After the Parade

25

Aaron awakened at eight his first morning back. He had fallen asleep at eight the night before, a symmetry that might have comforted him, except twelve hours was a long time to sleep. Ahead lay a day of getting up and going to school, teaching and coming home. Each of these tasks alone seemed beyond anything he felt equipped to do, but he got out of bed and ate, cold, the rest of the spaghetti with butter he had made the night before, after he realized that he had no interest in going out to buy groceries, had no interest in anything.

When he walked into the school an hour later, his colleagues greeted him as if it were a normal day, as if he had not been gone for nearly two weeks, as if Bill were not still suddenly dead, THE PRIVATE EYE SCHOOL sign gone, Bill’s students gone also. Aaron had been the only person from the school to attend Bill’s funeral, which was held at Mission Dolores. It was easy to pick out Bill’s sisters, one large and disheveled like Bill, the other tiny, both of them looking dazed. “Bill was such a joker,” they said to Aaron when he went over to offer his condolences. Earlier, he had watched them approach the casket, holding hands and peering inside as though they expected Bill to leap up and scare them. “He had a delightful sense of humor,” Aaron agreed, and they looked up at him like he was mocking them.

He walked into his classroom at precisely nine, which meant he was on time, strictly speaking, but the students had all arrived early, imagining he would be excited to see them. “Welcome back,” they said. “We’ve been looking forward to seeing you.” He had taught them that expression right before he left.

He set down his satchel and tried to smile.

“How was your vacation?” they asked. Vacation was what he had told them — anything else, namely a mother he had not seen in almost twenty-five years, seemed too complicated.

“Fine,” he said. “It was fine. Thank you. Now, let’s get started.”

He moved toward the board to write out phrasal verbs for review, but his legs felt weak and he detoured to his desk, where, he told himself, he would sit for just a minute, but his mouth was like a drain: as he talked about the difference between put off and put aside, his last little bit of energy flowed right out of him. When classes ended at one thirty, he was still sitting. He could see the confusion on their faces, which evolved into sadness over the following weeks as he continued to show up at nine, right at nine, with no time for pleasantries or questions, no time to help with college application essays or explain the best way to ask an employer for time off. When they straggled back from break late like everyone else, he said nothing, just sat at his desk at the front of the room, flipping through magazines that the former teacher had left behind.

* * *

After he left Gloria’s farm, he had driven back to Minneapolis and straight to Winnie’s house, where no one was home because no one was expecting him. It was Wednesday. They were at either work or school. There had been no plan. When he called Winnie from the airport hotel on Monday night, they had spoken for fifteen minutes, just long enough for him to stop crying and tell her about his mother, about how she was living with Gloria and had been all these years, about how Bill had found her and then died, about how he had booked a flight and gotten on a plane and now he was scared.

Winnie listened.

Right before they hung up, he said, “I’m so sorry, Winnie,” as he had on his birthday, an apology meant to include everything, from the way he had left without telling her to the fact that he was calling, out of the blue and sobbing. He had taught his students that adding so in front of sorry made the apology stronger, more sincere, but as he listened to himself say these words to Winnie, now that he had treated apologizing as a matter of semantics, they sounded empty, disingenuous.

“I know,” Winnie said.

“I better get some sleep. Big day tomorrow.” He laughed.

“Wait,” Winnie said. After a long pause, she blurted out, “I love you, Aaron.” They did not usually say this to each other, and he tried to make the whinnying sound, but his voice broke, so he set the phone back on the hook without replying, then lay on the hotel bed and cried some more, sick with the realization of how long it had been since he’d said “I love you” to anyone.

For thirty minutes, he sat in his rental car outside Winnie’s house. It was a cool, clear day, not unusual for Minnesota in April. Just hours earlier, he had awakened to the smell of bacon and eggs and Gloria’s exaggerated cheerfulness, which meant that his mother was being difficult, for that was how couples worked, he knew, one always trying to offset the other’s behavior.

“Is she still in bed?” he asked as he and Gloria sat down to eat.

“Yes,” Gloria said. “But it’s not you, Aaron.”

He cocked his head to indicate that he knew better, and she said, “Well, of course it’s your visit that’s thrown her, but the way she is? That’s not about you.”

“Thank you, Gloria. I know that.” He supposed he did know it. “But it’s nice of you to say so.” He ate some bacon, drank his coffee. “You know, after we finally went to bed, I still couldn’t sleep. I started to think about the day we moved to Mortonville, how I woke up that first night in the Rehnquists’ house, and she was gone. I looked for her everywhere. You know where she was? In the closet. I’m sure she heard me calling, but she didn’t answer, yet when I finally opened the closet door, she seemed happy to see me. She invited me in. I sat on the floor, and we talked. She was in there almost every night that first year. I thought it was because she didn’t want me to hear her crying.”

