After the Parade (45 page)

Melvin kept his eyes down.

“I'm sorry if I've embarrassed you,” said Aaron. “Can I get you anything? Water? A beer? Leftover pizza?”

“I must go,” said Melvin.

“Thank you for your help,” Aaron said again.

At the door, Melvin looked up. “It is the stigma of my life,” he said sadly.

“What is?” said Aaron, but Melvin had already turned to leave.

*  *  *

When he and Winnie had pulled off the interstate in Needles late in the afternoon, Aaron could not remember which direction to turn to get to the motel. He went right, but after several blocks, he decided he should have gone left, so he turned the car around, and there it was, nondescript and unappealing, the sort of place that people looked for when they wanted to sleep without frills. He pulled into the parking lot, and they got out. He showed Winnie the spot where Britta's boyfriend had punched and kicked him until he announced that he was gay.
He laughed and said, “Beaten up
until
I said I was gay,” and then, “What if Britta doesn't work here anymore?,” which was what he had been saying since they left Minnesota, and Winnie replied the way she had been replying. “We'll find her,” she said. “We'll figure out what happened to Jacob.”

She put her arm through his, and they walked toward the front entrance of the motel, but when they got to the door, he stopped. “I can't do this,” he said.

“Of course you can. We'll do it together. Okay? You're just nervous.”

He leaned against the wall beside the door. “No,” he said. “I really think I should not do this. If Jacob's dead, there's nothing more I can do about it. Not really. Right?”

She nodded.

“So what would it change for me to know?”

“Well, you'd know for sure. Sometimes clarity is important.”

He remembered the force with which Lex had kicked him that night, desperate to know the truth about what Britta had been doing in his room. But had knowing changed anything? Had it made Lex understand the woman he loved any better? Had it made Britta love him more? Had learning where his mother had been all these years made Aaron forgive her any faster?

“Clarity is important,” he agreed. “But maybe clarity is sometimes about knowing what you don't need to know. For months I've been thinking about Jacob, imagining his life before that day and his life after, and maybe I'll go through the rest of my life wondering about him, but it's okay. I saved him. I was running away, saving myself, and I saved him as well. Maybe that's enough.”

Winnie put her hand on his shoulder, the shoulder he had used to break down Jacob's door. He remembered the feeling as it gave way, the certainty he had experienced as he saved Jacob's life. Was certainty what Walter felt as he drove out of Mortonville that Sunday afternoon with Aaron beside him? He'd never asked him, but he thought he might, someday soon, because there was so much about Walter he didn't know.

The motel wall was warm against his back. He turned back toward the parking lot. As they drove past the front office, he slowed the car and glanced inside. A young woman stood behind the front desk. He thought it was Britta, but he couldn't be sure. It could be any young woman.

*  *  *

Before he dialed, he planned out what he would say. “This is Aaron,” he would begin, “and I'm calling to see how you are and to apologize for not calling sooner.” He wrote the words out and practiced reading them aloud, but it was like the script he had used when he was twenty-two and working for the political campaign, like something you read to a stranger. In the end, he decided just to see what happened, even though spontaneity and the unknown were everything he hated about the telephone, but when he heard Walter's voice, Walter sounded like a stranger, like someone who required a script.

“It's Aaron,” he said.

On the other end, Walter was running water, washing dishes maybe, and the sound of the water stopped abruptly. “Aaron,” Walter said. “I got your letter. I see that you haven't lost your flair for metaphor.” Just like that, he sounded like Walter.

“I miss you,” Aaron said, but that was unfair because it gave the wrong idea about why he was calling, so he said, “That's not why I'm calling.” Except that made it worse.

“Why
are
you calling?” Walter asked. He was not going to make it easy, and why should he? He'd made things easy all those years, and look where that had gotten him.

Aaron did not answer right away. He wanted Walter to know that he appreciated everything he had ever done for him, but all the ways that he thought about conveying his gratitude sounded like clichés. He could not imagine anyone being convinced by clichés, though he knew people were. People listened to pop music, didn't they? They wept at musicals and exchanged Hallmark cards. But not Walter.

“I'm calling to say that you saved my life,” Aaron said. “And to say thank you.”

Gloria was right—people did what they wanted to do. Walter had wanted to help him because helping him had also helped Walter. That morning, Aaron had opened an unpacked box and found his journal of grievances inside. He had thrown it away because that was what
he
wanted to do, because forgiving Walter was forgiving himself. He stood up and looked out the window of his new studio. He thought about Walter on the other end of the line, looking at the familiar walls of their house with no idea that Aaron was looking at the ocean. Even when they were together, he saw now, they had always been looking at different things.

“Call you next week?” Aaron said, and Walter said, “I'll be here.”

*  *  *

Maybe George had stopped going to the café after Aaron stood him up, or maybe he had not been a regular there to begin with. Maybe his presence that day had been a fluke. After two weeks of eating pie and waiting for George to reappear, Aaron got on Muni one afternoon, thinking he would ride the N all the way to the ocean and walk home from there. He got on, and there was George, wearing his Muni uniform and asking to see his ticket. Aaron showed him his ticket and said, “I'm sorry. I got scared. What time do you get off? Do you want to take a walk?”

And George said, “At six. And yes.”

When six came, Aaron was waiting. George came up close to him as if he were going to hug him, but he did not. After Aaron had recovered from his fear that George might hug him, he realized that he was disappointed George had not, so he reached out and hugged George. George hugged him back, and Aaron blurted out, “I'm not really much of a hugger” because they were two strangers after all, which meant that everything they did would lay the groundwork for how each came to understand the other. He did not want George to think he went around hugging people, that he crossed over into intimacy with such ease. Except now George would think he was so attracted to him that he could not help himself, that he had felt compelled to hug him.

