Olivia

by Judith Rossner

  I dreamed I was teaching a class that included Livvy and Leon. I was showing them how to slice vegetables when Livvy began to scream that it was her finger I was slicing, and as Leon and I watched, helpless and horrified, the whole dream picture filled with blood.

  I awakened, crying. The phone was ringing. It was Leon, telling me he’d made an eight o’clock reservation at the Coach House, an elegant place in the Village. I had a headache so terrible that I couldn’t imagine going to dinner with him or anyone. I got out of bed, took two super-aspirin, and wandered around the apartment for a while with the kind of end-of-the-world feelings I associated with New Year’s Eve and the heavy pressure to be jolly.

  It was seven-twenty. Leon was supposed to pick me up at a quarter to eight. The sane me kept the dream-crazed person of the moment from calling to tell him I couldn’t go to dinner. From my closet I took one of two beautiful dresses I’d bought from Rome, a blue and white silky-rayon print. I couldn’t imagine wearing anything with red. The dress was wrinkled. Almost relieved to have something to do with my remaining minutes, I set up the ironing board, heated the iron, brought over the dress, and proceeded to iron my left thumb as it rested on the cloth.

  I screamed, but then I grew calm. I didn’t do ice cubes or butter right away because I had to iron the dress, which I did. I’d never understood until then the relief pain could offer. I felt no pain anyplace except in my thumb. Which wasn’t why I delayed finding anything to relieve it; it would have been impossible to get dressed, put on makeup and earrings, and comb my hair with a thumb wrapped in butter or ice. And I wanted to be ready on time. In Italy nobody was ever prompt. I’d had to become accustomed to people’s being places approximately when they said they would be (especially the shrinks who were Beatrice and Larry’s friends and who were never five minutes late). Calmly, I did what I had to do. Carefully, I selected earrings, lovely silver hoops Beatrice had given me for my birthday, nearly cried out as I used my left thumb to close the right hook, resisted so I wouldn’t mess up my makeup. Artfully, I coiled my hair on top of my head, letting one strand curl to my shoulder.

  “Wow,” Leon said when I opened the door, “I never saw anyone look so different when she gets dressed up!”

  I held up my thumb and burst into tears.

  “What happened?” he asked, coming in and closing the door behind him. He told me later that in that moment when I burst into tears and held up my thumb, which he couldn’t see well in the living-room light, he’d wondered if he had been attracted to another lunatic.

  “I burned it when I ironed my dress!”

  “Oh, Jesus. Let me see.”

  Having ascertained that it was a real burn, he ran back upstairs to get a soothing ointment, then came down with it. I stood where he’d left me at the door. He put on the ointment, lightly wrapped a Band-Aid around it.

  It still hurt. But I was calm again.

  I said, “I feel like an idiot.”

  He grinned. “You’re right to. Why didn’t you come upstairs and tell me?”

  I started to explain about the dream, and how I’d wanted my finger to hurt, but instead I just said I was worried about losing the reservation if we were late.

  “Mmm,” he said. “Well, that’s not such . . . Maybe I’ll call them right now and tell them we’re delayed. You fix yourself up a little.”

  I went to the bathroom. Indeed, I was a wreck. With my right hand only, I washed and dried my face, put on fresh makeup, combed my hair again. No coil. My finger didn’t feel better yet, nor were the aspirin working on my head.

  “Maybe we should put off dinner,” I said when I came out. “I feel so stupid.”

  He shrugged. “Stupid people get hungry. Anyway, we can talk.”

  I smiled, determined to stop being stupid, or at least to put on a good act, and we left for the Coach House. Slowly the pain in my finger and the ache in my head diminished to a point where I could forget about them for minutes at a time. At the Coach House we both ordered martinis, which neither of us was accustomed to drinking. I loved the taste but Leon didn’t, and he asked me to select a wine. I picked a nice Italian white that was relatively reasonable. By the time I’d finished my martini and his, my pain was forgotten. We began with crab cakes. He asked me how the summer was working out with Olivia. I said very well, asked him if she’d always called herself Olivia with him. He said that she had.

