Lori Ostlund - After the Parade

“Here we are, between the past”—he pointed to the word Know —“and the future, which we don’t know.” He looked at them encouragingly. “Okay, now let’s say one of the drivers mixes up a very big pizza order, and the next day everyone is wondering whether the boss was mad when he found out, but nobody actually knows whether he was mad because he came in after everyone was already gone. How would you say that?”

“I wish that he weren’t mad,” suggested Katya, the lone Russian.

“Okay,” Aaron said. “Except that means he was mad, that I know he was mad.” A few of the students nodded. “In this case, the boss’s reaction is in the past, but we don’t know it yet. We’ll learn about it in the future, so we have to say, ‘I hope he wasn’t mad.’ ”

He looked at them, they looked back, and then several more nodded. He was relieved to be back in the classroom, where he felt clear about what was needed from him: his knowledge and his steadying presence. But teaching provided something he needed also, a period each day when his own life receded.

“If there are no more questions,” he said, “let’s take a break.” He pointed one last time at the diagram on the board. “Remember, the nice thing about not knowing what has already happened is that we can keep hoping for the best.”

“Even though outcome is finished?” said Katya with the fatalism of a Russian.

“Yes,” he said, but he did not let himself think of Jacob, who might already be dead.

Mr. Ng drove a UPS truck. Most nights, he pulled his car into the garage after his shift and stayed in it for several hours. Aaron found it unsettling to have him there, on the other side of the flimsy wall that he leaned against as he sat on the bed reading or eating dinner or preparing for class, especially since Mr. Ng did not seem to be doing anything in his car, except maybe sleeping. Of course, Aaron knew that Mr. Ng was putting off as long as possible the moment when he went upstairs and he and his wife resumed their screaming, furniture-shoving arguments. Aaron did not know what their arguments were about because he did not understand Cantonese, but he assumed money, because he had read somewhere that money was what most couples argued about. At the end of prolonged quarrels, the Ngs sometimes switched to English, as though inviting him into their problems. He hated this the most, the intimacy of lying in bed in his pajamas, listening to two people who were supposed to be nothing more than his landlords destroy each other in not one but two languages.

Despite the lost hours of sleep, Aaron began rising early. He thought it was his body’s natural rhythm finally asserting itself, now that there were no one else’s habits or needs to consider. As a boy, he had been an early riser, but that was because his mother was not, so the café’s morning preparations fell to him. After she disappeared, he spent his senior year living with the Hagedorns, a family of night owls, and their schedule became his, which meant his memories of the year were clouded by exhaustion. Then, Walter came along, insisting that he call supper “dinner,” and he had, for it seemed a different meal from the one that he and his mother had rushed through in the brief lull before the early-bird special began at five.

Walter considered it improper to dine before eight, though he favored nine, and while the supper that Aaron had shared with his mother was a mishmash of kitchen errors, dinner with Walter involved wine, always, and at least two courses, with salad served last. Afterward, they drank a nightcap, cognac, though Aaron would have preferred sherry. Most nights, Walter asked Aaron to read aloud to him after dinner, poetry usually, for they agreed on poetry, not just on its value but on which poets and poems they loved. Walter liked “Dover Beach” and T. S. Eliot and Richard Hugo’s “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg,” to which he had introduced Aaron years earlier and which Aaron had since committed to memory. “You might come here Sunday on a whim. / Say your life broke down,” Aaron would recite while Walter sat beside him, inhaling deeply, as though hearing the words were not enough and he needed to breathe them in also, breathe them in as Aaron exhaled them.

Aaron had always appreciated that Walter did not leave movies or concerts and immediately demand an opinion, and it was the same with poetry. They sat in silence after each poem, feeling whatever it was they each felt without having to put it into words. Eventually, they finished their nightcaps, rose, and got ready for, and then into, bed, the king-size bed, where they watched the news or read but did not have sex because Walter did not enjoy sex after dark, an indisposition he once explained by saying that he could never shake the feeling that he was being watched. Aaron assumed that Walter’s fear was tied to something from his past, something he did not want to discuss, though at times he wondered whether it might not be a function of his collective consciousness as a gay man, a throwback to an era when gay men did everything furtively, when every look or word or touch had the power to destroy lives.

Despite Walter’s fears, they had had sex at all hours in the beginning, sex at noon while the fire whistle blew, announcing lunchtime, and sex at midnight so that Aaron joked it had taken him two days to come. Sometimes Aaron would visit Walter on campus, and they would have sex there in Walter’s office, a Latin professor on one side of the thin walls and a young French professor on the other. Before he bent Aaron over his desk or tipped him back in his reading chair, Walter pulled the shades and locked the door, but such precautions made sense there, for neither of them wanted to look up as Walter thrust into Aaron hard from behind to find a student in the doorway.

Aaron always fell asleep first, Walter beside him, reading or preparing notes for an article or keeping up with his correspondence, for even after email came along, Walter continued to write letters by hand, using carbon paper between the top page, the one he would mail, and the bottom, the one that would go into a box marked neatly with the year. The boxes of letters were lined up in their basement, had moved with them from Minnesota to New Mexico. When Aaron asked Walter why he kept the letters, he said that he anticipated reaching a point in his life when the present offered nothing new, and when that day came, he would bring up his boxes and read through the story of his life, maybe finding even more pleasure in it the second time.

* * *

Most mornings the smallness of his new apartment overwhelmed him, the walls pressing in so that he could not read or grade papers or even think. He began walking to work, giving himself an hour and a half, even two hours, because he liked knowing that there was time to linger, time to learn about his new neighborhood, where he felt daily the surprise and pleasure of being an outsider. The signs on businesses often announced themselves first in large Chinese characters, catering to him as an afterthought, in English that was often grammatically incorrect and rendered in small letters. Among his favorite business names were these: Smartest Child, a tutoring center whose window featured a photograph of a teenage girl in a beauty pageant gown, her perfect SAT scores superimposed on her sash; 100 % Healthy Dessert, which he had tried once, intrigued by the pictures of syrupy concoctions filled with beans and colorful tapioca worms and even more by the menu descriptions promising enticements such as “promotes bowel movement”; and Happy Good Lucky, a tiny market on Taraval that advertised BEER ALL FLAVORS $9 and dissuaded shoplifters with a series of hand-lettered index cards, strategically placed, that read, HONESTY IS THE BEST PERSONALITY I APPRECIATE.