Hating Olivia: A Love Story (24 page)

I couldn’t believe my eyes. I read the letter over again, very slowly this time, pausing to drink in every single word. I pinched myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. I turned over the envelope and shook. Out came the two contracts and another sheaf of papers containing breakdowns of potential royalty payments.

I pinched myself again. No, I wasn’t dreaming.
The Old Cossack
had hit the sock on its maiden flight.

I soon realized that the agency’s offer didn’t add up to a sale, but still, it had to count for something, right? Didn’t it have to indicate that at least one expert thought I had talent—or something like it? Hadn’t Mister Henry Barr typed the words “a writer of exceptional promise"? After all the wasted years, the failure, the brain-dead jobs, that letter was a vindication.

In every lifetime there are a handful of days you’re destined to not forget. That shimmering early October day was one of them. For hours I was beside myself with a delirious ecstasy bordering on outright disbelief. From the excitement alone I couldn’t decide what to do with myself. I got up from the table clutching my letter and contract, then sat down again. I whooped like an Indian. “I’ve got a friggin’
agent,”
I repeated to myself like a moron who knows only five words or a souse who’s just hit the Irish Sweepstakes. I skipped from the kitchen to the living room to the bedroom laughing like a hysterical hyena. I phoned Bernie Monahan and whoever else I could think of with the news. I was in a state of shock. In the back of my mind was the anticipation that somehow this completely unexpected turn of events would spring me from the trap I was in. Maybe I wouldn’t have to get free. Maybe Livy would even fall in love with me all over again. Maybe it wasn’t too late after all.

When she got home from wherever she’d been I leaped up from the sofa and waved the letter at her.

“Look! An agent wants to sign my book! Can you fucking believe it? I can’t—tell me I’m not dreaming!”

She grabbed it out of my hand and looked it over skeptically.

“And they’re not charging me a red penny! They seem to think
this thing has a real chance out there on the open market! Think about it, Liv! The possibility of an advance! This could be it! Our ticket to a new life! No more crappy jobs! No more slaving for idiots! We’ll get out of the hole and head for Europe and all the rest of it! You can even have a kid if you want to!”

I’m not sure why I said everything I said. At that moment I would have promised just about anything to anybody.

Livy’s reaction to my lucky break was curious. The trace of a sneer crossed her lips. After only a few seconds she seemed to lose interest in the letter. Without a word of congratulations, she dropped it into my hands and disappeared into the bedroom.

Now that beat everything.
Maybe she was on the rag. Or maybe it was her own failed aspirations. After all, we’d both started out of the same gate, and I’d managed to do something while she hadn’t. I felt for the girl. She’d sacrificed for me in the beginning. Had I been in her shoes, I’d have probably felt the same way. Not jealous, exactly, but … shortchanged somehow. But after a few minutes I didn’t give it a second thought—I was too absorbed in my own good fortune.

That afternoon I strutted up to the savings and loan on the corner, the same institution where I no longer had an account, and affixed my John Hancock to the contracts in the presence of a notary public, who in turn stamped her official certification on both sheets of paper. She smiled at me when I handed over my five-dollar fee—I must have smelled like a man going places. Then I dropped the stuff into the mail, went home, and popped a bottle to celebrate the day.

Livy was looking like a fifty-karat piece of ass all over again. Amazing, what catching a break could do.

“How about a new restaurant tonight, Liv, that Turkish
kitchen over in Weehawken? On me,” I said, running my hands over her majestic flanks.

She said yes—I knew she would. After we devoured our exotic feast, I was going to fuck Livy. She would never know what hit her. It was bound to be a great night.

W
ithin a few days I began to figure out that the good tidings from the Vroom Agency hadn’t solved all my problems, especially my biggest, which was, as usual, money—the lack of it. With Livy out of work again and unable to collect unemployment compensation benefits—leading me to believe that she’d been fired rather than laid off from Gennaro’s—I was going to have to hit the pavement and dig something up all over again no matter
who
thought I demonstrated exceptional promise.

