Hating Olivia: A Love Story (5 page)

“How violent?”

“At my other place he busted down the front door in the middle of the night to make sure I wasn’t cheating on him. And he threw a fit once that was loud enough to make the neighbors call the cops. And he took a swing at me that missed and shattered all the crystal in the cupboard. And—well, things like that.”

“Things like that … I see.”

Recent odd occurrences in my life suddenly began to make sense. Such as that a certain car with a tinted windshield—a Mercedes or some similar expensive model—had tailed me out of the parking lot of the Purple Turtle once or twice. That on the rare occasions when I checked in at the roach palace I got telephone calls from someone who refused to speak but would only listen while breathing hard at the other end. And the typewritten anonymous letter that arrived in the mail and warned me to “mind my own business or
suffer the consequences….
“

Later, when I showed it to Livy, she admitted that it might have come from Edward but not to worry. She suspected that eventually the storm would blow over. In the meantime, we’d just have to wait it out.

“You love me, don’t you?”

“Hell, yes. And I won’t let anything happen to you, either.” “I didn’t think so.”

“He comes over here, I’ll deal with him.”

“Thanks, Max … I need somebody to look out for me.”

She dissolved into tears. But I had to admit that some part of me felt sorry for Edward. Here I was screwing the daylights out of his girlfriend—ex-girlfriend—while he sat at home and stewed about it, pictured the sordid details in his mind’s eye. No wonder he was teetering on the brink of committing mayhem. There was nothing worse than being on the outside looking in. I knew the feeling well.

If Livy could do it to him, did it mean she could do it to me someday, too?

No. Because I was different. Sure, I was a whole different ball game from everybody else, anybody she ever had before me. Me, I was special. Nobody had what I had. She didn’t really love Edward. It was me she loved.

Why, all I had to do was think of how she fucked me … right?

I
braced myself for the worst, but Edward never showed up to kill either one of us. The threatening calls stopped, too, and I didn’t receive any more ominous letters in the mail. The boy had come to his senses, just like Livy predicted. Still, I thought it was rather strange that he’d given up the ship after all that bluster and bravado. But hey—I wasn’t complaining. When things go your way, there’s no point in trying to figure out why. This was a gift horse, and I wasn’t about to look in its mouth.

9.

Tutoring the foreigners sure beat hell out of breaking my ass on the loading platform. I didn’t have to jackass a thing, never got dirty, and the hourly rate was a lot more respectable. All I had to do with the aliens was sit and talk. I was good at talking. Maybe I was better at talking than anything else. The downside was instead of packages, now I was dealing with people. You never knew what people were going to do next.

For instance, Mister V. Kishan Rao failed to show up at the appointed time for his eighth session. He never called to give me a reason why, and since he’d refused to divulge
his
number, I couldn’t call him. A piddling fifty-six tax-free dollars and it was over. I never heard from the man again….

As far as the Japs were concerned, something similar happened not long afterward. Again I was blindsided, because things got off to a fine and dandy start with them, more or less. We were all smiles and bows at first, a regular lovefest in the making. After greeting me with “You—caw-hee [his best attempt at the word ‘coffee'] now,” Hizimitsu Takahashi and I would take our cups, seal ourselves in one of the conference rooms, and go to it. He was competent enough in the “Herro, how are you,” “Good morning,” and “Thank you velly much” phase, but at each new tongue-bending
English word he would cock his head like a bewildered parrot. It was going to be tough, I learned early on, to bridge the cavernous linguistic gap between Occident and Orient. For weeks the salesman never progressed further in conversation than “My company bling me here” and “Tonight I go to Mah-hah-ta [Manhattan].” Damned near every utterance was prefixed with “my company.” It was my company this, my company that, until I reached the conclusion that my student did indeed regard his employer as a sort of supreme being or all-powerful deity—which was the Japanese way. The poor fellow needed some loosening up, I figured. So I did some research and came in one afternoon with a few choice items calculated to melt the ice between East and West.

“Ah, my
kintama”
—testicles—"are itchy as hell today!” No reaction. Had I pronounced the word correctly? “I had a damned good
asa mara
“—morning erection—"you?” Nothing. And: “What do you think of American
omanko?"—
cunt.

