Lori Ostlund - After the Parade

Aaron had gotten a late start — some mix-up at the U-Haul office that nobody seemed qualified to fix — so it was early afternoon when he finally began loading the truck, nearly eight when he finished. He wanted to drive away right then but could not imagine setting out so late. It was enough that the truck sat in the driveway packed, declaring his intention. Instead, he took a walk around the neighborhood, as was his nightly habit, had been his nightly habit since he and Walter moved here nine years earlier. He always followed the same route, designed with the neighborhood cats in mind. He knew where they all lived, had made up names for each of them — Falstaff and Serial Mom, Puffin and Owen Meany — and when he called to them using these names, they stood up from wherever they were hiding and ran down to the sidewalk to greet him.

He passed the house of the old woman who, on many nights, though not this one, watched for him from her kitchen window and then hurried out with a jar that she could not open. She called him by his first name and he called her Mrs. Trujillo, since she was surely twice his age, and as he twisted the lid off a jar of honey or instant coffee, they engaged in pleasantries, establishing that they were both fine, that they had enjoyed peaceful, ordinary days, saying the sorts of things that Aaron had grown up in his mother’s café hearing people say to one another. As a boy, he had dreaded such talk, for he had been shy and no good at it, but as he grew older, he had come to appreciate these small nods at civility.

Of course, Mrs. Trujillo was not always fine. Sometimes, her back was acting up or her hands were numb. She would hold them out toward him, as though the numbness were something that could be seen, and when he put the jar back into them, he said, “Be careful now, Mrs. Trujillo. Think what a mess you’d have with broken glass and honey.” Maybe he made a joke that wasn’t really funny, something about all those ants with bleeding tongues, and she would laugh the way that people who are very lonely laugh, paying you the only way they know how. She always seemed sheepish about mentioning her ailments, sheepish again when he inquired the next time whether she was feeling better, yet for years they had engaged in this ritual, and as he passed her house that last night, he felt relief at her absence. Still, when he let his mind stray to the future, to the next night and the one after, the thought of Mrs. Trujillo looking out the window with a stubborn jar of spaghetti sauce in her hands made his heart ache.

Aaron picked up his pace, almost ran to Falstaff’s house, where he crouched on the sidewalk and called softly to the portly fellow, waiting for him to waddle off the porch that was his stage. At nine, he returned from his walk and circled the truck, double-checking the padlock because he knew there would come a moment during the night when he would lie there thinking about it, and this way he would have an image that he could pull up in his mind: the padlock, secured.

A week earlier, Aaron had gone into Walter’s study with a list of the household items that he planned to take with him. He found Walter at his desk, a large teak desk that Walter’s father had purchased in Denmark in the 1950s and shipped home. He had used the desk throughout his academic career, writing articles that added up to books about minor Polish poets, most of them long dead, and then it had become Walter’s. Aaron loved the desk, which represented everything for which he had been longing all those years ago when Walter took him in and they began their life together: a profession that required a sturdy, beautiful desk; a father who cared enough about aesthetics to ship a desk across an ocean; a life, in every way, different from his own.

Though it was just four in the afternoon, Walter was drinking cognac — Spanish cognac, which he preferred to French — and later Aaron would realize that Walter had already known that something was wrong. Aaron stood in the office doorway, reading the list aloud — a set of bed linens, a towel, a cooking pot, a plate, a knife, cutlery. “Is there anything on the list that you prefer I not take?” he asked.

Walter looked out the window for what seemed a very long time. “I saved you, Aaron,” he said at last. His head sank onto his desk, heavy with the memories it contained.

“Yes,” Aaron agreed. “Yes, you did. Thank you.” He could hear the stiffness in his voice and regretted — though could not change — it. This was how he had let Walter know that he was leaving.

* * *

Walter had already tended to his “nightly ablutions,” as he termed the process of washing one’s face and brushing one’s teeth, elevating the mundane by renaming it. He was in bed, so there seemed nothing for Aaron to do but retire as well, except he had nowhere to sleep. He had packed the guest bed, a futon with a fold-up base, and they had never owned a typical couch, only an antique Javanese daybed from Winnie’s store in Minneapolis. Winnie was Walter’s sister, though from the very beginning she had felt more like his own. Sleeping on the daybed would only make him think of her, which he did not want. He had not even told Winnie that he was leaving. Of course, he could sleep with Walter, in the space that he had occupied for nearly twenty years, but it seemed to him improper —that was the word that came to mind — to share a bed with the man he was leaving. His dilemma reminded him of a story that Winnie had told him just a few weeks earlier, during one of their weekly phone conversations. Winnie had lots of stories, the pleasure — and the burden — of owning a small business.

“I’m a captive audience,” she had explained to him and Walter once. “I can’t just lock up and leave. People know that on some level, but it suits their needs to act as though we’re two willing participants. Sometimes they talk for hours.”

“They are being presumptuous, presumptuous and self-involved,” Walter had said. Walter hated to waste time, hated to have his wasted. “Just walk away.”

Aaron knew that she would not, for he and Winnie were alike: they understood that the world was filled with lonely people, whom they did not begrudge these small moments of companionship.

The story that Winnie had called to tell him was about a customer of hers, Sally Forth. (“Yes, that’s really her name,” Winnie had added before he could ask.) Sally Forth and her husband had just returned from a ten-day vacation in Turkey, about which she had said to Winnie, pretrip: “It’s a Muslim country, you know. Lots of taboos in the air, and those are always good for sex.” Sally Forth was a woman impressed with her own naughtiness, a woman endlessly amused by the things that came out of her mouth. The first morning, as she and her husband sat eating breakfast in their hotel restaurant and discussing the day’s itinerary, her husband turned to her and requested a divorce. Winnie said that Sally Forth was the type of person who responded to news — good or bad — loudly and demonstratively, without considering her surroundings. Thus, Sally Forth, who was engaged in spreading jam on a piece of bread, reached across the table and ground the bread against her husband’s chest, the jam making a red blotch directly over his heart. “Why would you bring me all the way to Turkey to tell me you want a divorce?” Sally Forth screamed, and her husband replied, “I thought you’d appreciate the gesture.”