I put off the ugly task. The only thing I wanted was to bask for as long as possible in the afterglow of my little triumph. Dreams of fame and fortune swirled in my head, but when I didn’t get immediate good news about
The Old Cossack,
the shine wore off. It only took a matter of days.

44.

This time I found myself behind the check-in desk of the Camel Brook Motor Inn in West Orange, a two-story motel-cum-nightclub that catered to tourists, corporate parties, hookers and their middle-class johns, lounge lizards who got lucky and their pickups, and a handful of geriatric Jews whose families no longer wanted them around and felt less guilty keeping them in a private motel room than an old-age home. Four-to-midnight was the most heavily trafficked shift of the day and the shift nobody else wanted, so of course that was the shift I drew. My duties included signing in lodgers and directing them toward the vending machines, ice chest, nightclub, and nearby restaurants, and handing out extra towels and directions. It was another chimp’s gig. The salary was peanuts. The weird thing about it was that the Camel Brook sat no more than a mile from Livy’s old homestead, where once upon a time—and it seemed like a lifetime ago now—she and I spent those eerie and poignant Sunday mornings….

Working as a desk clerk was a new one on me, but it could have been a lot worse. There was a portable television in an alcove behind the desk, unlimited coffee, and a cigarette machine. When there was no customer action, I was free to do whatever
I wanted so long as I didn’t fall asleep and allow somebody to knock the place over.

The proprietor was a guy named Billy Stankowski. Billy oversaw the daily operations of the Camel Brook, but he never interfered with me aside from asking “How you doin', Max?” whenever he came or went. He was a flabby blimp who just happened to inherit the whole shebang from his folks, Warsaw Poles off the boat who’d raked in a small fortune running the Camel Brook and had since retired to a Caribbean island. Billy Stankowski was one of those dumb-lucky oafs born into the right situation, but I didn’t hate him—he was only in his midthirties and already wearing a bad hairpiece.

The boss’s constant shadow was a hot little minx by the name of Marilyn. It was hard to tell what she actually did around the place, but if she wanted to attract the attention of men, she was a smashing success. Day and night she traipsed around in stiletto heels and velvet short shorts, showing whatever she could of her killer body without stripping all the way. Long and slim and blonde, there was more than a little something of the tart about her, and for all I knew she’d been just that once upon a time. If so, God bless Billy—everywhere he went there was that primo piece of tail right behind him. At five every afternoon the Polish prince and his princess retired to his penthouse suite on the top floor for a “nap,” a habit that bugged the shit out of the maids. “They’re disgusting, those two!” the ladies would bitch whenever Billy and Marilyn took the elevator up. One of them whispered to me that Billy’s room was like a pharmacy, so crammed was it with birth control devices. To top it off the place was as filthy as a pigsty! Couldn’t the two of them at least pick up after themselves? But I knew what the cleaning ladies were really pissed about:
Why Marilyn and not them?

No sooner had I finished training on the register than Livy began campaigning for an engagement ring. Her disastrous flings with Fred, Siffuzzi, and Edward and her unrequited passion for Michael Goldfarb hadn’t dampened her enthusiasm to get hitched, even if these days she all but pretty much detested
me.
Whenever we passed a jewelry store Livy would stop and moon over the merchandise in the window. When I wasn’t feeling bad for her, my blood was boiling, especially since we were still flat broke and owed money to everybody—and everybody’s brother.

The mere idea of marriage was insane—even I realized that in some recess of my frazzled brain—and so I tried to prod her off the notion. “Remember, at the beginning, how we always said we didn’t need society’s approval for the way we lived our lives?”

“Let’s not start a long intellectual disputation again, Max! If you don’t want me, just tell me and I’ll find somebody else! I can do it, you know! Make up your mind for once in your life!”

I was beat. I was so fucking tired. Maybe this time there
was
no way out.
Sure, I wanted to get married …
maybe it would make everything better. And maybe
The Old Cossack
would do something big and Livy would be happy and content at long last. Maybe then, if we had some money, I could afford to pop one into the oven and distract her from her demons once and for all….

