Fools die

by Mario Puzo

  Now what the hell is the harm in that? Why do men when they hear a story like that just put a woman down as a cunt? They would do it in a shot, every son of a bitch. It didn’t mean a thing. It didn’t make me any less a person. Sure, I fucked a creep. How many men, the best of them, fuck creepy women and not just once either?

  I have to fight against regressing into innocence. When a man loves me, I want to be faithful to him and never fuck anybody else for the rest of my life. I want to do everything for him, but I know now that it never lasts with him or me. They start putting you down, they start making you love them less. In a million different ways.

  The love of my life, the son of a bitch, I really loved him and he really loved me, I’ll give him that. But I hated the way he loved me. I was his sanctuary, I was where he ran when the world was too much for him. He always said he felt safe with me alone in our hotel rooms, our different suites like different landscapes. Different walls, strange beds, prehistoric sofas, rugs with different colored bloods, but always our naked bodies the same. But that’s not even true and this is funny. Once I surprised him and it was really funny. I had the big tit operation. I always wanted bigger tits-nice and round and standing up-and I finally did it. And he loved them. I told him I did it especially for him and it was partly true. But I did it so I would be less shy when I read for a part that required some nudity. Producers sometimes look at your tits. And I guess I did it for Alice too. But I told him I did it just for him and the bastard had better appreciate them. And so he did. And so he did. I always loved the way he loved me. That was always the best part of it. He really loved me-my flesh-and always told me it was special flesh, and finally I believed he couldn’t possibly make love to anyone else but me. I regressed into that innocence.

  But it was never true. It is, finally, never true. Nothing is. Even my reasons. Like another reason. I love women’s tits and why is that unnatural? I love to suck another woman’s tits and why does that disgust men? They find it so comforting-don’t they think women do? We were all babies once together. Infants.

  Is that why women cry so much? That they can never be that again? Infants? Men can be. That’s true, that’s really true. Men can be infants again. Women can’t. Fathers can be infants again. Mothers can’t.

  He always said that he felt safe. And I knew what he meant. When we were alone together, I could see the strain go out of his face. His eyes became softer. And when we were lying down together warm and naked, soft skin touching, and I put my arms around him and truly loved him, I could hear him sigh like a cat purring. And I knew that for that short time he was truly happy. And that I could do that was truly magical. And that I was the only human being in the world who could make him feel like that made me feel so worthwhile. That I really meant something. I wasn’t just a cunt to fuck. I wasn’t just somebody to talk to and be intelligent with. I was truly a witch, a love witch, a good witch, and it was terrific. At that moment we both could die happy, literally, truly die happy. We could face death and not be afraid. But only for that short time. Nothing lasts. Nothing ever will. And so we deliberately shorten it, make the end come faster, I can see that now. One day he just said, “I don’t feel safe anymore,” and I never loved him again.

  I’m no Molly Bloom. That son of a bitch Joyce. While she was saying yes, yes, yes, her husband was saying no, no, no. I won’t fuck any man who says no. Never, not anymore.

  Merlyn was sleeping. Janelle got out of bed and pulled an armchair up to the window. She lit a cigarette and stared out. As she was smoking, she heard Merlyn thrash around the bed in a restless dreaming sleep. He was muttering something, but she didn’t care. Fuck him. And every other man.

  MERLYN

  Janelle had on boxing gloves, dull red with white laces. She stood facing me, in the classic boxing stance, left extended, right hand cocked for the knockout punch. She wore white satin trunks. On her feet were black sneakers, slip-ons, no laces. Her beautiful face was grim. The delicately cut, sensuous mouth was pressed tight, her white chin tucked against her shoulder. She looked menacing. But I was fascinated by her bare breasts, creamy white and round nipples red, taut with an adrenaline that came not from love but the desire for combat.

  I smiled at her. She didn’t smile back. Her left flicked out and caught me on the mouth and I said, “Ah, Janelle.” She hit me with two more hard lefts. They hurt like hell, and I could feel blood filling the gap beneath my tongue. She danced away from me. I put my hands out and they too had red gloves on them. I slid forward on sneakered feet and hitched up my trunks. At that moment Janelle darted in on me and hit me with a solid right hand. I actually saw green and blue stars as if I were in a comic strip. She danced away again, her breasts bobbing, the dancing red nipples mesmerizing.

  I stalked her into a corner. She crouched down, her red-gloved tiny hands protecting her head. I started to throw a left hook into her delicately rounded belly, but the navel I had licked so many times repelled my hand. We went into a clinch and I said, “Ah, Janelle, cut it out. I love you, honey.” She danced away and hit me again. It was like a cat ripping my eyebrow with its claw and blood started dripping down. I was blinded and I heard myself saying, “Oh, Christ.”

