[Statement about Norris Church and their marriage]
Couples: Speaking from the Heart, photographs by Mariana Cook (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2000), 54-55 (00.13)
I look at this photograph as if I did not know these two people but am intrigued enough to study them. She seems so strong, so beautiful, so centered. She is in command. He hovers in the background. He is much older than she is, and his jacket does not fit, he is overweight; his pants will soon be very wrinkled.
Yet these two people are together. There is something odd about their relationship. They should not be in the same frame, yet very much they are.
The answer is clear to me, but then I need only step out of the fiction that I do not know them. Of a certainty, I understand why they are together. They have a hundred relations with each other and here there is only one. Since she used to be a fashion model, she likes being photographed; she is comfortable before a lens. He hates it. He is much too vain to have to consider his flaws now that the camera is no longer his friend.
Still, they do have those one hundred separate relations with one another and it keeps them powerfully together. They have been with each other for twenty-one years and have not lost interest. If a strand wears out, there is always another, then another. Soon there will be one hundred and one relations.
He could even adore the idea that they share a romance if only they did not have to take pictures together.
Norman Mailer
I am twenty-six. Divorced for two years. A high school art teacher in Arkansas. I am ready for an Adventure.
He is a walking Adventure. Fifty-two. Dangerously attractive. Masses of salt and pepper curls. Clear blue eyes. Married five times, seven children. A reputation as a brawler. Womanizer. Genius. What girl could resist?
We meet. Walk out onto a porch hanging over a brook in the woods of Arkansas. He tells me in full eloquent paragraphs how attractive I am. My eyes. My nose. My mouth. The rest.
“You certainly know how to deliver a good line, Mr. Mailer.”
“It’s no line.”
“I don’t care. I have always bought a good line, well presented.”
The Adventure begins. I take my first plane trip. New York. Restaurants. Shows. Jazz. Friends. The subway. Romance. Time to leave.
“Don’t go back to Arkansas,” he says. “Stay in New York.”
I consider for two seconds. Tops.
“All right.”
I quit my job. Pack up my three-year-old son, and move in. I am twenty-six and a half. I can take care of myself. If this mad romance fizzles, I will move on. Live each day as it comes. Enjoy the Adventure while it lasts.
A few years go by. We have a son together. Get married. Seven children have become nine.
Nine extraordinary individuals.
One man.
My life.
Twenty-one years have passed. He was telling the truth. It was no line.
Norris Church Mailer