I slid off the bed. She didn’t move when I took three steps toward her and ripped the towel off her torso.
I was as possessed as a rabid wolf. I bit the nipple of her left tit, ran my hand roughly over the steel wool of her thatch until it parted. Inside she was as soaking wet as a rain forest.
“The problem, baby, is that I’ve been too easy on you.”
I sounded like a Satanic maniac, even to myself. I herded her like a barnyard animal to the bed. When I pushed her onto the mattress, she offered no resistance. I unzipped and made her suck on my cock. She did it like a starving animal. The object was to torture, so I made her keep it up until she began to moan. Then I pulled it away and made her beg for it.
“Why should I touch your pussy, Liv? Tell me. Duke Johnston’s been fucking you, hasn’t he, you goddamn whore! Talk—
he’s been fucking you, hasn’t he?
“
When she wouldn’t, I mounted her and shoved it in with a desperate vengeance. All the madness and rage of the years we spent together seemed to have gathered in my member, transforming it into a blazing pistol.
We went at it like prehumans, instinctively and noisily contorting our torsos into positions we’d never tried before, even in all the million and one times we’d fucked. Head to feet, back to front, upside down and inside out, all of it, everything, until her cunt lips were baboon red and my dick was torn to shreds. It seemed to go on forever, like the slow-motion impact of a powerful narcotic—or a nuclear warhead.
“Christ—that was the best it’s ever been,” I said when it was over and we lay there panting like a pair of overheated dogs.
“Yes…. ” she whispered. But she had to be somewhere in fifteen minutes.
T
hat was to be the last time I would ever make love to Olivia Aphrodite, though I didn’t know it at the time. You never know when something is ending when it’s in the process. Maybe it’s best that way—the mind can only take so much. It’s only later that it all comes clear, like when the fog lifts from the shore and you can see the ocean. No, one last great fuck wasn’t going to be enough to save us. They say a real love story never ends. But the truth is that given enough time, love will usually morph into its opposite—repulsion, hatred … indifference. What do you think the world’s problem is? It’s the exhaustion bred by familiarity and tedium, the transience of romance. You see it every single day in the dead eyes of the men and women on the street. And yet that’s the way life itself has been built—everything is going to die. Even you and me. There’s nothing that can be done about it. Call it God’s joke on us….
As the days wore on, Livy grew more impatient with the fact that I was still hanging around the apartment. She seemed incredibly antsy to execute some scheme that my presence prevented her from doing. I stepped up the pace of my search for honest work, but luck wasn’t on my side. I checked out rooming houses, studios, basement apartments, sublets, but there was always some problem—the biggest being that I didn’t have the jack for a security deposit.
That Saturday morning as I was on my way out, Livy threw herself in my path as I reached for the doorknob. With tears in her eyes she embraced me, squeezing with all her might. It was like she loved me all over again, even more than ever. Like I was the only thing she’d ever loved in her entire life. Like she was never going to see me again—or that I was going out to meet my death. Before I had the chance to ask what it was all about, she ran off and barricaded herself in the bedroom.
Looking back, I should have realized that it was a sign. A few hours later I returned to find all my earthly belongings, including the typewriter, on the front lawn. Furious, I ran upstairs and tried my key in the lock, but it didn’t fit. I raised my fist to pummel the door like I had so many times before, but this time, instead of causing a scene, I turned around, went back down the stairs, picked my stuff off the grass and loaded it into the Ambassador.
Then I turned over the ignition and eased out of the parking lot. At the corner traffic light I contemplated whether to travel east or west.
I
t was over. I was alive.
Unless I wanted to end up in stir, I couldn’t go near the apartment on Roseland Avenue. Along with the locks, Livy had the telephone number changed to a private listing, so I couldn’t even talk to her if I wanted to.
I was consumed by fantasies of bloody violence. When you know for a fact that another man has taken your place in a woman’s bed, you can’t be blamed for what you think—or do. In my mind’s eye I watched myself breaking down the door of 5C and blowing Duke Johnston away while he slept. Then I’d take Livy by force and make her do my bidding. She’d lick my balls. She’d kiss my asshole. She’d suck my cock dry. She’d fuck me until I was bored. I’d force her to watch me make love to other women. And when I’d had enough, I’d kill her, too.
