Lori Ostlund - After the Parade

“Walter,” Rudy called back. “Give this boy a hand.”

Together, Aaron and the man hauled the boat out and got it stored while Rudy gave orders from the dock, where he sat, still drinking. When they were finished, they went over to join Rudy, who introduced them by saying, “Aaron, this here’s Walter Shapiro. He’s a professor at the university in Moorhead and no doubt the only goddamn Jew in a thirty-mile radius.” Walter laughed at the introduction and shook Aaron’s hand, and the three of them went into Walter’s cabin for what Walter called “a nightcap.” It was there in the lighted cabin that Aaron recognized Walter as the man who had come into the café for breakfast three years earlier, the man who read a book in French while he ate.

“You came into my mother’s café for breakfast,” Aaron said. “The Trout Café?”

“I remember,” Walter said. “Your mother was an excellent cook. That’s why I had to stop coming, or I would have started to look like Rudy here.” Rudy laughed, though Aaron would later learn that men did not always like to have their weight discussed either. He would also learn, after he and Walter had become lovers, that he was the real reason Walter had not come in again. “You were such a lovely boy,” Walter would explain. “So wistful and polite and filled with yearning.”

Just like that it became the three of them motoring out in Rudy’s boat each night, Rudy listening as Aaron and Walter conversed quietly, often about poetry. The poetry that Walter read aloud to them out there on the water was nothing like the poetry that Aaron had been forced to memorize in school, poems about the loveliness of trees. He started with several by Anne Sexton and T. S. Eliot, followed by a poem that he had driven all the way back to his house in Moorhead to retrieve because he had realized at breakfast that they needed to hear it. It was by a man named Richard Hugo, a poem that began so beautifully Aaron had found himself in tears: You might come here Sunday on a whim. / Say your life broke down.

Walter also asked questions, lots of them, his tone matter-of-fact: What had happened to Aaron’s father, and did he know where his mother had gone, and did he think his life would shape up differently because of these factors? He asked Aaron what he planned to study in college, as if college were a given and the only thing left to be worked out was what Aaron hoped to do with his life. Aaron discovered that Walter was a good listener, and he found himself answering honestly.

“Did Rudy know about you, that, you know, that you’re gay?” he asked Walter later, when he was just starting to figure this out about himself.

“I never told him in so many words, but I suspect he knew. Rudy is a very perceptive man,” Walter said. “Did you know he came out to the cabin one afternoon to talk to me about you?”

Aaron shook his head.

“Well, he did. He wanted my help getting you into college. He wasn’t sure what I could do exactly, but he wondered whether there wasn’t something, given my position at the university. He said he didn’t want you stuck there like his daughter.” It had made Aaron’s heart ache to picture Rudy doing this. “He’s a good man, Rudy is, a kind man. It’s probably why he drinks too much. There are some people that the world’s just too much for, you know.”

“I didn’t know,” Aaron had said. He was just eighteen, and there was so much he didn’t know.

On the board, Aaron wrote the day’s phrasal verb: turn into. He added a definition—“to change from X to Y; to become”—and beneath it, examples:

1. We turned the garage into a study.

2. He started studying more and turned into a straight-A student.

3. She turned her jeans into a pair of shorts.

Behind him, the students copied everything into their notebooks, which was always the case when they studied phrasal verbs. To truly understand English, they agreed, they had to know the difference between turn into and turn in . They sat in pairs writing sentences while Aaron circulated, checking their work. He read aloud what Chaa had written: Tommy used to be a man, but then he turned into a gay. The Thai boys laughed, except Tommy, who looked around for Aksu, worried that she might have overheard their teasing.

“You do know that gay men are still men?” Aaron said.

“Yes?” said Chaa. He sounded surprised.

Finally, it was break time, and the students turned on their cell phones and borrowed change from one another for the coffee machine. As Aaron passed the smoking balcony on his way down to the faculty room, he saw that the sliding door was ajar and that smoke was drifting into the hallway.

“Smoke travels,” he called to the two smokers, before slamming the door shut.

He recognized them, two young Japanese women who planned to remain in the class one level below his because they were afraid of him. “He looks too serious,” they had told his students, referring to his ties and the horn-rimmed glasses, his tallness and the severe part of his hair. The Thais had reported this to him gleefully.

The women began gesticulating. They pointed to the door, their mouths moving, and he pointed to his ear and yelled, “Louder.”

“Broken,” screamed the one on the right. She tugged on the door. Nothing. Aaron tugged. It was indeed broken, like everything else in this building.

“Okay,” he called. “I’ll get help.” Instead of going downstairs to find Bart, he turned back toward the detective’s classroom, assuming that a man who visited the smoking balcony with such regularity would be familiar with the door’s idiosyncrasies. He had not actually met him yet, but they often nodded at each other down the hallway. The detective’s door swung open just as Aaron reached it, and the two men collided, hard. Aaron extended his hand. “I’m Aaron,” he said.

“Bill,” said the detective, his grip unexpectedly loose. “Carpal tunnel,” he added, as though reading Aaron’s mind. “All those years of writing out reports.”

“I was wondering whether you might have some advice regarding the sliding door on the smoking balcony?”

“My advice is ‘whatever the hell you do, don’t close the damn thing.’ ”

“Well, I’ve already done so — slammed it, in fact,” Aaron said.

Bill put an unlit cigarette in his mouth, jiggled it up and down. “Let’s go take a look,” he said. Students had already gathered around the door, but they stepped back, no doubt reassured by Bill’s capable appearance. “Yup, it’s definitely off the track,” Bill confirmed. He turned to Aaron. “I remember seeing a toolbox in the basement when I got the tour — in the corner by the Christmas tree.”

Aaron understood that he had created the problem, which made retrieving the toolbox his responsibility. Generally, he avoided the basement, a dark, low-ceilinged place used for storing extra desks and blackboards as well as the numerous holiday decorations of which Marla was fond — bats and leprechauns keeping company with Chinese lanterns and turkeys. It was also used for hosting school-wide parties, the only space big enough to accommodate all the students. They had begun the term down there, the teachers and students collectively welcoming the new year and the new semester, and because he was new, they had welcomed him also. He recalled how uncelebratory the event felt, the dirty windows and flickering fluorescent lights, the ceiling pressing down on them. Marla had run off copies of “Auld Lang Syne,” which they sang together, ruining for Aaron, possibly forever, a song that had always invoked in him a sweet nostalgia.