Fools die

by Mario Puzo

  Anyway, Osano's party was one of the big events of the literary set in New York. The top people of the New YorkTimes Book Review came, the critics for most of the magazines and novelists that Osano was still friendly with. I was sitting in a corner talking with Osano's latest ex-wife when I saw Wendy come in and I thought immediately, Jesus, trouble, I knew she had not been invited.

  Osano spotted her at the same time and started walking toward her with the peculiar lurching gait he’d acquired in the last few months. He was a little drunk, and I was afraid he might lose his temper and cause a scene or do something crazy, so I got up and joined them. I arrived just in time to hear Osano greet her.

  “What the fuck do you want?” he said. He could be frightening when he was angry, but from what he had told me about Wendy I knew she was the one person who enjoyed making him mad. But I was still surprised at her reaction.

  Wendy was dressed in jeans and sweater and a scarf over her head. It made her thin dark face Medea-like. Her wiry black hair escaped from the scarf like thin black snakes.

  She looked at Osano with a deadly calm which held malevolent triumph. She was consumed with hatred. She took a long look around the room as if drinking in what she now no longer could claim any part of, the glittering literary world of Osano that he had effectively banished her from. It was a look of satisfaction. Then she said to Osano, “I have something very important to tell you.”

  Osano downed his glass of scotch. He gave her an ugly grin. “So tell me and get the fuck out.”

  Wendy said very seriously, “It’s bad news.”

  Osano laughed uproariously and genuinely. That really tickled him. “You’re always bad news,” he said and laughed again.

  Wendy watched him with quiet satisfaction. “I have to tell you in private.”

  “Oh, shit,” Osano said. But he knew Wendy, she would delight in a scene. So he took her up the stairs to his study. I figured later that he didn’t take her to one of the bedrooms because deep down he was afraid he would try to fuck her, she still had that kind of hold on him. And he knew she would delight in refusing him. But it was a mistake to bring her into the study. It was his favorite room, still kept for him as a place to work. It had a huge window which he loved to stare out of while he was writing and watch the goings-on in the street below.

  I hung around at the bottom of the stairs. I really don’t know why, but I felt that Osano was going to need help. So I was the first one to hear Wendy scream in terror and the first one to act on that scream. I ran up the stairs and kicked in the door of the study.

  I was just in time to see Osano reach Wendy. She was flailing her thin arms at him, trying to keep him away. Her bony hands were curled, the fingers extended like claws to scratch his face. She was terrified, but she was enjoying it too. I could see that. Osano's face was bleeding from two long furrows on his right cheek. And before I could stop him, he had hit Wendy in the face so that she swayed toward him. In one terrible swift motion he picked her up as if she were a weightless doll and threw her through the picture window with tremendous force. The window shattered, and Wendy sailed through it to the street below.

  I don’t know whether I was more horrified by the sight of Wendy’s tiny body breaking through the window or Osano's completely maniacal face. I ran out of the room and shouted, “Call an ambulance.” I snatched up a coat from the hallway and ran out in the street.

  Wendy was lying on the cement like an insect whose legs had been broken. As I came out of the house, she was teetering up on her arms and legs but had only gotten to her knees. She looked like a spider trying to walk, and then she collapsed again.

  I knelt beside her and covered her with the coat. I took off my jacket and folded it beneath her head. She was in pain, but there was no blood trickling out of her mouth or ears and there was not that deadly film over the eyes that long ago during the war I had recognized as a danger signal. Her face finally was calm and at peace with itself. I held her hand, it was warm, and she opened her eyes. “You’ll be OK,” I said. “An ambulance is coming. You’ll be OK.”

  She opened her eyes and smiled at me. She looked very beautiful, and for the first time I understood Osano's being fascinated by her. She was in pain but actually grinning." I fixed that son of a bitch this time,” she said.