“Maybe that was part of it,” said Gloria. “But knowing your mother, I’m pretty sure she sat in there because she wanted to keep reliving it, wanted to keep the pain fresh. She just couldn’t forgive herself, you know.”

“Forgive herself for what?” he said. “He was the one who locked us up, who kept us there all night and pretended he’d shot himself.”

“I know it doesn’t really make much sense, at least not to us, but she believes your father fell off the float because he was distracted and tired from being up all night. She blamed herself.”

Aaron had tried to explain the word blame to his students once, so he knew what a slippery word it was, that it reflected how a person perceived an event, not necessarily what was true. When his mother followed the causal chain backward, his father fell from the float and died because she had packed Aaron’s suitcase, intending to leave. Without the suitcase, there would have been no closet, and the parade would have been just a parade instead of the moment that their lives split in two: before the parade and after.

“I don’t understand it,” Aaron said. “I don’t understand how she could feel that way. You know, all those nights she and Pastor Gronseth sat in the booth talking, mainly they talked about forgiveness. They both felt it should be much harder to earn, that people get off too easily. I always thought it was a theoretical discussion, but I see now that they were talking about themselves.” He pierced the yolk of his other egg and thought about how this fork might be the same fork that Clarence had driven into Gloria’s hand all those years ago. He wondered whether Clarence had ever apologized, or whether he too had counted on easy forgiveness.

“Her closet was nothing like my closet in Moorhead,” he said. “It was big, the size of an office really. There was an overhead light, and she kept a chair in there. But still, I should have remembered something about that night. Right? It makes me feel like I’m crazy — because how could I not remember?”

“You were only five, and memory’s a strange thing. Sometimes it protects us from ourselves. Look at your mother. Look at what remembering did to her.”

He ate his last strip of bacon. “That was the best breakfast I’ve had in months,” he said. “I’m fortified for the road, so I guess I better get going.” He had put his bag in the car before he sat down, preparing for an efficient departure.

“Will you at least go in and say good-bye to her?” He did not want to. Gloria knew this. “Do it for me, Aaron? Because when you leave, I can tell you it will be that much worse if she has to face the fact that she didn’t even have it in her to say a proper good-bye. And I’m the one who’s going to have to deal with it.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Yes, of course, I’ll say good-bye.”

“Thank you.” Gloria stood up and began removing their plates, and he stood to help her. “I’d like to give you something of Clary’s,” she said. “It would make me happy to think of something of his with you. Would that be all right?”

“I’d like that,” he said. “Very much.”

He knew what he wanted: the book Clarence had shown him that first afternoon. He did not recall the name of the photographer, but they went into Clarence’s room and looked for it together. Diane Arbus.

“I remember this book,” Gloria said. She laughed and put one of her big hands to her mouth. “I was horrified when Clary first showed it to me, but he loved the pictures.”

Aaron thought about the letter to Diane Arbus that Clarence had read to him. Clarence had written to a person he thought was alive, a person he believed would understand him and photograph him in a way that made him feel understood.

“Thank you for the book,” he said to Gloria. “And for taking care of her.”

“I guess you won’t be coming back?” Gloria said.

“No,” he said. “I guess I won’t.”

* * *

He knew that Winnie was at her store, but showing up unannounced seemed melodramatic, as though he expected her to stop earning a living in order to tend to him. Then he remembered the way she had said, “I love you,” the way she hesitated first because she was nervous, and he started his car. When he arrived, she was discussing a Madurese bed panel with a woman who was taking notes and snapping photos with her cell phone, so he pretended to examine a dowry chest. Winnie came up behind him and threw her arms around him. “Go wait in the backroom,” she whispered. “I’m almost done with her.”

“I’m sorry to just show up,” he said when she joined him. He sat contritely atop a teak daybed.

“Don’t be sorry. I’m happy you’re here. I was worried about you.”

“Still, I don’t want you losing sales over me.”

The front door buzzed. “We’ll talk tonight,” Winnie said. “You’re staying, right?”

“If you’ll have me.”

“You’ll need to earn your keep,” she said. She handed him a bottle of oil and a rag, and as she tended to customers, he oiled furniture, his preferred task when visiting Winnie at the store, finding comfort in the way the wood came back to life, in the ease of working beside her without speaking.

At six they closed up. He drove behind her in his rental car, back to her house, where they opened a bottle of wine and began making dinner. Soon Thomas and the boys arrived, all three of them excited to find him there. Thomas hugged him tightly, but even after all these years, Aaron found himself gauging the hug, wanting to be the one who pulled away first. He knew what Walter would say: this was just proof of the distrust that existed between gay and straight men. But maybe it was just proof of the distrust among human beings.

