I called. Pam was trying to make some apology for having gotten me into such a mess. I told her it was no mess, and did she feel better now that she knew the truth? Pam giggled and said, “Christ, I think I’d rather it were a girlfriend.” She was cheerful again. And now our roles were reversed. Early that day I had pitied her, she was the person in terrible danger and I was the one who would rescue or try to help her. Now she seemed to think it was unfair that the roles were reversed. That was what the apology was about. I told her not to worry.
Pam stumbled over what she wanted to say next. “Merlyn, you didn’t really mean it, about your mother, that you won’t see her?”
“Does Artie believe me?” I asked her.
“He says he always knew it,” Pam said. “He wouldn’t have told you until he’d softened you up. Except for me causing the trouble. He was teed off at me for bringing it all on.”
I laughed. “See,” I said, “it started off as a bad day for you and now it’s a bad day for him. He’s the injured party. Better him than you.”
“Sure,” Pam said. “Listen, I’m sorry for you, really.”
“It has nothing at all to do with me,” I said. And Pam said OK and thanks and hung up.
Valerie was waiting for me now. She was watching me intently. She’d been briefed by Pam and maybe even by Artie on how to handle this, and she was being careful. But I guess she hadn’t really grasped it. She and Pam were really good women, but they didn’t understand. Both their parents had made trouble and objections about them marrying orphans with no traceable lineage. I could imagine the horror stories told about similar cases. What if there had been insanity or degeneracy in our family? Or black blood or Jewish blood or Protestant blood, all that fucking shit. Well, now here was a nice piece of evidence turned up when it was no longer needed. I could figure out that Pam and Valerie were not too happy about Artie’s romanticism, his digging up the lost link of a mother.
“Do you want her here to the house so that she can see the children?” Valerie asked.
“No,” I said.
Valerie looked troubled and a little terrified. I could see how she was thinking what if her children rejected her someday.
“She’s your mother,” Valerie said. “She must have had a very unhappy life.”
“Do you know what the word ‘orphan’ means?” I said. “Have you looked it up in the dictionary? It means a child who has lost both parents through death. Or a young animal that has been deserted or has lost its mother. Which one do you want?”
“OK,” Valerie said. She looked terrified. She went to look in on the kids and then went into our bedroom. I could hear her going into the bathroom and preparing for bed. I stayed up late reading and making notes, and when I went to bed, she was sound asleep.
It was all over in a couple of months. Artie called me up one day and told me his mother had disappeared again. We arranged to meet in the city and have dinner together so that we could talk alone. We could never talk about it with our wives present, as if it were too shameful for their knowledge. Artie seemed cheerful. He told me she had left a note. He told me that she drank a lot and always wanted to go to bars and pick up men. That she was a middle-aged floozy but that he liked her. He had made her stop drinking, he had bought her new clothes, he had rented her a nicely furnished apartment, given her an allowance. She had told him everything that had happened to her. It hadn’t really been her fault. I stopped him there. I didn’t want to hear about that.
“Are you going to look for her again?” I asked him.
Artie smiled his sad, beautiful smile. “No,” he said. “You know, I was a pain in the ass to her even now. She really didn’t like having me around. At first, when I found her, she played the role I wanted her to play, I think out of a sense of guilt that maybe she could make things up to me by letting me take care of her. But she really didn’t like it. She even made a pass at me one day, I think just to get some excitement.” He laughed. “I wanted her to come to the house, but she never would. It’s just as well.”
“How did Pam take the whole business?” I asked.
Artie laughed out loud. “Jesus, she was even jealous of my mother. When I told her it was all over, you should have seen the look of relief on her face. One thing I have to say for you, brother, you took the news without cracking a muscle.”
“Because I don’t give a shit one way or the other,” I said.
“Yeah,” Artie said. “I know. It doesn’t matter. I don’t think you would have liked her.”
– -
Six months later Artie had a heart attack. It was a mild one, but he was in the hospital for weeks and off from work another month. I went to see him in the hospital every day, and he kept insisting that it had been some sort of indigestion, that it was a borderline case. I went down to the library and read everything I could about heart attacks. I found out that his reaction was a common one with heart attack victims and that sometimes they were right. But Pam was panic-stricken. When Artie came out of the hospital, she put him on a strict diet, threw all the cigarettes out of the house and stopped smoking so that Artie could quit. It was hard for him, but he did. And maybe the heart attack did scare him because now he took care of himself. He took the long walks the doctors prescribed, ate carefully and never touched tobacco. Six months later he looked better than he had ever looked in his life and Pam and I stopped giving each other panicky looks whenever he was out of the room. “Thank God, he’s stopped smoking,” Pam said. “He was up to three packs a day. That’s what did him in.”
– -
I nodded, but I didn’t believe it. I always believed it was that two months he spent trying to claim his mother that did him in.
And as soon as Artie was OK, I got into trouble. I lost my job on the literary review. Not through any fault of mine but because Osano got fired and as his right-hand man I was fired with him.
Osano had weathered all the storms. His contempt of the most powerful literary circles in the country, the political intelligentsia, the culture fanatics, the liberals, the conservatives, Women’s Liberation, the radicals, his sexual escapades, his gambling on sports, his use of his position to lobby for the Nobel Prize. Plus a nonfiction book he published in defense of pornography, not for its redeeming social value, but as ant elitist pleasure of the poor in intellect. For all these things the publishers would have liked to fire him, but the circulation of the review had doubled since he became editor.
By this time I was making good money. I wrote a lot of Osano's articles for him. I could imitate his style pretty well, and he would start me off with a fifteen-minute harangue on how he felt about a particular subject, always brilliantly crazy. It was easy for me to write the article based on his fifteen minutes of ranting. Then he’d go over and put in a few of his masterful touches and we’d split the money. Just half his money was twice what I got paid for an article.
Even that didn’t get us fired. It was his ex-wife Wendy who did us in. Though that’s maybe unfair; Osano did us in, Wendy handed him the knife.
Osano had spent four weeks in Hollywood while I ran the review for him. He was completing some sort of movie deal, and during the four weeks we used a courier to fly out and give him review articles to OK before I ran it. When Osano finally came back to New York, he gave a party for all his friends to celebrate his home-coming and the big chunk of money he had earned in Hollywood.