Oliver Loving

by Stefan Merrill Block

  On the doorstep to her family’s house, Mr. Avalon now handed her a CD. “Listen to track four. ‘Historia de un Amor.’ It takes huge range, a real virtuosa, and I’ve never found a singer strong enough to put it in the show, but I have a feeling that maybe I have this year.” Mr. Avalon winked.

  Rebekkah listened to the track over and over that night, and the next day, at rehearsals, she offered an a cappella rendition. Even as she squinted her eyes to belt out the high notes, Rebekkah could see her fellow club members gaping, could also see the bright, slightly bent way Mr. Avalon watched on. Was there anything in this world that had ever made her happier than the way Mr. Avalon listened to her sing? He leaned into her voice like a houseplant to a window, as if her lungs were shedding some life-giving sustenance. When rehearsals were over, Mr. Avalon snagged her by her blouse. “That was marvelous,” Mr. Avalon said. “You are a very, very special creature.”

  “Thank you,” Rebekkah said.

  “But you know, I was worrying about you the whole night. And I got something for you, but I can’t give it to you here.”

  Rebekkah cocked her head, and what Mr. Avalon told her next hit her bloodstream like sickness, an infection of gratitude replicating itself. “I don’t want to make any of the other kiddos jealous,” he said. “I’ve got some paperwork to do. Find me outside in a few?”

  Less tipsy than the day before, Rebekkah waited for Mr. Avalon in the parking lot outside the school. And it was there, as she was trying to strike a cross-legged sophisticated-looking pose on the hot grill of a bench, that Rebekkah saw him for the first time: a young man who found Mr. Avalon as he came out of the school, his briefcase swinging. This guy marched up to Rebekkah’s teacher, as if they might hug or at least shake hands, but they did neither. A brown patch of schoolyard lay between Rebekkah and the two curtly speaking men, and she had trouble getting a read on this new person. He carried himself in the self-conscious way of a teenager, but his boyish face was incongruous beneath a shaved head. She couldn’t hear a word of what he and Mr. Avalon said, but from the tight way they carried their shoulders, from the way Mr. Avalon kept flinching as if he might march away, she sensed that the conversation was an unpleasant one.

  “An old student,” Mr. Avalon explained when he at last came to Rebekkah. “Dropped by to say hi.”

  “Oh,” Rebekkah said, her gaze drifting back to this old student, who had not budged from his spot near the school’s side door. He still just stood there, watching Rebekkah and Mr. Avalon speak. Rebekkah was relieved to climb onto the cool leather bench seat of his vintage Cadillac. But, after an awkwardly silent drive, when they arrived at his house, Rebekkah hesitated. She had seen how her father was with the world—jovial, generous, attentive—an identity he seemed to take off with his business suit at home. At home, Rebekkah’s father was afflicted by “nerves.” “Nerves” was her father’s term for the undetonated minefield of his personality, a wrong step in any direction triggering a charge. Anything Rebekkah said might set him off, and an hour later, Rebekkah would be tending to a fresh welt as her mother persuaded her to apologize to him.

  Mr. Avalon, however, seemed just the opposite; in his cluttered pueblo, he came more fully into his kindness.

  “So!” Mr. Avalon clapped his hands. “Are you ready for your surprise?”

  The surprise was waiting in an outbuilding, a little wood and asbestos shed across a flat. The surprise bounded out as soon as Mr. Avalon opened the door. “How?” Rebekkah said breathlessly. How could Mr. Avalon have known exactly what she had wanted since her ninth birthday? A little black fur ball, a squirming pug, twelve inches of adorable that was all hers. She hoisted the whining dog, pressed it against her face. A realization, both wonderful and also horrible: not all adults were like her parents. Easier to believe in a world in which everyone dealt with secrets, bruises to cover, a memory of a mother asleep in her own sick to wash away with daytime gin. Sorrowful to think that she might have been Mr. Avalon’s daughter, that another life could have existed with a father like him.

