After the Parade Read online

  He was relieved that the telephone was not yet hooked up because he would have called Walter right then to let him know he had arrived safely, but he would not have stopped there. He would have turned contrite, explaining tearfully how sorry he was, and Walter would have slipped into his most comfortable role, becoming patient and forgiving. “It’s fine,” he would have said. “Just come home.”

  Aaron wiped his greasy hands on his jeans, crawled onto the unmade futon, and slept for ten hours. The next morning, the city felt at rest. It was Christmas. He appreciated that silence would be his first memory. Then, an ambulance passed outside, and he felt the same sick dread that he had felt as a boy, when a siren almost always meant tragedy for someone he knew. He supposed that soon he would once again stop noticing sirens, but that morning he lay on his mattress and sobbed because the studio was dark and unfamiliar and because he had never lived alone.

  * * *

  Taffy had arranged an interview for him at her school, the San Francisco English Language Center. They needed someone to teach an advanced class, she said, and the director, Marla, wanted to meet him the day after Christmas. Taffy did not tell him much about the school, just that she had been teaching there for three years, since Glenna left. She had quit her old job, thinking change would make Glenna’s absence less noticeable, but instead she had found that going off to a new school each day and riding a new bus home to an empty apartment only made her miss Glenna more. She wrote this to him after he accepted her invitation to come, the only truly personal thing she had ever revealed. She was being kind, he supposed, letting him know that it would not be easy.

  The school was on Anza Street, housed in a drab building from the sixties that bore signs of neglect. Marla was also in a state of disrepair. Half the buttons on her dress had been replaced with safety pins, and when she stood, she appeared to list to one side, though he realized later that her dress was missing a shoulder pad. She began the interview by explaining that she had a firm policy of hiring gay people, though she herself was not gay, because she believed they made better teachers. Aaron did not know how to respond, for he desperately needed the job but was not in the habit of ignoring questionable logic. He laughed in case she was joking, but it turned out that she was not, and the two of them sat there awkwardly. He immediately regretted laughing, not because he had hurt Marla’s feelings, though there was that to consider, but because he had made a decision as he stared down at the road from the wheel of the U-Haul, a decision to stop second-guessing his own instincts. The decision had seemed doable there in the truck, where his needs were basic: he stopped when he needed to urinate; bought food when he was hungry; filled the gas tank when the needle neared empty. Most important, amid the monotony of satiating himself and the truck, there was Jacob, whom he had saved because he had trusted his gut.

  He looked at Marla and blurted out what he knew to be the truth, “I’m a really good teacher,” referring to the only part of himself that seemed intact.

  “Good,” said Marla. “Because you’re hired.” They stood up, shook hands, and Aaron thanked her.

  “What were they studying with their last teacher?” he asked.

  “Well,” she said. “Nico’s been sort of filling in lately, so I’m not sure what they’re up to.”

  “And before that? What about with their regular teacher?”

  “They had Noreen, but she left suddenly. What happened was, she was in class one morning, and her husband called.” Marla’s voice dropped, taking on the hushed, excited tone that people use to divulge someone else’s secrets. “He said he’d fallen asleep with the baby on the bed next to him, and she’d rolled off and hit her head, but the doctor said it was more than that.”

  Marla took a breath, and Aaron cut in. “What was Noreen doing with them when she left?” He wanted to establish that workplace gossip did not interest him. He had worked at schools that resembled dysfunctional families and had always ended up in the role of the older brother whose repeated attempts to remain uninvolved made him the most sought-after family member of all.

  Marla stared at him. “Ask the students, I guess.”

  * * *

  The next morning, Aaron put on a tie, the green silk that Walter had given him on his last birthday. He did not always wear a tie to work, but he wore at least a shirt with a collar because he believed his students deserved to know that he considered teaching them a profession. He tried not to dwell on the tie’s origins, yet he could not help but think of Walter as he stood in front of the mirror, tightening the tie around his neck. Aaron regarded the world as fraught with symbolism, a place where something as ordinary as knotting a tie became a commentary on one’s life.

