by Lori Ostlund
“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.”
19
* * *
Aaron 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 t
o 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.
Aaron did not really know the Bergstroms because they rarely came into the café, and he trudged along, dreading the visit. Mrs. Bergstrom had been a teacher in a town nearby. They lived in Mortonville because Mr. Bergstrom owned the tire store, long closed because they were retired and their son—their only child—had no affinity for tires. Anyway, their son was dead, had gone through the ice the winter before. This son was the reason that Aaron dreaded the visit, for people in town said that the Bergstroms had not recovered, that having a dead son had made them odd.
They had turned on their porch light, and he stood on their front steps, watching them through the picture window, the two of them side by side on the sofa, an afghan tucked round their collective legs and rising partway up their chests. They were staring ahead, both of them focused on something that he could not see—the news, he thought, for they had about them the look of people distracted by problems that were not their own. From outside, they did not look like two people with a dead son. He knocked, and they beckoned him in. He opened the door and stepped in, anticipating warmth, as one did in Minnesota in December, but when he said hello, his breath hung in the air. The room was silent, the television off, and he glanced over to see what they had been staring at, but there was nothing there.
“My mother sent me? She said you needed help?” His voice rose at the end of both sentences, turning them into questions, and he wished that he could start over, could reenter the house making declarations.
“Come here and let us take a look at you,” said Mr. Bergstrom, gesturing vaguely toward the middle of the room.
Aaron bent to remove his sneakers, which were covered with snow, and Mrs. Bergstrom said, “What a polite young man.”
He came and stood in front of them, and they regarded him without speaking. Then they turned and looked at each other, thoughtfully, as though Aaron were an appliance that they were considering buying, an appliance that offered some but not all the features that they wanted in their appliance. The look that they gave each other seemed to say, “Well, shall we take him anyway? Can we make do?”
“How old are you, Aaron?” asked Mrs. Bergstrom.
“Twelve,” he said quietly. “Almost thirteen.”
They waited, perhaps expecting him to comment on his impending puberty—to describe his first whisker or the new muskiness beneath his arms—and when he did not, Mrs. Bergstrom said, “Well, it’s time for the news, so why don’t we let Father watch while we work on our letter.” She told Aaron to turn on the television, and he did, the newscaster’s voice exploding into the room. She extricated herself from the afghan, and Aaron saw that she had on snow pants, as though she had just come in from an afternoon of sledding. She wiggled herself to the front of the sofa and concentrated, staring straight ahead before she hoisted herself to her feet with a small grunt that embarrassed him.
“Let’s settle ourselves in the den,” Mrs. Bergstrom said. He followed her down the hallway, her snow pants making a phit, phit sound as she walked, and into the den, where she locked the door behind them. The room smelled of cedar, which he liked, and wet cardboard, which he did not. On the wall above the sofa were photos of their son, Tim, their dead son, one from each year of school, lined up chronologically. He was smiling in all of them, and the gap between his front teeth seemed bigger than it had in person. There were no photos of him as an adult, but Aaron remembered him as a sad-looking man who came into the café alone and took a cloth from his pocket to clean the cutlery before using it. He had never ordered anything but water to drink, which Aaron’s mother said had to do with his inability to keep a job for long, which meant he could not afford to drink pop, and he always had a bacon cheeseburger, from which he would not take a bite until he had uncrossed the two strips of bacon arranged in an X by Aaron’s mother because he preferred his bacon parallel.
The morning after Tim fell through the ice, the café was exceptionally busy. Aaron came down late, so he did not know what was going on, only that something was, for the tables and booths were filled, the room buzzing.
“Something happened,” his mother told him later. She explained haltingly that this something involved the Bergstroms, who had called the police the night before because Tim had stopped by to visit them and was acting strange.
“Strange how?” Aaron asked.
“He kept telling them he loved them,” his mother said.
Aaron considered this: the fact that the Bergstroms had called the police because their son would not stop saying that he loved them. “They called the police because he wouldn’t stop?” he said at last.
“Well,” his mother said. “There was more to it than that.”
The police had come, pulling up in front of the Bergstroms’ house as Tim was driving away. They flashed their lights, but he did not stop, and like a parade of two, Tim and the police drove slowly through Mortonville and out of town. When Tim turned onto the dirt road that led to one of the lakes, the lake where people in Mortonville went to swim, the police sensed that something was wrong. They began running the siren and speaking to him over the loudspeaker, but he drove straight onto the frozen surface. The lakes had been tricky that year, with soft spots everywhere, which meant that even people who knew them well were staying off, so the police watched from the shore as Tim continued out toward the middle alone. Eventually, his headlights lurched upward, and within minutes he was gone. “You understand what I’m telling you, Aaron?” his mother said.
“Yes,” he said.
“They can’t get to the car. It’s too dangerous.” She tore open a packet of sugar and let it dissolve in her coffee. “Imagine how cold it must have been.”
* * *
He and Mrs. Bergstrom sat down at a card table, atop of which was a half-completed puzzle, the picture side facing down. He studied the gray backside of the puzzle for a moment, wanting to say, “This puzzle puzzles me,” but he was not the sort of boy who engaged in silliness with others. He used to say such things to his mother, who had been sincere in her reactions, laughing only when she truly found something funny, but it struck him one day that his mother was no longer listening.
“Why are you putting the puzzle together upside down?” he asked Mrs. Bergstrom. “Wouldn’t it be easier if y
ou could see the picture?”
“Why must everything be easy, young man?” She pushed the puzzle aside and drew a wooden box toward her, opening it to reveal stationery and pens. “How’s your penmanship?” she asked, and he said that his penmanship was fine. “Good,” she said. “I’m not interested in faulty penmanship. And your spelling?”
“I have the best spelling in my class,” he reported.
“Well,” said Mrs. Bergstrom, “that only means something if the class is not made up of imbeciles.” She removed the top sheet of paper from the box and put it in front of him. “I assume your mother told you that I require assistance with my correspondence.”
“Yes,” he said. He glanced at her hands, which looked capable of holding a pen.
“Dear,” she began dictating, and then stopped as though she could not recall to whom she had planned to write. “Just leave it blank for now,” she instructed before resuming her dictation: “Winter has arrived in Mortonville.”
She picked up the paper and examined it. “You must work on your uppercase letters,” she told him severely, pointing to the W specifically. “The bottoms should be sharp, like two elbows resting on the line. You see how rounded yours are? You’ve made knees of them, as though they are kneeling. I do not approve of kneeling,” she said. “We are not Catholics in this house.” She laughed as though this were funny.
“Should I fix it?” he asked.
“That would just make it unsightly,” she said, “and the first line, in particular, should not be unsightly. No, we’ll leave it, but it’s something to bear in mind.”
He held the pen above the paper, waiting for her to continue.
“You seem like a perspicacious young man,” she said, her tongue darting into the corners of her mouth as she studied him, slyly, wanting to know whether he would ask what perspicacious meant, wanting to know, that is, whether his curiosity would trump his timidity, for he understood that she saw him that way, as a timid boy who would put up with being bullied by an old lady in her den.