by Lori Ostlund
“Well, that’s the thing,” Winnie said. “He won’t tell me what those feelings are. Even back in January when he was calling every day, he’d spend the whole conversation complaining about some mix-up with the room scheduling for his Advanced Spanish class. Once, he did note that he’d switched to buying quarts of milk instead of gallons, which was the closest he came to talking about it, about you. So I was actually thankful when he called like that in the middle of the night, drunk.”
“I guess you know I haven’t called him?” he said, and Winnie nodded. “Every day I think about it, but then I just, I don’t know. I can’t bring myself to do it.”
“Do you miss him?” Winnie asked.
“Of course I miss him. I miss him all the time.”
“Then why haven’t you called?”
“At first I was afraid I’d hear his voice and want to go back. Now I’m afraid I’ll hear his voice and feel nothing. Lately, it’s like I’ve reverted to childhood, when everything made me cry, yet I feel oddly removed from emotion also. When I say it out loud to you like this, I can hear it doesn’t make sense.” He paused. “Maybe I just don’t think I deserve his understanding right now.”
Winnie looked away from him. “What do you think Walter deserves?” she asked.
* * *
They set out on Saturday, at dawn. Winnie did not like dawn, was no good at mornings. She sat beside him, not speaking, and he considered turning around, worried that she had changed her mind, though it had been her idea to go. The whole thing started when he told her about Jacob. “I don’t know why,” he’d said after he finished the story, “but lately I can’t stop thinking about him, wondering what happened. It’s strange. The more my own life seems to be closing in on me, the more obsessed I’ve become with knowing what happened to some kid I’ve never even really met.”
“Once, years ago, when Thomas and I were in southern Spain, we crossed over into Gibraltar for the afternoon. We were walking along in the park, enjoying ourselves, when this young Moroccan man came up to us. He looked awful, feverish. He was sick, he told us, and didn’t know what to do. Go to the hospital, we said, but he said the hospital wouldn’t help him. He had no money and was there illegally. We gave him aspirin and ten dollars. There was nothing else we could do. We were tourists. That’s what we told ourselves. For years I wondered about that young man, whether he was okay. It weighed on me. He’d singled us out to ask for help, us out of all those people strolling by. We’d looked like the ones who would help, and we got rid of him with some aspirin and ten dollars.”
“So what you’re saying is that this is not about Jacob. It’s about me.”
She laughed. “I thought I was being more subtle.”
“You might not be skilled at subtlety, but that doesn’t mean you’re wrong.”
“So why not call the motel and talk to that receptionist? She probably kept up with things.”
“I’ve thought about calling her, but it feels strange, especially now that so many months have passed.”
“Well, what if we go there?” Winnie said at last.
“Go there?” he said. “To the motel?”
“Yes, to the motel.” She sounded excited. “A road trip with just the two of us.”
They both knew that there were other ways to find out what had happened to Jacob, more practical and efficient ways that did not involve driving for days, except the driving was the point. Aaron had always been most comfortable talking in cars, staring ahead with the knowledge that he did not have to rush through the conversation because there were miles to go.
They spent the first night in North Platte, Nebraska, at a motel that evoked the artificial peacefulness of a funeral parlor. When Aaron told the man behind the counter that they would like two rooms, the man said, “Well, at least she’s not making you sleep in the doghouse,” engaging in one of those jokes that husbands make to other husbands. The man winked at Winnie to let her know that he was just having fun, which meant there were two things to be annoyed by: the comment and the winking. Winnie rolled her eyes but did not respond to the man. She knew how Aaron hated confrontations.
After they were settled in their rooms, they decided they might as well take a walk, see a bit of North Platte, Nebraska, since neither of them imagined coming back here. Winnie wanted to see the grain elevator up close, which meant crossing a small bridge. As they paused halfway across it, she asked, “Is this what Mortonville was like?”
“Sort of,” he said, “though Mortonville was much smaller.”
“Smaller?” she said, as if it were not possible to imagine a place smaller than North Platte, Nebraska.
“Didn’t you see the sign when we came in? The population’s twenty-four thousand. That means North Platte”—he paused to do the math—“is sixty times the size of Mortonville. But if you’re asking whether it feels familiar, the answer’s yes, though bear in mind that familiar doesn’t necessarily mean comfortable.”
“What makes you uncomfortable?” she asked, but before he could formulate a response, she said, “Did what the motel guy said bother you?”
“You mean that he assumed we were married?”
It was not just the motel clerk. The waitress at the diner in Iowa where they stopped for lunch had come by the table when Winnie was in the bathroom and asked Aaron what his wife wanted to drink. He had not known how to respond but thought he might feel foolish if he made a point of insisting that Winnie was not his wife, so he said, “Can you check back after she returns from the restroom?” It turned out that this made him feel foolish also. As they drove, they had become just one more husband and wife eating, buying gas, driving across the middle of the country, together. It was as though he had stepped into another life, the life he might have lived had he not left Mortonville, had he not understood who he was, whom he desired.