But George just smiled and said, “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself,” and Aaron smiled back and said, “I am large. I contain multitudes.”

“Actually, I'm not much of a Whitman fan,” said George.

“Me neither,” said Aaron. Even agreeing made him feel shy. “Anyway,” he said, “while I was waiting for you, it occurred to me that you've been on your feet all day, so it's okay if you're not up for a walk.”

“Are you standing me up again?” said George.

Aaron looked down. “It was the poem,” he said at last. “The Richard Hugo poem. It reminded me of someone, a man I met years ago, when I was just a boy. He introduced me to that poem, to poetry, to so many things.” How strange it felt to be discussing his life in such general terms, to be referring to Walter as “someone.” He took a breath. “I loved him very much.”

“Okay,” George said. “Good. It's important to have been in love.”

If he and George began walking now, where would it end? Would a day come when they would say, “Do you realize how many miles we've walked together?” They would try to calculate it. At least ten thousand they would decide. By then, they would know everything about the other. He would know that George always needed to be on his right when they walked because as a boy he had gone to the post office each day with his father, who could not hear from his left ear, so George had always walked on his right. Now George could not walk any other way. They would have had lots of sex. They would have talked and read poetry because poetry was not only who he was with Walter, it was who he was.

Or maybe none of that would happen. Maybe years from now, while eating a piece of pie, he would think to himself,
What was the name of that man I met over pie? He worked for Muni, I recall. We took a walk together once.

He did not know what would happen because that was the way life worked. You went to a parade, and your father fell from a float and died. You got into bed, thinking about the map of Canada, and woke up the next day to find your mother gone. You went out fishing one
night, and met the man who would change your life. You fell asleep at the wheel of the U-Haul in which you were leaving the man you'd met fishing, checked into a seedy motel, and saved a life.

“So, should we walk?” said George.

“Yes,” said Aaron, and they started walking.

I would like to thank the following:

The organizations and individuals who offered crucial support in the early stages of this book, especially Nancy Zafris, who got my publishing ball rolling and has continued to offer friendship and guidance; The Rona Jaffe Foundation, which provided me with the financial means to reduce my teaching load in 2009–10; the Creative Writing Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where I was the Kenan Visiting Writer from 2010 to 2012 and was fortunate to have wonderful students and colleagues; Bread Loaf Writers' Conference; and all the hardworking editors at various literary journals who have supported my work, especially
New England Review
, as well as those who published early parts of this novel:
The Iowa Review, Bluestem, Beloit Fiction Journal, Nashville Review
, and the
Northwest Review
.

My agent, Terra Chalberg, who is pragmatic and supportive and knows when to set deadlines;

Liese Mayer, my editor, who has been an enthusiastic friend to this book, saving me from myself countless times with her thoughtful, gentle, and judicious edits; as well as Nan Graham, Kate Lloyd, Alexsis Johnson, Rita Madrigal, Mia Crowley-Hald, and the rest of the team at Scribner, all of whom have made me feel continuously grateful to have found a home for my book with them.

My students, who make me feel both useful and hopeful. I'm not sure how much I would write if I didn't feel both of these at least some of the time;

My dear friends, who understand that when I complete a day of writing, I rarely want to talk about it, and who have shown their support in countless ways;

Anne Raeff, my first reader, with whom I have spent nearly two-and-a-half decades of my life.

Turn the page for an excerpt from “All Boy” from Lori Ostlund's debut story collection,

The Bigness of the World

L
ater, when Harold finally learned that his parents had not fired Mrs. Norman, the babysitter, for locking him in the closet while she watched her favorite television shows, he could not imagine why he had ever attributed her firing to this in the first place, especially since his parents had not seemed particularly upset by the news of his confinement. His father had said something vague about it building character and teaching inner resources, and his mother, in an attempt to be more specific, said that it could not hurt to learn how the sightless got by. Nor had Harold minded being in the closet, where he kept a survival kit inspired by the one that his parents, indeed all Minnesotans, stored in their cars in winter, though his contained only a small flashlight, several books, water, and a roll of Life Savers, chosen because he liked the surprise—there in the dark—of not knowing which flavor was next.

Furthermore, he understood Mrs. Norman's motivations, which had to do with the fact that if he were allowed to watch television with her, he would inevitably ask questions, which she would feel obligated to answer, thus diminishing her concentration and so her pleasure. Her concerns seemed to him reasonable: he had a tendency to ask questions, for he was a curious child (though awkwardly so), a characteristic that his teachers cited as proof in making comments both positive and negative.

Mrs. Norman, it turned out, had been fired because she sometimes wore his father's socks while she watched television, slipping them on over her own bare feet. It was the
bare
part that completely unhinged his father, who did not like to drink from other people's glasses or sit in the dentist's chair while the dentist stood close to him smelling of metal. One night, Mrs. Norman left a pair of his father's socks on the sofa instead of putting them back in his father's drawer, and when his father asked her about it, she said, “Oh my, I took them off when my toes got toasty and forgot all about them,” apologizing as though the issue were the forgetting and not the wearing. This had further angered Harold's father, who considered the sharing of socks—his naked feet where hers had been—an intimacy beyond what he could bear, and after he talked about it “morning, noon, and night for two days,” as Harold's mother later put it, they fired Mrs. Norman.

Harold was quite familiar with Mrs. Norman's feet. They were what old people's feet should look like, he thought, with nails so yellow and thick that she could not cut them by herself, not even with his assistance. Instead, her daughter, who occasionally stopped by on one of the two nights each week that Mrs. Norman stayed with Harold, cut them using a tool with long handles and an end that looked like the beak of a parrot.