The Butterfly and the Moth
Eleanor Levine
I had a dream that I was Norman Mailer's daughter: yes, big, fat, wife-beating, conglomerate of literature, eclectic mind Norman Mailer's daughter. Norman called our house one day after he'd been sending me money for years. I didn't know why I was getting this cash and wondered why my intensity far exceeded that of my adopted father.
Mother hated Norman Mailer (for political reasons) but didn't really hate him. In fact, she didn't mind his obsequious personality when she was sleeping with him. It was after he left her for a German girl that my mother began to say, "All Germans are Nazis."
Indeed, I could never understand, quite frankly, why Mother despised Germans and Norman Mailer with the same energy that Adolf Hitler expended toward Jews. It was that deplorable, insipid, and stereotypical disgust you could see personified in an overweight Jewish man who hits his wife and vacations in Cape Cod. He stretched that Harvard education on his resume, we all felt, to hit a woman. Because thus far only the pen knife, with which he stabbed his spouse Adele Morales during a drunken argument, was the only documented and barbaric tool he had used against “ladies.”
Mother also disliked Palestinians, but none of them had ever slept with her. The PLO had not left her for Germans, so after a while, she became neutral on the Middle East conflict.
I couldn't figure out how the loquacious and self-indulgent author of The Executioner's Song, who so deeply sympathized with a person on death row, could be without remorse for my maternal progenitor and me. He left Mother barefoot and pregnant in the park. She was homeless until my dad, a humble science teacher who penned poems about butterflies, came and rescued her in a midtown women's shelter. It was then that she stopped obsessing over Norman Mailer.
Mother was depressed seeing my big red cheeks shine each day like sheet metal music, and really, she never completely forgot that my genes were somehow connected to the Third Reich.
Thus, when I received his money in the mail—this trust fund from the Post Office—I became confused.
I think Norman felt guilty that he had abandoned my poor mother when she needed him most, in the middle of what is now Strawberry Fields in Central Park.
He said to her one Sunday morning on a park bench, "Agnes, the truth is that I don't love you. I love a German girl who has bigger tits than you have."
Since that day, my mother has refused to become a feminist, even though Norman Mailer gives women every reason to become one. No, she wanted to fight him on her own, without the assistance of a movement that, she claimed, “used dried-out metaphors.” Mom wanted to find her own unique ideas and philosophies and not quote from Gloria Steinem. And in truth, her words were often more provocative than Gloria's.
"He should drown in his own semen," she’d say out loud. Of course, at the time, not knowing that Norman Mailer was my father, I didn't understand how a non-feminist could be so articulate about Mr. Mailer, and, at the same time, so strikingly vindictive. It was beautiful, in a profound sort of way, how Mother struck those keys and didn't take shit from men after that.
In fact, people have called Mother a cross dresser, for she wore the pants in the family—usually polyester. While I suppose Norman was out gallivanting with women who fit his Marilyn Monroe obsession, Mother was ironing, doing the laundry, and reading Henry Miller. She always held it against him.
"Norman will never write as well as Henry," she glared. And although Henry was often times repetitious and said the same kind of bullshit in rambling style over and fucking over again, he was more real and genuine and not quite as stuffy as Norman, who, in my mind, was like an old man who spent inordinate amounts of time on completely bogus and boring and pretentious things, except for Gary Gilmore, who I always had a crush on.
But one day, when the sun was shining and I was playing with my toes, I got a note in the mail from Norman:
"Dear Susie,
I understand that your mother has recently told you that I am your father, and I would really like to meet you."
Sincerely,
Norman Mailer."
I truly resented, like all abandoned children, the way Norman left Mother in the Strawberry Patch, or whatever that insidious part of Central Park that honored Yoko and John was called. Indeed, the thought of meeting that scum bucket, anywhere, anytime, was enough to make me vomit and eat the vomit.
"Mom, I am not going to meet Norman for lunch—do you mind?"
"Do what you want, just don't tell me about it."
Indeed, she was always so encouraging about what to do, that my sisters and I were all like Hamlet—indecisive until she made the decision not to decide.
I didn't know why I was like the way I was—intense and strikingly obnoxious; however, I was not at all like Dad, my stepfather, who taught molecular structures to kids in our local high school and came home at night to write about his butterfly collection. His poetry sounded like this:
Amid the yellow feverish
wings that zap the earth
I feel God in our wings
in the little creatures
who fly at night and the
ones in the daytime who scream
when flies bite them
Dad's poems were so kind, so gentle—he was a lithe angel.
