Fools die

by Mario Puzo

  I shrugged a little unsympathetically, I guess. Osano saw it and said, “And my life went to shit, but you can see that. I envy you your life. Everything is under control. You don’t drink, you don’t smoke, you don’t chase broads. You just write and gamble and play the good father and husband. You’re a very unflashy magician, Merlyn. You’re a very safe magician. A safe life, safe books; you’ve made despair disappear.”

  He was pissed off at me. He thought he was driving into the bone. He didn't know he was full of shit. And I didn’t mind, that meant my magic was working. That was all he could see, and that was fine with me. He thought I had my life under control, that I didn’t stiffer or permit myself to, that I didn’t feel the bouts of loneliness that drove him on to different women, to booze, to his snorts of cocaine. Two things he didn’t realize. That he was suffering because he was actually going crazy, not suffering. The other was that everybody else in the world suffered and was lonely and made the best of it. That it was no big deal. In fact, you could say that life itself wasn’t a big deal, never mind his fucking literature.

  And then suddenly I had troubles from an unexpected quarter. One day at the review I got a call from Artie’s wife, Pam. She said she wanted to see me about something important, and she wanted to see me without Artie. Could I come over right away? I felt a real panic. In the back of my mind I was always worried about Artie. He was really frail and always looked tired. His fine-boned handsomeness showed stress more clearly than most. I was so panicky I begged her to tell me what it was over the phone, but she wouldn’t. She did tell me that there was nothing physically wrong, no medical reports of doom. It was a personal problem she and Artie were having, and she needed my help.

  Immediately, selfishly, I was relieved. Obviously she had a problem, not Artie. But still I took off early from work and drove out to Long Island to see her. Artie lived on the North Shore of Long Island and I lived on the South Shore. So it really wasn’t much out of my way. I figured I could listen to her and be home for dinner, just a little late. I didn’t bother to call Valerie.

  * * *

  I always liked going to Artie’s house. He had five kids, but they were nice kids who had a lot of friends who were always around and Pam never seemed to mind. She had big jars of cookies to feed them and gallon jugs of milk. There were kids watching television and other kids playing on the lawn. I said hi to the kids, and they gave me a brief hi back. Pam took me into the kitchen with its huge hay window. She had coffee ready and poured some. She kept her head down and then suddenly looked up at me and said, “Artie has a girlfriend.”

  Despite her having had five kids, Pam was still very young-looking with a fine figure, tall, slender, lanky before the kids, and one of those sensual faces that had a Madonna kind of look. She came from a Midwest town. Artie had met her in college and her father was president of a small bank. Nobody in the last three generations of her family had ever had more than two kids, and she was a hero-martyr to her parents because of the five births. They couldn’t understand it, but I did. I had once asked Artie about it and he said, “Behind that Madonna face is one of the horniest wives on Long Island. And that suits me fine.” If any other husband had said that about his wife, I would have been offended.

  “Lucky you,” I had said.

  “Yeah,” Artie said. “But I think she feels sorry for me, you know, the asylum business. And she wants to make sure I never feel lonely again. Something like that.”

  “Lucky, lucky you,” I had said.

  And so now, when Pam made her accusation, I was a little angry. I knew Artie. I knew it wasn’t possible for him to cheat on his wife. That he would never endanger the family he had built up or the happiness it gave him.

  Pam’s tall form was drooping; tears were in her eyes. But she was watching my face. If Artie were having an affair, the only one he would ever tell was me. And she was hoping I would give away the secret by some expression on my face.

  “It’s not true,” I said. “Artie always had women running after him and he hated it. He’s the straightest guy in the world. You know I wouldn’t try to cover for him. I wouldn’t rat on him, but I wouldn’t cover for him.”

  “I know that,” Pam said. “But he comes home late at least three times a week. And last night he had lipstick on his shirt. And he makes phone calls after I go up to bed, late at night. Does he call you?”