But I did nothing of the sort. Like the broken husk I was, the best I could manage was having a dozen angry red roses sent by courier to Livy’s doorstep. The gesture wasn’t even acknowledged. Later, when I regained my wits, I felt humiliated, embarrassed. Man, what a sap I was. I pictured the two of them laughing at me, then tossing the bouquet into the trash
.
A
fter a couple of weeks on Bernie Monahan’s sofa, I found a room in a boardinghouse in Montfleur. After all was said and done, I was back to square one. Life is that sort of illusion—you can think that you’ve traveled to the ends of the earth only to find yourself no farther than your own backyard….
Earlier that same day I’d landed a job as a proofreader for a pulp consumer magazine that advertised everything from used washing machines to secondhand clarinets. The money wasn’t going to make me rich, but it was enough to cover the rent and food.
When I stopped struggling to get back on my feet long enough to think about it, life really wasn’t all that bad. Nevertheless, the one notion I still couldn’t force out of my brain was the idea of Livy humping Duke Johnston. The weird thing was,
I didn’t even really care.
I was shuffling along Church Street in Montfleur one early summer evening when I spotted her behind the wheel of a long white Cadillac convertible. She was waiting on a traffic light. When she spotted me, she pulled into the curb.
She looked superfine—tan, sleek, healthy. She’d been poured into her tight clothes; there were bare patches of skin everywhere. She was puffing on a cigarette, something I’d never seen her do before. Well-buffed and well-fucked, she cut the perfect figure of a high-priced call girl.
I rested my elbows on the passenger’s door. “Interesting wheels.”
“Thanks. Duke wants me to drive in style.” “Of course…. Say, where does a janitor get the money for a Cadillac?”
She pretended not to hear the question. She ran her freshly manicured hands over her freshly waxed legs. Against my will, my mouth watered with desire.
“So, Liv, what’s life like with Dukie?”
“Gosh, I don’t know,” she sighed, shaking her mane of hair and checking her makeup in the rearview mirror. “It’s just about perfect—no thinking, no words, no books …
nothing but sex.”
Should I try and snuff her or fuck her? “Listen, why don’t you come over and see my new crib,” I suggested, leaning definitely toward the latter.
“No, thanks. I’m through with ratholes. Besides,
I can’t sleep with two men at the same time.”
“Well, that’s a new leaf, isn’t it?”
“I don’t have time for it, Max.” She stepped on it and roared straight through the red light, nearly ripping off my arms in the process.
T
he fan was blowing on my naked ass on a sweltering summer night when the telephone rang. It was her. “I’m coming over tomorrow. I have something for you.”
“What time?”
“Seven,” she said and hung up.
When she arrived the next evening, she was lugging a fat manila envelope.
“Quite some palace you have here,” she sniffed, taking in the sparse, threadbare furnishings. “I always knew you’d end up in a basement.”
“I’m getting by,” I said.
She handed over the package, which looked as if it had been shipped a few thousand miles. It was addressed to me. I tore it open and looked inside.
It was my coffee-stained, dog-eared manuscript of
The Old Cossack
as well as a white business envelope with my name typewritten on it.
I glanced at Livy, then opened it up. J
UNE
30, 1980
Dear Max Zajack:
We regret to report that we have been unable to place THE OLD COSSACK despite our extensive efforts. It has been considered and rejected by McGraw-Hill Book Company; Pocket Books; Random House; Atlantic Monthly Press; Charles Scribner’s Sons; the Viking Press; William Morrow and Co.; George Braziller; J. B. Lipincott; W. W. Norton and Co.; Fawcett Gold Medal Books; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; Little, Brown and Co.; MacMillan Publishing Co.; Paul S. Eriksson; Crown Publishers; Ballantine Books; Dodd, Mead and Co.; Doubleday and Co.; G. P. Putnam’s Sons; Stein and Day; Vanguard Press; Bantam Books; Coward, McCann & Geoghegan; Dell; and M. Evans and Co.
