by Lori Ostlund
“What’s going on in your head that needs escaping?” George asked softly.
Instead of answering, Aaron said, “I’m talking too much. What do you do?”
George laughed. He knew Aaron was sidestepping the question. “Do you want to guess?” he asked. “Twenty Questions, maybe?”
“I am extremely bad at Twenty Questions,” Aaron said. “I forget what I’ve already asked and ask questions that are entirely too specific or that have nothing to do with the topic at all. I can assure you that the best approach is for you to just tell me.”
George picked up their pie forks and pretended to make a drum roll, which Aaron normally would have found silly or annoying but instead found endearing because he could see how foreign the gesture was to George, that he was not someone who punctuated his conversations with drum rolls. “I’m a Muni cop,” George said. “I’m one of those guys that rides around all day asking to see your ticket.”
“Do you like it?” Aaron asked.
“I like the hours. I don’t like spending my days underground watching people get nervous the minute I get on the train.” He paused, and Aaron could tell that he was thinking about something. “Today, for example, I got on the K at West Portal, and I saw this young couple with a baby, all three of them looking like they hadn’t eaten in days. I knew right away they didn’t have tickets, that they were probably just riding around hoping the motion would lull the baby to sleep.”
“How old was the baby?” Aaron asked.
“I don’t know, maybe a year. She was at that point where you could tell she was a girl. Anyway, I had to ask them for their tickets along with everyone else. I figured they were going to either hand me expired tickets they’d taken from the garbage or feign some type of ignorance, pretend to be tourists who don’t speak English or act like they were looking everywhere for their tickets, and I already knew what I was going to do: make them get off with me at the next stop for appearance’s sake, and then just send them on their way. Except the father says, ‘I’m sorry, Officer, but the baby grabbed our tickets and ate them.’ And I look at the baby, who’s hungry and clearly needs her diaper changed and didn’t ask for any of this, and I want to punch the guy. I mean, I just felt this rage inside.
“So I say, ‘Both of your tickets?’ And he nods. ‘Without either of you being able to stop her?’ And he nods again. ‘Well, then, we need to call a medical unit,’ I say, and I make a move toward my walkie-talkie, ‘because that’s a lot of paper for a little thing like her to digest. They might even need to keep her—you know, for observation or something like that.’ I was just talking, trying to get the guy to admit he’d lied. Listening to myself tell you the story now, it doesn’t make any sense—that I was so angry, that I thought it would change anything for that baby if he admitted he’d lied.”
George shook his head, and Aaron wanted to say something to let him know that it did make sense, but George continued with the story. “So then the girl jumps in. ‘Please don’t call,’ she says. ‘They’ll take her. We lied. Okay? We don’t have tickets,’ and the guy turns and yells at her to shut up and makes this move toward her with his fist. It was obvious she was used to stuff like this from him because she cowered back in her seat and got quiet.”
“What did you do?” Aaron asked.
“You mean did I add even more to the mess I’d already made?”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Aaron said. “The guy’s a jerk.”
“I know,” George said. “But I also know that I lost sight of what I was supposed to be doing, which was checking tickets. Anyway, you asked what happened next, and that’s the best part. The whole time this big butch is sitting next to them, reading. Well, she stands up, sets her book on the seat, and nails the guy. Just boom. Then she sits back down and begins reading again. Jonathan Livingston Seagull, of all things. The baby starts crying, and the guy shakes his head like something’s loose, and he turns to me and says, ‘You saw it. I want that dyke arrested,’ and I say, ‘Saw what?’ ”
George laughed but his eyes were red. “Anyway, if you ask me a different day, I’d probably say that I like the job well enough. I like the pay and the fact that I can do a forty-hour week in four days and have three left over for other stuff.”
“What sort of stuff?” Aaron asked.
George looked embarrassed. “I want to make documentaries,” he said. “But that’s a discussion for another day because, unfortunately, I have somewhere I’m supposed to be. I’m already late.”
“Oh, right. Sorry,” said Aaron. He jumped up, and they paid and walked out of the café and onto the street. He wanted to ask something that would indicate whether George had enjoyed their conversation as much as he had or whether this was just the way he passed his afternoons, but he knew that asking would require subtlety, and he did not know how to be subtle in a hurry. They turned in opposite directions, Aaron heading toward the Muni entrance and George hurrying off toward—Aaron imagined—a tryst or a lover at home.
Then, like two men dueling, they spun back around and looked at each other. “You might come here Sunday on a whim,” George called, and Aaron laughed and nodded, understanding that he was agreeing to a date.
