point or he was full of shit. I saw his housekeeper slapping some of the little kids around. I said, “You sure give your housekeeper a lot of authority.”
Now he was so sharp that he caught everything without even trying. He knew exactly how I felt about what he’d been saying. Maybe that’s why he told me the truth, the whole story about his housekeeper. Just to needle me.
“She was my first wife,” he said. “She’s the mother of my three oldest kids.”
He laughed when he saw the look on my face. “No, I don’t screw her. And we get along fine. I pay her a damn good salary but no alimony. She’s the one wife I don’t pay alimony.”
He obviously wanted me to ask why not. I did.
“Because when I wrote my first book and got rich, it went to her head. She was jealous of me being famous and getting a lot of attention. She wanted attention. So some young guy, one of the admirers of my work, gave her the business, and she fell for it. She was five years older than him, but she was always a sexy broad. She really fell in love, I’ll give her that. What she didn’t realize was that he was fucking her just to put the great novelist Osano down. So she asked for a divorce and half the money my book made. That was OK with me. She wanted the kids, but I didn’t want my kids around that creep she was in love with. So I told her when she married the guy, she’d get the kids. Well, he fucked her brains out for two years and blew all her dough. She forgot about her kids. She was a young broad again. Sure, she came to see them a lot, but she was busy traveling all over the world on my dough and chewing the young guy’s cock to shreds. When the money runs out, he takes off. She comes back and wants the kids. But by now she has no case. She deserted them for two years. She puts on a big scene how she can’t live without them. So I gave her a job as a housekeeper.”
I said coolly, “That’s maybe the worst thing I ever heard of.”
The startling green eyes flashed for a moment. But then he smiled and said musingly, “I guess it looks that way. But put yourself in my place. I love having my kids around me. How come the father never gets the kids? What kind of bullshit is that? Do you know men never recover from that bullshit? The wife gets tired of being married, so men lose their kids. And men stand still for it because they got their balls chopped off. Well, I didn’t stand still for it. I kept the kids and got married again right away. And when that wife started pulling bullshit, I got rid of her too.”
I said quietly, “How about her children? How do they feel about their mother being a housekeeper?”
The green eyes flashed again. “Oh, shit. I don’t put her down. She’s only my housekeeper between wives; otherwise she’s more like a free-lance governess. She has her own house. I’m her landlord. Listen, I thought of giving her more dough, of buying her a house and making her independent. But she’s a dizzy cunt like all of them. She’d become obnoxsous again. She’d go down the drain. Which is OK, but she’d make more trouble for me and I’ve got books to write. So I control her with money. She has a damn good living from me. And she knows if she gets out of line, she’s out on her ass and scratching to make a living. It works out.”
“Could it be you’re antiwoman?” I said, smiling.
He laughed. “You say that to a guy who’s been married four times, he doesn’t even have to deny it. But OK. I’m really anti-Women’s Lib in one sense. Because right now most women are just full of shit. Maybe it’s not their fault. Listen, any broad who doesn’t want to fuck two days in a row, get rid of her. Unless she has to go to the hospital in an ambulance. Even if she has forty stitches in her cunt. I don’t care whether she enjoys it or not. Sometimes I don’t enjoy it and I do it and I have to get a hard-on. That’s your job if you love somebody, you gotta fuck their brains out. Jesus, I don’t know why I keep getting married. I swore I wouldn’t do it anymore, but I always get conned. I always believe it’s not getting married that makes them unhappy. They are so full of shit.”
“With the proper conditioning don’t you think women can become equal?”
Osano shook his head. “They forget they age worse than men. A guy at fifty can get a lot of young broads. A broad of fifty finds it rough. Sure, when they get political power, they’ll pass a law so that men of forty or fifty get operated on to look older and equal things out. That’s how democracy works. That’s full of shit too. Listen, women have it good. They shouldn’t complain.
“In the old days they didn’t know they had union rights. They couldn’t be fired no matter how lousy a job they did. Lousy in bed. Lousy in the kitchen. And who ever had fun with his wife after a couple of years? And if he did, she was a cunt. And now they want to be equal. Let me at ‘em. I’ll give them equality. I know what I’m talking about; I've been married four times. And it cost me every penny I made.”
Osano really hated women that day. A month later I picked up the morning paper and read that he’d married for the fifth time. An actress in a little theater group. She was half his age. So much for the common sense of America ’s foremost man of letters. I never dreamed that I would be working for him someday and be with him until he died, miraculously a bachelor but still in love with a woman, with women.
I caught it that day through all the bullshit. He was crazy about women. That was his weakness, and he hated it.
Chapter 13
I was finally ready for my trip to Las Vegas to see Cully again. It would be the first time in over three years, three years since Jordan had blown himself away in his room, a four-hundred-grand winner.
We had kept in touch, Cully and I. He phoned me a couple of times a month and sent Christmas presents for me and my wife and kids, stuff I recognized that came from the Xanadu Hotel gift shop, where I knew he got them for a fraction of their selling price or, knowing Cully, even for nothing. But still, it was nice of him to do it. I had told Value about Cully but never told her about Jordan.
I knew Cully had a good job with the hotel because hi~ secretary answered his phone with “Assistant to the president.” And I wondered how in a few years he had managed to climb so high. His telephone voice and manner of speaking had changed; he spoke in a lower tone; he was more sincere, more polite, warmer. An actor playing a different part. Over the phone it would be just idle chitchat and gossip about big winners and big losers and funny stories about the characters staying in the hotel. But never anything about himself. Eventually one of us would mention Jordan, usually near the end of the call, or maybe the mention of Jordan would end the call. He was our touchstone.
Value packed my suitcase. I was going over the weekend so I would only have to miss a day’s work at my Army Reserve job. And in the far-off distant future, which I smelled, the magazine story would give me the cover for the cops about why I went to Vegas.
The kids were in bed while Vallie was packing my bag because I was leaving early the next morning. She gave me a little smile. “God, it was terrible the last time you went. I thought you wouldn’t come back.”
“I just had to get away then,” I said. “Things were going bad.”
“Everything’s changed since,” Vallie said musingly. “Three years ago we didn’t have money at all. Gee, we were so broke I had to ask my father for some money and I was afraid you’d find out. And you acted as if you didn’t love me anymore. That trip changed everything. You were different when you came back. You weren’t mad at me anymore and you were more patient with the kids. And you got work with the magazines.”
I smiled at her. “Remember, I came back a winner. A few extra grand. Maybe if I’d come back a loser, it would have been a whole different story.”
Vallie snapped the suitcase shut. “No,” she said. “You were different. You were happier, happier with me and the kids.”
“I found out what I was missing,” I said.
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “With all those beautiful hookers in Vegas.”
“They cost too much,” I said. “I needed my money to gamble.”
It was all kidding around, but part of it was serious. If I told her the truth, that I never looked at another woman, she wouldn’t believe me. But I could give good reasons. I had felt so much guilt about being such a lousy husband and father who couldn’t give his family anything, who couldn’t even make a decent living for them, that I couldn’t add to that guilt by being unfaithful to her. And the overriding fact was that we were so lucky in bed together. She was really all I wanted, perfect for me. I thought I was for her.
“Are you going to do some work tonight?” she asked. She was really asking if we were going to make love first so that she could get ready. Then, after we’d made love, usually I would get up to work on my writing and she
