Hating Olivia: A Love Story (14 page)
Earning money was nothing but a waste of precious time…. Why, I could sit there forever serving the Big Telephone Machine and never have a blessed moment’s peace of mind! No wonder the world was full of miserable people! Whether it was the farm, the factory, the office, or the tower of power itself, if a human being was not following his deepest, most natural inclinations, if he was forced into the truss of unfulfilling labor, his existence was fated to be a hell on earth. Where the flower is not watered, it is sure to wilt….
Still, I tried to tough it out. Maybe the situation would improve … maybe, by some miracle, Williams would be replaced or transferred, maybe I’d get to supervise myself again, maybe Oleonski would get fed up with living in limbo and go find another gig. Because I couldn’t understand how the bastard could be content rolling his number 3 pencils back and forth across the desktop for hours on end, or for that matter how the boss could possibly get a rise out of revising the modus operandi for envelope sorting.
But more time went by and nothing changed. I grew surly. Whatever I said in the little office was meant to piss off and provoke. I compared all Big Telephone Machine employees to sheep
moving blindly toward the slaughter. I advocated anarchism. I planted myself firmly in the corner of the terrorists who blew up corporate facilities.
When she got completely exasperated, the boss bared her fangs at me. “Then what are you
doing
here,
Mister
Zajack?”
A good question, but I had an answer for it.
“Paying the rent. Same as you.”
“Lots of people would kill to have this job,” Oleonski chimed in. “I know I would. But then maybe that’s the difference between you and me. I’ve got ambition. I want to go places in this company.”
I cursed them under my breath. I thought of remarkable figures who’d walked out of their straight jobs on the spur of the moment, vowing to live new lives—Sherwood Anderson, who blew off the factory, the country club, the Chamber of Commerce, his wife and kids, and was found wandering amnesiac in another city hundreds of miles away … Henry Miller, who after taking up with his second wife, told his superiors at Western Union to stick it where the sun don’t shine (and they could keep his last paycheck, too) … and Raymond Chandler, who almost took a flying leap off the roof of a Los Angeles skyscraper before waking up from the American Dream … and I wondered whether I would have the balls to join their illustrious number.
Then, one late April afternoon, all of a sudden it
was
too much. Too much of Oleonski waxing ecstatic over the price of the Big Telephone Machine on the stock exchange … too many of the bitch’s baleful stares … too much silence in that tiny cell…. too many agitated voices babbling inside my head … too much priceless time spent collecting a paycheck … and all with the spring sunshine beaming outside the windows beyond my reach.
“Where are you going, Zajack?” the boss demanded when I got up without a word and, briefcase in hand, went for the door.
I walked in a nimbus, my limbs heavy and numb. I looked around. It was weird—there was nothing to mark that I’d ever done time in this place.
Ms. Williams repeated her question.
“Enjoy your future, fat boy,” I whispered as I passed Oleonski’s desk.
“What?
What did you say?”
With that I was gone. As I hurried to the elevator I began to breathe a little more easily. I was free, free as a bird. There was nothing anyone in the world could do to stop me from taking that walk.
I pressed the button and waited. While I waited, I prayed that nobody would come and try and make me change my mind.
The point was that there was enough cash to last for a while—weeks, months maybe, if we lived frugally. No one—not Ms. Williams, not Oleonski nor anyone else from the Big Telephone Machine—called to find out what happened to me; it was as if the gears of the bureaucratic machinery itself needed time to catch up with the fact that one of their own had flown the coop.
Weeks later the phone finally rang. The voice at the other end of the line was lifeless, incorporeal. It belonged to John Jones, an assistant to Grayson, the guy who hired me.
“Mister Zajack, a few questions. Will you be returning to your position?”
“No way!”
The man paused and cleared his throat. Either he wasn’t used to being answered so directly or he had all the time in the world to file his report.
“May I ask the reason why you’ve decided not to return?”
“You certainly may,” I said.
“Boredom.
Utter and complete fucking boredom.”
Not a chuckle, not a sigh—nothing. I could hear some papers rustling in the background.
“I see. Boredom, mm-hmm…. ” I could hear him writing something down.
