by Mario Puzo
She was relieved that Joel believed her. He asked, “Do you want me to call a doctor for you?”
And she said, “No, I’ll just take some pills and I’ll be OK.”
She watched until he was safely out the door of her apartment.
She went immediately to the bathroom to take more Percodan, wet a towel and wrapped it around her head like a turban. She was on her way to the bedroom, going through the doorway, when she felt a terrible crushing blow on the back of her neck. She almost fell. For a moment she thought someone concealed in the room had hit her, and then she thought she had hit her head against something protruding from the wall. But then another crushing blow brought her to her knees. She knew then that something terrible was happening to her. She managed to crawl to the phone beside the bed and just barely made out the red sticker on which was printed the paramedic number. Alice had pasted it there when her son had been visiting them, just in case. She dialed the number and a woman’s voice answered.
Janelle said, “I’m sick. I don’t know what’s happening, but I’m sick.” And she gave her name and address and let the phone drop. She managed to pull herself up on the bed, and surprisingly enough she suddenly felt better. She was almost ashamed that she had called, there was nothing really wrong with her. Then another terrible blow seemed to strike her whole body. Her vision diminished and narrowed down to a single focus. Again she was astonished and couldn’t believe what was happening to her. She could barely see beyond the stretches of the room. She remembered Joel had given her some cocaine and she still had it in her handbag and she staggered to the living room to get rid of it, but in the middle of the living room her body was struck another terrible blow. Her sphincter loosened, and though the haze of a near unconsciousness, she realized she had voided herself. With a great effort she took off her panties and wiped up the floor and threw them under the sofa and then she felt for the earrings she was wearing, she didn’t want anyone to steal the earrings. It took her what seemed a long time to get them out, and then she staggered into the kitchen and pushed them far back on the roof of the cabinet where it was all dusty and where no one would ever look.
Still conscious when the paramedics arrived, she was dimly aware of being examined and one of the medics looking in her handbag and finding her cocaine. They thought she had overdosed. One of the paramedics was questioning her. “How much drugs did you take tonight?”
And she said, defiantly, “None.”
And the medic said, “Come on, we’re trying to save your life.”
And it was that line that really saved Janelle. She went into a certain role that she played. She used a phrase that she always used to scorn what others value. She said, “Oh, please.” The Oh, please in a contemptuous note to show that saving her life was the least of her worries and, in fact, something not even to be considered.
She was conscious of the ride in the ambulance to the hospital and she was conscious of being put in the bed in the white hospital room, but by now this was not happening to her. It was happening to someone she had created and it was not true. She could step away from this whenever she wished. She was safe now. At that moment she felt another terrible blow and lost consciousness.
On the day after New Year’s I got the phone call from Alice. I was mildly surprised to hear her voice; in fact, I didn’t recognize it until she told me her name. The first thing that flashed through my mind was that Janelle needed help in some way.
“Merlyn, I thought you’d want to know,” Alice said. “It’s been a long time, but I thought I should tell you what happened.”
She paused, her voice uncertain. I didn’t say anything, so she went on. “I have some bad news about Janelle. She’s in the hospital. She had a cerebral hemorrhage.”
I didn’t really grasp what she was saying, or my mind refused the facts. It registered as an illness only. “How is she?” I asked. “Was it very bad?”
Again there was that pause, then Alice said, “She’s living on machines. The tests show no brain activity.”
I was very calm, but I still didn’t really grasp it. I said, “Are you telling me that she’s going to die? Is that what you’re telling me?”
“No, I’m not telling you that,” Alice said. “Maybe she’ll recover, maybe they can keep her alive. Her family’s coming out and they’ll make all the decisions. Do you want to come out? You can stay at my place.”
“No,” I said. “I can’t.” And I really couldn’t “Will you call me tomorrow and tell me what happens? I’ll come out if I can help, but not for anything else.”
There was a long silence, and then Alice said, her voice breaking. “Merlyn, I sat beside her, she looks so beautiful, as if nothing happened to her. I held her hand and it was warm. She looks as if she were just sleeping. But the doctors say that there’s nothing left of her brain. Merlyn, could they be wrong? Could she get better?”
And at moment I felt certain it was all a mistake, that Janelle would recover. Cully had said once that a man could sell himself anything in his own hand and that’s what I did. “Alice, the doctors are wrong sometimes, maybe she’ll get better. Don’t give up hope.”
“All right,” Alice said. She was crying now. “Oh, Merlyn, it’s so terrible. She lies there on the bed asleep like some fairy princess and I keep thinking some magic can happen, that she’ll be all right. I can’t think of living without her. And I can’t leave her like that. She would hate to live like that. If they don’t pull the plug, I will. I won’t let her live like that.”
