Hating Olivia: A Love Story (13 page)

I didn’t give myself the chance to think further. I took the pen and scrawled my name on the dotted line. Lars did, too. With that simple gesture we became the company’s property.

As I dragged my carcass into the office that Monday morning I wasn’t sure whether I was dead or alive. On the radio coming in I caught a news report about a Texas Rangers pitcher who suffered a mental breakdown in the clubhouse after one of the first games of the season. Tenuous as the grip on my own sanity had been through the years, I felt some sort of strange identification with the poor devil, who was straitjacketed after lapsing into a catatonic state and hauled off to a psychiatric ward….

D2391 was my new work location. It was one more dull room with nothing in it except for battleship-gray desks, chairs, and credenzas. The assignment meant farewell to the executive suite forever and on to the prosaic reality deep inside the twisted guts of the Big Telephone Machine. And it meant something else, too. A real boss. After all the months of unsupervised shenanigans and tomfoolery, I was going to be working for somebody I could actually
see.

Her name was Amy Williams. She was gangly and mousy and she wore glasses that didn’t help her looks. Even before we said a word to each other I detested her face, which was creased by the lugubrious frown of the drone.
Where was Lars?
was the first thing I wanted to know. Transferred, to another department, on another wing of the complex. My new partner on the job—which was to consist of a massive revision of AT&T’s internal mail procedures, something tantamount to rewriting the U.S. Postal Service’s operating schemes—was an acne-scarred, blubber-bellied, mustachioed lump of shit in a three-piece suit.

“Max, meet John Oleonski,” said Amy. “You two will be seeing a lot of each other. You’ll be seeing a lot of me, too.”

I gave Oleonski’s limp paw a pump. I was seasick all over again. I wanted fucking Lars back. The question of how long I’d be able to last in this cell scudded through my brain. The fact that it was tight and windowless wasn’t going to help.

Ms. Williams showed me to my desk. It happened to be cheek by jowl with hers. Not six feet away sat Oleonski at his, which faced mine squarely. A bad setup. Horrible. Oleonski stared at me. He smiled inanely. The long fingers of dread wrapped around my throat….

Time itself grinds to a halt in D2391. I glance at my watch every two minutes. Each second is a small eternity—and it’s
only the first fucking day.

The boss disappears. Since there’s nothing whatsoever to do, I pull out a volume of Hamsun. But Oleonski won’t allow me to read in peace. He wants to get acquainted. He wants to be my buddy. He wants to talk about ice hockey, which I loathe, and his favorite team, the New York Rangers. This dick follows the Rangers from city to city whenever he can. He loves disco music, too. The Bee Gees. Some group named Meco. He remarks on how lucky we are to have landed this job. Yeah, sure. What a fucking bore.

Ms. Williams returns with a gargantuan volume entitled
Intra-Company Mail Procedures for the American Telephone and Telegraph Corporation.
This is the behemoth we’re going to do battle with. Sitting side by side at my desk, Oleonski and I look it over, the ultra-fine print doing a dance of death before my eyes.

Pursuant to Section 101.35A of the American Telephone and Telegraph Corporation’s Code of Operations, all mail not designated U.S. shall be stamped “For Company Use Only” and may only be processed in official AT&T mail areas unless otherwise designated by a person at the divisional supervisory level or above; such mails may only be distributed to company personnel at the first or “A” level and may not leave AT&T premises under any circumstance unless so permitted by personnel at district level or above, providing such designated personnel have obtained written permission to approve such permissions from a supervisor at least one level above their present designation….

The boss’s telephone rings. She says hello. There’s a long, earnest conversation. When it’s finished, she walks over to us. As quickly as the manual appeared, it vanishes, having been deemed not yet ready for revision by some authority with jurisdiction over our affairs….

As the days grind on, Ms. Williams makes known the rules of the game. She doesn’t like the smell of my cigarette smoke, and she’d appreciate it if when I lit up I’d take myself out into the hallway or the nearest lounge.

“If you’re going to kill yourself, do it outside,” she sniffs. If we have no immediate assignment on our desks, we are to
sit quietly and wait
for the arrival of such assignment—no reading, no writing, and telephone calls kept to a strict minimum. If this means that Oleonski and I sit idly at our desks for the full eight hours while we wait, then so be it.

