Hating Olivia: A Love Story (9 page)
We shook hands. Clara offered us a pair of chairs. At once static electricity crackled between the females.
The conversation was all about people they had in common, business acquaintances and such—no mention of the family whatsoever. All the while, Livy’s mother checked me out from the corner of her eye, very unobtrusively to be sure, but I caught her at it all right. With my beard and long hair, I couldn’t imagine that I’d be the Chamber of Commerce’s cup of tea.
“So what is it you do again, Max?” she asked, all phony smiles.
“Livy mentioned something, but it seems to have slipped my mind.”
Musician, writer, etc. Big mistake.
“I see…. Now I’m just curious, so I hope you don’t mind my asking—
do you make any real money at something like that?
“
The question was like a hard slap in the face. It’s a bitch that most times you don’t catch on to the full intent of a remark until it’s just a little too late for an appropriately smart-assed reply.
I yammered out something about millionaire rock stars and Nobel laureate novelists by way of self-justification, conveniently neglecting to mention my own nullity of income.
The purpose of this exchange was for the business tycoon to gauge exactly what her daughter had in this new boyfriend of hers. Not much, she had to be thinking, though the congenial expression never left her lips. For all I knew, she approved. I glanced at Livy. Smoke was puffing out of her ears.
“I’ll call you,” Mrs. Tanga nodded at her daughter. “We’ll get together for dinner sometime.”
Uh-oh. Mother was going to offer daughter her
opinion
of me. What else could it mean?
“Have you heard from your father?” Clara asked, just as we were about to make our escape.
“A little while back…. ”
“Well, well, well—he actually picked up the phone?
Hah!
I can hardly believe it! If you ever need anything, you make sure you ask him. That skinflint can spare a few bucks! What does
he
have to spend money on? The son of a bitch never sends me anything for Mary-Jo as it is! And he’s got that new girlfriend paying his way already, so I hear!”
This was a new one on Livy; I saw the surprise register in her eyes.
“I’ll tell you all about it later, don’t worry,” Clara told her daughter like a conspirator. “Anyway, better
her
than me.”
Her disdain for her ex-husband was palpable, and it wasn’t mere jealousy. It was more like pure hatred. The attack left me feeling a trace of guilt. After all, what was I but a sponge, too? It wasn’t like I wanted it that way, but….
“So how about it—think your mom liked me?” I joked when we were on the sidewalk.
“My mother doesn’t like
anybody,
including me. Sorry to disappoint you, Max.”
Livy looked a bit green around the gills. She complained of a splitting headache before we even neared the Millburn city line. This time she didn’t make a grab for my cock.
T
he next morning…. Livy points to her dry, cracked lips and gives a shake of her head. Her eyes were squinched in agony. I roll over off my pillow and move my face close to hers.
“What is it?”
“Water. Get me some water, please…. ”
Her teeth are clenched. She can’t seem to open her mouth.
I ran into the bathroom and filled a cup. The liquid had the desired effect of loosening her jaws and tongue. Like a doctor, I ventured a look inside. Milky-white pustules covered every centimeter of the moist walls and roof of her mouth—a downright ghastly sight. The angry cankers made the slightest movement of her mouth an agonizing torture. Since any attempt at speech broke the sores open, there was nothing the poor girl could do but lie helplessly in the dark. I spent the day running back and forth to the bedroom with any palliative I could think of, from camphor to cracked ice.
Not a goddamn thing worked. For days the lesions remained intractable, resistant like some new strain of stubborn virus to every conceivable ministration. When the pain got to be too much for Livy, I stripped off my clothes and crawled into bed beside her.
Finally she couldn’t take it anymore. There was nothing else to do but seek professional treatment. I packed her into the car and drove her to Livingston to see Doctor Brownstein. He took one look and pronounced it the worst—and strangest—case of oral canker sores he’d ever seen, and he’d been an oral surgeon for twenty-five years. He did his best to close them with oxygen blasts but without success; an attack like this had to run its course. Since the doc couldn’t figure out why the plague had appeared in the first place, he advised Livy to go home, take a few aspirin, and try to relax….
