Hating Olivia: A Love Story (3 page)

“What’s his instrument?”

“His instrument?” She gave a suggestive little giggle. All right. So whoever Basil was had screwed her. And I was turned on. “Yeah. What does he play?”

“The violin, in chamber groups mostly. He specializes in Prokofiev and Bach. On occasion he’ll brave Shostakovich.”

Was I supposed to be impressed? Intimidated? Okay, but no way I was about to let on.

“I see. The guy at your table, by any chance?”

A few long seconds ticked away.

“No.”

If Olivia wanted to come off as a riddle, she was scoring a great success.

“Actually,
I
start at the Purple Turtle next week.”

“Really…. What doing?”

“Waitress. I’m working on an advanced degree in literature. A few nights a week at the Turtle will help with the bills…. How about you? Can you make a living playing the Purple Turtle?”

“I do whatever I can to make ends meet. These days I’m on the graveyard shift. Whenever I can squeeze it in, I play the coffeehouses.

I write music. Someday I want to write books, novels. That’s my great ambition.” “Mine, too.”

My ears pricked up. “We’re talking the same language then.”

“I have to go,” she said suddenly. “It was nice talking to you.”

Why did she have to go?
Where
did she have to go? Was somebody with her? On his way? The blond guy again? The back of my neck began to burn.

“Nice talking to you,” I said. “We’ll have to do it again sometime.”

There it was—smooth and casual and self-assured. “Maybe we will.”

Before I had the chance to ask when, she’d hung up.

5.

That little conversation with Olivia kept me guessing for days on end. I told myself I didn’t give a damn, but somewhere down deep I did.

One night when I had off from the loading dock I was roused from my sleep by a bloodcurdling scream. It was like someone’s throat was being torn out. Since my dreams tended toward the violent and frightening, my first guess was that the sound had come from some uncharted region inside my own skull.

My eyes shot open. The ceiling of my cage was a black slate. Outside the porthole the sky was colorless. As usual, I was sweating like a pig.

Another scream ripped out of the darkness. There was no doubt about it now: somebody was being murdered beneath the very roof of the boardinghouse. I leaped off the mattress, toppling the reading lamp in the process. When I succeeded in finding and switching it on, I saw by the alarm clock that it was three thirty.

Where the hell were my cigarettes? I fumbled around for the pack, lighted one, and cracked the door. What I heard out there was the gibbering of a wild animal, followed by a burst of hysterical laughter. It wasn’t murder after all—somebody was losing his mind.

Somewhere below a light flared. Mrs. Trowbridge, in her flea-bitten nightgown, stood on the second-floor landing outside her bedroom and squinted up at me.

“What’s going
on
up there, Max?”

Just as I was about to tell her that her guess was as good as mine, there was another yelp.

This time I figured out where the commotion was coming from. I took three steps down the hall and knocked on Benny’s door.

“You okay in there? Benny—you all right?”

“Ugh … agh … EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE…. ”

I turned the handle and pushed the door open. Benny was thrashing around in his sheets, his spindly black legs spastically pumping the pedals of an invisible bicycle.

“Christ! What’s wrong, man?”

“MY EAR!” he shouted into the pillow he clutched with two fists.

“Your ear? What’s wrong with your ear?”

“IT’S IN MY EAR! ONE OF THEM GODDAMN COCKER-ROACHES CRAWLED INTO MY EAR AND I CAN’T GET THE MOTHERFUCKER OUT!”

I ran to the bed and yanked him by his arms into a sitting position. Then I forced his hand away from his ear.

“THE SON OF A BITCH BURROWED IN THERE WHILE I WAS SLEEPIN'! THIS PLACE IS A FUCKIN’ OUTHOUSE! THEY SHOULD BE ASHAMED TO CHARGE RENT! THEY SHOULD PAY
US
TO LIVE HERE!”

Before he lost it all over again, I twisted his head and peered inside the canal. Sure enough, there were the creature’s bent hind legs.

“GET IT OUT! GET IT THE FUCK OUT, MAX, BEFORE IT CLIMBS INTO MY BRAIN!”

“It can’t climb into your brain, Benny, it’s not anatomically possible!” I assured him, though I wasn’t at all certain.

“PLEASE, MAX! BEFORE IT DRIVES ME FUCKIN’ CRAZY!”