  “No,” I said. And now I felt shitty. It might be true. I still didn’t believe it, but I had to find out.

  “Will he be home for dinner tonight?” I asked. Pam nodded. I picked up the kitchen phone and called Valerie and told her I was eating at Artie’s house. I did that once in a while on the spur of the moment when I had an urge to see him, so she didn’t ask any questions. When I hung up the phone, I said to Pam, “You got enough to feed me?”

  She smiled and nodded her head. “Of course,” she said.

  “I’ll go down and pick him up at the station,” I said. “And we’ll have this all straightened out before we eat dinner.” I burlesqued it a bit and said, “My brother is innocent.”

  “Oh, sure,” Pam said. But she smiled.

  Down at the station, as I waited for the train to come in, I felt sorry for Pam and Artie. There was a little smugness in my pity. I was the guy Artie always had to bail out and finally I was going to bail him out. Despite all the evidence, the lipstick on the shirt, the late hours and phone calls, the extra money, I knew that Artie was basically innocent. The worst it could be was some young girl being so persistent that he finally weakened a little, maybe. Even now I couldn’t believe it. Mixed with the pity was the envy I always felt about Artie’s being so attractive to women in a way I could never be. With just a touch of satisfaction I felt it was not all that bad being ugly.

  When Artie got off the train, he wasn’t too surprised to see me. I had done this before, visiting him unexpectedly and meeting his train. I always felt good doing it, and he was always glad to see me. And it always made me feel good to see that he was glad to see me waiting for him. This time, watching him carefully, I noticed he wasn’t quite that glad to see me today.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” he said, but he gave me a hug and he smiled. He had an extraordinarily sweet smile for a man. It was the smile he had as a child and it had never changed.

  “I came to save your ass,” I said cheerfully. “Pam finally got the goods on you.”

  He laughed. “Jesus, not that shit again.” Pam’s jealousy was always good for a laugh.

  “Yep,” I said. “The late hours, the late phone calls and now, finally, the classic evidence: lipstick on your shirt.” I was feeling great because just by seeing Artie and talking to him I knew it was all a mistake.

  But suddenly Artie sat down on one of the station benches. His face looked very tired. I was standing over him and beginning to feel just a little uneasy.

  Artie looked up at me. I saw a strange look of pity on his face. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll fix everything.”

  He tried to smile. “Merlyn the Magician,” he said. “You’d better put on your fucking magic hat. At least sit down.” He lit up a cigarette. I thought again that he smoked too much. I sat down next to him. Oh, shit, I thought. And my mind was racing on to how to square things between him and Pam. One thing I knew, I didn’t want to lie to her or have Artie lie to her.

  “I’m not cheating on Pam,” Artie said. “And that’s all I want to tell you.”

  There was no question about my believing him. He would never lie to me. “Right,” I said. “But you have to tell Pam what’s going on or she’ll go crazy. She called me at work.”

  “If I tell Pam, I have to tell you,” Artie said. “You don’t want to hear it.”

  “So tell me,” I said. “What the hell’s the difference? You always tell me everything. How can it hurt?”

  Artie dropped his cigarette to the stone cement floor of the train platform. “OK,” he said. He put his hand on my arm and I felt a sudden sense of
dread. When we were children alone together, he always did that to comfort me. “Let me finish, don’t interrupt,” he said.

  “OK,” I said. My face was suddenly very warm. I couldn’t think of what was coming.

  “For the last couple of years I’ve been trying to find our mother,” Artie said. “Who she is, where she is, what we are. A month ago I found her.”

  I was standing up. I pulled my arm away from his. Artie stood up and tried to hold me again. “She’s a drunk,” he said. “She wears lipstick. She looks pretty good. But she’s all alone in the world. She wants to see you, she says that she couldn’t help-”

  I broke in on him. “Don’t tell me any more,” I said. “Don’t ever tell me any more. You do what you want, but I’ll see her in hell before I’ll see her alive.”

