Hating Olivia: A Love Story (11 page)

So like Bukowski entering the U.S. Postal Service or Melville at the customhouse or Kafka and his nameless insurance company, I reported like an automaton to the front desk, to be inducted into the ranks of corporate America.

All around the vast hall the products and accoutrements of the coming new age were on display—videophones … computer terminals … fantastic futuristic telephone receivers of all shapes and sizes. The walls were covered with stunning murals, oil paintings, watercolors, etchings, and drawings. Looking closer, I realized that I was actually face-to-face with the original handiwork of Dalí, Matisse, Braque, Picasso, Chagall, Bonnard, as well as the masterpieces of lesser-known but equal talents—and that I was the only one who seemed to notice. That’s the thing about big money—incomprehensible money—it buys everything, including the sweat of genius; it turns your living room into a wing of the Louvre. It was surrealistic—not to mention sad—to think of what some of those wretched beings went through in order to produce their work, then to watch the philistines pass by, oblivious to the struggle.

Hundreds of bodies came and went. There were terse telephone conversations between the receptionist and an unseen presence regarding me. They made me wait a long time. Finally I was handed a card laminated in plastic—
DAY VISITOR,
it read—and told to clamp it onto the lapel of my jacket and keep it there at all times.

A uniformed guard appeared and escorted me up to Ivan Holland’s office on the third floor. Ivan was an affable teddy bear of a man somewhere in his forties. His sleeves were rolled up past his
elbows and his tie was slightly askew. For the early hour—eight thirty—he looked like he’d already been hard at it.

We shook hands. He showed me to an empty chair next to another guy.

“This is Lars Peterson,” said Ivan. I shook hands with him, too. Lars was about my age, a bit soft in the gut, with a mop of unruly Swedish-blond hair. What I liked about him right away was his casual duds—rumpled sports coat, unpressed olive-green khakis, soft boots. Since he was smoking, I lit up, too.

“You fellows will be working together on a long-term, top-secret project I’ve been overseeing here since last June, so before we start anything, you’re both going to have to sign a nondisclosure agreement. The parent company is considering divestiture for some future point in time, and my task force is taking a close look at how Indiana Bell—a prime example of one of the unit companies—would fare in a deregulated environment in a hypothetical scenario when the national telecommunications superstructure has been deconstructed…. Got it?”

I had no idea what the fuck the man was talking about. I glanced at Lars. I doubted he did, either. Ivan went on talking. The practical upshot of it was—as far as I could make out—that we were to proof earnings projection printouts from the parent company against actual earnings from the field—whatever that meant.

After we affixed our John Hancocks to the promise not to leak company information, Ivan led us through a maze of corridors to a compact, windowless room. On the oblong table sat enormous stacks of two-by-four computer printouts, pads, pencils, and paper clips.

“All right, fellas, go to it. If you need anything, you know where to find me.”

With that, he disappeared, closing the door behind him. Lars and I shrugged at each other. We went to it.

S
oon it became patently obvious that not only did Lars and I have no clue what we were up to, but that it didn’t really seem to matter in the least. For days on end we never set eyes on Ivan (he was forever “tied up in a meeting”), and when he did come around, it was to cryptically order us to stop what we were doing and await further instruction, or resume what we were doing until further notice. Any and all activity in this joint was shrouded in mystery, and even after gabbing with the other inmates at the lunch table, we never got a clear idea of what anyone here actually
did,
aside from attend those all-important meetings. What we couldn’t help but notice was that each and every employee of the Big Telephone Machine carried a single sheet of paper at all times while in transit in the halls. But aside from the comic value to Lars and me, we stayed in the dark on what the business signified.

To stave off boredom, we played games with the dictionary (“Okay, for three points, what does ‘transpontine’ mean?”), strolled with a sheet of paper in hand (so as to make it look like official business) the length and breadth of the complex, killed time in the company library, smoked pack after pack of cigarettes, and watched television in the lounges during the interminable afternoons. Since no one ever showed up with a long-distance invoice, Lars yakked it up on the phone with his girlfriend, Cecilia Swan, who was living down south (they’d met at the University of Georgia some years back), for hours on end. After all, he figured, the telephone company doesn’t bill itself.

