The truth was that over the last ten years he had lost a great deal of his popular success and his literary reputation. He had published too many books done off the top of his head, made too many enemies with the high-handed way he ran the review. Even when he did some ass kissing by praising powerful literary figures, he did it with such arrogance and condescension, did it with himself mixed up with it in some way (as his Einstein article had been as much about himself as about Einstein) that he made enemies of the people he was stroking. He wrote one line that really caused an uproar. He said the huge difference between French literature of the nineteenth century and English literature was that French writers had plenty of sex and the English didn’t. Our review clientele boiled with rage.
On top of this his personal behavior was scandalous. The publishers of the review had learned of the airplane incident, and it had leaked into the gossip columns. On one of his lectures at a California college he met a young nineteen-year-old literary student who looked more like a cheerleader or starlet than a lover of books, which she really was. He brought her to New York to live with him. She lasted about six months, but during that time he took her to all the literary parties. Osano was in his middle fifties, not yet gray but definitely paunchy. When you saw them together, you got a little uncomfortable. Especially when Osano was drunk and she had to carry him home. Plus he was drinking while he was working in the office. Plus he was cheating on his nineteen-year-old girlfriend with a forty-year-old female novelist who had just published a best-seller. The book wasn’t really that good, but Osano wrote a full-page essay in the review hailing her as a future great of American literature.
And he did one thing I really hated. He would give a quote to any friend who asked. So you saw novels coming out that were lousy but with a quote from Osano saying something like: “This is the finest Southern novel since Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness.” Or, “A shocking book that will dismay you,” which was kind of sly because he was trying to play both ends against the middle, doing his friend the favor and yet trying to warn the reader off the book with an ambiguous quote.
– -
It was easy for me to see that he was coming apart in some way. I thought maybe he was going crazy. But I didn’t know from what. His face looked unhealthy, puffy; his green eyes had a glitter that was not really normal. And there was something wrong with his walk, a hitch in his stride or a little waver to the left sometimes. I worried about him. Because despite my disapproval of his writings, his striving for the Nobel with all his cutthroat maneuvers, his trying to screw every dame he came into contact with, I had an affection for him. He would talk to me about the novel I was working on, encourage me, give me advice, try to lend me money though I knew he was in hock up to his ears and spent money at an enormous rate supporting his five ex-wives and eight or nine children. I was awestricken by the amount of work he published, flawed though it was. He always appeared in one of the monthlies, sometimes in two or three; every year he published a nonfiction book on some subject the publishers thought was “hot.” He edited the review and did a long essay for it every week. He did some movie work. He earned enormous sums, but he was always broke. And I knew he owed a fortune. Not only from borrowing money but drawing advances on future books. I mentioned this to him, that he was digging a hole he’d never get out of, but he just waved the idea away impatiently.
“I’ve got my ace in the hole,” he said. “I got the big novel nearly finished. Another year maybe. And then I’ll be rich again. And then on to Scandinavia for the Nobel Prize. Think of all those big blond broads we can fuck.” He always included me on the trip to the Nobel.
The biggest fights we had were when he’d ask me about what I thought of one of his essays on literature in general. And I would infuriate him with my by now familiar line that I was just a storyteller. “You’re an artist with divine inspiration,” I’d tell him. “You’re the intellectual, you’ve got a fucking brain that could squirt out enough bullshit for a hundred courses on modem literature. I’m just a safecracker. I put my ear to the wall and wait to hear the tumblers fall in place.”
“You and your safecracker bullshit,” Osano said. “You’re just reacting away from me. You have ideas. You’re a real artist. But you like the idea of being a magician, a trickster, that you can control everything, what you write, your life in general, that you can beat all the traps. That’s how you operate.”
“You have the wrong idea of a magician,” I told him. “A magician does magic. That’s all.”
“And you think that’s enough?” Osano asked. He had a slightly sad smile on his face.
“It’s enough for me,” I said.
Osano nodded his head. “You know, I was a great magician once, you read my first book. All magic, right?”
I was glad that I could agree. I had an affection for that book. “Pure magic,” I said.
“But it wasn’t enough,” Osano said. “Not for me.”
Then too bad for you, I thought. And he seemed to read my mind. “No, not how you think,” he said. “I just couldn’t do it again because I don’t want to do it or I can’t do it maybe. I wasn’t a magician any more after that book. I became a writer.”
I shrugged a little unsympathetically, I guess. Osano saw it and said, “And my life went to shit, but you can see that. I envy you your life. Everything is under control. You don’t drink, you don’t smoke, you don’t chase broads. You just write and gamble and play the good father and husband. You’re a very unflashy magician, Merlyn. You’re a very safe magician. A safe life, safe books; you’ve made despair disappear.”
He was pissed off at me. He thought he was driving into the bone. He didn't know he was full of shit. And I didn’t mind, that meant my magic was working. That was all he could see, and that was fine with me. He thought I had my life under control, that I didn’t stiffer or permit myself to, that I didn’t feel the bouts of loneliness that drove him on to different women, to booze, to his snorts of cocaine. Two things he didn’t realize. That he was suffering because he was actually going crazy, not suffering. The other was that everybody else in the world suffered and was lonely and made the best of it. That it was no big deal. In fact, you could say that life itself wasn’t a big deal, never mind his fucking literature.
– -
And then suddenly I had troubles from an unexpected quarter. One day at the review I got a call from Artie’s wife, Pam. She said she wanted to see me about something important, and she wanted to see me without Artie. Could I come over right away? I felt a real panic. In the back of my mind I was always worried about Artie. He was really frail and always looked tired. His fine-boned handsomeness showed stress more clearly than most. I was so panicky I begged her to tell me what it was over the phone, but she wouldn’t. She did tell me that there was nothing physically wrong, no medical reports of doom. It was a personal problem she and Artie were having, and she needed my help.