Ah, what a chance it was for me to be a hero. A fairy princess dead in an enchantment and Merlyn the Magician knowing how to wake her. But I didn’t offer to help pull the plug. “Wait and see what happens,” I said. “Call me, OK?”
“OK,” Alice said. “I just thought you’d want to know. I thought you might want to come out.”
“I really haven’t seen her or spoken to her for a long time,” I said. And I remember Janelle asking, “Would you deny me?” and my saying laughingly, “With all my heart.”
Alice said, “She loved you more than any other man.”
But she didn’t say “more than anybody,” I thought. She left out women. I said, “Maybe she’ll be OK. Will you call me again?”
“Yes,” Alice said. Her voice was calmer now. She had begun to grasp my rejection and she was bewildered by it. “I’ll call you as soon as something happens.” Then she hung up.
And I laughed. I don’t know why I laughed, but I just laughed. I couldn’t believe it, it must be one of Janelle’s tricks. It was too outrageously dramatic, something I knew she had fantasized about and so had arranged this little charade. And one thing I knew, I would never look upon her empty face, her beauty vacated by the brain behind it. I would never, never look at it because I would be turned to stone. I didn’t feel any grief or sense any loss. I was too wary for that. I was too cunning. I walked around the rest of the day, shaking my head. Once again I laughed and later I caught myself with my face twisting in a kind of smirk, like someone with a guilty secret wish come true, or of someone who is finally trapped forever.
Alice called me late the next day. “She’s all right now,” Alice said.
And for a minute I thought she meant it, that Janelle had recovered, that it had all been a mistake. And then Alice said, “We pulled the plug. We took her off the machines and she’s dead.”
Neither of us said anything for a long time, and then she asked, “Are you going to come out for the funeral? We’re going to have a memorial service in the theater. All her friends are coming. It’s going to be a party with champagne and all her friends giving speeches about her. Will you come?”
“No,” I said. “I’ll come in a couple of weeks to see you if you don’t mind. But I can’t come now.”
There was another long pause if she were trying to control her anger, and then she said, “Janelle once told me to trust you, so I do. Whenever you want to come out, I’ll see you.”
And then she hung u
p.
***
The Xanadu Hotel loomed before me, its million-dollar marquee of bright lights drowned the lonely hills beyond. I walked past it, dreaming of those happy days and months and years I had spent seeing Janelle. Since Janelle’s death I had thought of her nearly every day. Some mornings I’d wake up thinking about her, imagining how she looked, how she could be so affectionate and so furious at the same time.
Those first few minutes awake I always believed she was alive. I’d imagine scenes between us when we met again. It took me five or ten minutes to remember she was dead. With Osano and Artie this had never happened. In fact, I rarely thought of them now. Did I care for her more? But then if I felt that way about Janelle, why my nervous laugh when Alice told me the news over the phone? Why, during the day I heard of her death, did I laugh to myself three or four times? And I realize now perhaps it was because I was enraged with her for dying. In time, if she had lived, I would have forgotten her. By her trickery she would haunt me all my life.
When I saw Alice a few weeks after Janelle’s death, I learned that the cerebral hemorrhage came from a congenital defect which Janelle may have known about.
I remembered how angry I was when she was late or the few times she forgot the day on which we were supposed to meet. I was so sure they were Freudian slips, her unconscious wish to reject me. But Alice told me that this had happened often with Janelle. And had gotten worse shortly before her death. It was certainly linked to the bulging aneurysm, the fatal leakage into her brain. And then I remembered that last night with her when she had asked me if I loved her and I had answered her so insolently. And I thought if she could only ask me now, how different I would be. That she could be and say and do whatever she wishes. That I would accept anything she wanted to be. That just the thought that I could see her, that she was someplace I could go to, that I could hear her voice or hear her laugh would be the things that could make me happy. “Ah, then,” I could hear her ask, pleased but angry too, “but is it the important thing to you?” She wanted to be the most important thing to me and to everyone she knew and, if possible, to everyone in the world. She had an enormous hunger for affection. I thought of bitter remarks for her to make to me as she lay in bed, her brain shattered as I looked down upon her with grief. She would say, “Isn’t this the way you wanted me? Isn’t that the way men want women? I would think this would be ideal for you.” But then I realized she never would have been so cruel or even so vulgar, and then I realized another odd thing. My memories of her were never about our lovemaking.
I know I dream of her many times at night, but I never remember those dreams. I just wake up thinking about her as if she were still alive.
I was on the very top of the Strip, in the shadow of the Nevada mountains, looking down into the huge, glittering neon nest that was the heart of Vegas. I would gamble tonight and in the early morning I’d catch a plane for New York. Tomorrow night I would sleep with my family in my own house and work on my books in my solitary room. I would be safe.
