Hating Olivia: A Love Story (8 page)

“I don’t know—maybe you can think of something.”

What it added up to was that now we were without a source of income unless I came up with a gig. For the past several weeks, I’d been living off Livy’s largesse.

“Well, I guess I could try Manpower again, or—”

“Don’t sweat it, Max. Something will come up.”

Sure,
I thought,
something will come up. But it’ll be my dick—which can’t sign checks.

I
talked Livy into hitting the road for a while. Why not? We had no obligations and nothing to hang around for. We locked the apartment, packed up my old Impala, and started driving, without a destination. I loved that old dinosaur; it had been with me
for years through thick and thin, even surviving a ramrod front-fender shot from a pickup truck on a foggy highway outside Toronto shortly after I bought her. In those days everybody drove V–8s, it was nothing to be ashamed of….

Whenever I set out I thought of all the great ones before me who’d taken to the road: Rimbaud … Miller … Hamsun … Dylan. (Never Kerouac and that bunch. I never did get what that Beat shit was all about.) When in doubt, I always headed west. It was a stunning morning and our spirits were high. The asphalt in front of us was like the promise of an unfurling destiny—which was nothing but romantic bullshit, but I had to believe that we were traveling for a reason. For the first few hours the open highway was great, until Livy began to get the fidgets from sitting on her ass too long. We decided to spend the night in a rustic cabin in some godforsaken western Pennsylvania forest. The accommodations were less than first class, but for twenty-five bucks we weren’t about to get the Hilton.

I was outside gazing at Venus and Jupiter with a smoke and a beer when Livy came up behind me.

I want to go back home tomorrow morning.

Why?

No real reason. I’m just not in the mood for this roughing it crap.

I knew what that meant. Women have this thing about bathrooms with all the amenities. The Whispering Pines didn’t even feature hot water as an attraction.

Come on, I said. You haven’t given yourself much of a chance. How about we try one more day. Maybe you’ll change your mind.

If you don’t drive back to New Jersey first thing tomorrow morning, I’m going by myself.

There was nothing more to say.

14.

Sometimes without explanation Livy would disappear for long clips of the day, leaving me to wonder where the hell she’d gotten to. She’d show up finally toward evening laden with new stuff for the apartment—a loveseat we just had to have, an expensive Persian rug she couldn’t resist, a wok we’d be sure to get tons of use out of. More often than not, there’d be a bag full of new duds, too.

Knowing that she’d used her credit cards for the binges, I’d try to sneak in a question about how she planned to pay for the items when the invoices arrived at the end of the month—especially with both of us being out of work and the last bill having gone unattended.

“How many times do I have to tell you? Shopping makes me feel better. And stop fretting, Max—it’ll get taken care of one way or another.”

She had reserves I wasn’t privy to—that had to be it. No way Livy would purposely plunge herself into a slough of debt she couldn’t extricate herself from—she was far too intelligent for something like that.

But I had my doubts. Not enough, though, to go out and scare up a job.

B
y now I was exasperated and bored with the melancholy that resulted from our weekend pilgrimages out to the old family “estate.” No doubt Livy’s dejection had to do with the fact that her parents had split up. But I had to cop to a nagging curiosity, too.

“If you miss your family so much, why don’t we just go visit one of them?”

“You don’t get it. It’s not that easy.”

“Okay, I’m sure it’s not. But why not just face whatever it is that bothers you? That’s always the best way—face up to it. Besides, I’ll be there. That has to count for something, right?”

To that she had nothing to say. But when her old man phoned not long afterward, she agreed to go over to his newest digs, and she was bringing me along. She hadn’t seen the guy in over two years.

“I just hope I did the right thing,” she sighed after hanging up. “You did, no question. And I’ll be there, don’t forget. What could possibly go wrong?”

Now we’re getting somewhere,
I thought.

Livy’s father was holed up in a second-floor flat in the old North Ward of Newark. It was a quiet neighborhood—as in funeral-parlor quiet. We squeezed the Nova into a tight spot and walked around to the back of the orange baked-brick two-family house.

Livy was jittery. She tripped more than once in her platform heels.

