After the Parade (6 page)

Several weeks later, he received a reply. “Thanks for thinking of me,” her letter began. She went on to describe her new batch of students, one of whom had come to the school Halloween party dressed as Hitler. “It fell to me to speak to him about his costume,” she wrote. “Imagine trying to discuss such a thing with nothing more than a few nouns and verbs at your disposal. Still, I believe that by the end of our conversation he realized the potential this had to hurt others.” Aaron understood that he had been forgiven.

They settled into a routine, Aaron composing a letter at the beginning of the month and Taffy responding near the end. He preferred her as a pen pal, having just her words before him and not Taffy herself, nose dusted with doughnut powder. She was the only friend he had who was exclusively his, who had never met Walter. Everyone who knew Walter loved him, was taken in by the way he seemed to listen deeply before dispensing advice that sounded wise and obvious when tendered in his calm, mellifluous voice. Aaron began writing to her about Walter occasionally, indulging in a newfound openness. Two years later, when he wrote that he was leaving Walter, Taffy had not waited until the end of the month to reply. She wrote back
immediately, a response that read in its entirety, “I can help with the transition if you are interested in moving to San Francisco.”

*  *  *

He pulled up in front of Taffy's house around two on Christmas Eve, tired and wanting only to rinse his face and drink a glass of water, perhaps walk around the block to stretch his legs and soothe his hip, which had settled into a steady throb, but Taffy, who had been watching for him, came out and hoisted herself into the truck. She had arranged for him to rent a studio apartment in Parkside, a neighborhood near hers, from the Ng family. She had once taught Mr. Ng's nephew.

“Let's go,” Taffy said by way of greeting. “Mr. Ng is expecting us.”

They drove in silence except for her one-word directions—
left, straight, left
. Finally, Aaron asked what the studio was like. “Tiny,” she said, explaining that it was actually the back third of the Ngs' garage, which had been converted into living quarters. “And dark. It's the fog belt, but you'll be just fourteen blocks from the ocean.”

The houses on his new street appeared nearly identical: the main quarters sat over the garage and were accessed by a tunnel entrance on the right. When they arrived, Mr. Ng came out. “One rule,” he said as he shook Aaron's hand. “You pay, you stay.”

“Yes, well, I think I can remember that,” Aaron said. “Certainly the rhyming helps.” Neither Taffy nor Mr. Ng laughed. Aaron took out his checkbook and wrote a check for the security deposit and another for the first month's rent, an amount close to what he and Walter had paid for their mortgage each month. Taffy had explained that it was the cheapest rent he would find in the city, given his insistence on living alone.

Mr. Ng stared at the check, which had his New Mexico address. “Mexico?” said Mr. Ng skeptically.

“
New
Mexico,” he said, and Taffy assured Mr. Ng that New Mexico was in the United States.

“Okay, okay,” Mr. Ng said finally, as though he were granting a dispensation in accepting this as fact. “Here is key.”

But it was not a key. It was a garage door opener. Mr. Ng pointed it at the garage door, which rolled up noisily before them.

It seemed that this basic principle—thrift over convenience—had governed the conversion. No thought had been given to soundproofing, for example, which meant—Aaron would soon discover—that he could hear the family walking above him, hear them talking and arguing and even snoring. A thin wall had been erected to separate the studio from the garage proper, which housed not just the Ngs' car but also, problematically, the garbage cans. Indeed, in the months to follow, Aaron would lie in his studio at night, imagining all the ways that he could die right there in bed: the Ngs' Toyota smashing through the wall and running him over as he lay reading; the house (and the family with it) buckling down on him during an earthquake; the ocean forgetting itself and rolling up these fourteen blocks, drowning him in his sleep.

Taffy left him to settle in by himself, which he did not mind. It took him seven hours to unload and return the truck and then find his way back via public transportation, but when he finally stood on his block holding noodles from a Thai take-out place, he realized that he could not remember his new house number. He walked back and forth, pausing at last in front of the house that he thought was the Ngs', and when he pressed the garage door opener in his pocket, the door rolled up. He ate the noodles with his fingers because the take-out place had forgotten to include a fork and he could not find the box that contained cutlery. Above him he could hear Chinese, a pleasant sound. He focused on it and tried not to think about Walter. The two of them had observed a Christmas Eve tradition: they made a Moroccan chicken with gizzard-and-artichoke-heart stuffing and Brussels sprouts, and as they ate, they talked about what they each wanted from the coming year. It was like making resolutions, except they always began with an analysis of the previous year's disappointments. The last couple of years, however, Walter had been less willing to focus on the past, to reveal what had frustrated or discouraged him. Instead, he raised his wineglass and announced, “I wouldn't change a thing about my life,” which left Aaron struggling to articulate his own discontentment.

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 had 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.