I, on the other hand, was an angry bitch who read Naked Lunch and screamed at my sisters. They were so afraid of me they'd hide beneath our couch in the daytime if they thought I was going to holler at them. Indeed, I was the fly; they were the butterflies; they were his offspring. Yet, Dad found me much more intriguing than his biological children.
But I never returned his love, especially when he would sing, "I'd like to buy a paper doll that I could call my own." He had this fetish for 1930s songs, like "Sweetheart! Sweetheart!” that truly irritated me, so I read intensely and wondered why he and I were so different.
I had seen Norman Mailer once when he was walking with Jimmy Breslin near Wall Street in Manhattan.
"Hey you wife beater!" I barked.
"Why don't you join us?" he replied. I didn't know if he approved of incest, but Norm was clearly making a pass at me. I was not interested in making love to his vast cellular particles. And I have never understood his love for Marilyn or Madonna. Certainly, neither would have slept with him.
Nonetheless, when he phoned our house one Saturday morning, curiously seeking to unearth me from my provincial surroundings, I was quite weirded out.
"Hello."
"Hello, is this Susie?"
"Eh—yes?"
"Well, hello Susie, this is your other dad, Norman Mailer."
"Eh—yes?"
"I was wondering if you might like to get together and have lunch?"
"Well..."
"You can pick whichever restaurant you want, and I'll pick you...."
It sounded like a child molester was on the phone; nonetheless, it was my other half, and I agreed to meet in a neutral place—the Rustler Steakhouse.
"That's fine," I could hear his voice yelling through a multitude of fat layers. It was riveting on the phone, even more so because he represented fifty percent of my insane and inane gene pool.
"Dad, I am going to meet my other father tomorrow," I looked at him. He was bald and depressed and couldn't understand why I wasn't satisfied with his Hemingwayesque existence—why I had to search for a wannabe Henry James to make my life easier.
"Dad," I whimpered, "he called me, I didn't call him."
I didn't like him, didn't like his writing, and most of what he represented. I didn't like being Norman Mailer's daughter, the overwhelming sensibility of it all. The Doctor Faustus Jew trying to make it in a Christian world.
In some ways, Norman was worse than Harold Bloom, whom I loved and admired and tolerated for his intellect; with Mailer, it was a matter of I don't want to be your daughter, you're too damn prolific (you and John Updike)—why can't I be the offspring of butterflies?
I was chewing the ice in my glass of water. It had large ice cubes—the kind you chew up, spit back and keep chewing until the person you're supposed to meet arrives.
"Susie?" he greeted me. He had a beer belly, not that of bear, which is quite above beer.
"Hi," I looked down at the table, wanting to be the flat-surfaced daughter of Ernest Hemingway or Russell Baker.
"Can I give you a hug?"
I shook his hand. It was reminiscent of the way he left me and my mother in Central Park.
"I gathered from your voice that this is a regular hangout?"
"The Rustler Steakhouse? No, it's just cheap."
"You needn't worry about prices...."
It was true, Norman Mailer had made enough money to die and come back again. He was one of the few people who could have blonde fixations and make them profitable. Everyone else got thrown into jail or a mental institution. I thought of John Hinkley Jr. and Ezra Pound sitting in their cells for delusionary criminal activity against humanity and of Norman Mailer profiting from his. It was a savage and unfair world. I loved my other father: the pale, circumspect butterfly professor.
He bored people but was, at times, whimsical, wise, didn't stab his wife or daughters, was not a polygamist, didn't get fixated on movie stars forty years younger, didn't live off the fact that his first book was a wonderful success. He was my daddy and once wrote the following about a spotted butterfly:
the spotted
creature
reminds me
of an orangutan
who gets
blown
away
in the wind
like confetti.
When he arrived at the restaurant, Norman was wearing cotton slacks and dancing with his toe in his mouth; he couldn't understand why I was staring at him. I felt like Elizabeth Wurtzel discovering she was manic depressive—except my being a blue-collar feminist, with disembodied spirits in Connecticut, Long Island and Philly, I was quite unable to distance myself from this person in front of me.
"You're kind of cute..." he whispered.
"I'm not a proponent of incest," I returned his remark, sticking a beef burger in my mouth.