“To be fair,” he told Winnie, “they’re looking at two people who clearly enjoy each other’s company, so it’s not a stretch to think we’re a couple. But if you’re asking whether it bothers me that I could be here with a man, looking just as pleased with his company, and these same people would be asking whether we’re brothers, and which one of us is older, and nonsense like that, yes, that bothers me.”
But he was guilty of making assumptions also, for hadn’t he decided that most of these people had never felt on the outside of anything, were incapable of seeing the world from the perspective of someone who was? Without even knowing them, he had concluded that they lacked the necessary imagination.
“When Walter and I traveled, we’d get to a town like this and find ourselves right back in the closet, actually thanking the motel clerk after he’d explained proudly that he’d managed to secure us a room with two beds. The truth is that a part of me enjoys how easy this feels, yet I simultaneously feel like, I don’t know, like I’m being erased, like I don’t exist here.” By then they were in front of the grain elevator, and they stood looking up at it together.
Later that night, after they had eaten dinner and gone back to their rooms, Aaron composed a letter to Walter on stationery from the North Platte Motel. He carried the letter with him, stamp-less, during the rest of the trip.
Dear Walter [he had written],
Do you remember how you tried to teach me Spanish and French, back in the beginning? “With your vocabulary and the ubiquity of cognates?” you used to say. “It’ll be a piece of pie.” “Piece of cake,” I’d always correct you, and then we’d argue about whether it was still a cliché if you changed one of the key words like that. “You’ve turned it into a cliché and a malapropism, which makes it doubly offensive,” I would say, and you’d reply with something like “Well, there’s more than one way to skin a mouse.” We’d laugh, and sometimes we’d have sex because we had that in common: verbal sparring aroused us. I know it will probably embarrass you that I’m writing about sex—you never liked to talk about it, at least not with me. I wish you would have told me why, but you didn’t, and I didn’t know h
ow to make you.
But back to language. I always argued that it was my fierce love of English—of its nuances and endless synonyms—that hindered my attempts to learn, that and the fact that you were a language professor. But what I never told you was that I abhorred cognates, that I preferred words that bore no resemblance to English, to the sounds that I formed on a daily basis. I gravitated toward the useless and obscure. In fact, I kept secret lists, words that I learned in the countries we visited: in Japanese, I liked inushishi, which is a wild boar; in German, I could request a sewing kit, a dustpan, or a table runner; and in Spanish, I could point to a child’s curly hair and say “ringlets.”
Of course, I could also exchange pleasantries and keep myself fed. But it was only in tossing around those useless words—blurting them out to children on trains and to the spouses of your colleagues as we sat together at interminable dinners—that I truly felt I was communicating, letting everyone know how far I was (and would always be) from ever being able to say anything that I really needed to say.
That is, I’m sorry.
Aaron
He finally mailed the letter from the airport in Minneapolis, as he waited for his flight back to San Francisco. Winnie had insisted on going with him to the airport, even though he still had the rental car to return. She was waiting for him just before the security checkpoint, holding a bag of cookies that she had stayed up making for him the night before. “Snickerdoodles,” she said happily. He’d told her once, years ago, that they were his favorite.
Then, they stood awkwardly for a few minutes, as people do when there is still more to say. “Beware of leaving guests,” he joked. It was something that Walter used to say, a Russian proverb he thought.
“You’re the one who’s insisting on leaving,” she said.
He thought about all the things he wanted to say to her. “Thanks for my cookies,” he said. “I love snickerdoodles.”
“I know,” Winnie said.
As he walked toward his gate, he took out the letter to Walter that he’d composed in North Platte, Nebraska, bought a stamp, and dropped it in a mailbox. Immediately, he wanted it back, but wasn’t it always that way with letters? There was that moment right after you’d put it in the box when you wished you’d said so much less—or so much more.
* * *
Whatever was wrong with him—and there was something wrong—had started before he walked into the school and saw Bill’s empty room and the smoking balcony door still leaning against the wall, before he awakened, exhausted, from his half day of sleep. He did not understand it. On the plane home he had been buoyant, filled with resolve: there were issues to be addressed, and he was going to address them. He would begin by telling the Ngs that he could hear everything, all their screaming and cursing and furniture shoving. Then he would find a new apartment, something quiet where he could maybe have a cat. Next, he would go to the café where he had met George and would keep going until he found him. He would invite George to take a walk with him, just a walk. Maybe they would become friends, maybe something more, but even if nothing ever happened, this nothing would at least be the result of something other than fear. The most important thing was that he was going to call Walter and make sure that the letter had arrived. He was going to apologize for not calling earlier.
These were the things he had planned to do, had thought about on the flight back from Minneapolis and was still thinking about as he rode BART into the city from the airport, but then he entered his studio beneath the Ngs’ house, dropped his bag on the bed, and discovered he did not have the energy to unpack it. Instead, he lay down and pulled the covers over his head, making a tent, where he stayed for hours, trying to empty his mind, as people who meditate claim to do, but he did not have a mind for meditation.