  When they got her to the hospital, they found that she had suffered a broken toe and a fracture of the shoulder clavicle. She was conscious enough to tell what had happened, and the cops went looking for Osano and took him away. I called Osano's lawyer. He told me to keep my mouth shut as much as I possibly could and that he would straighten everything out. He had known Osano and Wendy a long time and he understood the whole thing before I did. He told me to stay where I was until he called.

  Needless to say, the party broke up after detectives questioned some of the people, including myself. I said I hadn’t seen anything except Wendy falling through the window. No, I hadn’t seen Osano near her, I told them. And they left it at that. Osano's ex-wife gave me a drink and sat next to me on the sofa. She had a funny little smile on her face. “I always knew this would happen,” she said.

  It took almost three hours for the lawyer to call me. He said he had Osano out on bail but that it would be a good idea for someone to be with him a couple of days. Osano would be going to his studio apartment in the Village. Could I go down there to keep him company and keep him from talking to the press? I said I would. Then the lawyer briefed me. Osano had testified that Wendy had attacked him and that he had flung her away from him and she had lost her balance and went through the window. That was the story given to the newspapers. The lawyer was sure that he could get Wendy to go along with the story out of her own self-interest. If Osano went to jail, she would lose out on alimony and child support. It would all be smoothed over in a couple of days if Osano could be kept from saying something outrageous. Osano should be at his apartment in an hour, the lawyer would bring him there.

  I left the brownstone and took a taxi down to the Village. I sat on the stoop of the apartment house until the lawyer’s chauffeured limo rolled up. Osano got out.

  He looked dreadful. His eyes were bulging out of his head, and his skin was dead white with strain. He walked right past me, and I got into the elevator with him. He took his keys out, but his hands were shaking and I did it for him.

  When we were in his tiny studio apartment, Osano flopped down on the couch that opened out into a bed. He still hadn’t said a word to me. He was lying there now, his face covering his hands out of weariness, not despair. I looked around the studio apartment and thought, here was Osano, one of the most famous writers in the world and he lived in this hole. But then I remembered that he rarely lived here. That he was usually living in his house in the Hamptons or up in Provincetown. Or with one of the rich divorced women he would have a love affair with for a few months.

  I sat down in a dusty armchair and kicked a pile of books into a corner. “I told the cops I didn’t see anything,” I said to Osano.

  Osano sat up and his hands were away from his face. To my amazement I could see that wild grin on his face.

  “Jesus, how did you like the way she sailed through the air. I always said she was a fucking witch. I didn’t throw her that hard. She was flying on her own.”

  I stared at him. “I think you’re going fucking crazy,” I said. “I think you’d better see a doctor.” My voice was cold. I couldn’t forget Wendy lying in the street.

  “Shit, she’s going to be OK,” Osano said. “And you don’t ask why. Or do you think I throw all my ex-wives out the window?”

  “There’s no excuse,” I said.

  Osano grinned. “You don’t know Wendy. I’ll bet twenty bucks when I tell you what she said to me, you’ll agree you’d have done the same thing.”

  “Bet,” I said. I went into the bathroom and wet a facecloth and threw it to him. He wiped his face and neck and sighed with pleasure as the cold water refreshed his skin.

  Osano hunched
forward on the couch. “She reminded me how she had written me letters the last two months begging for money for our kid. Of course, I didn’t send her any money, she’d spend it on herself. Then she said that she hadn’t wanted to bother me while I was busy in Hollywood but that our youngest boy had gotten sick with spinal meningitis and because she didn’t have enough money she had to put him in the charity ward in the city hospital, Bellevue no less. Can you imagine that fucking cunt? She didn’t call me that he was sick because she wanted to lay all that shit on me, all that guilt on me.”

  I knew how Osano loved all his kids from his different wives. I was amazed at this capacity in him. He always sent them birthday presents and always had them with him for the summers. And he dropped in to see them sporadically to take them to the theater or to dinner or a ball game. I was astonished now that he didn’t seem worried about his kid being sick. He understood what I was feeling.