  “I always called her Livvy,” I said. “I never thought about its not being Italian. Her father adored Olivia, and I liked it, too, but giving her a nickname was sort of the only American thing I did there. She’s begun getting hysterical if I call her that.”

  Leon said, “I hear they’re always hysterical about something at that age.”

  I smiled ruefully. “Everyone’s heard those stories but me. Not that I would have believed they’d be about her.”

  I told him about Angelo’s anger when I connected her name to the olives he loved, and then about the risotto that was my first real but sneaky step toward freedom, and about the boy with the rusty penis. He was reminded of a rare time when the girls weren’t squabbling because they’d ganged up over the matter of wanting to take turns having Ovvy’s penis. From the day they’d seen it, and Annie had asked for one, and he’d explained about girls and boys, both girls had found it unfair. He’d reminded them that men couldn’t have babies, he’d promised them they’d have breasts when they were older, but they’d just wanted to know why Ovvy hadn’t had to wait for his stuff. He told me how, after Annie’s birth, anytime Rennie saw a sleeping child on the street, she’d asked why they couldn’t exchange it for Annie. If she was playing with some kid she liked, she’d want that kid to come home with her and Annie could go to the other’s house. This whole idea of interchangeability had persisted so that, for example, until recently, when he’d brought a female friend to the house, and he always went with someone for a long time before he let the kids meet her, or, he should say, exposed her to the kids . . . Anyway, Rennie usually wanted to know why the woman couldn’t be swapped for one of her teachers, or had to look the way she did or have that particular name. With Christina, she’d outgrown that one, then pulled something more outrageous; she’d claimed she could never get out of her head a picture of Christina nailed to a cross.

  By the time our steaks arrived, I was drunk and happy. The white wine was gone and Leon insisted that I choose a red. It wasn’t as though he had to drive. I selected a Brolio Chianti, as much because it still came in a basket as because it was reasonably priced, and then Leon and I talked about having Chianti candle holders when we were in school, and Leon said he was going to keep this one if it would fit in my bag, which it did.

  Even in my drunken state, in the part of my mind people refer to as the back, but that I picture as on top, like the heavy pot you set on top of the eggplant slices to help them lose their water, I cautioned myself not to invest too much in this dinner. Maybe someone in Christina’s family had died and she’d gone home for the funeral. On the other hand, something terrible could have happened to her. Maybe Leon had spoken so much about my cooking that she’d tried to make a meal and had gone up in flames! I told myself to stop it, but I couldn’t.

  “You know what I was thinking?” Leon asked as we left the restaurant and I began wobbling heavily down the street. “It’s a perfect night for a ride on the Staten Island ferry.”

  I stopped in my tracks, which was considerably easier than walking at this point.

  “That is the best idea I ever heard in my whole life.”

  Leon hailed a cab because it was clear that I was too drunk to walk even a couple of blocks, and half an hour later, we were standing on the ferry deck, talking about what a brilliant idea he’d had. Halfway across the Hudson we moved inside because, even with his arm, then his jacket, around me, I was cold. I was telling him how the only times I ever wanted certain foods were in specific places. Hog dogs were for Coney Island, popcorn was for the movies, as long as they didn’t put any
coconut oil on it. The cold had made me chatter, but the warmth didn’t stop me. What stopped me was that when we were perhaps three-quarters of the way across the harbor, Leon, whose arm was now around me under his jacket, turned my face to his and kissed me lightly on the mouth.

  “Oh, dear,” I said, “I was afraid of this.” I was a little less drunk, and my hand was hurting again. Nor had I really understood until now that I was afraid of something.

  He smiled. “Afraid of what?”

  “What happened to Christina?” I asked, unable to answer his question.

  “What made you think of Christina now?”

  “Not just now,” I said. “I thought of her as soon as you asked me to have dinner on a Saturday night.”

  “Well,” he said after a long time, “Christina and I have reached . . . what you might call an impasse.”

  I giggled. “And we’ve reached a pass?”

  He kissed me warmly. I succumbed.

