by Lori Ostlund
“Just call,” he said, and he ran back outside. When he got to room 253, he hesitated, the full weight of his good-fences-make-good-neighbors upbringing bearing down on him. He raised his hand and knocked hard at the door. The room went silent, and he knew that something was very wrong.
“Hello?” he called, making his voice louder because he had learned early on in teaching that volume was the best way to conceal a quaver.
The receptionist came up the steps and stood watching, afraid, he knew, of the responsibility they shared, of the haste with which she had wedded her life to his. “Key?” he mouthed, but she shook her head. He stepped back until he felt the walkway railing behind him and then rushed at the door, doing this again and again until the chain ripped away and he was in.
* * *
The receptionist’s name was Britta. He had heard her spelling it for the policeman who took down their stories as they stood outside the door that Aaron had broken through minutes earlier.
That night she knocked at his room door. “It’s me, Britta,” she called, without adding qualifiers—“the receptionist” or “we saved a boy’s life together this afternoon.”
When he opened the door, she said, “I came to give you an update on Jacob,” but she was carrying a six-pack of beer, which confused him. Still, he invited her in because he could not sleep, could not stop picturing the boy—Jacob—lying on the floor as though he simply preferred it to the bed, as though he had lain down there and gone to sleep. There’d been blood, and the boy’s arm was flung upward and out at an angle that only a broken bone would allow. The mother sat to the side, sobbing about her son from a distance, from the comfort of a chair. She was not smoking but Aaron later thought of her that way, as a woman who sat in a chair and smoked while her husband threw her son against the wall. It was the husband who surprised him most: a small, jovial-looking man with crow’s-feet (duck feet a student had once called them, mistaking the bird) and a face that seemed suited for laughing.
He and Britta did not drink the beer she had brought, though he could see that she wanted to. “It’s still cold,” she said hopefully as she set it down. She would not go further, would not slip a can from the plastic noose without his prompting. She was an employee after all, used to entering these rooms deferentially. Aaron was relieved. He had left behind everything that was familiar, but at least he recognized himself in this person who would not drink beer with a teenager in a cheap motel room in Needles, California.
The beer sat sweating on the desk between the television and the Gideon Bible. “Were you reading the Bible?” Britta asked, for of course she would know that it was generally kept tucked away in the bottom drawer of the desk. He felt embarrassed by the question, though he could see that she considered Bible-reading a normal activity, one to be expected given what had happened earlier.
“Not really,” he said, which was true. He had spent the last three hours not really doing anything. He had tried, and failed at, a succession of activities: sleeping, reading (both the Gideon Bible and Death Comes for the Archbishop, his least favorite Willa Cather book, though he periodically felt obligated to give it another chance), studying the map of California in an attempt to memorize the final leg of his trip, mending a small tear that had appeared in his shirtsleeve, and watching television. When Britta knocked, he had been sitting on the bed listening, the way he had as a child just after his father died and he lay in bed each night straining to hear whether his mother was crying in her room at the other end of the house. Some nights he heard her (gasping sobs that he would be reminded of as an adult when he overheard people having sex) while other nights there was silence.
“Where are you going?” Britta asked him.
“San Francisco,” he said.
She nodded in a way that meant she had no interest in such things: San Francisco specifically, but really the world outside Needles. He tried to imagine himself as Britta, spending his days interacting with people who were on the move, coming from or going to places that he had never seen, maybe never even heard of. Was it possible that she had not once felt the urge to pack up and follow, to solve the mystery of who Britta would be—would become—in Columbus, Ohio, or Roanoke, Virginia? It seemed inconceivable to him, to have no curiosity about one’s parallel lives, those lives that different places would demand that you live.
They sat in silence, he at the foot of the bed and she in the chair beside the desk. He did not know what to say next. “Do you like working at the motel?” he asked finally.
“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s kind of boring most of the time, but sometimes it’s interesting.”
“Give me an example of something interesting,” he said, his teacher’s voice never far away. “Other than today, of course.”
“Today wasn’t interesting,” she said. “It was scary. I threw up afterward. Weren’t you scared at all?”
“Yes,” he said. “Actually, I was terrified.”
She smiled, and then she began to cry. “Do you think we did the right thing?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “My boyfriend—Lex—he said that it was none of our business. And my boss is this Indian guy—he’s all in a bad mood now because he said it’s bad for business for people to see the cops here.”
Aaron’s first impulse was to ask what her boss’s ethnicity had to do with the rest of her statement, but he did not. He sensed no malice, and the question would only confuse her. “Listen,” he said sternly. “We definitely did the right thing. Okay? We saved a boy’s life.”
His voice broke on the word saved. It seemed he had been waiting his whole life to save this boy, though he did not believe in fate, did not believe that everything in his forty-one years had happened in order to bring him here, to a run-down motel in Needles, California, so that he might save Jacob. No. They were two separate facts: he had saved a life, and he was alone. He had never felt so tired.
“I need to go to bed,” he said, and he stood up.
Britta stood also and picked up her beer, leaving behind six wet circles on the desktop. “He’s in a coma,” she announced as she paused in the doorway. “Jacob. So you see, we might not have saved him. He might die anyway.”
