Hating Olivia: A Love Story (2 page)

It had been months since I’d gotten laid. Between that ugly fact and the heat, I was a crazed jackal. I would have made a move on Mrs. London, but she was the all-business type, no hint of flirtation there at all. Besides, she showed no personal interest in me whatsoever.

But as usual, my dick was like a billy club just from seeing a woman’s naked flesh. The damned thing was straining like
a caged beast to get free. I reached down and undid my fly. It popped right out from the leg of my underwear. Since Mrs. London was easing into her phone-counseling session, I figured why not…. It was one of those days when I only needed a hard stroke or two to get there. I beat it in time to the slap of Mrs. London’s sandal against her pedicured foot. When she started in on Pluto’s ingress into Donald’s eighth house, which happens to govern the sex drive, I was riding her like a dog, and she didn’t even know it.

My trunk arched. I was a silent rocket launcher….

Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom.

The first missile landed on the rim of the table. The following volleys drifted through the air squiggling like baby snakes and fell to the carpet with a soft plop. I immediately tucked my organ back into my jeans and reached into my pocket for my handkerchief. I wiped the table clean, then moved my sneaker onto the jizm on the carpet and ground it in. Then I sat back and waited. Mrs. London never knew what hit her.

When she got back, she proceeded to analyze my personality, and then say a few things about my past. But I’d already tuned out. The Sibyl’s dire warnings hung now like an ominous cloud above my head. The expectant mood I’d carried in was gone—she’d annihilated it. Suddenly I felt like Ishmael. Or a leper.

At precisely one hour her egg timer went off. She slid the chart across the table to me.

“That’ll be twenty-five dollars.”

By now I was thoroughly deflated. “I meant to tell you up front…. I’m a little short on cash. Would you mind if I sent it to you in a week or so, when my next paycheck comes in?”

Mrs. London’s green cat’s eyes narrowed with suspicion. “All right. Next Thursday at the latest. Make sure you leave me your telephone number.”

I wrote it down. She saw me to the door. The street was as quiet as a morgue. As lots of people said, Brooklyn was a place for nonbelievers. And, as someone once wrote, it was only known by the dead.

It was August. It was very hot. I was due at work in a few hours.

2.

That night it must have been 150 degrees Fahrenheit inside the trailer I’d been assigned to. The truck had rolled up from Arkansas or Mississippi or some other godforsaken place like that, and was filled to the rafters with the fattest, heaviest packages I’d ever set eyes on. My job was to haul the cargo to the conveyor belt at the rear of the vehicle. When I was finished with this baby, there was another waiting, where I would reverse the process. Nothing but lugging boxes back and forth until six in the morning.

I’d started at the depot a few months back after running out of jack for the thousandth time. Kleingrosse, the floor boss, had taken one look at all six feet, 175 pounds of me and gave me the nastiest jobs. Since he was management, he wore a shirt and tie and jacket and never got his hands dirty. Needless to say, he wasn’t my favorite fellow.

At three that morning I took my fifteen for a smoke and a cold Coke. In the harsh light of the lunchroom I noticed my hands. They were glazed with a sticky orange substance. Within seconds they were on fire. One of the packages must have been leaking a contraband substance, acid or astringent.

I went running to the medic’s station and stuck out my paws for the guy on duty.

“Wash with soap and water,” he shrugged without taking his eyes off his Superman comic book. “That should do the trick.”

I hurried to the john and followed his instructions, but the burning sensation continued. Even under the cascade of cold water, it felt like the vile stuff was about to sear the flesh off my bones.

I marched over to the central dispatch desk and asked Kleingrosse to let me go for the night.

“Occupational hazard,” he sniffed. “I can’t let you go. I’m short two guys tonight as it is. You walk out of here, you forfeit your pay.”

I looked at his clean fingernails, his neatly combed hair. That was all I could do. Whenever they have you by the balls, that’s all you
can
do.

You fucking asshole. You big fucking asshole.

I was fuming. But I returned to my truck anyway, cursing all the way. That’s life—when you gotta have the money, you gotta have the money. All five bucks an hour.

