After the Parade (30 page)

It had upset Aaron, his sense of decorum, for there seemed something unsavory about engaging in such activity in a school, the place where one went to improve one's mind. The incident had reminded him of something else, something from his childhood that he did not like to think about because thinking about it reminded him of his own shame, never far away, even after all these years. When he was eleven, a man from Mortonville named Ronnie Hopkins was arrested and sent to jail. He was an older man with large hips who was married to a much younger woman with no hips at all; she had a “boyish” figure, people in Mortonville liked to say knowingly, after Ronnie Hopkins was arrested for having sex with a student—a
male
student—at the vocational school for the developmentally disabled where he worked.

The student was technically an adult, forty, but mentally a boy, and so the police had come to the house where Ronnie Hopkins lived with his hipless wife and three children, and arrested him. While he was in prison, his wife divorced him and his children refused to write, yet when Ronnie Hopkins was released two years later, he came back to Mortonville and settled in one of the trailer houses on the edge of town. That Ronnie Hopkins chose to return had made no sense to Aaron—no sense to anyone in town really—and as Aaron worked to understand, he considered two possibilities: Ronnie Hopkins was punishing himself, or he simply had no sense that the world beyond Mortonville might offer something different. He had always kept to himself, had never sat with the other men in the café, drinking coffee and rolling the tumbler of dice to determine who would pick up the tab for the table. Instead, he came in alone and sat alone, generally to eat a hamburger before work. He was polite, almost apologetic, when he needed something, ketchup or a refill of pop.

After prison, Ronnie Hopkins stayed even more to himself than before. He no longer went into the bank, where his wife, his ex-wife, was a teller, nor did he buy gasoline or groceries in town or come into the café for a hamburger. Yet he still went into Bildt Hardware to pick up some necessity like batteries or nails, even though everyone in town knew that Harold Bildt had become fixated on Ronnie Hopkins. Each night after he finished his paperwork, Harold drove by Ronnie Hopkins's trailer house, making sure that Ronnie was inside and accounted for. Often, Aaron overheard Harold and his friends discussing Ronnie Hopkins, so he knew also that Harold refused to wait on him when he came into the store. Even if Edna, Harold's wife, was not around, Harold stayed in his office with his pals, laughing loudly and ignoring Ronnie Hopkins, who would never dream of demanding assistance. He had not been that kind of man before his arrest, and he was certainly not that kind after.

One afternoon Aaron's mother sent him across the street to let Harold know that the dishwasher was acting up again. Aaron did not like going into Harold's office, where Harold and his friends talked
about sex in coarse language that often made no sense to Aaron and about everything else in the world according to a rigid code of right and wrong that seemed never to require examination or recalibration. As Aaron made his way through the quiet store, past Gardening and Hunting, he came upon Ronnie Hopkins standing in Households, scrutinizing the Scotch tape as though he were picking out a wedding ring, but Households was near the office, so Aaron knew that he was actually listening to the men talk. While Aaron stood observing Ronnie Hopkins, he heard Marvin Hultgren say loudly, “What kind of man wants someone's business up his rear end anyway?”

Aaron had always thought of blushing as a public function, but that day in Bildt Hardware, hearing for the first time a graphic description of what men did to each other sexually, he learned otherwise. His face grew hot. He watched Ronnie Hopkins put a roll of tape in his pocket and turn to leave.

“When I joined the army back in '42,” Marvin Hultgren continued, “the first thing was they had us strip down to nothing. There we were, buck naked, and we had to line up and bend over with our palms on the floor, asses straight up. This feller comes by with a fire hose and lets each of us have it—straight up the ass. I'm telling you, if that didn't clean you out, nothing would. Hurt like hell. We walked around like sissies for a week.”