He tried an exercise he’d read about in a magazine one time. He was supposed to picture something, let it come into focus. What he saw was a package, neatly wrapped, like a gift beneath a Christmas tree. The tag on it said For: Walter and From: Aaron, and inside was An Apology. Except envisioning it beneath a tree reminded him that he had left just before Christmas and, worse, that he had never given Walter a gift, not once in all their years together. Walter had always claimed not to mind. He probably didn’t mind, but Aaron was still ashamed. He had let his mother’s injunction against gifts become a rule, and now Walter had nothing to remember their years together by.
When he tried to push these thoughts away by focusing on the gift itself—picturing himself handing the package to Walter and Walter opening it—he found that there was not only An Apology inside but so many other things, all the things he had realized during his trip: that he loved Walter but when he was right there beside him, day after day, the love part disappeared. It was only from a distance, without the daily grievances and resentments to obscure it, that he was able to recall this love at all, and even then, he was not sure whether what he felt was love or the memory of love. But if he included that in the package, he would need to include the part about how he had also come to hate Walter, in order for any of it to make sense. And what kind of gift was that?
* * *
“Did you find a new place yet?” Winnie asked each time she called, and each time he said, “No, I haven’t seen anything interesting.”
“You are looking?” she asked finally.
He did not answer, and Winnie did not fill the silence because she knew he would answer eventually. “No,” he said. “The truth is that I’m not doing anything. I go to school and I teach, if you can call it teaching, and then I come home and I wait to go to bed. I try to make it to nine because that seems like a respectable hour, but I rarely make it past eight. It’s like I’m swimming through the day, and the shore’s so far off, and the only way I can get to it is by taking one stroke at a time and ignoring everything else around me, and when I do get there, I’m exhausted. All I want to do is sleep.”
“What about your landlords?” she asked. He had told her about the Ngs. He had told her everything.
“The same. Everything’s the same, Winnie. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” He did not tell her that he was scared, though he supposed she knew.
“The trip was a lot,” Winnie said. “There’s also Bill’s death. Maybe you didn’t know him long, but he was your friend. Sometimes you just need to let yourself be sad, and if you don’t take time, your body takes it anyway. You’ve got a lot on your plate right now.”
“I taught my students that expression not long ago,” he said, “and now they use it constantly. Last week Melvin told me he wanted to do his upcoming presentation on the Amish because they have a lot on their plate.”
“What did he mean?” Winnie asked.
“I’m not sure. I think he meant that they have a lot of rules to follow. I guess I’ll find out soon enough—they start presenting tomorrow.”
“How is Melvin?” she asked. He had told her about what he had seen in the basement, and she said that he needed to talk to Melvin about it, that saying nothing only reinforced Melvin’s feeling that having sex with a man was shameful, which was what had led him to the basement in the first place. At the time he had agreed, but now, talking to Melvin was just one more thing he didn’t have the energy for.
“It’s always hard with Melvin to tell how he is,” Aaron said, “but I suspect Melvin has a lot on his plate also.”
* * *
The next morning, Aaron asked for a volunteer to begin the presentations. Everyone looked down, as students do when they fear being chosen. As he stared out at their bent heads, the room became once again a great expanse of water. He knew that if he stopped swimming, he would go under, so he sat at his desk and they stared at theirs, until finally Paolo raised his hand and said he would go first.
He went to the front of the room, smiled at everyone, and said, “Today I will tell you about a very important subject, Harley motorcycles in this country, the United States.” The students laughed, and Paolo looked pleased. “In August I will
go for first time to bike rally in Sturgis, South Dakota. This rally starts in 1938.” Aaron did not tell him to watch his verb tenses. Paolo wrote vocabulary words on the board—rally and hog and biker chick—and then he walked over to the map of the United States and traced the route that his motorcycle club would take when they drove to South Dakota. He told them how many miles they would ride each day and gave them data about how many bikers attended each year and how much money Sturgis earned from the rally, because at heart Paolo was still a man who felt most comfortable assessing the world in numbers.
When Paolo was finished, Neto raised his hand and went next. He had attended Burning Man for the first time and spoke with the zeal of a convert. His presentation consisted primarily of pictures of people who appeared to have survived an apocalypse. Normally Aaron would have tried to understand what Neto saw when he looked at the photos, would have asked Neto questions with that objective in mind, but this time he sat at his desk and watched Neto’s slideshow in silence. After that, one of the Borols talked about Levi’s jeans, which had been invented during the Gold Rush, and then Lila explained the role of the Chinese in building the railroads. She used note cards and a PowerPoint, and Aaron was sure no one would volunteer to follow her, but Melvin, surprising everyone, offered to go next.
His first talk, about computers, had been incomprehensible, but this time he stood in front of them and said, “I will tell you about some people I met when I was on East Coast. They are called Amish people. They do not drive cars or use telephones.” He showed a picture of an Amish horse and buggy and wrote the word buggy on the board. “My friend, who is Amish person, cannot sit at family table. He must sit quietly in corner to eat his food.” He turned and wrote shun beside buggy. “When I visit with my friend’s family, I sit at table but my friend, he is on the floor, and we must not talk to him.”