No response, only a half grin and a nervous push of the hornrimmed spectacles back up the bridge of his nose.

The very next day, Mister Kimitake, my charge’s boss, phoned to inform me that my services were no longer needed and thank you very much.

“But I thought you were going to use me through the end of the fiscal ye—” A click and a buzz. Another sinecure down the drain. No doubt the Japanese sense of propriety had been offended by my choice of terms for translation. Of course it was all supposed to be a lighthearted joke, but they weren’t getting it. Or maybe they thought I was coming on to the guy. Or maybe it was the fact that I’d not responded with sufficient enthusiasm to the seaweed crackers proffered as a snack whenever I came to work.

They were a damned curious lot, those Nipponese pen hucksters. Tight and formal and inscrutable, they never betrayed a scintilla of what was going on inside their skulls.

The upshot was that I was about to be as poor as a church mouse all over again. I didn’t worry much about it, though—I had Livy. Having Livy was like having an ace up my sleeve. I had a hunch she was going to save me.

J
ust before Christmas I hopped the train to Philly to visit my brother. When I got back a few days later and rapped on Livy’s door, it swung open with a vengeance.

“I missed you,” she said, her eyes flashing with something like rage.

“Yeah. I missed you, too.”

“I don’t want us to spend any more time apart.” “That’s what I want, too.” “Are you going to stay?” “If you want me to.”

“I only want you to if you really want me…. ” I grabbed her hand and guided it to my crotch. “What does this tell you?”

And it was true. I’d done nothing but think about her from the minute I left town.

“This is the way it has to be. Just me and you.” “Yeah. This is how it’s going to be.”

Within seconds, we were tearing each other’s clothes off. Next day I moved the rest of my stuff in.

Late at night Livy and I spun out elaborate plans for the future. We were going to be together. We were going to travel. The main thing was we were going to write. From the beginning it
was a given, a fundamental presumption—though neither of us was writing. Maybe when all was said and done we’d pack up and move to a sunny foreign country—Spain or Italy or Portugal (the climate for artists was sure to be more conducive)—but since neither of us had been abroad we were at a complete loss where to go. We avoided talking about money, but I couldn’t help noting Livy’s champagne tastes in couture and dining. But I figured that if she was covered, then so was I. Everything I have is yours, she said.

Winter was the coldest on record. The Arctic winds that blew in were vicious and bitter. Day after day shrouds of snow fell over the world, blotting out the sky. The stuff accumulated in huge, swirling mounds that choked the boulevards and backstreets. A crusty frost adhered to everything in creation, from the sidewalks to the telephone wires to the windows of homes and shops. Going out of doors at all became an excruciatingly painful chore—like trudging through Siberia. Livy and I spent more time than ever holed up and between the sheets. We were slowly drifting, like twin feathers in a vacuum, into some separate existence all our own, where we only needed each other for sustenance. Of course, neither of us recognized, or cared, that it was happening. That’s what a certain kind of love can do….

Coincidentally, circumstances conspired to facilitate our metamorphosis. Livy complained that she was growing bored with her classes and was thinking about dropping out of her program altogether. Weren’t all the great ones autodidacts anyway? Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Miller, Kerouac—they’d all gone running from the halls of academia! The worst fate would be to end up a Joyce Carol Oates, ensconced in a cushy ivory tower, scribbling page after page full of desiccated words that had no relation whatsoever to anything organic, anything
living.
So more and more often Livy cut her classes. She called in sick to the
Purple Turtle whenever the whim ambushed her. As for me, I lay around doing nothing but waiting for her….

All the dead time on our hands meant even more fucking. When a man has nothing constructive to do, he immerses himself in sex; Livy and I went on inventing endless variations on the theme. The boudoir filled with lotions, perfumes, jellies, aphrodisiacs—it became a veritable harlot’s chamber. One day she came home with a floor-to-ceiling mirror so that we could watch ourselves in the act. I became hypnotized with the sensual poses we struck, many of which recalled the mythological statuary of the Hindus. My favorite was Livy astride the bed, heels high on the stems of her Candies, while I scuttled from behind….

