by Mario Puzo
* * *
When I finished the story, Janelle got up from the bed and went to get herself another glass of wine. She came back into the bed, leaning up against me, and said, “I want to meet your brother, Artie.”
“You never will,” I said. “Girls I brought around fell in love with him. In fact, the only reason I married my wife was that she was the only girl who didn’t.”
Janelle said, “Did you ever find the glass jar with the money?”
“No,” I said. “I never wanted to. I wanted it to be there for some kid who came after me, some kid might dig in that wood and it would be a piece of magic for him. I didn’t need it anymore.”
Janelle drank her wine and then said jealously, as she was jealous of all my emotions, “You love him, don’t you?”
And I really couldn’t answer that. I couldn’t think of that word of “love” as a word that I would use for my brother or any man. And besides, Janelle used the word “love” too much. So I didn’t answer.
On another night Janelle argued with me about women having the right to fuck as freely as men. I pretended to agree with her. I was feeling coolly malicious from suppressed jealousy.
All I said was: “Sure they do. The only trouble is that biologically women can’t handle it.”
At this, Janelle became furious. “That’s all bullshit,” she said. “We can fuck just as easily as you do. We don’t give a shit. In fact, it’s you men who make all the fuss about sex being so important and serious. You’re so jealous and so possessive we’re your property.”
It was just the trap I hoped she would fall into. “No, I didn’t mean that.” I said. “But did you know that a man has a twenty to fifty percent chance of catching gonorrhea from a woman, but a woman has a fifty to eighty percent chance of catching gonorrhea from a man?”
She looked astounded for a moment and I loved that look of childish astonishment on her face. Like most people, she didn’t know a damn thing about VD or how it worked. As for myself, as soon as I had started cheating on my wife, I had read up on the whole subject. My big nightmare was catching VD, gonorrhea or syphilis, and infecting Valerie, which is one of the reasons that it distressed me when Janelle told me about her love affairs.
“You’re just making it up to scare me,” Janelle said. “I know you when you sound so sure of yourself and so professorial; you’re just making stories up.”
“No,” I said. “It’s true. A male has a thin, clear discharge from within one to ten days, but women most of the time never even know they have gonorrhea. Fifty to eighty percent of women have no symptoms for weeks or months or they have a green or yellow discharge. Also, women get a mushroom odor from their genitals.”
Janelle collapsed on the bed, laughing, and threw her bare legs up in the air. “Now I know you’re full of shit.”
“No, it’s true,” I said. “No kidding. But you’re OK. I can smell you from here.” Hoping the joke would hide my malice. “You know usually the only way you know you have it is if your male partner tells you.”
Janelle straightened up primly. “Thanks a lot,” she said. “Are you getting ready to tell me you have it and, therefore, I must have it?”
“No,” I said. “I’m straight, but if I do get it, I know it’s either from you or my wife.”
Janelle gave me a sarcastic look. “And your wife is above suspicion, right?”
“That’s right,” I said.
“Well, for your information,” Janelle said, “I go to my gynecologist every month and get a complete checkup.”
“That’s full of shit,” I said. “The only way that you can tell is to take a culture. And most gynecologists do not. They take it in a thin glass with light brown jelly from your cervix. The test is very tricky and it’s not always a positive test.”
She was fascinated now, so I threw her a zinger. “And if you think you can beat the rap by just going down on a guy, the percentages are much greater for a woman getting a venereal disease from going down on a man than a man has from going down on a woman.”
Janelle sprang up from the bed. She was giggling, but she yelled, “Unfair! Unfair!”
We both laughed.
“And gonorrhea is nothing,” I said. “Syphilis is the real bad part. If you go down on a guy, you can get a nice chancre on your mouth or your lips or even your tonsils. It would hurt your acting career. What you have to look out for on a chancre is if it’s dull red and breaks down into a dull red sore that does not bleed easily. Now, here’s what’s tricky about it. The symptoms can vanish in one to five weeks, but the disease is still in your body and you can infect somebody after this point. You may get a second lesion or the palms and soles of your feet may develop red bumps.” I picked up one of her feet and said, “Nope, you haven’t got them.”
