Forty

My favorite quote of Norman’s is from The Deer Park: “There is that law of life, so cruel and so just—that one must grow, or else pay more for remaining the same.” I think we both did a lot of growing in those next years, and it wasn’t easy. Things kept popping up that flicked the scab off the healing wound, like the old girlfriend who kept calling and causing trouble, who made sure the story of their affair was printed over and over in newspapers and magazines. Any time something like that appeared, it was painful for me. But miraculously, the kids seemed to be okay with everything and we were continuing our lives. We had family dinners at Barbara’s or our house, we saw the grandchildren, went to the kids’ plays and art shows. Everyone was just thrilled we had dodged the bullet and had not broken up the family again. But after all the months of confessions and recriminations and anger, I somehow had taken a step away from Norman in my heart, and I thought that was a good thing. It was the only way I could go on living with him, because if I was still so in love with him, so raw and trusting, I would just be hurt again. I had no real faith that he was going to actually give all the women up. I thought he might try, but sooner or later, he would be on a trip and temptation would be too strong. He would just go back to being more careful, and he would have to, now that I knew the signs. I told him if I caught him cheating one more time, that was it, and I meant it. No, it was better to be that little bit less in love and not care quite as much.

Harlot’s Ghost made the bestseller list, then dropped out of sight. In spite of the last line in the book, “To Be Continued,” and a halfhearted effort to research the next volume, Norman never really wanted to finish that book. His fascination with the CIA had played itself out, and as he said, he didn’t know how to end the exciting story he had started.

There were several themes that ran through Norman’s life and his work. Now in his seventies, he had written about most of them, but there were still others on the list: President Kennedy’s assassination, God and the devil, religion and Hitler, all of which he would end up writing about before his life was over. Now he started working on Oswald’s Tale, about Lee Harvey Oswald. This necessitated more travel—trips to Moscow and Minsk, and Dallas.

Larry Schiller was back in the picture on this book. He had worked his Schiller magic and gotten the KGB, in the one open moment in its history, to agree to sell him some of the files they had developed on Oswald while he’d lived in Minsk. Norman and Larry had to go to Minsk and Moscow many times, and I don’t know all the fine points of the negotiation, but the papers were obtained. The picture they presented was one of a nutty American kid with more guts than brains who had somehow managed to defect to Russia, find a job, and marry a pretty Russian girl. Then, when he realized he wasn’t going to be a rock star just because he was an American, that the Russians weren’t going to give him some big job in the government and a fancy place to live, he wanted to go back home. He was pretty shrewd, though, in the way he played the establishment, to get them to pay for his travel. Among the papers Larry and Norman received were over two hundred pages of conversations between Lee and his wife, Marina, from a microphone planted in their apartment. Their dialogue could have been between any couple anywhere.

“You never wash the kitchen floor,” he complains.

“Yes, I do. I wash it more than you. I have washed the kitchen floor seventeen times and you have washed it none.” Marina was not happy with Lee’s habit of lying around reading children’s comics and “fouling the air with gasses.” Lee was not happy with his job in a factory, assembling radios in Minsk. But as banal as some of the dialogue was, it was still rich stuff for a writer because the man who had assassinated the president was speaking the banalities.

Larry and Norman interviewed several high-ranking officers and KGB people who knew Lee, co-workers and friends, and they discovered an interesting phenomenon—everyone seemed to have crystal clear memories of him. It might have been because after President Kennedy’s assassination anyone who knew Lee was ordered not to talk about him, even to their families, so the memories hadn’t been adulterated by discussion, but the material Larry and Norman were getting was fresh and good. Oswald’s Tale is, in fact, one of my favorites of Norman’s books.