I made a grab for the insect with my thumb and forefinger, but no dice. The harder I tried, the farther in the beast scurried, until it disappeared entirely.

By now there was a crowd huddled in Benny’s door, including Lou and his wife and the drowsy, shell-shocked tenants from the lower floors.

“Anybody got some tweezers?”

“Tweezers!”

“I think I got some in my room…. ”

“DO
SOMETHIN', MAX!”

“Just hold on a minute, Benny, hold on, help is on the way … !”

Heavy footsteps banged down the stairs. “MAX!
PLEASE!
“

“Oh, my
Lord,”
warbled Mrs. Trowbridge.

“Try turning him over on his side,” Lou suggested feebly.

“What good will that do?”

An argument broke out. Heavy footfalls up the stairs.

I pulled the tweezers out of Jimmy McNulty’s paw and gently inserted the tongs into Benny’s auricle. But it was too late. The cockroach had forged onward into the jungle of the inner ear.

“YOU GOT HIM, MAX?”

I removed the tweezers. “Benny, I hate to have to tell you this, but there’s nothing I can do. You’re going to have to get out of bed and make a trip to the emergency room.”

That prompted a vessel-bursting bellow from the poor bugger. He tore at his hair.

“I’ll call an ambulance!” offered McNulty.

“Forget it. I’ll drive him over myself,” I said.

The gathering slowly dispersed while McNulty and I dressed the trembling Benny in his Bermuda shorts and T-shirt. Since his equilibrium was destroyed, I draped his arm around my neck and carried him down the staircase.

“I’m gonna sue you, you slumlord!” Benny shouted over his shoulder at Mrs. Trowbridge. “I’m gonna take you for everything you’re worth! You got no business runnin’ a lodging for human beings! THERE’S A GODDAMN COCKROACH IN MY EAR! YOU’RE TRYIN’ TO KILL ME HERE!”

“Relax, Benny…. ”

I hauled him across the lawn to my decrepit Chevy Impala and laid him across the back seat. Caroline and Lou watched with sleepy horror from the porch.

Benny was still cursing them for bastards as we pulled away from the curb into the steamy New Jersey night.

6.

Benny didn’t follow through on his threat to sue, but the next day after being discharged from the hospital he packed up his stuff and moved out. The incident was one more that made me question what I was doing with my life, drifting from one cockroach palace to another, nursing puerile fantasies about writing great novels but never actually trying, barely scraping by on survival jobs while most normal people my age were embarking on real careers and starting families and all the rest of it, American-style. The problem was, Norman Rockwell was rotten to the core, and I knew it. When I contemplated what a man had to endure in order to get by in this world, it turned my stomach. Nevertheless, an undefined sense of guilt dogged me. Why was it I detested all things conventional and bourgeois? My head was in the clouds, for sure. Or up my ass, as my blue-collar old man liked to say. My best friend, Bernie Monahan, always accused me of “Too many books! Too much Dostoyevsky! Too much Henry Miller! Too much of that ridiculous Shithead Shinsky!” (his bizarre moniker for Nietzsche—or any other intellectual for that matter).

Maybe all that was true—it
was
true, in fact—but there was something more that accounted for my restlessness and disaffection. I was also out of step with the world in some fatal,

cement-solid way. Yours truly always had to be different. Whatever everybody else loved, I hated. My tastes in music and literature and film and theater ran to the esoteric, and the more obscure, the better. Give me Arthur Machen over Stephen King any day! Marguerite Duras over Erica Jong! Bowles and Bukowski over any bestseller on the list! I was most decidedly a lone wolf, a
contrarian,
and a foot soldier to my own private drummer. Moreover, I wanted to
accomplish
something unique—a calamitous urge, especially when connected with the so-called “creative” or “artistic” temperament.

Worst of all—
absolute worst of all
—I never listened to anyone’s advice.

One morning, after a brutal eight-hour stretch of lifting, with another scheduled for that night, I dialed the loading dock. “Message for Kleingrosse, the guy in charge of bay C.” “Okay. What’s the message?” “I quit.”

Clean. Simple. Decisive. There was a pause on the line. “And your name?”

I spelled it out for the operator. I thought I could hear her scribbling something down.

“Don’t forget to send my last check,” I reminded her before hanging up.

