by Mario Puzo
But the women went crazy for him; bright college girls, well-read society matrons, Women’s Lib fighters who cursed him out and then tried to get him in the sack so they could have it on him, so they said, the, way men used to have it on women in Victorian days. One of his tricks was to address himself to women in his books.
I never liked his work, and I didn’t expect to like him. The work is the man. Except that it proved not to be true. After all, there are some compassionate doctors, curious teachers, honest lawyers, idealistic politicians, virtuous women, sane actors, wise writers. And so Osano, despite his fishwife style, the spite in his work, was in reality a great guy to hang out with and not too much of a pain in the ass to listen to, even when he talked about his writing.
Anyway, he had quite an empire as editor of the book review. Two secretaries. Twenty staff readers. And a great outdoors of free-lance critics from top-name authors to starving poets, unsuccessful novelists, college professors and jet-set intellectuals. He used them all and hated them all. And he ran the review like a lunatic.
Page one of the Sunday review is something an author kills for. Osano knew that. He got the first page automatically when he published a book, in all the book reviews in the country. But he hated most fiction writers, he was jealous of them. Or he would have a grudge against the publisher of the book. So he would get a biography of Napoleon or Catherine the Great written by a heavyweight college professor and put it on page one. Book and review usually were both equally unreadable, but Osano was happy. He had infuriated everybody.
The first time I ever saw Osano he lived up to all the literary party stories, all the gossip, all the public images he had ever created. He played the role of the great writer for me with a natural gusto. And he had the props to suit the legend.
I went out to the Hamptons, where Osano took a summer house, and found him ensconced (his word) like an old sultan. At fifty years of age, he had six kids from four different marriages and at that time had not gotten his fifth, sixth and terminal seventh notch. He had on long blue tennis pants and blue tennis jacket specially tailored to hide his bulging beer gut. His face was already craggily impressive, as befitted the next winner of the Nobel Prize for literature. Despite his wicked green eyes, he could be naturally sweet. Today he was sweet. Since he was head of the most powerful Sunday literary review, everybody kissed his ass with the utmost devotion every time he published. He didn’t know I was out to kill him, because I was an unsuccessful writer with one flop novel published and the second coming hard. Sure, he’d written one big almost great novel. But the rest of his work was bullshit, and if Everyday Life let me, I’d show the world what this guy was really made of.
I wrote the article all right, and I caught him dead to rights. But Eddie Lancer turned it down. They wanted Osano to do a big political story, and they didn’t want him to get mad. So it was a day wasted. Except that it really wasn’t. Because two years later Osano called me up and offered me a job working for him as assistant on a new big literary review. Osano remembered me, had read the story the magazine killed, and he liked my guts, or so he said. He said it was because I was a good writer and I liked the same things about his work that he liked.
That first day we sat in his garden and watched his kids play tennis. I have to say right now he really loved his kids and he was perfect with them. Maybe because he was so much a child himself. Anyway, I got him talking about women and Women’s Lib and sex. And he threw in love with it. He was pretty funny. And though in his writings he was the great all-time left-winger, he could be pretty Texas chauvinistic. Talking about love, he said that once he fell in love with a girl he always stopped being jealous of his wife. Then he put on his big writer-statesman look and said, “No man is allowed to be jealous of more than one woman at a time- unless he’s Puerto Rican.” He felt he was allowed to make jokes about Puerto Ricans because his radical credentials were impeccable.
The housekeeper came out to yell at the children fighting for a game on the tennis court. She was a pretty bossy housekeeper and pretty snotty with the kids, as if she were their mother. She also was a handsome woman for her age, which was about Osano’s. For a moment I wondered. Especially when she gave us both a contemptuous look before she went back into the house.
I got him talking about women, which was easy. He took the cynic’s stance, which is always a great stance to take when you’re not crazy about some particular lady. He was very authoritative, as befitted a writer who had had more gossip written about him than any novelist since Hemingway.
“Listen, kid,” he said, “love is like the little red toy wagon you get for Christmas or your sixth birthday. It makes you deliriously happy and you just can’t leave it alone. But sooner or later the wheels come off. Then you leave it in a corner and forget it. Falling in love is great. Being in love is a disaster.”
Asking quietly and with the respect he thought due, I said, “What about women, do you think they feel the same way since they claim to think as men think?”
He flashed me a quick look of those surprisingly green eyes. He was on to my act. But it was OK. That was one of the great things about Osano even then. So he went on.
“Women’s Lib thinks we have power and control over their lives. In its way that’s as stupid as a guy’s thinking women are purer sexually than men. Women will fuck anybody, anytime, anyplace, except that they’re afraid of talk. Women’s Lib bullshits about the fraction of a percent of men who have power. Those guys are not men. They’re not even human. That’s whose place women have to take. They don’t know you have to kill to get there.”
I interrupted. “You’re one of those men.”