As with all meaningless activity, pointless habit soon got the
upper hand. Our absurd labors were a river emptying into an ocean of Monday-through-Friday, eight-thirty-until-five-thirty days, during which we rarely glimpsed the light of day….

But the money was rolling in, and just in the nick of time. Within weeks Livy and I made good on many outstanding debts. I was even able to send off a check to Mrs. London for that apocalyptic astrological reading and get her off my back once and for all. For a minute or two, I felt pretty damned good about being flush for the first time in my life. When I sliced open the envelope that held my check, I could hardly believe I was bringing down good money—over $360 a week after taxes—to sit on my ass all day and shoot the shit with Lars.

Corporate America made sense to me now—it was a royal scam, a cushy gig for anybody who could find his way in,
the
place to be, especially if you wanted to do nothing.

But before long a strange restiveness set in. I was nagged by the thought that I hadn’t actually
done
anything of any significance whatsoever throughout the long workweeks. I was accomplishing less, in fact, than when I laid around the apartment devouring book after book and occasionally turning out a new tune. And if you weren’t doing something you liked in life, well, what good was the money? What good was all the money in the world if you didn’t want to be where you were? Now that I had a regular wage, I was responsible for a million and one expenses I didn’t have when I was hard up against it. Like the rent on Livy’s apartment, for example, and the gasoline sucked up while traveling back and forth to work (a fifty-mile round trip), and my new wardrobe, and the dry cleaning, and the ten-dollar lunches with Lars. To boot, rather than bother with preparing our own meals, Livy and I found ourselves in a different restaurant damned near
every night. Before I knew it, I was living paycheck to paycheck all over again, with not a shilling to spare….

Everything in life is money. You can try your damnedest to ignore it, but you’re nothing without it, an untouchable. With it, you’re damned, too, but for different reasons. Like most things on this earth, it’s a no-win situation.

21.

Once you relinquish your dreams—the dreams that bubble up from the deepest wells of your real self—you’re finished, you’re dead; it doesn’t matter how much jack you’re bringing down. We were earning bread, Livy and me, but worms had appeared in the loaf of our success. By the time the dead leaves had broken off the tree branches, I’d been gripped by a depression that had me near paralyzed before I could even make it out of the apartment in the frosty mornings. Because by now I knew for sure that in the process of holding down a regular, respectable job and making money the old-fashioned way, I was trashing my life.

“I’ve been thinking … I have to get back to trying to do something,” I announced to Livy’s naked back as I watched her dress for a morning meeting with the rebbes.

“What are you talking about?”

“You know. What we always planned at the beginning—write, music, travel. All of it.
Any
of it.”

She shrugged. I kept an eye on her remarkable deltoid muscles, another part of her I always admired.

“Who’s stopping you?”

“Well, with these fucking jobs of ours there’s no time.” “So what do you want me to do?”

I laughed. “I didn’t ask you to
do
anything. But there has to be some way…. ”

She swung around and fixed me with a look of scorn and pity—a look I hadn’t seen before.

“Let’s not kid ourselves, Max. We tried all that, and we didn’t even come close.”

There was no arguing her point. “Yeah,” I went on anyway, “but maybe it’ll just take more time. That’s the way it is for some people. Think of all the late bloomers who took years, decades, to develop into genuine artists.”

“Like who?”

“Well, like Cézanne, for one. Like Whitman, for another. And even Dostoyevsky didn’t become Dostoyevsky overnight.”

“Decades?
Who’s got decades? Jesus, Max! I can’t talk about this now. I have to get to the office. You do, too.”

“Yeah, sure…. But think about it, okay?”

She stepped into her shoes and checked herself in the mirror. “I can’t
think
about that shit anymore. I have to
think
about the rent. Remember the rent?”

