by Lori Ostlund
The next week, Elmer was not present. From his booth, Aaron heard one of the waitresses say to a regular, “Did you hear? The terrorists finally got old Dick.” She inclined her head toward Elmer’s usual spot. Aaron finished his breakfast burrito and set a ten-dollar bill on the table, anchoring it with his coffee mug. When he got out to his car, he put his head down on the steering wheel and sobbed. He had not known the old man, had not even bothered to learn that his name was Dick, so he was not sure where the grief came from, except that he pictured the old man alone in his motel room, smoking and peering into the parking lot, and he regretted that he had not argued with him.
Aaron had not thought of Elmer, Dick, in a couple of years, but the Friday before he left Walter, as he sat at Milton’s for the last time, he looked around at the old men and what came to mind was Thoreau’s observation that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” He was sure Thoreau had meant, literally, men, for Aaron knew that men lived far lonelier lives than women—with the exception, perhaps, of his mother, though he considered the possibility that she was no longer lonely, that she had left Mortonville (and him) all those years ago to escape loneliness. He had not read Thoreau in years, not since college. He was not interested in reading about nature, not because he disliked nature, but because he disliked the artistic tendency to interpret nature, to put nature into words. He felt that nature spoke sufficiently for itself. He did not care to discuss it or to listen to others discuss it, nor to read about it in prose or poetic form or to see it depicted in art, for nature did not puzzle him: the seasons changed in the same order year after year, animals reproduced, birds assembled nests, flowers bloomed. People, on the other hand, did perplex him, and because the mind is often like that, gravitating toward mystery and challenge, Aaron preferred people.
Here was the thing, the irony perhaps: he had been coming to Milton’s these nine years in order to be alone. No one knew of his Friday ritual, especially not Walter, for how could he have explained to Walter that surrounded by these men, these lives-of-quiet-desperation men, he had acknowledged his own abiding loneliness. He ate a forkful of beans and looked around the diner, wondering whether anyone there would notice his absence and ask, “Does anyone know what happened to that quiet young fellow who came in every Friday and ordered the breakfast burrito with chorizo?”
He hoped so.
* * *
Aaron stopped to eat just after Bakersfield, at a place marked by an old door propped up beside the road, doorknob intact, painted with the words SALS FOOD. The apostrophe—what his students called “the up comma”—was missing, though he knew that the sign looked the same to most people with the apostrophe or without. He could not get over this, for all he could see was the missing mark; it was like looking at a face without a nose.
The parking lot was empty, which meant that he could position the U-Haul in front of the window. When he walked in, three waitresses jumped up from a booth and ran toward him, calling out, “Welcome. Merry Christmas.” There were no other diners. They tried to put him at a small table with a fresh flower on it, and when he asked for a booth near the window, they became flustered. Aaron wanted to tell them that the flower was beautiful but the truck outside contained everything he owned in the world. He noted the bulge in his throat, the telltale quiver of his chin, and knew that if he did not pick up the water glass that had been set before him and drink from it right away, he would begin to cry. The three waitresses watched him, listening to his throat convulse loudly as he swallowed. When he set the glass down, one of the women—SHIRLEY said her nametag—refilled it and handed him a menu. They watched him study it, and Shirley wrote down his order—a breakfast burrito with chorizo—while Margarita stood to the side snapping photos.
“I’m sorry,” said Shirley, nodding at Margarita. “You’re our first customer.”
“Ever?” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “We just opened ten minutes ago. I’m sorry if we don’t know what we’re doing. It’s our first time. We’re sisters. That’s our father.” She pointed to a man wearing a chef’s apron who stood in the doorway of the kitchen.
“Sal?” Aaron asked, and she nodded. He smiled at Margarita and hoisted his water glass as proof of their hospitality and his pleasure, evidence for their future customers, who would be looking at his picture—taped to the wall or the cash register—for years to come. “You’re doing very well,” he said.
