Life Lessons

by Stefan Merrill Block

  “I told Grant that I’m just not in a state to see anyone right now. It’s terrible, I know it, but I said that my brother died in the towers, and I’m still processing my grief.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “I did!”

  In Ava’s relationship with men — or, rather, in our relationship toward Ava’s relationship with men — each was a challenge set down, a new story to be invented. The most important rule to this particular game was that Ava could never simply admit to a guy that she was less than interested, though the reason for this rule, its dark motive, was another topic we similarly forbade from discussion.

  “Ah! I just had a stroke of genius,” I told her once. “You said that guy Aaron, he’s all about family, right? You should tell him that you’re already married, your husband has hired a PI, and there’s no knowing what hubby might do if he sees hard evidence of you messing around with someone new.”

  “Ha-Ha!” Ava said. “Brilliant!”

  Life lesson: the most soothing salve available to the man who has recently torched his own face is a regular application of wickedness with a pretty girl. Several times a week, Ava and I would work ourselves up into a merry, cackling spirit. And while I knew a girl like Ava might never take a freakshow such as myself as a lover, I also liked to think that she would also never let any other man into the dark territory we alone shared. And yet, I couldn’t help but notice a certain flaw in this hypothesis: if all these falsehoods were just for my benefit, then why would she get so angry at how these men behaved after her lies? “But if I really did have pancreatic cancer,” she once said, “this is how he’d treat me?”

  “It’s disgusting,” I agreed.

  All of this gave me special cause for concern when it came to Andre. Following their first episode in Ava’s bedroom, Andre had made his arrivals to 544 a nightly event, and after their long, rhythmic sessions in her room, Ava would tiptoe across the hall to relate his behavior. “It’s getting bad,” Ava told me one night that October. “He talked about us moving in together!”

  “What did you say?”

  “I didn’t know what to say!”

  I worried for Andre and also for the sake of our tenancy at Etzel Avenue, when Ava inevitably broke it off. But I worried mostly for Ava. She liked to joke that she was in the “Square Root Club,” her GPA multiplied by itself would still have been hardly respectable. Though she had been put on the Dean’s watch list, she mostly laughed off my efforts to get her to study. Her tethers to this collegiate life were thin as fishing line, and I suspected that her residency across the hall from me was all that kept her in my world.

  “Quite a pickle you’ve gotten yourself into.”

  She held my wrist. Her hand practically melted through the long-sleeve shirt I was wearing, to conceal my arms. “Help.”

  “Why don’t you use the jealous ex-boyfriend story again? A big burly guy, a man named Kurt, who will crack skulls if he sees you with someone else.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Andre doesn’t seem like the timid type. After all he’s been through.”

  “Tell him you are pregnant!” I blurted. “Tell him you need time and space to decide what you are going to do.”

  Ava paused. “God,” she said. “Can you imagine?”

  “Or maybe,” I said, “you should just tell him that you are sorry, that it’s nothing he did, but you just aren’t in a place to date right now.” At this, we both had a nice long chuckle.

  Ava hoisted her white bottle of Malibu Rum. “I have to put on my thinking cap,” she said.

  And as Ava set off to construe her next lie on her own, I resumed my own shameful routine. A couple months back, Ava had struck upon a clever way to pay her share of the rent; a man she had known back in Idaho had been transferring her escalating sums for nudie photos. He demanded higher quality, better angles, and when I began to worry over just what this man might do with such pictures, Ava had devised a brilliant way to silence my concerns. She asked me to serve as photographer! I was, after all, a film minor. The evening of the shoot, I had tried to strike a workmanlike air as I set the image, arranging the sheepskin rug, tilting lampshades to bathe her in a warm glow. I did not look directly at the glorious fact of Ava’s body until I looked through the viewfinder. “We’d better get a bunch of these done at once,” the naked object of my heart’s truest yearnings told me through the lens. “Here, I’ll turn over.” After she’d transferred the files to her computer and returned the memory chip to me, I found that she had not deleted the pictures, nor did she ever mention them to me again. That evening, soon after I had completed my nightly, masturbatory montage of these images, there was a knock at my door.