She was fascinated now, and she hadn’t caught on either to why I was lecturing her.
“What about men? What do you bastards get out of all this?”
“Well,” I said, “we get swelling of the lymph glands in the groin, and that’s why sometimes you tell a guy he’s got two pairs of balls, or sometimes you lose your hair. That’s why in the old days the slang for syphilis was ‘haircut.’ But still, you’re not in too bad a shape. Penicillin can wipe it all out. Again, as I said, the only trouble is men know they got it, but women don’t and that’s why women are not biologically equipped to be promiscuous.”
Janelle looked a little stunned. “Do you find this fascinating? You son of a bitch.” She was beginning to catch on.
I continued very blandly. “But it’s not as terrible as it sounds. Even if you don’t find out that you have syphilis or, as it happens with most women, you have no symptoms of any kind unless some guy tells you out of the goodness of his heart. In one year you won’t be infectious. You won’t infect anyone.” I smiled at her. “Unless you’re a pregnant woman and then your child is born with syphilis.”
I could see her shrink away from the thought. “Now after that one year, two-thirds of those infected will live with no ill effects. They are home free. They are OK.”
I smiled at her.
Janelle said suspiciously, “And the other one-third?”
“They’re in a lot of trouble,” I said. “Syphillis injures the heart, it injures the blood vessels. It can lie low for ten to twenty years, and then it can cause insanity, it can cause paralysis, make you a paralytic. It can also affect your eyes, lungs and liver. So you see, my dear, you’re shit out of luck.”
Janelle said, “You’re just telling me this to keep me from going out with other men. You’re just trying to scare me just like my mother did when I was fifteen by telling me I’d be pregnant.”
“Sure,” I said. “But I’m backing it up with science. I have no moral objection. You can fuck whoever you want. You don’t belong to me.”
“You’re such a smart-ass,” Janelle said. “Maybe they’ll come up with a pill just like the birth control pill.”
I made my voice sound very sincere. “Sure,” I said. “They have that already. If you take a tablet of five hundred milligrams of penicillin one hour before you have contact, it knocks out the syphilis completely. But sometimes it doesn’t work and it just reaches the symptoms and then ten or twenty years later you can be really screwed. If you take it too early or too late, these spirochetes multiply. Do you know what spirochetes are? They’re like corkscrews and they fill up your blood and get into the tissues and there’s not enough blood in your tissues to fight it off. There is something about the drug that keeps the cell from increasing and blocking off the infection, and then the disease becomes resistant to penicillin in your body. In fact, the penicillin helps them grow. But there is another thing you can use. There is a female gel, Proganasy, that’s used as a contraceptive and they found that it destroys VD bacteria as well, so you can kill two birds with one stone. Come to think of it, my friend Osano uses those penicillin pills whenever he thinks he’s going to get lucky with a girl.”
Janelle laughe
d scornfully. “That’s all right for men. You men will fuck anything, but women never know who or when they are going to fuck until an hour or two hours beforehand.”
“Well,” I said very cheerfully, “let me give you some advice. Never fuck anybody between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. They have about ten times more VD than any other age bracket. Another thing is before you go to bed with a guy, give him a short arm.”
Janelle said. “That sounds disgusting. What is that?”
“Well,” I said, “you strip down his penis, you know, like you’re masturbating him, and if there’s a yellow fluid coming out like a drippage, you know he’s infected. That’s what prostitutes do.”
When I said that, I knew I had gone too far. She gave me a cold look, so I went on hastily. “Another thing is herpes virus. It isn’t really a venereal disease and is usually transmitted by uncircumcised men. It can give women cervical cancer. So you see what the score is. You can get cancer from screwing, syphilis from screwing and never even know you’re infected. And that’s why women can’t fuck as freely as men.”