The boys hugged him also and then went to their rooms to change. “We’ll be right back, Uncle Aaron,” they said. They had always called him that, Uncle Aaron, but after dinner, as he and Winnie talked quietly in the living room, he asked, “Do they know about me and Walter? You know, that we’re not together?”

“Of course they know.” Then, because Winnie had always sensed what he was thinking, she said, “You’re still their uncle. You’ve been their uncle their whole lives. That’s not going to change.”

“Okay,” he said.

“You know, he called every day that first month. Once he called at two in the morning.”

“Walter did?” This shocked him. Walter had always adhered to proper telephone etiquette. He said it was unfair to send people to bed or welcome them to the day with the feeling of unease that a call at an inappropriate hour triggered.

“Just once. He’d been drinking,” Winnie said. “He told me he was calling because he finally got what you’d been saying all these years about king-size beds.”

“We won’t be getting back together,” Aaron said. “You know that, right?”

She held up the bottle of wine they had started before dinner, and he nodded.

“I do,” she said, “but you have to give me time to get used to it, to keep getting used to it. The two of you were together more than twenty years. And now it’s been what? Four months?” She stopped talking and took a sip of wine. “When you left, he waited until Christmas to call, three whole days, and then he acted like it was our usual holiday telephone call, him calling to wish ‘the gentile’ a merry Christmas. He and Thomas talked for a couple of minutes, and then he talked to the boys and wished them ‘half a merry Christmas.’ Finally, I asked him to put you on the line, and he said you weren’t there. I said, ‘What do you mean not there? Where is he?’ And he said, ‘Well, I imagine that by now he’s settled in his new home in San Francisco.’ ” Winnie looked at him. “And that’s how I found out you were gone.”

“I’m sorry,” he said again, because she sounded angry.

“So that’s it?” Winnie said. She held up her wineglass as if making a toast. “To the end of a twenty-year friendship.” She was definitely angry.

“Okay, you’re right,” he said. “I should have told you I was leaving. You’re the closest thing I’ve got to family. Still, you’re Walter’s sister, not mine, and we have to think about his feelings.”

“Well, that’s the thing,” Winnie said. “He won’t tell me what those feelings are. Even back in January when he was calling every day, he’d spend the whole conversation complaining about some mix-up with the room scheduling for his Advanced Spanish class. Once, he did note that he’d switched to buying quarts of milk instead of gallons, which was the closest he came to talking about it, about you. So I was actually thankful when he called like that in the middle of the night, drunk.”

“I guess you know I haven’t called him?” he said, and Winnie nodded. “Every day I think about it, but then I just, I don’t know. I can’t bring myself to do it.”

“Do you miss him?” Winnie asked.

“Of course I miss him. I miss him all the time.”

“Then why haven’t you called?”

“At first I was afraid I’d hear his voice and want to go back. Now I’m afraid I’ll hear his voice and feel nothing. Lately, it’s like I’ve reverted to childhood, when everything made me cry, yet I feel oddly removed from emotion also. When I say it out loud to you like this, I can hear it doesn’t make sense.” He paused. “Maybe I just don’t think I deserve his understanding right now.”

Winnie looked away from him. “What do you think Walter deserves?” she asked.

* * *

They set out on Saturday, at dawn. Winnie did not like dawn, was no good at mornings. She sat beside him, not speaking, and he considered turning around, worried that she had changed her mind, though it had been her idea to go. The whole thing started when he told her about Jacob. “I don’t know why,” he’d said after he finished the story, “but lately I can’t stop thinking about him, wondering what happened. It’s strange. The more my own life seems to be closing in on me, the more obsessed I’ve become with knowing what happened to some kid I’ve never even really met.”

“Once, years ago, when Thomas and I were in southern Spain, we crossed over into Gibraltar for the afternoon. We were walking along in the park, enjoying ourselves, when this young Moroccan man came up to us. He looked awful, feverish. He was sick, he told us, and didn’t know what to do. Go to the hospital, we said, but he said the hospital wouldn’t help him. He had no money and was there illegally. We gave him aspirin and ten dollars. There was nothing else we could do. We were tourists. That’s what we told ourselves. For years I wondered about that young man, whether he was okay. It weighed on me. He’d singled us out to ask for help, us out of all those people strolling by. We’d looked like the ones who would help, and we got rid of him with some aspirin and ten dollars.”

“So what you’re saying is that this is not about Jacob. It’s about me.”

She laughed. “I thought I was being more subtle.”

“You might not be skilled at subtlety, but that doesn’t mean you’re wrong.”

“So why not call the motel and talk to that receptionist? She probably kept up with things.”

“I’ve thought about calling her, but it feels strange, especially now that so many months have passed.”

“Well, what if we go there?” Winnie said at last.

“Go there?” he said. “To the motel?”

“Yes, to the motel.” She sounded excited. “A road trip with just the two of us.”