Osano nodded. “Yeah. And metaphorically I had to kill. What women will get is what men have. Which is shit, ulcers and heart attacks. Plus a lot of shitty jobs men hate to do. But I’m all for equality. I’ll kill those cunts then. Listen, I’m paying alimony to four healthy broads who can earn their own living. All because they are not equal.”
“Your affairs with women are almost as famous as your books,” I said. “How do you handle women?”
Osano grinned at me. “You’re not interested in how I write books.”
I said smooth as shit, “Your books speak for themselves.”
He gave me another long, thoughtful look, then went on.
“Never treat a woman too good. Women stick with drunks, gamblers, whoremasters and even beater-uppers. They can’t stand a sweet, good guy. Do you know why? They get bored. They don’t want to be happy. It’s boring.”
“Do you believe in being faithful?” I asked.
“Sure I do. Listen, being in love means making another person the central thing in your life. When that no longer exists, it’s not love anymore. It’s something else. Maybe something better, more practical. Love is basically an unfair, unstable, paranoid relationship. Men are worse than women at it. A woman can screw a hundred times, not feel like it once and he holds it against her. But it’s true that the first step downhill is when she doesn’t want to fuck when you do. Listen, there’s no excuse. Never mind the headaches. No shit. Once a broad starts turning you down in bed it’s all over. Start looking for your backer-upper. Never take an excuse.”
I asked him about orgasmic women who could have ten orgasms to a man’s one. He waved it aside.
“Women don’t come like men,” he said. “For them it’s a little phitt. Not like a guy’s. Guys really blow their brains with their nuts. Freud was close, but he missed it. Men really fuck. Women don’t.”
Well, he didn’t really believe that all the way, but I knew what he was saying. His style was exaggeration.
I switched him on to helicopters. He had this theory that in twenty years the auto would be obsolete, that everybody would have his own chopper. All it needed were some technical improvements. As when auto power steering and brakes enabled every woman to drive and put railroads out of business. “Yeah,” he said, “that’s obvious.” What was also obvious was that on this parti
cular morning he was wound up on women. So he switched back.
“The young guys today are on the right track. They say to their broads, sure you can fuck anybody you want, I’ll still love you. They are so full of shit. Listen, any guy who knows a broad will fuck strangers thinks of her as a geek.”
I was offended by the comparison and astonished. The great Osano, whose writings women were particularly crazy about. The most brilliant mind in American letters. The most open mind. Either I was missing his point or he was full of shit. I saw his housekeeper slapping some of the little kids around. I said, “You sure give your housekeeper a lot of authority.”
Now he was so sharp that he caught everything without even trying. He knew exactly how I felt about what he’d been saying. Maybe that’s why he told me the truth, the whole story about his housekeeper. Just to needle me.
“She was my first wife,” he said. “She’s the mother of my three oldest kids.”
He laughed when he saw the look on my face. “No, I don’t screw her. And we get along fine. I pay her a damn good salary but no alimony. She’s the one wife I don’t pay alimony.”
He obviously wanted me to ask why not. I did.
“Because when I wrote my first book and got rich, it went to her head. She was jealous of me being famous and getting a lot of attention. She wanted attention. So some young guy, one of the admirers of my work, gave her the business, and she fell for it. She was five years older than him, but she was always a sexy broad. She really fell in love, I’ll give her that. What she didn’t realize was that he was fucking her just to put the great novelist Osano down. So she asked for a divorce and half the money my book made. That was OK with me. She wanted the kids, but I didn’t want my kids around that creep she was in love with. So I told her when she married the guy, she’d get the kids. Well, he fucked her brains out for two years and blew all her dough. She forgot about her kids. She was a young broad again. Sure, she came to see them a lot, but she was busy traveling all over the world on my dough and chewing the young guy’s cock to shreds. When the money runs out, he takes off. She comes back and wants the kids. But by now she has no case. She deserted them for two years. She puts on a big scene how she can’t live without them. So I gave her a job as a housekeeper.”
I said coolly, “That’s maybe the worst thing I ever heard of.”
The startling green eyes flashed for a moment. But then he smiled and said musingly, “I guess it looks that way. But put yourself in my place. I love having my kids around me. How come the father never gets the kids? What kind of bullshit is that? Do you know men never recover from that bullshit? The wife gets tired of being married, so men lose their kids. And men stand still for it because they got their balls chopped off. Well, I didn’t stand still for it. I kept the kids and got married again right away. And when that wife started pulling bullshit, I got rid of her too.”
I said quietly, “How about her children? How do they feel about their mother being a housekeeper?”
The green eyes flashed again. “Oh, shit. I don’t put her down. She’s only my housekeeper between wives; otherwise she’s more like a free-lance governess. She has her own house. I’m her landlord. Listen, I thought of giving her more dough, of buying her a house and making her independent. But she’s a dizzy cunt like all of them. She’d become obnoxsous again. She’d go down the drain. Which is OK, but she’d make more trouble for me and I’ve got books to write. So I control her with money. She has a damn good living from me. And she knows if she gets out of line, she’s out on her ass and scratching to make a living. It works out.”
“Could it be you’re antiwoman?” I said, smiling.