  “Hey, come on, come on,” Artie said. He tried to put his hand on me again and I broke away and walked toward the car. Artie followed me. We got in and I drove him to the house. By this time I was under control and I could see that Artie was distressed, so I said to him, “You’d better tell Pam.”

  Artie said, “I will.”

  I stopped in the driveway of the house. “You coming in for dinner?” Artie asked. He was standing by my open window, and again he reached in to put his hand on my arm.

  “No,” I said.

  I watched him as he went into the house, shooing the last of the kids still playing on the lawn into the house with him. Then I drove away. I drove slowly and carefully, I had trained myself all my life to be more careful when most people became more reckless. When I got home, I could see by Value’s face that she knew about what happened. The kids were in bed, and she had dinner for me on the kitchen table. While I ate, she ran her hand over the back of my head and neck when she went by to the stove. She sat opposite, drinking coffee, waiting for me to open the subject. Then she remembered. “Pam wants you to call her.”

  I called. Pam was trying to make some apology for having gotten me into such a mess. I told her it was no mess, and did she feel better now that she knew the truth? Pam giggled and said, “Christ, I think I’d rather it were a girlfriend.” She was cheerful again. And now our roles were reversed. Early that day I had pitied her, she was the person in terrible danger and I was the one who would rescue or try to help her. Now she seemed to think it was unfair that the roles were reversed. That was what the apology was about. I told her not to worry.

  Pam stumbled over what she wanted to say next. “Merlyn, you didn’t really mean it, about your mother, that you won’t see her?”

  “Does Artie believe me?” I asked her.

  “He says he always knew it,” Pam said. “He wouldn’t have told you until he’d softened you up. Except for me causing the trouble. He was teed off at me for bringing it all on.”

  I laughed. “See,” I said, “it started off as a bad day for you and now it’s a bad day for him. He’s the injured party. Better him than you.”

  “Sure,” Pam said. “Listen, I’m sorry for you, really.”

  “It has nothing at all to do with me,” I said. And Pam said OK and thanks and hung up.

  Valerie was waiting for me now. She was watching me intently. She’d been briefed by Pam and maybe even by Artie on how to handle this, and she was being careful. But I guess she hadn’t really grasped it. She and Pam were really good women, but they didn’t understand. Both their parents had made trouble and objections about them marrying orphans with no traceable lineage. I could imagine the horror stories told about similar cases. What if there had been insanity or degeneracy in our family? Or black blood or Jewish blood or Protestant blood, all that fucking shit. Well, now here was a nice piece of evidence turned up when it was no longer needed. I could figure out that Pam and Valerie were not too happy about Artie’s romanticism, his digging up the lost link of a mother.

  “Do you want her here to the house so that she can see the children?” Valerie asked.

  “No,” I said.

  Valerie looked troubled and a little terrified. I could see how she was thinking what if her children rejected her someday.

  “She’s your mother,” Valerie said. “She must have had a very unhappy life.”

  “Do you know what the word ‘orphan’ means?” I said. “Have you looked it up in the dictionary? It means a child who has lost both parents through death. Or a young animal that has been deserted or has lost its mother. Which one do you want?”

  “OK,” Valerie said. She looked terrified. She went to look in on the kids and then went into our bedroom. I could hear her going into the bathroom and preparing for bed. I stayed up late reading and making notes, and when I went to bed, she was sound asleep.

  It was all over in a couple of months. Artie called me up one day and told me his mother had disappeared again. We arranged to meet in the city and have dinner together so that we could talk alone. We could never talk about it with our wives present, as if it were too shameful for their knowledge. Artie seemed cheerful. He told me she had left a note. He told me that she drank a lot and always wanted to go to bars and pick up men. That she was a middle-aged floozy but that he liked her. He had made her stop drinking, he had bought her new clothes, he had rented her a nicely furnished apartment, given her an allowance. She had told him everything that had happened to her. It hadn’t really been her fault. I stopped him there. I didn’t want to hear about that.

  “Are you going to look for her again?” I asked him.