Aaron leaned against the door frame, steadying himself. “At least we gave him a chance,” he said. Then, because he did not have it in him to offer more, he offered this: “You’re a good person, Britta, and that’s important.”
They were standing so close that he could smell alcohol and ketchup on her breath. He imagined her sitting in a car in an empty parking lot somewhere in Needles with her boyfriend, Lex, the two of them eating French fries and drinking beer as she tried to tell Lex about Jacob while Lex rubbed his greasy lips across her breasts.
“Good night,” Aaron said, gently now. He shut the door and pressed his ear to it, waiting to slide the chain into place because he worried she might take the sound of it personally, though later he realized that she would not have thought the chain had anything to do with her. It was a feature of the room, something to be used, like the ice bucket or the small bars of soap in the bathroom.
* * *
When the telephone rang, he sat up fast in the dark and reached for it. “Hello,” he said.
“Front desk,” said the man on the other end. He sounded bored, which reassured Aaron. “You have the U-Haul in the parking lot.”
“Yes,” said Aaron, though the man had not inflected it as a question. “Is something wrong? What time is it?”
“You’ll need to come down to the parking lot. Sir.” The “sir” was an afterthought, and later Aaron knew he should have considered that, should have weighed the man’s reassuring boredom against that pause.
“Now?” said Aaron. “Is something wrong?” But the line had already gone dead.
He looked at the bedside clock. It seemed so long ago that he had been lying beside Walter, worrying about the truck, yet it had been only twenty-four hours. He dressed and ran down
the steps to the parking lot, where a man stood beside the truck. Aaron had parked under a light—not intentionally, for he had been too tired for such foresight—and as he got closer, he could see that the man was young, still a boy, with hair that held the shape of a work cap.
“What’s wrong?” Aaron asked. The boy lifted his right hand in a fist and slammed it into Aaron’s stomach.
As a child, Aaron had been bullied—punched, taunted, bitten so hard that his arm swelled—but he had always managed to deflect fights as an adult. It was not easy. He was tall, four inches over six feet, and his height was often seen as a challenge, turning innocent encounters—accidentally jostling someone, for example—into potential altercations. He did not know how to reconcile what other men saw when they looked at him with the image preserved in his mind, that of a small boy wetting himself as his father’s casket was lowered into the ground.
The boy hit him again, and Aaron dropped backward onto his buttocks. “What do you want?” he asked, looking up at the boy.
“I’m Lex,” said the boy.
“Ah, yes, Britta’s friend.”
“Boyfriend,” said the boy.
“Yes, of course,” said Aaron, but something about the way he articulated this angered the boy even more. He jerked back his foot and kicked Aaron hard in the hip. Aaron whimpered. He had learned early on that bullies liked to know they were having an effect.
“What was she doing in there?” asked the boy.
“Where?” said Aaron. “In my room, you mean? We were talking. She was telling me about Jacob, the child we saved this afternoon.”
“So why was she crying then?”
“Crying?” said Aaron.
“She was crying when she came out. I saw her. I was right here the whole time, and I saw her come out of your room. She was crying, and she wouldn’t talk to me.”
“Well,” Aaron said, trying to think of words, which was not easy because he was frightened. He could see the fury in the boy, the fury at being in love with someone he did not understand. “You do realize that people cry. Sometimes we know why they are crying, and sometimes we do not. Britta had an extremely hard day. She saw a child who had been beaten almost to death.”
The boy looked down at him. “She was in your room. You can talk how you like, mister, but she was in your room.”
Aaron realized only then what it was the boy imagined. “I don’t have sex with women,” he said quietly. He thought of his words as a gift to the boy, who did not have it in him to add up the details differently, to alter his calculations. Behind him, Aaron could hear the interstate, the sound of trucks floating past Needles at night.
“What?” said Lex. “What are you saying? That you’re some kind of fag?” His voice was filled with wonder.
Later, when he was in the U-Haul driving away, Aaron would consider Lex’s phrasing: some kind of fag, as if fags came in kinds. He supposed they did. He did not like the word fag, but he knew where he stood with people who used it, knew what they thought and what to expect from them. He had nodded, agreeing that he was some kind of fag because the question was not really about him. Lex’s fist somersaulted helplessly in the air, his version of being left speechless, and he turned and walked away.
Aaron’s wallet was in his back pocket, the truck keys in the front. He could simply rise from the pavement, get into the truck, and drive away. He wished that he were that type of person, one who lived spontaneously and without regrets, but he was not. He was the type who would berate himself endlessly for leaving behind a much-needed map and everything else that had been in the overnight bag. He went back up to his room, checked beneath the bed and in the shower, though he had not used the latter, and when he left, he had everything with which he had arrived. He drove slowly away from Needles, waiting for the sun to catch up with him.
