After the Parade (32 page)

“When I was a teenager, I started going to early Mass before school every day, just to have that communion wafer in my stomach. And to this day I'm the best speller you're likely to meet because every Friday at school we had a spelling contest, and the prize was a candy bar. The teacher didn't know what to make of it: Billy Dawkins, who failed every test he ever took, winning spelling bees. I wanted to tell her that for a hamburger or a box of cereal, I'd learn anything they wanted, ace every test, but I was too proud for that, and besides, my father would have killed me. Not because he worried about what people thought. He didn't. He just didn't want anyone meddling in his business.

“I was sixteen the last time I saw him. I came home from school so hungry I'd almost fainted during PE, and when I walked in, I saw him at the table. Until then, I'd always figured that while he was starving us, he was starving himself also. It was a small consolation to think that way, that we were all in it together—you know, that that's how being poor worked. The thing is, I think most days he did hold himself to the same standard, but not that day. That day he was sitting there with a mound of pickled pigs' feet piled high on a sheet of butcher paper, everything about him slick with vinegar and grease, a pile of bones that he'd sucked clean tossed to the side. The bones were tiny, like children's knucklebones. It was watching him suck those bones that did it. I knocked him off his chair and wrestled him to the floor. I had my hands around his neck, would have killed him too if my mother hadn't come in then and begged me to stop. When I stood up, my father yelled, ‘Get out of my house. Get out and don't come back. I'm not spending another dime on you.'

“And I said, ‘Right. Because that would mean doubling what
you've spent so far.' ” Bill laughed and finished his beer. “I've always been very proud that that was the last thing I said to him, that I had the presence of mind to say something, you know, sort of clever. So I packed a few things and left—never saw the bastard again. It wasn't until he died that it came out about him being filthy rich, a millionaire actually. Of course, he'd written me out of his will the very day I left. My sisters tried to give me my third anyway, but I refused. I didn't want a thing from him.”

“How did you survive?” Aaron asked. “You were just a boy.”

“Our priest helped. He was a good man—found me a job working construction and a place to live. I had to leave school, but that was bound to happen anyway. I did that for maybe eight or ten years, and then I got hooked up with this whole detective business, apprenticed myself to an old guy and found out I was pretty good at it. He couldn't get around so much anymore, so I became his legs, and he taught me everything I know about the business, which is considerable.” He looked down at his empty beer glass as though he wished it were not empty. “It's a funny thing, isn't it,” he said. “I drop out of school when I'm sixteen, and here I am, almost forty years later, a teacher. Not a very good one, but it's still a heck of a thing.”

“Yet another example of life's abundant irony,” Aaron said. Then, afraid that Bill might think he was mocking him, he continued, “When I was a boy, my mother owned a café, which we lived above. My bedroom window looked out over the street facing Bildt Hardware and Swenson's Variety Store, which sold primarily groceries but also school supplies and bed linens. At night I lay in bed, watching the Swenson's neon sign flash off and on:
Variety. Variety. Variety. Variety
. I'd been watching that sign for years before it suddenly hit me that there was actually something very funny about a sign that promised
variety
flashing off and on in the same monotonous way night after night.”

It was the first time he had told Bill anything about his childhood, and he stopped there, not explaining about the pleasure he had felt that night at realizing that this was irony. That would mean talking about
Clarence, who had predicted that he would grow nicely into irony. He was not ready to talk about Clarence.

Bill laughed. “Yup,” he said, “it's a fine thing, irony.”

*  *  *

Bill still attended Mass at Mission Dolores once a week. “Oftener,” he told Aaron, “when I'm involved in a really sordid case.”

Aaron did not think that he had ever had a friend who attended church regularly. “Give me an example of sordid,” he said.

“Cheating spouses. That's my bread and butter, you know.” Aaron did know, since Bill had told him several times that his caseload was made up, disproportionately, of adultery and workers' comp scams. “They get messy.”

“Tell me about a recent case that required extra attendance at Mass,” Aaron said.

