Hating Olivia: A Love Story (20 page)
Some primitive instinct makes me open my mouth to protest,
but I stop myself in time. You don’t fight it when you’re sacked from a delivery boy’s job.
In a daze I get up and stumble out the door. Driving back to Roseland Avenue in the wake of my latest defeat, it occurs to me that not so very long ago I’d voluntarily resigned from a job writing for a major daily newspaper in another part of the country.
Now I’m not good enough to deliver the damned things.
But ironies don’t mean a thing now, now that I’m free again. How do I feel about my freedom? I can’t decide. I can’t decide anything, not whether to ram full speed into the garbage truck directly in front of me or even whether to brush away the fly that’s landed on my arm….
L
ivy’s hangover finally wore off. Since she couldn’t very well lie on her back forever, she roused herself out of bed and got back to the classifieds. Fortified by whatever she was taking and the endless blasting of “I Will Survive” on the turntable, she grimly went about the task of putting her life back together. In the meantime I kept my head down and plowed through my masterpiece—when I could. After the debacle with Fred, a new strain of madness manifested itself in Livy. The floors of the apartment had to be stained one day; the next the pad needed new drapery. Things—
everything
—had to be turned upside down in order to shake her out of her rut. The upshot was that the writing desk—as well as the writer himself—was booted from the living room to the bedroom to the breakfast nook and back again: anything to keep me and that goddamn book of mine in a state of perpetual turbulence, until the routine became a kind of perverse ritual. Like a stick of furniture that’s outworn its usefulness, I complied most times without putting up a stink, even when Livy flew into
a rage, cursing and berating me for being a worthless fool. By this time I’d learned that there was no use resisting her when she was in that state and that if I tried to escape, she’d track me down and punish me all over again. During this siege I bucked myself up with the half-baked, completely unfounded notion that the novel was going to be a success and my tribulations would miraculously come to an end. God knows why, but I’m one of those psychos who has always had a powerful, irrational sense of destiny—my dire circumstances at the time notwithstanding—even if that belief could disappear in a matter of seconds when Livy and I threatened to kill each other. Something else—I had no idea how “destiny” was supposed to work, but I was damned curious to find out.
That hunger was just the thing to drive me back into the library stacks, but instead of escape, my goal now was to produce a fissure in the secrets of metaphysical wisdom. Whatever occult material I could get my hands on I sucked down whole, particularly when it came to the astrological, which had always fascinated me. I delved into the horary, the mundane, the karmic. I studied the fixed stars and constellations, midpoints, zodiacal symbology, progressions and transits. I cast horoscopes—for the famous and the infamous, my buddy Bernie Monahan, Livy, and myself, all for practice—in order to understand how they worked, to try and comprehend the abstruse machinations of fate. Since I’d joined the ranks of the unemployed again, I had all the time in the world.
I failed, it goes without saying. No one in this life can grasp what’s written in the Great Beyond—if there is such a place. At the heart of existence on earth—a cause and effect that itself is completely unknowable—is mystery. It is mystery within riddle within enigma that governs all things, from the smallest grain
of sand to the beauty of the flower, from the relations between yin and yang to the ultimate darkness at the outer reaches of the universe. If the great philosophers claim differently, they’re full of it—they don’t know a fucking thing.
But if I fell far short of the mark, at least I became conversant in the arcane pseudosciences. And who could tell—a new line of bullshit might come in handy someday for picking up a few bucks. Show me somebody who doesn’t want to hear about himself….
Meanwhile, Livy had landed something new. This time she was going to be assistant to a guy who owned and operated a roofing supply company out of the attic office of his house at the south end of Roseland Avenue. Ned Sampras was the prototype of Caspar Milquetoast, she told me when she got home from the interview—she could handle him all right. She started on Monday and the pay was respectable, just enough so that if we lived within our means, we’d be able to go on until—
That was exactly the problem. Our lives were always a matter of until, and until never came.
