I wrote the article all right, and I caught him dead to rights. But Eddie Lancer turned it down. They wanted Osano to do a big political story, and they didn’t want him to get mad. So it was a day wasted. Except that it really wasn’t. Because two years later Osano called me up and offered me a job working for him as assistant on a new big literary review. Osano remembered me, had read the story the magazine killed, and he liked my guts, or so he said. He said it was because I was a good writer and I liked the same things about his work that he liked.
That first day we sat in his garden and watched his kids play tennis. I have to say right now he really loved his kids and he was perfect with them. Maybe because he was so much a child himself. Anyway, I got him talking about women and Women’s Lib and sex. And he threw in love with it. He was pretty funny. And though in his writings he was the great all-time left-winger, he could be pretty Texas chauvinistic. Talking about love, he said that once he fell in love with a girl he always stopped being jealous of his wife. Then he put on his big writer-statesman look and said, “No man is allowed to be jealous of more than one woman at a time– unless he’s Puerto Rican.” He felt he was allowed to make jokes about Puerto Ricans because his radical credentials were impeccable.
The housekeeper came out to yell at the children fighting for a game on the tennis court. She was a pretty bossy housekeeper and pretty snotty with the kids, as if she were their mother. She also was a handsome woman for her age, which was about Osano’s. For a moment I wondered. Especially when she gave us both a contemptuous look before she went back into the house.
I got him talking about women, which was easy. He took the cynic’s stance, which is always a great stance to take when you’re not crazy about some particular lady. He was very authoritative, as befitted a writer who had had more gossip written about him than any novelist since Hemingway.
“Listen, kid,” he said, “love is like the little red toy wagon you get for Christmas or your sixth birthday. It makes you deliriously happy and you just can’t leave it alone. But sooner or later the wheels come off. Then you leave it in a corner and forget it. Falling in love is great. Being in love is a disaster.”
Asking quietly and with the respect he thought due, I said, “What about women, do you think they feel the same way since they claim to think as men think?”
He flashed me a quick look of those surprisingly green eyes. He was on to my act. But it was OK. That was one of the great things about Osano even then. So he went on.
“Women’s Lib thinks we have power and control over their lives. In its way that’s as stupid as a guy’s thinking women are purer sexually than men. Women will fuck anybody, anytime, anyplace, except that they’re afraid of talk. Women’s Lib bullshits about the fraction of a percent of men who have power. Those guys are not men. They’re not even human. That’s whose place women have to take. They don’t know you have to kill to get there.”
I interrupted. “You’re one of those men.”
Osano nodded. “Yeah. And metaphorically I had to kill. What women will get is what men have. Which is shit, ulcers and heart attacks. Plus a lot of shitty jobs men hate to do. But I’m all for equality. I’ll kill those cunts then. Listen, I’m paying alimony to four healthy broads who can earn their own living. All because they are not equal.”
“Your affairs with women are almost as famous as your books,” I said. “How do you handle women?”
Osano grinned at me. “You’re not interested in how I write books.”
I said smooth as shit, “Your books speak for themselves.”
He gave me another long, thoughtful look, then went on.
“Never treat a woman too good. Women stick with drunks, gamblers, whoremasters and even beater-uppers. They can’t stand a sweet, good guy. Do you know why? They get bored. They don’t want to be happy. It’s boring.”
“Do you believe in being faithful?” I asked.
“Sure I do. Listen, being in love means making another person the central thing in your life. When that no longer exists, it’s not love anymore. It’s something else. Maybe something better, more practical. Love is basically an unfair, unstable, paranoid relationship. Men are worse than women at it. A woman can screw a hundred times, not feel like it once and he holds it against her. But it’s true that the first step downhill is when she doesn’t want to fuck when you do. Listen, there’s no excuse. Never mind the headaches. No shit. Once a broad starts turning you down in bed it’s all over. Start looking for your backer-upper. Never take an excuse.”
I asked him about orgasmic women who could have ten orgasms to a man’s one. He waved it aside.
“Women don’t come like men,” he said. “For them it’s a little phitt. Not like a guy’s. Guys really blow their brains with their nuts. Freud was close, but he missed it. Men really fuck. Women don’t.”
Well, he didn’t really believe that all the way, but I knew what he was saying. His style was exaggeration.
I switched him on to helicopters. He had this theory that in twenty years the auto would be obsolete, that everybody would have his own chopper. All it needed were some technical improvements. As when auto power steering and brakes enabled every woman to drive and put railroads out of business. “Yeah,” he said, “that’s obvious.” What was also obvious was that on this particular morning he was wound up on women. So he switched back.
“The young guys today are on the right track. They say to their broads, sure you can fuck anybody you want, I’ll still love you. They are so full of shit. Listen, any guy who knows a broad will fuck strangers thinks of her as a geek.”
I was offended by the comparison and astonished. The great Osano, whose writings women were particularly crazy about. The most brilliant mind in American letters. The most open mind. Either I was missing his 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.”