Marina’s aunt Valya still lived in Minsk, and Larry hired her to be their cook. Larry gave her money to shop for better food on the black market, and several nights a week they went to Valya’s house for dinner. She was a good cook, and an important part of the story as well. Larry was amazing at getting things done. I’ve always marveled at his ingenuity, and I do to this day. He found Norman an apartment in a workers’ building in Minsk—a little two-bedroom in a building made of poured concrete that was five years old but looked fifty—where he stayed for weeks at a time. Then Norman would return to New York and be with us before going back again. I was having a hard time with the separation. I, of course, imagined he was schtupping fat, old, ugly Russian women in babushkas, but tried to go on and live my life as if things were fine. I tried to keep that little step away from him in my heart.

One night at a dinner party, I was seated next to a friend I had known socially for many years, and he began to question me on where Norman was and why I was always alone. He, of course, had seen the stories in the papers about our troubles and had heard the gossip. I found myself confiding in him, and he was a most attentive listener. He gave me a ride home in his car, invited me to dinner the following evening, and I went. That began a brief affair, one that showed me there was a possibility I could have another life if I wanted to. I’m sure he was teasing, but at one point he said, “If you will divorce Norman, I’ll marry you.” I lightly answered, “You’re going to have to stop saying things like that to girls. One of them will take you up on it, and then you’ll be in big trouble.” We laughed, and nothing was said again about marriage or divorce, but I think we both thought about it. I was terribly fond of him, and still am happy when I see him, but my life was bound up with that crazy wild man who was in Minsk. I wondered what he was up to, and I knew that if I left him I would wonder the rest of my life what he was up to, and be sorry I wasn’t with him.

Norman invited me to come spend a couple of weeks with him in Minsk. It was winter, and the city was as dreary as anyplace I had ever been. The yellow mud froze in ruts along the roads, and the snow was piled high, geologically layered in various shades of dirt. The apartment had worn linoleum on the floor, a rug on the wall, and wooden furniture of an angular style that was popular in America in the fifties. The door to the apartment was padded leather, and the first day I was there, at seven in the morning, someone stood in the hallway pounding on it, yelling in Russian. I had no idea what they were saying, it might have been “The building is on fire” or “Can you help me pull my car out of the mud?” or anything else. Norman didn’t know, either, so he just rolled over and went back to sleep. I did, too, figuring if the building was on fire we would soon know all about it.

The kitchen had a stove with four burners and a tiny oven, and a small fridge that smelled of cabbage. Beside the sink was a strange-looking gray cardboard box of dishwashing soap that looked like ashes with bits of bone or something ghastly mixed in it. All the products and foods were fascinating to me—the egg shampoo that was the bright yellow of yolks, and the real, small hard eggs that came in a plastic sack of twenty, eggs squeezed from the butts of sturdy little chickens that continually pecked the frozen ground in search of an insect or worm, scratching out a living like everybody else.

We had a car, an old beat-up Russian Lada, with a driver named Murat who looked like Ratso Rizzo and who protected Norman with his life. I stayed in the apartment and worked on a new play I was writing for the Actors Studio while Norman and Larry went out to do interviews, but after a couple of days I needed to get out, so they got me a driver of my own named Sasha, a young, sweet boy who took me shopping and sightseeing. The stores were poor, indeed, but if there is something to be found in a store, you can trust I will find it. Sasha wanted to take me to the few fancy Western stores that had Revlon cosmetics and more modern-style clothes, but I insisted on going to the real old Russian stores. He couldn’t understand why, until I told him I could get Revlon in New York but I couldn’t get a good wool coat made in Latvia or a hand-crocheted tablecloth made by a little old lady for twenty dollars.

In one store, I tried on several coats, to the delight of the salesgirls, modeling them like I used to do on the New York runways, and when I bought a purple wool coat, they all clapped and cheered. “Nobody from New York has ever bought anything in here,” one of them said, tears practically running down her cheeks. I paid ten dollars cash for it, and they lovingly wrapped it in brown paper and string. It was a nice, warm coat that I wore for many years.