However, when Sunday came around, Aaron could not bring himself to go because he was overwhelmed by desire, a desire that was not only sexual, though there was definitely that. It was the nonsexual part that frightened him. Specifically, in the days after their meeting, he had found himself wanting to tell George things: that he enjoyed taking public transportation, sitting on Muni surrounded by people from all over the world; that he rode public transportation sometimes just to be near people, not for companionship but because he never felt as keenly alone as when he stood pressed uncomfortably close to strangers; that he needed to feel alone. He wanted to tell George about something that he had recently witnessed in United Nations Plaza. He was on his way to an afternoon concert at the symphony hall, Dvoák’s New World Symphony, one of his favorites, but he’d arrived early, so he settled on a bench. As he sat there in his suit and tie, a group of young people, grubby and presumably homeless, had engaged in a ritualistic shaving of one another’s underarms. They stood in a circle near the fountain and took turns stroking the shaver against the underarms of the person beside them, dipping it into the fountain, then passing it on. Aaron felt repulsed yet could not stop watching. In the end, he had to run to make it to the concert on time. He could imagine telling George the whole story while George nodded and asked questions. He liked imagining it, and that was what frightened him, this desire to have George listen and nod as he tried to describe the trust involved in lifting one’s arms like that, in letting another person take in your smell and touch a razor to one of the most tender parts of your body.
He had told no one about George, not even Taffy. “The Castro?” she said. “Why don’t we have a drink somewhere nearby?” He knew that she assumed he would agree to this request, and he supposed he should, but he also knew that if they were really friends he would have told her about meeting George and standing him up and wanting to go back to the café in the hope of fixing things. He had not told her because they were not really friends. He appreciated her help, he did, but when he thought about his future, he did not picture Taffy in it, except as someone with whom he might occasionally have a drink while discussing nothing more personal than students and pedagogy.
“Rain check?” he said, though he supposed they both knew this was unlikely. They walked down to the first floor together and got on different buses outside the school, and when he arrived in the Castro, he went directly to the café, where he looked through the window. He saw a man—just the back of his head—that might be George, and he did not go inside. Instead, he walked up Market to Civic Center, where he sat for a long while on a bench, waiting for something to happen, for strangers to start shaving the underarms of other strangers, to begin stroking their brows or brushing their hair or feeding them by hand, to begin doing the kinds of things t
hat strangers did not do for other strangers—because he knew now that sometimes they did.
* * *
Aaron did not know how the friendship with Bill began, even whether it could be called a friendship, since they had nothing in common. Still, in the weeks following the episode with the broken smoking balcony door, they came to know things about each other, and wasn’t that what friendship came down to? He knew, for example, that Bill had been married three times. “First to a black lady, Marabelle,” he told Aaron as they stood in the hallway during break, “and then a white lady. That was Peggy. Last was Misclaida from Cuba. So you see, I’ve tried this marriage thing from different angles, but none of them took. Now I play the dating sites a bit, but that’s about it. How about you?”
Aaron wanted to tell Bill that he would never meet a woman if he thought of dating sites as something to be played, like slot machines, but Bill had not solicited his advice. Instead, Aaron told him about Walter, and Bill nodded. “I had you pegged that way,” he said, clearly pleased with himself.
“What way?” Aaron said. “As someone who could pull off a twenty-year relationship, or as someone who would leave that relationship behind?” He knew that Bill meant neither of these, but he wanted to make him say it.
Bill laughed. “No, I could just tell you were a little light in the loafers.”
“You do know that people don’t really use that expression anymore? If, in fact, they ever did.”
Bill laughed again. He knew all about “the gays,” he said. He’d grown up right here in San Francisco—okay, technically in Daly City, which was where you found yourself if you went all the way down Mission and kept going even after it stopped being interesting. Aaron said that he had not explored that part of town yet, and Bill said, “You remember that song ‘Little Boxes,’ right?” and Aaron said he did, and Bill announced proudly that the song had been written about Daly City.
“My impression of the song is that it’s not meant to be flattering,” Aaron said.
“I suppose that depends on how you look at things,” Bill said. “Sometimes it’s just plain nice not to have to think about who’s got the better house ’cause ‘they’re all made out of ticky tacky and they all look just the same.’ ” He sang this last part. Aaron was surprised at his voice, which was soothing and sweet.
Chaa came up to them with a bag of durian chips, and Bill, who had never heard of durian, took several and then spit them back into his hand. “That is the absolute worst thing I’ve ever put in my mouth,” he said to Chaa, who laughed as if this were precisely the response he had hoped for. After Chaa walked away, Bill turned to Aaron. “I bet it’s not the worst thing you’ve ever put in your mouth,” he said.
“You’re sure you’re not gay?” Aaron replied. “Because you have the sense of humor of an aging queen.”
Quickly, they progressed from talking in the hallway during breaks to having a drink together several times a week at a nearby café. Bill referred to it as the hippie café because of the menu, though Aaron pointed out that a true hippie café would not have so many ringing cell phones. It was there that Bill told Aaron the story of his father, who had been one of those people who could figure out a money angle on anything. During the Korean War, he’d gone on a two-week leave to Thailand, where, at a roadside stall that sold gasoline from cans and fixed cars in a small shack behind, he had stumbled across a shedful of old car parts, never used, all still in their boxes and covered with dust. Bill said that his father was the sort of man who was always stumbling across things. He came home from Korea, started a family, and it was only years later that he thought about those parts and went back to Thailand. He made his way through Thailand as well as Malaysia, stopping at any out-of-the-way place that looked like it might service cars. When he came across a stash of parts, especially those for vintage Mercedes-Benzes, he acted like he could not imagine anyone wanting such things—pristine gearshift knobs and hubcaps, mirrors and window cranks—even as he bought everything up, offering fifty cents or a dollar and the illusion that he was the one granting favors.
