Lori Ostlund - After the Parade

“You’re mad that I didn’t clarify that we weren’t having sex?” Walter asked.

“No,” Aaron said, “I’m not mad about it.” This was true. “I guess I just don’t know why you can’t see that if they were really your friends, you’d have told them the truth.”

Walter was silent. “Sometimes,” he said finally, “people just need to be around others that are like them.”

“That’s just it,” Aaron said. “I had nothing in common with them, nothing except being gay. Maybe that’s something, but it’s not nearly enough.”

“Surely you don’t hold it against them that they don’t like poetry?” Walter said.

“No, I don’t hold it against them. I’m just saying that if I had to choose between spending time with a straight person who reads and a gay person who doesn’t, I’d choose the straight person.”

“What if both of them read?” said Walter.

“Well, then it depends on what they’re reading.”

The argument had ended there, not because things had been resolved but because they saw that they could not be. It had become absurd, yet they were not able to laugh together at the absurdity. Aaron supposed it was ironic that he was the one who had moved to San Francisco, he who had never required the trappings of gay life, the bars and restaurants and entire neighborhoods populated by gays and lesbians; he who did not go out of his way to patronize gay mechanics and plumbers, did not assume that a heterosexual mechanic or plumber — or detective — would say something homophobic until he said it, and then, you dealt with it. You explained why the comment or word or joke was offensive. It was tiring at times, but he thought it was the price you paid for truly living in the world.

“Do you ever feel bad about what you do?” Aaron asked Bill. “About making money by exposing other people’s secrets?”

“Everyone’s got secrets,” Bill said. “Maybe this guy’s got the right to his, but his wife’s paying me to find out what they are, and I think she’s got the right to know. It just proves what I’ve always said: that you can’t really know another person, and if you can’t know them, you can’t trust them.”

“I’ve always found that people who say you can’t trust anyone are actually saying something about their own trustworthiness,” Aaron said.

“I guess it’s a matter of how you think about trust. For me, if you’ve got secrets, then I can’t trust you.”

“Everyone has secrets, Bill,” Aaron said. “That’s the state of being human. I know you Catholics like your confession, but I just don’t believe we need to confess everything about ourselves to the world. That’s too much to expect of people.”

Aaron was awakened one morning by the moan of a foghorn, an anomaly, he supposed, since everyone had said that March would be a respite before heading into the fog of summer. The sound put him in mind of cows, of their low, mournful mooing, which was all that he really knew of the creatures, though numerous people over the years, upon learning that he had grown up in a small town in Minnesota, had called on him to explain not just cows but any number of things: how grain elevators worked and which crops were easiest to grow, how fast a tractor could go and whether it was true that farm boys had sex with sheep. He knew the answers to none of these questions, his only knowledge of farming gleaned from the discussions he had overhead as he served farmers in the café and from the summer he spent pulling tassels from corn when he was twelve, monotonous work that he had enjoyed. His mother had made him quit after just three weeks because she said that she needed his help at the café, but he thought that she resented the way he came home tired but whistling each afternoon.

In fact, she wanted him around the café—around her — even less that summer, and in the fall, she began lending him out. Lent was how he thought of himself, like a library book that entered the homes of strangers briefly. His mother said that people in Mortonville could not forgive them for being outsiders, using the word forgive as if she would like nothing better than to make an apology and be done with it. Aaron supposed it was this need, the need for acceptance, that led her to begin lending him out to people in town, primarily old people, his job to help with tasks that they could no longer manage — carrying boxes up and down steps, shopping for food, applying rubber pads to the bottoms of things — tasks that made him privy to their vulnerabilities. The old people were always grateful for his help, grateful to his mother for sending him, and as he was leaving, they often tried to press something into his hand — a few coins, a Pop-Tart, an envelope bearing colorful stamps — compensation for his services, all of which his mother required him to refuse. The old people fussed then, telling him to zip his coat all the way up, to be careful walking home, not because there was anything to fear in Mortonville but because they wanted to give him something. He felt that his mother was wrong to deny them this small pleasure.

As he made his way across Mortonville late one afternoon in December, the normally pleasant sound of snow crunching beneath his sneakers nearly brought him to tears. In truth, it was not just the crunching or the day’s steady retreat but so many things, all piling up inside him like the mounds of snow that flanked the recently plowed streets, mounds that other children, not he, liked to climb upon. Of course, winter dusk is particularly conducive to melancholy, and though he was young to know such things, to feel them so deeply, his age did not change the fact that he did. He thought about his mother sitting by herself in the café, wanting to be alone, wanting nothing between her and dusk. Back in their house in Moorhead, she used to come into his room some afternoons and wake him from his naps. “It’s getting dark,” she’d say, “and I thought how nice it would be to have your company.” He missed that mother, the one who thought his presence made nightfall more bearable.

He was being lent that day to the Bergstroms. There were no streetlights in their part of town, but all around him houses were aglow, predictably, with Christmas lights and kitchen lights and the steady yellow beam of porch lights, each anticipating a specific event — a holiday, a warm meal, a father’s return. He could tell who was having chicken that night, the odors wafting from these well-lit kitchens into the street where he walked. Meanwhile, his mother was back at the café, creating her own good smells as she cooked, but this thought only added to his mood, surrounded as he was by mothers making meals for their families, whom they solely considered as they cooked. He could not remember the last time his mother had prepared something just for him, something that was not a leftover from the daily special or a kitchen mistake, an overcooked hamburger that became his supper.

Aaron did not really know the Bergstroms because they rarely came into the café, and he trudged along, dreading the visit. Mrs. Bergstrom had been a teacher in a town nearby. They lived in Mortonville because Mr. Bergstrom owned the tire store, long closed because they were retired and their son — their only child — had no affinity for tires. Anyway, their son was dead, had gone through the ice the winter before. This son was the reason that Aaron dreaded the visit, for people in town said that the Bergstroms had not recovered, that having a dead son had made them odd.

They had turned on their porch light, and he stood on their front steps, watching them through the picture window, the two of them side by side on the sofa, an afghan tucked round their collective legs and rising partway up their chests. They were staring ahead, both of them focused on something that he could not see — the news, he thought, for they had about them the look of people distracted by problems that were not their own. From outside, they did not look like two people with a dead son. He knocked, and they beckoned him in. He opened the door and stepped in, anticipating warmth, as one did in Minnesota in December, but when he said hello, his breath hung in the air. The room was silent, the television off, and he glanced over to see what they had been staring at, but there was nothing there.