He laughed. “You say that to a guy who’s been married four times, he doesn’t even have to deny it. But OK. I’m really anti-Women’s Lib in one sense. Because right now most women are just full of shit. Maybe it’s not their fault. Listen, any broad who doesn’t want to fuck two days in a row, get rid of her. Unless she has to go to the hospital in an ambulance. Even if she has forty stitches in her cunt. I don’t care whether she enjoys it or not. Sometimes I don’t enjoy it and I do it and I have to get a hard-on. That’s your job if you love somebody, you gotta fuck their brains out. Jesus, I don’t know why I keep getting married. I swore I wouldn’t do it anymore, but I always get conned. I always believe it’s not getting married that makes them unhappy. They are so full of shit.”
“With the proper conditioning don’t you think women can become equal?”
Osano shook his head. “They forget they age worse than men. A guy at fifty can get a lot of young broads. A broad of fifty finds it rough. Sure, when they get political power, they’ll pass a law so that men of forty or fifty get operated on to look older and equal things out. That’s how democracy works. That’s full of shit too. Listen, women have it good. They shouldn’t complain.
“In the old days they didn’t know they had union rights. They couldn’t be fired no matter how lousy a job they did. Lousy in bed. Lousy in the kitchen. And who ever had fun with his wife after a couple of years? And if he did, she was a cunt. And now they want to be equal. Let me at ‘em. I’ll give them equality. I know what I’m talking about; I've been married four times. And it cost me every penny I made.”
Osano really hated women that day. A month later I picked up the morning paper and read that he’d married for the fifth time. An actress in a little theater group. She was half his age. So much for the common sense of America ’s foremost man of letters. I never dreamed that I would be working for him someday and be with him until he died, miraculously a bachelor but still in love with a woman, with women.
I caught it that day through all the bullshit. He was crazy about women. That was his weakness, and he hated it.
Chapter 13
I was finally ready for my trip to Las Vegas to see Cully again. It would be the first time in over three years, three years since Jordan had blown himself away in his room, a four-hundred-grand winner.
We had kept in touch, Cully and I. He phoned me a couple of times a month and sent Christmas presents for me and my wife and kids, stuff I recognized that came from the Xanadu Hotel gift shop, where I knew he got them for a fraction of their selling price or, knowing Cully, even for nothing. But still, it was nice of him to do it. I had told Value about Cully but never told her about Jordan.
I knew Cully had a good job with the hotel because hi~ secretary answered his phone with “Assistant to the president.” And I wondered how in a few years he had managed to climb so high. His telephone voice and manner of speaking had changed; he spoke in a lower tone; he was more sincere, more polite, warmer. An actor playing a different part. Over the phone it would be just idle chitchat and gossip about big winners and big losers and funny stories about the characters staying in the hotel. But never anything about himself. Eventually one of us would mention Jordan, usually near the end of the call, or maybe the mention of Jordan would end the call. He was our touchstone.
Value packed my suitcase. I was going over the weekend so I would only have to miss a day’s work at my Army Reserve job. And in the far-off distant future, which I smelled, the magazine story would give me the cover for the cops about why I went to Vegas.
The kids were in bed while Vallie was packing my bag because I was leaving early the next morning. She gave me a little smile. “God, it was terrible the last time you went. I thought you wouldn’t come back.”
“I just had to get away then,” I said. “Things were going bad.”
“Everything’s changed since,” Vallie said musingly. “Three years ago we didn’t have money at all. Gee, we were so broke I had to ask my father for some money and I was afraid you’d find out. And you acted as if you didn’t love me anymore. That trip changed everything. You were different when you came back. You weren’t mad at me anymore and you were more patient with the kids. And you got work with the magazines.”
I smiled at her. “Remember, I came back a winner. A few extra grand. Maybe if I’d come
back a loser, it would have been a whole different story.”
Vallie snapped the suitcase shut. “No,” she said. “You were different. You were happier, happier with me and the kids.”
“I found out what I was missing,” I said.
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “With all those beautiful hookers in Vegas.”
“They cost too much,” I said. “I needed my money to gamble.”
It was all kidding around, but part of it was serious. If I told her the truth, that I never looked at another woman, she wouldn’t believe me. But I could give good reasons. I had felt so much guilt about being such a lousy husband and father who couldn’t give his family anything, who couldn’t even make a decent living for them, that I couldn’t add to that guilt by being unfaithful to her. And the overriding fact was that we were so lucky in bed together. She was really all I wanted, perfect for me. I thought I was for her.
“Are you going to do some work tonight?” she asked. She was really asking if we were going to make love first so that she could get ready. Then, after we’d made love, usually I would get up to work on my writing and she would fall so soundly asleep she would not stir until morning. She was a great sleeper. I was lousy at it.
“Yes,” I said. “I want to work. I’m too excited about the trip to sleep anyway.”
It was nearly midnight, but she went into the kitchen to make me a fresh pot of coffee and some sandwiches. I would work until three or four in the morning and then still wake up before she did in the morning.