Livy decided that we needed a vacation before she harnessed herself to the yoke of work again. Better yet, since we were still together after all our ups and downs, since we’d lasted through Blake and Fred, we should make it a sort of unofficial second honeymoon, do it up big. It would have to be someplace cheap, someplace close by, since she was starting the new gig in only a few days.
I didn’t want to go. The last place you wanted to be when you were miserable was on holiday pretending to enjoy yourself. And once again Livy had us trying to act like royalty—or at least a middle-class family—when in reality we were nothing more than bottom-feeders scraping by on a shoestring.
Okay, I said. I let her make the arrangements. We packed up our stuff fast. But before we could get out the door, a half-dozen skirmishes had to be fought. First she wasn’t going. Then I wasn’t going. She hated my guts. I hated hers. It went back and forth like this for hours. Madness. By the time we climbed into the Nova with the suitcase, half the day was gone. I drove with a flask of Rock & Rye between my legs. It was sleeting and snowing and raining, all at the same time. Livy navigated, until we ended up at one of those cheesy blue-collar newlywed resorts in the Pocono
Mountains where the sunken bathtubs were built in the shape of gigantic hearts and every night you were supposed to screw the living daylights out of your new bride or groom. Wherever we went we were greeted as “Mister and Mrs. Tanga.” Rather than make Livy happy, whenever that happened she would glance at me with a hint of disappointment in her eyes. Could she possibly want to be legally married to me after the shit we’d been through? After all this time, I still couldn’t decipher what was in her mind. She had to be insane. I knew that I was. We were both insane.
Bombed on the cheap champagne that was stocked in the room by the maids every afternoon, we got it on a few times in the tub, and the old magic was back. For some reason at that time I liked to pin her ankles behind her ears—buck-fucking, I once heard someone call it. If I was out of rubbers, I’d wait until the very last second to pull out and blow my wad all over her smooth, hard belly, then drag my dribbling dick across the black hair of her cunt and to the mouth of her asshole. When it comes to sex, that’s how men are—we get something in our heads, and we can’t rest easy until we do it. I can still see Olivia Aphrodite climbing naked out of the white puffs of frothy bubbles like some mythological Diana emerging from the forest, and my mouth waters at the memory. But if fucking Livy was good, the best part of the trip was driving the snowmobiles in the hills surrounding the resort. Rocketing through the icy winter air in the bullet-shaped vehicles, I felt free. Free of everything, including myself, for a few minutes. Had there been some way, I would have kept the pedal to the gas until I made it all the way to the other end of the earth—China.
At night after dinner it was important to Livy that we listen to the lame comedians and then dance to the second-rate music in the main lounge. Even though I hated it, I did it. I did everything
I could so that she’d be happy for those three or four days at least, not so much from a desire to see her happy, but in order to have a few hours of surcease to the suffering that had become our life together.
But in the end, as we were driving away through the early February flurries, I couldn’t miss the dejection in her face, and I knew that whatever I’d tried to do hadn’t worked.
For ten bucks I had a business card dummied up:
MAX ZAJACK
BIRTH CH ARTS
DELINEATION, INTERPRETATION,
CONSULTATION
226–9164
I cut the astrological symbol for Capricorn (my sign) out of an issue of
Dell Horoscope
and asked the designer at the shop to affix it to the upper right-hand corner. With the addition of that decorative touch, I was in business.
I dropped the card all over the place, in the Laundromat, the library, at the corner newsstand, and within a few days the phone was ringing off the hook. I was right—people aren’t interested in anything so much as they’re interested in themselves; if there’s one thing that will keep a woman’s attention (and my clients turned out to be women almost exclusively), it’s talking about her nonstop for an hour or two.
I scheduled all my appointments for anywhere between nine and five, when Livy was at work. All species of female came to the
apartment in search of answers to questions about their past and future. The majority were lost souls simply in need of someone to talk to. Like Minnie the librarian. She was a nearsighted little mouse who was shy to the point of painfulness and who’d never set foot out of her Jersey hometown. Whether it was something she gave off or something I sensed, her horoscope refused to speak to me in any way. While I considered it my duty to be truthful about what I thought was written in the cosmic wheel, I couldn’t bring myself to let her leave without some kind of hope, so I concocted a few glowing generalities on the spot.
