Hating Olivia: A Love Story (15 page)
Every page of those books spoke to me in a different way. There was fodder for the body, the mind, the soul. Since I had no money to travel, they transported me around the world. And, if nothing else, they served as a buffer against the purposelessness of my existence—of existence, period. After sucking up
Genius and Lust,
Norman Mailer’s brilliant reinterpretation of Henry Miller’s stuff, I summoned the brass to write the celebrated author my observations and comments. Some months later, to my astonishment, a gracious reply arrived from the great man himself, praising everything from my critical insights to the power of my writing, and informing me that in the interests of tweaking the master he was taking it upon himself to forward a copy of my missive to Miller out in sunny California, since old Henry was not entirely happy with what had been written about him….
I read the slip of paper again and again to make sure I wasn’t dreaming or imagining things. I carried it around in my pocket and pulled it out several times a day. So there—I’d show ‘em all! A letter from one of the world’s great minds! If that didn’t prove something, then nothing would! For days I walked on ether. It turned out I
was
some kind of writer after all! Maybe only a scribbler of letters, true, but I’d take it—it was better than nothing. An acknowledgment from a bona fide genius meant everything to someone floating around like a turd at the bottom of the commode. And maybe, just maybe, I could find my way out of this morass yet.
When my eyes needed a rest, I sat back and checked out the ass. There was always plenty of it, mostly succulent teenagers, around that swimming pool. For a short while at least, the devils were at bay. There’s something in the summer sun that heals. All a guy needed was a little hope….
But by the week my bank account dwindled: $1,000 … $850 … $500. Sometimes, standing in line to make another withdrawal at the savings and loan, I would look into the bovine eyes of the teller, the same featureless woman who happened to be tending the window every time I came in, and I would wonder what she was thinking, what she figured this tanned and relaxed young good-for-nothing was up to when every other man in the world was at his job, or who it was he owed…. But she never asked, and I never let on.
T
hen Livy and I take a turn for the worse. A simple disagreement will suddenly flare into something far more vehement. Worse, I never quite know when an explosion is coming, or what happened to set it off. Once the fuse is lit, there’s no turning back—the eruption has to follow its natural course.
If madness is the complete loss of rational control, then Livy and I had taken our first steps across the Rubicon. It begins when she tosses the contents of a glass into my face—maybe during a tiff over the bills, or the fact that we still aren’t married and she’s not pregnant. Next thing I know, I’m trailing her, screaming like a maniac, from one room to the next while she overturns tables and chairs, smashes glass, hurls dishes and records, topples bookcases and shelves. In short, she destroys everything that lies in her path, and I watch with perverse fascination, unable to stop her, unable to do anything but try to feebly defend myself when she accuses
me of every sin under the sun—shiftlessness, stupidity, unfaithfulness, evil. She slaps me in the face, and I’ve grown deranged enough to slap her back…. She calls me a vile name and I call her a rotten, no-good cunt…. She tells me to go back to my prosecutor’s wife; I tell her to go back to her mother, or better yet, her
old man….
She orders me out of the apartment forever; she never wants to see my face again for as long as she lives; she couldn’t care less if I did myself in right there in front of her…. Like a loon I laugh in her face. With what’s left of my pride I take her up on her invitation. I blow out of the place, slamming the door so hard the walls vibrate…. On the front steps I stop. I think it over. I turn and walk back up the stairs to give her another piece of my mind, but she’s locked and bolted the door. I kick at the thing, left-hook it, right-jab it, head-butt it, spit at it for good measure.
Let me in, you fucking whore! No? All right then, have it your way, if that’s the way you want it! I’m gone, I’m out of here, I’m history! You can take your pathetic life and jam it up your cunt, you castrating bitch!
In a blind rage I crawl the streets for hours on end, my heart trying to blast its way out of my rib cage, my soul roiling with the fury of the misunderstood. What have I done but adore the woman? Nothing!
Then what the fuck more does she want from me?
Since my pockets are empty and I don’t have car keys, I’m utterly stranded. There’s nowhere in the whole wide world worse for your misery than the antiseptic lanes of suburbia. Better in your wretchedness to face the mean streets of the ghetto than the sterility of the split-level, the two-car garage, and the perfectly manicured lawn, where the cold-fish eyes regard your forlorn, starving, unshaven face with suspicion, even downright loathing….
