Read Online After the Parade by Lori Ostlund - Free Book Online Page B

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 daysto 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 bythe 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