Hating Olivia: A Love Story (4 page)

“She took off about an hour ago. You’re just a little too late.”

“The story of my life.” Before she had the chance to get away, I said: “How about a drink?”

Five minutes later we were in my wreck en route to a beer-and-burger joint in Paterson. We took a table in a quiet corner. Olivia was wearing that peculiar half smile I’d noticed the night we met, as if she knew something that I didn’t. All the same, it was the first time I had the feeling that something was sealed between us. It turned out we were both taken with many of the same writers, though she didn’t share my passion for Henry Miller, and I argued against the precious Virginia Woolf, whom she admired. When it came to anything personal, a veil descended. Afterward, when I drove her back to her car, she seemed nervous and preoccupied, but she let me kiss her a few times. The brightly lit parking lot behind the Turtle wasn’t a good place to do much else.

“My boyfriend’s the jealous type,” she revealed, apropos of nothing.

And who might he be?

The guy with the blond hair. She suspected that he may have followed us tonight, and that he might just be spying on us from the shadows at this very moment.

Not to worry, she assured me. Lately Edward was getting to be too much. She’d been trying to set him straight: She was a free woman and wouldn’t be tied down.

I said nothing. Better never to betray what you were thinking when it came to rivals. We kissed again.

A few days later Olivia phoned and invited me over to her place for dinner. It was the least she could do for me since I treated her the last time. The address was in a decent neighborhood of Caldwell and featured a view of the noisy thoroughfare below. All around there were similar characterless, garden-variety apartment buildings. She’d moved in just recently, she said, while giving me the tour. The place had been freshly painted. Light and airy, it was a brilliant and startling contrast to my shithole. The predominant notes were white and cerulean. It was sparsely and tastefully furnished, with lots of wicker everywhere. A swag lamp with a basketball-sized frosty dome dangled from the ceiling in the breakfast nook, and a big peacock chair sat majestically in a corner of the small living room. There were framed reproductions of Impressionist paintings on the walls, including a large poster of
The Kiss
by Gustav Klimt. Fluffy throw rugs and miniature straw mats were strewn across the hardwood floors; the total effect was a pleasant admixture of the Oriental and the American Southwest.

I wondered vaguely how she could afford such relatively upscale digs, but it was none of my business so I didn’t ask.

She popped open a flask of Italian red and offered me a glass.

“So—did you get in trouble with Edward on account of me?”

No, it was okay, she thought she’d managed to straighten everything out. With drink in hand I watched while she deftly whipped up a heap of pasta, garlic bread, and sweet bay scallops. Then she ignited a pair of long brand-new tapers and we ate by candlelight. Very romantic. It was the best meal I’d had in months. I was beginning to feel like one of the living again.

My cock revived, too. Livy—which was what she preferred to
be called—had legs straight out of a Vargas illustration. In sheer black stockings they were nothing short of magnificent. Her preference for dark clothing, rather than creating an impression of mournfulness, lent itself to a steely bohemian sexuality. I didn’t know what was hidden beneath her dress, but I could venture a good guess. My mouth watered at the thought.

Livy pushed the dishes aside when we were through eating, and we went on working the red. Words flowed as easily as the booze, but we were still only feeling each other out. Beneath the sounds we made was an unstated question that held fast in the deep current like a big, powerful fish: How far were we willing to take this thing? Were we ready to throw in our lot with each other no matter what?

I peeled open a second bottle. In a pleasant haze we moved to the small couch in the living room. She produced a joint from somewhere and I fired it up. I was drunk and ready for anything, ready to go anywhere the night took us. Even as it was happening, I realized it was one of life’s nonpareil moments—a man and a woman with a few drinks and good food in their bellies, locked away from the world, talking about the most important things under the sun. After dimming the light, I launched into a disquisition on literature, philosophy, religion, music, film, even love itself (as if I knew what I was talking about) … the entire gamut. For a twenty-three-year-old, she chipped in more than enough, too, but she also possessed the extraordinary ability of allowing me to fill the atmosphere with the din of my own ludicrous grandiloquence. That’s a great facility women have—they understand how important it is for a guy to hear himself blab.