  When he entered the classroom at nine sharp, carrying a satchel and wearing the tie, the class looked startled. Taffy later explained that the students were coming off two months with Nico, an octogenarian who could not teach at the school permanently because he made frequent trips to Cuba to visit his “young men.” According to Taffy, Nico treated the classroom as a private salon: he arrived at ten because he considered nine an uncivilized hour and spent the morning passing around photos of his latest young man and demonstrating dance steps from the rumba and danzón. One morning, he had shown up in his Castro bar wear, a leather vest and chaps, though he had worn underwear, Taffy noted, perhaps in deference to the realities of the job, which required him to turn periodically to write on the board. “Nico’s lived in San Francisco too long,” Taffy concluded, but Aaron knew that he could spend the rest of his life here and never consider wearing chaps to class. Once, he and Walter had gone to a cowboy bar in Albuquerque, but after thirty minutes they left because Aaron could not bear the sight of men playing pool and dancing and sitting on barstools wearing nothing but chaps, their buttocks ripping away from the vinyl when they stood. “You can’t be so squeamish,” Walter had scolded him afterward.

  “Nine o’clock,” Aaron announced. “Time to begin class. My name is Aaron Englund.” He turned to write his name in capital letters on the board. “I will be your teacher this semester.”

  “Like the country?” a student asked. The student’s name was Paolo, and he was from Italy. In Italy, Paolo had taught mathematics for twenty-six years, and then one day, he decided that twenty-six years was enough; he would go to the United States, where he would spend his days riding Harleys. He would do this until all the money he had saved during those twenty-six years was gone. When Paolo spoke, which was often, he sounded like someone parodying an Italian accent, and his hands swung rhythmically in the air as though he expected those around him to pick up instruments and begin to play. Aaron tried to imagine Paolo standing in front of a classroom, leading students through the intricacies of math. He wondered how it was possible to go from being that man, a man who wanted numbers to add up, to being a man who embraced risk.

  “That’s England,” Aaron said, enunciating the e before turning to write ENGLAND next to ENGLUND. “One vowel,” he said. “The difference between me and a country.” The students laughed.

  The class was large, twenty students, but he went around the room learning their names and where they were from. He always did this the first day because he knew that it mattered, especially to those who were accustomed to being overlooked. There were five Brazilians—“Almost a football team,” they joked—and three Thais, but he was most surprised by the Mongolians. He had never had a Mongolian student before, did not think he had even met a Mongolian, yet there were two in the class, both named Borol. When he said, “Borol must be a common name in Mongolia,” the second Borol replied, “Not common,” with a serious face and the voice of a Russian, and the first Borol laughed to let him know it was a joke. He realized that he had always thought of Mongolians as not the joking types. It surprised him to find that he harbored stereotypes of Mongolians.

  “Well,” he asked the class, “where should we begin? You must have questions. What’s confused you lately?”

  They all stared at him. They h
ad no reason to trust him—his ability or his intentions—yet. In the front row, a handsome Brazilian named Leonardo raised his hand. In Brazil, Leonardo was a pilot, but here in San Francisco, he delivered pizzas, which the other Brazilians referred to as the Brazilian National Occupation. “Why are you studying English?” Aaron had asked each student earlier, and Leonardo had explained that it was his first step toward becoming a pilot in China.

  “China?” Aaron said. He had not meant to sound so surprised. “Why China?”

  “Is big country,” Leonardo said.

  “Yes,” Aaron agreed, waiting for the explanation to continue, but Leonardo, he would learn, did not believe in explaining a point to death. He considered others capable of connecting the dots: a big country required lots of planes, planes required pilots. Leonardo’s reticence would not benefit his English, but Aaron could not help but think that circumspection was attractive in a pilot. Aaron did not like flying, particularly the life-and-death bargaining he did with himself each time he got on a plane. When he imagined the people who sat in the cockpit, he did not want to think of them as chatty sorts who cared about entertaining one another. He wanted to think of them like Leonardo, less enamored of words than flight.