  “The kid only had a high fever, some sort of respiratory infection. While you were being so gallant about Wendy, I was calling the hospital before the cops came. They told me there was nothing to worry about. I called my doctor and he’s having the kid taken to a private hospital. So everything’s OK.”

  “Do you want me to hang around?” I asked him.

  Osano shook his head. “I have to go see my kid and take care of the other kids now that I’ve deprived them of their mother. But she’ll be out tomorrow, that bitch.”

  Before I left him, I asked Osano one question. “When you threw her out that window, did you remember that it was really only two stories above the street?”

  He grinned at me again. “Sure,” he said. “And besides, I never figured she’d sail that far. I tell you she’s a witch.”

  All the New York newspapers had front-page stories the next day. Osano was still famous enough for that kind of treatment. At least Osano didn’t go to jail because Wendy didn’t press charges. She said that maybe she had stumbled and gone through the window. But that was the next day and the damage had been done. Osano was made to resign gracefully from the review and I resigned with him. One columnist, trying to be funny, speculated that if Osano won the Nobel Prize, he would be the first one to win who had ever thrown his wife out of the window. But the truth was that everybody knew that this little comedy would end all Oscano's hopes in that direction. You couldn’t give the sober respectable Nobel to a sordid character like Osano. And Osano didn’t help matters much when a little later he wrote a satirical article on the ten best ways to murder your wife.

  But right now we both had a problem. I had to earn a living free lance without a job. Osano had to lie low someplace where the press couldn’t keep hounding him. I could solve

  Osano's problem. I called Cully in Las Vegas and explained what had happened. I asked Cully if he could stash Osano in the Landau Hotel for a couple of weeks. I knew nobody would be looking for him there. And Osano was agreeable. He had never been to Las Vegas.

  Chapter 26

  With Osano safely stashed in Vegas I had to fix my other problem. I had no job, so I took on as much free-lance work as I could get. I did book reviews for Time magazine, the New York Times, and the new editor of the review gave me some work. But for me it was too nerve-racking. I never knew how much money was going to come in at any particular time. And so I decided that I would go all-out to finish my novel and hope that it would make a lot of money. For the next two years my life was very simple. I spent twelve to fifteen hours a day in my workroom. I went with my wife to the supermarket. I took my kids to Jones Beach in the summer, on Sundays, to give Valerie a rest. Sometimes at midnight I took Dexamyls to keep me awake so that I could work until three or four in the morning.

  During that time I saw Eddie Lancer for dinner a few times in New York. Eddie had become primarily a screenwriter in Hollywood, and it was clear that he would no longer write novels. He enjoyed the life out there, the women, the easy money, and swore he would never write another novel again. Four of his screenplays had become hit movies and he was much in demand. He offered to get me a job working with him if I was willing to come out there, and I told him no. I couldn’t see myself working in the movie business. Because despite the funny stories Eddie told me, what was very clear was that being a writer in the movies was no fun. You were no longer an artist. You were just a translator of other people’s ideas.

  During those two years I saw Osano about once a month. He had stayed a week in Vegas and then disappeared. Cully called me to complain that Osano had run away with his favorite girlfriend, a girl named Charlie Brown. Cully hadn’t been mad. He had just been astonished. He told me the girl was beautiful, was making a fortune in Vegas under his guidance and was living a great life, and she had abandoned all this to go with a fat old writer who not only had a beer gut but was the craziest guy Cully had ever seen.

  I told Cully that that was another favor I owed him and if I saw the girl with Osano in New York, I would buy her a plane ticket back to Vegas.

  “Just tell her to get in touch with me,” Cully said. “Tell her I miss her, tell her I love her, tell her anything you want. I just want to get her back. That girl is worth a fortune to me in Vegas.”

  “OK,” I said. But when I met Osano in New York for dinner, he was always alone and he didn’t much look like anybody who could hold the affections of a young, beautiful girl with the advantages that Cully had described.