Lots of maybes, but in life you never know. Stranger things had happened. Men had walked on the moon, hadn’t they? So I went ahead and out of my first paycheck laid a fifty-dollar payment down on a minuscule sapphire at a discount place in an industrial park in Fairfield. I was supposed to pay the balance off in installments over a six-month period. Until I did, Livy couldn’t wear it. What in hell was I thinking?

O
nce I had the hang of the desk, the motel wasn’t such a bad gig. On a daily basis I got to study an enormous array of characters out of the world’s encyclopedia: upstanding family men on the cheat with their mistresses … finely dressed pimps … slick distributors of cocaine … shady types who laid low and paid only in cash—in other words, guys on the run. There was something pathetic about all of them, but maybe it was just my frame of mind at the time….

When I wasn’t busy with check-ins, I stared at the tube—usually hoops, and the best soap opera ever broadcast on an American network—
I, Claudius.
For an hour a week, the chronicle of the decline of the decadent Roman Empire transported me out of my beleaguered self. The sight of that wicked, deadly adder slithering across the mosaic tiles of a Roman bath in the opening credits reminded me that we were all mired in a poisonous slough of deceit and treachery, whether we were gods, nobles—or motel clerks. The only difference between us was that the rich and powerful enjoyed themselves more than ordinary mortals during their time in hell. That program was the single event of every week that I lived for.

With the rest of my free time I’d begun writing again, in five- or ten-minute stretches, on legal pads I found stashed in the bottom drawer of the registration desk, this time a florid pornographic novel based on my own past sexual exploits. There’d been a few before Livy, and what I hadn’t lived myself I could concoct out of my imagination—like any horny guy on the street. If
The Old Cossack
was a flop (I still hadn’t heard a word about its whereabouts or fate) this new book would give me something to fall back on. Sex, according to the experts, always sells.

From the beginning, it came shooting out of me like sperm from a humongous geyser: anonymous seductions, threesomes,

daisy chains, lesbian fist-fuck-fests—my windy literary version of
Penthouse Forum.
And if ultimately the book failed, at least I was learning something new about the craft of writing. The most important thing was that I was
doing
it; in one sense, it was all a writer could ever ask for, and it sure beat the shit out of some of the other ways I’d frittered away time in my life.

If I had a problem, it was at home. Since I used her car now to get to the motel, Livy had nothing to do with herself during the long nights. Apparently she was still unable to write—writing was something she never even mentioned anymore. Livy was an odd duck … while she could lock herself in her bedroom for days on end, it was because she knew I was on the other side of the door. Like most beautiful women, she couldn’t stand to be alone with herself. Soon enough she’d had enough of staring at the four walls night after night, so she took to dialing the desk whenever she felt the whim.

“I’m bored, Max. Bring my car home.”

“Liv, I happen to be right in the middle of a customer here.”

“I don’t care what you’re doing! You’ve got my car, and I want you to bring it back right now!”

“Look—I can’t talk now, I’m telling you…. ”

By this time the registrant’s curiosity was piqued, and he was watching me like a hawk.

“Didn’t you hear me, Max? I said bring my car home! I’d like to use the fucking thing!”

“Liv,
please.
… Listen. I’m going to hang up now. I’ll talk to you about it later.”

No sooner did I replace the phone in its cradle than it would ring again.

“YOU SON OF A BITCH! I’M NOT KIDDING AROUND HERE! IF YOU DON’T BRING THAT CAR HOME THIS
MINUTE, I’M GOING TO CALL THE COPS AND TELL THEM YOU STOLE IT!”

I’d force a phony smile while I filled out the registration card. “Yes, thank you,” I’d reply politely into the mouthpiece. “Yes, ma’am. Whatever you say, ma’am…. And thank you for calling the Camel Brook Motor Inn…. ”

Most times the person standing in front of me wasn’t snookered at all. Livy’s voice was so loud coming over the wire he could hear it clear across the counter.

The bitch had me cold. And no way I could get away with not answering the telephone—management would have me fired in a heartbeat.

All night long Livy punched the redial and let me have it until I was damned near out of my gourd. She hollered. She accused. She cursed. She threatened. She bawled. When I finally got home in the early morning, it was even worse. Laying to waste everything in the apartment, she seemed to have reached a new threshold of dementia.