After the Parade Read Online Free PDF Page A

and was shocked to see that it was not in English. Sensing his interest, Walter held the book up. “Camus. Have you read him yet?” Aaron shook his head, and Walter said, “Well, Camus is a must, but I guess I’ve officially lost my adolescent enthrallment with existentialism. I’m finding it quite tedious this time around.” He sighed the way other men sighed about the weather or a hard-to-find tractor part. The adult Aaron would have laughed at Walter’s transparent need to prove himself to a fifteen-year-old boy, but the Aaron he was then felt the world shifting, accommodating the fact that it was much vaster than he had ever imagined, that it included people who read books in other languages and spoke of ideas so foreign to him that they, too, seemed another language.
    For men perhaps more than for women, there is something aphrodisiacal about finding oneself on the greater-than side of an intellectual disparity, and years later, Aaron would learn that Walter had felt something during that first encounter, a sexual stirring that they never fully discussed because Walter was not comfortable talking about desire. Aaron did know that Walter had been introduced to sex by a man who followed him back to the dressing room while he shopped for school clothes with his mother in a department store in New York. He was fourteen. He had no bad feelings toward the man, but he told Aaron that the experience had shaped him nonetheless, had taught him to associate sexual gratification with furtiveness and haste and a lack of reciprocity. On those rare occasions when Walter did discuss sex, he always brought to it this same textbook-like dryness.
    Aaron had felt desire that day, a desire that was in no way sexual. In fact, it had felt to him more potent than anything sexual could be, for sexual desire was, by nature, transient, a flame that grew large and went out. Admittedly, he knew very little of sexual desire, recognized it largely in terms of what he did not want but was led to believe that he should—girls. True sexual desire, he thought, was like an undershirt worn close to the skin and covered by layers of shirts and sweaters and coats.
    Three years after that first meeting, when Walter brought Aaronhome with him to Moorhead and introduced him to his circle of closeted friends, one of them, Jonas, commented coyly, “Oh my, look what Walter caught,” and the others laughed as if they had known all along that Walter’s weekend getaways were not really about fishing. Within the group it was common knowledge that Jonas was in love with Walter and that his love was not reciprocated, for various reasons, among them that Walter did not date married men, and Jonas was married, a fact that the other men snickered at behind his back. They could not imagine Jonas, with his pear-shaped body and hands as white and soft as sifted flour, atop a woman. Walter did not snicker. He was patient with Jonas, partly because Walter was a kind man but largely because he pitied Jonas, pitied him for having both a woman’s body and a wife. Pity is a hard thing to bear, for it’s never about love; pity is the opposite of love, or one of its opposites, since love has many. Still, Jonas bore it.
    Aaron later understood that the men’s campiness was a pose, a function of the fact that they lived their lives hidden and needed to make the most of these secret moments together, but at the time he had not known what to think of any of them—not even Walter, who was solicitous of his needs yet laughed along with Jonas’s joke, allowing the implication that he and Aaron were sexually involved to stand as truth. In fact, during their first four years together, he and Walter did not have sex, not with each other. Aaron was in college and engaged occasionally in sexual relations —as Walter termed it, taking all the passion and dirt right out of it—with other young men, his first encounter with a boy