“We were dirt poor,” Bill said, “and then my father came home with that shipping container of parts, and within a year, he’d sold it all, sometimes for a five-hundred- or even thousand-time markup.” He paused to drink half of his beer. “He loved to tell stories to anyone who’d listen about how he’d acquired all those parts, but he never let on that it had made him rich. It wasn’t until he died years later that we found out he owned buildings all over the city, land up in Napa, but we never moved out of the ticky tacky house in Daly City. He kept locks on the cupboards and the fridge that only he had keys to, and he instructed my mother that we were to eat just one meal a day. It was served at five sharp, and if we missed it, well, we missed eating that day. The rest of the time we drank coffee, gallons of it. He kept a big pot going in the kitchen because he’d heard somewhere, maybe in the army, that coffee was a hunger depressant. We filled our stomachs with it until our insides were bloated and raw and we couldn’t sleep, but that was fine with him because exhaustion was also a hunger depressant.
“When I was a teenager, I started going to early Mass before school every day, just to have that communion wafer in my stomach. And to this day I’m the best speller you’re likely to meet because every Friday at school we had a spelling contest, and the prize was a candy bar. The teacher didn’t know what to make of it: Billy Dawkins, who failed every test he ever took, winning spelling bees. I wanted to tell her that for a hamburger or a box of cereal, I’d learn anything they wanted, ace every test, but I was too proud for that, and besides, my father would have killed me. Not because he worried about what people thought. He didn’t. He just didn’t want anyone meddling in his business.
“I was sixteen the last time I saw him. I came home from school so hungry I’d almost fainted during PE, and when I walked in, I saw him at the table. Until then, I’d always figured that while he was starving us, he was starving himself also. It was a small consolation to think that way, that we were all in it together—you know, that that’s how being poor worked. The thing is, I think most days he did hold himself to the same standard, but not that day. That day he was sitting there with a mound of pickled pigs’ feet piled high on a sheet of butcher paper, everything about him slick with vinegar and grease, a pile of bones that he’d sucked clean tossed to the side. The bones were tiny, like children’s knucklebones. It was watching him suck those bones that did it. I knocked him off his chair and wrestled him to the floor. I had my hands around his neck, would have killed him too if my mother hadn’t come in then and begged me to stop. When I stood up, my father yelled, ‘Get out of my house. Get out and don’t come back. I’m not spending another dime on you.’
“And I said, ‘Right. Because that would mean doubling what you’ve spent so far.’ ” Bill laughed and finished his beer. “I’ve always been very proud that that was the last thing I said to him, that I had the presence of mind to say something, you know, sort of clever. So I packed a few things and left—never saw the bastard again. It wasn’t until he died that it came out about him being filthy rich, a millionaire actually. Of course, he’d written me out of his will the very day I left. My sisters tried to give me my third anyway, but I refused. I didn’t want a thing from him.”
“How did you survive?” Aaron asked. “You were just a boy.”
“Our priest helped. He was a good man—found me a job working construction and a place to live. I had to leave school, but that was bound to happen anyway. I did that for maybe eight or ten years, and then I got hooked up with this whole detective business, apprenticed myself to an old guy and found out I was pretty good at it. He couldn’t get around so much anymore, so I became his legs, and he taught me everything I know about the business, which is considerable.” He looked down at his empty beer glass as though he wished it were not empty. “It’s a funny thing, isn’t it,” he said. “I drop out of school when I’m sixteen, and here I am, almost forty years
later, a teacher. Not a very good one, but it’s still a heck of a thing.”
“Yet another example of life’s abundant irony,” Aaron said. Then, afraid that Bill might think he was mocking him, he continued, “When I was a boy, my mother owned a café, which we lived above. My bedroom window looked out over the street facing Bildt Hardware and Swenson’s Variety Store, which sold primarily groceries but also school supplies and bed linens. At night I lay in bed, watching the Swenson’s neon sign flash off and on: Variety. Variety. Variety. Variety. I’d been watching that sign for years before it suddenly hit me that there was actually something very funny about a sign that promised variety flashing off and on in the same monotonous way night after night.”
It was the first time he had told Bill anything about his childhood, and he stopped there, not explaining about the pleasure he had felt that night at realizing that this was irony. That would mean talking about Clarence, who had predicted that he would grow nicely into irony. He was not ready to talk about Clarence.
Bill laughed. “Yup,” he said, “it’s a fine thing, irony.”
* * *
Bill still attended Mass at Mission Dolores once a week. “Oftener,” he told Aaron, “when I’m involved in a really sordid case.”
Aaron did not think that he had ever had a friend who attended church regularly. “Give me an example of sordid,” he said.
“Cheating spouses. That’s my bread and butter, you know.” Aaron did know, since Bill had told him several times that his caseload was made up, disproportionately, of adultery and workers’ comp scams. “They get messy.”