The men laughed and then one of them passed gas loudly, and so they laughed again, and Aaron knew that all of it—the story and the laughter and the passing of gas—was meant for Ronnie Hopkins. Ronnie Hopkins knew this also, and he stood still for a moment, unaware that he was being watched, and then he took the roll of tape back out of his coat pocket, slid it onto the display prong, and left.

Aaron could not tell his mother that he had failed to relay her message to Harold Bildt, so he walked quietly through Households, waiting for his face to cool, but everything he looked at—the corn skewers that went into the ends of cobs, the ketchup and mustard squirt bottles—reminded him of what he had heard. He took a breath and went into the office and told Harold Bildt about the dishwasher.
Harold looked at the calendar on his desk, trying to figure out a time that he could walk across the street to fix it, and Aaron looked down at the floor because he could not look at the other men, now that he understood: what they hated about Ronnie Hopkins was not that he had done what he had to a retarded man but simply that he had done it to a man.

A
fter classes were dismissed that afternoon, Taffy appeared in his doorway, wanting to go out for a drink in order to talk about what he had seen in the basement. Taffy had never come up to his room before, but he knew that the incident had aroused something in her, brought out the part of her that liked being in charge, handling situations, maintaining order. He suggested that they have a drink in the Castro, knowing she would decline. Taffy did not like the Castro because she did not like the way gay men regarded her. The truth was that he did not feel at ease there either, especially when he saw men walking around almost naked or couples holding hands, but he had begun cutting through the Castro on walks and had recently stumbled upon a café that he liked, a busy place, not the type of place he normally chose, but as he sat in the corner with a beer and a slice of pie, he discovered that the café's busyness made him feel invisible.

He liked feeling invisible, and he sat with a poetry book open before him because he had learned that reading was a way to help that feeling along. At Milton's, he had sometimes read through an entire week's worth of newspapers, and the last time he ate there, the Friday right before he left Albuquerque, he had come across an article in
The New York Times
that he read with great interest and now wished he had clipped and saved. It was about the letter writers of India, a disappearing breed of men who set up shop—makeshift desks, paper, ink, stamps—day after day under the same trees in the same village markets in order to take down the letters of those around them who
could not read or write but wished to record and share the details of their lives. It was a natural desire, this need to account for one's life, to say it out loud or see it written down before abandoning it to the dusty shelves of memory—to suggest, in some way, that it mattered.

As he sat with his book and his pie that day in the Castro, a man, a very nice man named George, had come up and asked what he was reading. As this man George stood next to his table, his head inclined toward the open poetry book, Aaron considered how much of his life had been spent listening to the stories of others. It was not a complaint. He had felt nothing but fondness for the tellers. But now, nearly forty-two and alone for the first time, he had begun to think that his own life added up to nothing more than the stories of other people. He looked up at this stranger with kind eyes who wanted to know what he was reading and said, “ ‘Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg.' ”

The stranger smiled, which made his eyes appear even kinder, and began to recite: “You might come here Sunday on a whim. / Say your life broke down.” He stopped abruptly because the next line was about a kiss, and they both looked down awkwardly. Aaron felt a tightening in his chest, a jolt to his groin, and he thought about how long it had been since he'd felt either. He recalled the farm boy he'd slept with in college, the boy from his poetry class. He had known so little about poetry then, only what Walter had taught him, but put off by the boy's veneration of Wordsworth, he had used poetry as an excuse not to engage in sex with the boy again. He looked up at this man who could quote from Richard Hugo and said, “I'm Aaron. Would you care to join me?”

George sat down, and Aaron tried hard not to think about Walter, who had first read this poem to him all those years ago as they sat in a boat together fishing, just before Walter took him away and helped him become the person he was meant to be, which he now thought of simply as the person he was, the person this stranger, George, had seen reading poetry and wanted to get to know.

