And then he waited for me to react. He was grinning, the sneaky green eyes challenging. I knew he was having fun just laying it on, but I also knew he meant it a little and I was hurt.
There were a lot of things I wanted to say. I wanted to tell him how it was growing up an orphan. That I had missed what was basic, the core of almost every human being’s experience.
That I had no family, no social antennae, nothing to bind myself to the rest of the world. I had only my brother, Artie. When people talked about life, I couldn’t really grasp what they meant until after I had married Vallie. That was why I had volunteered to fight in the war. I had understood that war was another universal experience, and I hadn’t wanted to be left out of it. And I had been right. The war had been my family, no matter how dumb that sounds. I was glad now I hadn’t missed it. And what Osano missed or didn’t bother saying because he assumed I knew it was that it wasn’t that easy to exercise control over your own life. And what he couldn’t know was that the coin of happiness was a currency I could never understand. I had spent most of my early life being unhappy purely because of external circumstance. I had become relatively happy again because of external circumstance. Marrying Valerie, having kids, having a skill or art or the ability to produce written matter that earned me a living made me happy. It was a controlled happiness built on what I had gained from a dead loss. And so, very valuable to me. I knew I lived a limited life, what seemed to be a life that was bare, bourgeois. That I had very few friends, no sociability, little interest in success. I just wanted to make it through life, or so I thought.
And Osano, watching me, was still smiling. “But you’re the toughest son of a bitch I’ve ever seen. You never let anybody get near you. You never let anybody know what you really think.”
At this I had to protest. “Listen, you ask me my opinion about anything and I’ll give it to you. Don’t even ask. Your last book was a piece of shit, and you run this review like a lunatic.”
Osano laughed. “I don’t mean that kind of stuff. I never said you weren’t honest. But let it go. You’ll know what I’m talking about someday. Especially if you start chasing broads and wind up with somebody like Wendy.”
– -
Wendy came around to the review offices once in a while. She was a striking brunette with crazy eyes and a body loaded with sexual energy. She was very bright, and Osano would give her books to review. She was the only one of his ex-wives who was not afraid of him, and she had made his life miserable ever since they were divorced. When he fell behind in his alimony payments, she went to court to get her child support and alimony raised. She had taken a twenty-year-old writer into her apartment and supported him. The writer was heavy on drugs, and Osano worried about what he might do to the kids.
Osano told stories about their marriage that were to me incredible. That once, going to a party, they had gotten into the elevator and Wendy refused to tell him the floor the party was on simply because they had quarreled. He became so infuriated that he had started to choke her to make her tell him, playing a game, as he called it, of “choke the chicken.” A game that was his fondest memory of the marriage. Her face turning black, she shook her head, still refusing to answer his question about where the party was being held. He had to release her. He knew she was crazier than he was.
Sometimes when they had minor arguments, she would call the police to have him thrown out of the apartment and the police would come and be stunned by her unreasonableness. They would see Osano’s clothes scissored to pieces on the floor. She admitted doing it, but that didn’t give Osano a right to hit her. What she left out was that she had sat on the pile of scissored suits and shirts and ties and masturbated over them with a vibrator.
And Osano had stories to tell about the vibrator. She had gone to a psychiatrist because she could not achieve orgasms. After six months she had admitted to Osano that the psychiatrist was fucking her as part of the therapy. Osano wasn’t jealous; by this time he really loathed her, “loathe” he said, “not hate. There’s a difference.”
But Osano would get furious every time he got the bill from the psychiatrist and he would rage to her, “I pay a guy a hundred dollars a week to fuck my wife and they call that modern medicine?” He told the story when his wife gave a cocktail party, and she was so mad that she stopped going to the psychiatrist and bought a vibrator. Every evening before dinner she locked herself into the bedroom to shut out the kids and masturbated with the machine. She always achieved orgasm. But she laid down the strict rule that she was never to be disturbed during that hour, by the children or her husband. The whole family, even the children, referred to it as “The Happy Hour.”
What made Osano finally leave her, as he told the story, was when she started carrying on about how F. Scott Fitzgerald had stolen all his best stuff from his wife, Zelda. That she would have become a great novelist if her husband had not done this. Osano grabbed her by the hair of her head and shoved her nose into The Great Gatsby.
“Read this, you dumb cunt,” he said. “Read ten sentences, then read his wife’s book. Then come and tell me that shit.”
She read both and came back to Osano and told him the same thing. He punched her in the face and blackened both her eyes and then left for good.
Just recently Wendy had won another infuriating victory over Osano. He knew she was giving the child-support payments to her young lover. But one day his daughter came to him and asked for money for clothes. She explained that her gynecologist had told her not to wear jeans anymore because of a vaginal infection, and when she had asked her mother for money for dresses, her mother said, “Ask your father.” This was after they had been divorced for five years.
To avoid an argument, Osano gave his daughter’s support money to her directly. Wendy didn’t object. But after a year she took Osano to court for the year’s money. The daughter testified for her father. Osano had been sure he would win when the judge knew all the circumstances. But the judge told him sternly not only to pay the money directly to the mother but also to pay the support money for the past year in a lump sum. So in effect he paid twice.
Wendy was so delighted with her victory that she tried to be friendly with him afterward. In front of their children he brushed off her affectionate advances and said coldly, “You are the worst cunt I’ve ever seen.” The next time Wendy came around to the review he refused her entrance to his office and cut off all the work he had given her. And what amazed him was that she couldn’t understand why he loathed her. She raged about him to her friends and spread the word that he had never satisfied her in bed, that he couldn’t get it up. That he was a repressed homosexual who really liked little boys. She tried to keep him from having the kids for the summer, but Osano won that battle. Then he published a maliciously witty short story about her in a national magazine. Maybe he couldn’t handle her in life, but in fiction he painted a truly terrible portrait, and since everybody in the literary world of New York knew her, she was recognized immediately. She was crushed, as much as it was possible for her to be, and she left Osano alone after that. But she rankled in him like some poison. He couldn’t bear to think about her without his face flushing and his eyes going a little crazy.