Fools die

by Mario Puzo

  Arcania Publishing House was considered one of the classy, most literary publishing houses in the country. On its backlist were a half dozen Nobel Prize winners and dozens of Pulitzer and NBA winners. They were famous for being more interested in literature than best-sellers. And the editor in chief, Henry Stiles, could have passed for an Oxford don. But be got down to business as briskly as any Babbitt.

  “Mr. Merlyn,” he said, “I admire your novels very much. I hope someday we can add you to our list.”

  “I’ve gone over Osano’s stuff,” I said, “as his executor.”

  “Good,” Mr. Stiles said. “You may or may not know, since this is the financial end of Mr. Osano’s life, that we advanced him a hundred thousand dollars for his novel in progress. So we do have first claim to that book. I just wanted to make sure you understood that.”

  “Sure,” I said. “And I know it was Osano’s wish that you publish it. You did a great job publishing his books.”

  There was a grateful smile on Mr. Stiles’s face. He leaned back. “Then there’s no problem?” he said. “I assume you’ve gone through his notes and papers and you found the manuscript.”

  I said, “Well, that’s the problem. There is no manuscript; there is no novel, only five hundred pages of notes.”

  Stiles had a stunned, horrified look on his face and behind that exterior I know what he thought: Fucking writers, hundred-thousand-dollar advance, all those years and all he has is notes! But then he pulled himself together. “You mean there’s not one page of manuscript?” he said.

  “No,” I said. I was lying, but he would never know. There were six pages.

  “Well,” Mr. Stiles said, “it’s not something we usually do, but it has been done by other publishing houses. We know that you helped Mr. Osano with some of his articles, under his by-lines, that you imitated his style very well. It would have to be secret, but why couldn’t you write Mr. Osano’s book in a six-month period and publish it under Mr. Osano’s name? We could make a great deal of money. You realize that couldn’t show in any contract between us, we could sign a separate very generous contract for your future books.”

  Now he had surprised me. The most respectable publishing house in America doing something that only Hollywood would do, or a Vegas hotel? Why the fuck was I surprised?

  “No,” I told Mr. Stiles. “As his literary executor I have the power and authority to keep the book from being published from those notes. If you would like to publish the notes themselves, I’ll give you permission.”

  “Well, think it over,” Mr. Stiles said. “We’ll talk about it again. Meanwhile, it’s been a pleasure to meet you.” He shook his head sadly. “Osano was a genius. What a pity.”

  I never told Mr. Stiles that Osano had written some pages of his novel, the first six. With them was a note addressed to me.

  MERLYN:

  Here are the six pages of my book. I give them to you. Let’s see what you can make of them. Forget the notes, they’re bullshit.

  Osano

  I had read the pages and decided to keep them for myself. When I got home, I read them over again very slowly, word by word.

  “Listen to me. I will tell you the truth about a man’s life. I will tell you the truth about his love for women. That he never hates them. Already you think I’m on the wrong track. Stay with me. Really-I’m a master of magic.

  “Do you believe a man can truly love a woman and constantly betray her? Never mind physically, but betray her in his mind, in the very ‘poetry of his soul.’ Well, it’s not easy, but men do it all the time.

  “Do you want to know how women can love you, feed you that love deliberately to poison your body and mind simply to destroy you? And out of passionate love choose not to love you anymore? And at the same time dizzy you with an idiot’s ecstasy? Impossible? That’s the easy part.

  “But don’t run away. This is not a love story.

  “I will make you feel the painful beauty of a child, the animal hominess of the adolescent male, the yearning suicidal moodiness of the young female. And then (here’s the hard part) show you how time turns man and woman around full circle, exchanged in body and soul.

  “And then of course, there is TRUE LOVE. Don’t go away! It exists or I will make it exist. I’m not a master of magic for nothing. Is it worth what it costs? And how about sexual fidelity? Does it work? Is it love? Is it even human, that perverse passion to be with only one special person? And if it doesn’t work, do you still get a bonus for trying? Can it work both ways? Of course not, that’s easy. And yet-

  “Life is a comical business, and there is nothing funnier than love traveling through time. But a true master of magic can make his audience laugh and cry at the same time. Death is another story. I will never make a joke about death. It is beyond my powers.

