After the Parade (7 page)

“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.

M
r. 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
.

His favorite restaurant was T-28, a Macau diner, the name a handy mnemonic derived from its location at the corner of Taraval and Twenty-Eighth. At T-28, nobody asked how he was, only what he wanted. He found this deeply appealing and had eaten there every night his first week in San Francisco, drawn to the lack of pleasantries and inexpensive food, until the bubble burst: low on cash, he missed a night, and when he returned, the waitress slapped down his menu and said, “Hey, long time no see.” He imagined her sitting in an ESL class, memorizing such expressions and waiting for an opportunity to use them, to say, “Breakfast special already finished. Early bird gets the worm.” He did not begrudge her the chance to use her knowledge, but he missed the way it had been.

His morning walk took him down Noriega Street, where he stopped in front of a bank to read the exchange rates posted in the front window, noting which countries' currencies were listed, because this told him something about his neighborhood, and which currencies had risen or fallen, because this told him something about the world. From Noriega, he walked over several blocks to Golden Gate Park, where he lingered longest. Often, the bison were out, a herd that was kept there—in the middle of a city—to commemorate the lost American frontier. He liked to watch them and think about the irony of this. His last stop before exiting the park was a lake, man-made, where he sat on a bench watching a group of elderly Chinese doing tai chi, teenagers smoking pot before school, and a boy and his grandfather who came frequently, though not every morning, to motor a toy sailboat across the lake.

He preferred to begin his days in silence and found that walking to work eased him into the world. There was also the fare he saved by not taking the bus. He worried about money now that he was on his own, not because he had relied on Walter—he had not—but
there was something reassuring about a household with two incomes. Mainly, he was avoiding the bus because of the twins, who were always on board. He had come to suspect that they had no destination, that riding the bus was what they did, the way that other people went to jobs.

The twins were identical. They dressed alike, usually in zippered, gray sweaters over emerald green cowboy shirts with snap buttons, and groomed each other like cats, one tamping down the other's cowlick with moistened fingertips, straightening his collar, rebuttoning his shirt, zipping his sweater to a point just above the heart. It was as though the public nature of the bus allowed them to more fully enter their own secret world. Aaron could not look away.

Twins were popping up everywhere. In class, Yoshi, who had recently become the father of fraternal twins, raised his hand to note that twins were highly unusual in Japan. Only here in America did you see twins with regularity, said Pilar, the Spaniard, turning Yoshi's children into a by-product of their parents' temporary expatriation. Several of her classmates nodded in vehement agreement.

Aaron knew that he should point out the obvious: the United States was nothing more than an aggregate of the world's populations and it seemed unlikely that the genetic capabilities of these same populations would change so drastically on American soil. But he did not disabuse the class of its theory, for he had noticed that the students were sometimes skeptical of his views on topics other than grammar. They would not be convinced, for example, that homelessness was not caused by laziness or that Americans did not all eat old food, as one of the Bolors had suggested.

“What is ‘old food' anyway?” he had asked, perplexed by the deceptive simplicity of the words.

“Food that is old,” another student said, because they all understood the charge being made. In fact, they had an arsenal of anecdotal evidence, stories of host mothers who prepared frozen waffles with expiration dates years past, of babysitting for families who ate around mold and expected them to do the same. He tried to explain that they were arguing from exception, assuring them that most Americans
did not eat spoiled food or feed it to guests, but he stopped because he saw that they needed to believe these things. They spent their days cleaning houses and delivering pizzas to people who counted change in front of them, convinced of their dishonesty or inability to subtract, or, more likely, some combination of the two, being told—as they accepted a fifty-three-cent tip—how grateful they must feel to be in this country.