2
* * *
“Tell me what you want, Aaron,” Walter had periodically insisted, his tone turning impatient these last few years, the words no longer an invitation but a way of chiding Aaron, of suggesting that he wanted too much—or worse, that he had no idea what he wanted. But in the beginning of their lives together, back when they were two discrete people, Walter’s motives felt easy to read: Tell me who you are, he seemed to be saying. Tell me what you want from this life. Only later had Aaron understood that his real motive in asking was to discover how he might serve as benefactor to Aaron’s wishes and ambitions and, in doing so, bind Aaron to him.
Walter had first posed the question on a Sunday afternoon, as they drove toward Moorhead, Minnesota, where Walter was a language professor—French and Spanish, Italian in a pinch—at the university. Though it was hard even to imagine such a time now, they were strangers then, two men (one just barely) occupying the intimacy of a car. Aaron had spent the first five years of his life in Moorhead. It was there that his father had died, his death causing something to shift in Aaron’s mother so that soon after, the two of them had moved to Mortonville. Aaron still had memories of the house his family had lived in and the street where his father died, enough to make his arrival with Walter a homecoming, even though he thought of what he was doing that day as running away. It was all a matter of perspective: whether one was focused on leaving or arriving, on the past or the future.
In the midst of pondering this, he heard Walter say, “Tell me, Aaron. What is it that you want?”
“I want a different brain,” he had answered.
He was eighteen and bookish, this latter the adjective that he would employ as an adult—euphemistically—to indicate that he had not yet had sex. He did not mean that he actually wanted a different brain but rather that he wanted to fill the one he had with knowledge and experiences of which he could not yet conceive but was sure existed. Walter had laughed, not unkindly, but the laughter had upset Aaron, a feeling that was underscored by the music playing on Walter’s cassette deck. It was classical music, which Aaron had never known anyone to listen to, not like this: in the car, for pleasure. People in Mortonville listened to country music and rock, hymns and patriotic songs, though they did not discount such things as classical music and poetry. Most of them were proud that their children could recite nine poems by the end of sixth grade, a poem a month. They saw these poems as proof that their children were getting educated, for they were practical people who did not expect education to be practical, did not expect it to make their children better farmers or housewives. If it did, it was probably not education.
When Aaron was nine, Mrs. Carlsrud had assigned each student a classical composer, about whom the child was expected to deliver an oral report. He was assigned Sibelius, who was a Finn, a Swedish Finn, a distinction of importance in Mortonville, where most people were either Scandinavian or German. The Scandinavian block was dominated by the Norwegians and Swedes, who were seen as separate groups, except when discussed beside the Finns; the Finns were technically Scandinavian, but they were different. All of them, every single Finn in Mortonville, lived east of town, a self-imposed segregation. They even had their own church, which sat atop a hill amid their farms.
The first day of the presentations, Ellen Arndt stood at the front of the classroom holding a small stack of recipe cards, from which she read two parallel pieces of information: “Tchaikovsky was a Russian and a homosexual.” Three children giggled, and Sharon Engstrom raised her hand and said, “What’s a Russian?” When Mrs. Carlsrud replied that a Russian was “someone from Russia, a communist,” Sharon Engstrom said, “Then what’s a homosexual?,” shifting her focus to the second noun, which included the word sex after all, and the same three children laughed.
“That is not relevant,” said Mrs. Carlsrud, her reply suggesting to Aaron that homosexuals were worth investigating. He planned to ask his mother about the word after school, but when he arrived at the café, their café, she was preparing the supper special, meatballs, and because she did not like to be asked questions when she was busy, he waited until the two of them were closing up that night
.
“What does homosexual mean?” he asked as he filled the saltshakers.
“What makes you ask?” said his mother. She was running her hands under the bottoms of the tables, looking for improperly disposed of gum.
“Today, Ellen Arndt said that Tchaikovsky was a Russian and a homosexual, and Mrs. Carlsrud said that Russians live in Russia but homosexuals aren’t relevant.”
“Well,” his mother said. “It means he likes men.”
“Why isn’t it relevant?” he said.
“That’s just something Mrs. Carlsrud said because she didn’t want to talk about it,” said his mother. Then, she turned off the lights in the dining room and went upstairs, which was what she did when she didn’t want to talk about something.
* * *
The first time Aaron and Walter met was on a Saturday morning when Walter came into the café for breakfast. He was alone, for his weekend fishing trips to Mortonville were solitary affairs. Aaron was fifteen. He later learned that Walter was thirty, twice his age, though Aaron, like most teenagers, had no sense of what thirty looked like. Walter stood by the door, waiting to be seated, which was not the custom at the café, so Aaron finally approached him and asked whether he needed directions.
Years later, as he walked through the Castro, Aaron would be struck by how many gay male couples looked alike, the narcissistic component of love driven home in stark visual terms, but he and Walter were opposites. Aaron’s hair was blond and fine, and already, at fifteen, he wore it in a severe right part, while Walter’s hair that day was unevenly shorn, with dark, curly patches sprouting out along his neck and across the top. When Aaron next encountered him, his hair would be long and frizzy, though just as inexpertly cut. Over the years, Walter would come home with one bad haircut after another, the bad part the only constant, but when Aaron asked why he didn’t try a different salon, Walter would reply with a shrug, “Nobody around here knows how to cut Jew hair anyway.”