“Anything else you’d like to know? You caught me in the middle of taking my morning crap.”
“No…. I thank you for your time.”
“You’re quite welcome,” I said, suddenly feeling sorry for the poor fellow. He had to be thinking that he’d gotten the King of the Nuts on the line, even if David Berkowitz aka Son of Sam had been recently apprehended.
“One last thing. Please return your company identification card to us by mail at the soonest possible convenience. And have a pleasant day.”
With that conversation, it was officially over.
B
lowing out of the Big Telephone Machine without looking back convinced me that I possessed the spunk and daring to make a life-shattering move, to throw all caution to the wind, to step off the plank without looking down. But soon enough the glow wore off and the specter of doubt reared up and stuck out its horny tongue at me: Had I walked out of there simply because I couldn’t take it? Because I feared for my sanity? Because I was skittish of any form of success? Because I refused to accept responsibility for my life? And one more thing—
what the hell was I going to do now?
I was going to give the creative life one more try, that’s what…. I’d make an artist of myself or I’d go out on my shield! If I gave it the supreme effort, who could tell what I might accomplish? What was it Thomas Edison once said? “I’ll never give up, for I may have a streak of luck before I die!” That’s the stuff I was made of, and I’d prove it to the world!
But again I did nothing. Within a matter of days it was apparent to me that Livy and I were back at square one, that we were stranded in the same boat all over again, and that neither of us had the faintest notion how to right the vessel—which was in danger of capsizing.
Like a blanket of fresh snow, a new gloom descended on me. It took the form of a stultifying lethargy and an unease about what lay beyond the door of the apartment on Roseland Avenue. Whenever I crossed the threshold, in fact, a wave of chilling anxiety swept over me. In the supermarket or at the mall, this fright could transform into sheer panic at certain unpredictable moments, until the only remedy was staying holed up in our crib….
Something strange had stolen into the bedroom, too—a dissatisfaction on Livy’s part that changed the way we fucked. With all her screaming in the early days, I’d always assumed we’d been hitting the high note. Now I learned that it hadn’t been true after all.
“I can never come with you inside me,” she revealed one night after we’d just made it.
What the hell was all her rumpus about then? So now, before shooting my wad, I’d roll off and let Livy frig herself to orgasm while I sucked on her tits. The goose bumps all over her flesh was the evidence that she’d brought herself off. Then I’d pry her legs apart, climb back in the saddle, and take it home. It was a little out of the ordinary, maybe, but if it made her happy, so what? It was okay by me….
This shift in sexual technique for some reason gave me a perpetual hard-on. Maybe it was the incredibly erotic sight of Livy getting herself off. Maybe it was some need to prove my dwindling manhood. Maybe I had nothing better to do with myself…. but more than ever, all I thought about was sex. With the Polaroid
Instant camera she purchased when we first met, I snapped nude pictures of Livy in all sorts of lewd poses. She returned the favor and snapped me at full mast, my stiff cock saluting the ceiling, a shit-eating grin on my face. Then we set up the instrument to record ourselves in the act. Afterward we propped the photos on the bureau and admired our work. I’d subscribed to
Playboy,
and went out and purchased
Penthouse
and
Club International
whenever I had a few bucks to spare, because I could never get enough of the spectacle of the naked female body. Sometimes when I’d study the glossy pictorials, Livy would watch over my shoulder, fondling my cock as she did so, nodding approval over this model or that.
“What if we brought another girl in to join us?” I suggested.
To my surprise, she didn’t flinch.
“Maybe…. ”
For some reason I’d always suspected that she’d nursed secret desires in that direction. I entertained orgiastic images of a ménage à trois, with me plowing both Livy and our partner to the point of exhaustion. Whenever we talked like that, it ended up in a bang that went on for hours….
But there was a price to be paid for my fantasies, especially afterward, when the euphoria was gone.
“All you want is a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, empty-headed California bimbette.”
“That’s ridiculous, Liv! Where the hell did you get that idea?”
“You’re more interested in those films and magazines than you are in me!”
“No…. ”
“You like their artificial tits more than mine!”
“No way—yours are perfect!”