At the end of the month, the latest Visa invoice arrived. The insidious thing about charge cards is that you tend to forget you’ve used them. I don’t know exactly what had been going on in Livy’s head when she’d made all those extravagant purchases, but as they say, the chickens had come home to roost.
When I caught a glimpse of the total, I almost passed out on the spot.
“Jesus fucking Christ—$2,175! That’s a lot of jack, baby.”
Livy made a dash for the utility drawer and came back to the kitchen table with a pair of scissors. Then she turned her purse upside down, opened her wallet, plucked out the offending plate, and proceeded to cut it into strips before my eyes.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Just making sure it doesn’t happen again.”
“Good idea. You don’t want to have to deal with another bill like that monster.”
“You must be joking! I don’t know how I’m going to deal with
this
one.”
“What do you mean?”
“There isn’t a penny in my checking account.” “What?
What?
“
“Just what I said. I’m flat broke.”
“I don’t get it. Then why did you go out and buy all that stuff?” “Because I had to.”
“But I mean, how did you expect to
pay
for it?”
“I thought maybe you’d toss in something to help.”
“Me?
I mean I would, but—Liv, I don’t have two fucking nickels to rub together, you know that.”
“But you’ve been living here all this time free of charge.”
“Free of—what’s that got to do with anything?”
It was the first time I’d ever heard anything close to an accusation from Livy’s lips.
“Then let them come and take me away. What can they do to me after all—throw me into debtors’ prison?”
All the overused clichés when it came to women swarmed my brain. Irrational. Flighty. Unfathomable. Completely unreasonable. Man, I didn’t get this one at all. But when you’re in love, what are you supposed to do? You stand back and see her as the greatest of natural wonders, to be admired and feared at the same time, but never understood.
Nevertheless, Livy’s dereliction felt like a noose tightening around my neck. I had another pang of guilt over shacking up with her all this time and not coughing up a red cent for my share of the ride. On the other hand, she’d never asked.
I pulled her onto my lap. The luscious curves of her flanks melted into me like butter on hot bread.
“So what can we do? We’ll just have to find some way to deal with it,” I whispered, jabbing the tip of my tongue into her ear.
“Yeah? How?”
“I don’t know, but we will. Don’t we always?” “I guess…. Maybe I can go out and walk the streets. Think I’d be able to drum up any business?”
“I don’t see why not. Hey, June Miller did it for Henry.”
I had a laugh over that bit of literary lore. Livy didn’t. She was thinking hard about something else. What it was she wouldn’t say. Before I knew it she was straddling me.
As always when confronted with an unpalatable reality, we went out and celebrated, convinced that it would all be better tomorrow. That night we selected the Lotus Flower on Bloomfield Avenue, our very favorite Chinese joint, the most expensive of the lot. We shared the steamed dumpling appetizers. Sautéed beef with asparagus stalks for her. Jumbo prawns with lobster sauce for me. A bottle of Pinot Grigio—we went the whole route. I used some of my dwindling stash to pay for it.
Livy’s fortune read you
WILL ALWAYS BE LUCKY WHEN IT
COMES TO MAKING MONEY.
That made her happy. “And you know what’s really weird? These things are always right!”
Mine was more cryptic:
TOMORROW IS NOT ALWAYS A NEW DAY. SOMETIMES TOMORROW IS THE SAME AS TODAY.
I
felt vaguely goaded to do something about Livy’s oversized tab, but when push came to shove I did nothing. Nothing at all. In life, it’s always easier to do nothing unless you feel the heat. And who could know, ultimately, when the heat would be turned up? Despite all evidence to the contrary, I always believed in the last-second reprieve….
Like that leaf in the muddy river, I went on drifting. Some afternoons, agitated by an uncontrollable sexual mania that went beyond my desire for Livy, I jumped into the Impala and drove over to the triple-X theater at the Willowbrook Mall, where I laid down a fin to watch a double bill of suck-and-fuck films. Surrounded
by losers, perverts, and dirty old men, I let myself be carried away on a sea of celluloid fornication. When it was over, rather than duck into the rancid john and jerk off, I’d bring a Louisville Slugger of a hard-on and the idea for a spectacular, acrobatic sexual position—such as the female standing on her head like a meditating Yogi—back to the apartment and try it out on Livy. She was always willing.