When in an unguarded moment I swing my legs onto the top of my desk, she hisses like a snake.

“Shoes on the desk is not a very cool thing to do, Mister Zajack! Kindly remove them!”

What a sour bitch.
Like a coward I immediately pull my size tens off the planner.

Choke on it, you miserable whore.

The bizarre image of that ballplayer lapsing into madness explodes like a Roman candle in my brain. It could happen to me, too, and don’t I know it. You don’t have to make it too far in years to realize that the catastrophes and disasters are lying in wait around every corner, and that at some point you’re going to become a victim yourself.

A sheen of flop sweat appears on my palms, and it stays there all day long, leaving the wet impressions of my hands on everything I touch. A knot of tension coagulates in the left plane of my trapezius muscle, lodging there like a tumor. A fiery splash of acid rises up in a wave from the netherworld of my belly.

The walls of the narrow room are closing in on me. I’m beginning to feel just like a rat—a rat in a trap.

24.

Livy was deep under the covers when I got home. “What’s up, baby—early day at the office?” “I quit.”

“You
quit?
What the hell happened? I thought tricks in real estate were, like, spectacular?”

“It’s my mother. I don’t know what ever gave me the idea I could work with that woman!”

“I told you so, didn’t I?”

“Don’t start with me, Max!”

“All right, I won’t.”

“If only she’d left me alone! I cannot
take
being told how to do every single thing all day long! I can dress myself, I can feed myself, I know how to comb my own fucking hair!”

“You actually resigned?”

“After she instructed me on how to conduct myself with Mister and Mrs. Lowenstein—kowtow to them, tell them how wonderful their son the doctor is, because that’s how she makes her commissions, after all—I told her I was through and wasn’t coming back. Besides, I hate real estate! Selling houses is the most boring job in the world!”

“What do you know…. I’m stunned.”

The telephone rang.

“Don’t you dare pick that up, Max! The last person in the world I want to talk to is that bitch!” She began to sob.

“So now what?” I said. It was a question we’d asked each other a thousand times already.

“How the fuck should I know? Maybe you can take care of things around here from now on. I’m tired …
really, really
tired…. ”

I ripped off my tie and soggy shirt like I did every day after the office. I felt nothing, nothing at all. I sat on the edge of the blue sheet and watched Livy sleep, waiting for that to change, but it didn’t.

L
ater that evening we had a surprise visitor—the lovely Cecilia Swan. It was the first time in all these months I got a look at Lars’s girlfriend. The great thing about being young is that everybody is perfect, at least for a short while, and she was no exception with her long blonde tresses and killer body. But the best part of her was her Southern accent. Something about that down-home sound completely disarms me….

Cecilia Swan is all shaken up, there are tears in her baby blues and her hands are shaking. It seems that Lars has been on a wicked shitter ever since being officially drafted into the ranks of the Big Telephone Machine. And when he’s stewed, he bangs her around, and she’s got the bruises to prove it: the mouse under her right eye, and the black-and-blue marks his knuckles left on her arm when he took a wild swing in her direction this morning. Frankly, she’s scared to death he’s going to
kill
her. Since she has no friends up north, she didn’t know where else to go for help. Actually, it’s a miracle she found our address.

“You can hang out here for as long as you need to,” I assure her—with a quick glance at Livy.

Livy nods, but I can see she’s not in ecstasies over the prospect.

“All I want is to rest for a little while, then I’ll be out of your hair. Lars doesn’t know where I am, see. It just makes me feel safer to be here, at least until he sobers up. And thanks, thanks a lot, you two, y’all sure are kind and considerate…. ”

I show her to the bedroom, where she collapses like a rag doll.

“Some friends you have,” Livy sneers when I come out to the breakfast nook. “Low balls from the wrong side of the tracks—every last one of them!”

“I didn’t know anything about this, Liv! What am I supposed to be, a goddamn mind reader? Besides, what’s wrong with helping somebody who needs it? And this girl needs it!”