They talked for two hours, eating their individual slices of pie and then sharing a third (apple again) to prolong the conversation, forks intertwining for one awful, glorious second as they both reached for the same bit of crust. Most people were not interested in the specifics
of teaching, perhaps because they had spent their youths in school and thought they already knew every boring detail of what it meant to be a teacher. They offered overly zealous praise for teachers and all that they had to endure, right before changing the subject. But George wanted to know everything—why Aaron had become a teacher and whether he ever regretted it, where he taught and what his students were like and whether he got along with his colleagues—and Aaron found himself describing it all: Melvin's fiancée, Paolo's motorcycle club, the week without heat, even that Marla wrote “Love you guys” on the box of pineapple buns.

“But she's your boss,” George said, voice rising, and Aaron wanted to lean across the table and kiss him. “So what was the thing that surprised you most when you started teaching?” he asked next. “I don't mean about education.” He looked flustered. “I mean something more personal, I guess, about how it feels to be in the classroom.”

“When I first started teaching, I couldn't sleep most nights because I was so worried I wasn't teaching them enough,” Aaron said, but as he spoke, he remembered something else: Walter lying awake with him, listening to him talk through the details of his teaching day. Some nights, he got up and brought Aaron a plate of saltine crackers and ketchup, that childhood snack for which he had never lost the taste. “You need to sleep,” Walter would whisper, but he always lay beside Aaron, stroking his brow for as long as it took because he understood that sometimes the only way to fall asleep was with the knowledge that someone was awake beside you.

George smiled encouragingly. He did not know that Aaron was thinking about lying in bed with the man with whom he had lived for more than twenty years. “But you just sort of get used to it,” Aaron finally continued. “To the overwhelming sense of responsibility, I mean. Or maybe you just get better at teaching.”

George nodded. “What else?”

“Well, one of the little things I really wasn't expecting was how intimate being in a classroom feels, like you're all on this long trip together. Sometimes the students act like they're invisible, like I can't see them doodling and rolling cigarettes, yawning and staring at the clock when they're
tired or waiting for the break. The strangest thing—I guess this is where intimate and invisible meet—is that an inordinate number of them poke their fingers into their ears and noses, beneath their arms, even into the little crevice between their shoe and foot. They poke, and then they bring their fingers to their noses and sniff deeply, taking stock of their hygiene. And even though they're sitting right in front of me, it's as if they have no idea that I can see them.”

George smiled again, and Aaron noticed that his front tooth was chipped, that one eye crinkled up slightly more than the other when he smiled. He was handsome, Aaron thought, the type of handsome that had to do with being slightly awkward and not caring about a chipped tooth.

“Sometimes, when all the twitching and poking and sniffing becomes too much, I'll stop what we're doing and remind them that I can see them. ‘It's not like at the police station,' I'll say. ‘There's no one-way mirror. You can see me. I can see you.' They always look a bit sheepish, but then they go right back to twitching and doodling and clock-checking.”

“It makes me wonder what I was like,” George said. “You know, when I was sitting in my desk feeling invisible.” He looked down. “I think your students are lucky to have you.” He did not say it like someone who went around handing out compliments, and Aaron felt at once pleased and terrified.

“Actually, I'm lucky to have them,” he said. “They're young, and they speak about everything with such passion. They see everything as possible.” Aaron stopped, embarrassed by his own earnestness, but George nodded, so he went on. “One of the things I most like about teaching is knowing there's a part of my day that's solely about them. I don't mean that in a ‘doing my part to make the world better' way. It's much more selfish. I like knowing that when I go into the classroom, my needs and problems get set aside, that I'll be able to escape my own head, even if it's just for a little while.”

“What's going on in your head that needs escaping?” George asked softly.

Instead of answering, Aaron said, “I'm talking too much. What do you do?”

George laughed. He knew Aaron was sidestepping the question. “Do you want to guess?” he asked. “Twenty Questions, maybe?”

“I am extremely bad at Twenty Questions,” Aaron said. “I forget what I've already asked and ask questions that are entirely too specific or that have nothing to do with the topic at all. I can assure you that the best approach is for you to just tell me.”