"But you do have to lose weight." He sounded like my mother and stepfather, who I assumed, just for the past generation or so, had been the real thing. But now this missing link in evolution, this Loch Ness Monster of Prozac as it were, was in front of me. He had big, hairy hands—like Mr. Hyde in Renoir's movie.
I could understand if my biological mother were Leni Riefenstahl—she was true and true a Nazi even if she didn't admit it. But this lump, I'm afraid, who thought he was infinitely more intelligent than all female life, was inhaling steak next to me.
"Why do you suddenly pop into my life as soon as it's convenient? Do you want to sleep with me or have you tired of your fictional characters?"
"You're a real sarcastic bitch, aren't you?" he grinned.
"Look, I appreciate your money, but you can keep it—really...just leave me alone."
I felt like this ominous cloud was raining over the Rustler Steakhouse, and at any moment, it was going to pour Prozac pills and that Norman was going to sue the Rustler Steakhouse for allowing depressive hail to enter its interiors.
"Why do you hate me?"
"It's not that I hate you, it's just hard to pick strawberries with a phantom who leaves your mother in the middle of Central Park."
"We weren't in love."
I was getting exhausted with this repetition of life, so I asked Mr. Mailer, the non-butterfly professor of my existence, if I could kindly leave and forget that we met and state his existence in the index of my memoirs one day.
"I'll even sign a prenuptial agreement not to sign a prenuptial agreement."
"Fine," he replied, hoping this little game with the distraught daughter had come to its financial end.
"You sure you don't want me to send any more checks?" he winced.
"Sure. Thanks...bye bye...."
I know they say genes are as important as the environment, and I was sure that if some obscure genetic malfunction occurred in a future son or daughter I didn't plan to have, then I would contact his lawyer. But the immediacy of knowing Norman Mailer reminded me of a butterfly poem my father had written when I was seven:
your hair is
a yellow leaf
on the fringe
of my mind
and when I get
nectar from
my wings they burn up
Norman paid the bill and we shook hands. I felt his fur and realized this was a Mr. Hyde through and through, not so demure and quite the monstrosity.
I waved to him, but he just walked to his car without turning his head.
I stood there silently and hitched a ride home. My mom had prepared a tuna casserole and Dad was opening a cheap bottle of wine. I stood in the hallway, next to a torn part of our rug, and rubbed my shoe for a while.
Eleanor Levine
I had a dream that I was Norman Mailer's daughter: yes, big, fat, wife-beating, conglomerate of literature, eclectic mind Norman Mailer's daughter. Norman called our house one day after he'd been sending me money for years. I didn't know why I was getting this cash and wondered why my intensity far exceeded that of my adopted father.
Mother hated Norman Mailer (for political reasons) but didn't really hate him. In fact, she didn't mind his obsequious personality when she was sleeping with him. It was after he left her for a German girl that my mother began to say, "All Germans are Nazis."
Indeed, I could never understand, quite frankly, why Mother despised Germans and Norman Mailer with the same energy that Adolf Hitler expended toward Jews. It was that deplorable, insipid, and stereotypical disgust you could see personified in an overweight Jewish man who hits his wife and vacations in Cape Cod. He stretched that Harvard education on his resume, we all felt, to hit a woman. Because thus far only the pen knife, with which he stabbed his spouse Adele Morales during a drunken argument, was the only documented and barbaric tool he had used against “ladies.”
Mother also disliked Palestinians, but none of them had ever slept with her. The PLO had not left her for Germans, so after a while, she became neutral on the Middle East conflict.
I couldn't figure out how the loquacious and self-indulgent author of The Executioner's Song, who so deeply sympathized with a person on death row, could be without remorse for my maternal progenitor and me. He left Mother barefoot and pregnant in the park. She was homeless until my dad, a humble science teacher who penned poems about butterflies, came and rescued her in a midtown women's shelter. It was then that she stopped obsessing over Norman Mailer.
Mother was depressed seeing my big red cheeks shine each day like sheet metal music, and really, she never completely forgot that my genes were somehow connected to the Third Reich.
Thus, when I received his money in the mail—this trust fund from the Post Office—I became confused.
I think Norman felt guilty that he had abandoned my poor mother when she needed him most, in the middle of what is now Strawberry Fields in Central Park.
He said to her one Sunday morning on a park bench, "Agnes, the truth is that I don't love you. I love a German girl who has bigger tits than you have."