“Let me tell you about a very rare experience of pure revelation, Livy. Now don’t laugh, okay …? It was just a few years ago…. At the time I was working the assembly line of a brewery
in a coal-mining town outside of Pittsburgh. I’d recently discovered Dostoyevsky, and at night after my shift I plowed straight through
Crime and Punishment
and
The Brothers Karamazov,
and I was maybe halfway through
Demons.
… Now on my day off I happened to be walking beneath the Gothic arches of an old Benedictine monastery in the hills nearby, where I sometimes went for peace and quiet from the infernal racket of bottles and cans dropping into cases, when all of a sudden—
kaboom!
Here! Now! This was it! The
moment of moments!
It comes to me in a bolt of lightning—I’m a
genius!
And all this time I hadn’t a
clue!
I hadn’t
realized!
It took this twenty-four-hour-a-day living with the Verkhovenskys, Smerdyakovs, and Stavrogins to bring it to the surface.
A fucking genius!
Don’t ask me
how
I knew—it was an alchemical thing—I just
knew.
…”

What bullshit…. I was a little embarrassed. I had to laugh at myself. But Livy didn’t. She seemed to be taking me seriously. Of course I hadn’t the slightest morsel of evidence, aside from a few pages of a play and half a notebook full of songs untested outside the coffeehouses and bars, that would bear out my preposterously grandiose claim. And I didn’t mention the prodigious quantities of hash I’d been smoking at the time of the great revelation, or the mescaline trips I’d been fond of taking on the weekends. Nevertheless, it made me feel good
—validated
me almost—to be listened to by a beautiful female without derision. That’s something else women are good at.

“You’re going to be famous, I can feel it,” Livy nodded. “I have a sixth sense about these things.”

A chill shot up my spine.
Yes!
I knew it all along! I’d only needed somebody else to say it out loud in order to believe it myself. Or at least half believe it.

“Come over here.”

I wrapped her in my arms and plunged my tongue into her mouth. She gave back as good as she got until we were both huffing and puffing like long-distance runners. I began to strip off her clothes, piece by exquisite piece. I was in no hurry to get where I was going. Then she yanked on the flap of my belt….

We were both naked. I swept her up and carried her through the open bedroom door. In the soft blue shadows cast by the streetlamps I laid her on the bed and stood over her, my erect prong hovering like a hummingbird in the air between us. She reached up and wrapped her long fingers around the shaft. I let her pull me down on top of her, then gripped her flanks for support. Then I pushed into the wetness inside and drove upward.

I’d had a few women in my life, but I was to learn something new about sex from Olivia Aphrodite (her true middle name). We were to take the plunge together into the subsoil of raw concupiscence, from which both ecstasy and madness spring, and forgo the dusty, worthless upper strata of passionless habit and duty that most humans know. I would come to live for fucking Livy. For the first time I knew what it was to truly
bang
a woman, to ram like a battery, to bury my body, obliterate my
self,
in the mysterious folds of a cunt. Like a devoted master of the Kama Sutra, I discovered the rude pleasure of enjoying the female in an infinite number of contortions, to forge onward when there was no juice left, to bludgeon myself into insensibility from the sheer act of fornication. We would finish our sessions in a state of complete and utter exhaustion—in a delirium, really—oblivious altogether to the outside world….

And could Livy
scream….
It was a giddy delight, knowing I could coax such a welter of howls and caterwauls out of a bitch. With every yelp, a strange thrill traveled up from the tip of my cock and into the depths of my brain….

That first time we fucked it was a haunted night in early November. Some time after midnight we stopped for a bite to eat. I was famished, and so was she. All that exercise had built up a ravenous appetite. In the living room the television was murmuring. I couldn’t remember how or when it had gotten switched on. Puppets in suits and evening gowns clasped their hands jubilantly above their heads. A man with a Southern accent delivered an impassioned speech from a podium. Numbers—vast, incomprehensible totals in the millions—flashed across the screen. They meant nothing to me or to Livy. Standing there nude with chunks of leftover Italian bread in our mouths, my red-and-purple cock bobbing, we learned that Jimmy Carter had just been elected president of the United States….

