And Osano said with maniacal quiet, “You cunt, now you get it.” And he lunged for her. He was really crazy. He hit her in the face. I ducked in front and grabbed him. But he had his hands around her throat and she screamed. And then it became a madhouse. The plane must have had security guards in plain clothes because two men took Osano very professionally by the arms and peeled his coat back to form a straitjacket. But he was wild and he was throwing them around anyway. Everybody watched, horrified. I tried to quiet Osano down, but he couldn’t hear anything. He was berserk. He was screaming curses at the woman and her husband. The two security men were trying to gentle him down, addressing him by name, and one, a good-looking strong boy, was asking him if they let him go would he behave. Osano still fought. Then the strong boy lost his temper.
Now Osano was in an uncontrollable rage because partly it was his nature and partly because he was famous and knew he would be insulated against any retaliations for his rage. The young strong boy understood this by instinct, but now he was affronted that Osano didn’t respect his superior youthful strength. And he got mad. He took a handful of Osano’s hair and yanked his head back so hard he nearly snapped his neck. Then he put his arm around Osano’s neck and said, “You son of a bitch, I’ll break it.” Osano went still.
Jesus, it was a mess after that. The captain of the plane wanted to put Osano in a straitjacket, but I talked him out of it. The security cleared out the lounge, and Osano and I sat there with them for the rest of the trip. They didn’t let us off in New York until the plane was empty, so we never saw the woman again. But that last glimpse of her was enough. They had washed the blood off her face, but she had one eye almost shut and her mouth was mashed to pulp. The husband carried the poodle, still alive, wagging its tail desperately for affection and protection. Later there were some legal complaints that the lawyers handled. Of course, it got in all the papers. The great American novelist and prime candidate for the Nobel Prize had almost murdered a little French poodle. Poor dog. Poor Osano. The cunt had turned out to be a large stockholder in the airline plus having millions of other dollars, and of course, she couldn’t even threaten never to fly that airline again. As for Osano he was perfectly happy. He had no feeling about animals. He said, “As long as I can eat them, I can kill them.” When I pointed out that he had never eaten dog meat, he just shrugged and said, “Cook it right and I’ll eat it.”
One thing Osano missed. That crazy woman had her humanity too. OK, she was crazy. OK, she deserved a bloody mouth, it might even have done her good. But she really didn’t deserve what Osano did to her. She really couldn’t help the kind of person she was, I thought then. The earlier Osano would have seen all that. For some reason he couldn’t now.
Chapter 25
The sexy poodle didn’t die, so the lady didn’t press charges. She didn’t seem to mind getting her face smashed or it wasn’t important to her or to her husband. She might even have enjoyed it. She sent Osano a friendly note, leaving the door open for them to get together. Osano gave a funny little growl and tossed the note into the wastepaper basket. “Why don’t you give her a try?” I said. “She might be interesting.”
“I don’t like hitting women,” Osano said. “That bitch wants me to use her as a punching bag.”
“She could be another Wendy,” I said. I knew Wendy always had some sort of fascination for him despite their being divorced all these years and despite all the aggravation she caused him.
“Jesus,” Osano said. “That’s all I need.” But he smiled. He knew what I meant. That maybe beating women didn’t displease him that much. But he wanted to show me I was wrong.
“Wendy was the only wife I had that made me hit her,” he said. “All my other wives, they fucked my best friends, they stole my money, they beat me for alimony, they lied about me, but I never hit them, I never disliked them. I’m good friends with all my other wives. But that fucking Wendy is some piece of work. A class by herself. If I’d stayed married to her, I’d have killed her.”
But the poodle strangling had got around in the literary circles of New York. Osano worried about his chances of getting the Nobel Prize. “Those fucking Scandinavians love dogs,” he said. He fired up his active campaign for the Nobel by writing letters to all his friends and professional acquaintances. He also kept publishing articles and reviews on the most important critical works to appear in the review. Plus essays on literature which I always thought were full of shit. Many times when I went into his office he would be working on his novel, filling yellow lined sheets. His great novel, because it was the only thing he wrote in longhand. The rest of his stuff he banged out with two fingers on the typewriter he could swivel to from his executive desk piled with books. He was the fastest typist I have ever seen even with just two fingers. He sounded like a machine gun literally. And with that machine-gun typing he wrote the definition of what the great American novel should be, explained why England no longer produced great fiction, except in the spy genre, took apart the latest works and sometimes the body of work of guys like Faulkner, Mailer, Styron, Jones, anybody who could give him competition for the Nobel. He was so brilliant, the language so charged, that he convinced you. By publishing all that crap, he demolished his opponents and left the field clear for himself. The only trouble was that when you went to his own work, he had only his first two novels published twenty years ago that could give him serious claim to a literary reputation. The rest of his novels and nonfiction work were not that good.
The truth was that over the last ten years he had lost a great deal of his popular success and his literary reputation. He had published too many books done off the top of his head, made too many enemies with the high-handed way he ran the review. Even when he did some ass kissing by praising powerful literary figures, he did it with such arrogance and condescension, did it with himself mixed up with it in some way (as his Einstein article had been as much about himself as about Einstein) that he made enemies of the people he was stroking. He wrote one line that really caused an uproar. He said the huge difference between French literature of the nineteenth century and English literature was that French writers had plenty of sex and the English didn’t. Our review clientele boiled with rage.
On top of this his personal behavior was scandalous. The publishers of the review had learned of the airplane incident, and it had leaked into the gossip columns. On one of his lectures at a California college he met a young nineteen-year-old literary student who looked more like a cheerleader or starlet than a lover of books, which she really was. He brought her to New York to live with him. She lasted about six months, but during that time he took her to all the literary parties. Osano was in his middle fifties, not yet gray but definitely paunchy. When you saw them together, you got a little uncomfortable. Especially when Osano was drunk and she had to carry him home. Plus he was drinking while he was working in the office. Plus he was cheating on his nineteen-year-old girlfriend with a forty-year-old female novelist who had just published a best-seller. The book wasn’t really that good, but Osano wrote a full-page essay in the review hailing her as a future great of American literature.