  “You have a question, Leonardo?” Aaron asked.

  “Yesterday,” Leonardo said, “I hear my coworker say to my other coworker, ‘I hope the boss wasn’t mad.’ ” Leonardo leaned forward. “Is correct?”

  “Yes,” Aaron said apologetically, for he could see the point in question. “It depends on the situation, but yes, it is correct.”

  “Why?” Leonardo demanded, almost angrily. “Why he is saying ‘hope’ when it is past tense? Hope is about the future. This is what we always learn.”

  The other students nodded, asserting their collective will. Aaron could feel their frustration and beneath it their distrust, for they had been taught, rightfully, that hope described the future, yet here he stood, telling them that this was not always so. In just one hour, he had taken away more knowledge than he had supplied.

  Aaron had discovered his love of grammar as a boy, when he first observed in these structures and symbols a kind of order, patterns that allowed words—his first love—to join together and make sense. He saw that he could open his heart and love grammar almost more, the way one loved the uglier child best because it required more effort to do so. He was known for explaining grammar in ways that made sense, for filling the board with sketches and equations and even cartoons that his students eagerly copied into their notebooks. He turned now and wrote: I hope he wasn’t mad. Below the sentence, he drew a timeline, the past on the left marked Know, the future on the right, Don’t Know.

  “Here we are, between the past”—he pointed to the word Know—“and the future, which we don’t know.” He looked at them encouragingly. “Okay, now let’s say one of the drivers mixes up a very big pizza order, and the next day everyone is wondering whether the boss was mad when he found out, but nobody actually knows whether he was mad because he came in after everyone was already gone. How would you say that?”

  “I wish that he weren’t mad,” suggested Katya, the lone Russian.

  “Okay,” Aaron said. “Except that means he was mad, that I know he was mad.” A few of the students nodded. “In this case, the boss’s reaction is in the past, but we don’t know it yet. We’ll learn about it in the future, so we have to say, ‘I hope he wasn’t mad.’ ”

  He looked at them, they looked back, and then several more nodded. He was relieved to be back in the classroom, where he felt clear about what was needed from him: his knowledge and his steadying presence. But teaching provided something he needed also, a period each day when his own life receded.

  “If there are no more questions,” he said, “let’s take a break.” He pointed one last time at the diagram on the board. “Remember, the nice thing about not knowing what has already happened is that we can keep hoping for the best.”

  “Even though outcome is finished?” said Katya with the fatalism of a Russian.

  “Yes,” he said, but he did not let himself think of Jacob, who might already be dead.

  4

  * * *

  Mr. Ng drove a UPS truck. Most nights, he pulled his car into the garage after his shift and stayed in it for several hours. Aaron found it unsettling to have him there, on the other side of the flimsy wall that he leaned against as he sat on the bed reading or eating dinner or preparing for class, especially since Mr. Ng did not seem to be doing anything in his car, except maybe sleeping. Of course, Aaron knew that Mr. Ng was putting off as long as possible the moment when he went upstairs and he and his wife resumed their screaming, furniture-shoving arguments. Aaron did not know what their arguments were about because he did not understand Cantonese, but he assumed money, because he had read somewhere that money was what most couples argued about. At the end of prolonged quarrels, the Ngs sometimes switched to English, as though inviting him into their problems. He hated this the most, the intimacy of lying in bed in his pajamas, listening to two people who were supposed to be nothing more than his landlords destroy each other in not one but two languages.

  Despite the lost hours of sleep, Aaron began rising early. He thought it was his body’s natural rhythm finally asserting itself, now that there were no one else’s habits or needs to consider. As a boy, he had been an early riser, but that was because his mother was not, so the café’s morning preparations fell to him. After she disappeared, he spent his senior year living with the Hagedorns, a family of night owls, and their schedule became his, which meant his memories of the year were clouded by exhaustion. Then, Walter came along, insisting that he call supper “dinner,” and he had, for it seemed a different meal from the one that he and his mother had rushed through in the brief lull before the early-bird special began at five.