Late one January afternoon…. Everybody else in the world except for us was at his job. The building was so still we could hear the merciless wind soughing at the window sealings. Livy happened to be on all fours on the mattress at the time, like a dog, with me slamming into her from behind—another favorite position. She was screaming with ecstasy when a soft tap sounded at the door.

That knock stopped us dead, since whoever it was could no doubt hear
us.
We held our breath, thinking that maybe we were mistaken, that we’d only been jostling the bed frame against the wall.

Then we heard it again.

Livy slipped off the bed and tiptoed to the door. I followed, and watched as she put her eye to the peephole.

She jerked back, like she’d been punched in the face. “It’s my
father.”

She laid her forefinger over her lips. We turned and retraced our steps, lifting our naked legs high, like people slogging through quicksand.

We sat on the bed and waited. “Jesus
Christ,”
I whispered after the slow, heavy footsteps died away down the stairs to the street.

It wasn’t that I was ashamed or embarrassed over what the guy had just heard. It was just so goddamned creepy to realize that somebody had been eavesdropping on your intimate grunts. You had to wonder how the porn actors did it.

We tried to go back to screwing, but the mood was broken. I pushed a cigarette between my lips, leaned against the pillows, and stroked Livy’s still-wet pussy.

“Your old man ever pull a stunt like that before?”

She was oddly detached. She shrugged. The steel curtain had descended with a crash.

I let it go. In a matter of minutes Livy was back to herself. It was like nothing at all had happened. Good—I wasn’t finished with her.

“Hey, d’you think he really heard us?” I laughed after shooting my wad. “If he did, he sure got an earful.”

She giggled. She didn’t seem to give a damn one way or the other now, and that pleased me.

“There’s my baby…. ”

That night I dreamed that Livy’s old man broke into the apartment and ransacked it, ripping underwear out of the dresser in a rage, skulking from room to room searching for some trace of me, while I cowered in fear, hiding behind the hollow door of Livy’s closet….

10.

It’s extraordinary how time disappears when you’re doing nothing. Blink once and the days have vanished into history…. How did I spend those early days with Livy? Who knows…. Sometimes we pretended to write. While our schedules were completely haphazard—there really was no timetable to speak of for any aspect of our lives—Livy would manage to sit for stretches at her black mahogany desk in the bedroom while I commandeered the kitchen table. We never showed so much as a word to each other. One afternoon when she’d run out to replenish her supply of birth control pills, my curiosity got the best of me. In the bottom drawer of her desk I discovered a few words written in her beautiful hand on the top sheet of a legal pad:

Life’s colors are indistinct, like the chiaroscuro painted on the early night sky.

One sentence, that was all. Yesterday’s date was printed in the top right-hand corner. She’d spent half the day working on that single sentence. I riffled through the rest of the pages—nothing. That fragment of prose was all she’d produced in weeks. I wasn’t
doing much better. The situation was absurd, and more than a little pitiful. We were so young and naive.

Which was how we reassured each other after another wasted day: “We’re young. We have time.”

Maybe I was lazy. Maybe life with Livy was too damned easy. If you’re lucky enough to shag a gorgeous piece of tail, you’re bound to lose your ambitions—it’s an immutable law of nature. After all, once you’ve reached the Promised Land, there’s no use wandering in the desert.

In time I reached the point where I no longer even
pretended
to put words to paper. Instead of crawling out of bed at noon or thereabouts and reaching for pad and pen, I lifted whatever book I was reading from the nightstand and picked up where I’d left off at four
A.M.
Along with my insatiable desire for Livy’s cunt, I’d developed a new hunger for words, words, and more words—so long as they weren’t mine. Roaming through the public library one day I happened upon the complete, unabridged
Memoirs
of Giacomo Casanova. After checking out number one, my course was fixed. As the days passed, I devoured volume after volume. Through the words of the aged, invalid narrator, writing by this time from the private library of a nobleman’s castle in Bohemia, I was able to vicariously live the young roué's countless debaucheries and swindles;, his wild escapades, flights and travels, his incestuous fornications and orgies, to participate in the world’s upheavals, to witness unique moments in history. I figured that if I wasn’t likely to live such an adventurous existence myself, then Casanova was the next best thing.