I entered the doors of the Xanadu casino. I was chilled by the frozen air. Two spade hookers went gliding by arm in arm, their heavy curly wigs glistening, one dark chocolate, the other sweetly brown. Then white hookers in boots and short shorts offering pearly white thighs, but the skin of their faces ghostly, showing skeleton bones thinned by chandeliered light and years of cocaine. Down the gauntlet of green felt blackjack tables a long row of dealers raised their hands and washed them in the air.
I went through the casino toward the baccarat pit. And as I approached the gray-railed enclosure, the crowd in front of me broke to spread around the dice pit and I saw the bacarrat pit clear.
Four Saints in black tie waited for me. The croupier running the game held up his right hand to halt the Banker with the shoe. He gave me a quick glance and smiled his recognition. Then with his hand still up he intoned, “A card for the Player.” The laddermen, two pale Jehovah, leaned forward.
I turned away to watch the casino. I felt a rush of oxygenated air and I wondered if the senile, crippled Gronevelt in his solitary rooms above had pushed his magic buttons to keep all these people awake. And what if he had pushed the button for Cully and all the others to die?
Standing absolutely still in the center of the casino, I looked for a lucky table on which to begin.
Chapter 55
“I suffer, but still I don’t live. I am an X in an indeterminate equation. I am a sort of phantom in life who has lost all beginning and end.”
I read that in the asylum when I was fifteen or sixteen years old, and I think Dostoevsky wrote it to show the unending despair of mankind and perhaps to instill terror in everyone’s heart and persuade them to a belief in God. But long ago, as a child when I read it, it was a beam of light. It comforted me, being a phantom didn’t frighten me. I thought that X and its indeterminate equation were a magic shield. And now having remained so prudently alive, having passed through all the dangers and all the suffering, I could no longer use my old trick of projecting myself forward into time. My own life was no longer that painful and the future could not rescue me. I was surrounded by countless tables of chance and I was under no illusion. I knew now the single fact that no matter how carefully I planned, no matter how cunning I was, lies or good deeds done, I couldn’t really win.
Finally I accepted the fact that I was not a magician anymore. But what the hell. I was still alive and that’s more than I could say for my brother, Artie, or Janelle or Osano. And Cully and Malomar and poor Jordan. I understood Jordan now. It was very simple. Life was too much for him. But not for me. Only fools die.
Was I a monster then that I didn’t grieve, that I wished so much to stay alive? That I could sacrifice my only brother, my only beginning, and then Osano and Janelle and Cully and never even grieve for them and only weep for one? That I could be comforted with the world I had built for myself?
How we laugh at primitive man for his worry and terror of all the charlatan tricks of nature, and how we ourselves are so terrified of the terrors and guilts that roar in our own heads. What we think of as our sensitivity is only the higher evolution of terror in a poor dumb beast. We suffer for nothing. Our own death wish is our only real tragedy.
Merlin, Merlin. Surely a thousand years have passed and you must finally be awake in your cave, putting on your star-covered conical hat to walk through a strange new world. And poor bastard, with your cunning magic, did it do you any good to sleep that thousand years, your enchantress in her grave, both our Arthurs turned to dust?
Or do you have one last magic spell that can work? A terrible long shot, but what’s that to a gambler? I still have a stack of black chips and an itch for terror.
I suffer, but I still live. It’s true that I may be a sort of phantom in life, but I know my beginning and I know my end. It is true that I am an X in an indeterminate equation, the X that will terrify mankind as it voyages through a million galaxies. But no matter. That X is the rock upon which I stand.
ABOUT THE AUTHUR
Mario Puzo was born on Manhattan ’s West Side in a neighborhood known for decades as Hell’s Kitchen. His first books, The Fortunate Pilgrim (“a minor classic” NY Times) and Dark Arena, brought him critical acclaim, but it was publication of The Godfather in March, 1969, that catapulted him into the front ranks of American authors. The Godfather is available in a Signet edition.
FB2 document info
Document ID: fbd-60ixl6uu-cvrp-bvsj-6ubf-2mfwe2xnxlk8
Document version: 1
Document creation date: 30.09.2007
Created using: Fiction Book Designer software
Document authors :
Source URLs :
About
This file was generated by Lord KiRon's FB2EPUB converter version 1.1.5.0.
(This book might contain copyrighted material, author of the converter bears no responsibility for it's usage)
Этот файл создан при помощи конвертера F
B2EPUB версии 1.1.5.0 написанного Lord KiRon.
(Эта книга может содержать материал который защищен авторским правом, автор конвертера не несет ответственности за его использование)
http://www.fb2epub.net
https://code.google.com/p/fb2epub/