  “Oh, geez, did I do something wrong? Why are you crying?”

  Rebekkah bit her lip and shook her head. “We’ll have to keep her here. My parents would never let me have her at home.”

  “Of course, we’ll do that. You can visit her every day. The only thing you have to worry about is what you’ll name her.”

  The next weeks were very happy. Each day, after rehearsals, Rebekkah visited Mr. Avalon and Edwina, and she ate four-compartment frozen dinners, after which her teacher helped her with her homework, his own theater assignments and otherwise. As for payment, Mr. Avalon would just tap at his own rough cheek on parting, and Rebekkah would give it a quick little kiss. The first term ended, and her report card became one less trigger to her father’s “nerves.” She hadn’t yet told Mr. Avalon about what it was like with her parents, but sometimes, as they hunched together over her geometry textbook, he ran his fingers near a furious Ping-Pong ball of a bruise on her shoulder, and his eyes watered. She wouldn’t have known how to explain it, and she was glad Mr. Avalon didn’t make her try. And yet, one day, on another ride to his house, Mr. Avalon’s mood had shifted like her dad’s daily arrival at the doorstep. When she asked about his day, he sniffed the Cadillac’s leathery air, as if she had just filled it with a fart.

  “What were you talking to Oliver Loving for?” Mr. Avalon asked later, over a pepperoni pizza dinner.

  “Oliver?” She thought of the kind, nerdish boy she chatted with before first period literature, the boy who had nudged a nervous hand toward her that one night when his father had invited her to the meteor showers. The truth was that when Rebekkah talked with Oliver, she thought often about Mr. Avalon’s kindness to her, how she should pay it forward.

  “He seems lonely, but he’s really nice.”

  “Don’t play stupid. I saw you acting all—” Mr. Avalon did a grotesque imitation of girlish flirting, batting at his hair and giggling. “His family is not like yours or mine. For your information, they couldn’t know one thing about what it’s like to be like us.”

  Mr. Avalon was standing now, a posture very much like her father’s, gathering a dark charge.

  “To be special, you have to be broken. It’s the trade-off. A boy like Oliver Loving couldn’t understand that.”

  Rebekkah was so afraid of losing Mr. Avalon’s attention that she did not ask him, “Why?” She nodded, regretfully.

  “I won’t let anyone ever hold you back from what you could become,” he said, as if that was what this conversation had been about, as if that sweet-shy, scrawny eleventh grade boy held some claim on her. But Rebekkah could tell that Mr. Avalon expected this proclamation to elicit a hug, and it was then, when she stood from the table to let him receive her, that he kissed her for the first time, a kiss quite unlike the dozens of pecks she’d planted on his cheek. She now tasted his sweet, musty flavor. She tried to measure what this kiss meant, and she wasn’t sure except that she knew it would repair the blackness of his mood, so she kissed him back.

  “Who’s there?” her mother called from the study when she came home, just before midnight.

  “No one,” Rebekkah said. She took the steps two at a time. Alone in bed, Rebekkah was lit up with her secret, her skin glowing in the dark.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Jed’s secret, poorly kept: it was true. Once upon a very different time, Hector Espina had been only another student of his.

  Jed was in his early forties then, at what would prove to be a kind of zenith in his life, though he couldn’t have known it. Jed Loving, local art instructor, with his dreams of succeeding as an artist in his own right not yet entirely crumpled, his whiskey sessions still limited to the weekends. Jed had never wanted to be a teacher, but he liked his job well enough. Things hadn’t been right in Jed’s own childhood, and those kids—sketching miserable scenes of their family lives alongside the usual dragons and flowers and pretty sunsets—were like some daily lesson for J
ed, suggesting that he might even still paint his way free of his own past.

