For the better part of a year, I had dreamt only of Ava’s well-imagined weight atop me. Now I wanted to beg her to get off. That boundary, I understood, was what had shaped our friendship, and apparently Ava had come that night to open the gates. For the first time, Ava reached her hands down to my face.
“And you’re disgusting,” Ava told me, or perhaps did not tell me. Life lesson: when you are deformed, a certain condemnation is forever coiled within you, a kind of Jack-in-The-Box that a single glare from a beloved friend can trigger open.
Well, it certainly felt like condemnation, what followed. There, she seemed to say to me with each thrust, is this what you wanted? There. There. It was like an injury, the loss of my virginity. For a long while, I lay there reeling.
“I’m done pitying you,” Ava told me. She slipped out of the bed, and when I woke the next morning her room was empty.
****
Sixteen years later— this was just last week— my phone lit up on my nightstand, chiming with a new email.
I’m happy to report that on the day that Ava’s name popped into my inbox, there was a woman beside me in the bed of my studio apartment, though the rest of what I’d have to say about Jennifer would not be particularly happy at all.
Over the last years, I’ve hewn closely to the recovery plan that Dr. Weitzer and her colleagues long ago prescribed. I went in for the skin grafts, which reduced my facial scars to an iridescent shine; I at last learned how to seal away the combustive energies of that long-ago explosion into a safe and harmless story, which I often display on first dates, having come to understand the odd power it seems to work on women. I’ve never undertaken any skin-graft procedures on my torso, though. All that history is beneath my shirt now.
Ava had written to say that she’d heard that I was living in Chicago, that she was coming through town for work and would like to see me. I know It’s been forever, her short email read. But I’m doing this AA thing, and I’m at the step where I’m supposed to make amends. LOL!
I silently nodded, a hand over my face, ashamed to wonder — even then! — if this weren’t in fact some kind of elaborate trick Ava was playing. Oh, I won’t say that I hadn’t kept tabs on her. For a few years, I still googled her name, and a social media profile had shown her tipping back a yellowish beer at a place called Señor Hornito’s. From LinkedIn, I learned that she had finished her education at Truman State University and then had come back to Saint Louis to earn a law degree. But at last, preferring the Ava I’d known to the adult version these web results suggested, I had stopped searching for her. Though, to be perfectly honest, I had transferred those photos I’d taken from computer to computer to computer.
“Ava.” That next Thursday I was standing in the lobby of the Omni Hotel, taking in the changes age had played on her. Nothing very obvious other than the cat eyeglasses she now sported, and the faint divot where she’d once worn her nose ring, she looked as I remembered, if in some unnamable way slightly plainer. “Look at you! Your face!” she said.
At a little table, we spoke of what we had been up to, my wonderful career writing technical instruction manuals for a readership of a hundred or so bespectacled engineers, my doomed romance with Jennifer that I described like a marriage in the making. Ava didn’t speak of any relationship of her own, and she related the substance of her work in legalese I couldn’t quite parse: torts and writs and exculpation. “That’s great, really great,” we both kept saying. An awkward half hour passed in dull, friendly chatter.
“Sorry, by the way.” Ava said.
“Excuse me?”
“I’m getting to the part,” she said, “where I apologize. I have to, you know. It’s part of my quote unquote recovery.”
I puckered my lips, nodding. “How’s all that going?”
“Hm.” She shrugged sadly. “You know I’ve always been a bit of a cheater.”
The way Ava laughed then was a sound apart from the two registers her laughter had once taken; it was neither the trill giggle nor the high sardonic guffaw I remembered. It was just the sort of wry, sad little chortle that any ordinary adult might offer in an uncomfortable conversation, and it was that ordinariness that struck me as the most desperate fact of all.