As usual, I did not fully consider the consequences of my actions. Monahan had warned me beforehand to think it over, but I refused. All I knew was that I had enough cash to buy food for the next couple of weeks, as well as scrape by on the rent. Surely something would happen between now and the day when the coffer ran dry? It always had in the past. I was still here, wasn’t I?

A few minutes later Mrs. Trowbridge called up the stairs that the telephone was for me. I went for the hall extension.

“Candace London here. Your horoscope, remember? I’m still waiting for payment. When can I expect it?”

“Damn—I thought I sent that out. You’ll have it in a few days, I promise. I’ll get it out to you no later than tomorrow…. ”

“Just make sure you do.”

Mrs. London did not sound pleased. Some streak of perversity in me wanted to make her wait as long as possible for her twenty-five bucks. Why should I compensate the messenger for a baleful message? Not to mention that I didn’t have it to spare.

Now that I had some free time on my hands, I was going to write. Do what I’d read that real artists did: rise at the crack of dawn, plant themselves at their workbenches in the holy quietude of first light, and wait to be struck by the lightning of inspiration. If it worked for them, why shouldn’t it work for me?

The very next morning I dragged myself out of bed at five—
five,
when not even the birds were awake!—boiled water in the aluminum pot for instant coffee, gobbled down two chocolate-coated donuts, and sat with my pens and pencils and blank pad of paper at the tiny, scarred desk facing the porthole.

The setting was perfect. There I was—the impoverished, budding genius in his garret, armed with weapons to conquer the world of ideas, to set his name forever upon the world’s tablet….

The problem was nothing—not a single word—would come. Like an impotent lover or outclassed prizefighter, I couldn’t get a thing off: not a bolt of sperm, not a single stiff jab. Morning after morning I hunched for hours over that cramped student’s desk, mulling, brooding, cogitating. I sweated and strained. I puffed cigarette after cigarette. I compiled mountains of notes about nothing. I contemplated unanswerable quandaries, such as:
How does a writer discover his own voice? Isn’t the unalloyed inner flow transformed into something else altogether—something contaminated

—immediately upon contact with open air—or paper? What’s more, every human being has a million voices coursing through his being! Which is the real thing?
The exhortation to “Find your own voice!” was absurd, really, even after two seconds’ worth of thought! The veneer of authenticity could be a falsehood, and the appearance of uncertainty and dubiousness much closer to truth and honesty. I would call up examples of each, then reverse the process, until I was thoroughly confused. Finally, out of complete paralysis and frustration, I’d turn to the latest girlie magazine and begin to fantasize in another direction altogether.

Once in a while I’d succeed in starting a novel, or a story, or a play, in a blast of self-assured afflatus, but for one reason or another—usually that I was mysteriously without the wherewithal to follow through—each project was aborted in the early stages of pregnancy. Ten or fifteen incandescent pages, then a perplexing meltdown. I tried to muddle through the problem, but eventually got entangled like a fish in the net of my own ponderings.

Those early mornings never amounted to much of anything. Well, fuck it all anyway—maybe I just wasn’t cut out to be a writer….

7.

Within a few short weeks I was staring straight into the black bottom of my meager bank account. There were no gigs, musical or otherwise, on the horizon. I figured I’d better do something, and fast, before even Mrs. Trowbridge lost her patience and evicted me. To add to the pressure, the sorcerer had called for her money again. Welching on that chit wasn’t going to be as easy as I thought.

But as always I struck pay dirt in the classifieds. Mister V. Kishan Rao was in need of coaching in the English language if he had any hope of passing his examinations to become certified as a medical doctor in this country, and he was paying eight bucks an hour and willing to visit the roach palace for it. The Pentel Corporation of North America likewise wanted someone to come out to its facilities in a Fairfield industrial park and converse with a recently arrived employee from Japan, in order to prime him for life in the United States. Within twenty-four hours, I’d nailed down both positions. It was one rare day.

With a little jingle in my pocket again, I could breathe easier.

The balmy evenings of late summer passed like a lilac-scented dream. Before I noticed, autumn had tossed its longer nights over the world like a soft blanket. Olivia was still on my mind, but I
wasn’t banking on anything. A couple weeks after talking to her, I cruised over to the Purple Turtle around closing time to try and snag myself a booking. I peeked into the window. There weren’t any patrons left in the place, and the waitstaff was turning chairs upside down onto the empty tables. I rapped on the glass. Olivia, who was wiping down the table on the other side, opened up. “The boss around?”