For a long time I sit on a curbside bench on one of those side streets, waiting. But for what? For the next bus? To decide once and for all whether to check out of this cruel world? Occasionally a cleancut
pedestrian happens by, glances at me, shakes his head, passes on. No, the ultimate question is whether to light another cigarette….
Evening steals in. Stirring myself from my trance, I get up and walk again. Up on the boulevard I search for any open door—a lunch counter, a diner, a shot-and-beer joint. Hours pass before last call is announced or they tell me to beat it like any common tramp. Inside my head the voices rage.
Is she insane—or is it me who’s over the edge?
Maybe, if I just married her, everything would be different. Or if I gave her a baby; everywhere we go she fawns over the little bastards. If only I were more docile … more aggressive … more this, more that.
If only I were somebody else.
Back on the street my stomach cries from hunger. The storefronts—five and dimes, Laundromats, travel agencies—seem to mock my longings to be elsewhere—Tangier or Timbuktu or Tibet. They’ve rolled up the sidewalks, all right, and aside from the patrol car cruising to ensure the public safety, there isn’t a soul to be seen—after all, tomorrow is a workday.
Sometimes, if I’ve got a few coins on me, I mount a bus and ride in the backseat until the driver tells me that I’ve missed my stop or to move my ass along. Other times I succeed in getting farther without knowing how I’ve done it, halfway to Baltimore or Pittsburgh, say, and have to find my way back somehow in the middle of the night….
Always, in the end, when I’m too blasted to stick out my thumb and hitch one more ride, there’s nowhere left to go. I tap softly upon the door of 5C and hear soft, ominous footsteps. She throws back the bolt, turns the lock, and scurries back into the bedroom before I cross the threshold. I attack the refrigerator and gobble up anything in there, though these days it’s usually not much. Then I buck myself up for the inevitable.
The bedroom is awash in the glaucous light from the streetlamps
and the TV repair shop’s iridescent sign across the way. Even from the doorway I can tell that her eyes are open, angry, pained. On the table at her elbow are empty drug vials and liquor bottles.
I sit on the edge of the bed.
We should talk.
You don’t love me. If you did, you wouldn’t do to me what you do.
That’s not true.
We can’t stay together.
I know.
You’re no good. You’ve always been no good. You’re nothing but a piece of shit.
Probably you’re right. You’re destroying my life.
I’ll try to do better. Honest to God I will. I promise.
Why? What’s the point?
I don’t know. I’m just so goddamn tired…. Where have you been? Where did you go? Everywhere. Nowhere. What are we going to do? Try again tomorrow, I guess.
It grinds on into the early hours—three, four, five o’clock, when the refracted rays of the rising sun wrap themselves around the gauzy drapes. There’s no point to this talk, to any of it, but every inch has to be covered, every last tangent, until exhaustion is all that’s left.
When we can’t thrash it out anymore, I crawl in beside her. Strip off her nightgown. Stick it to her good.
Even though we were staring down yet another collapse of our meager finances, Livy decided that we had to have a dog. The notion seemed to grow out of her longing for a baby, though she denied it. It seemed to me the lesser of two evils—no question a canine would be easier to care for than a human being. Maybe a mutt would make things better between us.
She insisted that we drive out to the pound, in the event there were any cuddly pooches we might rescue from the gas chamber. The experience was a depressing disappointment. I’m not sure what Livy expected to find in those awful pens, but it certainly couldn’t have been the mangy, feces-covered creatures that howled at us so piteously from behind the chain-link. When the attendant offered us a broken-down German shepherd and an ugly wire-haired mixed breed scheduled for execution in a matter of days, Livy turned and hotfooted it back to the car.
We sat there contemplating what to do next. “You and me, we’re doomed,” she said.
“What are you talking about?”
“You idiot. Haven’t you noticed that everything we touch turns to…. ” She shook her head. “It’s just a run of bad luck.”
“No. It’s me. It’s my whole life. It’s us.”
“Come on, Liv, you’re being fucking melodramatic.”
“Then why does this always happen?”
“What? Doomed mutts? They were doomed before we got here. We can’t rescue every doomed mutt on the planet, baby. But if you think we should go back and save those two, then I say let’s go back and save ‘em.”