Since that day, my mother has refused to become a feminist, even though Norman Mailer gives women every reason to become one. No, she wanted to fight him on her own, without the assistance of a movement that, she claimed, “used dried-out metaphors.” Mom wanted to find her own unique ideas and philosophies and not quote from Gloria Steinem. And in truth, her words were often more provocative than Gloria's.
"He should drown in his own semen," she’d say out loud. Of course, at the time, not knowing that Norman Mailer was my father, I didn't understand how a non-feminist could be so articulate about Mr. Mailer, and, at the same time, so strikingly vindictive. It was beautiful, in a profound sort of way, how Mother struck those keys and didn't take shit from men after that.
In fact, people have called Mother a cross dresser, for she wore the pants in the family—usually polyester. While I suppose Norman was out gallivanting with women who fit his Marilyn Monroe obsession, Mother was ironing, doing the laundry, and reading Henry Miller. She always held it against him.
"Norman will never write as well as Henry," she glared. And although Henry was often times repetitious and said the same kind of bullshit in rambling style over and fucking over again, he was more real and genuine and not quite as stuffy as Norman, who, in my mind, was like an old man who spent inordinate amounts of time on completely bogus and boring and pretentious things, except for Gary Gilmore, who I always had a crush on.
But one day, when the sun was shining and I was playing with my toes, I got a note in the mail from Norman:
"Dear Susie,
I understand that your mother has recently told you that I am your father, and I would really like to meet you."
Sincerely,
Norman Mailer."
I truly resented, like all abandoned children, the way Norman left Mother in the Strawberry Patch, or whatever that insidious part of Central Park that honored Yoko and John was called. Indeed, the thought of meeting that scum bucket, anywhere, anytime, was enough to make me vomit and eat the vomit.
"Mom, I am not going to meet Norman for lunch—do you mind?"
"Do what you want, just don't tell me about it."
Indeed, she was always so encouraging about what to do, that my sisters and I were all like Hamlet—indecisive until she made the decision not to decide.
I didn't know why I was like the way I was—intense and strikingly obnoxious; however, I was not at all like Dad, my stepfather, who taught molecular structures to kids in our local high school and came home at night to write about his butterfly collection. His poetry sounded like this:
Amid the yellow feverish
wings that zap the earth
I feel God in our wings
in the little creatures
who fly at night and the
ones in the daytime who scream
when flies bite them
Dad's poems were so kind, so gentle—he was a lithe angel.
I, on the other hand, was an angry bitch who read Naked Lunch and screamed at my sisters. They were so afraid of me they'd hide beneath our couch in the daytime if they thought I was going to holler at them. Indeed, I was the fly; they were the butterflies; they were his offspring. Yet, Dad found me much more intriguing than his biological children.
But I never returned his love, especially when he would sing, "I'd like to buy a paper doll that I could call my own." He had this fetish for 1930s songs, like "Sweetheart! Sweetheart!” that truly irritated me, so I read intensely and wondered why he and I were so different.
I had seen Norman Mailer once when he was walking with Jimmy Breslin near Wall Street in Manhattan.
"Hey you wife beater!" I barked.
"Why don't you join us?" he replied. I didn't know if he approved of incest, but Norm was clearly making a pass at me. I was not interested in making love to his vast cellular particles. And I have never understood his love for Marilyn or Madonna. Certainly, neither would have slept with him.
Nonetheless, when he phoned our house one Saturday morning, curiously seeking to unearth me from my provincial surroundings, I was quite weirded out.
"Hello."
"Hello, is this Susie?"
"Eh—yes?"
"Well, hello Susie, this is your other dad, Norman Mailer."
"Eh—yes?"
"I was wondering if you might like to get together and have lunch?"
"Well..."
"You can pick whichever restaurant you want, and I'll pick you...."
It sounded like a child molester was on the phone; nonetheless, it was my other half, and I agreed to meet in a neutral place—the Rustler Steakhouse.
"That's fine," I could hear his voice yelling through a multitude of fat layers. It was riveting on the phone, even more so because he represented fifty percent of my insane and inane gene pool.
"Dad, I am going to meet my other father tomorrow," I looked at him. He was bald and depressed and couldn't understand why I wasn't satisfied with his Hemingwayesque existence—why I had to search for a wannabe Henry James to make my life easier.
"Dad," I whimpered, "he called me, I didn't call him."
I didn't like him, didn't like his writing, and most of what he represented. I didn't like being Norman Mailer's daughter, the overwhelming sensibility of it all. The Doctor Faustus Jew trying to make it in a Christian world.