I didn’t know what I wanted to say. Maybe there was really nothing
to
say. I felt like I was out in left field by myself. As if Livy had bailed on me. As if she didn’t take me at all seriously anymore. As if I’d been born to shake up the world and had been sent out to do the job minus the weapons.

I was angry. In a rage. Always in a rage. Livy paused in the bedroom doorway, swinging her alligator-skin purse.

“Know what, Max?”

“What?”

“This is all just more pipe dreams.”

“Yeah, well, you can say that for just about anything. Or anybody.”

“I gotta go, Max.” “See ya later…. ”

I watched her sashay out the front door. When she closed it, I fired up a smoke, my first of the day, and mulled over the conversation in the silence of morning. Then I climbed out of bed, showered, and reported for duty.

A
long with a flagging spirit, I’d developed another nasty ailment—heartburn. At first I blamed the condition on Livy’s hot, rich southern Italian dishes. But when the burning persisted after I laid off the spicy red sauce, it got to be a real nuisance, reaching the point where I could do little during a severe attack but lie on my belly in a vain attempt to quell the hot streams of volcanic acid running up and down my esophagus.

“You should probably see a doctor,” suggested Livy after my gastric suffering became a daily phenomenon that threatened to incapacitate me altogether.

I thumbed through the phone directory and made an appointment with one Doctor Bovasi, who had an office around the corner. When my turn came, he studied me first through his spectacles, and then asked me to take off my shirt and sit on the examination table.

“Open your mouth and say ‘Aaahhh.’ ”

He pushed at my stomach. He prodded. He poked and kneaded. He interrogated me on my medical history and family background. From time to time he mumbled, as if carrying on a private conversation with himself.

“Too young for esophageal cancer…. Maybe a spastic colon? But you don’t present the requisite symptoms…. Peptic ulcer? I don’t think so. Hmm…. ”

When he was through, he folded his arms and squinted at me. “Mister Zajack, is something bothering you?” “Bothering me?”

“Problems on the job? At home, maybe?”

Sure, there were problems. But to lay them out for Bovasi would take hours. Besides, that’s what shrinks were for, and I told him so.

“I see…. Well, complicated or simple, I recommend that you eliminate whatever’s bothering you from your life. It’s my opinion that you won’t lose your indigestion until you do.”

The good doctor’s counsel cost me twenty-five skins, and since he found nothing physically wrong that I could report to my health insurance carrier, it was going to come out of my pocket….

The next evening Livy arrived at the apartment without her long, luxuriant hair.

“What the fuck happened to
you?”

“I’m going into the real estate business.”

“You’re going to do
what?”

“With my mother. Monday after next I start showing houses. Then I start taking classes for my license…. Anyway, she thinks that short hair is more
functional.
More mature, know what I mean? What do you think? Myself, I think it looks pretty good.”

“What about the temple?”

“I’ll handle that.”

Eventually the shock wore off, and we talked. Seems that, unbeknownst to me, Livy had been in touch with her mother after we made that visit to her office. In fact, relations between the women these days weren’t as icy as they used to be. Maybe they were coming to understand each other after all. And now Mrs. Tanga had decided to take her daughter under her wing. It was about time to get serious about life, according to her. Time to put
away childish things once and for all. It was certainly high time to forget about piddly shit like writing stories and novels. Livy let slip that it was her mother’s opinion that I, Max Zajack, should have been ashamed of myself for sitting around strumming the guitar
at my age,
and that the best thing I ever did was procure a legitimate position. As a real estate agent, Livy could make some
real
money. She didn’t want to be stranded behind a desk drawing up rabbis’ schedules for the rest of her life, did she? Glorified secretary was no position for a sharp young woman! Besides, what could Livy do with twelve grand a year? Especially if she wasn’t going to get married! If she wasn’t going to get hitched to a professional man and start a family, she’d better start thinking about how she was going to make a living to support herself—a good living!

I didn’t like it. The thought of Livy fast-talking prospective suburban homeowners didn’t work for me at all.

Goddamn her mother. That interfering bitch.