Sasha took me to the market, a huge building that once must have been an airplane hangar, where all the farmers from the countryside came in with their produce and set up little stalls. There was fresh-churned butter, cut into chunks and wrapped in newspaper; chickens that had been killed and plucked that same morning, poor little things that I was embarrassed for, their breasts were so small. I wanted to avert my eyes. It was almost obscene, the way they were lying there, their skinny legs splayed. Little boys rushed around selling lemons, and one came up to me and scratched the yellow skin and stuck it under my nose. I bought it for a dollar, and he presented it to me as though it were a precious jewel. A woman stood with her arms outstretched, a human clothes rack, her knitted scarves and shawls hung up and down her arms. I watched her for several minutes, and she never flinched, never seemed to get tired. I bought a soft brown shawl that felt like a cloud, just to give her a break, I think. It’s a comfort blanket. I still wrap my feet in it in bed on cold winter nights. Men in butcher stalls would chop off a piece of meat and roll it in newspapers for you, and women minded baskets of cabbages and beets and carrots, dirt still clinging to them. I didn’t want to remember that we were not all that far from Chernobyl, and bought what we needed for dinner.

Norman and I stayed home that night and made borscht. The snow was falling and the room was warm and lit by a bulb hanging from an electric wire in the middle of the kitchen. Neither of us really knew what we were doing, but we sautéed the meat first in its own fat, then threw all the other ingredients into the pot, added some water, and the beets turned the broth a rich deep purple. I chopped more onions fine, sautéed them until they were brown, and mixed them into salty creamed potatoes, and we invited Larry and his translator for dinner. It was one of the best meals we have ever made, and for years we tried without success to reconstruct how we made it, but I think the real secret was the ingredients, grown in the glowing soil of Minsk, the meat grown there, and the sour cream, made from fresh milk by local women and brought to the market in big jars. I still dream about the yogurt and fresh milk, the brown bread and butter, and caviar you could get, five dollars for a big dollop.

The food in the restaurants, however, was another matter. You could get a meal for a dollar and a quarter, and it was worth about seventy cents. The potatoes were burned, greasy, and raw all at the same time. The meat was gristly and fatty. The cabbage salad was limp and warm. There was not enough money to buy a good meal in the whole city, and we tried most of the restaurants.

We went to one place in a nice hotel, and the first thing I noticed was the beautiful girls, all with perfect legs from years of studying ballet, all with long, long hair and short, short skirts. One girl I saw with a certain man was back a while later with a different one. Larry pointed out that they were prostitutes, and I was so upset that these elegant women had to do that.

We went to the ballet to see The Nutcracker, and while the theater was a little threadbare, the show was magic. I was wearing my Anna Karenina outfit, as Norman called it, a black shearling coat and a black fox fur hat. When Murat drove us home afterward, there were a dozen or so boys standing outside. Norman knew them. They were teenagers who lived in our building, and they were all drunk. There was not a lot else for teenagers in Minsk to do at night. They stood to one side as we walked to the door, and I was a little uneasy, but Norman said, “They’re okay.” They were definitely curious about me. Norman said “Good evening” in Russian, and then presented me. “My wife,” he said, which sounded something like “Moy jhene.” The oldest and boldest one of the group, who looked a little like Michael J. Pollard, stepped up with wonder in his eyes. “Ve jhene?” he asked. “This is your wife?” Then the group broke out in applause, for Norman, for having the good taste to have me for a wife, I guess. I did a little curtsy for them.

We were in a good mood when we went inside, and for the first time since I’d gotten there, maybe for the first time since we had started the marital war, the ice began to melt and we began to come back to each other. We did love each other. We wanted to be together, not just for the family, not just for the apartment and the house, but for us. I knew I was going to be with him the rest of my life, and I think he felt the same way. It wasn’t always easy after that. We of course fought, bitterly at times, and once in a while the scab on the old wound would be picked, but this time in Minsk was the beginning of the healing.

When I got back to New York, I went to my friend’s apartment and told him I couldn’t see him again, that I was going to stay with Norman. He wasn’t surprised. “I always knew you were never going to leave Norman,” he said. But it was okay. I’m not sorry we had our little fling. It made me see that I really loved Norman, for better or for worse. Maybe it just took a little more for Norman to find this out for himself.