While it is true that, over the last years, I’ve come to see that my friendship with Ava was of a certain type, a kind of miserable cliché — I often pity those gangly young men I see chasing after their pretty “besties,” wearing their disingenuous “good guy” grins as they tote an overstuffed purse — I still maintain a disconcerting habit of whispering Ava’s name at moments when shame prickles at my face: when I creep out of a bed in which my older coworker sleeps, when my old scars flush redly before a presentation at work, every time I take off my shirt in front of a new person. “Ava,” I sometimes even still address the hidden passenger I carry in my thoughts, as if I might somehow return us to that moment before we were fully formed, when we were too young to understand the damages we could do, when we still believed — like our half-witted old president with his delusional crusades or my T3 crowd with our pioneer adventures in a devastated city on the verge of racial combustion — that we could ignore anyone’s true history and retrofit the world to meet our own needs with a few words, some vaguely persuasive bullshit.
“We were just kids,” I said. “We didn’t know what the hell we were doing. No need to apologize to me. Actually, maybe I should be the one to apologize to you. Or maybe we should both go try to apologize to Andre DeWitt.”
“Maybe,” she said.
Ava stared for a while at the fourteen-dollar martini I’d bought for myself, and though I couldn’t know what losses Ava wanted that drink to blank, I still knew her well enough to know what longing looked like in her face.
“You know what I was thinking on my way over?” I asked. “Today that baby we made up would be fifteen years old.”
Ava blinked at me for a long moment before she took my hands “God. What if we had kept her?”
“One of the biggest mistakes of my life,” I said.
. “But you mean is,” Ava said. “Today that baby is fifteen years old.”
“Excuse me?”
“You didn’t let me finish, apology-wise. There’s a pretty big apology for you, eh? I really did get pregnant in the end, but it sure wasn’t Andre’s.” Ava could still grin in the way I remembered, the corners of her mouth curling up with heartening, blackest irony. When I pointed quizzically at my own chest, Ava only laughed.
“Ha!” she said. “Didn’t you ever wonder why I just dropped out? Why I never came back? But don’t worry, I found some nice folks to take care of her, a better life than fuckups like you and I could have offered. Ha-ha!”
“You’re lying.” But the sharpness in Ava’s grinning face warned me off from asking her more. As with all those years ago, her narrowed eyes dared me to play along. And yet, it’s also true that I still wouldn’t have known what Ava looked like when confessing to the truth. I suppose a person like Dr. Weitzer would say it’s some kind of measure of my adulthood that I chose not to press the point that day, that I chose to believe our little girl might really be out there somewhere and that someday she might come back to find us.
“Just imagine it.” Ava reached over the table then, inviting herself to one quick pat of my grafted cheek. “A fifteen-year-old!”
And I really did try to imagine it then: a child’s face, a fifteen-year-long story all her own, what sort of life lesson I might be able to offer her to make sense of it all, what she might need to know. When I opened my mouth, I found that I was speechless.
If you enjoyed Life Lessons, Stefan Merrill Block’s exquisite novel Oliver Loving is the perfect next read. A brilliant, propulsive novel about family, the traumas and secrets that test our deepest bonds, and the stories that hold us together.
Read on for an extract from Stefan Merrill Block’s Oliver Loving….
First published in the Un
ited States of America in 2018 by Flatiron Books,
an imprint of Macmillan, New York.
First published in hardback and trade paperback in Great Britain in 2018
by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.
This paperback edition published in Great Britain in 2019 by Atlantic Books.
Copyright © Stefan Merrill Block, 2017
The moral right of Stefan Merrill Block to be identified as the author
of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored
in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior
permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents
portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Paperback ISBN: 978 1 78649 210 4
eBook ISBN: 978 1 78649 209 8
Printed in Great Britain.
