A Ticket to the Circus by Norris Church Mailer

Author:Norris Church Mailer [Mailer, Norris Church]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-58836-979-6
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2010-09-22T04:00:00+00:00

THE WINTER OF ’76–’77 was a particularly snowy one, and I didn’t have a warm coat. I’d left all my coats, which weren’t heavy, behind in Arkansas, and the winter before, I’d made do with a black velvet coat with a fur collar I’d gotten in a vintage clothing store in the Village on Bleecker Street for twenty-five dollars. While it was striking for evening, it wasn’t warm. I’d also gotten a purple wool cape in Italy, which was dramatic but not warm enough for the deep cold. Then I ran across some old pictures of Carol and Norman, and she was wearing a fur coat, a gray fox or whatever, and I got green-eyed fur lust. But how to broach the subject with Norman? I couldn’t let him know how jealous of her I was, and I hated to ask him for money. He had started having his secretary send me a check for a hundred dollars every week, which paid the rent and a few extras, but I wasn’t making enough at modeling to really fill in the gaps. It was tricky. I couldn’t ask him for a fur coat head-on, but one night when we were out in a snowstorm, he put his arm around me and felt me shiver. “Is that the warmest coat you have?” he said. I said yes, but maybe I could find a warmer one at a vintage store or something. He took a look at the purple cape, like he’d never seen it, which was entirely possible, given his obliviousness to his environment. “We have to get you something warmer than that!”

“How much would a fur coat cost?” I asked. “Not that I’d need to have a fur coat, but they’re really warm. Maybe I could get a secondhand one or something. I’ll look around.” Oh, I was so crafty!

I saw the wheels begin turning in his head. It would never occur to him on his own to get me a fur coat, but once an idea got into his head, he did it up in a big way. He asked one of his friends, who knew someone whose uncle or cousin or whatever was a furrier in the Garment District, and found we could get one wholesale. Norman said he would take me down there and just look and see what they had, no promises. I modeled in the Ben Kahn fur ads for The New York Times, and I knew a coat like those would be way beyond my wildest dreams, but I was sure we could find something reasonable for wholesale.

The place was called D’Cor and was run by a guy named Buddy. His assistant was a woman named Rita, who wore too much eye makeup, but then so did I, and we liked each other immediately. She started off showing us the cheaper furs like rabbit and raccoon, none of which Norman liked at all. I tried on a mink, which he didn’t like, either. Too plain. Then he saw a coat across the room.

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