Hating Olivia: A Love Story Read Online Free PDF Page B

States….

8.
    Life got to be what it’s supposed to be at least some little part of our time here on earth: perfect. When you first invade a woman’s body, you stumble into the realm of the dream—the dream of nirvana. You move through the days like a contented sleepwalker. The more depleted you are, the better: the senses are heightened, the boundary between illusion and reality pleasantly blurred. And that’s the way you want to live—inside a beautiful dream.
    It was like I’d been granted a new lease on the whole deal—my ship, as they say, had come in. Every evening I found myself climbing the steps to Livy’s spare but recherché apartment on Roseland Avenue. When she opened up to my knock, we’d go right at each other, fucking before we even said hello. She wanted me there with her all the time. What was the point of being anywhere else? We were on the same page from the get-go.
    Suddenly it seemed as if nothing else was quite so important as Olivia Aphrodite. We spent all our free time at her flat, fucking, talking, reading. We put on our clothes and went out only when we had to—usually to a hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant up on Bloomfield Avenue. There wasn’t ever more than a few inches between us.
    Since I felt myself to be pretty much a failure in real life, winning this knockout’s attention was a singular achievement when not much else was going great guns. I liked to think that I was a somebody, but I could never be sure. Maybe, I figured, Livy could help. She was always telling me “You’re handsome,” and “You’re talented"; it made me feel good just to be around her.
    And the one thing we couldn’t resist doing when we were around each other was fuck. Everywhere. In the peacock chair … on the couch … the floor … the kitchen table … the shower … the bathroom sink, and anywhere else we could manage.
    The instant of orgasm was often agonizing in its extremity of pleasure, punctuated as always by one of Livy’s delirious raves. The quantity of fluid expended by each of us was immense—a fucking flood. Wherever I moved there was semen and cunt juice: her belly and ass, me, all over the sheets.
    In those first days it struck me sometimes that I had no idea who Livy was. Here we were, living like a pair of monkeys in a jungle tree, and she was a stranger to me. Mysterious moods like swift-moving clouds passed across her onyx eyes; she never betrayed what they were. You can get inside a woman’s body, but you can never get inside the head. Not really.
    Once in a while the telephone would ring. Mostly Livy would let it go on ringing, but when its persistence broke through our insular contentment, she’d have no choice but to climb out of bed and pick it up.
    Some of the calls were peculiar. After saying hello, she’d hold the receiver to her ear and listen for a long time—five, ten, fifteen minutes. Now and then she might answer “Yes” or “Maybe"; invariably the one-sided conversation would terminate with “No!” or “Please don’t do that!”
    After she hung up I interrogated her delicately about the calls,
    but she was evasive, as she was about so many other things. She seemed preoccupied, on the verge of flat-out panic. I didn’t press her. What did it matter, after all? She was here with me, and that was the important thing.
    One night she let slip that it was Edward who’d been phoning. Yes, that Edward, the fair-haired Nazi she wasn’t seeing anymore since she’d taken up with me. Edward, the luxury automobile mechanic who was thoroughly unappreciative of her intellectual aspirations and artistic talent and only wanted to own her like a car. And to think she’d nearly married somebody like him.
    “What does he want?”
    Silence.
    “Come on, Livy, what does he want? He keeps you on the line for long enough.”
    “Nothing you have to know.”
    “Why not? We sleep together, don’t we? If this guy wants to see you again, that’s a natural enough thing.