Fools die

by Mario Puzo

  I hate women using words like “fuck” and “cunt” and “mother-fucker.” But she was the only woman I ever heard who made the word “fuck” sound humorous and friendly. The f and the k were Southern slurry soft.

  Maybe it was obvious that she had never said the word until lately. Maybe it was because she grinned at me to let me know she knew I was imitating Kellino. She had a great grin, not a charming smile.

  “I don’t know why I’m so silly,” she said. “But I never go to parties. I just came because I knew she’d be here. I admire her so much.”

  “She’s a good critic,” I said.

  “Oh, she’s so smart,” Janelle said. “She once wrote something nice about me. And you know, I thought she’d like me. Then she put me down. For no reason.”

  “She had plenty of reason,” I said. “You’re beautiful and she’s not. And she’s got plans for Kellino tonight, and she was not going to have him distracted by you.”

  “That’s silly,” she said. “I don’t like actors.”

  “But you’re beautiful,” I said. “Also, you were talking intelligently. She has to hate you.”

  For the first time she looked at me with something like real interest. I was way ahead of her. I liked her because she was beautiful. I liked her because she never went to parties. I liked her because she didn’t go for actors like Kellino, who were so goddamn handsome and charming and dressed so beautifully in exquisitely tailored suits, with haircut by a scissor Rosin. And because she was intelligent. Also, she could cry over a critic putting her down at a party. If she was that tenderhearted, maybe she wouldn’t kill me. It was the vulnerability finally that made me ask her to have dinner and a movie. I didn’t know what Osano could have told me. A vulnerable woman will kill you all the time.

  The funny thing is, I didn’t see her sexually. I just liked her a hell of a lot. Because despite the fact that she was beautiful and had that wonderfully happy grin even with tears, she was not really a sexy woman at first glance. Or I was too inexperienced to notice. Because later, when Osano met her, he said he felt the sexuality in her like an exposed electric wire. When I told Janelle about Osano, she said that must have happened to her after I met her. Because before she met me, she had been off sex. When I kidded her about that and didn’t believe her, she gave me that happy grin and asked if I had ever heard about vibrators.

  It’s funny that a grown woman telling you that she masturbated with a vibrator can turn you on to her. But it’s easy to figure out. The implication is that she is not promiscuous, though she is beautiful and lives in a milieu where men are after women as quickly as a cat after a mouse and mostly for the same reason.

  We went out with each other for two weeks, about five times, before we finally got to bed. And maybe we had a better time before we slept together than we did afterward.

  I would go to work at the studio during the day and work on the script and have some drinks with Malomar and then go back to the suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel and read. Sometimes I’d go to a movie. On the nights I’d have a date with Janelle she’d meet me at the suite, and then she would drive me around to the movies and a restaurant and then back to the suite. We’d have a few drinks and talk, and she’d go home about one in the morning. We were buddies, not lovers.

  She told me why she divorced her husband. When she was pregnant, she’d been horny as hell, but he didn’t care for her pregnant Then when the baby came, she’d loved nursing it. She was delighted by the milk flowing from her breast and the baby enjoying it. She wanted her husband to taste the milk, to suck her breast and feel the flow. She thought it would be so great. Her husband turned away in disgust. And that finished him for her.

  “I’ve never told anybody that before,” she said.

  “Jesus,” I said. “He was crazy.”

  Late one night in the suite she sat beside me on the sofa. We necked like kids and I got her panties down around her legs and then she balked and stood up. By this time I had my pants down in anticipation, and she was laughing and half crying, and she said, “I’m sorry. I’m an intelligent woman. But I just can’t.” We looked at each other and we both started laughing. We just looked too funny, both of us, with our bare legs and crotches and her white panties over her bare feet. Me with my pants and shorts snagging my ankles.

