Lori Ostlund - After the Parade

However, when Sunday came around, Aaron could not bring himself to go because he was overwhelmed by desire, a desire that was not only sexual, though there was definitely that. It was the nonsexual part that frightened him. Specifically, in the days after their meeting, he had found himself wanting to tell George things: that he enjoyed taking public transportation, sitting on Muni surrounded by people from all over the world; that he rode public transportation sometimes just to be near people, not for companionship but because he never felt as keenly alone as when he stood pressed uncomfortably close to strangers; that he needed to feel alone. He wanted to tell George about something that he had recently witnessed in United Nations Plaza. He was on his way to an afternoon concert at the symphony hall, Dvo ák’s New World Symphony, one of his favorites, but he’d arrived early, so he settled on a bench. As he sat there in his suit and tie, a group of young people, grubby and presumably homeless, had engaged in a ritualistic shaving of one another’s underarms. They stood in a circle near the fountain and took turns stroking the shaver against the underarms of the person beside them, dipping it into the fountain, then passing it on. Aaron felt repulsed yet could not stop watching. In the end, he had to run to make it to the concert on time. He could imagine telling George the whole story while George nodded and asked questions. He liked imagining it, and that was what frightened him, this desire to have George listen and nod as he tried to describe the trust involved in lifting one’s arms like that, in letting another person take in your smell and touch a razor to one of the most tender parts of your body.

He had told no one about George, not even Taffy. “The Castro?” she said. “Why don’t we have a drink somewhere nearby?” He knew that she assumed he would agree to this request, and he supposed he should, but he also knew that if they were really friends he would have told her about meeting George and standing him up and wanting to go back to the café in the hope of fixing things. He had not told her because they were not really friends. He appreciated her help, he did, but when he thought about his future, he did not picture Taffy in it, except as someone with whom he might occasionally have a drink while discussing nothing more personal than students and pedagogy.

“Rain check?” he said, though he supposed they both knew this was unlikely. They walked down to the first floor together and got on different buses outside the school, and when he arrived in the Castro, he went directly to the café, where he looked through the window. He saw a man — just the back of his head — that might be George, and he did not go inside. Instead, he walked up Market to Civic Center, where he sat for a long while on a bench, waiting for something to happen, for strangers to start shaving the underarms of other strangers, to begin stroking their brows or brushing their hair or feeding them by hand, to begin doing the kinds of things that strangers did not do for other strangers — because he knew now that sometimes they did.

* * *

Aaron did not know how the friendship with Bill began, even whether it could be called a friendship, since they had nothing in common. Still, in the weeks following the episode with the broken smoking balcony door, they came to know things about each other, and wasn’t that what friendship came down to? He knew, for example, that Bill had been married three times. “First to a black lady, Marabelle,” he told Aaron as they stood in the hallway during break, “and then a white lady. That was Peggy. Last was Misclaida from Cuba. So you see, I’ve tried this marriage thing from different angles, but none of them took. Now I play the dating sites a bit, but that’s about it. How about you?”

Aaron wanted to tell Bill that he would never meet a woman if he thought of dating sites as something to be played, like slot machines, but Bill had not solicited his advice. Instead, Aaron told him about Walter, and Bill nodded. “I had you pegged that way,” he said, clearly pleased with himself.

“What way?” Aaron said. “As someone who could pull off a twenty-year relationship, or as someone who would leave that relationship behind?” He knew that Bill meant neither of these, but he wanted to make him say it.

Bill laughed. “No, I could just tell you were a little light in the loafers.”

“You do know that people don’t really use that expression anymore? If, in fact, they ever did.”

Bill laughed again. He knew all about “the gays,” he said. He’d grown up right here in San Francisco — okay, technically in Daly City, which was where you found yourself if you went all the way down Mission and kept going even after it stopped being interesting. Aaron said that he had not explored that part of town yet, and Bill said, “You remember that song ‘Little Boxes,’ right?” and Aaron said he did, and Bill announced proudly that the song had been written about Daly City.

“My impression of the song is that it’s not meant to be flattering,” Aaron said.

“I suppose that depends on how you look at things,” Bill said. “Sometimes it’s just plain nice not to have to think about who’s got the better house ’cause ‘they’re all made out of ticky tacky and they all look just the same.’ ” He sang this last part. Aaron was surprised at his voice, which was soothing and sweet.

Chaa came up to them with a bag of durian chips, and Bill, who had never heard of durian, took several and then spit them back into his hand. “That is the absolute worst thing I’ve ever put in my mouth,” he said to Chaa, who laughed as if this were precisely the response he had hoped for. After Chaa walked away, Bill turned to Aaron. “I bet it’s not the worst thing you’ve ever put in your mouth,” he said.

“You’re sure you’re not gay?” Aaron replied. “Because you have the sense of humor of an aging queen.”

Quickly, they progressed from talking in the hallway during breaks to having a drink together several times a week at a nearby café. Bill referred to it as the hippie café because of the menu, though Aaron pointed out that a true hippie café would not have so many ringing cell phones. It was there that Bill told Aaron the story of his father, who had been one of those people who could figure out a money angle on anything. During the Korean War, he’d gone on a two-week leave to Thailand, where, at a roadside stall that sold gasoline from cans and fixed cars in a small shack behind, he had stumbled across a shedful of old car parts, never used, all still in their boxes and covered with dust. Bill said that his father was the sort of man who was always stumbling across things. He came home from Korea, started a family, and it was only years later that he thought about those parts and went back to Thailand. He made his way through Thailand as well as Malaysia, stopping at any out-of-the-way place that looked like it might service cars. When he came across a stash of parts, especially those for vintage Mercedes-Benzes, he acted like he could not imagine anyone wanting such things — pristine gearshift knobs and hubcaps, mirrors and window cranks — even as he bought everything up, offering fifty cents or a dollar and the illusion that he was the one granting favors.

“We were dirt poor,” Bill said, “and then my father came home with that shipping container of parts, and within a year, he’d sold it all, sometimes for a five-hundred- or even thousand-time markup.” He paused to drink half of his beer. “He loved to tell stories to anyone who’d listen about how he’d acquired all those parts, but he never let on that it had made him rich. It wasn’t until he died years later that we found out he owned buildings all over the city, land up in Napa, but we never moved out of the ticky tacky house in Daly City. He kept locks on the cupboards and the fridge that only he had keys to, and he instructed my mother that we were to eat just one meal a day. It was served at five sharp, and if we missed it, well, we missed eating that day. The rest of the time we drank coffee, gallons of it. He kept a big pot going in the kitchen because he’d heard somewhere, maybe in the army, that coffee was a hunger depressant. We filled our stomachs with it until our insides were bloated and raw and we couldn’t sleep, but that was fine with him because exhaustion was also a hunger depressant.