Janelle clapped her hands, “Bravo, Professor. I think I’ll just fuck women.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” I said.
It was easy for me to say. I wasn’t jealous of her women lovers.
Chapter 41
On my next trip back a month later I called Janelle, and we decided to have dinner and go to the movies together. There was something a little cold in her voice, so I was wary, which prepared me for the shock of seeing her when I picked her up at her apartment.
Alice opened the door and I kissed her and I asked Mice how Janelle was and Alice rolled her eyes up in her head, which meant I could expect Janelle to be a little crazy. Well, it wasn’t crazy, but it was a little funny. When Janelle came out of the bedroom, she was dressed as I had never seen her before.
She had on a white fedora with a red ribbon in it. The brim snapped over her dark brown gold-flecked eyes. She was wearing a perfectly tailored man’s suit of white silk, or what looked like silk. The trouser legs were strictly tailored straight as any man’s. She had on a white silk shirt and the most beautiful red-and-blue-striped tie, and to top it off, she was carrying a delicately slender cream-colored Gucci cane, which she proceeded to stab me in the stomach with. It was a direct challenge, I knew what she was doing; she was coming out of the closet and without words she was telling the world of her bisexuality.
She said, “How do you like it?”
I smiled and said, “Great.” The most dapper dyke I ever met. “Where do you want to eat?”
She leaned on her cane and watched me very coolly. “I think,” she said, “we should eat at Scandia and that for once in our relationship you might take me to a nightclub.”
We had never eaten at the fancy places. We had never gone to a nightclub. But I said OK. I understood, I think, what she was doing. She was forcing me to acknowledge to the world that I loved her despite her bisexuality, testing me to see if I could bear the dyke jokes and snickers. Since I had already accepted the fact myself, I didn’t care what anybody else thought.
We had a great evening. Everybody stared at us in the restaurant, and I must admit that Janelle looked absolutely smashing. In fact, she looked like a blonder and fairer version of Marlene Dietrich, Southern belle style, of course. Because, no matter what she did, that overwhelming femininity came off her. But I knew that if I told her that, she would hate it. She was out to punish me.
I really enjoyed her playing the dyke role simply because I knew how feminine she was in bed. So it was a sort of double joke on whoever was watching us. I also enjoyed it because Janelle thought she was making me angry and was watching my every move and was disappointed and then pleased that I obviously didn’t mind.
I drew the line at going to a nightclub, but we went and had drinks at the Polo Lounge, where for her satisfaction I submitted our relationship to the stares of her friends and mine. I saw Doran at one table and Jeff Wagon at another, and they both grinned at me. Janelle waved to them gaily and then turned to me and said, “Isn’t it wonderful to go somewhere for a drink and see all your old dear friends?”
I grinned back at her and I said, “Great.”
I got her home before midnight and she tapped me on the shoulder with her cane and she said, “You did very well.”
And I said, “Thank you.”
She said, “Will you call me?”
And I said, “Yes.” It had been a nice night anyway. I had enjoyed the double takes of the maitre d’, the doorman, even the guys who did the valet parking, and at least now Janelle was out of the closet.
There came a time soon after this when I loved Janelle as a person. That is, it wasn’t that I just wanted to fuck her brains out; or look into her dark brown eyes and faint; or eat up her pink mouth. And all the rest of it, the staying up all night telling her stories, Jesus, telling her my whole life, and her telling me all her life. In short, there came a time when I realized it was her sole function to make me happy, to make me delight in her. I saw that it was my job to make her a little happier than she was and not to get pissed off when she didn’t make me happy.
I don’t mean I became one of those guys who are in love with a girl because it makes them unhappy. I never understood that really. I always believed in getting my share of any bargain, in life, in literature, in marriage, in love, even as a father.
And I don’t mean I learned to make her happy by giving her a gift, that was my pleasure. Or to cheer her when she was down, which was just clearing obstacles out of the way so that she could get on with the job of making me happy.
