a German soldier or a Jew in the last war; sometimes he had nightmares about things he would or should never have known about. He would wake up screaming, saying he was being put into an oven. I’m a total believer in reincarnation, and often young children still retain remnants of memories of their last lives. I was in awe of him, and so glad he was here with me, safe. I enrolled him in nursery school at Open House, not far from our apartment, and every day when we walked home, we would stop and get an ice cream cone at Baskin-Robbins or a small toy at the drugstore. He particularly liked Boney Benny, a rubber skeleton, and had several of those. If anything, I worried at his enthusiasm for horror movies—he loved Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Wolfman, as well as all the superheroes. From the time he was able to think in those terms, he wanted to make movies.

Norman came home to Brooklyn on New Year’s eve. It was snowing, and we went to Gage and Tollner on Fulton Street in Brooklyn—a restaurant that had opened at the turn of the century and still retained its Victorian flavor—to celebrate, just the two of us. Although I had never been happier, and he seemed to be just as happy and relieved to have finally made the decision, it must have been a little bittersweet for him. Now Maggie would begin the ritual of coming to visit, just as the other children did. He had left them all, the wives and the seven children. I should have been worried that I, too, would be next in line for heartbreak, but I wasn’t. He so totally convinced me that I was the love of his life, that I was the one he wanted to be with, that it never entered my mind he would do the same thing to me.

As naïve as it was, as farfetched as it seems looking back now, I was right. He never left me, in spite of some heartbreak along the way. Whatever qualities I had, they were something he needed, and for whatever reasons, I was the one he stayed with. A lot of people have tried to figure that one out, it was such an unlikely pairing. Some have said that I have a calm centered quality that appealed to and balanced his fiery personality, or that I was his Marilyn Monroe (although Marilyn and I were nothing alike in any way I could see). I do know that I ran his life like a tidy ship—I took care of the kids, the bookkeeping, and bill paying, and got the insurance we needed. I looked after his mother and his children, keeping in touch with them by phone when they weren’t with us, making sure we all got together from time to time for dinners or outings, and organized the summers. I shopped and cooked and saw that he always had clean clothes in his closet and a car full of gas. I hung pictures, painted rooms, and did minor repairs on the house. I rewired lamps and did other small jobs. I put in bookshelves. I dealt with the workmen who did things that were beyond me. He was always grateful and said that I allowed him to write and not have to deal with life, and that’s certainly true.

Once, early in the relationship, when he was at work (he didn’t have a phone in his studio), I needed him for something. I forget what now, but at the time I thought it was important, so I went and knocked on his door. He was not pleased. He said, “When I’m writing, pretend I have gone to South America. What would you do if I was in South America? You have a brain. You can deal with whatever comes up.” I apologized and said, “Okay,” and I never knocked on his door again.

I realized then that he would never be a partner for me, like a lot of marriages were, but in truth, I enjoyed taking care of everything. I would not have liked to be married to someone who made me depend on him. We agreed on most things such as politics and religion; he liked my taste in decorating, he was generous, and he seldom questioned any purchase I made. His mother said I was down-to-earth and levelheaded, like she was. (He told friends I had more common sense than anyone he’d ever known besides his mother, and I equaled her.) Fanny said I knew when to overlook things (or as Norman used to say when he had done something particularly egregious, “Rise above it!”) and not fight, although Norman loved fighting better than anything, which I never truly enjoyed. He would say that I did like fighting, and we certainly fought a lot. I’m sure our friends were exhausted by all the fighting, the repartee, the one-upmanship we engaged in all the time.

When we were alone, we got along fine for the most part, but if we were out with friends, or at a dinner party, it was a game we invariably played, one of us making a comment, the other one topping it. People’s heads would swivel back and forth, as if they were watching a tennis match. Sometimes I did enjoy the back-and-forth, especially if I won, but I did get terribly weary of his bad-boy behavior, like the time he invited an old girlfriend to dinner when I had a fever and he expected me to entertain her. I cooked a nice meal and tried to be gracious to her and the girlfriend she had brought along for protection, but she was flirty with him, snarky to me, and when Norman mentioned I hadn’t been feeling well, she said “Oh, I hope it’s not cancer” in a tone of voice that indicated that was exactly what she was hoping for.

After she left, I complained bitterly, and he told me for the umpteenth time to “rise above it.” I said that he should marry an angel—if he could find one that would have him—that I had no wings with which to “rise above it.” At times like those, the fights were real. He did things like that purely for the novelistic curiosity of seeing what would happen, I think. Although I would prefer to believe that he was a curious novelist than to think he was just an insensitive clod.

Clod or angel, there are many reasons we lasted for thirty-three years, aside from the physical passion, which was as intense decades into the marriage as it was at the beginning, if not as frequent. As trite as it sounds, I think we stayed together because we really loved each other, we loved our kids, we loved our life, and we were comfortable together. We had each found someone whose quirks and habits we could live with, like a key in a lock. Besides, if I had left him, as I seriously considered only once, I would have always wondered what he was up to, and would have been miserable in my curiosity.