They both knew that there were other ways to find out what had happened to Jacob, more practical and efficient ways that did not involve driving for days, except the driving was the point. Aaron had always been most comfortable talking in cars, staring ahead with the knowledge that he did not have to rush through the conversation because there were miles to go.

They spent the first night in North Platte, Nebraska, at a motel that evoked the artificial peacefulness of a funeral parlor. When Aaron told the man behind the counter that they would like two rooms, the man said, “Well, at least she’s not making you sleep in the doghouse,” engaging in one of those jokes that husbands make to other husbands. The man winked at Winnie to let her know that he was just having fun, which meant there were two things to be annoyed by: the comment and the winking. Winnie rolled her eyes but did not respond to the man. She knew how Aaron hated confrontations.

After they were settled in their rooms, they decided they might as well take a walk, see a bit of North Platte, Nebraska, since neither of them imagined coming back here. Winnie wanted to see the grain elevator up close, which meant crossing a small bridge. As they paused halfway across it, she asked, “Is this what Mortonville was like?”

“Sort of,” he said, “though Mortonville was much smaller.”

“Smaller?” she said, as if it were not possible to imagine a place smaller than North Platte, Nebraska.

“Didn’t you see the sign when we came in? The population’s twenty-four thousand. That means North Platte”—he paused to do the math—“is sixty times the size of Mortonville. But if you’re asking whether it feels familiar, the answer’s yes, though bear in mind that familiar doesn’t necessarily mean comfortable.”

“What makes you uncomfortable?” she asked, but before he could formulate a response, she said, “Did what the motel guy said bother you?”

“You mean that he assumed we were married?”

It was not just the motel clerk. The waitress at the diner in Iowa where they stopped for lunch had come by the table when Winnie was in the bathroom and asked Aaron what his wife wanted to drink. He had not known how to respond but thought he might feel foolish if he made a point of insisting that Winnie was not his wife, so he said, “Can you check back after she returns from the restroom?” It turned out that this made him feel foolish also. As they drove, they had become just one more husband and wife eating, buying gas, driving across the middle of the country, together. It was as though he had stepped into another life, the life he might have lived had he not left Mortonville, had he not understood who he was, whom he desired.

“To be fair,” he told Winnie, “they’re looking at two people who clearly enjoy each other’s company, so it’s not a stretch to think we’re a couple. But if you’re asking whether it bothers me that I could be here with a man, looking just as pleased with his company, and these same people would be asking whether we’re brothers, and which one of us is older, and nonsense like that, yes, that bothers me.”

But he was guilty of making assumptions also, for hadn’t he decided that most of these people had never felt on the outside of anything, were incapable of seeing the world from the perspective of someone who was? Without even knowing them, he had concluded that they lacked the necessary imagination.

“When Walter and I traveled, we’d get to a town like this and find ourselves right back in the closet, actually thanking the motel clerk after he’d explained proudly that he’d managed to secure us a room with two beds. The truth is that a part of me enjoys how easy this feels, yet I simultaneously feel like, I don’t know, like I’m being erased, like I don’t exist here.” By then they were in front of the grain elevator, and they stood looking up at it together.

Later that night, after they had eaten dinner and gone back to their rooms, Aaron composed a letter to Walter on stationery from the North Platte Motel. He carried the letter with him, stamp-less, during the rest of the trip.

Dear Walter [he had written],

Do you remember how you tried to teach me Spanish and French, back in the beginning? “With your vocabulary and the ubiquity of cognates?” you used to say. “It’ll be a piece of pie.” “Piece of cake,” I’d always correct you, and then we’d argue about whether it was still a cliché if you changed one of the key words like that. “You’ve turned it into a cliché and a malapropism, which makes it doubly offensive,” I would say, and you’d reply with something like “Well, there’s more than one way to skin a mouse.” We’d laugh, and sometimes we’d have sex because we had that in common: verbal sparring aroused us. I know it will probably embarrass you that I’m writing about sex — you never liked to talk about it, at least not with me. I wish you would have told me why, but you didn’t, and I didn’t know how to make you.

But back to language. I always argued that it was my fierce love of English — of its nuances and endless synonyms — that hindered my attempts to learn, that and the fact that you were a language professor. But what I never told you was that I abhorred cognates, that I preferred words that bore no resemblance to English, to the sounds that I formed on a daily basis. I gravitated toward the useless and obscure. In fact, I kept secret lists, words that I learned in the countries we visited: in Japanese, I liked inushishi, which is a wild boar; in German, I could request a sewing kit, a dustpan, or a table runner; and in Spanish, I could point to a child’s curly hair and say “ringlets.”

Of course, I could also exchange pleasantries and keep myself fed. But it was only in tossing around those useless words — blurting them out to children on trains and to the spouses of your colleagues as we sat together at interminable dinners — that I truly felt I was communicating, letting everyone know how far I was (and would always be) from ever being able to say anything that I really needed to say.

