Lori Ostlund - After the Parade

His students were still staring at him, waiting.

“I guess they wanted a challenge,” he said. “And they wanted land, even if it was above the Arctic Circle.” He reached into the punch bowl. “Next story.”

He unfolded the paper, which read: I am engaged to Bulgarian woman. We meet last year in my country. Now I am in USA and she is in her country. I am waiting for H-1B visa, and she will come here and marry with me.

The students called out the name of every man in the class, including Aaron, every man except Melvin. Aaron wondered how it made Melvin feel, to seem less likely than his gay teacher to have a fiancée. Of course, Aaron was not sure that the students understood he was gay. He had referred once or twice to his “former partner,” but even native speakers had trouble with the nomenclature of gay relationships, and he knew that for many of the students, Nico, in his chaps, was the model for gayness.

“You’re forgetting someone,” Aaron said, though it had taken him a moment also to realize that Melvin was the author. Melvin was Korean. His real name was Man-soo, but here in the United States, people had begun shortening it to Man, a nickname that had discomfited him, and so he decided to create his own, Melvin. “Melvin, is this yours?” Aaron asked. “Are you engaged?”

Melvin began to stammer. “Her name is Nikolina,” he said.

“How did you and Nikolina meet?”

“She was cleaning in Korea.”

“A maid?” said Aaron.

“Yes,” said Melvin.

“Your maid?” Aaron asked.

“No.” Melvin shrugged, licked his lips, which always looked painfully chapped, and said nothing more.

Of all his students, Aaron had the least sense of Melvin, who tended toward one-word responses and never smiled. The others treated him politely, but they did not tease him as they did one another, perhaps because he was older, thirty-two, though Paolo was in his fifties and everyone in the school joked with him. Aaron knew that their careful, almost deferential, treatment of Melvin had to do with his face, which was crumpled in on the right side, as though a horse had stepped on it. Melvin never mentioned his face, but he carried himself like someone accustomed to people’s stares.

“Congratulations, Melvin,” Aaron said.

* * *

That afternoon, Tommy, who was not so secretly one of Aaron’s favorite students, stayed after class with the other Thais to ask whether there was a word in English to indicate that someone was in love with a person who didn’t love him back. As they huddled around his desk, Aaron noted that Melvin, who was usually the first to leave, was still seated. “Unrequited love,” Aaron said. “ Unrequited means unreturned.”

They repeated it—“unrequited love”—and Bong, the most serious of the three despite his unfortunate nickname, asked questions aimed at pinpointing how the word might be used, questions along the lines of whether unrequited could be used to talk about unreturned library books or food that customers wished to send back to the kitchen.

“No,” Aaron told him, and “No.”

“I have unrequited love,” Tommy announced tragically, and Aaron and the other Thais laughed. Tommy tried to look miserable, but he was an optimist with a natural goofiness that he took care to cultivate, all of which undermined his occasional attempts at angst.

“Are you sure that your love is unrequited?” Aaron asked, which made the other two laugh harder. They apparently knew the object of his affection.

“Yes,” said Tommy. “I am definitely sure. It’s Aksu.”

“Ah,” said Aaron, then regretted sounding surprised.

Aksu, the new Turkish student, was a quiet, beautiful twenty-four-year-old who had just arrived in the United States, having completed her studies to become a French teacher. When she explained this to the class her first day, Aaron asked, “Why didn’t you go to France instead of coming here?” and she replied sadly, “I hate French.”

“Then why did you study it?” he asked, and she said, either logically or illogically (he wasn’t sure which), “How could I know I hated it until I learned it?”

“Aksu is quite a bit older than you,” Aaron said, trying to make her seem less desirable, not easy given her wistful smile and doe eyes. Tommy was just nineteen, fresh from high school.

“I’ve decided I prefer older women,” he said. “They’re worldly.” Aaron laughed. Worldly was a vocabulary word. “And we’re perfect for each other. We’re both couch potatoes.”

“You’ll need two couches,” said Aaron.

“Tell us the couch potato story again,” said Chaa.

“You already know the couch potato story,” Aaron said. He deeply regretted telling them the story, which had only reinforced their notions of this country.

“Yes, but we like to hear it again,” Chaa said. “Please.”

The story, told to him by an ER nurse at a party in Albuquerque, was about a man who had been brought in with chest pain. “He was four hundred and eighty-two pounds,” the nurse said. “It took four paramedics to lift him off his couch. So I’m undressing him and trying to get him into a hospital gown — nothing fit, we ended up wrapping a sheet around him — and I felt something hard in his stomach area. I started massaging the region. You know what it was? A TV remote, folded into the rolls of his stomach.”

He had told his students the story because they were doing a unit on uniquely American court cases, among them the case of a man suing an airline for charging him for two seats because he had not fit into one. Pilar said that when she flew back from Spain after Christmas, she had been made to sit in one of the crew fold-down seats because the woman next to her had spilled into hers, making the flight uncomfortable for both of them. “Even though I paid for my seat,” said Pilar, “I could not occupy it.”

“Does a ticket represent a person or a seat?” Aaron had asked the class.

“Why is this a case?” Katya asked. “The man is using two seats. He must pay for two seats.”

It was then that he had told them about the patient with the remote control folded into his stomach. The truth was that when the ER nurse told him the story, there at the party, they had both laughed at the notion of a man’s vice melding with his body, impressed by the symbolism, but as he told his students the story, it no longer seemed funny or symbolic. It seemed cruel. He felt cruel for telling it, particularly as it aligned too neatly with their stereotypes of America: a place where a man could lie on his couch and eat himself to death because, in America, you were free, free to be lonely, to become so big that you could not get off your own couch.

Melvin was still at his desk. Already he had taken out and put away his notebook twice, feigning busyness.

“No story,” Aaron told the Thai boys firmly. “I need to talk to Melvin.”

Melvin’s head snapped up.

“Good-bye, Aaron,” said the Thais. “See you tomorrow.”

“Be on time,” he called after them, knowing they would not be. “And don’t fall in unrequited love.” They laughed from the hallway.

Melvin sat waiting with his crumpled-in face. Aaron wondered what he had thought of the couch potato story. Did he think to himself that everywhere in the world, people looked at those who were different and said unkind things, or did he hear the story of a fat man and think that it had nothing to do with him?

“Melvin,” he said. “You’ve been very patient. Do you have a question?”

He was expecting a grammar question, a request for clarification on the passive voice, for example, but Melvin began to stammer. “I have romantic question,” he said.