For the first time I realized how lucky I was. That no matter how much I ate I never put on a pound. The first week was something I’ll never forget. I saw three three-hundred-pound girls bouncing on a trampoline. Then a guy who was over five hundred pounds being taken down to the railroad station and getting weighed on the freight-weighing machine. There was something genuinely sad about that huge form shambling into the dusk like some elephant wandering toward the graveyard where he knew he had to die.
Osano had a suite of rooms at the Holiday Inn close by the Duke Medical Center building. Many of the patients stayed there and got together for walks or card games or just sat together trying to start an affair. There was a lot of gossip. A two-hundred-fifty-pound boy had taken his three-hundredfifty-pound girl to New Orleans for a shack-up date for the weekend. Unfortunately the restaurants in New Orleans were so great they spent the two days eating and came back ten pounds heavier. What struck me as funny is that the gaining of the ten pounds was treated as a greater sin than their supposed immorality.
Then one evening Osano and I, at four o’clock in the morning, were startled by the screams of a man in mortal agony. Stretched on the lawn outside our bedroom windows was one of the male patients who had finally gotten himself down to two hundred pounds. He was obviously dying or sounded like it. People were rushing to him and a clinic doctor was already there. He was taken away in an ambulance. The next day we found out what had happened. The patient had emptied all the chocolate bar machines in the hotel. They counted the wrappers on the lawn, there were a hundred and sixteen. Nobody seemed to think this was peculiar, and the guy recovered and continued on the program.
“You’re going to have a great time here”, I told Osano. “Plenty of material.”
“Naw,” Osano said. “You can write a tragedy about skinny people, but you can never write a tragedy about fat people. Remember how popular TB was? You could cry over Camille, but how could you cry over a bag encased in three hundred pounds of fat? It’s tragic, but it wouldn’t look right. There’s only so much that art can do.”
The next day was the final day of Osano’s tests and I planned to fly back that night. Osano had behaved very well. He had stayed strictly on the rice diet and he was feeling good because I had kept him company. When Osano went over to the Medical Center for the results of his tests, I packed my bags while waiting for him to come back to the hotel.
Osano didn’t show until four hours later. His face was alive with excitement. His green eyes were dancing and had their old sparkle and color.
“Everything came out OK?” I said.
“You bet your ass,” Osano said.
For just a second I didn’t trust him. He looked too good, too happy.
“Everything is perfect, couldn’t be better. You can fly home tonight and I have to say you are a real buddy. No one would do what you did, eating that rice day after day, and worse still, watching those three-hundred-pound broads go by shaking their asses. Whatever sins you have committed against me I forgive you.” And for a moment his eyes were kind, very serious. There was a gentle expression on his face. “I forgive you,” he said. “Remember that, you’re such a guilty fuck I want you to know that.”
And then for one of the few times since we knew each other he gave me a hug. I knew he hated to be touched except by women and I knew he hated being sentimental. I was surprised, but I didn’t wonder about what he meant by forgiving me because Osano was so sharp. He was really so much smarter than anyone else I had ever known that in some way he knew the reason why I had not gotten him the job on the Tri-Culture-Jeff Wagon script. He had forgiven me and that was fine, that was like Osano. He was really a great man. The only trouble was I had not yet forgiven myself.
I left Duke University that night and flew to New York. A week later I got a call from Charlie Brown. It was the first time I had ever spoken to her over the phone. She had a soft, sweet voice, innocent, childlike, and she said, “Merlyn, you have to help me.”
And I said, “What’s wrong?”
And she said, “Osano is dying, he’s in the hospital. Please, please come.”
Chapter 50
Charlie had already taken Osano to St. Vincent ’s Hospital, so we agreed to meet there. When I got there, Osano was in a private room and Charlie was with him, sitting on the bed where Osano could put his hand in her lap. Charlie let her hand rest on Osano’s stomach, which was bare of covers or top shirt. In fact, Osano’s hospital nightgown lay in shreds on the floor. That act must have put him in good humor because he was sitting up cheerfully in bed. And to me he really didn’t look that bad. In fact, he seemed to have lost some weight.
I checked the hospital room quickly with my eyes. There were no intravenous settings, no special nurses on duty, and I had seen walking down the corridor that it was not in any way an intensive care unit. I was surprised at the amount of relief I felt, that Charlie must have made a mistake and that Osano wasn’t dying after all.
Osano said coolly, “Hi, Merlyn. You must be a real magician. How did you find out I was here? It’s supposed to be a secret.”
I didn’t want any fooling around or any kind of bullshit, so I said straight out, “Charlie Brown told me.” Maybe she wasn’t supposed to tell me, but I didn’t feel like lying.
Charlie just smiled at Osano’s frown.
Osano said to her, “I told you it was just me and you, or just me. However you like it. Nobody else.”
Charlie said almost absently, “I know you wanted Merlyn.”
Osano sighed. “OK,” he said. “You’ve been here all day, Charlie. Why don’t you go to the movies or get laid or have a chocolate ice-cream soda or ten Chinese dishes? Anyway, take the night off and I’ll see you in the morning.”
“All right,” Charlie said. She got up from the bed. She stood very close to Osano and he, with a movement not really lecherous, but as if he were reminding himself of what it felt like, put his hand under her dress and caressed her inner thighs and then she leaned her head over the bed to kiss him.
And on Osano’s face as his hand caressed that warm flesh beneath the dress came a look of peace and contentment as if reassured in some holy belief.
When Charlie left the room, Osano sighed and said, “Merlyn, believe me. I wrote a lot of bullshit in my books, my articles and my lectures. I’ll tell you the only real truth. Cunt is where it all begins and where it all ends. Cunt is the only thing worth living for. Everything else is a fake, a fraud and just shit.”
I sat down next to the bed. “What about power?” I said. “You always liked power and money pretty good.”
“You forgot art,” Osano said.
“OK,” I said. “Let’s put art in there. How about money, power and art?”
“They’re OK,” Osano said. “I won’t knock them. They’ll do. But they’re not really necessary. They’re just frosting on the cake.”
And then I was right back to my first meeting with Osano and I thought I knew the truth about him then, when he didn’t know it. And now he’s telling it to me and I wonder if it’s true because Osano had loved them all. And what he was really saying was that art and money and fame and power were not what he regretted leaving.
“You’re looking better than when I saw you last,” I told Osano. “How come you’re in the hospital? Charlie Brown says it’s really trouble this time. But you don’t look it.”
“No shit?” Osano said. He was pleased. “That’s great. But you know I got the bad news down the fat farm when they took all those tests. I’ll give it to you short and sweet. I fucked up when I took those dosages of penicillin pills every time I got laid, so I got syphilis and the pills masked it, but the dosage wasn’t strong enough to wipe it out. Or maybe those fucking spirochetes figured out a way to bypass the medicine. It must have happened about fifteen years ago. Meantime, those old spirochetes ate away at my brain, my bones and my heart. Now they tell me I got six months or a year before going cuckoo with paresis, unless my heart goes out first.”