  “I did something very, very bad,” Ava told me. As she stepped toward my bed, her every exhale was a sort of unending, warbling giggle.

  “What is it?”

  “I just called Andre.”

  “And?” The word did not come out as jauntily as I’d wanted.

  Ava patted her belly. “Baby should be about a month along now.”

  “You didn’t.”

  Ava shook her head in slow, tremulous turns. “I told him I couldn’t talk with him for a while, while I tried to figure out if I was going to keep it.”

  “Jesus Christ, Ava.”

  “I didn’t know what to do! I tried telling him that we needed to lay off for a while, but he wouldn’t listen to me! Turns out you were right. Pregnancy. Apparently, that is something that will make a guy like Andre pay attention.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “Jesus!”

  Our gaze met then, a possible renegotiation of the rules that governed our friendship passing between us. Forgive me: all I wanted was Ava’s sweet-warm breath back in my ear. “You know,” I said, “when people fake pregnancies it’s usually to get the guy to stay. I think this might be the first baby in human history that was invented to get a man to buzz off.”

  For a long while, we both laughed into the dimness of my room.

  “So,” I said after a time. “Have you thought about what you’re going to name him?”

  Ava offered a mischievous, grateful smile. “It’s a girl, actually. And I was thinking maybe Annabelle, as a peace offering.”

  “Ha.”

  “This is very, very bad,” she said.

  “Well,” I told her, “If Andre doesn’t do right by you, I’ll help you raise little Annabelle myself.”

  We fell asleep like that, our knees drawn up to our chests, our faces nearly touching. As with almost every night even still, I dreamt of explosions, the oddly pleasing fires, as if some infection were burning away at its root. When I woke, at some later hour, Ava had turned over, and she had laid my deformed hand on her right breast. She held it there, as a kind of directive. I made the most of it, doing my best — through the scar-tissue and Ava’s silk-screened T-shirt for the 1989 Idaho State Fair — to consign to memory its firm shape. At some point, I tried to roll over on top of her, but she wriggled away.

  The moment of crisis arrived two days later, announced on the flyers that the T3 crew had distributed on the sly around campus: HAUNTED HOUSE PARTY! All the guys Ava saw were peripherally connected with our group, and there could have been little doubt that at least one of them would arrive that night, eager to shrug off Ava’s warnings of unprocessed grief, private investigators, or terminal illness with the hope of an evening of her sweet attentions. “What happens if Andre walks in?” Ava was fretting.

  I shook my head. In adherence with rule number one, I did not ask Ava if she might just consider skipping the party. I knew better than to ask. I sensed that the crisis scene was, in fact, part of the point of her lies.

  By nine, 544 Etzel was already tilting toward mayhem. In the living room, the bass line of the stereo agitated the DeWitts’ framed landscape art on the walls. It was the night before Halloween, and our house was crammed with sexy nurses and chambermaids, famous liter
ary suicides, a few Freddy Kruegers. And sure enough, around ten, one of Ava’s boyfriends showed up, a guy she and I referred to as “Tripod,” for the huge swinging half-leg he carried in his pants. That night, dressed as a wigged and powdered Oompa Loompa, Tripod seemed particularly self-possessed in his intentions, meting out bright orange shots of something. He gripped the rim of a little plastic cup with his teeth and fed the drink to Ava like a mother bird. That night, of course, I was dressed as The Phantom of the Opera. I had ordered the white plastic mask online, but guess what? The mask covered the wrong side! It concealed the good half of my face, leaving only my scars exposed. From across the room, I noticed Ava’s hand not so accidentally alight on the fly of Tripod’s vaunted groin.

  And it was then, turning for the stairs, that I noticed a new arrival, gaping diffidently at the throng of bodies, in the foyer. “Where is she?” Andre asked. I could hear my heart in my temples. I gestured with my shoulder in the direction of Ava, who was presently blowing the foam off Tripod’s beer pong ball.

