Mario Puzo - Fools die

“Yeah,” Artie said. “I know. It doesn’t matter. I don’t think you would have liked her.”

– -

Six months later Artie had a heart attack. It was a mild one, but he was in the hospital for weeks and off from work another month. I went to see him in the hospital every day, and he kept insisting that it had been some sort of indigestion, that it was a borderline case. I went down to the library and read everything I could about heart attacks. I found out that his reaction was a common one with heart attack victims and that sometimes they were right. But Pam was panic-stricken. When Artie came out of the hospital, she put him on a strict diet, threw all the cigarettes out of the house and stopped smoking so that Artie could quit. It was hard for him, but he did. And maybe the heart attack did scare him because now he took care of himself. He took the long walks the doctors prescribed, ate carefully and never touched tobacco. Six months later he looked better than he had ever looked in his life and Pam and I stopped giving each other panicky looks whenever he was out of the room. “Thank God, he’s stopped smoking,” Pam said. “He was up to three packs a day. That’s what did him in.”

– -

I nodded, but I didn’t believe it. I always believed it was that two months he spent trying to claim his mother that did him in.

And as soon as Artie was OK, I got into trouble. I lost my job on the literary review. Not through any fault of mine but because Osano got fired and as his right-hand man I was fired with him.

Osano had weathered all the storms. His contempt of the most powerful literary circles in the country, the political intelligentsia, the culture fanatics, the liberals, the conservatives, Women’s Liberation, the radicals, his sexual escapades, his gambling on sports, his use of his position to lobby for the Nobel Prize. Plus a nonfiction book he published in defense of pornography, not for its redeeming social value, but as ant elitist pleasure of the poor in intellect. For all these things the publishers would have liked to fire him, but the circulation of the review had doubled since he became editor.

By this time I was making good money. I wrote a lot of Osano's articles for him. I could imitate his style pretty well, and he would start me off with a fifteen-minute harangue on how he felt about a particular subject, always brilliantly crazy. It was easy for me to write the article based on his fifteen minutes of ranting. Then he’d go over and put in a few of his masterful touches and we’d split the money. Just half his money was twice what I got paid for an article.

Even that didn’t get us fired. It was his ex-wife Wendy who did us in. Though that’s maybe unfair; Osano did us in, Wendy handed him the knife.

Osano had spent four weeks in Hollywood while I ran the review for him. He was completing some sort of movie deal, and during the four weeks we used a courier to fly out and give him review articles to OK before I ran it. When Osano finally came back to New York, he gave a party for all his friends to celebrate his home-coming and the big chunk of money he had earned in Hollywood.

The party was held at his East Side brownstone which his latest ex-wife used with their batch of three kids. Osano was living in a small studio apartment in the Village, the only thing he could afford, but too small for the party.

I went because he insisted that I go. Valerie didn’t come. She didn’t like Osano and she didn’t like parties outside her family circle. Over the years we had come to an unspoken agreement. We excused each other from each other’s social lives whenever possible. My reason was that I was too busy working on my novel, my job and free-lance writing assignments. Her excuse was that she had to take care of the kids and didn’t trust baby-sitters. We both enjoyed the arrangement. It was easier for her than it was for me since I had no social life except for my brother, Artie, and the review.

Anyway, Osano's party was one of the big events of the literary set in New York. The top people of the New York Times Book Review came, the critics for most of the magazines and novelists that Osano was still friendly with. I was sitting in a corner talking with Osano's latest ex-wife when I saw Wendy come in and I thought immediately, Jesus, trouble, I knew she had not been invited.

Osano spotted her at the same time and started walking toward her with the peculiar lurching gait he’d acquired in the last few months. He was a little drunk, and I was afraid he might lose his temper and cause a scene or do something crazy, so I got up and joined them. I arrived just in time to hear Osano greet her.

“What the fuck do you want?” he said. He could be frightening when he was angry, but from what he had told me about Wendy I knew she was the one person who enjoyed making him mad. But I was still surprised at her reaction.

Wendy was dressed in jeans and sweater and a scarf over her head. It made her thin dark face Medea-like. Her wiry black hair escaped from the scarf like thin black snakes.

She looked at Osano with a deadly calm which held malevolent triumph. She was consumed with hatred. She took a long look around the room as if drinking in what she now no longer could claim any part of, the glittering literary world of Osano that he had effectively banished her from. It was a look of satisfaction. Then she said to Osano, “I have something very important to tell you.”

Osano downed his glass of scotch. He gave her an ugly grin. “So tell me and get the fuck out.”

Wendy said very seriously, “It’s bad news.”

Osano laughed uproariously and genuinely. That really tickled him. “You’re always bad news,” he said and laughed again.

Wendy watched him with quiet satisfaction. “I have to tell you in private.”

“Oh, shit,” Osano said. But he knew Wendy, she would delight in a scene. So he took her up the stairs to his study. I figured later that he didn’t take her to one of the bedrooms because deep down he was afraid he would try to fuck her, she still had that kind of hold on him. And he knew she would delight in refusing him. But it was a mistake to bring her into the study. It was his favorite room, still kept for him as a place to work. It had a huge window which he loved to stare out of while he was writing and watch the goings-on in the street below.

I hung around at the bottom of the stairs. I really don’t know why, but I felt that Osano was going to need help. So I was the first one to hear Wendy scream in terror and the first one to act on that scream. I ran up the stairs and kicked in the door of the study.

I was just in time to see Osano reach Wendy. She was flailing her thin arms at him, trying to keep him away. Her bony hands were curled, the fingers extended like claws to scratch his face. She was terrified, but she was enjoying it too. I could see that. Osano's face was bleeding from two long furrows on his right cheek. And before I could stop him, he had hit Wendy in the face so that she swayed toward him. In one terrible swift motion he picked her up as if she were a weightless doll and threw her through the picture window with tremendous force. The window shattered, and Wendy sailed through it to the street below.

I don’t know whether I was more horrified by the sight of Wendy’s tiny body breaking through the window or Osano's completely maniacal face. I ran out of the room and shouted, “Call an ambulance.” I snatched up a coat from the hallway and ran out in the street.

Wendy was lying on the cement like an insect whose legs had been broken. As I came out of the house, she was teetering up on her arms and legs but had only gotten to her knees. She looked like a spider trying to walk, and then she collapsed again.