  Walter considered it improper to dine before eight, though he favored nine, and while the supper that Aaron had shared with his mother was a mishmash of kitchen errors, dinner with Walter involved wine, always, and at least two courses, with salad served last. Afterward, they drank a nightcap, cognac, though Aaron would have preferred sherry. Most nights, Walter asked Aaron to read aloud to him after dinner, poetry usually, for they agreed on poetry, not just on its value but on which poets and poems they loved. Walter liked “Dover Beach” and T. S. Eliot and Richard Hugo’s “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg,” to which he had introduced Aaron years earlier and which Aaron had since committed to memory. “You might come here Sunday on a whim. / Say your life broke down,” Aaron would recite while Walter sat beside him, inhaling deeply, as though hearing the words were not enough and he needed to breathe them in also, breathe them in as Aaron exhaled them.

  Aaron had always appreciated that Walter did not leave movies or concerts and immediately demand an opinion, and it was the same with poetry. They sat in silence after each poem, feeling whatever it was they each felt without having to put it into words. Eventually, they finished their nightcaps, rose, and got ready for, and then into, bed, the king-size bed, where they watched the news or read but did not have sex because Walter did not enjoy sex after dark, an indisposition he once explained by saying that he could never shake the feeling that he was being watched. Aaron assumed that Walter’s fear was tied to something from his past, something he did not want to discuss, though at times he wondered whether it might not be a function of his collective consciousness as a gay man, a throwback to an era when gay men did everything furtively, when every look or word or touch had the power to destroy lives.

  Despite Walter’s fears, they had had sex at all hours in the beginning, sex at noon while the fire whistle blew, announcing lunchtime, and sex at midnight so that Aaron joked it had taken him two days to come. Sometimes Aaron would visit Walter on campus, and they would have sex there in Walter’s office, a Latin professor on one side of the thin walls and a young French professor on the other. Before he bent Aaron over his desk or tipped him back in his reading chair,
Walter pulled the shades and locked the door, but such precautions made sense there, for neither of them wanted to look up as Walter thrust into Aaron hard from behind to find a student in the doorway.

  Aaron always fell asleep first, Walter beside him, reading or preparing notes for an article or keeping up with his correspondence, for even after email came along, Walter continued to write letters by hand, using carbon paper between the top page, the one he would mail, and the bottom, the one that would go into a box marked neatly with the year. The boxes of letters were lined up in their basement, had moved with them from Minnesota to New Mexico. When Aaron asked Walter why he kept the letters, he said that he anticipated reaching a point in his life when the present offered nothing new, and when that day came, he would bring up his boxes and read through the story of his life, maybe finding even more pleasure in it the second time.

  * * *

  Most mornings the smallness of his new apartment overwhelmed him, the walls pressing in so that he could not read or grade papers or even think. He began walking to work, giving himself an hour and a half, even two hours, because he liked knowing that there was time to linger, time to learn about his new neighborhood, where he felt daily the surprise and pleasure of being an outsider. The signs on businesses often announced themselves first in large Chinese characters, catering to him as an afterthought, in English that was often grammatically incorrect and rendered in small letters. Among his favorite business names were these: Smartest Child, a tutoring center whose window featured a photograph of a teenage girl in a beauty pageant gown, her perfect SAT scores superimposed on her sash; 100% Healthy Dessert, which he had tried once, intrigued by the pictures of syrupy concoctions filled with beans and colorful tapioca worms and even more by the menu descriptions promising enticements such as “promotes bowel movement”; and Happy Good Lucky, a tiny market on Taraval that advertised BEER ALL FLAVORS $9 and dissuaded shoplifters with a series of hand-lettered index cards, strategically placed, that read, HONESTY IS THE BEST PERSONALITY I APPRECIATE.