  It’s funny when you hear of somebody’s success, of his fame. That fame, like a shooting star that has appeared out of nowhere. But the way it happened to me was surprisingly tame.

  I lived the life of a hermit for two years and at the end the book was finished and I turned it into my publisher and I forgot about it. A month later my editor called me into New York and told me they had sold my novel to a paperback house for reprint for over half a million dollars. I was stunned. I really couldn’t react. Everybody, my editor, my agent, Osano, Cully, had warned me that a book about kidnapping a child where the kidnapper is a hero would not appeal to a mass public. I expressed my astonishment to my editor, and he said, “You told such a great story that it doesn’t matter.”

  When I went home to Valerie that night and told her what had happened, she seemed not to be surprised either. She merely said calmly, “We can buy a bigger house. The kids are getting bigger, they need more room.” And then life simply went on as before, except that Valerie found a house only ten minutes from her parents and we bought it and moved in.

  By that time the novel was published. It made all the bestseller lists all over the country. It was a big best-seller, and yet it really didn’t seem to change my life in any way. In thinking about this I realized that it was because I had such few friends. There was Cully, there was Osano, there was Eddie Lancer and that was it. Of course, my brother, Artie, was terribly proud of me and wanted to give a big party until I told him he could give the party but I wouldn’t come. What really touched me was a review of the book by Osano which appeared on the front page of the literary review. He praised me for the right reasons and pointed out the true flaws. In his usual fashion he overrated the book because I was a friend of his. And then, of course, he went on and talked about himself and his novel in progress.

  I called his apartment, hut there was no answer. I wrote him a letter and got a letter in return. We had dinner together in New York. He looked terrible, but he had a great-looking young blonde who rarely spoke but ate more than Osano and I put together. He introduced her as “Charlie Brown,” and I realized she was Cully’s girl, but I never gave her Cully’s message. Why should I hurt Osano?

  There was one funny incident I always remembered. I told Valerie to go out shopping and buy herself some new clothes, whatever she wanted, and that I would mind the kids for that day. She went with some of her girlfriends and came back with an armful of packages.

  I was trying to work on a new book hut really couldn’t get into it, so she showed me what she had bought. She unwrapped a package and showed me a new yellow dress.r />
  “It cost ninety dollars,” Valerie said. “Can you imagine ninety dollars for a little summer dress?”

  “It looks beautiful,” I said dutifully. She was holding it against her neck.

  “You know,” she said, “I really couldn’t make up my mind whether I liked the yellow one or the green one. Then I decided on the yellow. I think I look better in the yellow, don’t you?”

  I laughed. I said, “Honey, didn’t it occur to you that you could buy both?”

  She looked at me stunned for a moment, and then she too laughed. And I said, “You can buy a yellow and a green and a blue and a red.”

  And we both smiled at each other, and for the first time we realized, I think, that we had entered some sort of new life. But on the whole I found success not to be as interesting or as satisfying as I had thought it would be, So, as I usually did, I read up on the subject and I found that my case was not unusual, that in fact, many men who had fought all their lives to reach the top of their professions immediately celebrated by throwing themselves out of a high window.

  It was wintertime, and I decided to take the whole family down to Puerto Rico for a vacation. It would be the first time in our married life that we had been able to afford to go away. My kids had never even been to summer camp.

  We had a great time swimming, enjoying the heat, enjoying the strange streets and food, the delight of leaving the cold winter one morning and that afternoon being in the broiling sun, enjoying the balmy breezes. At night I took Valerie to the hotel gambling casino while the children dutifully sat in the great wicker chairs of the lobby, waiting for us. Every fifteen minutes or so Valerie would run down and see if they were OK, and finally she took them all to our suite of rooms and I gambled until four o’clock in the morning. Now that I was rich, naturally I was lucky, and I won a few thousand dollars and in a funny way I enjoyed winning in the casino more than the success and the huge sums of money I had made so far on the book.