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.”
“Do you want me to hang around?” I asked him.
Osano shook his head. “I have to go see my kid and take care of the other kids now that I’ve deprived them of their mother. But she’ll be out tomorrow, that bitch.”
Before I left him, I asked Osano one question. “When you threw her out that window, did you remember that it was really only two stories above the street?”
He grinned at me again. “Sure,” he said. “And besides, I never figured she’d sail that far. I tell you she’s a witch.”
All the New York newspapers had front-page stories the next day. Osano was still famous enough for that kind of treatment. At least Osano didn’t go to jail because Wendy didn’t press charges. She said that maybe she had stumbled and gone through the window. But that was the next day and the damage had been done. Osano was made to resign gracefully from the review and I resigned with him. One columnist, trying to be funny, speculated that if Osano won the Nobel Prize, he would be the first one to win who had ever thrown his wife out of the window. But the truth was that everybody knew that this little comedy would end all Oscano's hopes in that direction. You couldn’t give the sober respectable Nobel to a sordid character like Osano. And Osano didn’t help matters much when a little later he wrote a satirical article on the ten best ways to murder your wife.
But right now we both had a problem. I had to earn a living free lance without a job. Osano had to lie low someplace where the press couldn’t keep hounding him. I could solve
Osano's problem. I called Cully in Las Vegas and explained what had happened. I asked Cully if he could stash Osano in the Landau Hotel for a couple of weeks. I knew nobody would be looking for him there. And Osano was agreeable. He had never been to Las Vegas.
Chapter 26
With Osano safely stashed in Vegas I had to fix my other problem. I had no job, so I took on as much free- lance work as I could get. I did book reviews for Time magazine, the New York Times, and the new editor of the review gave me some work. But for me it was too nerve-racking. I never knew how much money was going to come in at any particular time. And so I decided that I would go all-out to finish my novel and hope that it would make a lot of money. For the next two years my life was very simple. I spent twelve to fifteen hours a day in my workroom. I went with my wife to the supermarket. I took my kids to Jones Beach in the summer, on Sundays, to give Valerie a rest. Sometimes at midnight I took Dexamyls to keep me awake so that I could work until three or four in the morning.
During that time I saw Eddie Lancer for dinner a few times in New York. Eddie had become primarily a screenwriter in Hollywood, and it was clear that he would no longer write novels. He enjoyed the life out there, the women, the easy money, and swore he would never write another novel again. Four of his screenplays had become hit movies and he was much in demand. He offered to get me a job working with him if I was willing to come out there, and I told him no. I couldn’t see myself working in the movie business. Because despite the funny stories Eddie told me, what was very clear was that being a writer in the movies was no fun. You were no longer an artist. You were just a translator of other people’s ideas.
During those two years I saw Osano about once a month. He had stayed a week in Vegas and then disappeared. Cully called me to complain that Osano had run away with his favorite girlfriend, a girl named Charlie Brown. Cully hadn’t been mad. He had just been astonished. He told me the girl was beautiful, was making a fortune in Vegas under his guidance and was living a great life, and she had abandoned all this to go with a fat old writer who not only had a beer gut but was the craziest guy Cully had ever seen.
I told Cully that that was another favor I owed him and if I saw the girl with Osano in New York, I would buy her a plane ticket back to Vegas.
“Just tell her to get in touch with me,” Cully said. “Tell her I miss her, tell her I love her, tell her anything you want. I just want to get her back. That girl is worth a fortune to me in Vegas.”
“OK,” I said. But when I met Osano in New York for dinner, he was always alone and he didn’t much look like anybody who could hold the affections of a young, beautiful girl with the advantages that Cully had described.
It’s funny when you hear of somebody’s success, of his fame. That fame, like a shooting star that has