That is, I’m sorry.

Aaron

He finally mailed the letter from the airport in Minneapolis, as he waited for his flight back to San Francisco. Winnie had insisted on going with him to the airport, even though he still had the rental car to return. She was waiting for him just before the security checkpoint, holding a bag of cookies that she had stayed up making for him the night before. “Snickerdoodles,” she said happily. He’d told her once, years ago, that they were his favorite.

Then, they stood awkwardly for a few minutes, as people do when there is still more to say. “Beware of leaving guests,” he joked. It was something that Walter used to say, a Russian proverb he thought.

“You’re the one who’s insisting on leaving,” she said.

He thought about all the things he wanted to say to her. “Thanks for my cookies,” he said. “I love snickerdoodles.”

“I know,” Winnie said.

As he walked toward his gate, he took out the letter to Walter that he’d composed in North Platte, Nebraska, bought a stamp, and dropped it in a mailbox. Immediately, he wanted it back, but wasn’t it always that way with letters? There was that moment right after you’d put it in the box when you wished you’d said so much less — or so much more.

* * *

Whatever was wrong with him — and there was something wrong — had started before he walked into the school and saw Bill’s empty room and the smoking balcony door still leaning against the wall, before he awakened, exhausted, from his half day of sleep. He did not understand it. On the plane home he had been buoyant, filled with resolve: there were issues to be addressed, and he was going to address them. He would begin by telling the Ngs that he could hear everything, all their screaming and cursing and furniture shoving. Then he would find a new apartment, something quiet where he could maybe have a cat. Next, he would go to the café where he had met George and would keep going until he found him. He would invite George to take a walk with him, just a walk. Maybe they would become friends, maybe something more, but even if nothing ever happened, this nothing would at least be the result of something other than fear. The most important thing was that he was going to call Walter and make sure that the letter had arrived. He was going to apologize for not calling earlier.

These were the things he had planned to do, had thought about on the flight back from Minneapolis and was still thinking about as he rode BART into the city from the airport, but then he entered his studio beneath the Ngs’ house, dropped his bag on the bed, and discovered he did not have the energy to unpack it. Instead, he lay down and pulled the covers over his head, making a tent, where he stayed for hours, trying to empty his mind, as people who meditate claim to do, but he did not have a mind for meditation.

He tried an exercise he’d read about in a magazine one time. He was supposed to picture something, let it come into focus. What he saw was a package, neatly wrapped, like a gift beneath a Christmas tree. The tag on it said For: Walter and From: Aaron, and inside was An Apology. Except envisioning it beneath a tree reminded him that he had left just before Christmas and, worse, that he had never given Walter a gift, not once in all their years together. Walter had always claimed not to mind. He probably didn’t mind, but Aaron was still ashamed. He had let his mother’s injunction against gifts become a rule, and now Walter had nothing to remember their years together by.

When he tried to push these thoughts away by focusing on the gift itself — picturing himself handing the package to Walter and Walter opening it — he found that there was not only An Apology inside but so many other things, all the things he had realized during his trip: that he loved Walter but when he was right there beside him, day after day, the love part disappeared. It was only from a distance, without the daily grievances and resentments to obscure it, that he was able to recall this love at all, and even then, he was not sure whether what he felt was love or the memory of love. But if he included that in the package, he would need to include the part about how he had also come to hate Walter, in order for any of it to make sense. And what kind of gift was that?

* * *

“Did you find a new place yet?” Winnie asked each time she called, and each time he said, “No, I haven’t seen anything interesting.”

“You are looking?” she asked finally.

He did not answer, and Winnie did not fill the silence because she knew he would answer eventually. “No,” he said. “The truth is that I’m not doing anything. I go to school and I teach, if you can call it teaching, and then I come home and I wait to go to bed. I try to make it to nine because that seems like a respectable hour, but I rarely make it past eight. It’s like I’m swimming through the day, and the shore’s so far off, and the only way I can get to it is by taking one stroke at a time and ignoring everything else around me, and when I do get there, I’m exhausted. All I want to do is sleep.”

“What about your landlords?” she asked. He had told her about the Ngs. He had told her everything.

“The same. Everything’s the same, Winnie. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” He did not tell her that he was scared, though he supposed she knew.

“The trip was a lot,” Winnie said. “There’s also Bill’s death. Maybe you didn’t know him long, but he was your friend. Sometimes you just need to let yourself be sad, and if you don’t take time, your body takes it anyway. You’ve got a lot on your plate right now.”

“I taught my students that expression not long ago,” he said, “and now they use it constantly. Last week Melvin told me he wanted to do his upcoming presentation on the Amish because they have a lot on their plate.”

“What did he mean?” Winnie asked.