Atlantic Books
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Oliver
CHAPTER ONE
Your name is Oliver Loving. Or not Oliver Loving at all, some will say. Just a fantasy, a tall tale. But perhaps those labels are fitting; maybe you were born to become nothing more than a myth. Why else would your granny have insisted your parents name you after your state’s legendary cattleman, to whom your family had only an imaginary genealogical linkage? Like yours, your namesake’s story was a rough and epic one. The original Oliver Loving, and his vast cattle empire, came to an end when the man was just fifty-four, shot by the Comanche people somewhere in the jagged terrain of New Mexico. “Bury me in Texas,” your namesake begged his trail partner, Charles Goodnight, whose name your granny later bestowed upon your brother. And so you might be forgiven for thinking that your future was foretold in the beginning. Just as the violence of your namesake’s time turned the first Oliver Loving into a folk hero, so did the violence of your own time turn you from a boy into a different sort of legend.
A boy and also a legend: you were seventeen years old when a .22 caliber bullet split you in two. In one world, the one over your hospital bed, you became the Martyr of Bliss, Texas. Locked in that bed, you lost your true dimensions, rose like vapor, a disembodied idea in the hazy blue sky over the Big Bend Country. You became the hopeful or desperate or consoling ghost who hovered over the vanishing populace of your gutted hometown, a story that people told to serve their own ends. Your name has appeared on the homemade signs pumped by angry picketers on the redbrick steps of your old schoolhouse, in many heated opinion pieces in the local news papers, on a memorial billboard off Route 10. By your twentieth birthday, you had become a dimming hive of neurological data, a mute oracle, an obsession, a regret, a prayer, a vegetative patient in Bed Four at Crockett State Assisted Care Facility, the last hope your mother lived inside.
And yet, in another universe, the one beneath your skin, you remained the other Oliver, the one few people cared to know before, just a spindly kid, clumsy footed and abashed. A straight-A student, nervous with girls, speckled with acne, gifted with the nice bone structure you inherited: your father’s pronounced jaw, your mother’s high cheekbones. You were a boy who often employed the well-used adolescent escape pods from solitude, through the starships and time machines of science fiction. You were also a reverential son, eager to please, and you tried to be a good brother, even if you sometimes let yourself luxuriate in the fact that your mother clearly preferred you. In truth, you needed whatever victories you could win. You were just seventeen; after that night, only your family could remember that boy clearly. But yours was a family that remembered so often and well that it could seem—if only for a minute, here and there—as if the immense, time-bending gravity of their remembering could punch a hole in the ether that spread between you, as if your memories might become their own.
“According to science,” your father spoke to the stars on that night when your story began, “our universe is only one of many. Infinite universes. Somewhere there is a universe that takes place in a single frozen second. A universe where time moves backward. A universe that is nothing but the inside of your own head.”
At seventeen, you took this bit of soft astrophysics in the way you took all your father’s lectures: less than seriously. Your father, an after-hours painter and teacher of art classes at Bliss Township School, had founded the school’s Young Astronomers Club and more or less forced your brother and you to serve as its president and vice president. But the truth was that you shared with Pa just an artist’s dreamy interest in astronomy. The constellations were mostly twinkling metaphors to you both. But that night, in his Merlot-warmed way, your father was prophetic. Your own journey into another universe, the universe where your family lost you, began very subtly. It began, appropriately enough, with the minute movements of your left hand.
Your hand. That night it was like an autonomous being whose behavior you couldn’t predict. For a half hour or more, it had just lain there, but now you watched in silent astonishment as your fingers marshaled their courage, began a slow march across the woolen material of the Navajo blanket on which you were lying on a reedy hilltop on your family’s ancient ranch, a two-hundred-acre patch of Chihuahuan Desert that an optimistic forbear of yours named Zion’s Pastures. Your eyes hardly registered the blazing contrails and sparkles of celestial brilliance in the sky, the Perseid meteor shower falling over West Texas. Your whole awareness was focused upon your fingers, which were more interested in a different, localized phenomenon: Rebekkah Sterling on a blanket just inches from your own. You breathed deeply, her vanilla smell cutting through the land’s headshop aroma of sun-cooked creosote.
