Free Hating Olivia: A Love Story by Mark Safranko Page A

meeting you, Mister Tanga,” I mumbled, passing him.
    “Take it easy, kid.” I had the feeling he was about to add something—like “keep banging the piss out of her” or something of that sort—but maybe I was just being paranoid.
    I followed Livy down to the street. What the hell happened? The guy seemed all right to me, and I told her so. “No, Max— you don’t fucking get it.”
    “All right. I guess I don’t.” And there was no talking to her at all on the ride back to Roseland Avenue.
    But the touchy encounter produced an altogether unexpected effect. When Livy stepped out of the shower a half hour later, it was as if she’d swallowed a brick of Spanish fly or some other powerful aphrodisiac. She gripped my dick and steered me toward the bed, where she seemed to want to devour me whole. It was the best session we had in weeks—and none was ever bad.
    “So what in the world happened in that crazy house of yours?” I asked afterward when I lay there smoking a cigarette. “Sure you want to know?”
    “Hell yes, I want to know. Why wouldn’t I want to know?” She stared hard at the ceiling. “He molested me.”
    “Who?”
    “Who do you think?”
    I got up on my elbow and looked at her. She was wearing the mask again.
    “What? You’re saying your father—” “My two sisters, too.” “Jesus Christ.” So that was it.
    “The entire family knew about my father. And it wasn’t just us he was after. It was some of the other girls, too, my cousins, our friends…. ”
    “The lousy bastard. Didn’t anyone try to stop him?”
    “Oh, he was sly. It was all broom closets and basements and stairwells when nobody was looking. And none of us knew that itwas happening to the next person. We all thought it was just us. Divide and conquer, as they say.” “What a fucking creep.”
    In my brain I conjured up incestuous scenes. I got angry. Then horny all over again.
    “What—what did he do to you?”
    “Put his hands all over me. Kissed me. Groped inside my clothes. Some other wonderful stuff.”
    “ ‘Some other wonderful stuff'? Like what?” She turned her head away. “Like what? Did he fuck you?”
    She wasn’t talking. In my mind’s eye I tried to picture Enrico Tanga in that compromising position, but I had trouble with it.
    Was Livy dishing out the truth? Of course she was! She had to be! Why would she lie about something like incest?
    “Why didn’t you tell me about this before?”
    She made a face.
    “But it wasn’t just that vileness that came between him and my mother when she finally found out. It was everything else. The fact that he was from the wrong side of the tracks. That he’s a lowlife from Newark, as she liked to call him. That he wanted his daughters to stay home and wait on him hand and foot like a Sicilian nobleman rather than get an education. That he wasn’t interested in becoming anything better than a carpenter. That his grand ambition in life was to sit around the house and drink wine and eat pasta…. You should have seen the fights. Once, when my mother locked him out, he tore down the front door of the house out there on the compound. I mean literally ripped it off its hinges. I was never so scared in my life. We actually hid under the beds thinking he was going to murder us. Thank God for the police. If it wasn’t for them, I might not be alive right now. Maybe noneof us would. And she claims that my little sister, Mary-Jo, was the result of a drunken rape one night after they’d come home from a party…. ”
    Okay. So I’d screwed up. It had been a piss-poor idea to coax Livy into a reunion with her father. Next time I’d keep my big mouth shut.
    A gang of kids was screeching with delight at some game it was playing down in the street. The late-afternoon sun slanted across the twisted blue sheets, creating an effect that was ineffably sad, like everything else in the whole wide world.
    “Now do you get it, Max?”
    For that day, there was nothing left