“Thank you. Are you from around here?” she asked hopefully, though he could see that she did not think it likely.
“I’m passing through,” he said, and he pointed out the window to the truck. “I’m moving to San Francisco.”
3
* * *
Like most major cities of the world, San Francisco, Aaron would quickly learn, had developed its own brand of provincialism, which manifested itself in its citizens’ unwavering belief that theirs was the only city where one would want, even dare, to be gay. Upon discovering that he had spent the last nine years in New Mexico, more than one San Franciscan had remarked, “So I guess you moved here to really be gay,” a comment that annoyed but mainly perplexed him with its implication that, until now, he had been only going through the motions, playing at being gay.
“Actually, I came here because of a woman,” he generally replied. This was true, for he had chosen San Francisco because of Taffy, whom he had met two years earlier at an English-as-a-Second-Language conference in El Paso, a three-day event aimed at connecting ESL teachers with overseas jobs. He did not tell Walter that this was the conference’s emphasis, allowing Walter to believe that he was going off to learn yet another strategy for teaching the past unreal conditional. Aaron went with the goal not of securing a job abroad but of entertaining the notion, of talking to recruiters from Hungary and Japan as though he possessed the intention and the freedom to pick up and go. It was his first step toward leaving. Taffy, on the other hand, attended because Glenna, her girlfriend of twenty-five years, had broken up with her, which meant that Aaron and she were two halves of the same coin—the leaver and the left. They became inseparable, attending meals and events and group interviews together, prompting a recruiter from Osaka to inquire, hopefully, whether they were married, hopefully because married couples were highly sought after, two-for-ones that were considered more stable. Aaron was afraid that even uttering a simple “no” would reveal the shock and horror he felt at considering the question, at imagining Taffy as his lover.
Her given name, the one recorded on her conference pass, was Hulda. It suited her far better than Taffy, which was, after all, not a name but a candy. One heard Taffy and expected a pink-hued, stickily sweet young thing and not a dour, obese woman in her fifties who wore too much red, unbecomingly, and often left her hotel room without wiping the sleep from her eyes or the toothpaste residue from the corners of her mouth, oversights that Aaron felt obligated to point out. He told himself that Taffy had been getting along just fine without him, yet each morning at breakfast he found himself mentioning the glob of lotion that clung to the side of her cheek or offering her his unused napkin while noting that she might want to give her nose one more good blow, all of which had imposed a level of intimacy with Taffy that he did not want.
“Not married,” Aaron finally replied. “We’re friends.” This struck him as deceitful.
The recruiter, a trim Japanese man in his sixties, smiled at his response. Was he smiling at how long it had taken Aaron to respond, or because he considered friendship a virtue worth smiling about? Or was he suggesting Aaron had employed friends as a euphemism for lovers, which meant that the conversation was back where it had started. Generally, Aaron enjoyed these strolls across cultural lines, into territory where people and situations could not be easily read or categorized. It was one of the aspects of teaching foreigners that appealed to him, but this interaction had drained him.
On the final afternoon of the conference, as Aaron and Taffy worked their way, table by table, through the conference hall, a Ko
rean recruiter informed Taffy that she would not find work unless she lost weight. “Diet,” the delegate said, pronouncing the word with an odd inflection so that, at first, Aaron thought he was actually speaking Korean.
Smiling pleasantly, Taffy assured the man that she had no interest in teaching in Korea. “Crossed it off my list ages ago,” she said, adding in a mock-friendly tone, “Korean food is not very likable.” She laughed and slapped the man on the back, and as she and Aaron walked away, she whispered, “That’ll get him. Koreans can’t stand to have their food maligned.” Then she slapped Aaron on the back. “Come on,” she said. “We might as well get a jump on happy hour.”
They left the sea of tables, each representing an opportunity to escape the lives to which they would be returning the next day, and once they were settled in the hotel bar, drinking beer and eating free nachos, Aaron said, “Don’t you think the Korean recruiter felt bad about what you said?”