“You make me feel like I’m
nothing!”
“I don’t mean to, I swear…. ”
“Why don’t you just get the hell out of here and leave me alone! Go on!
Go!
“
My Livy was becoming increasingly erratic. The slightest trifle could ignite a fracas. Without warning she smacked me with her open hand. My instinct was to retaliate, but before letting her have it, I came to my senses:
What the fuck are you doing? You can’t hit a woman!
After she left the bedroom, I’d hear the shattering of a glass or plate in the kitchen sink … a rodomontade of the vilest oaths … the slamming of doors … desperate shrieks that rattled the walls of the building….
Then she’d come back for another round.
“I
hate
you, Max … !”
“No you don’t, Liv. You’re just talking.” And I’d laugh, like she’d just told me the biggest and best joke I’d ever heard in my life.
“No, I’m serious—I hate you, you rotten louse!”
More laughter. I could hardly stop myself, and that would incite her all the more.
Hours later the skirmishes would fizzle out, as always, with the two of us in the rack all over again. I promised to change, to treat her better. I made declarations of undying, everlasting devotion, and she did, too. Then we’d hump. Afterward we’d lie on our backs gazing dumbly at the ceiling…. We could hear the girl who lived on the other side of the wafer-thin wall pleading with one of her late-night pickups, growing angry, breaking down … then sobbing—long, wracking, pitiful, heartbreaking spasms. I wanted to knock on her door and fill her in on my own predicament—that it wasn’t so different, but that I wished she’d stop bawling anyway, that she’d stifle herself or at least move over
to the other side of her flat because her agony was wearing me down. But I couldn’t. All I could do was stay where I was, with Livy next to me, and blow empty smoke rings into the blackness…. stay there and absorb that anonymous girl’s tears, like rotting wood drinks in the moisture that will one day break it apart once and for all….
The stray moments that endure, the things you remember: a lonely siren down on the avenue. A fugitive gust of wind bumping against the window, like an intruder trying to get in. A renegade creak in the floorboards. The cheap Chinese fan, suspended a little off center, above the headboard of the bed. The grandeur of a woman’s exquisite, naked buttocks as they move heavily, slowly, toward the open bathroom door in the half-light from the streetlamp. The sheer misery of her god-awful beauty….
The night you vowed to yourself that one day, when you found the courage of the warrior in yourself, you would leave. How you could never find it. And you stayed.
Instead of writing, Livy and I camped out at the public pool. It was a cracked cement crater built back in the early fifties, after the last great war was decided and the men who’d fought it wanted nothing more than to keep their wives pregnant and sit on their duffs enjoying the security of peace. It only cost a couple of bucks per visit, and from morning until evening you could lie in the shade of the maple tree and watch the world go by….
Livy, looking as tasty as ever in her black bikini, soaked up the sun. Meanwhile I gorged myself on volume after volume in an attempt to forget our fix and convince myself that in doing so I was learning to write. There was more Simenon (always him for what ailed me) … Emma Goldman’s
Anarchism
… Abelard’s
The Story of My Misfortunes
…
The Arabian Nights
of Scheherazade … Lao-Tzu’s
The Way of Life
again (it was the only philosophical tract I’d ever read that made a lick of sense) … the works of Chuang Tsu (even better) … Raul Hilberg’s
The Destruction of the European Jews
… Jacob Wassermann’s
The Maurizius Case
… Ludwig Lewisohn’s
The Case of Mr. Crump
… Lin Yutang’s
The Importance of Living
…
The Autobiography of John Cowper Powys
… Nietzsche’s
On the Genealogy of Morals
and
The Antichrist,
one of my favorites for its language alone … Dostoyevsky’s
The Eternal
Husband
… Balzac’s more obscure canon—
Sarrasine, Facino Cane, Christ in Flanders, A Passion in the Desert, Seraphita, Louis Lambert,
and the incredible
The Magic Skin
… John Fowles’s
The Magus (A Revised Version)
… Mishima’s
Confessions of a Mask
and
Sun and Steel.
… Flaubert’s
November
… and finally, a marvelous discovery, the works of the Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer.