After the Parade (3 page)

“Now?” said Aaron. “Is something wrong?” But the line had already gone dead.

He looked at the bedside clock. It seemed so long ago that he had been lying beside Walter, worrying about the truck, yet it had been only twenty-four hours. He dressed and ran down the steps to the parking lot, where a man stood beside the truck. Aaron had parked under a light—not intentionally, for he had been too tired for such foresight—and as he got closer, he could see that the man was young, still a boy, with hair that held the shape of a work cap.

“What's wrong?” Aaron asked. The boy lifted his right hand in a fist and slammed it into Aaron's stomach.

As a child, Aaron had been bullied—punched, taunted, bitten so hard that his arm swelled—but he had always managed to deflect fights as an adult. It was not easy. He was tall, four inches over six feet, and his height was often seen as a challenge, turning innocent encounters—accidentally jostling someone, for example—into potential altercations. He did not know how to reconcile what other men saw when they looked at him with the image preserved in his mind, that of a small boy wetting himself as his father's casket was lowered into the ground.

The boy hit him again, and Aaron dropped backward onto his buttocks. “What do you want?” he asked, looking up at the boy.

“I'm Lex,” said the boy.

“Ah, yes, Britta's friend.”

“
Boy
friend,” said the boy.

“Yes, of course,” said Aaron, but something about the way he articulated this angered the boy even more. He jerked back his foot and kicked Aaron hard in the hip. Aaron whimpered. He had learned early on that bullies liked to know they were having an effect.

“What was she doing in there?” asked the boy.

“Where?” said Aaron. “In my room, you mean? We were talking. She was telling me about Jacob, the child we saved this afternoon.”

“So why was she crying then?”

“Crying?” said Aaron.

“She was crying when she came out. I saw her. I was right here the whole time, and I saw her come out of your room. She was crying, and she wouldn't talk to me.”

“Well,” Aaron said, trying to think of words, which was not easy because he was frightened. He could see the fury in the boy, the fury at being in love with someone he did not understand. “You do realize that people cry. Sometimes we know why they are crying, and sometimes we do not. Britta had an extremely hard day. She saw a child who had been beaten almost to death.”

The boy looked down at him. “She was in your room. You can talk how you like, mister, but she was in your room.”

Aaron realized only then what it was the boy imagined. “I don't have sex with women,” he said quietly. He thought of his words as a gift to the boy, who did not have it in him to add up the details differently, to alter his calculations. Behind him, Aaron could hear the interstate, the sound of trucks floating past Needles at night.

“What?” said Lex. “What are you saying? That you're some kind of fag?” His voice was filled with wonder.

Later, when he was in the U-Haul driving away, Aaron would consider Lex's phrasing:
some kind of fag,
as if fags came in
kinds
. He supposed they did. He did not like the word
fag,
but he knew where he stood with people who used it, knew what they thought and what to expect from them. He had nodded, agreeing that he was
some kind of fag
because the question was not really about him. Lex's fist somersaulted helplessly in the air, his version of being left speechless, and he turned and walked away.

Aaron's wallet was in his back pocket, the truck keys in the front. He could simply rise from the pavement, get into the truck, and drive away. He wished that he were that type of person, one who lived spontaneously and without regrets, but he was not. He was the type who would berate himself endlessly for leaving behind a much-needed map and
everything else that had been in the overnight bag. He went back up to his room, checked beneath the bed and in the shower, though he had not used the latter, and when he left, he had everything with which he had arrived. He drove slowly away from Needles, waiting for the sun to catch up with him.

“T
ell me what you want, Aaron,” Walter had periodically insisted, his tone turning impatient these last few years, the words no longer an invitation but a way of chiding Aaron, of suggesting that he wanted too much—or worse, that he had no idea what he wanted. But in the beginning of their lives together, back when they were two discrete people, Walter's motives felt easy to read:
Tell me who you are,
he seemed to be saying.
Tell me what you want from this life.
Only later had Aaron understood that his real motive in asking was to discover how he might serve as benefactor to Aaron's wishes and ambitions and, in doing so, bind Aaron to him.

Walter had first posed the question on a Sunday afternoon, as they drove toward Moorhead, Minnesota, where Walter was a language professor—French and Spanish, Italian in a pinch—at the university. Though it was hard even to imagine such a time now, they were strangers then, two men (one just barely) occupying the intimacy of a car. Aaron had spent the first five years of his life in Moorhead. It was there that his father had died, his death causing something to shift in Aaron's mother so that soon after, the two of them had moved to Mortonville. Aaron still had memories of the house his family had lived in and the street where his father died, enough to make his arrival with Walter a homecoming, even though he thought of what he was doing that day as running away. It was all a matter of perspective: whether one was focused on leaving or arriving, on the past or the future.

In the midst of pondering this, he heard Walter say, “Tell me, Aaron. What is it that you want?”

“I want a different brain,” he had answered.

He was eighteen and bookish, this latter the adjective that he would employ as an adult—euphemistically—to indicate that he had not yet had sex. He did not mean that he actually wanted a different brain but rather that he wanted to fill the one he had with knowledge and experiences of which he could not yet conceive but was sure existed. Walter had laughed, not unkindly, but the laughter had upset Aaron, a feeling that was underscored by the music playing on Walter's cassette deck. It was classical music, which Aaron had never known anyone to listen to, not like this: in the car, for
pleasure
. People in Mortonville listened to country music and rock, hymns and patriotic songs, though they did not discount such things as classical music and poetry. Most of them were proud that their children could recite nine poems by the end of sixth grade, a poem a month. They saw these poems as proof that their children were getting educated, for they were practical people who did not expect education to be practical, did not expect it to make their children better farmers or housewives. If it did, it was probably not education.

When Aaron was nine, Mrs. Carlsrud had assigned each student a classical composer, about whom the child was expected to deliver an oral report. He was assigned Sibelius, who was a Finn, a Swedish Finn, a distinction of importance in Mortonville, where most people were either Scandinavian or German. The Scandinavian block was dominated by the Norwegians and Swedes, who were seen as separate groups, except when discussed beside the Finns; the Finns were technically Scandinavian, but they were
different
. All of them, every single Finn in Mortonville, lived east of town, a self-imposed segregation. They even had their own church, which sat atop a hill amid their farms.

The first day of the presentations, Ellen Arndt stood at the front of the classroom holding a small stack of recipe cards, from which she read two parallel pieces of information: “Tchaikovsky was a Russian and a homosexual.” Three children giggled, and Sharon Engstrom raised her hand and said, “What's a Russian?” When Mrs. Carlsrud
replied that a Russian was “someone from Russia, a communist,” Sharon Engstrom said, “Then what's a homosexual?,” shifting her focus to the second noun, which included the word
sex
after all, and the same three children laughed.

“That is not relevant,” said Mrs. Carlsrud, her reply suggesting to Aaron that homosexuals were worth investigating. He planned to ask his mother about the word after school, but when he arrived at the café, their café, she was preparing the supper special, meatballs, and because she did not like to be asked questions when she was busy, he waited until the two of them were closing up that night.

“What does
homosexual
mean?” he asked as he filled the saltshakers.

“What makes you ask?” said his mother. She was running her hands under the bottoms of the tables, looking for improperly disposed of gum.

“Today, Ellen Arndt said that Tchaikovsky was a Russian and a homosexual, and Mrs. Carlsrud said that Russians live in Russia but homosexuals aren't relevant.”

“Well,” his mother said. “It means he likes men.”

“Why isn't it relevant?” he said.

“That's just something Mrs. Carlsrud said because she didn't want to talk about it,” said his mother. Then, she turned off the lights in the dining room and went upstairs, which was what she did when she didn't want to talk about something.

*  *  *

The first time Aaron and Walter met was on a Saturday morning when Walter came into the café for breakfast. He was alone, for his weekend fishing trips to Mortonville were solitary affairs. Aaron was fifteen. He later learned that Walter was thirty, twice his age, though Aaron, like most teenagers, had no sense of what thirty looked like. Walter stood by the door, waiting to be seated, which was not the custom at the café, so Aaron finally approached him and asked whether he needed directions.

Years later, as he walked through the Castro, Aaron would be struck by how many gay male couples looked alike, the narcissistic
component of love driven home in stark visual terms, but he and Walter were opposites. Aaron's hair was blond and fine, and already, at fifteen, he wore it in a severe right part, while Walter's hair that day was unevenly shorn, with dark, curly patches sprouting out along his neck and across the top. When Aaron next encountered him, his hair would be long and frizzy, though just as inexpertly cut. Over the years, Walter would come home with one bad haircut after another, the
bad
part the only constant, but when Aaron asked why he didn't try a different salon, Walter would reply with a shrug, “Nobody around here knows how to cut Jew hair anyway.”

Walter was short, just five eight, his weight concentrated in his lower torso and thighs, and as Aaron stood before him for the first time that morning in the café, Walter had to tilt his head slightly back to look up at Aaron. “Directions, no,” Walter said. “What I need is a hearty breakfast.”

Aaron paid close attention to Walter that morning. He noted that Walter was left-handed, though he would later learn that he was left-handed only for eating. Walter cut his food with his right hand, holding his fork in the left, but did not take what he called “the unnecessary step” of switching the fork to his right when he transported each bite to his mouth. His parents, who had both been refugees from Nazi Germany, had taught him to eat this way, like a European. He told Aaron that during the war, American spies—men who spoke perfect German—had been caught because of this simple slip, the shifting of the fork from left hand to right. Later, under Walter's tutelage, Aaron would become a left-handed eater also. Even as he evolved into his own person over the years, he would find the Pygmalion aspect of their relationship—habits such as these, established early on—the hardest to shed.

Walter carried a book, which he sat reading. Aaron had never seen anyone read while eating, not in public. Of course, the regulars sometimes glanced at the newspaper, making comments about crop prices or sports, but Walter read as if nothing but the book existed. Aaron often wished that he could bring a book to the table, especially as the meals that he and his mother shared became increasingly silent, but his mother forbade it. When he refilled Walter's coffee cup, Aaron looked
down at his book and was shocked to see that it was not in English. Sensing his interest, Walter held the book up. “Camus. Have you read him yet?” Aaron shook his head, and Walter said, “Well, Camus is a must, but I guess I've officially lost my adolescent enthrallment with existentialism. I'm finding it quite tedious this time around.” He sighed the way other men sighed about the weather or a hard-to-find tractor part. The adult Aaron would have laughed at Walter's transparent need to prove himself to a fifteen-year-old boy, but the Aaron he was then felt the world shifting, accommodating the fact that it was much vaster than he had ever imagined, that it included people who read books in other languages and spoke of ideas so foreign to him that they, too, seemed another language.

For men perhaps more than for women, there is something aphrodisiacal about finding oneself on the greater-than side of an intellectual disparity, and years later, Aaron would learn that Walter had felt something during that first encounter, a sexual stirring that they never fully discussed because Walter was not comfortable talking about desire. Aaron did know that Walter had been introduced to sex by a man who followed him back to the dressing room while he shopped for school clothes with his mother in a department store in New York. He was fourteen. He had no bad feelings toward the man, but he told Aaron that the experience had shaped him nonetheless, had taught him to associate sexual gratification with furtiveness and haste and a lack of reciprocity. On those rare occasions when Walter did discuss sex, he always brought to it this same textbook-like dryness.

Aaron had felt desire that day, a desire that was in no way sexual. In fact, it had felt to him more potent than anything sexual could be, for sexual desire was, by nature, transient, a flame that grew large and went out. Admittedly, he knew very little of sexual desire, recognized it largely in terms of what he did not want but was led to believe that he should—girls. True sexual desire, he thought, was like an undershirt worn close to the skin and covered by layers of shirts and sweaters and coats.