  By that time I liked her too much to get mad. And oddly enough I didn’t feel rejected. “It’s OK,” I said. I pulled up my trousers. She pulled up her panties and we hugged each other on the sofa again. When she left, I asked her if she would come around the next night. When she said she would, I knew she would go to bed with me.

  The next night she came into the suite and kissed me. Then she said, with a shy smile, “Shit, guess what happened.”

  I knew enough, innocent as I was, that when a prospective bed mate says something like that, you’re out in the cold. But I wasn’t worried.

  “My period started,” she said.

  “That doesn’t bother me if it doesn’t bother you,” I said. I took her by the hand and led her to the bedroom. In two seconds we were naked in bed except for her panties and I could feel the pad underneath. “Take all that stuff off,” I said. She did. We kissed and just held each other.

  We weren’t in love that first night. We just liked each other a hell of a lot. We made love like kids. Just kissing and fucking straight. And holding each other and talking and feeling comfortable and warm. She had satiny skin and a lovely soft ass that wasn’t mushy. Her small breasts had a really great feel to them and big red nipples. We made love twice in the space of an hour, and it had been a long time since I had done that. Finally we got thirsty, and I went into the other room to open a bottle of champagne I had waiting. When I got back into the bedroom, she had her panties back on. She was sitting cross-legged on the bed with a wet towel in her hand, and she was scrubbing out the dark bloodstains on the white sheets. I stood watching her, naked, champagne glasses in my hand, and it was then I first got that overwhelming feeling of tenderness that is the signal of doom. She looked up and smiled at me, her blond hair tousled, her huge brown eyes myopically serious.

  “I don’t want the maid to see,” she said.

  “No, we don’t want her to know what we did,” I said.

  Very seriously she kept scrubbing, peering nearsightedly at the sheets to make sure that she hadn’t missed any spots. Then she dropped the wet towel on the floor and took a glass of champagne from my hand. We sat on the bed together, drinking and smiling foolishly at each other in a delighted sort of way. As if we had both made the team, passed some sort of important test. But we still weren’t in love with each other. The sex had been good but not great. We were just happy to be together, and when she had to go home, I asked her to sleep over but she said she couldn’t and I didn’t question her. I thought maybe she was living with a guy and she could stay out late on him but not stay overnight. And it didn’t bother me. That was the great thing about not being in love.

  One good thing about Women’s Lib is that maybe it will make falling in love less corny. Because, of course, when we did fall in love, it was in the corniest tradition. We fell in love by having a fight.

  Before that we had a little trouble. One night in bed I couldn’t quite get there. Not that I was impotent, but I couldn’t finish. And she was trying like hell for me to make it. Finally she started to yell and scream that she would never have sex again, that she hated sex and why did we ever start. She was crying with frustration and failure. I laughed her out of it. I explained to her that it was no big deal. That I was tired. That I had a lot of things on my mind like a five-million-dollar movie, plus all the usual guilts and hang-ups of a conditioned twentieth-century American male who had led a square life. I held her in my arms and we talked for a while and then after that we both came-no sweat. Still not great but good.

  OK. There came a time when I had to go back to New York to take care of family business, and then, when I came back to California, we bad a date for my first night
back. I was so anxious that on the way to the hotel in my rented car I went through a red light and got smashed by another car. I didn’t get hurt, but I had to get a new car and I guess I was in a mild sort of shock. Anyway, when I called Janelle, she was surprised. She had misunderstood. She thought it was for the next night. I was mad as hell. I’d nearly gotten myself killed so I could see her, and she was pulling this routine on me. But I was polite.

  I told her I had some business the next night, but I would call her later on in the week when I knew I would be free. She had no idea I was angry, and we chatted for a while. I never called her. Five days later she called me. Her first words were: “You son of a bitch, I thought you really liked me. And then you pulled that old Don Juan shit of not calling me. Why the hell didn’t you just come out and say you don’t like me anymore.”

  “Listen,” I said. “You’re the phony one. You knew goddamn well we had a date that night. You canceled out because you had something better to do.”