8.

Life got to be what it’s supposed to be at least some little part of our time here on earth: perfect. When you first invade a woman’s body, you stumble into the realm of the dream—the dream of nirvana. You move through the days like a contented sleepwalker. The more depleted you are, the better: the senses are heightened, the boundary between illusion and reality pleasantly blurred. And that’s the way you want to live—inside a beautiful dream.

It was like I’d been granted a new lease on the whole deal—my ship, as they say, had come in. Every evening I found myself climbing the steps to Livy’s spare but recherché apartment on Roseland Avenue. When she opened up to my knock, we’d go right at each other, fucking before we even said hello. She wanted me there with her all the time. What was the point of being anywhere else? We were on the same page from the get-go.

Suddenly it seemed as if nothing else was quite so important as Olivia Aphrodite. We spent all our free time at her flat, fucking, talking, reading. We put on our clothes and went out only when we had to—usually to a hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant up on Bloomfield Avenue. There wasn’t ever more than a few inches between us.

Since I felt myself to be pretty much a failure in real life, winning this knockout’s attention was a singular achievement when not much else was going great guns. I
liked
to think that I was a somebody, but I could never be sure. Maybe, I figured, Livy could help. She was always telling me “You’re handsome,” and “You’re talented"; it made me feel good just to be around her.

And the one thing we couldn’t resist doing when we were around each other was fuck. Everywhere. In the peacock chair … on the couch … the floor … the kitchen table … the shower … the bathroom sink, and anywhere else we could manage.

The instant of orgasm was often agonizing in its extremity of pleasure, punctuated as always by one of Livy’s delirious raves. The quantity of fluid expended by each of us was immense—a fucking flood. Wherever I moved there was semen and cunt juice: her belly and ass, me, all over the sheets.

In those first days it struck me sometimes that I had no idea who Livy
was.
Here we were, living like a pair of monkeys in a jungle tree, and she was a stranger to me. Mysterious moods like swift-moving clouds passed across her onyx eyes; she never betrayed what they were. You can get inside a woman’s body, but you can never get inside the head. Not really.

Once in a while the telephone would ring. Mostly Livy would let it go on ringing, but when its persistence broke through our insular contentment, she’d have no choice but to climb out of bed and pick it up.

Some of the calls were peculiar. After saying hello, she’d hold the receiver to her ear and listen for a long time—five, ten, fifteen minutes. Now and then she might answer “Yes” or “Maybe"; invariably the one-sided conversation would terminate with
“No!”
or
“Please don’t do that!”

After she hung up I interrogated her delicately about the calls,

but she was evasive, as she was about so many other things. She seemed preoccupied, on the verge of flat-out panic. I didn’t press her. What did it matter, after all? She was here with me, and that was the important thing.

One night she let slip that it was Edward who’d been phoning. Yes,
that
Edward, the fair-haired Nazi she wasn’t seeing anymore since she’d taken up with me. Edward, the luxury automobile mechanic who was thoroughly unappreciative of her intellectual aspirations and artistic talent and only wanted to own her like a car. And to think she’d nearly
married
somebody like him.

“What does he want?”

Silence.

“Come on, Livy, what does he want? He keeps you on the line for long enough.”

“Nothing you have to know.”

“Why not? We sleep together, don’t we? If this guy wants to see you again, that’s a natural enough thing. He used to sleep with you, too, I presume.”

My attempt at generosity of spirit. More silence.

“Come on. You can tell me.”

“Well, okay … if you really have to know.”

“Well, all right then.”

She took a deep breath.

“He’s got a gun. And he’s threatening to come over here and blow us both away. Me for betraying him, you for coming between us.”

Oh. Nice.

“Do you think he’d actually
do
it?”

“I hope not. But you never know. Edward can be pretty violent.”