  But Jed saw it, even back then: Hector Espina had been more troubled than most kids. A slight and awkward boy, all elbows, who chose to work at an easel near the back of the room, just as, in the halls, Jed had watched Hector move through his days like the shadow of his classmates. A flitting, furtive, shaking boy, whose first drawings were grim indeed. “Is that your father?” Jed would later remember asking Hector Espina one day.

  “It is a nightmare,” Hector said. “My nightmare.”

  Jed looked at the blobby blue corpse Hector had etched, maggot eaten and nude. “It sure is,” Jed said.

  Hector shrugged at the mess he’d made on the page. “It’s ugly,” Hector said.

  “But isn’t ugliness the point?”

  “Not in the way I wanted.”

  Jed nodded. “Well, how about you try to do something a little happier next time? Maybe your ma?”

  Hector clenched his eyes, shook his head. “My mother? She went back to Mexico when I was five.”

  Jed took this fact the way he took many similar admissions from his students; he couldn’t quite bear to look at the poor kid. He looked, instead, at the drawing. The horror aside, it really was crude. Hector was no artist. Still, if ever there was a boy who needed a gold star, it was he. “You are really making some improvements there, Hector. Your only problem,” Jed said, “is that you need to shade.”

  Behind Jed, other boys were hardly trying to stifle their snickering. From day one of the semester, Jed had seen that Hector was the unluckiest kind of target for adolescent tormentors; Hector was the kind who fought back. “Fuck you,” Hector now hissed at these boys, to their considerable delight.

  “Don’t listen to them,” Jed told Hector in a close voice. “And maybe chill it with the language?” Hector nodded, and Jed patted his shoulder, feeling no small sympathy for the kid. Every day, in front of his class, Jed delivered the same timeworn lectures. Perspective, the color wheel, the tricks to diagramming the human face. But sometimes it could seem that his class work was more therapy than art.

  And drawings like Hector’s were hardly unusual among a certain set of Jed’s moody boy students. In fact, Jed often encouraged these boys in their catharsis through painted gore. Near the start of each semester, to make a display of the fact that art should not only be about prettiness, Jed offered his class a slide show of a time-tested student favorite: details from The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch, its fancifully macabre depictions of hell, the demons delighting in the grotesque punishments of the writhing, naked bodies consigned to their damnation. This slide show was Jed’s little rebellion against the banalities of the state-issued curriculum. More than that, Jed hoped his students might feel encouraged to draw away their own demons.

  But perhaps Jed had made a mistake; Hector took to Bosch in a way no boy before him had. Every six weeks, each student was assigned to present a completed painting, to be presented at a “gallery show,” a Friday morning event to which Jed brought decaf coffee and croissants, trying to create a cultured atmosphere. And on that first “viewing” Hector revealed to his teacher and classmates a truly appalling work, a kid’s ode to Bosch that might have dismayed Bosch himself. Hector’s painting was divided into three sections. In the bottom area, Hector’s hell, was a clumsy Boschian display of miseries. In Hector’s rendition, the demons supped at steaks made of human thigh, they luxuriated on a throw rug made of flayed human skin, they bludgeoned the poor humans with a variety of implements: a rolling pin, a golf club, a baseball bat. In the center panel, perhaps representing purgatory, was a clumsy, overcast depiction of the town of Bliss. At the top, Hector’s heaven showed a malformed version of Hector himself on a cloud, while below, a crowd of similarly misshapen audience members, rendered with heartbreaking intricacy, threw up their arms in Hector’s direction. But there was a different, less adoring kind of crowd gathered around Hector now: his fellow art students, who were scoffing quite openly. Jed raised his voice, trying to speak over them.

  “Is that you? What are you doing onstage there? Is that some sort of play?”

  “I’m singing,” Hector said in a grumpy whisper, bristling at the mocking attention of his classmates.

  “Really? You sing? I had no idea.”

  “You will,” Hector said, glancing around with a little defiant glare. “Someday everyone will. I’m very, very good.”