“I just went this morning,” Bill said. “Fourth time this week 'cause I'm tailing a guy who's a real piece of work. Guess where he heads every night?”

He had also never had a friend who used words like
tailing
. “Where?” he said.

“The Castro. He's got one of those transvestites on the side. You know—looks like a woman, but then the plumbing's all male. Anyway, so I have to tell the wife that her husband's a fag, and—”

“Bill,” Aaron interrupted. They were having this conversation in the hallway with just five minutes left of break, and he did not know where to begin.

“What?” Bill said, and then, “Oh, I get it. I shouldn't say
fag
around you, right?”

“You shouldn't say it, period,” Aaron said, and Bill looked at him as though Aaron had asked him to give up smoking or stop eating a hamburger for lunch every day.

Aaron knew what Walter would say about his friendship with Bill—Walter, who believed that gay men and straight men could never really be friends, that the former could never fully trust the
latter. Though their social lives over the years had involved a preponderance of heterosexuals—colleagues, neighbors—Walter insisted that gay people could only be themselves, their truest, uncensored selves, in the company of other gay people. Aaron found this argument perplexing and reductive. “Do you think that's how it was with you and the guys in Moorhead—that you were being your truest, uncensored selves?” he had asked, referring to the group of closeted men with whom Walter had been friends when Aaron came to live with him. “Because the truth is I didn't feel any more true and uncensored with them than I did sitting around with the men at the café when I was a kid.”

Walter had acted incredulous—perhaps he truly was incredulous. “But didn't it at least mean something to you, after all those years in the closet, to be able to say things out loud, to not wonder what people were thinking?”

“Maybe,” Aaron had said. He thought about it. “Okay, yes, though I don't think I ever felt in the closet as a boy—that implies a level of awareness that I simply didn't have. And I certainly never felt like myself around your guys either. I always felt the way I do when someone who's really religious suddenly wants to be my friend and I can't help but think that it's not me, Aaron, they want to be friends with—because they don't really know me. That's how I felt with those guys—like I was just some gay boy that you were lucky enough to catch, and their job was to make clever remarks.”

“Well,” Walter said, “at least they never gave me the kind of look that everyone else did, those here-comes-Walter-with-his-boy looks.”

“Of course they did. The only difference was that they approved. But what were they approving of? What did they really know about our relationship? Did they know that we read poetry together at night? That we didn't have sex those first four years? They didn't, because they weren't interested in poetry, and they believed we were having sex because that's what you let them believe.” He wondered at what point in the conversation he had become angry.

“You're mad that I didn't clarify that we weren't having sex?” Walter asked.

“No,” Aaron said, “I'm not mad about it.” This was true. “I guess I just don't know why you can't see that if they were really your friends, you'd have told them the truth.”

Walter was silent. “Sometimes,” he said finally, “people just need to be around others that are like them.”

“That's just it,” Aaron said. “I had nothing in common with them, nothing except being gay. Maybe that's something, but it's not nearly enough.”

“Surely you don't hold it against them that they don't like poetry?” Walter said.

“No, I don't hold it against them. I'm just saying that if I had to choose between spending time with a straight person who reads and a gay person who doesn't, I'd choose the straight person.”

“What if both of them read?” said Walter.

“Well, then it depends on what they're reading.”

The argument had ended there, not because things had been resolved but because they saw that they could not be. It had become absurd, yet they were not able to laugh together at the absurdity. Aaron supposed it was ironic that he was the one who had moved to San Francisco, he who had never required the trappings of gay life, the bars and restaurants and entire neighborhoods populated by gays and lesbians; he who did not go out of his way to patronize gay mechanics and plumbers, did not assume that a heterosexual mechanic or plumber—or detective—would say something homophobic until he said it, and then, you dealt with it. You explained why the comment or word or joke was offensive. It was tiring at times, but he thought it was the price you paid for truly living in the world.

“Do you ever feel bad about what you do?” Aaron asked Bill. “About making money by exposing other people's secrets?”