  Artie smiled his sad, beautiful smile. “No,” he said. “You know, I was a pain in the ass to her even now. She really didn’t like having me around. At first, when I found her, she played the role I wanted her to play, I think out of a sense of guilt that maybe she could make things up to me by letting me take care of her. But she really didn’t like it. She even made a pass at me one day, I think just to get some excitement.” He laughed. “I wanted her to come to the house, but she never would. It’s just as well.”

  “How did Pam take the whole business?” I asked.

  Artie laughed out loud. “Jesus, she was even jealous of my mother. When I told her it was all over, you should have seen the look of relief on her face. One thing I have to say for you, brother, you took the news without cracking a muscle.”

  “Because I don’t give a shit one way or the other,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Artie said. “I know. It doesn’t matter. I don’t think you would have liked her.”

  Six months later Artie had a heart attack. It was a mild one, but he was in the hospital for weeks and off from work another month. I went to see him in the hospital every day, and he kept insisting that it had been some sort of indigestion, that it was a borderline case. I went down to the library and read everything I could about heart attacks. I found out that his reaction was a common one with heart attack victims and that sometimes they were right. But Pam was panic-stricken. When Artie came out of the hospital, she put him on a strict diet, threw all the cigarettes out of the house and stopped smoking so that Artie could quit. It was hard for him, but he did. And maybe the heart attack did scare him because now he took care of himself. He took the long walks the doctors prescribed, ate carefully and never touched tobacco. Six months later he looked better than he had ever looked in his life and Pam and I stopped giving each other panicky looks whenever he was out of the room. “Thank God, he’s stopped smoking,” Pam said. “He was up to three packs a day. That’s what did him in.”

  I nodded, but I didn’t believe it. I always believed it was that two months he spent trying to claim his mother that did him in.

  And as soon as Artie was OK, I got into trouble. I lost my job on the literary review. Not through any fault of mine but because Osano got fired and as his right-hand man I was fired with him.

  Osano had weathered all the storms. His contempt of the most powerful literary circles in the country, the political intelligentsia, the culture fanatics, the liberals, the conservatives, Women’s Liberation, the radicals, his sexual escapades, his gambling on sport
s, his use of his position to lobby for the Nobel Prize. Plus a nonfiction book he published in defense of pornography, not for its redeeming social value, but as ant elitist pleasure of the poor in intellect. For all these things the publishers would have liked to fire him, but the circulation of the review had doubled since he became editor.

  By this time I was making good money. I wrote a lot of Osano's articles for him. I could imitate his style pretty well, and he would start me off with a fifteen-minute harangue on how he felt about a particular subject, always brilliantly crazy. It was easy for me to write the article based on his fifteen minutes of ranting. Then he’d go over and put in a few of his masterful touches and we’d split the money. Just half his money was twice what I got paid for an article.

  Even that didn’t get us fired. It was his ex-wife Wendy who did us in. Though that’s maybe unfair; Osano did us in, Wendy handed him the knife.

  Osano had spent four weeks in Hollywood while I ran the review for him. He was completing some sort of movie deal, and during the four weeks we used a courier to fly out and give him review articles to OK before I ran it. When Osano finally came back to New York, he gave a party for all his friends to celebrate his home-coming and the big chunk of money he had earned in Hollywood.

  The party was held at his East Side brownstone which his latest ex-wife used with their batch of three kids. Osano was living in a small studio apartment in the Village, the only thing he could afford, but too small for the party.

  I went because he insisted that I go. Valerie didn’t come. She didn’t like Osano and she didn’t like parties outside her family circle. Over the years we had come to an unspoken agreement. We excused each other from each other’s social lives whenever possible. My reason was that I was too busy working on my novel, my job and free-lance writing assignments. Her excuse was that she had to take care of the kids and didn’t trust baby-sitters. We both enjoyed the arrangement. It was easier for her than it was for me since I had no social life except for my brother, Artie, and the review.