  “She’s drinking,” Andre hissed. “She’s drinking with that guy.”

  “Her body, her choice,” I said, and Andre distantly informed me that I could go fuck myself.

  “Wait,” Andre said. “What do you mean, her choice? She told you?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Oh, such a good little buddy like yourself. I’m sure she told you.”

  And yet, Andre seemed to harbor no particular malice. He looked terrifically exhausted, as if he had staggered miles to his former home in a driving rain. For the first time in our acquaintance, I thought I could see in Andre an intimation of his fatherly grief, his eyes red and glazed.

  “Listen, Andre, you don’t have to —” I began, but something in me faltered before I actually admitted it. I shrugged. But in that shrug — and also, perhaps, in his experience of whatever unimaginable intimacies they had shared behind Ava’s closed door — I thought I could perceive a different realization dawning in his weary, hooded gaze.

  Andre pushed past, a renewed forcefulness in his step. He grasped Ava by her wrist, the little cups of neon shooter spilling across the table. As for Ava’s self-confident, well-hung boyfriend? He responded in the automated way of any suburban white boy to an angry black man: Tripod showed Andre his palms, as if at a stick up. Andre led Ava upstairs, and the ensuing conversation happened behind Ava’s door. Even in my intensive eavesdropping, I could make out little of what was said. Their voices were curt, measured muffles. But out in the hallway, I was holding fast to my copy of Richardson’s Clarissa, from my last semester’s literature seminar, its heavy spine in my palm, in case the worst happened, and I would be called upon to brain poor Andre. But, after a time, the door cracked open and out Andre staggered, his feet shuffling as if miswired from his uncomprehending brain, the sorrowful sort of hobble with which I had become familiar at Walter Reed. Ava trailed Andre out to the sidewalk, where — through the wonky aluminum blinds of the living room window — I watched Ava tug at Andre’s arm. It looked like she was begging him for something. When he turned to face her, something seemed to shift all at once in Andre, his hands now flailing dangerously about, as if fighting to keep himself afloat in a deluge. He grabbed Ava’s shoulders and shook. Already, my body was charging beneath me.

  There was a lost minute then, of the sort that I had not known for a long while, the kind of lacuna in time that marked so many high school nights when I’d blink down and find myself, at 4 a.m., crusted in my own sick, an empty bottle of my father’s schnapps on the pillow next to mine. Well, this time, when I blinked to awareness, I found myself on the front lawn, my swollen knuckles aching, my Phantom mask shattered, my lower lip already as thick as a gherkin. On the sidewalk, where an officer named Fillopovic had cuffed him, Andre was nursing an eye. “You told him it wasn’t true?” Ava was fairly shouting at me. “You fucking told him?”

  “Not exactly, I —” But before I could explain anything to Ava, Officer Fillopovic had come strolling up, wearing the kind of sympathetic grin that I knew too well by now. Someone had apparently already informed him of my service.

  “Next time some thug like that bothers you, you just give us a call first,” Officer Fillopovic told me. “You’re stateside now, son. Don’t always have to play the hero.”

  The next morning, after a fitful, sleepless night, I scampered out of bed to a knock at the front door. I pulled it open to reveal Andre grinning at me beneath the raw-looking knot that had swallowed his left eye.

  “Clocked me good,” Andre said.

  “I’m really sorry about that, Andre. I’m very, very sorry.”

  “Damn, son.” Andre made a tsk-tsk sound. “Turned you into a beast out there, huh?”

  “Something like that,” I said. “I guess.”

  “Turns out my ma was right. White folks like you, should’ve known what would come of all this.”

  “I, I —” I was sputtering when Andre put a hand to my shoulder.

  “So, listen,” he said. “Is the lady of the house home?”

  “Honestly? I have no idea where she went. She left after what happened, never came home.”

  Andre nodded. “Truth be told, I knew that girl wasn’t being straight with me from the get-go, with all that baby business.”

  “You did?”

