Hating olivia, p.2
Hating Olivia, page 2
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.
The 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.’ ”
“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?