  Brushing away the blood, I saw her standing in the middle of the ring, waiting for me. Her blond hair was pulled tightly back into a bun and the rhinestone clip that held it glittered like a hypnotic charm. She hit me with two more lightning jabs, the tiny red gloves flicking in and out like tongues. But now she left an opening and I could hit the finely boned face. My hands wouldn’t move. I knew that the only thing that could save me was a clinch. She tried to dance around me. I grabbed her around the waist as she tried to slip away and spun her around. Defenseless now except that the trunks did not go all the way around her body and I could see her back and her beautiful buttocks, so rounded and full, that I had always pressed against in our bed together. I felt a sharp pain in my heart and wondered what the hell she was fighting me for. I grabbed her around the waist and whispered in her ear, tiny filaments of gold hair remembered on my tongue. “Lie on your stomach,” I said. She spun quickly. She hit me with a straight right I never saw coming and then I was tumbling in slow motion, upended in the air and floating down on the canvas. Stunned, I managed to get to one knee and I could hear her counting to ten in her lovely warm voice that she used to make me come. I stayed on one knee and stared up at her.

  She was smiling and then I could hear her saying, “Ten, ten, ten, ten,” frantically, urgently, and then a gleeful smile broke over her face and she raised both hands in the air and jumped for joy. I heard the ghostly roar of millions of women screaming in ecstatic glee; another woman, heavyset, was embracing Janelle. This woman wore a heavy turtleneck sweater with “CHAMP” stenciled across two enormous breasts. I started to cry.

  Then Janelle came over to me and helped me. “It was a fair fight,” she kept saying. “I beat you fair and square,” and through my tears I said, “No, no, you didn’t.”

  And then I woke up and reached out for her. But she was not in bed beside me. I got up and, naked, went into the living room of the suite. In the darkness I could see her cigarette. She was sitting in a chair, watching the foggy dawn come up over the city.

  I went over and reached down and traced my hands over her face. There was no blood, her features were unbroken and she reached one velvety hand up to touch mine as it covered her naked breast.

  “I don’t care what you say,” I said. “I love you whatever the hell that means.”

  She didn’t answer me.

  After a few minutes she got up and led me back to the bed. We made love and then fell asleep in each other’s arms. Half asleep, I murmured, “Jesus, you nearly killed me.”

  She laughed.

  Chapter 44

  Something was waking me out of a deep sleep. Through the cracks of the shutters of the hotel room I could see the rose light of early California dawn, and then I heard the phone ringing. I just lay there for a few second
s. I saw Janelle’s blond head snuggled almost under the covers. She was sleeping far apart from me. As the phone kept on ringing, I got a panicky feeling. It must be early in the morning here in Los Angeles, so the call had to be from New York and it had to be from my wife. Valerie never called me except in an emergency, something had happened to one of my kids. There was also the feeling of guilt that I would be receiving this call with Janelle in bed beside me. I hoped she wouldn’t wake up as I picked up the phone.

  The voice on the other end said, “Is that you, Merlyn?”

  And it was a woman’s voice. But I couldn’t recognize it. It wasn’t Valerie.

  I said, “Yes, who is it?”

  It was Artie’s wife, Pam. There was a tremor in her voice.

  “Artie had a heart attack this morning.”

  And when she said it, I felt a lessening of anxiety. It wasn’t one of my kids. Artie had had a heart attack before and for some reason in my mind I thought of it as something not really serious.

  I said, “Oh, shit. I’ll get on a plane and come hack right away I’ll be back today. Is he in the hospital?”

  There was a pause at the other end of the phone, and then I heard her voice finally break.

  She said, “Merlyn, he didn’t make it.”

  I really didn’t understand what she was saying. I really didn’t. I still wasn’t surprised or shocked, and then I said, “You mean he’s dead?”

  And she said, “Yes.”

  I kept my voice very controlled. I said, “There’s a nine o’clock plane and I’ll be on it and I’ll be in New York at five and I’ll come right to your house. Do you want me to call Valerie?”

  And she said, “Yes, please.”

  I didn’t say I was sorry, I didn’t say anything. I just said, “Everything will be all right. I’ll be there tonight. Do you want me to call your parents?”

  And she said, “Yes, please.”

  And I said, “Are you all right?”

  And she said, “Yes, I’m all right. Please come back.”

  And then she hung up the phone.

  Janelle was sitting up in bed and staring at me. I picked up the phone and got long distance and got Valerie. I told her what had happened. I told her to meet me at the plane and she wanted to talk about it, but I told her I had to pack and get on the plane. That I didn’t have any time and I would talk to her when she met me. And then I got the operator again and I called Pam’s parents. Luckily I got the father and explained to him what had happened. He said he and his wife would catch the next plane to New York and he would call Artie’s wife.

  I hung up the phone and Janelle was staring at me, studying me very curiously. From the phone conversations she knew, but she didn’t say anything. I started hitting the bed with my fist and kept saying, “No, no, no, no.” I didn’t know I was shouting it. And then I started to cry, my body flooded with an unbearable pain. I could feel myself losing consciousness. I took one of the bottles of whiskey that was on the dresser in the room and drank. I couldn’t remember how much I drank, and after that all I could remember was Janelle’s dressing me and taking me down through the lobby of the hotel and putting me on a plane. I was like a zombie. It was only much later, when I had come back to Los Angeles, that she told me she had to throw me in the bath to sober me up and bring me back to consciousness and then she had dressed me, she had made the reservations and accompanied me onto the plane and told the stewardess and chief flight attendant to look out for me. I don’t even remember the plane ride, but suddenly I was in New York and Valerie was waiting for me and by that time I was OK.