“I’m not sure. I think he meant that they have a lot of rules to follow. I guess I’ll find out soon enough — they start presenting tomorrow.”

“How is Melvin?” she asked. He had told her about what he had seen in the basement, and she said that he needed to talk to Melvin about it, that saying nothing only reinforced Melvin’s feeling that having sex with a man was shameful, which was what had led him to the basement in the first place. At the time he had agreed, but now, talking to Melvin was just one more thing he didn’t have the energy for.

“It’s always hard with Melvin to tell how he is,” Aaron said, “but I suspect Melvin has a lot on his plate also.”

* * *

The next morning, Aaron asked for a volunteer to begin the presentations. Everyone looked down, as students do when they fear being chosen. As he stared out at their bent heads, the room became once again a great expanse of water. He knew that if he stopped swimming, he would go under, so he sat at his desk and they stared at theirs, until finally Paolo raised his hand and said he would go first.

He went to the front of the room, smiled at everyone, and said, “Today I will tell you about a very important subject, Harley motorcycles in this country, the United States.” The students laughed, and Paolo looked pleased. “In August I will go for first time to bike rally in Sturgis, South Dakota. This rally starts in 1938.” Aaron did not tell him to watch his verb tenses. Paolo wrote vocabulary words on the board—rally and hog and biker chick—and then he walked over to the map of the United States and traced the route that his motorcycle club would take when they drove to South Dakota. He told them how many miles they would ride each day and gave them data about how many bikers attended each year and how much money Sturgis earned from the rally, because at heart Paolo was still a man who felt most comfortable assessing the world in numbers.

When Paolo was finished, Neto raised his hand and went next. He had attended Burning Man for the first time and spoke with the zeal of a convert. His presentation consisted primarily of pictures of people who appeared to have survived an apocalypse. Normally Aaron would have tried to understand what Neto saw when he looked at the photos, would have asked Neto questions with that objective in mind, but this time he sat at his desk and watched Neto’s slideshow in silence. After that, one of the Borols talked about Levi’s jeans, which had been invented during the Gold Rush, and then Lila explained the role of the Chinese in building the railroads. She used note cards and a PowerPoint, and Aaron was sure no one would volunteer to follow her, but Melvin, surprising everyone, offered to go next.

His first talk, about computers, had been incomprehensible, but this time he stood in front of them and said, “I will tell you about some people I met when I was on East Coast. They are called Amish people. They do not drive cars or use telephones.” He showed a picture of an Amish horse and buggy and wrote the word buggy on the board. “My friend, who is Amish person, cannot sit at family table. He must sit quietly in corner to eat his food.” He turned and wrote shun beside buggy. “When I visit with my friend’s family, I sit at table but my friend, he is on the floor, and we must not talk to him.”

“Why?” asked Pilar. “Why must he sit on the floor?”

“Because he buys car and keeps it in secret garage. This is how I meet him. He is selling car very cheap, and I think I will buy car and drive across America to my new home, which is San Francisco. He told me that he had to eliminate the car from his life because now his family knows he has car. They are very angry and also embarrassment because all of the Amish people know about the car, and they criticize his family. The car is called ‘stigma.’ ” Melvin wrote stigma on the board next to shun.

“Stigma is what Jesus had,” Lerma said. “From the nails in his hands.”

“Excuse me,” said Katya. “I am not understanding this word stigma.”

She looked at Aaron, and from his desk he said wearily, “A stigma means that other people look at you in a negative way because they think something about you is shameful.” He paused. “If you have a mental illness, for example, people might think of you in a negative way, so we say, ‘There’s a stigma attached to mental illness.’ ”

“What else?” said Katya. She was taking notes. “What else is attaching with stigma?”

“Well, I guess being in prison, having AIDS, being homeless. But remember, sometimes the stigma disappears.”

“How can it disappear?” asked Katya.

“Well, because the stigma isn’t real. It’s about how people think, so maybe society changes. People become educated about a topic, and then they think the situation isn’t shameful anymore.”

He could see from their faces that he was not explaining stigma well. He should get up and write his examples on the board, but he knew that if he left his desk, he would drown.

“What about Jesus?” said Lerma.

“That’s not relevant,” he said. He could hear the impatience in his voice. The others looked down. Lerma looked down also.

Each day after class, Lerma took two buses to her job, her first job, which involved picking up a brother and sister from school and shuttling them home, where she oversaw their homework and made dinner and got them ready for bed. Their mother was there also, but she did not like to be disturbed. She required “peace and quiet,” lots of it, she had told Lerma at the interview. She reminded Lerma about this whenever the children became loud. Lerma put the brother and sister to bed, and then she went to her second job, sleeping in a chair beside the bed of a sick girl. Every two hours an alarm rang, waking her so that she could check on the girl. She did this until the nurse arrived at seven, and then she went home and changed in order to be at school by nine. This was her schedule every day except Sunday because Sunday was church day. She worked hard to improve her English. She did not complain or fall asleep in class. And in return he had yelled at her for wanting to understand stigma better. He said her question was “not relevant” because everything felt irrelevant to him now, and he had not stopped to consider that for Lerma it was more relevant than anything else.

