Fools die

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 appeared out of nowhere. But the way it happened to me was surprisingly tame.

I lived the life of a hermit for two years and at the end the book was finished and I turned it into my publisher and I forgot about it. A month later my editor called me into New York and told me they had sold my novel to a paperback house for reprint for over half a million dollars. I was stunned. I really couldn’t react. Everybody, my editor, my agent, Osano, Cully, had warned me that a book about kidnapping a child where the kidnapper is a hero would not appeal to a mass public. I expressed my astonishment to my editor, and he said, “You told such a great story that it doesn’t matter.”

When I went home to Valerie that night and told her what had happened, she seemed not to be surprised either. She merely said calmly, “We can buy a bigger house. The kids are getting bigger, they need more room.” And then life simply went on as before, except that Valerie found a house only ten minutes from her parents and we bought it and moved in.

By that time the novel was published. It made all the bestseller lists all over the country. It was a big best-seller, and yet it really didn’t seem to change my life in any way. In thinking about this I realized that it was because I had such few friends. There was Cully, there was Osano, there was Eddie Lancer and that was it. Of course, my brother, Artie, was terribly proud of me and wanted to give a big party until I told him he could give the party but I wouldn’t come. What really touched me was a review of the book by Osano which appeared on the front page of the literary review. He praised me for the right reasons and pointed out the true flaws. In his usual fashion he overrated the book because I was a friend of his. And then, of course, he went on and talked about himself and his novel in progress.

I called his apartment, hut there was no answer. I wrote him a letter and got a letter in return. We had dinner together in New York. He looked terrible, but he had a great-looking young blonde who rarely spoke but ate more than Osano and I put together. He introduced her as “Charlie Brown,” and I realized she was Cully’s girl, but I never gave her Cully’s message. Why should I hurt Osano?

There was one funny incident I always remembered. I told Valerie to go out shopping and buy herself some new clothes, whatever she wanted, and that I would mind the kids for that day. She went with some of her girlfriends and came back with an armful of packages.

I was trying to work on a new book hut really couldn’t get into it, so she showed me what she had bought. She unwrapped a package and showed me a new yellow dress.

“It cost ninety dollars,” Valerie said. “Can you imagine ninety dollars for a little summer dress?”

“It looks beautiful,” I said dutifully. She was holding it against her neck.

“You know,” she said, “I really couldn’t make up my mind whether I liked the yellow one or the green one. Then I decided on the yellow. I think I look better in the yellow, don’t you?”

I laughed. I said, “Honey, didn’t it occur to you that you could buy both?”

She looked at me stunned for a moment, and then she too laughed. And I said, “You can buy a yellow and a green and a blue and a red.”

And we both smiled at each other, and for the first time we realized, I think, that we had entered some sort of new life. But on the whole I found success not to be as interesting or as satisfying as I had thought it would be, So, as I usually did, I read up on the subject and I found that my case was not unusual, that in fact, many men who had fought all their lives to reach the top of their professions immediately celebrated by throwing themselves out of a high window.

It was wintertime, and I decided to take the whole family down to Puerto Rico for a vacation. It would be the first time in our married life that we had been able to afford to go away. My kids had never even been to summer camp.

We had a great time swimming, enjoying the heat, enjoying the strange streets and food, the delight of leaving the cold winter one morning and that afternoon being in the broiling sun, enjoying the balmy breezes. At night I took Valerie to the hotel gambling casino while the children dutifully sat in the great wicker chairs of the lobby, waiting for us. Every fifteen minutes or so Valerie would run down and see if they were OK, and finally she took them all to our suite of rooms and I gambled until four o’clock in the morning. Now that I was rich, naturally I was lucky, and I won a few thousand dollars and in a funny way I enjoyed winning in the casino more than the success and the huge sums of money I had made so far on the book.

When we got back home, there was an even greater surprise waiting for me. A movie studio, Malomar Films, had spent a hundred thousand dollars for the film rights to my book and another fifty thousand dollars plus expenses for me to go out to Hollywood to write the screenplay.

I talked it over with Valerie. I really didn’t want to write movie scripts. I told her I would sell the book but turn down the screen-writing contract. I thought she would be pleased, but instead, she said, “I think it would be good for you to go out there. I think it would be good for you to meet more people, to know more people. You know I worry about you sometimes because you’re so solitary.”

“We could all go out,” I said.

“No,” Valerie said. “I’m really happy here with my family and we can’t take the children out of school and I wouldn’t want them to grow up in California.”

Like everybody else in New York, Valerie regarded California as an exotic outpost of the United States filled with drug addicts, murderers and mad preachers who would shoot a Catholic on sight.

“The contract is for six months,” I said, “but I could work for a month and then go back and forth.”

“That sounds perfect,” Valerie said, “and besides, to tell you the truth we could use a rest from each other.”

That surprised me. “I don’t need a rest from you,” I said.

“But I need a rest from you,” Valerie said. “It’s nerve-racking to have a man working at home. Ask any woman. It just upsets the whole routine of my keeping house. I never could say anything before because you couldn’t afford an outside studio to work in, but now that you can, I wish you wouldn’t work at home anymore. You can rent a place and leave in the morning and come home at night. I’m sure you’d work better.”

I don’t know even now why her saying this offended me so much. I had been happy staying and working at home, and I was really hurt that she didn’t feel the same way, and I think it was this that made me decide to do the screenplay of my novel. It was a childish reaction. If she didn’t want me home, I’d leave and see how she liked it. At that time I swear that Hollywood was a nice place to read about, but I didn’t even want to visit it.

I realized a part of my life was over. In his review Osano had written, “All novelists, bad and good, are heroes. They fight alone, they must have the faith of saints. They are more often defeated than victorious and they are shown no mercy by a villainous world. Their strength fails (that’s why most novels have weak spots, are an easy target for attack); the troubles of the real world, the illness of children, the betrayal by friends, the treacheries of wives must all be brushed aside. They ignore their wounds and fight on, calling on miracles for fresh energy.”

I disapproved of his melodramatics, but it was true that I felt as if I were deserting the company of heroes. I didn’t give a damn if that was a typical writer’s sentimentality.