“Just relax,” I encouraged her, tossing my smoldering cigarette butt into a hedge. “If it’s too much to handle, we’ll just split, got it?” We climbed the wooden staircase that gave out on a view of
two-by-four backyards, some with plots full of the tangled vines of tomato and pepper plants. Enrico Tanga made us wait before he opened up. Was he having his revenge on us for freezing him out that afternoon when he’d surprised us in the act? You can always count on people to be weird that way.

Livy’s papa was handsome—I could see right off where she’d inherited her swarthiness and lush head of hair. His clothes—plaid shirt and khaki trousers—were neatly pressed. Despite his lack of ostentation, there was something of the delicate dandy about him. Latin dudes from the old school—they all think they’re Valentino or Sinatra.

“Come on in,” he said, letting us into the sun-splashed kitchen. I took note that he and his daughter did not touch. Odd—especially for dagos.

Livy introduced me. We shook hands. There was nothing much in the place—a ficus tree with sagging leaves in one corner; a few sticks of plain, functional furniture; a stove with an old-fashioned stainless-steel pot; a three-quarter-sized refrigerator. The sum of its parts suggested a man who was not planning on staying very long—or who wasn’t really living there at all.

We sat around the small table. Enrico broke out a jug of Chianti and poured three glasses.

“So—what is it you do, Max?” he said without looking at me.

“Musician … I’m, uh, trying to write, too.”

He didn’t press for details, which was lucky for me. He was much more interested in his daughter. There was some unspoken tension between them that I couldn’t put a finger on. I wrote it off as the typical family antagonism.

He asked a few perfunctory questions about the circumstances of her life—nothing about her screams of passion that afternoon we’d been going at it—before getting on to the crux of the issue.

“Talked to your sisters?”

“No.”

“Mm-hmm…. Heard from your mother?”

“No…. ”

“Doesn’t surprise me…. You thought of getting in touch with her?”

Livy shrugged.

“I’m sure she’s conquering the world with her precious career and all that. Well, I just hope she’s happy with her life now—after what she did to the rest of us.”

I kept watch on Livy. She shifted uneasily in her chair.

“Right, Liv? Wouldn’t you agree with me on that?”

That’s when she bridled. “I don’t want to get into all that again! It’s none of my business! That’s between you and her!”

“Hey—all I’m saying is that your mother was the cause of all the—”

“It was you, too!” Livy cried, catapulting out of her seat like a surface-to-air missile. “Don’t forget that! Don’t you forget it for a second!”

She grabbed her purse and turned to me. “I’m getting out of here! Are you coming with me or not?”

She bolted for the door. Enrico jumped up and tried to block her way.

“Olivia! All I wanted was to talk to you! Don’t go getting all bent out of shape here!”

But his daughter evaded his grasp. A pained grimace creased his face as he watched her stomp down the stairs.

“Nice meeting you, Mister Tanga,” I mumbled, passing him.

“Take it easy, kid.” I had the feeling he was about to add something—like “keep banging the piss out of her” or something of that sort—but maybe I was just being paranoid.

I followed Livy down to the street. What the hell happened? The guy seemed all right to me, and I told her so. “No, Max—
you don’t fucking get it.”

“All right. I guess I don’t.” And there was no talking to her at all on the ride back to Roseland Avenue.

But the touchy encounter produced an altogether unexpected effect. When Livy stepped out of the shower a half hour later, it was as if she’d swallowed a brick of Spanish fly or some other powerful aphrodisiac. She gripped my dick and steered me toward the bed, where she seemed to want to devour me whole. It was the best session we had in weeks—and none was ever bad.

“So what in the world happened in that crazy house of yours?” I asked afterward when I lay there smoking a cigarette. “Sure you want to know?”

“Hell yes, I want to know. Why wouldn’t I want to know?” She stared hard at the ceiling. “He molested me.”

“Who?”

“Who do you think?”

I got up on my elbow and looked at her. She was wearing the mask again.

“What?
You’re saying your father—” “My two sisters, too.” “Jesus Christ.” So
that
was it.