  We drove right to Artie’s house. I took charge of everything and made all the arrangements. Artie and his wife had agreed that he would be buried as a Catholic with a Catholic ceremony and I went to the local church and arranged for services. I did everything I could do and I was OK. I didn’t want him lying aboveground alone in the mortuary, so I made sure the services would be next day and he would be buried right afterward. The wake would be this night. And as I went through the rituals of death, I knew I could never be the same again. That my life would change and the world around me; my magic fled.

  Why did my brother’s death affect me so? He was quite simple, quite ordinary, I guess. But he was truly virtuous. And I cannot think of anyone else that I have met in my life that I can say this of.

  Sometimes he told me of battles on his job against its corruption and administrative pressures to soften reports on additives his tests showed were dangerous. He always refused to be pressured. But his Stories were never a pain in the ass in the way of some people who always tell you how they refuse to be corrupted. Because he told them without indignation, with complete coolness. He was not unpleasantly surprised that rich men with money would insist on poisoning their fellowmen for profit. Again he was never pleasantly surprised that he could resist such corruption; he made it very clear that he felt no obligation to do battle for the right.

  And he had no delusions of grandeur about how much good his fighting did. They could go around him. I remembered the stories he told me about how other agency chemists made official tests and gave favorable reports. But my brother never did. He always laughed when he told me these stories. He knew the world was corrupt. He knew his own virtue was not valuable. He did not prize it.

  He just simply refused to give it up. As a man would refuse to give up an eye, a leg; if he had been Adam, he would have refused to give up a rib. Or so it seemed. And he was that way in everything. I knew that he had never been unfaithful to his wife, though he was really a handsome man and the sight of a very pretty girl made him smile with pleasure; and he rarely smiled. He loved intelligence in a man or a woman, yet never was seduced by that either, as many people are. He never accepted money or favors. He never asked for mercy to his feelings or his fate. And yet he would never judge others, outwardly at least. He rarely spoke, always listened, because that was his pleasure. He demanded the barest minimum of life.

  And Christ, what breaks my heart now is that I remember he was virtuous even as a kid. He never cheated in a ball game, never stole from a store, was never insincere with a girl. He never bragged or lied. I envied his purity then and I envy it now.

  And he was dead. A tragic, defeated life, so it seemed, and I envied him his life. For the first time I understood the comfort people get from religion, those people who believe in a just God. That it would comfort me to believe now that my brother could not be refused his just reward. But I knew that was all shit. I was alive. Oh, that I should be alive and rich and famous, enjoying all the pleasures of the flesh on this earth, that I should be victorious and not anywhere near the man he was, and he so ignominiously put to death.

  Ashes, Ashes, Ashes, I wept as I had never wept for my lost father or my lost mother, for lost loves and all other defeats. And so at least I had that much decency, to feel anguish at his death.

  Tell me, anyone, why all this should be? I cannot bear to look at my brother’s dead face. Why was I not lying in that casket, devils dragging me to hell? My brother’s face had never looked so strong, so composed, so at rest, but it was gray as if powdered over with the dust of granite. And then his five children came, dressed in neat funerality, and knelt before his coffin to say their final prayers. I could feel my heart break, tears came against my will. I left the chapel.

  But anguish is not important enough to last. In the fresh air I knew that I was alive. That I would dine well the next day, that in time I would have a loving woman again, that I would write a story and walk along the beach. Only those we most love can cause our death, and only of them we must beware. Our enemies can never harm us. And at the core of my brother’s virtue was that he feared neither his enemies nor those he loved. So much the worst for him. Virtue is its own reward and fools are they who die.

  But then weeks later I heard other stories. How early in his marriage, when his wife became ill, he had gone to her parents weeping and begged for money to get his wife well.

&nbs
p; How, when the final heart attack came and his wife tried to give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, he waved her wearily away the moment before he died. But what had that final gesture really meant? That life had become too much for him, his virtue too heavy to bear? I remember Jordon again, was he too a virtuous man?

  Eulogies for suicides condemn the world and blame it for their deaths. But could it be that those who put themselves to death believed there was no fault anywhere, some organisms must die? And they saw this more clearly than theft bereaved lovers and friends?

  But all this was too dangerous. I extinguished my grief and my reason and put my sins forward as my shield. I would sin, beware and live forever.

  Book VII

  Chapter 45

  A week later I called Janelle to thank her for getting me on the plane. I got her answering machine voice disguised in a French accent, asking me to leave a message.

  When I spoke, her real voice was there, breaking in.

  “Who are you ducking?” I said.

  Janelle was laughing. “If you knew how your voice sounded,” she said. “So sour…”