  “That lie of hers, that wasn’t what got me. Just that she’d say some crazy shit like that to me? After what I’ve seen.” Andre shook his head deeply, his one good eye seeming now to faintly leak.

  “My baby girl died, you know. She’s gone.”

  “I know, Andre.”

  “What sort of a person would do a thing like that?”

  I shrugged.

  “Well. I had some time to think, in that drunk tank. And, God’s honest truth, I got to worrying about her. All that stuff with her family. Never once got to leave home. The things her brother did to her?” He gulped the air. “Honest to god, I’m worried about her.”

  “I wouldn’t do that,” I said, a note of bitterness in my voice announcing the arrival of these new facts. Could they be true? From the little I knew of Ava’s past, these admissions had the whiff of truth. But then — I had well learned by now — that was also the savory, false aroma of any convincing bullshit. “She’s a big girl,” I added.

  Andre considered my scars for a moment. “Let me ask you something,” he said. “How’d your face get so fucked up?”

  Perhaps I had learned a life lesson after all, from my fellow passengers on the M64 bus: sometimes it is only to a relative stranger that you can make your truest confessions. Oh, I didn’t quite tell Andre the whole truth, that morning on the doorstep. I did not mention the worst months of my senior year, the halfhearted attempt I’d made on my life — after I’d sealed the garage door, my father’s Ford pickup had only run for ten minutes or so before my parents crept out of bed to investigate the noise — for which my mother would never forgive me and for which my father had concluded the only corrective measure was my enrollment in the military. And yet, the last bit I told Andre was true. “It was weird, but when I pulled the pin — for some reason, I just couldn’t seem to let it go. I guess I’m lucky that the thing was just a stun grenade, a flash-bang. Funny thing is, it really did shake me out of whatever I was in. Mostly, anyhow.”

  Andre squinted at me. “Yeah, right,” he concluded. “Y’all are just a bunch of kids, playing at grownups.”

  “House meeting! House meeting!” At eleven that morning, Victoria was pacing through the halls of 544, beating a ladle against a soup pot. By the time I arrived at the dining room table, its tackiness thick as resin with last night’s beer, Victoria was already holding forth. “It just isn’t right, that Ava brings this kind of drama into our house.” Victoria exerted a sort of matriarchal influence over the group, and I was remembering now that she had dated Tripod in her Freshman year. “And I know,” she said to me, “that you thought you we
re just protecting her, but the fact is that he’s our landlord and this is our home.”

  I had always sensed that my friends found Ava haughty and disingenuous. While “fucking crazy” was generally high praise from my crew, whenever they had applied that label to Ava’s latest romantic adventure, it rarely came out like a compliment; I could often discern a little bight of contempt. And after Victoria came right out and said it — “I think,” she told us in a bitter, formal voice, “that Ava should find accommodations elsewhere” — and every bloodshot eye turned at once in my direction, I at last understood, with startling, wrecking clarity, that the reason they had invited Ava to move in at all had been for my own sake. I was the charity case, and Ava was my comfort pet. Pity: the monster character I’d invented for myself had done nothing to fix the truth printed on my face, just as it had never granted me the combination to my best friend’s padlocked heart, where Andre had so easily entered. Well, I nodded, and Victoria made the call.

  The next evening, just before sunset, I saw an old beater Buick pull up out on Etzel Avenue. Through the grimed windshield, I could just make out Ava planting a kiss on Tripod’s cheek. And then she was shuffling up the lawn, her gait awkward with the grocery store boxes and the rolls of masking tape she carried. I hid out in my room for an hour or two, until at last I fell asleep to the sounds of objects bumping around across the hall.

  It was some time that night that the door cracked open, admitting the fitful hallway light and the piney funk of that pot-laced autumn. Ava said nothing as she slid beside me in bed. No, not slid. She climbed right on top, straddling me snuggly between her thighs.

  “I think we really should keep the baby,” Ava said at last. “Get away from all this. Raise the little tyke in a nice place out in the ‘burbs.”

  “You’re pathological,” I told her, and Ava nodded.