Hating Olivia: A Love Story by Mark Safranko Read Free Book Online

with a crash.
    I let it go. In a matter of minutes Livy was back to herself. It was like nothing at all had happened. Good—I wasn’t finished with her.
    “Hey, d’you think he really heard us?” I laughed after shooting my wad. “If he did, he sure got an earful.”
    She giggled. She didn’t seem to give a damn one way or the other now, and that pleased me.
    “There’s my baby…. ”
    That night I dreamed that Livy’s old man broke into the apartment and ransacked it, ripping underwear out of the dresser in a rage, skulking from room to room searching for some trace of me, while I cowered in fear, hiding behind the hollow door of Livy’s closet….

10.
    It’s extraordinary how time disappears when you’re doing nothing. Blink once and the days have vanished into history…. How did I spend those early days with Livy? Who knows…. Sometimes we pretended to write. While our schedules were completely haphazard—there really was no timetable to speak of for any aspect of our lives—Livy would manage to sit for stretches at her black mahogany desk in the bedroom while I commandeered the kitchen table. We never showed so much as a word to each other. One afternoon when she’d run out to replenish her supply of birth control pills, my curiosity got the best of me. In the bottom drawer of her desk I discovered a few words written in her beautiful hand on the top sheet of a legal pad:
Life’s colors are indistinct, like the chiaroscuro painted on the early night sky.
    One sentence, that was all. Yesterday’s date was printed in the top right-hand corner. She’d spent half the day working on that single sentence. I riffled through the rest of the pages—nothing. That fragment of prose was all she’d produced in weeks. I wasn’tdoing much better. The situation was absurd, and more than a little pitiful. We were so young and naive.
    Which was how we reassured each other after another wasted day: “We’re young. We have time.”
    Maybe I was lazy. Maybe life with Livy was too damned easy. If you’re lucky enough to shag a gorgeous piece of tail, you’re bound to lose your ambitions—it’s an immutable law of nature. After all, once you’ve reached the Promised Land, there’s no use wandering in the desert.
    In time I reached the point where I no longer even pretended to put words to paper. Instead of crawling out of bed at noon or thereabouts and reaching for pad and pen, I lifted whatever book I was reading from the nightstand and picked up where I’d left off at four A.M. Along with my insatiable desire for Livy’s cunt, I’d developed a new hunger for words, words, and more words—so long as they weren’t mine. Roaming through the public library one day I happened upon the complete, unabridged Memoirs of Giacomo Casanova. After checking out number one, my course was fixed. As the days passed, I devoured volume after volume. Through the words of the aged, invalid narrator, writing by this time from the private library of a nobleman’s castle in Bohemia, I was able to vicariously live the young roué's countless debaucheries and swindles;, his wild escapades, flights and travels, his incestuous fornications and orgies, to participate in the world’s upheavals, to witness unique moments in history. I figured that if I wasn’t likely to live such an adventurous existence myself, then Casanova was the next best thing.
    Not long afterward I discovered My Secret Life, that sprawling, salacious diary of a Victorian man of leisure. As with Casanova, I followed the anonymous hero of quenchless sexual appetitearound the world, from Mediterranean spa to English country estate to French village as he pursued every last one of his whims, obsessions, and fetishes, fucking, sucking, masturbating, “minetting,” “gamahuching,” and raping his way through an army of females, from the prepubescent to the middle-aged, without once suffering even a pang of conscience or guilt. Pleasure for its own