But I couldn’t afford the flicks every day. To kill time, maybe I’d sit for an hour in the laundry room watching our clothes tumble monotonously behind the window of the dryer. Or listen to my old records on the stereo. And of course there was always the public library only a short half block away, where I could murder hours by the cartload dozen while wandering through the stacks picking up every last obscure title.
It was there, in the Mystery section, where I stumbled blindly and fortuitously into the world of Georges Simenon. Life will always bring a man at the right moment to his appropriate destination. Not only were those short novels (the non-Maigrets only) hypnotic and riveting on their own merits, but I sensed a powerful affinity with each of the hapless protagonists who’d been trapped like a rat in some situation beyond his control. I went from one intriguing title to the next—
The Train, The Innocents, The Man on the Bench in the Barn
—with the uncanny certitude that I was perusing—even living out—one more version of my own life, even though the dramas were being played out on the other side of the world.
Because despite the fact that I could walk away from Livy anytime I wanted to—and I didn’t
want
to—I had the growing sensation of being caught, like a fish swimming blindly into a seine….
Livy’s canker sores eventually disappeared, but her Visa invoice didn’t. Nor did any of the others—water, gas and electric, telephone, etc. When the first notices of serious delinquency began to arrive by mail, then the dire warnings, to be followed by the telephone calls at all hours from company reps indifferent to the reasons why Livy’s fiduciary obligations could not be met, there was no longer any avoiding the inevitable—which was to own up to the fact that money was owed and that it had to be paid.
Though we tried to do just that—avoid the inevitable. For weeks running we refused to pick up the phone when it rang. Any piece of mail not carrying a return address—the telltale sign of the bill collector—was immediately tossed unopened into the trash. We even tried staying away from the apartment for as long as possible, walking the streets, hiding in the library, loitering at the diner, hitting the cheap afternoon movie matinees, or watching the American Legion baseball games at the diamond behind the apartment building in the musky twilight.
But no matter what you do, you can’t avoid the machine forever. After Livy was threatened with legal proceedings by registered mail, she decided the time was ripe for action.
I sat at the kitchen table and eavesdropped while she dialed
her father and put in a request for a bailout loan to be made as soon as possible. He hemmed and hawed, but finally gave in. Maybe it was guilt over what he’d done to his daughter in the past that made him loosen his purse strings—or maybe he wanted to get his paws on her again. Whatever it was, the following evening I ducked out for a walk before Enrico came around with a check for seven hundred bucks, a sum that would have the effect of turning down the heat on Livy and me for at least a short while. A very short while.
That night as we lay in the dark listening to the traffic pass on the avenue below, Livy sobbed quietly.
“At first I thought that you’d take me away from all this, Max. I really did. That’s all I ever wanted—somebody to take me away from all this.”
It cut me to the quick when she said things like that. There was such pathetic sorrow in her voice it damned near tore the heart out of me. What made it all worse was that I wasn’t going anywhere myself.
“Everything will be all right,” I tried to convince her, though I didn’t believe it myself. They say that having money is the root of all evil, but I could never figure out why. Everybody knows that the truth is just the opposite.
“It’s hard to explain how and why, but … something’s wrong,” I stammered out to the willowy, middle-aged blonde sitting on the other side of the dented metal desk.
“Try to put it into words. Just try, in any way you know how.”
Ms. Bentford’s translucent blue eyes radiated genuine sympathy.
For a shrink, she’s a fucking knockout,
I was thinking, all the while struggling to translate my psychic discomfort into something halfway intelligible.
My heart was beating like a trip-hammer. I took another hit off my cigarette. What the fuck was I doing here? What urge had driven me to seek out low-cost counseling at the community mental health center? Whatever it was, it had been powerful enough to bring me to this tight second-floor office on South Fullerton Avenue. In those days, with the demise of religion, there was great belief in “the Couch” as a cure-all for soul sickness. Over the years I’d been attracted to the idea of a fix-up by a trained pro (since I strongly suspected I was in need of it), I’d read widely in the field, from the classics like Freud and Jung all the way up to the quacks like Janov and Laing, but now that the moment of truth had arrived, I was tongue-tied. Max Zajack was a man, for Christ’s sake, and men should be able to handle their own baggage.