  Jed cringed a little, on Hector’s behalf. In his own childhood and in his years at the front of the classroom, Jed had learned well that the one piece of truly irresistible bait to a bully was a claim of specialness.

  “Yeah, right,” a voice said from behind. “Hector Espina, rock star!”

  Hector stiffened, turned to face the speaker. “Now, Henry,” Jed was saying, but he was useless with discipline, and his students knew it. Henry pushed his way forward, just a few inches from Hector. “Want to know where you’ll be in ten years? Eh, maricón?” Henry pointed to a detail in Hector’s deepest hell, where a demon probed a kneeling man with what appeared to be the barrel of a handgun.

  The suddenness of Hector’s violence: it was as if Jed could hear the sound of a leash being ripped. Hector was on top of Henry now, pinning the boy with his knees. He had already landed two punches to the kid’s face before Jed could lunge to pull him away. And then Jed did try, but he wasn’t much use. In the bear hug he had on Hector’s back, Jed could feel the relentlessness of Hector’s swinging arms, a thrashing machine that would not stop running until its job was done. Thankfully, Henry’s friends came to Jed’s aid, jarring Hector away, pinning him to the blackboard. Ten minutes later, after the classroom had emptied, Jed was looking at Henry’s fat lip, the knot rising on the side of Hector’s head. And what did Jed do? A lifelong nonconfronter, he handled this fight as he always handled the little skirmishes that broke out in his classroom. No boy wanted a trip to Doyle Dixon’s office, with its inevitable call home to explain the specifics. He made the kids shake hands, and no one ever spoke of it again. Weeks passed, at last the semester tipped to its end, and then the problem of Hector was no longer Jed’s to worry over.

  Hector was, in fact, only one of a great many disturbed kids who had filtered through Jed’s room over the years—if not for what happened years later, these memories would likely have vanished, not taken on their crushing tonnage. But Jed would remember too well the fury he had felt in Hector as he hooked his arms around the boy’s shoulders, a machine set into frantic motion, a violence that only the muscular effort of other bodies could put to a stop.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  One day, in the midst of another quiet evening of homework at Mr. Avalon’s kitchen table, Rebekkah perked her head to a knock at the door. Rebekkah would not yet have admitted to any feelings of shame about their evenings together, but she panicked a little, not wanting to reveal her presence there to whoever had dropped by.

  “Oh,” Mr. Avalon said to the dark figure at the door.

  “Forget about me? You said I should drop by sometime,” the voice said, in an odd way that brought Rebekkah away from her books, made her creep up behind for a better glimpse. This visitor’s face was mostly shadowed in the porch light, but she identified his shaven head from that afternoon, outside the school.

  “Her again?”

  Something in this guy’s tone had an odd effect on Rebekkah. She could only name herself in a near-whisper. “Rebekkah,” she said. “I’m Rebekkah.”

  “What can I do for you, Hector?” Mr. Avalon felt for his mustache.

  “It’s been a while, aren’t you happy to see me?”

  “It’s just not a good time. Right now. We’re in the middle of some work.” Mr. Avalon was already closing the door a few inches. “If you’d like to come visit some other time, I’d be happy to talk.”

  “Right. Work.” This young man now craned his head past Mr. Avalon. “And so what did he tell you—Rebekkah, you said it was? That you’re gonn
a be some rock star? I should tell you,” he said. “He lies.”

  “Hector.”

  “He lies! You know, he never even let me sing in that stupid club of his? He wouldn’t even let me join his class! ‘First you have to hone your craft,’ he says. Hone my craft! Ha ha!”

  Mr. Avalon jerked back his arm, as if he might shove the kid to the ground. Instead, he slammed the door shut into Hector’s grinning face.

  “I’m sorry about that,” Mr. Avalon said after the sound of the car had grumbled away. He cleared his throat a couple of times, shook his shoulders like a wet dog. “Hector. Truth is the boy was very talented. Another kid from a broken home. I thought I could help him, but sometimes boys like Hector just go in the wrong direction.”