“Everyone's got secrets,” Bill said. “Maybe this guy's got the right to his, but his wife's paying me to find out what they are, and I think she's got the right to know. It just proves what I've always said: that you can't really know another person, and if you can't know them, you can't trust them.”

“I've always found that people who say you can't trust anyone are
actually saying something about their own trustworthiness,” Aaron said.

“I guess it's a matter of how you think about trust. For me, if you've got secrets, then I can't trust you.”

“Everyone has secrets, Bill,” Aaron said. “That's the state of being human. I know you Catholics like your confession, but I just don't believe we need to confess everything about ourselves to the world. That's too much to expect of people.”

A
aron was awakened one morning by the moan of a foghorn, an anomaly, he supposed, since everyone had said that March would be a respite before heading into the fog of summer. The sound put him in mind of cows, of their low, mournful mooing, which was all that he really knew of the creatures, though numerous people over the years, upon learning that he had grown up in a small town in Minnesota, had called on him to explain not just cows but any number of things: how grain elevators worked and which crops were easiest to grow, how fast a tractor could go and whether it was true that farm boys had sex with sheep. He knew the answers to none of these questions, his only knowledge of farming gleaned from the discussions he had overhead as he served farmers in the café and from the summer he spent pulling tassels from corn when he was twelve, monotonous work that he had enjoyed. His mother had made him quit after just three weeks because she said that she needed his help at the café, but he thought that she resented the way he came home tired but whistling each afternoon.

In fact, she wanted him around the café—around her—even less that summer, and in the fall, she began lending him out.
Lent
was how he thought of himself, like a library book that entered the homes of strangers briefly. His mother said that people in Mortonville could not forgive them for being outsiders, using the word
forgive
as if she would like nothing better than to make an apology and be done with it. Aaron supposed it was this need, the need for acceptance, that led
her to begin lending him out to people in town, primarily old people, his job to help with tasks that they could no longer manage—carrying boxes up and down steps, shopping for food, applying rubber pads to the bottoms of things—tasks that made him privy to their vulnerabilities. The old people were always grateful for his help, grateful to his mother for sending him, and as he was leaving, they often tried to press something into his hand—a few coins, a Pop-Tart, an envelope bearing colorful stamps—compensation for his services, all of which his mother required him to refuse. The old people fussed then, telling him to zip his coat all the way up, to be careful walking home, not because there was anything to fear in Mortonville but because they wanted to give him something. He felt that his mother was wrong to deny them this small pleasure.

As he made his way across Mortonville late one afternoon in December, the normally pleasant sound of snow crunching beneath his sneakers nearly brought him to tears. In truth, it was not just the crunching or the day's steady retreat but so many things, all piling up inside him like the mounds of snow that flanked the recently plowed streets, mounds that other children, not he, liked to climb upon. Of course, winter dusk is particularly conducive to melancholy, and though he was young to know such things, to feel them so deeply, his age did not change the fact that he did. He thought about his mother sitting by herself in the café, wanting to be alone, wanting nothing between her and dusk. Back in their house in Moorhead, she used to come into his room some afternoons and wake him from his naps. “It's getting dark,” she'd say, “and I thought how nice it would be to have your company.” He missed that mother, the one who thought his presence made nightfall more bearable.

He was being lent that day to the Bergstroms. There were no streetlights in their part of town, but all around him houses were aglow, predictably, with Christmas lights and kitchen lights and the steady yellow beam of porch lights, each anticipating a specific event—a holiday, a warm meal, a father's return. He could tell who was having chicken that night, the odors wafting from these well-lit kitchens into the street where he walked. Meanwhile, his mother was
back at the café, creating her own good smells as she cooked, but this thought only added to his mood, surrounded as he was by mothers making meals for their families, whom they solely considered as they cooked. He could not remember the last time his mother had prepared something just for him, something that was not a leftover from the daily special or a kitchen mistake, an overcooked hamburger that became his supper.