“I’m sorry, Lerma,” he said. “I’m very sorry. Everyone.” His voice trembled. “Let’s take a break.” He went across the hallway to the room where Bill used to teach sleuthing. It was dark inside, but he did not turn on the light. He went in and sat at the table and cried. He wondered whether his mother had felt this way when she sat in the closet after his father died, as though she had no idea what she was crying about at all.

26

The next morning when Aaron pressed the button on his remote control, the garage door did not open. He tried the wall control, thinking his batteries were dead, but the door remained firmly closed, not even making the whirring sound that meant it was trying. He thought he could hear Mrs. Ng upstairs, so he seized a rake and banged it against the ceiling, but upstairs Mrs. Ng went blithely along with her morning routine, unaware that he was trapped below her. He began to think about earthquakes, for that was the way the mind worked, wasn’t it? And the more he thought about them, the surer he became that one would occur any minute. The house would buckle down on top of him, Mrs. Ng’s screaming the last thing he heard.

In second grade, when he first learned the unbearable truth that the earth was spinning beneath him, he’d felt a similar panic. He remembered standing outside after school, thinking about it: this earth beneath him that felt so solid was turning at a frantic pace. He had flung himself on the ground and hung on. It seemed the only thing to do, and it had helped. He went back into his studio and lay down, wrapping his arms around the mattress.

The last time he saw his mother, she was in bed also. After Gloria gave him Clarence’s book, she took him upstairs to where his mother lay, in a bed that was clearly too small to accommodate a second person, certainly not Gloria with her giant body. The covers were pulled up over her, so he could not even tell which way she was facing. He and Gloria stood in the doorway, and finally Gloria said, “Dolores, Aaron’s leaving. He’d like to say good-bye.”

His mother did not reply or take the covers off her head to look at him.

“I’m hoping to be back in the Twin Cities by noon,” he said, “so I guess this is it.” He thought he should say more, but he could not act as though this were a routine visit, one that concluded with him thanking her for her hospitality. “Remember the coma?” he said. “I used to worry about it all the time, wondering whether it could happen again. I still do.” He paused. “When I woke up that night, you were sitting by the window in my hospital room. It was dark outside, and for a while, I just watched you. You seemed to have forgotten all about me lying there behind you. Afterward, I could never call up the image of you looking out into the night without thinking that that was the moment I should have known you would leave.”

He turned as if to go, but he knew he would regret it if his last words to her sounded bitter, angry. “Anyway,” he added, “I want you to know that I’ve had a good life.” It was not that he forgave her. He did not, not yet, but he was giving her permission to forgive herself. He did not think she would. His mother was not ready to be done with guilt or unhappiness.

It was eight thirty. He was going to be late for work, but he did not get off the bed or think about the garage door that would not open. Instead, he thought about how Walter used to get into bed with him when he sensed that something was wrong, about the way Walter would take his hand and hold it tightly and they would lie together, not talking, just staring at the ceiling because Walter had understood that sometimes it was enough for two people to be looking at the same thing. And just like that he could breathe.

He called Marla and told her what had happened. He asked whether Taffy was at work already, and Marla handed the telephone to Taffy, who was sitting right there in her office and who did have the Ngs’ number, had written it down when she arranged for him to rent the studio. He listened to the phone ringing above him. He listened to Mrs. Ng walking across the room toward it. He thought that she hesitated right before picking it up, but then she did pick it up, answering in Chinese, and soon he was free.

* * *

Winnie had told him once that when she felt stuck, she tried to find the wherewithal to make just one change. She said that if she could do that, sometimes everything else followed. That afternoon he stayed after school, looking through apartment listings in the computer lab, and three days later he found a new studio. It was near the school, but what he liked most about it was that it was on the fifth floor. When he stood at the window while the landlord pretended to be busy behind him, he could see the ocean just nine blocks away. He had not known until then that just seeing the ocean would make him feel better.

The studio cost more than the Ngs’ studio, but he would be leaving the school soon. It was not a place one stayed for long, unless you were a lazy teacher like Felix or ill-equipped for the world like Taffy. Until he found something else, a job that paid better, he would be fine. Walter had sent him a check, a buyout for his part of their house in Albuquerque. It had arrived one week after he sent the letter from the airport, wrapped in a half sheet of blank typing paper. He had not cashed the check yet, but Winnie said he needed to, her reasoning based not on the fact that he needed the money (though he did) but on her observation that he needed to stop giving substance to his guilt.