  She said very quietly, very convincingly, “I misunderstood, or you made the mistake.”

  “You’re a goddamn liar,” I said. I couldn’t believe the infantile rage I felt. But maybe it was more than that. I’d trusted her. I thought she was great. And she had pulled one of the oldest female tricks. I knew, because before I married, I’d been on the other end when girls broke their dates that way to be with me. And I hadn’t thought much of those girls.

  That was that. It was over and I really didn’t give a shit. But two nights later she called me.

  We said hello to each other, and then she said, “I thought you really liked me.”

  And I found myself saying, “Honey, I'm sorry.” I don’t know why I said “honey.” I never use that word. But it loosened her all up.

  “I want to see you,” she said.

  “Come on over,” I said.

  She laughed. “Now?” It was one in the morning.

  “Sure,” I said.

  She laughed again. “OK,” she said.

  She got there about twenty minutes later. I had a bottle of champagne ready and we talked and then I said, “Do you want to go to bed?”

  She said yes.

  Why is it so hard to describe something that is completely joyful? It was the most innocent sex in the world and it was great. I hadn’t felt so happy since I was a kid playing ball all day in the summer. And I realized that I could forgive Janelle everything when I was with her and forgive her nothing when I was away from her.

  I had told Janelle once before that I loved her, and she had told me not to say something like that, that she knew that

  I didn’t mean it. I wasn’t sure I meant it, so I said OK. I didn’t say it now. But sometime during the night we both woke up and we made love and she said very seriously in the darkness, “I love you.”

  Jesus Christ. The whole business is so goddamn cornball. It’s so much bullshit that they use to make you buy a new kind of shaving cream or fly a special airline. But then why is it so effective? After that everything changed. The act of sex became special. I literally never even saw another woman. And it was enough just to see her to get sexually excited. When she met me at the plane, I’d grab her behind the cars in the parking lot to touch her breasts and legs and kiss her twenty times before we drove to the hotel

  I couldn’t wait. Once, when she protested laughingly, I told her about the polar bears. About how a male polar bear could react only to the scent of one particular female polar bear and sometimes had to wander over a thousand square miles of Arctic ice before he could fuck her. And that was why there were so few polar bears. She was surprised at that, and then she caught on that I was kidding and punched me. But I told her really that was the effect she had on me. That it was not love or that she was so great-looking and smart and everything that I had ever dreamed about in a woman since I was a kid. It was not that at all. I was not vulnerable to that corny bullshit of love and soul mates and all that. It was quite simply that she had the right smell; her body gave off the right odor for me. It was simple and nothing to brag about.

  The great thing was that she understood. She knew I wasn’t being cute. That I was rebelling against my surrender to her and to the cliche of romantic love. She just hugged me and said, “OK, OK.” and when I said, “Don’t take too many baths,” she just hugged me again and said, “OK.”

  Because really it was the last thing in the world I wanted. I was happily married. I loved my wife more than anyone else in the world at one time, and still liked her better than any female I ever met even when I started being unfaithful. So now for the first time I felt guilty with both of them. And stories about love had always irritated me.

  Well, we were more complicated than polar bears. And the catch in my fairy tale, which I didn’t point out to Janelle, was that the female polar bear did not have the same problem as the male.

  And then, of course, I pulled the usual shitty things that people in love do. I slyly asked around about her. Did she date producers and stars to get parts? Did she have other affairs? Did she have another boyfriend? In other words, was she a cunt and fucking a million other guys at the drop of a hat? It’s funny the things you do when you fall for a woman. You would never do it with a guy you liked. There you always trusted your own judgment, your own gut feeling. With women you were always mistrustful. There is something really shitty about being in love.

