Lori Ostlund - After the Parade

In the classroom next to his, Felix prepared students to take the TOEFL, an ESL exam on which they needed to do well in order to enter college here, but the truth was that Felix’s class offered very little preparation, for Felix prioritized having fun. His morning curriculum included showing movies, playing practical jokes on his students, and listening to music at a high volume. In the afternoons the students sat at their desks, taking practice exams if they were actually interested in improving their scores, and sleeping with their heads on their desks if they were not. Aaron had quickly realized that the TOEFL class was a holding pen for students who needed a student visa but had little interest in being students.

Aaron was familiar with men like Felix, a homely underachiever who had gone to Korea in his twenties to teach and found himself suddenly successful with women. He did not care that his success had nothing to do with who he was as a person and everything to do with his being American. That he had neither an interest in teaching nor aptitude did not prevent him from continuing on once he was back in the United States because the school afforded him a supply of sexual partners. When Aaron looked at the female students and then at Felix, he did not understand it, for not only was Felix unattractive but he seemed determined to accentuate his worst features. He wore T-shirts that fit snugly around his fleshy waist and a wig tied in a loose ponytail similar to that of John Adams. He was overly fond of accessories and wore a utility belt, to which he snapped or tied various nonnecessities: a money pouch, though he often borrowed bus fare; a walkie-talkie; a container of aspirin that rattled like a maraca when he walked; and a light of the sort that bicyclists wore after dark, nestled into the small of his back, flashing attention on his buttocks as he walked down the hallway or, more disconcertingly, stood at the urinals, urinating.

Aaron initially heard about Felix’s trysts from Taffy, but Felix himself had recently described for everyone in the faculty room how he had gotten caught breaking into the school with Akiko, one of his Japanese students, the night before. “We didn’t technically break in,” he clarified. “I still had the key from when I taught nights last semester. I just didn’t know Polka Dot changes the alarm code, like, all the time. But you know how he is — he doesn’t trust anyone.” Aaron wondered how Felix could think that his complaint had legitimacy, given that he had engaged in the very behavior that Pulkka was guarding against. “FYI, the alarm’s silent,” Felix added, as though sharing information meant to make them better teachers.

When Marla and the police arrived, he and Akiko were up in his classroom. He said it that way—“we were already up in my room”—as though the evening had involved nothing more than a scheduled tutorial. “We didn’t even hear them coming. Things got, you know, sort of loud.”

Aaron stood up then and left the faculty room, though it was too late. He could not erase the image of Felix bent over Akiko, naked but for his utility belt, the bike strobe pulsing as the two of them, teacher and student, worked away atop Felix’s desk.

* * *

Most weekends Aaron felt as if he were tumbling over a waterfall, floating and struggling for footing, and then Monday morning came, he entered his classroom, and the ground appeared beneath him again. He had wanted his life to change — had believed he might lose his mind if it did not — and just like that, it had. He had changed it. But after the initial euphoria, which reached its apex in Needles as he broke down the door of Jacob’s room, he felt discouraged. He thought of Walter often, with what seemed like grief some days and simple nostalgia others. He could not tell whether he missed him, the sum of him, but he knew he missed parts of their life together. He missed feeling like an adult in the world, cooking proper meals and eating them at a real dining room table while he reported on his day. He missed the comforting familiarity of knowing a person for twenty-three years: they had known how to occupy space together, how to be quiet together. He had thrown that away, and if he ever met someone new, they would have to start from scratch. They would have to learn how the other smelled first thing in the morning or when he was sick, how he smelled just after a bath or when he wanted sex. They would have to learn these smells and then how to be comfortable with them.

He did not miss sex with Walter. In fact, he did not miss sex at all. He felt far away from his body, from desire. The last time they had had sex was on Thanksgiving. Aaron had eaten too much, yet when Walter touched him, his mouth still greasy from the turkey, he gave in to Walter’s need. It was still light out, and as Walter moved behind him, he could hear the neighbors tossing a football in their backyard. Afterward, as they lay on the king-size bed, Walter said, “Well, someone certainly was thankful,” affecting an arch tone, both the tone and the words taking Aaron back to those early days with Walter and his group of middle-aged, closeted friends. Walter burrowed his nose under Aaron’s arm while Aaron stared out the window, watching the football arc through the air. He felt something wet, salty, on his lips and realized he was crying. He knew then that he needed to be gone by Christmas.

Aaron did not miss the king-size bed. He liked this bed, a twin-size futon, which reminded him of the bed he had slept in as a boy. When he and his mother first arrived in Mortonville, they had rented a furnished house from Mr. Rehnquist, where Aaron had occupied the lower half of a bunk bed. He used to tuck a blanket under the top mattress and let it hang down around his bed like a curtain, pretending it was a house or a cave or a boat, this last his favorite because he liked imagining storms that flung the boat about. In the midst of the storms, he would throw himself from the bed to the floor, where he pretended that he was swimming, staying afloat and saving his own life because there was nobody else to save him.

The day Aaron’s mother picked him up from his aunt and uncle’s house, after she unlocked their front door and they stepped inside, she said, “Does it feel strange to be home? It’s the longest you’ve been away, you know. Almost a month.”

It did feel strange, though stranger still was the disarray in which he found the house: dirty dishes stacked in the sink, mail piled high on the counter, a box of clothes open in front of the hallway closet. He had believed they were returning home together, but he saw then that this was not the case. Nor could he make sense of the mess. His mother had always washed dishes as soon as they finished with them. When she brought in the mail, she did not set it on the counter to be dealt with later. He had seen her toss the whole stack in the trash because she cared more about neatness than bills or correspondence.

Her own parents were pack rats. Perched on his bed one night, she had told him this as if it were a bedtime story. He had met them just once. “I vowed never to take you to that house again,” she said. “It’s no place for a child.” He wanted to point out that she had lived there as a child, but instead he asked what a pack rat was, and she said it meant that her parents were burying themselves alive beneath stacks of paper and plastic containers and instruction manuals for appliances that had stopped working years ago. When they did die, several years later, it was not because of garbage. His grandfather’s heart gave out on a Monday, his grandmother’s succumbing by Thursday. Aaron, who was ten, stayed with the Rehnquists while his mother went to oversee the joint funeral, and when she came back, she said, “Well, that’s that,” and they did not speak of his grandparents again.