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

sake—that’s what I was after, too. When Livy appeared, I’d immediately entice her into some new sex game I’d picked up from those pages, and the day would be complete.
    When I ran low on classic erotic literature, I dug out the works of Henry Miller again, a man whose apprehension and sensibility of the world was almost exactly my own. Here once and for all was a rationalization for why I felt so out of place in the Western Hemisphere, why I was so loath to stick with a humdrum job, why I was devoid of conventional ambition, why I was addicted to women’s bodies, why I nursed the sentiments of an anarchist. Once and for all I’d found justification for the way I was, and, like Henry himself, if I didn’t find my way out of America before I got too old, then I was going to pop my cork.
    But I went nowhere. All those books, of course, were nothing but a big, fat excuse for not coming to grips with my own self. The fact is I had no idea who I really was, had no clue whether I possessed talent—or even value—of any kind, hadn’t the faintest idea what I was supposed to do with myself in this life. Whatever happened, it was always easier to let Livy show the way, to bury myself inside her, to black myself out in the folds of her fragrant snatch. To drift like a leaf down the ol’ Mississippi….
    Hey—who could blame me?

11.
    Spring was threatening to show. It takes a long time for anything resembling fine weather to arrive in this part of the country, and that year the interminable winter, snow and all, dragged on into the middle of April. It was okay, I didn’t really mind—the cold had served Livy and me all too well. Besides, the. 44 Caliber Killer had begun his rampage, and everybody in the entire area around the city of New York was on edge and holing up—nobody knew where the maniac was going to strike next.
    Sunday morning…. We were lying in bed waiting to do nothing but crawl on top of each other again.
    “Let’s take a ride.” It was her suggestion.
    “Sure, why not? I suppose we have to get out of here sometime.” Saturday had been a late night at the Turtle for Livy.
    After coffee, toast, and eggs, we slipped into our coats. Sunday morning is always the best time to drive. The roads are deserted. The civilized world is in church or at the in-laws for lunch or at home with the Sunday edition. Unlike me, they were all resting up for work on Monday.
    We jumped into Livy’s new, unpaid-for Chevy Nova and cruised for twenty minutes. As always, I was behind the wheel. She navigated me south, then east. For two or three miles therewere strolling Orthodox Jews everywhere we looked. This was the suburb of West Orange.
    “Turn here!” she cried suddenly, pointing to a narrow fissure in the woods.
    “Here?” I couldn’t even see a footpath, much less a road. “Just do it!”
    The spoor was in a thatch of trees, well hidden from the fast-food restaurants, convenience stores, and service stations along Northfield Avenue. I yanked the wheel and steered over soft gravel past scraggly bushes and stripped maples and horse chestnut trees, down a rough decline and around a bend into a clearing the size of a football field. On a wooden fence post a sign proclaimed NO TRESPASSING in forbidding black letters.
    “Stop here!” Livy’s black eyes scanned the plain.
    “Wow…. From the main road it’s hard to believe there could be so much land back here,” I said like an idiot.
    “We owned it all,” Livy whispered solemnly.
    I checked her face. She wasn’t putting me on.
    “See that house over there? That’s where I spent the first seventeen years of my life.”
    It was a rambling three-story pseudo-Victorian with boarded-up windows.
    She nodded to my left. “And over there?” A mansion-sized colonial perched on top of a rolling hill.
    “That’s where my grandparents lived. Destroyed by fire, a mysterious fire…. ”
    Black scars rose in jagged tufts from the upper-story windows. I understood