“Huh,” Rebekkah Sterling said. “That is fascinating.”
“You think that’s fascinating.” Your father then proceeded to hold forth on one of his favorite astronomical lectures, about how the basic atomic building blocks for life, everything that makes us us, was produced in the fiery engine of distant stars. But you did not need your father’s lecture on the epochs of evolution. Your hand offered a better, in vivo demonstration of life’s perseverance despite the bad odds. Your hand, like an amphibious creature clambering out of the primordial ocean, now began its journey over the five inches of hard earth and dead grama grass that separated Rebekkah Sterling’s blanket from yours.
Rebekkah Sterling! For the year since her family had moved to town, you had been tracking her closely. Well, you tracked many girls closely in the slumped silence of your school days, but what was it about Rebekkah that set her apart? She was a very slight girl; the outline of her bones pressed against her tight skin. It was true what you would later write about her in a poem, her hair really did look like a piled fortune of amber ringlets. But she carried that hair like some burdensome heirloom her mother obliged her to wear, something that faintly embarrassed her. She’d tuck that fortune into barrettes and scrunchies, pull and chew at its ends. She seemed to spend the durations of your literature class together practicing how to make the least sound possible. When she had to sneeze, she’d first bury her head in her sweater. It was the peculiar sadness of her silence that you found so beautiful. But if not for your father’s astonishing pronouncement at dinner one Monday night, your Rebekkah Sterling story would likely have ended the way all your girl stories ended, in your own, far less beautiful b
rand of silence.
Over the last years, the cumulative effects of disappointment, time, and the considerable quantities of the cheap whiskey Pa consumed had eroded most of your family’s old traditions, but you still maintained a Monday night ritual, Good Things Monday, when each Loving, before supper, had to name one good thing to look forward to in the week to come. That night, as the burnt molasses of Ma’s meat loaf had wafted from the gray slab set before you, you mustered something perfunctory about a novel, Ender’s Game, which you were liking; Ma spoke of a slight alleviation of her back pain; Charlie’s Good Thing was many good things, three separate parties to which he had been invited that weekend. But the only truly Good Thing you heard that night, the first certifiable Good Thing you had heard in a very long while, was your father’s news.
“Looks like we’ll have a visitor,” Pa said.
The permanent roster of the Young Astronomers counted no member who did not share the last name Loving, but over the years, Pa had occasionally been able to cajole one of his pupils to attend a meeting. And when your father that night informed his family that he had convinced a former student of his named Rebekkah Sterling to come to Zion’s Pastures to watch the meteors, you grasped your seat.
“Rebekkah Sterling?”
“That’s what I said.” Pa grinned. “Why? That name mean something special to you?”
“No. Or I guess something. We have English together.”
Before that day you had never exchanged more than a word or two in Mrs.Schumacher’s Honors Literature class. You were certain she wouldn’t actually follow through on your father’s invitation.
Days passed, and you tried to forget that unlikeliest possibility, tried to resign yourself to the glumness of your town in that late summer. That August represented something of a crisis point in Presidio County, but it was a crisis that had been roiling for years—generations, in fact. The border between the English-speaking north and the Spanish-speaking south might have been settled a century and a half before, but it was never an entirely peaceful distinction out in your slice of the borderland. On the white side of that divide, you’d grown up under your late grandmother’s alternative Texas history, “the true story of this country they’d never teach in those schoolbooks of yours,” a place where for 150 years immigrants had been building the towns and doing the menial tasks, the enduring threat of deportation used to enforce a sort of soft slavery. Granny Nunu had told you how, as recently as her own childhood, your school had conducted a mock burial for “Mr.Spanish,” a ceremony in which the Latino students were made to write Spanish words on slips of paper, drop them into a hole in the earth, and bury them. “Shameful, shameful business, behind us now, thank the Lord, but you can’t ever forget it,” Granny Nunu told you.
Life Lessons Page 3