  But by the time we’d reached home, I understood what was bothering me, and when I put the key in the lock and he embraced me, kissing the top of my head and waiting for me to raise my face, I gently pushed him away instead. The couple who lived on the third floor came in, were briefly taken aback, nodded, and went up the stairs.

  “I don’t think this is a good idea.”

  “Why not?” he asked, moving back up against me, his manner still seductive. “You’re not going to start in about AIDS, are you? Christina’s the only woman I’ve been to bed with in three years and she was a virgin when I met her.”

  I shook my head.

  Leon said, “Why don’t we go upstairs? The air conditioner’s on, and we can talk and be comfortable.”

  I shook my head. I knew what would happen if we were comfortable.

  “I just . . . I just . . . don’t want to ruin a beautiful friendship!” I burst into tears.

  He, of course, didn’t have the foggiest notion of what I was talking about.

  “Listen,” he said after a moment. “Let’s go upstairs, or in here, if you prefer—I just realized Olivia isn’t here, either—and we can talk about it. I promise not to, you know, to push. We’ll talk.”

  I took out my keys, gave him his Chianti bottle, opened the door. The apartment was dark and uncomfortably warm. I turned on some lights, but decided not to get the fan from my bedroom. He took off his jacket, set the Chianti bottle on the coffee table, sat on one of the sofas. I chose the one catty-corner to his.

  “Now,” he said, “do you want to tell me what you’re worried about?”

  “It’s really very simple,” I said. It’s one thing to have fantasies about a romance with you, another to risk my love affair with your kids. “My own kid hates me, and”—I held up a hand to keep him from protesting—“and yours, I love them, and they’re fond of me. At least Annie and Ovvy are, and I keep hoping Rennie’ll come around. I’m afraid if I have a—whatever—with you, and it doesn’t work, and I don’t see you anymore, I won’t see them, either. And I couldn’t stand that.”

  But it was Livvy’s face I was seeing as I began to cry again.

  Leon came over, sat down next to me, put an arm around me, which made me cry more. How long had it been since I’d felt the warm, hairy skin of a man’s arm?

  “So,” he said when I’d finally stopped and I was looking at him, waiting to see if he was angry or just disgusted, “you’re not afraid I won’t be able to get it up, or anything like that. You just don’t want my kids to know that we crossed the line.”

  “If we crossed the line,” I corrected, unsmiling.

  “If,” he corrected, smiling.

  I was silent. My finger was hurting terribly, but it would be awful to ask him for ointment now. At least my headache seemed to have vanished.

  “I’ll tell you what,” Leon said. “I’m going to give you a peck on the forehead and go upstairs to the air conditioning. You can come with me or not. But I’ll make you a promise. If we go to bed—tonight, next year, whenever—I promise not to let my kids know until you say it’s all right. I’ll be as secretive as if we were, you know, illicit lovers.”

  “Well,” I pointed out, “you are married.”

  “Sure,” he said. “So are the nuns.”

  “Yes, but your wife exists. She’s alive.”

  “Don’t start with that stuff,” he said sharply. “I had enough of it with Christina. The first year I wasn’t really married because my wife was a lesbian in California, and then the second year comes, and suddenly I have to get a divorce because I’m really married.”

  Fortunately, it wasn’t the problem on my mind.

  “Do you mean it?” I asked. “About not letting the kids know?”

  “Yours or mine,” he said.

  “Livvy couldn’t care less,” I assured him.

  “It seems to me she’s more likely to mind than they are. I don’t think you can do any wrong where my kids are concerned.”

  “I’ll try to get my brain turned around,” I said when he made no motion to leave. “But right now, my finger hurts, and I think I’m about to have a hangover, and I just want to take some aspirin and go to sleep.”

  He handed me the tube of ointment from his pocket, kissed my forehead, and left quietly. As the door closed behind him, I noticed that the Chianti bottle was still on the table. It was a long time since I’d had a Chianti bottle with a candle in it.