“Well, I don’t want her here! This is no pit stop for your greasy friends!”

“What the hell’s gotten into you, Liv? You were never like this before.”

But Livy isn’t up to answering questions. She’d much rather fume and rant and act the injured party. Our early morning fuckfest is completely forgotten now.

Was she
jealous?
Was that it? I hadn’t seen the signs of it before. I sat on the couch and watched her funk deepen. It wasn’t lost on me that Livy’s volatile moods were appearing with increasing frequency these days. Aside from the real estate calamity, I was at a loss to explain them, but more and more often I was feeling like a stranger in my own backyard.

We didn’t have to wait long for Lars to show. Not a half hour later he was pounding on the door like a madman, hollering and cursing.

“Is she here? Is this where my little Swan came to hide out?

LET ME AT THE BITCH, MAX! LET ME AT THE LITTLE WHORE!”

The last thing I wanted was the one of neighbors calling the police, so there was nothing I could do but open up. Lars looked like shit. He smelled like shit, too. There was barf all over his clothes, which looked like they’d been slept in. He staggered into the apartment and dropped into Livy’s peacock chair.

“Look here, Lars,” I began, with Livy glowering over my shoulder, “we have to have a little talk. You shouldn’t punch Swan around, she’s just a gi—”

His eyes were crazed with the fury of the mean drunk.
“Don’t tell me what the fuck to do, Max!”

“Listen, man, I’m not telling you what to do. I’m only trying to—”

He toppled out of the chair, then made a leap for me, throwing an off-target haymaker in the process. I was just winding up to punch back when his bird of paradise flew out of the bedroom. One look and they threw themselves into each other’s arms.

“Swannie, baby…. ”

“Lars! Are you all right? I missed you
so much!”

I shrugged at Livy. It was okay after all. Since we were all hungry, we figured why not make an evening of it…. Within minutes we were in Livy’s Nova, on the way to a restaurant. It was a good sign that the lovebirds slobbered over each other in the backseat. But Lars reeked to high heaven—by now it was obvious that he’d broken off a log in his pants—and before long he was snoring like Rip van Winkle.

Livy retched. “I want him out of here! If he’s not out of here in five seconds, I’m going to throw up all over the dash!”

I pulled a screeching U-turn and burned rubber in the direction of Roseland Avenue.

After nudging the car into its spot, Livy ran straight into the building without a word. I dragged Lars out of the backseat and dumped him into his own vehicle, then turned to Cecilia Swan and patted her on the shoulder.

“If you need anything, honey, the door is always open.”

“Thanks for trying, Max, it was sweet of you, honest. But I think you’re going to need some help yourself.”

25.

The worst part of most suffering is its utter banality. Like an itch that refuses to go away, you scratch and claw at your wound until it festers and infects and oozes its ugly pus. But unless you throw yourself from the roof or blow your brains out, the world sees nothing, knows nothing, understands nothing of your torment, whatever your torment may be. Because it’s not as if you’re on the battlefield of war for a glorious cause with your senses all alive. No—it’s just you and you alone with your commonplace misery, your garden-variety toothache. Day and night it gnaws at you, until finally you have to laugh at yourself—if you’ve got a sense of humor left….

Whatever had me by the tail was growing more vicious by the day. No sooner would I hit the ramp to the highway leading me to the Big Telephone Machine pagoda than I began to hyperventilate. My epidermis erupted in hives. My heart tripped over itself with panic.
I was about to lose my marbles.
And for what?

All day long Oleonski and I stared at each other across the little room, while over at her desk the bitch pored over reams of company red tape, scribbled notes, and typed page after page, outline after outline, painstakingly honing the strategy with
which we’d eventually attack the mail regulations. We still had no work to do and no indication when it might come down.

“Sometimes,” said the boss, “these things can take months…. ”

It was the most asinine thing I’d ever been part of in my whole life, worse than swabbing toilets, a bigger joke than the loading dock. At that point I would have rather shoveled shit than sit there all day long with those two zombies. When it occurred to me that my reward for all the waiting was going to be the privilege of sinking my teeth into a gigantic bureaucrat’s manual, I nearly gagged.