‘My Oberon! What visions have I seen!
Methought I was enamoured of an ass.’
Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Colm Tóibín

I had published my first novel. It was called The South. I was on my first tour and this was Boston. The schedule said I was to do a TV show, and thus I found myself, make-up on, ready to appear, sitting in a room waiting to be called into the studio. The show was live, and when I looked at the screen I saw that Norman Mailer was already on the programme.

‘That is Norman Mailer!’ I said to the two women in the room. ‘That’s amazing!’

I don’t remember how I realized that one of the people to whom I was gushing was Mrs Mailer. She was very beautiful and very cool. Her skin was perfect. She stared at the screen, expressionless.

‘Am I on after him?’ I asked the production assistant.

‘Yeah, you’re on after him,’ the production assistant said.

I smiled at Mrs Mailer as if to say that we were in this together, but she remained placidly staring at her husband as he spoke, his wonderful worn face in full flight on the screen, his arms gesticulating.

Time went on. We continued to watch in silence. I knew the show was twenty-nine minutes long. Mailer was still on The Deer Park after fifteen. Then he talked about Marilyn and the Kennedys. He smiled, he laughed, he shrugged his shoulders, he interrupted the questions. At twenty-five, he was discussing The Executioner’s Song.

‘Don’t worry,’ the production assistant said to me, ‘keep calm. It’ll soon be your turn.’

At twenty-seven and a half minutes, they rushed me past Norman Mailer and put me sitting in his chair and miked me while the camera focused on the host holding up a copy of Mailer’s new book.

The chair where Mailer had been sitting was still warm. I thought about Mailer’s ass, I imagined it short and muscular and strong, hairy but not fleshy, the grey hair darkening towards the deep cleft. The heat from his ass was going through me as I said a few words about my book and then the show came to an end before the heat had faded.

Mailer was outside putting on his coat. I placed my book down on the table while I reached for my bag. He looked at the book. I wondered if I could start to tell him how much I admired his work, how the sweeping, fiery tones of The Armies of the Night and Miami and the Siege of Chicago had made me want to be a journalist, but how I believed that The Executioner’s Song was a masterpiece, as good as it gets, how that book made me want to do nothing except read it again.

‘You’re Irish,’ he said and took me in with his clear gaze.

I nodded. He studied the book again. I wondered if he was going to ask me if he could have a copy of it. I wondered if I should offer him one. It had taken me years to write.

“The Outh,’ he said, approvingly, touching the jacket of the book.

‘No,’ I said almost breathlessly, ‘The South.’

He seemed puzzled. We both looked down at the jacket.

The graphic designer had made a beautiful’S’ in a different colour and type-face to the ‘O-u-t-h’ so that the last four letters were perfectly clear against a blue background, but the ‘S’ was not so clear. I traced my finger along the ‘S’ to show him it was there. He smiled sadly.

‘So it’s not The Outh?’ His tone was amused, relaxed, mellow. He seemed to have liked saying the word ‘Outh’, he had made it long and glamorous-sounding and the afterglow of saying it stayed with him now in a slow smile.

He began to turn. His wife was waiting for him.

‘I thought it was an Irish word,’ he said.

Then he gathered himself up and left. I glanced sharply at his ass as he moved towards the door. It was everything I thought it might be and more. And then he was gone.