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.
I knelt beside her and covered her with the coat. I took off my jacket and folded it beneath her head. She was in pain, but there was no blood trickling out of her mouth or ears and there was not that deadly film over the eyes that long ago during the war I had recognized as a danger signal. Her face finally was calm and at peace with itself. I held her hand, it was warm, and she opened her eyes. “You’ll be OK,” I said. “An ambulance is coming. You’ll be OK.”
She opened her eyes and smiled at me. She looked very beautiful, and for the first time I understood Osano's being fascinated by her. She was in pain but actually grinning." I fixed that son of a bitch this time,” she said.
– -
When they got her to the hospital, they found that she had suffered a broken toe and a fracture of the shoulder clavicle. She was conscious enough to tell what had happened, and the cops went looking for Osano and took him away. I called Osano's lawyer. He told me to keep my mouth shut as much as I possibly could and that he would straighten everything out. He had known Osano and Wendy a long time and he understood the whole thing before I did. He told me to stay where I was until he called.
Needless to say, the party broke up after detectives questioned some of the people, including myself. I said I hadn’t seen anything except Wendy falling through the window. No, I hadn’t seen Osano near her, I told them. And they left it at that. Osano's ex-wife gave me a drink and sat next to me on the sofa. She had a funny little smile on her face. “I always knew this would happen,” she said.
It took almost three hours for the lawyer to call me. He said he had Osano out on bail but that it would be a good idea for someone to be with him a couple of days. Osano would be going to his studio apartment in the Village. Could I go down there to keep him company and keep him from talking to the press? I said I would. Then the lawyer briefed me. Osano had testified that Wendy had attacked him and that he had flung her away from him and she had lost her balance and went through the window. That was the story given to the newspapers. The lawyer was sure that he could get Wendy to go along with the story out of her own self-interest. If Osano went to jail, she would lose out on alimony and child support. It would all be smoothed over in a couple of days if Osano could be kept from saying something outrageous. Osano should be at his apartment in an hour, the lawyer would bring him there.
I left the brownstone and took a taxi down to the Village. I sat on the stoop of the apartment house until the lawyer’s chauffeured limo rolled up. Osano got out.
He looked dreadful. His eyes were bulging out of his head, and his skin was dead white with strain. He walked right past me, and I got into the elevator with him. He took his keys out, but his hands were shaking and I did it for him.
When we were in his tiny studio apartment, Osano flopped down on the couch that opened out into a bed. He still hadn’t said a word to me. He was lying there now, his face covering his hands out of weariness, not despair. I looked around the studio apartment and thought, here was Osano, one of the most famous writers in the world and he lived in this hole. But then I remembered that he rarely lived here. That he was usually living in his house in the Hamptons or up in Provincetown. Or with one of the rich divorced women he would have a love affair with for a few months.
I sat down in a dusty armchair and kicked a pile of books into a corner. “I told the cops I didn’t see anything,” I said to Osano.
Osano sat up and his hands were away from his face. To my amazement I could see that wild grin on his face.
“Jesus, how did you like the way she sailed through the air. I always said she was a fucking witch. I didn’t throw her that hard. She was flying on her own.”
I stared at him. “I think you’re going fucking crazy,” I said. “I think you’d better see a doctor.” My voice was cold. I couldn’t forget Wendy lying in the street.
“Shit, she’s going to be OK,” Osano said. “And you don’t ask why. Or do you think I throw all my ex-wives out the window?”
“There’s no excuse,” I said.
Osano grinned. “You don’t know Wendy. I’ll bet twenty bucks when I tell you what she said to me, you’ll agree you’d have done the same thing.”
“Bet,” I said. I went into the bathroom and wet a facecloth and threw it to him. He wiped his face and neck and sighed with pleasure as the cold water refreshed his skin.
Osano hunched forward on the couch. “She reminded me how she had written me letters the last two months begging for money for our kid. Of course, I didn’t send her any money, she’d spend it on herself. Then she said that she hadn’t wanted to bother me while I was busy in Hollywood but that our youngest boy had gotten sick with spinal meningitis and because she didn’t have enough money she had to put him in the charity ward in the city hospital, Bellevue no less. Can you imagine that fucking cunt? She didn’t call me that he was sick because she wanted to lay all that shit on me, all that guilt on me.”
I knew how Osano loved all his kids from his different wives. I was amazed at this capacity in him. He always sent them birthday presents and always had them with him for the summers. And he dropped in to see them sporadically to take them to the theater or to dinner or a ball game. I was astonished now that he didn’t seem worried about his kid being sick. He understood what I was feeling.
“The kid only had a high fever, some sort of respiratory infection. While you were being so gallant about Wendy, I was calling the hospital before the cops came. They told me there was nothing to worry about. I called my doctor and he’s having the kid taken to a private hospital. So everything’s OK.”