Somehow I managed to make it through to the end of my shift. I was too exhausted to go someplace for a beer, so I jumped into my wreck and drove back to Park Street, where I sucked down gallon after gallon of water like a camel. I was sweat-drenched from head to toe. Even my work boots were saturated—they squished when I walked back and forth to the sink for refills.

As usual, I watched the sun come up through the porthole. Already a few commuters were gathered on the station platform below, waiting with their
Wall Street Journals
and Styrofoam cups for the six thirty-eight train. Sure, I was glad I wasn’t one of them—but where the hell was I?

Somehow I’ve got to get out of this,
I told myself. But how? I didn’t have the money for Paris, and besides, nobody went there
anymore. And I damned sure didn’t have the savings to take an early retirement.

I stripped naked, dunked myself in the bathtub, then stretched out on the narrow mattress. Outside the window the sky was painted robin’s-egg blue. Summer had made it so stifling up here on the fifth floor I could hardly breathe. I was sweating all over again and it was only seven thirty. My hands were as crimson as boiled lobsters and still faintly burning. I leaned over and switched on my ancient, dust-coated, portable electric fan. Then I closed my eyes and tried to find a dream.

3.

Between trucks I’d occasionally pick up a gig playing acoustic guitar and singing. What with the rise of disco, it was a dying art. If the joint had a piano, I’d bang on that, too. There were a few holes in the wall in the Village and one or two in Jersey where I could make up to forty smackers a night, not bad change at all, and it sure beat humping tractor-trailers for UPS.

I was delivering a lugubrious, Leonard Cohen—like rendition of “Greensleeves” at a popular Montfleur coffeehouse called the Purple Turtle when I looked up from the catgut strings and saw her.

She was all by herself at a table near the entrance, a cup in front of her, a dreamy half smile on her face. Right off I could tell she was really something. Rich ebony hair gathered into a ponytail by a gold-and-scarlet silk bandeau. Features that were strong and broad, just the way I liked them. Was she Creole? Gypsy? Puerto Rican? A caramel-skinned African queen? Her eyes were like a pair of glowing black coals, her lips thick and luscious.

She glanced at me, and then away. Quickly. In that single instant I forgot all about my DA’s wife.

When it was time for a break, I made a beeline for the door.

“Hey,” I said to her, slowing down as I passed. “My name’s Max. I hope you’re enjoying yourself.”

She seemed startled at being spoken to, even suspicious. Her mouth was full of large, even white teeth. “Oh. I guess I am…. ”

The preoccupied, lukewarm response was disappointing. But no matter—her smile was enough to encourage me, at least a little.

I ducked out and fired up a Marlboro. All sorts of questions flashed through my mind: Who is she? Where’d she come from? And, as always:
Where’s the guy?

On my way back to the stage, I stopped at her table again.

“Been here before?”

“No…. ”

Her “no” had the inflection of a question, which didn’t put me any more at ease. It was like she was thinking,
What the fuck do
you
want?

“What’s your name?” That’s what I wanted, for starters.

“Olivia.”

“A lovely name.”

And that was all. She refused to rise to the bait. I felt the blood rush into my face. Women could always force me into making a fool of myself.

Like a crooning sleepwalker I strummed and picked my way through another rambling set. “Magdalena,” one of the finely cut gems of the uncelebrated Danny O’Keefe. “To Ramona,” Dylan. “Winter Lady,” Cohen.
“Traveling lady, stay a while / Until the night is over…. ”
Then one of my own ballads. Every one was directed at her.

A few seconds into the last piece, Olivia wasn’t alone anymore. Her companion was a blond, heavily muscled, scowling young buck in a polo shirt and jeans who stared out the long picture window rather than at me. Once in a while he and Olivia
exchanged a word or two. After another tune, he got up and stormed out. She followed moments later, wearing a pair of oversized sunglasses, even though it was night.
Just my luck.

At the next break, I made for the door again, slowly this time. One of the waitresses handed me a slip of paper. “Here, this is for you.”
Call me,
it read.
226–9164.

4.