All of the letters from the publishers were standard rejection slips.
Your manuscript is being returned, enclosed, and you are released from your representation contract with us, freeing you to pursue other marketing avenues on all your literary work. I’m sorry our endeavors have not resulted in success, and I wish you much good fortune in the future.
Sincerely,
Henry Barr
When I finished reading, I stole another glance at Livy. An omniscient, satisfied half smile danced on her face.
“Bad news, Max?”
I felt as if I’d been gutted. Before I could react, she was on her feet and out the door. Seconds later, I heard the wheels of the Cadillac peeling out of the gravel driveway outside the window.
W
hen I got over the letter, I went up to the street and stood on the sidewalk. There was nobody around, which was always the way I liked it.
It was a spectacular night, the sky razor-blade blue and the dim lights of the stars and planets just beginning to show. Tomorrow … tomorrow was supposed to be more of the same good weather. I looked around for the moon, and there she was, pinned over the rooftops at the east end of the city like a cutout.
Man, it was almost like nothing at all had happened. Suddenly it hit me for the first time that I was going to make it. Really. I’d have my ups and downs, but I was going to make it. It was the sea change I’d been waiting for, the interior turning of the tide that always portends the shattering of an obsession. It’s when you give up all hope that everything is finally right. I was going to get out of bed in the morning, and I was going to want to do it, even with a dead-end job waiting for me. Life was a juicy chunk of sweet fruit, and I had my teeth sunk in deep. I couldn’t believe how much in love I was.
The music of a lone saxophone was drifting in from somewhere. A black-and-white alley cat on the prowl appeared from around the corner and sat on his haunches to check me out. What are you up to, he growled.
Nothing. I was just thinking about Kafka’s point of no return, and how we all get there sooner or later.
He nodded. I had the feeling he understood.
We didn’t say any more to each other. I lit a cigarette, smoked it all the way down to the filter, ground it out with my heel. When I looked up, my pal was gone. Then I went back inside.
Olivia Aphrodite married Duke Johnston on the following Saint Valentine’s Day. They set off on a cross-country honeymoon on the groom’s Harley-Davidson. At the end of that year, a son was born.
The union was not destined to be a happy one. Within months, Johnston took off in the middle of the night, leaving Livy and her brat in their trailer home on the edge of an East Hanover swamp, and was never heard from again.
As for me … I moved around a lot, but once every few months she would track me down somehow and phone in the middle of the night; but there was nothing left for me to say to her. The anger from her betrayal had hardened into pure hatred.
From time to time I’d hear things from people who’d known us in those early days. That Livy had been ill and had had her gallbladder removed. That she’d done time in a psycho ward. That she’d done more time in another psycho ward. That Michael Goldfarb had come back into her life, and that she and her son by Duke Johnston had moved into his home when the jeweler’s wife lay dying in the hospital of a malignant brain tumor. Later that she’d married Goldfarb after his wife kicked the bucket, and they’d merged their offspring into one big happy family….
One day when I was living in Manhattan, a snapshot arrived anonymously in the mail from some Podunk town in Ohio. The picture was of the Goldfarb family in front of the mantel during the holiday season. None of the kids looked happy, especially Livy’s son. Goldfarb, bearded like a proper rabbi, stared into the eye of the camera with gloomy defeat.
I could hardly recognize Livy, so thoroughly had her appearance changed. Her face was etched with deep lines and her black hair was streaked with iron. Her makeup was too heavy, her lipstick slightly askew. She was already a woman on the threshold of old age despite her youth.
Who did this to her?
For a long time, years, I heard nothing else. On the streets, even in foreign countries, I would think I’d spotted her, only to find myself mistaken when I moved closer.
Did I really want to see Olivia Aphrodite again? No, no, it wasn’t that. A certain addiction, like heroin or cigarettes or alcohol, once overcome, will always remain a source of fascination—that’s all. Maybe some little part of every love story never really ends.