“Your life is going to take an adventurous turn. Yes, definitely.”
“Really? When?”
“Hmm … let me see here…. Well, in about a year, when Jupiter crosses into your ninth house.”
“God,
I hope you’re right about that…. Sometimes I’m afraid that I’ll never get out of my mother’s house!”
“I’m always right, so don’t you worry.”
“And what else do you see?”
“From the favorable relationship between your Neptune in the fifth and Mercury in the second, that you have quite a fertile imagination. And that there’s money to be made from developing it. Poetry, singing, sculpture.”
“Really…. I never thought…. I mean, I
wanted
to believe, but I never had the
confidence
that—”
“That’s all it is, Minnie—a matter of confidence,” I said—as if I knew anything about it. “If you believe in yourself, there’s nothing that can stop you. You just have to dig right in, and whatever you do, don’t be afraid.”
Even if no such thing was indicated, what was the harm in a few bromides? It was necessary to impart hope; that was the
important thing. Because, after all, hope was what they’d come for—even if hope was at bottom an insidious quantity. Better to live without a shred of hope than to live within the hazes of illusion. But human beings always need the quick fix. Without it, there’s no use getting out of bed in the morning.
“I’m so glad I came to you, Max! You’re making me feel so
good!”
“It’s not me, Minnie—it’s right here in the stars.”
Of course, just the idea of a jerk in my boat doling out counsel was preposterous, since I was completely and totally inept when it came to handling my own affairs. I only had to think of my relations with Livy to be reminded of that. Still, it didn’t seem to matter—in a steady stream they kept coming to have their fortunes told….
One of the more intriguing calls came from a woman announcing herself in a heavy Middle Eastern accent as Shareen. How did she get my number? Laura Dexter, a portrait painter who I’d advised recently, recommended my services highly. Rather than come to my apartment—Shareen had two young children and it was sometimes difficult to haul them around—she wondered would I be averse to making a house call? She would certainly make it worth my while.
We set an appointment for Thursday afternoon. The address Shareen gave me was in a ritzy section of Roseland, across the street from where the Mafia dons had their fortresses. I rolled my heap into the driveway and took in the huge Colonial: three stories with two spacious wings, a shady acre or two out back, a shiny black Mercedes docked in one garage bay—somebody here was nicely covered.
When she answered the bell, I had trouble believing my eyes. Shareen was a drop-dead dusky knockout. Her ebony hair was
pulled back from her face, revealing an exquisite bone structure full of lovely angles beneath bronze skin and black eyes that seethed with sex, the sex-fire of a harem girl in ancient Persia. She wore a neck-to-floor shift, but at her slightest movement I could see the outline of her brown nipples and juicy haunches.
She invited me into the airy living room and served coffee. Her kids scampered around like mice until she banished them to the basement to play.
“Now,” she said, reclining against the plush cushions on the sofa,
“tell me all about myself…. ”
Since I could hardly rip my eyes away from her, it took a supreme effort to pay attention to what I was there to do. I rambled from topic to topic, spouting truisms until I ran out of things to say. It didn’t matter. She wanted to talk, too.
It turned out that Shareen had entered into an arranged marriage at seventeen (she was only twenty-something now) in her native Lebanon to a considerably older man. They’d immigrated to America only a few years ago, in order to pursue greater opportunities in his career. Her husband was a surgeon at the Saint Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston, a man under enormous pressure to save lives every single day. Why, he was so busy at the hospital, it was a wonder she or the kids got to see him even once a week.
Sometimes she felt lonely, being marooned here in the American suburbs. Which was why it was so nice to have company…. someone like myself to come around and offer intelligent, mature, sophisticated conversation. How much did she owe me again?
She wrote out a check and laid it on the top of the glass coffee table. One more thing…. Would I by any chance be able to come again and go into greater detail on her chart? There were
certain things she wanted to know, answers she needed to specific questions. Was Tuesday a possibility, maybe?