He told the landlord on the spot that he would take the apartment. Then he walked up Fulton and cut down into the Castro. He went into the café where he had met George, ordered a slice of apple pie, and sat at a table to eat and read poetry and wait. He did this every afternoon for the rest of the week while in the evenings he repacked his few belongings into boxes. He told the Ngs that he would be moving out. They did not ask why, and he did not tell them because there was no reason to tell them. They knew they argued. They did not need him pointing out that they were unhappy.

One afternoon, Eugenia came into the faculty room and stared at him in that way that meant she was waiting for him to look up so that she could start talking. In the past, he had listened to her with a bland expression on his face that Eugenia always interpreted as interested, but today he pretended to focus on other tasks — his timesheet, corrections to Pilar’s résumé. Finally, Eugenia could not help herself. “You’re going to the Pride Parade this weekend, right?” she said, asking in the same way that she had asked about the missing Lake Wobegon tapes, as though assured of his interest.

“No,” he said. “I don’t like parades.” This was true. He had never taken to parades. People who knew about his father treated his dislike as a given, for how could he ever get past the memory of the float and his father tumbling backward through the air? But he believed that his aversion was a response to the overall aesthetics of parades — the gaudy floats, the music that inspired marching, the sun bright overhead — though it was possible everyone else was right.

“But everybody in San Francisco goes to Pride,” Eugenia said.

“Well, that’s one more reason to stay home,” he said. He laughed to show that he was sort of kidding, and then he said, “Anyway, I’m moving this weekend.”

In class the next day, Paolo asked whether he would be going to the parade.

“Actually, I’m moving this weekend, to a new apartment, so I don’t have time for parades.” He pretended to sound disappointed.

“Are you needing help?” said one of the Borols.

“No,” he said quickly. He did not like people handling his belongings. He never had, but he especially did not want his students doing so. He did not want to think of Chisato carrying a box that contained his underwear and socks or the Thais lifting his mattress, because how did you carry someone’s mattress without picturing the person on top of it, sleeping or having sex, intimate activities that he did not want his students imagining when they looked at him. He had boundaries, and boundaries were a good thing. But letting others help you was a good thing also. Winnie had told him that on the trip.

He took a breath. “Actually, I am needing help,” he heard himself say.

“I will bring shuttle van,” said Leonardo, who had graduated from delivering pizzas to driving an airport shuttle. “We can fit many things.”

“I have car,” said Katya.

“I have car also,” said Yoshi.

“I will bring pizzas from delivery mistakes,” said Diego. “They will be from past night but still very good.”

“Old food?” said Aaron. The students laughed hard, so he knew they forgave him.

On Sunday morning they arrived at his place at nine o’clock, as if they were meeting for class, except they were all on time. The Brazilians brought cheese bread and coffee, and the Thais brought bags of dried mango and durian chips. Aaron had everything packed, and he stood with the garage door rolled up, waiting for them.

“Where’s Melvin?” asked Ji-hun. Melvin was the only student missing, except for one of the Bolors, who’d had to work. He had not said he was coming, nor had he said he was not coming. He had, as usual, said nothing, letting the conversation swirl around him as though he were not really part of it. Aaron wondered whether the others had actually expected him to show up.

“He left a message on my cell,” Tommy said. “This morning before I was awake. He has some problem with his fiancée’s visa paperwork, so he will meet us at the new apartment.”

Sure enough, when they pulled up at Aaron’s new address two hours later, there was Melvin, leaning against the building. The other students greeted him, and he put on gloves and helped them unload the shuttle van.

“Melvin,” Aaron said as they carried in boxes together, “can I talk to you after everyone leaves?”

“I must go home very quickly,” Melvin said.

“It won’t take long,” Aaron assured him.

The Thais were the last to go, and when Tommy called to Melvin, asking whether he needed a ride, Melvin turned and said, “Thank you, but I must talk to teacher Aaron.” He was at the window that looked out over the ocean, and Aaron wondered whether Melvin was the sort of person who felt hopeful when he looked at the ocean’s vastness or overwhelmed by his own insignificance.

“Do you mind sitting on the floor?” Aaron said, because it would be awkward to sit on the bed, awkward even to suggest it. They sat and leaned back against the wall. “Thanks for your help today,” Aaron said.

“It is my pleasure,” said Melvin, bowing his head at Aaron. Aaron looked at the crumpled side of Melvin’s face, remembering how it had risen slowly in the basement, the eyes filled with shame.

“Melvin,” he said, “we never talked about what happened in the basement.” He saw fear in Melvin’s eyes, and he added quickly, “And we don’t have to. I understand that maybe you don’t want to talk, and that’s fine. I just want to say that if you do want to talk, or you have questions, or just need help with something, you can ask me. Okay?”

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.