“The entire family knew about my father. And it wasn’t just us he was after. It was some of the other girls, too, my cousins, our friends…. ”

“The lousy bastard. Didn’t anyone try to stop him?”

“Oh, he was sly. It was all broom closets and basements and stairwells when nobody was looking. And none of us knew that it
was happening to the next person. We all thought it was just
us.
Divide and conquer, as they say.” “What a fucking creep.”

In my brain I conjured up incestuous scenes. I got angry. Then horny all over again.

“What—what did he do to you?”

“Put his hands all over me. Kissed me. Groped inside my clothes. Some other wonderful stuff.”

“ ‘Some other wonderful stuff'? Like what?” She turned her head away. “Like what? Did he fuck you?”

She wasn’t talking. In my mind’s eye I tried to picture Enrico Tanga in that compromising position, but I had trouble with it.

Was Livy dishing out the truth? Of course she was! She had to be! Why would she lie about something like incest?

“Why didn’t you tell me about this before?”

She made a face.

“But it wasn’t just that vileness that came between him and my mother when she finally found out. It was everything else. The fact that he was from the wrong side of the tracks. That he’s a lowlife from Newark, as she liked to call him. That he wanted his daughters to stay home and wait on him hand and foot like a Sicilian nobleman rather than get an education. That he wasn’t interested in becoming anything better than a carpenter. That his grand ambition in life was to sit around the house and drink wine and eat pasta…. You should have seen the
fights.
Once, when my mother locked him out, he tore down the front door of the house out there on the compound. I mean literally
ripped it off its hinges.
I was never so scared in my life. We actually hid under the beds thinking he was going to murder us. Thank God for the police. If it wasn’t for them, I might not be alive right now. Maybe none
of us would. And she claims that my little sister, Mary-Jo, was the result of a drunken rape one night after they’d come home from a party…. ”

Okay. So I’d screwed up. It had been a piss-poor idea to coax Livy into a reunion with her father. Next time I’d keep my big mouth shut.

A gang of kids was screeching with delight at some game it was playing down in the street. The late-afternoon sun slanted across the twisted blue sheets, creating an effect that was ineffably sad, like everything else in the whole wide world.

“Now do you get it, Max?”

For that day, there was nothing left to say.

15.

“My mother has a nose for things, too. Whenever my father comes into the picture, she’s not far behind, even if we haven’t talked for a year. Don’t ask me how she does it. She doesn’t even know where I’m living.”

Sure enough, not long after we saw Livy’s old man, the telephone rang and damned if it wasn’t the missus.

Livy shrugged after hanging up. “Well, since we’re at it, you should probably make the queen’s acquaintance.”

By now I knew that I had damaged goods on my hands—not that any of us on earth are in one piece. But it was as if Livy felt compelled to demonstrate to me the balancing end of the sick equation.

The offices of T&C Realty were located on the second floor of a row of tony storefronts above the twin movie theater in the posh suburban village of Millburn. Mrs. Tanga had managed to extricate herself from her marriage and start up her own company, which had grown into one of the most successful in the county.

It was a Thursday evening. Office hours were already over for the day. The anteroom was empty except for several heavy gray desks whose surfaces were covered with fat directories and
multiline telephone sets. Livy knocked on the door of the inner sanctum.

“On the phone—I’ll be with you in a minute!”

Her mother’s voice was brassy and hard. Stenciled on the door were the words “Clara Tanga, Licensed Realtor.” Translation: She was the big chief.

From the other side of the door we heard fragments of the one-sided conversation, all delivered in a no-bullshit, imperious tone. A few minutes passed. Livy and I stood there gawking at each other.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” she whispered, though she didn’t go for the exit.

“We came all this way. Why not stay?” After making the acquaintance of Enrico, I was more curious than ever.

Moments later, there were a few hard, purposeful footsteps, then the door swung open.

The figure that appeared was diminutive but strikingly attractive in her spiffy businesswoman’s suit and just-so bob haircut. Large emerald-green eyes were the dominant note in her finely chiseled face. Once upon a time this woman had been a beauty, and she wasn’t all that bad now—shit, I’d nail her in a heartbeat. The apple had certainly not fallen far from the tree.