“No,” I said.
Valerie looked troubled and a little terrified. I could see how she was thinking what if her children rejected her someday.
“She’s your mother,” Valerie said. “She must have had a very unhappy life.”
“Do you know what the word ‘orphan’ means?” I said. “Have you looked it up in the dictionary? It means a child who has lost both parents through death. Or a young animal that has been deserted or has lost its mother. Which one do you want?”
“OK,” Valerie said. She looked terrified. She went to look in on the kids and then went into our bedroom. I could hear her going into the bathroom and preparing for bed. I stayed up late reading and making notes, and when I went to bed, she was sound asleep.
It was all over in a couple of months. Artie called me up one day and told me his mother had disappeared again. We arranged to meet in the city and have dinner together so that we could talk alone. We could never talk about it with our wives present, as if it were too shameful for their knowledge. Artie seemed cheerful. He told me she had left a note. He told me that she drank a lot and always wanted to go to bars and pick up men. That she was a middle-aged floozy but that he liked her. He had made her stop drinking, he had bought her new clothes, he had rented her a nicely furnished apartment, given her an allowance. She had told him everything that had happened to her. It hadn’t really been her fault. I stopped him there. I didn’t want to hear about that.
“Are you going to look for her again?” I asked him.
Artie smiled his sad, beautiful smile. “No,” he said. “You know, I was a pain in the ass to her even now. She really didn’t like having me around. At first, when I found her, she played the role I wanted her to play, I think out of a sense of guilt that maybe she could make things up to me by letting me take care of her. But she really didn’t like it. She even made a pass at me one day, I think just to get some excitement.” He laughed. “I wanted her to come to the house, but she never would. It’s just as well.”
“How did Pam take the whole business?” I asked.
Artie laughed out loud. “Jesus, she was even jealous of my mother. When I told her it was all over, you should have seen the look of relief on her face. One thing I have to say for you, brother, you took the news without cracking a muscle.”
“Because I don’t give a shit one way or the other,” I said.
“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 YorkTimes 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.”