  As the summer passed and I failed to meet another man I could imagine sitting through a movie with, much less enjoying in bed, I managed to convince myself that Leon and I could have a lovely, secret affair that went on for so long that it sort of seeped into all of our lives, and the kids got accustomed to it without even thinking about it. Having settled which, I dreamed that I looked out of my loft window to see Leon entering the house with a beautiful, deeply tanned, eighteen-year-old blonde wearing a white bikini and a wedding veil with a long train.

  In the only other dream I remember from that summer, I made boeuf bourguignonne for Leon and Elizabeth David, using her recipe. She tasted it, put down her fork, and spoke the words she’d used in her book to introduce the dish. “This is a favorite among those carefully composed, slowly cooked dishes which are the domain of French housewives and owner-cooks of modest restaurants rather than of professional chefs. . . . Such dishes do not, of course, have a rigid formula, each cook interpreting it according to her taste. . . .” She smiled at Leon. “Unfortunately, this is not according to my taste.”

  Everyone (except Beatrice) continued to assure me that my daughter had made a beautiful transition to being an American teen. Furthermore, it had become clear, though Livvy never acknowledged it, that she was steadily losing her extra weight. By the middle of August it was gone, though she’d become so American that, when complimented, she complained that her legs were still too fat. No amount of reassurance about body type or comments on how lovely she looked had any effect. On the occasion when she shared a meal with us, she ate like a horse, said that she was lucky, the food where she was employed was so awful, she never wanted to eat. One day Beatrice and I passed her in town at an ice-cream parlor, sitting over the kind of sundae one couldn’t imagine tackling after turning voting age.

  On a rainy weekday morning in August, when her charges were at camp, she did come by (on her employer’s bike; the boys had taught her to ride). Beatrice and Larry were upstairs, my parents were out hunting for furniture for the new rooms. I was reading on the porch, Max and Rebecca in my charge. Livvy came around back, seemed positively startled to find me there.

  I said, “Hi, it’s nice to see you.”

  She said, “Where’re Nonno and Nanna?”

  I said, “In town.”

  She hesitated.

  I said, “C’mon in. They’ll probably be here soon.”

  Having decided that nothing major was at stake, she entered the porch. Not quite fifteen, she could have passed for a few years older, and was really looking lovely, slender and deeply tanned, with her wonderful
, dark complexion that was meant to survive the sun. She flopped down on the other rattan settee, picked up a couple of magazines lying on it, thumbed through one, then the other, as though she were just exercising her thumb.

  Max was seven years old by this time, Rebecca close to a year. Her playpen was a permanent porch fixture and she would remain in it happily for long periods of time, playing with the measuring spoons I’d given her or some other favorite toy, watching the activity around her, more recently, standing with the help of the mesh playpen sides. Most particularly she liked to watch Max, who since her birth had been willing to go to other kids’ houses, but wanted none at his, though he created so much noise and movement that there might have been two or three. When Max talked to Rebecca he smiled, clowned, and grimaced in a way that made his hostility clear to everyone but the baby, who adored every minute of it. She held out to him each toy or piece of food that came into her possession. Often he took it only for long enough to set it somewhere outside of the playpen, beyond her reach. Some of his more aggressive tactics—like the grimace with his face stuck up against Rebecca’s through the mesh—drove my sister crazy. After a couple of drinks one night Beatrice had announced she was glad they’d had a second child, it was the first one they shouldn’t have had.

  The phone rang; Livvy ran to answer it as though she was expecting a call there, then irritably summoned me. I went in, she returned to the porch and picked up her magazine as I took the call. One of the women in my class wanted to know whether her houseguest could attend the class that week. I was saying it would be okay when Rebecca yelped and began to cry.

  I ran out to the porch and scooped her up from the playpen. Max sat on the floor, absorbed in a book, a child’s caricature of an adult’s pose of disinterest. A bunch of her alphabet blocks were in the playpen, suspiciously close to the corner where Rebecca had been lying. Livvy hadn’t so much as glanced up from her magazine. I went back to the phone. A moment later, Beatrice, who could see the playpen from her bedroom corner window, dashed through the dining room onto the porch, took the still bawling baby from me.