I decided to wait it out. The one thing you never want to show a beautiful woman is desperation. Instead of jumping for the telephone the very next day, I planted myself on the floor and interrogated the
I Ching.

Six in the second place means:

The woman loses the curtain of her carriage.

Do not run after it;

On the seventh day you will get it.

Ambiguous, as usual. But tantalizing. Even promising, if you bought into that sort of thing.

I’d been dozing on the carpet when I heard Mrs. Trowbridge’s bleat. “Max!
Maaaaaaax!
“ I jumped up and peered five flights down through the railing curves.

“Lou needs some help! Would you mind coming down?”

What the fuck is this all about?
My landlady never summoned me for anything besides phone calls. I pulled on a T-shirt and a pair of shorts and headed downstairs.

“Sorry to bother you, Max.”

Since I hadn’t made good on my bills in at least a couple of weeks, I figured a charitable gesture wouldn’t hurt.

Lou was outside on the front lawn, skinny arms folded over his chest, waiting for me in the brilliant sunshine.

“Thanks for coming down, Max.” He seemed more agitated than usual.

“No problem,” I lied.

“Elkins next door is about to die. Incurable cancer of the pancreas. The hospital let him come home for the final days. But the poor son of a gun keeps rolling off his bed. His wife can’t handle him at all.”

Well, here was something to feel good about—I wasn’t as bad off as Elkins. I’d never been inside the house next door. We traipsed across the driveway and climbed the steps. Inside the parlor it was shadowy and cool, the rays of the sun broken down by the heavy drapery.

In the dank atmosphere was the stench of rotting meat. Elkins, a flour-white cadaver, was rolling back and forth like an inverted tortoise on the Persian rug, moaning and groaning. It was hard to imagine that one day I’d be in the same boat. But I had an inkling of the future at that moment, and it made me shudder.

“All right now, Max, the objective is to get him back up there.”

“Up there” was a hospital pallet complete with stainless-steel handrails and an electronic control for adjusting the position of the torso. It was a long way down to the floor, and for a man without padding on his carcass, the impact must have hurt like kissing the pavement after a leap from the roof of a ten-story building.

Elkins’s elderly wife was standing by, wringing her hands.

“It’s the drugs,” she fretted. “Those damned painkillers are so strong that my poor Howard lapses into a delirium and doesn’t even know where he is! Next thing, he’s on the floor! I can’t very
well sit here every minute and watch over him. I hope you can do something, Lou…. ”

Lou ignored her like he ignored his own wife.

“Max, why don’t you step over there and hoist him up under the armpits. I’ll take him by the legs.”

Wanting nothing but to get the infernal task over with as quickly as possible, I did as ordered. It seemed incongruous for a man to kick the bucket on a spectacular summer day, but death, as we all know, spares no favorites, respects no specific time or place.

The touch of Elkins’s sallow, desiccated skin gave me the creeps. His cheeks, which were decorated with a nexus of broken blood vessels and a patchwork of blue and green bruises, had collapsed into his mouth. The only hair left on his head was scattered in a few unsightly white tufts. His lids were stretched tightly over bulging eyeballs.

In a matter of seconds—he was as light as a feather—we had him tucked safely in his crib.

Lou leaned over the railing with a goofy smile on his lips. “Now try and stay in there, Howard, will you?”

It was supposed to be funny, but nobody laughed.

T
he ugly specter of Death was enough to spook me back to life. The next evening, after a supper of soggy canned beans and franks that I whipped up on the hot plate in the basement, my fantasies got the best of me. I decided to call Olivia. After the seventh or eighth ring, she picked up.

“It’s Max, from the Purple Turtle. Thought I’d take you up on your offer.”

I could picture her clearly in my mind’s eye—sultry and remote and delicious.

“I enjoyed your music,” she said. “Thanks. I do the best I can.”

“Somebody I know—
knew
—is a classical musician.” The fair-haired guy she’d been sitting with? He didn’t look the type.

“No kidding.”

Her laughter tinkled like wind chimes.

“No kidding. I adore all kinds of music. But Basil” (pronounced
Ba-zeel)
“says that the only music Americans know is ‘Light My Fire.’ ”