  “I am always alert for death. He doesn’t fool me. I spot him right away. He loves to come in his country-bumpkin disguise; a comical wart that suddenly grows and grows; the dark, hairy mole that sends its roots to the very bone; or hiding behind a pretty little fever blush. Then suddenly that grinning skull appears to take the victim by surprise. But never me. I’m waiting for him. I take my precautions.

  “Parallel to death, love is a tiresome, childless business, though men believe more in love than death. Women are another story. They have a powerful secret. They don’t take love seriously and never have.

  “But again, don’t go away. Again, this is not a love story. Forget about love. I will show you all the stretches of power. First the life of a poor struggling writer. Sensitive. Talented. Maybe even some genius. I will show you the artist getting the shit kicked out of him for the sake of his art. And why he so richly deserves it. Then I will show him as a cunning criminal and having the time of his life. Ah, what joy the true artist feels when he finally becomes a crook. It’s out in the open now, his essential nature. No more kidding around about his honor. The son of a bitch is a hustler. A conniver. An enemy of society right out of the clear instead of hiding behind his whore’s cunt of art. What a relief. What pleasure. Such sly delight. And then how he becomes an honest man again. It’s an awful strain being a crook.

  “But it helps you to accept society and forgive your fellow-man. Once that’s done no person should be a crook unless he really needs the money.

  “Then on to one of the most amazing success stories in the history of literature. The intimate lives of the giants of our culture. One crazy bastard especially. The classy world. So now we have the poor struggling genius world, the crooked world, and the classy literary world. All this laced with plenty of sex, some complicated ideas you won’t be hit over the head with and may even find interesting. And finally on to a full-blast ending in Hollywood with our hero gobbling up all its rewards, money, fame, beautiful women. And…don’t go away-don’t go away-how it all turns to ashes.

  “That’s not enough? You’ve heard it all before? But remember I’m a master of magic. I can bring all these people truly alive. I can show you what they truly think and feel. You’ll weep for them, all of them I promise you that. Or maybe just laugh. Anyway, we’re going to have a lot of fun. And learn something about life. Which is really no help.

  “Ah, I know what you’re thinking. That conning bastard trying to make us turn the page. But wait, it’s only a tale I want to tell. What’s the harm? Even if I take it seriously, you don’t have to. Just have a good time.

  “I want to tell you a story, I have no other vanity. I don’t desire success or fame or money. But that’s easy, most men, most women don’t, not really. Even better, I don’t want love. When I was young, some women told me they loved me for my long eyelashes. I accepted. Later it was for my Wit. Then for my power and money. Then for my talent. Then for my mind-deep. OK, I can handle all of it. The only woman who scares me is the one who loves me for myself alone. I have plans for her. I have poisons and daggers and dark graves in caves to hide her head. She can’t be allowed to live. Especially if she is sexually faithful and n
ever lies and always puts me ahead of everything and everyone.

  “There will be a lot about love in this book, but it’s not a love book. It’s a war book. The old war between men who are true friends. The great ‘new’ war between men and women. Sure it’s an old story, but it’s out in the open now. The Women’s Liberation warriors think they have something new, but it’s just their armies coming out of their guerrilla hills. Sweet women ambushed men always: at their cradles, in the kitchen, the bedroom. And at the graves of their children, the best place not to hear a plea for mercy.

  “Ah well, you think I have a grievance against women. But I never hated them. And they’ll come out better people than men, you’ll see. But the truth is that only women have been able to make me unhappy, and they have done so from the cradle on. But most men can say that. And there’s nothing to be done.

  “What a target I’ve given here. I know-I know-how irresistible it seems. But be careful. I'm a tricky storyteller; not just one of your vulnerable sensitive artists. I’ve taken my precautions. I’ve still got a few surprises left.

  “But enough. Let me get to work. Let me begin and let me end.”

  And that was Osano’s great novel, the book that would cinch the Nobel Prize, restore his greatness. I wish he had written it.

  That he was a great con artist, as those pages showed, was irrelevant. Or maybe part of his genius. He wanted to share his inner worlds with the outside world, that was all. And now as his final joke he had given me his last pages. A joke because we were such different writers. He so generous. And, I, I realized now, so ungenerous.

  I was never crazy about his work. And I don’t know whether I really loved him as a man. But I loved him as a writer. And so I decided, maybe for luck, maybe for strength, maybe just for the con, to use his pages as my own. I should have changed one line. Death has always surprised me.

  Chapter 51

  I have no history. That is the thing Janelle never understood. That I started with myself. That I had no grandparents or parents, uncles and aunts, friends of the family or cousins. That I had no childhood memories of a special house, or a special kitchen. That I had no city or town or village. That I began my history with myself and my brother, Arthur. And that when I extended myself with Valerie and the kids and her family and lived with her in a house in the city, when I became a parent and a husband, they became my reality and my salvation. But I don’t have to worry about Janelle anymore. I haven’t seen her for over two years and it’s three years since Osano died.

  I can’t bear to remember about Artie, and when I even think of his name, I find tears coming from my eyes, but he is the only person I have ever wept for.

  For the last two years I have sat in a working study in my home, reading, writing and being the perfect father and husband. Sometimes I go to dinner with friends, but I like to think that finally I have become serious, dedicated. That I will now live the life of a scholar. That my adventures are over. In short, I am praying that life holds no more surprises. Safely in this room, surrounded by my books of magic, Austen, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Joyce, Hemingway, Dreiser and finally, Osano, I feel the exhaustion of an animal who has escaped many times before reaching its haven.

  Beneath me in the house below, the house that is now my history, I knew my wife was busy in the kitchen preparing Sunday dinner. My children were watching TV and playing cards in the den, and because I knew they were there, sadness was bearable in this room.

  I read all Osano’s books again and he was a great writer at the beginning. I tried to analyze his failure in later life, his inability to finish his great novel. He started off amazed by the wonderment of the world around him and the people in it. He ended writing about the wonderment of himself. His concern, you could see, was to make a legend of his own life. He wrote to the world rather than to himself. In every line he screamed for attention to Osano rather than to his art. He wanted everyone to know how clever, how brilliant he was. He even made sure that the characters he created would not get credit for his brilliance. He was like a ventriloquist getting jealous of the laughs his dummy earned. And it was a shame. Yet I think of him as a great man. His terrifying humanity, his terrifying love of life, how brilliant he was and what fun to be with.

  How could I say that he was a failed artist when his achievements, flawed though they were, seemed much greater than mine? I remembered going through his papers, as his literary executor, and the astonishment growing upon me when I could find no trace of his novel in progress. I could not believe he was such a fake, that he bad been pretending to write it all those years and that had just been fucking around with notes. Now I realized that he had been burned out. And that part of the joke had not been malicious or cunning, but simply a joke that delighted him. And the money.

  He had written some of the most beautiful prose, created some of the most powerful ideas, of his generation, but he had delighted in being a scoundrel. I read all his notes, over five hundred pages of them on long yellow sheets. They were brilliant notes. But notes are nothing.

  Knowing this made me think about myself. That I had written mortal books. But more unfortunate than Osano, I had tried to live without illusions and without risk. That I had none of his love for life and his faith in it. I thought about Osano’s saying that life was always trying to do you in. And maybe that’s why he lived so wildly, struggled so hard against the blows and the humiliations.

  Long ago Jordan had pulled the trigger of the gun against his head. Osano had lived life fully and ended that life when there was no other choice. And I, I tried to escape wearing a magical conical hat. I thought about another thing Osano bad said: “Life is always getting in the way.” And I knew what he meant. The world to a writer is like one of those pale ghosts who with age become paler and paler, and maybe that’s the reason Osano gave up writing.

  The snow was falling heavily outside the windows of my workroom. The whiteness covered the gray, bare limbs of the trees, the moldy brown and green of the winter lawn. If I were sentimental and so inclined, it would be easy to conjure up the faces of Osano and Artie drifting smilingly through those swirling snowflakes. But this I refused to do. I was neither so sentimental nor so self-indulgent nor so self-pitying. I could live without them. Their death would not diminish me, as they perhaps hoped it would do.

  No, I was safe here in my workroom. Warm as toast. Safe from the raging wind that hurled the snowflakes against my window. I would not leave this room, this winter.

  Outside, the roads were icy, my car could skid and death could mangle me. Viral poisonous colds could infect my spine and blood. Oh, there were countless dangers besides death. And I was not unaware of the spies death could infiltrate into the house and even into my own brain. I set up defenses against them.

  I had charts posted around the walls of my room. Charts for my work, my salvation, my armor. I had researched a novel on the Roman Empire to retreat into the past. I had researched a novel in the twenty-fifth century if I wanted to hide in the future. Hundreds of books stacked up to read, to surround my brain.

  I pulled a big soft chair up to windows so that I could watch the falling snow in comfort. The buzzer from the kitchen sang. Supper was ready. My family would be waiting for me, my wife and children. What the hell was going on with them after all this time? I watched the snow, a blizzard now. The outside world was completely white. The buzzer rang again, insistently. If I were alive, I would get up and go down into the cheerful dining room and have a happy dinner. I watched the snow. Again the buzzer rang.

  I checked the work chart. I had written the first chapter on the novel of the Roman Empire and ten pages of notes for the novel on the twenty-fifth century. At that minute I decided I would write about the future.

  Again the buzzer rang, long and incessantly. I locked the doors of my workroom and descended into the house and into the dining room, and entering it, I gave a sigh of relief.

  They were all there. The children nearly grown and ready to leave. Valerie p
retty in a housedress and apron and her lovely brown hair pulled severely back. She was flushed, perhaps from the heat of the kitchen, perhaps because after dinner she would be going out to meet her lover? Was that possible? I had no way of knowing. Even so, wasn’t life worth guarding?

  I sat down at the head of the table. I joked with the kids. I ate. I smiled at Valerie and praised the food. After dinner I would go back up into my room and work and be alive.

  Osano, Malomar, Artie, Jordan, I miss you. But you won’t do me in. Au of my loved ones around this table might someday, I had to worry about that.

  During dinner I got a call from Cully to meet him at the airport the next day. He was coming to New York on business. It was the first time in over a year that I had heard from Cully, and from his voice I knew he was in trouble.

  I was early for Cully’s plane, so I bought some magazines and read them, then I had coffee and a sandwich. When I heard the announcement that his plane was landing, I went down to the baggage area where I always waited for him. As usual in New York it took about twenty minutes for the baggage to come down a chute. By that time most of the passengers were milling around the carousel into which the chute emptied, but I still didn’t see Cully. I kept looking for him. The crowd began to thin, and after a while there were only a few suitcases left on the carousel.

  I called the house and asked Valerie if there had been any calls from Cully and she said no. Then I called TWA flight information and asked if Cully Cross had been on the plane. They told me that he had made a reservation but had never shown up. I called the Xanadu Hotel in Vegas and got Cully’s secretary. She said yes, that as far as she knew, Cully had flown to New York. She knew he was not in Vegas and would not be due back for a few days. I wasn’t worried. I figured something had come up. Cully was always flying off to all parts of the United States and the world on hotel business. Some last-minute emergency had made him change course and I was sure he would get in touch with me. But far back in my mind there was the nagging consciousness that he had never hung me up before, that he had always told me of a change in plans and that in his own way he was too considerate to let me go to the airport and wait for hours when he was not coming. And yet it took me almost a week of not hearing from him and not being able to find out where he was before I called Gronevelt.