Lori Ostlund - After the Parade

Aaron had always thought of blushing as a public function, but that day in Bildt Hardware, hearing for the first time a graphic description of what men did to each other sexually, he learned otherwise. His face grew hot. He watched Ronnie Hopkins put a roll of tape in his pocket and turn to leave.

“When I joined the army back in ’42,” Marvin Hultgren continued, “the first thing was they had us strip down to nothing. There we were, buck naked, and we had to line up and bend over with our palms on the floor, asses straight up. This feller comes by with a fire hose and lets each of us have it — straight up the ass. I’m telling you, if that didn’t clean you out, nothing would. Hurt like hell. We walked around like sissies for a week.”

The men laughed and then one of them passed gas loudly, and so they laughed again, and Aaron knew that all of it — the story and the laughter and the passing of gas — was meant for Ronnie Hopkins. Ronnie Hopkins knew this also, and he stood still for a moment, unaware that he was being watched, and then he took the roll of tape back out of his coat pocket, slid it onto the display prong, and left.

Aaron could not tell his mother that he had failed to relay her message to Harold Bildt, so he walked quietly through Households, waiting for his face to cool, but everything he looked at — the corn skewers that went into the ends of cobs, the ketchup and mustard squirt bottles — reminded him of what he had heard. He took a breath and went into the office and told Harold Bildt about the dishwasher. Harold looked at the calendar on his desk, trying to figure out a time that he could walk across the street to fix it, and Aaron looked down at the floor because he could not look at the other men, now that he understood: what they hated about Ronnie Hopkins was not that he had done what he had to a retarded man but simply that he had done it to a man.

After classes were dismissed that afternoon, Taffy appeared in his doorway, wanting to go out for a drink in order to talk about what he had seen in the basement. Taffy had never come up to his room before, but he knew that the incident had aroused something in her, brought out the part of her that liked being in charge, handling situations, maintaining order. He suggested that they have a drink in the Castro, knowing she would decline. Taffy did not like the Castro because she did not like the way gay men regarded her. The truth was that he did not feel at ease there either, especially when he saw men walking around almost naked or couples holding hands, but he had begun cutting through the Castro on walks and had recently stumbled upon a café that he liked, a busy place, not the type of place he normally chose, but as he sat in the corner with a beer and a slice of pie, he discovered that the café’s busyness made him feel invisible.

He liked feeling invisible, and he sat with a poetry book open before him because he had learned that reading was a way to help that feeling along. At Milton’s, he had sometimes read through an entire week’s worth of newspapers, and the last time he ate there, the Friday right before he left Albuquerque, he had come across an article in The New York Times that he read with great interest and now wished he had clipped and saved. It was about the letter writers of India, a disappearing breed of men who set up shop — makeshift desks, paper, ink, stamps — day after day under the same trees in the same village markets in order to take down the letters of those around them who could not read or write but wished to record and share the details of their lives. It was a natural desire, this need to account for one’s life, to say it out loud or see it written down before abandoning it to the dusty shelves of memory — to suggest, in some way, that it mattered.

As he sat with his book and his pie that day in the Castro, a man, a very nice man named George, had come up and asked what he was reading. As this man George stood next to his table, his head inclined toward the open poetry book, Aaron considered how much of his life had been spent listening to the stories of others. It was not a complaint. He had felt nothing but fondness for the tellers. But now, nearly forty-two and alone for the first time, he had begun to think that his own life added up to nothing more than the stories of other people. He looked up at this stranger with kind eyes who wanted to know what he was reading and said, “ ‘Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg.’ ”

The stranger smiled, which made his eyes appear even kinder, and began to recite: “You might come here Sunday on a whim. / Say your life broke down.” He stopped abruptly because the next line was about a kiss, and they both looked down awkwardly. Aaron felt a tightening in his chest, a jolt to his groin, and he thought about how long it had been since he’d felt either. He recalled the farm boy he’d slept with in college, the boy from his poetry class. He had known so little about poetry then, only what Walter had taught him, but put off by the boy’s veneration of Wordsworth, he had used poetry as an excuse not to engage in sex with the boy again. He looked up at this man who could quote from Richard Hugo and said, “I’m Aaron. Would you care to join me?”

George sat down, and Aaron tried hard not to think about Walter, who had first read this poem to him all those years ago as they sat in a boat together fishing, just before Walter took him away and helped him become the person he was meant to be, which he now thought of simply as the person he was, the person this stranger, George, had seen reading poetry and wanted to get to know.

They talked for two hours, eating their individual slices of pie and then sharing a third (apple again) to prolong the conversation, forks intertwining for one awful, glorious second as they both reached for the same bit of crust. Most people were not interested in the specifics of teaching, perhaps because they had spent their youths in school and thought they already knew every boring detail of what it meant to be a teacher. They offered overly zealous praise for teachers and all that they had to endure, right before changing the subject. But George wanted to know everything — why Aaron had become a teacher and whether he ever regretted it, where he taught and what his students were like and whether he got along with his colleagues — and Aaron found himself describing it all: Melvin’s fiancée, Paolo’s motorcycle club, the week without heat, even that Marla wrote “Love you guys” on the box of pineapple buns.

“But she’s your boss,” George said, voice rising, and Aaron wanted to lean across the table and kiss him. “So what was the thing that surprised you most when you started teaching?” he asked next. “I don’t mean about education.” He looked flustered. “I mean something more personal, I guess, about how it feels to be in the classroom.”

“When I first started teaching, I couldn’t sleep most nights because I was so worried I wasn’t teaching them enough,” Aaron said, but as he spoke, he remembered something else: Walter lying awake with him, listening to him talk through the details of his teaching day. Some nights, he got up and brought Aaron a plate of saltine crackers and ketchup, that childhood snack for which he had never lost the taste. “You need to sleep,” Walter would whisper, but he always lay beside Aaron, stroking his brow for as long as it took because he understood that sometimes the only way to fall asleep was with the knowledge that someone was awake beside you.

George smiled encouragingly. He did not know that Aaron was thinking about lying in bed with the man with whom he had lived for more than twenty years. “But you just sort of get used to it,” Aaron finally continued. “To the overwhelming sense of responsibility, I mean. Or maybe you just get better at teaching.”