She shook her head violently. “We can’t.”
“Sure we can.”
“No. It’s too late.”
“I don’t get it, Liv.”
“Drive. Let’s just get the hell out of here!”
Doomed.
That was a new one on me. The idea of being doomed did not appeal, but I had to admit that maybe she had something there. Nevertheless, every time we went near a mall, Livy made us scour the pet stores with their yipping puppies, cackling jungle birds, and scurrying rodents until she found what she wanted—a pocket-sized gray-and-white dappled Shih Tzu that looked out at us from its cage with pleading eyes.
“That one!” she gasped. The dog seemed to be pointing back at us with its paw. Within seconds a salesman had it sprung free. The thing squealed with delight and frolicked at our feet.
“He
likes
us, Max,” Livy cooed.
“All dogs like you if they think you’re taking them home, Liv.”
“Tough to resist, eh?” said the salesman, eyeing Livy as she stooped to let the dog lick her nose. “A real heartbreaker, this guy is…. ”
He grinned at me, assuming that as the man of the couple, I was the one with the money. If I could have gotten away with it, I would have decked him.
Livy, who’d never in her life owned an animal of any kind,
wasn’t quite sure what to do. She daintily touched the Shih Tzu with a mixture of awe and fear.
“You sure about this?” I questioned her out of the side of my mouth. “Maybe we ought to think this over some…. ”
“Oh, Max—you have to take chances in life!”
“Tell you what,” the clerk butted in. “List on that pup is three-fifty, but I’ll let you have him at two-fifty—today only, AKC papers and all. You won’t find a better deal anywhere. Look at him—the little fella is dying to go with you. You’re not gonna turn down that mug, are you?”
If there was one thing I detested it was the hard sell, but Livy was totally oblivious. Her mind was made up. She looked at me imploringly—
I wasn’t going to deny her this, too, was I?
If we couldn’t afford to (translation: if
I
didn’t
want
to) get married and have a child, then couldn’t I at least let her have this harmless toy?
Even as I was pulling out my wallet for the down payment I knew the whole thing was completely daft. The expenditure itself was like a new rupture in the hull of the sinking
Titanic.
Oh—and we needed a leash and collar and dog food and dishes and flea powder, too. Should we add them to the tab? Sure, why the fuck not….
Minutes later we were transporting our whimpering cargo back to the apartment.
“Don’t worry, little guy, it’ll be all right,” I assured him as I patted his cardboard transport. It was a new low for me—I’d resorted to lying to a dog….
We settle on the unlikely name of Blake, after another of my idols. Like his namesake, Blake turns out to be a bundle of raw life force, a two-pound firecracker who gnaws on everything in sight (including wicker chairs and Persian rugs), hides beneath the bed and sofa as part of a game, and pisses and shits wherever
and whenever he so desires without the slightest warning. Just as I suspected, the thrill wears thin very quickly for Livy. Within a day or two she’s cursing the dog, begging me to do something about him before she murders him, and finally ignoring him altogether.
The care and feeding of Blake quickly falls to me, and since he’s a fractious son of a gun, it’s a twenty-four-hour ordeal. Livy refuses to be left alone with him—I’m not sure what she thinks he’ll do to her—so my sole purpose in life now is looking after a miniature mutt that was her idea in the first place. Since it’s slightly embarrassing for a grown man to be seen walking a lady’s lapdog during the daylight hours—and since my fear of the outside world is worse than ever—I take Blake out for jaunts after dark, when we can meander freely through the tiny parks around the neighborhood.
One night when I’m having a smoke on a bench and Blake is sniffing the grass, I hear a voice.
“What a precious dog!”
“Thanks,” I say without thinking.
The color of night is heavy, like the black curtain in an old-time movie theater. I can’t see a goddamned thing. Then, like a ghost, the lady passes from somewhere in the darkness into the light of the moon. She’s nothing to look at. Squat. Unevenly cropped hair. Thick glasses. Age indeterminate. Her mouth has that torque to one side you sometimes see in hard-core alkies or old whores. Blake trots over; he takes to her at once. The lady goes to her knees, caresses him, kisses him, whispers sweet nothings into his ear—it’s a puppy bonanza.
