Mario Puzo - Fools die

I had sneaked in a bottle of champagne to celebrate our last night together. But I didn’t mind sharing it with Alice. Janelle had three glasses stashed. Alice opened the bottle. She was very capable.

Janelle had on a pretty filled lace nightgown, and as always, she looked somehow dramatic lying there on the bed. I knew that she had deliberately not used makeup for my visit so as to look the part. Wan, pale, another Camille. Except that she really was in great shape and bursting with vitality. Her eyes were dancing with pleasure as she sipped the champagne. She had trapped in this room the two people she loved best. They were not allowed to be mean to her in any way, or hurt her feelings in any way, not even stop her from being mean to them. And maybe it was this that made her reach out and take my hand in hers as Alice sat there watching.

Ever since I had known about them, I had been careful not to act like a lover in front of Alice. And Alice never betrayed her sexual relationship with Janelle. Watching them, you would swear that they were two sisters or two comrades. They were absolutely casual with one another. Their relationship was indicated only by Janelle, who sometimes bossed Alice around like a domineering husband.

Now Alice moved her chair back so that it tilted her against the far wall, away from Janelle’s bed, away from us. As if she were giving us the official status of lovers. For some reason this gesture of hers affected me painfully, it was so generous.

I guess I envied them both. They were so comfortable with each other that they could afford to indulge me, my privileged position as an official lover. Janelle played with the fingers on my hand. And now I realized it was not perversity on her part but a genuine desire to make me happy, so I smiled at her. In the next hour we would finish the champagne and I would leave and catch my plane to New York and they would be alone and Janelle would make it up to Alice. And Alice knew that. As she knew that Janelle must have this moment with me. I resisted the impulse to pull my hand away. That would be ungenerous, and the male mystique has it that men are basically more generous than women. But I knew that my generosity was forced. I couldn’t wait to leave.

Finally I could kiss Janelle good-bye. I promised to call her the next day. We hugged each other as Alice discreetly left the room. But Alice was waiting outside for me and kept me company down to the car. She gave me another of her soft kisses on the mouth.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll spend the night with her.” Janelle had told me that after her operation Alice spent the whole night curled up on the armchair in her room, so I was not surprised.

I just said, “Take care of yourself, thanks,” and got into my car and drove to the airport.

It was dark before the plane started its journey east. I could never sleep on a plane.

And so I could think of Alice and Janelle comfortable with each other in the hospital bedroom, and I was glad Janelle was not alone. And I was glad that early in the dawn I would be having breakfast with my family.

One of the things I never admitted to Janelle was that my jealousy was not merely romantic, but pragmatic. I searched the literature of romantic novels, but in no novel could I find the admission that one of the reasons a married man wants his mistress to be faithful is that he fears catching the clap or worse and then transmitting it to his wife. I guess one of the reasons this couldn’t be admitted to the mistress at least is that the married man usually lied and said he was no longer sleeping with his wife. And since he was already lying to his wife and since if he did infect her, if he was human at all, he’d have to tell both. He was caught in the double horn of guilt.

So one night I told Janelle about that and she looked at me grimly and said, “How about if you caught it from your wife and gave it to me? Or don’t you think that’s possible?”

We were playing our usual game of fighting but not really fighting, really a duel of wits in which humor and truth were allowed and even some cruelty but no brutality.

“Sure,” I said, “But the odds are less. My wife is a pretty strict Catholic. She’s virtuous.” I held up my hand to stop Janelle’s protest. “And she’s older and not as beautiful as you are and has less opportunity.”

Janelle relaxed a bit. Any compliment to her beauty could soften her up.

Then I said, grinning a little, “But you’re right. If my wife gave it to me and I gave it to you, I wouldn’t feel guilty. That would be OK. That would be a kind of justice since you and I are both criminals together.”

Janelle couldn’t resist any longer. She was almost jumping up and down. “I can’t believe you said something like that. I just can’t believe it. I may be a criminal,” she said, “but you’re just a coward.”

Another night in the early-morning hours, when as usual we couldn’t sleep because we were so excited by each other after we had made love a couple of times and drunk a bottle of wine, she was finally so persistent that I told her about when I was a kid in the asylum.

– -

As a child I used books as magic. In the dormitory late at night, separate and alone, a greater loneliness than I have ever felt since, I could spirit myself away and escape by reading and then weave my own fantasies. The books I loved best at that early age of ten, eleven or twelve were the romantic legends of Roland, Charlemagne, the American West, but especially of King Arthur and his Round Table and his brave knights Lancelot and Galahad. But most of all, I loved Merlin because I thought myself like him. And then I would weave my fantasies, my brother, Artie, was King Arthur and that was right too, and that was because Artie had all the nobility and fairness of King Arthur, the honesty and true purpose, the forgiving lovingness which I did not have. As a child I fantasized myself as cunning and far-seeing and was firmly convinced that I would rule my own life by some sort of magic. And so I came to love King Arthur’s magician, Merlin, who had lived through the past, could foresee the future, who was immortal and all-wise.

It was then I developed the trick of actually transferring myself from the present into the future. I used it all my life. As a child in the asylum I would make myself into a young man with clever bookish friends. I could make myself live in a luxurious apartment and on the sofa of that apartment make love to a passionate, beautiful woman.

During the war on tedious guard or patrol duty I would project myself into the future when I would be on leave to Paris, eating great food and bedding down with luscious whores. Under shellfire I could magically disappear and find myself resting in the woods by a gentle brook, reading a favorite book.

It worked, it really worked. I magically disappeared. And I would remember in later actual time, when I was really doing those great things, I remembered these terrible times and it would seem as if I had escaped them altogether, that I had never suffered. That they were only dreams.

I remember my shock and astonishment when Merlin tells King Arthur to rule without his help because he, Merlin, will be imprisoned in a cave by a young enchantress to whom he has taught all his secrets. Like King Arthur, I asked why. Why would Merlin teach a young girl all his magic simply so he could become her prisoner and why was he so cheerful about sleeping in a cave for a thousand years, knowing the tragic ending of his king? I couldn’t understand it. And yet, as I grew older, I felt that I too might do the same thing. Every great hero, I had learned, must have a weakness, and that would be mine.

I had read many different versions of the King Arthur legend, and in one I had seen a picture of Merlin as a man with a long gray beard wearing a conical dunce like cap spangled with stars and signs of the zodiac. In the shop class of the asylum school I made myself such a hat and wore it around the grounds. I loved that hat. Until one day one of the boys stole it and I never saw it again and I never made another one. I had used that hat to spin magic spells around myself, of the hero that I would become; the adventures I would have, the good deeds I would perform and the happiness I would find. But the hat really wasn’t necessary. The fantasies wove themselves anyway. My life in that asylum seems a dream. I never was there. I was really Merlin as a child of ten. I was a magician, and nothing could ever harm