Fools die

hide her head. She can’t be allowed to live. Especially if she is sexually faithful and never lies and always puts me ahead of everything and everyone.

“There will be a lot about love in this book, but it’s not a love book. It’s a war book. The old war between men who are true friends. The great ‘new’ war between men and women. Sure it’s an old story, but it’s out in the open now. The Women’s Liberation warriors think they have something new, but it’s just their armies coming out of their guerrilla hills. Sweet women ambushed men always: at their cradles, in the kitchen, the bedroom. And at the graves of their children, the best place not to hear a plea for mercy.

“Ah well, you think I have a grievance against women. But I never hated them. And they’ll come out better people than men, you’ll see. But the truth is that only women have been able to make me unhappy, and they have done so from the cradle on. But most men can say that. And there’s nothing to be done.

“What a target I’ve given here. I know-I know-how irresistible it seems. But be careful. I'm a tricky storyteller; not just one of your vulnerable sensitive artists. I’ve taken my precautions. I’ve still got a few surprises left.

“But enough. Let me get to work. Let me begin and let me end.”

And that was Osano’s great novel, the book that would cinch the Nobel Prize, restore his greatness. I wish he had written it.

That he was a great con artist, as those pages showed, was irrelevant. Or maybe part of his genius. He wanted to share his inner worlds with the outside world, that was all. And now as his final joke he had given me his last pages. A joke because we were such different writers. He so generous. And, I, I realized now, so ungenerous.

I was never crazy about his work. And I don’t know whether I really loved him as a man. But I loved him as a writer. And so I decided, maybe for luck, maybe for strength, maybe just for the con, to use his pages as my own. I should have changed one line. Death has always surprised me.

Chapter 51

I have no history. That is the thing Janelle never understood. That I started with myself. That I had no grandparents or parents, uncles and aunts, friends of the family or cousins. That I had no childhood memories of a special house, or a special kitchen. That I had no city or town or village. That I began my history with myself and my brother, Arthur. And that when I extended myself with Valerie and the kids and her family and lived with her in a house in the city, when I became a parent and a husband, they became my reality and my salvation. But I don’t have to worry about Janelle anymore. I haven’t seen her for over two years and it’s three years since Osano died.

I can’t bear to remember about Artie, and when I even think of his name, I find tears coming from my eyes, but he is the only person I have ever wept for.

For the last two years I have sat in a working study in my home, reading, writing and being the perfect father and husband. Sometimes I go to dinner with friends, but I like to think that finally I have become serious, dedicated. That I will now live the life of a scholar. That my adventures are over. In short, I am praying that life holds no more surprises. Safely in this room, surrounded by my books of magic, Austen, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Joyce, Hemingway, Dreiser and finally, Osano, I feel the exhaustion of an animal who has escaped many times before reaching its haven.

Beneath me in the house below, the house that is now my history, I knew my wife was busy in the kitchen preparing Sunday dinner. My children were watching TV and playing cards in the den, and because I knew they were there, sadness was bearable in this room.

I read all Osano’s books again and he was a great writer at the beginning. I tried to analyze his failure in later life, his inability to finish his great novel. He started off amazed by the wonderment of the world around him and the people in it. He ended writing about the wonderment of himself. His concern, you could see, was to make a legend of his own life. He wrote to the world rather than to himself. In every line he screamed for attention to Osano rather than to his art. He wanted everyone to know how clever, how brilliant he was. He even made sure that the characters he created would not get credit for his brilliance. He was like a ventriloquist getting jealous of the laughs his dummy earned. And it was a shame. Yet I think of him as a great man. His terrifying humanity, his terrifying love of life, how brilliant he was and what fun to be with.

How could I say that he was a failed artist when his achievements, flawed though they were, seemed much greater than mine? I remembered going through his papers, as his literary executor, and the astonishment growing upon me when I could find no trace of his novel in progress. I could not believe he was such a fake, that he bad been pretending to write it all those years and that had just been fucking around with notes. Now I realized that he had been burned out. And that part of the joke had not been malicious or cunning, but simply a joke that delighted him. And the money.

He had written some of the most beautiful prose, created some of the most powerful ideas, of his generation, but he had delighted in being a scoundrel. I read all his notes, over five hundred pages of them on long yellow sheets. They were brilliant notes. But notes are nothing.

Knowing this made me think about myself. That I had written mortal books. But more unfortunate than Osano, I had tried to live without illusions and without risk. That I had none of his love for life and his faith in it. I thought about Osano’s saying that life was always trying to do you in. And maybe that’s why he lived so wildly, struggled so hard against the blows and the humiliations.

Long ago Jordan had pulled the trigger of the gun against his head. Osano had lived life fully and ended that life when there was no other choice. And I, I tried to escape wearing a magical conical hat. I thought about another thing Osano bad said: “Life is always getting in the way.” And I knew what he meant. The world to a writer is like one of those pale ghosts who with age become paler and paler, and maybe that’s the reason Osano gave up writing.

The snow was falling heavily outside the windows of my workroom. The whiteness covered the gray, bare limbs of the trees, the moldy brown and green of the winter lawn. If I were sentimental and so inclined, it would be easy to conjure up the faces of Osano and Artie drifting smilingly through those swirling snowflakes. But this I refused to do. I was neither so sentimental nor so self-indulgent nor so self-pitying. I could live without them. Their death would not diminish me, as they perhaps hoped it would do.

No, I was safe here in my workroom. Warm as toast. Safe from the raging wind that hurled the snowflakes against my window. I would not leave this room, this winter.

Outside, the roads were icy, my car could skid and death could mangle me. Viral poisonous colds could infect my spine and blood. Oh, there were countless dangers besides death. And I was not unaware of the spies death could infiltrate into the house and even into my own brain. I set up defenses against them.

I had charts posted around the walls of my room. Charts for my work, my salvation, my armor. I had researched a novel on the Roman Empire to retreat into the past. I had researched a novel in the twenty-fifth century if I wanted to hide in the future. Hundreds of books stacked up to read, to surround my brain.

I pulled a big soft chair up to windows so that I could watch the falling snow in comfort. The buzzer from the kitchen sang. Supper was ready. My family would be waiting for me, my wife and children. What the hell was going on with them after all this time? I watched the snow, a blizzard now. The outside world was completely white. The buzzer rang again, insistently. If I were alive, I would get up and go down into the cheerful dining room