  And if I had gotten some real dirt on her, I wouldn’t have fallen in love. How is that for a shitty romanticism? No wonder so many women hate men now. My only excuse was that I had been a writing hermit so many years and not smart about women to begin with. And then I couldn’t get any scandal on her. She didn’t go out to parties. She wasn’t linked with any actors. In fact, for a girl who had appeared and worked in movies pretty often very little was known about her. She didn’t run with any of the movie crowds or go to any of the eating places where everybody went. She never appeared in the gossip columns. In short, she was the girl of a square hermit’s dream. She even liked to read. What more could I want?

  Asking around, I found out to my surprise that Doran Rudd had grown up with her in some hick town in Tennessee. He told me she was the straightest girl in Hollywood. He also told me not to waste my time, that I’d never get laid. This delighted me. I asked him what he thought of her, and he said she was the best woman he had ever known. It was only later, and it was Janelle who told me, that I learned that they had been lovers, had lived together, that it was Doran who had brought her to Hollywood.

  Well, she was very independent. Once I tried to pay for the gas when we were riding around in her car. She laughed and refused. She didn’t care how I dressed and she liked it when I didn’t care how she dressed. We went to movies together in jeans and sweaters and even ate in some of the fancy joints that way. We had enough status for that. Everything was perfect. The sex became great. As good as when you’re a kid, and with Innocent foreplay that was more erotic than any porno jazz.

  Sometimes we’d talk about getting her fancy undergarments, but we never got around to it. A couple of times we tried to use the mirrors to catch any reflections, but she was too near sighted and she was too vain to put on her glasses. Once we even read a book on anal sex together. We got all excited and she said OK. We worked very carefully, but we didn’t have any Vaseline. So we used her cold cream. It was really funny because to me it felt lousy, as if the temperature had gone down. As for her, the cold cream didn’t work and she screamed bloody murder. And then we quit. It was not for us, we were too square. Giggling like kids, we took a bath; the book had been very stern about cleaning up after anal sex. What it came down to was that we didn’t need any help. It was just great. And so we lived happily ever after. Until we became enemies.

  And during that happy time, a blond Scheherazade, she told me the story of her life. And so I lived not two but three lives. My family life in New York with my wife and children, with Janelle in Los Angeles and Janelle’s life before she met me. I used the747 plane
s like magic carpets. I was never so happy in my life. Working on movies was like shooting pool or gambling, relaxing. Finally I had found the crux of what life should be. And I was never more charming. My wife was happy, Janelle was happy, my kids were happy. Artie didn’t know what was going on, but one night, when we were having dinner together, he said suddenly, “You know for the first time in my life I don’t worry about you anymore.”

  “When did that start?” I said, thinking it was because of my success with the book and my working in movies.

  “Just now,” Artie said. “Just this second.”

  I was instantly on the alert. “What does that mean exactly?” I said.

  Artie thought it over. “You were never really happy,” he said. “You were always a grim son of a bitch. You never had any real friends. All you did was read books and write books. You couldn’t stand parties, or movies, or music, or anything. You couldn’t even stand it when our families had holiday dinners together. Jesus, you never even enjoyed your kids.”

  I was shocked and hurt. It wasn’t true. Maybe I seemed that way, but it wasn’t really true. I felt a sick feeling in my stomach. If Artie thought of me this way, what did other people think? I had that familiar feeling of desolation.

  “It’s not true,” I said.

  Artie smiled at me. “Of course it’s not. I just mean that now you show things more to other people besides me. Valerie says you’re a hell of a lot easier to live with.”

  Again I was stung. My wife must have complained all these years and I never knew it. She never reproached me. But at this moment I knew I had never really made her happy, not after the first few years of our marriage.

  “Well, she’s happy now,” I said.

  And Artie nodded. And I thought bow silly that was, that I had to be unfaithful to my wife to make her happy. And I realized suddenly that I loved Valerie more now than I ever had. That made me laugh. It was all very convenient, and it was in the textbooks I had been reading. Because as soon as I found myself in the classical unfaithful-husband position, I naturally started to read all the literature on it. “Valerie doesn’t mind my going out to California so much?” I asked.