In some ways, Norman was worse than Harold Bloom, whom I loved and admired and tolerated for his intellect; with Mailer, it was a matter of I don't want to be your daughter, you're too damn prolific (you and John Updike)—why can't I be the offspring of butterflies?
I was chewing the ice in my glass of water. It had large ice cubes—the kind you chew up, spit back and keep chewing until the person you're supposed to meet arrives.
"Susie?" he greeted me. He had a beer belly, not that of bear, which is quite above beer.
"Hi," I looked down at the table, wanting to be the flat-surfaced daughter of Ernest Hemingway or Russell Baker.
"Can I give you a hug?"
I shook his hand. It was reminiscent of the way he left me and my mother in Central Park.
"I gathered from your voice that this is a regular hangout?"
"The Rustler Steakhouse? No, it's just cheap."
"You needn't worry about prices...."
It was true, Norman Mailer had made enough money to die and come back again. He was one of the few people who could have blonde fixations and make them profitable. Everyone else got thrown into jail or a mental institution. I thought of John Hinkley Jr. and Ezra Pound sitting in their cells for delusionary criminal activity against humanity and of Norman Mailer profiting from his. It was a savage and unfair world. I loved my other father: the pale, circumspect butterfly professor.
He bored people but was, at times, whimsical, wise, didn't stab his wife or daughters, was not a polygamist, didn't get fixated on movie stars forty years younger, didn't live off the fact that his first book was a wonderful success. He was my daddy and once wrote the following about a spotted butterfly:
the spotted
creature
reminds me
of an orangutan
who gets
blown
away
in the wind
like confetti.
When he arrived at the restaurant, Norman was wearing cotton slacks and dancing with his toe in his mouth; he couldn't understand why I was staring at him. I felt like Elizabeth Wurtzel discovering she was manic depressive—except my being a blue-collar feminist, with disembodied spirits in Connecticut, Long Island and Philly, I was quite unable to distance myself from this person in front of me.
"You're kind of cute..." he whispered.
"I'm not a proponent of incest," I returned his remark, sticking a beef burger in my mouth.
"But you do have to lose weight." He sounded like my mother and stepfather, who I assumed, just for the past generation or so, had been the real thing. But now this missing link in evolution, this Loch Ness Monster of Prozac as it were, was in front of me. He had big, hairy hands—like Mr. Hyde in Renoir's movie.
I could understand if my biological mother were Leni Riefenstahl—she was true and true a Nazi even if she didn't admit it. But this lump, I'm afraid, who thought he was infinitely more intelligent than all female life, was inhaling steak next to me.
"Why do you suddenly pop into my life as soon as it's convenient? Do you want to sleep with me or have you tired of your fictional characters?"
"You're a real sarcastic bitch, aren't you?" he grinned.
"Look, I appreciate your money, but you can keep it—really...just leave me alone."
I felt like this ominous cloud was raining over the Rustler Steakhouse, and at any moment, it was going to pour Prozac pills and that Norman was going to sue the Rustler Steakhouse for allowing depressive hail to enter its interiors.
"Why do you hate me?"
"It's not that I hate you, it's just hard to pick strawberries with a phantom who leaves your mother in the middle of Central Park."
"We weren't in love."
I was getting exhausted with this repetition of life, so I asked Mr. Mailer, the non-butterfly professor of my existence, if I could kindly leave and forget that we met and state his existence in the index of my memoirs one day.
"I'll even sign a prenuptial agreement not to sign a prenuptial agreement."
"Fine," he replied, hoping this little game with the distraught daughter had come to its financial end.
"You sure you don't want me to send any more checks?" he winced.
"Sure. Thanks...bye bye...."
I know they say genes are as important as the environment, and I was sure that if some obscure genetic malfunction occurred in a future son or daughter I didn't plan to have, then I would contact his lawyer. But the immediacy of knowing Norman Mailer reminded me of a butterfly poem my father had written when I was seven:
your hair is
a yellow leaf
on the fringe
of my mind
and when I get
nectar from
my wings they burn up
Norman paid the bill and we shook hands. I felt his fur and realized this was a Mr. Hyde through and through, not so demure and quite the monstrosity.
I waved to him, but he just walked to his car without turning his head.
I stood there silently and hitched a ride home. My mom had prepared a tuna casserole and Dad was opening a cheap bottle of wine. I stood in the hallway, next to a torn part of our rug, and rubbed my shoe for a while.