“I hope he did,” said Taffy. “That was the point, after all.” She licked a glob of greasy cheese from her palm. “What I wouldn’t give for some kimchi right about now, but what are the chances of finding decent kimchi in El Paso, Texas?”
Aaron did not reply, and after a moment, Taffy said, “He started it, Aaron. The man insulted me. Do we agree?” Her voice was sharp.
Aaron nodded.
“And do I not have the right to defend myself?”
Aaron did not look at her or respond.
“Listen,” she said. “Is it because he’s Korean? Is that what this is about? You’re going to sit there and make one of those bullshit cultural relativity arguments?” She let her voice drift up to a breezy falsetto: “ ‘Oh, it’s wrong for an American to call me a fat pig, but we need to excuse him since he’s from a different culture.’ Because I can assure you that there are plenty of fat Koreans who would feel just as humiliated as I did, and he knows that. And if he doesn’t, well, it’s time he learned.”
She was breathing heavily, not even waiting for him to reply. “Or maybe you think I should be used to it by now. I’m fat, so I need to expect people to say things, right? It goes with the territory. Is that it, Aaron?” She pounded the table hard as she spoke, the basket of nachos hopping like a rabbit toward the edge. “Or maybe this is some male solidarity thing that I’m just not getting?” She studied him. “Somehow, I don’t peg you that way, but there you have it. Help me out if I’ve missed something.”
Aaron thought about the ease with which the man had spoken, as though Taffy’s body, her fat, were public domain, open for scrutiny and comment. He knew that he had hurt her more deeply than the Korean recruiter had because the recruiter was a stranger, while he was supposed to be her friend. Still, nothing changed the fact that he was put off by Taffy in a way that seemed beyond his control, repulsed not by her size or laxness in grooming but by something he did not fully understand, though he knew it had to do with the way she positioned herself in the world. She had told him at breakfast one morning that she taught only beginning ESL because she preferred the docility of students who did not yet comprehend what was being said to or expected of them. He imagined her as a child, the one always put in charge when teachers left the room because they knew she would report everything, caring more about this small measure of power than she did the goodwill of her peers.
Taffy dipped another chip into the cheese and opened her mouth wide to receive the whole dripping mess, then slapped her greasy hands across her thighs, thumping them like watermelons. “I’m fat, Aaron,” she declared, bits of nacho flying from her mouth. He felt one land on his face but did not reach up with his napkin to brush it away because he thought that that was what she expected him to do. He glanced at the tables around them. More than anything, he wanted her to lower her voice.
“That’s what Glenna always did,” she said. “Looked around to see whether anyone was listening.”
“Well, she probably couldn’t focus on the conversation with people listening. It’s like having two audiences, and they want completely different things. You want to know what I think, but everyone else wants to be entertained, and I don’t care to be entertainment for a bunch of strangers.”
This, in fact, was Grievance #78: When Walter wants to win an argument, he waits until we’re in public, knowing that the minute it gets heated, I’ll back down. He claims there’s no forethought involved, that he cannot stifle himself simply because there are others around. Still, I can’t help but feel that he seeks out an audience of strangers as a way to silence me.
After that, neither of them was in the mood for another beer. Aaron picked up the tab, and Taffy let him. The next morning, they ate breakfast together, and Aaron did not point out that Taffy’s shirt was misbuttoned. They said good-bye outside the dining room, shaking hands and exchanging addresses, though Aaron did not think they would keep in touch. However, once he was back home, away from Taffy and the constant stoking of his aversion, Aaron found himself remembering their time together with remorse. Eventually, he wrote to her, a brief note offering standard pleasantries—“It was great to meet you”—clipped to an article about teaching incorrect grammar to ESL students to help them better fit in with Americans. They had discussed the subject at breakfast the first morning, bonding over their mutual indignation. He hoped that she would see the letter as an overture.
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.