Now what was curious was that after she had “betrayed” me, after we started to hate each other a little, after we had the goods on each other, I came to love her as a person.
She was really such a good guy. She used to say like a child sometimes, “I’m a good person,” and she really was. She was really so straight in all the important things. Sure she fucked other guys and women too, but what the hell, nobody’s perfect. She still loved the same books I did, the same movies, the same people. When she lied to me, it was to keep from hurting me. And when she told me the truth, it was partly to hurt me (she had a nice vengeful streak and I even loved that too), but also because she was terrified I’d learn the truth in a way that would hurt me more.
And of course, as time went on, I had to understand that she led a hurtful life in many ways. A complicated life. As who indeed does not.
So finally all the falseness and illusion had gone out of our relationship. We were true friends and I loved her as a person. I admired her courage, her indestructibility with all the disappointments of her professional life, all the treacheries of her personal life. I understood it all. I was for her all the way.
Then why the hell didn’t we have those deliriously good times we had before? Why wasn’t the sex as good as it had been, though still better than anyone else? Why weren’t we as ecstatic with each other as we used to be?
Magic-magic, black or white. Sorcery, spells, witches and alchemy. Could it really be true that spinning stars decide our destiny and moon blood makes lives wax and wane? Could it be true that the innumerable galaxies decide our fate day by day on earth? Is it quite simply true that we cannot be happy without false illusions?
There comes a point in every love affair when, so it seems, the woman gets pissed off at her lover’s being too happy. Sure she knows it’s her making him happy. Sure she knows that it’s her pleasure, even her job. But finally she comes to the conclusion that in some way, the son of a bitch is getting away with murder. Especially with the man married and the woman not. For then the relationship is an answer to his problem but does not solve hers.
And there comes a time when one of the partners needs a fight before making love. Janelle had come to that stage. I usually managed to sidetrack her, but sometimes I felt like fighting too. Usually when she was pissed off that I stayed married and didn’t make any promises for
a permanent commitment.
We were in her house in Malibu after the movies. It was late. From our bedroom we could look over the ocean, which wore a long streak of moonlight like a lock of blond hair.
“Let’s go to bed,” I said. I was dying to make love to her. I was always dying to make love to her.
“Oh, Christ,” she said, “you always want to fuck.”
“No,” I said. “I want to make love to you.” I had become that sentimental.
She looked at me coldly, but her liquid brown eyes were flashing with anger. “You and your fucking innocence,” she said. “You’re like a leper without his bell.”
“Graham Greene,” I said.
“Oh, fuck you,” she said, but she laughed.
And what had led to all this was that I never lied. And she wanted me to lie. She wanted me to give her all the bullshit married men give to girls they screw. Like “My wife and I are getting a divorce.” Like “My wife and I haven’t screwed in years.” Like “My wife and I don’t share the same bedroom.” Like “My wife and I have an understanding.” Like “My wife and I are unhappy together.” Since none of this was true for me, I wouldn’t say it. I loved my wife, we shared the same bedroom, we had sex, we were happy. I had the best of two worlds and I wasn’t going to give it up. So much the worse for me.
Once Janelle laughed she was OK for a while. So now she went and drew a tub full of hot water. We always took a bath together before we went to bed. She would wash me and I would wash her and we’d fool around a little and then jump out and dry each other, with big towels. Then we’d wind ourselves around each other, naked under the covers.
But now she lit a cigarette before getting into bed. That was a danger signal. She wanted to fight. A bottle of energy pills had spilled out of her purse and that had pissed me off, so I was a little ready too. I was no longer in so loving a mood. Seeing that bottle of energy pills had set off a whole train of fantasies. Now that I knew she had a woman lover, now that I knew she slept with other men when I was away back with my family in New York, I no longer loved her as much, and the energy pills made me think that she needed them to make love to me because she was fucking other people. So now I didn’t feel like it. She sensed this.
