The War for Gloria: A Novel

by Atticus Lish

  “I really fill out a pair of shorts, don’t I?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Not just in front; in behind too. I’ve got big glutes.”

  “I’d fill out my shorts too if I wore a cup everywhere.”

  “I’d fill them out without it.”

  “Guys are looking at you.”

  “I’m doing exactly what babes do to get attention. It works for them; why shouldn’t it work for me?”

  “It might not be the same.”

  “Why shouldn’t it be?”

  “All right, I’m going.”

  Corey hiked up the grassy slope to the hatchback, which was parked one block over on an avenue of brownstones, and headed back to Quincy in gathering afternoon traffic—workingmen were getting off work. He looped around the river on Storrow Drive, past the place where he had just been, into the tunnel beneath the city, then out into the sunlight. Shopping plaza. The dilapidated homes of Dorchester. A beach-white causeway. Now a glimpse of blue water.

  In the stop-and-go traffic, he was surrounded by trucks filled with disassembled scaffolding, rope rigging, ladders, power tools, groups of guys with hats on backwards, joking, riding shoulder to shoulder. A sense of having soiled himself with Adrian grew in him as he traveled home.

  * * *

  —

  Now that he was alone, Adrian walked around until he found a place to sit and study physics, facing a pair of females, who were sunning on the grass.

  Occasionally, as he studied, a girl turned over, presenting a different portion of her body to the sun. Adrian adjusted himself beneath his textbook, which was resting on his knees. Sailboats continued tacking back and forth soundlessly on the water. An hour passed. A female wearing a baseball hat stood up, bent down, picked up her shorts, and wriggled into them, getting them above her hips. Toting her shoulder bag, she walked his way, looking at her phone, sport sandals slapping the path, bracelets jingling.

  As she passed him, Adrian said something to make her look. He had removed his penis from his shorts. When she turned, he spread his knees and made sure she saw it. She was wearing sunglasses. She kept walking without changing her expression.

  Her friends were waiting some distance away.

  “Where?”

  “Under the tree.” She pointed. Her friends looked at Adrian, who pretended to study. They turned away as a group and went off wherever they were going. There was some laughter. Adrian watched to see what they would do, but they did nothing.

  * * *

  —

  When they were gone, Adrian shut his book. He yawned again and stretched.

  He crossed the bridge to MIT and set out across the athletic field, in his tight shorts and combat boots. The field smelled like cut grass.

  On the other side, there was a space-age building with hexagonal windows. The lobby was air-conditioned. It had soaring walls of high-gloss white and geometric designs—simple Euclidean shapes—triangles, circles—in primary colors. Daylight coming from the windows created a greenhouse effect. A security guard walked out from behind a steel staircase and it was Leonard.

  Adrian followed him downstairs.

  “The best thing happened today!” he said when they were in the basement. “But before I tell you, you’re going to want to know: I saw your son. We had a nice long conversation. I got him to talk about you. He told me…,” and Adrian began painting Corey’s admissions to him in vivid terms. “He sees you as this giant monster, which he’s powerless to defeat, so he has to kill it. He has homicidal feelings towards you.”

  “He said he’s going to kill me?”

  “Not verbatim. But the homicidal ideation is clear. I know that from my own feelings of rage.”

  Then Adrian told Leonard his good news.

  “I was studying on the Esplanade and there was this chick sunbathing on the grass, showing off her body, using all her sexual power to dominate me. She was showing me everything I wanted and I couldn’t have. Well, I gave her a show of my own. I took my penis out of my shorts and when she walked by, I made her look at something she couldn’t have!”

  “Did she do anything?”

  “That’s the thing: She didn’t do anything! She didn’t say a word.”

  “Are you sure she saw you?”

  “Oh yeah. I could tell from her face. She couldn’t miss it—trust me.”

  “She might not have seen anything, if she wasn’t looking.”

  “No, I know she did. She had these friends and they all started laughing about it together.”

  “They were laughing?”

  “Yeah, it was great.”

  “You’re lucky nothing happened.”

  “No. She was happy. She was laughing about it with them. I bet it made her feel important. She’s probably going to get herself off tonight thinking about me. It completely proves my theory that women are just as aroused by seeing a dick as I am by seeing a pussy.”

  Leonard said, “Sometimes people laugh when they’re afraid.”

  16

  Cherry Pit

  Late that night, Corey was awakened by the sound of tires stopping on the road outside his house. An engine died. Then the front door opened. A switch snapped and a line of light appeared under Corey’s bedroom door.

  He got up, put on his grappling shorts and went out to the living room. The living room was empty. Leonard’s black zippered cop bag was lying on the floor. Corey went to the kitchen and looked around the corner. His father was standing under the fluorescent light, facing out the window. He was wearing a nylon jacket that said POLICE on the back and he was staring at the marsh.

  “Dropping by?”

  Leonard didn’t answer.

  Corey went back to the living room and, after a moment’s thought, began to move the furniture. He moved the coffee table, then began opening the futon, controlling the mattress so it wouldn’t flop and slam the frame into the wall and wake his mother, who was sleeping in the other room.

  “Bed’s all set up for you,” he said. There was no answer from the kitchen.

  He waited. He was so awake, he thought he could hear his mother’s respiration through the bedroom door. Total silence came from the kitchen.

  He went to the kitchen and looked inside. Leonard had turned around and was looking at him with a blank expression on his face.

  “What’s going on?” Corey asked.

  “I know everything about you.”

  Corey went to his room and closed the door but did not go to sleep.

  * * *

  —

  He determined to respond. When Leonard next dropped in, this time at an earlier hour when it was still light out and Gloria was awake and eating dinner, Corey walked up to him and declared that Muay Thai can beat boxing and jits can beat wrestling. He looked his father dead-on, then slid his eyes up and over Leonard’s head to indicate there were bigger things than him. He addressed the air, the pocket of emptiness above the man’s shoulder.

  “If you’re a cop, how come you smoke weed?” he demanded.

  “I don’t smoke weed.”

  “The fuck you don’t.” And: “If you’re a cop, where’s your gun? I never see you with a gun. You sure you have one?”

  But Leonard had his own way of punishing Corey. He began making Gloria cry.

  “If you make my mother cry,” Corey said, “we’re going to have a problem.”

  “Oh really?” Leonard said. “What kind of problem are we going to have?”

  Gloria begged the two of them not to fight. “I can’t take it!” she screamed.

  * * *

  —

  The Fourth of July is a good time out on Houghs Neck, a time of families, barbecues and beer, and fireworks popping up in the ocean sky above the woods, celebrating the American war against the British. The Goltzes
passed the holiday in their small house, isolated from these celebrations but aware of them.

  A week into July, Corey heard Leonard in his mother’s bedroom speaking to her in a way he didn’t like. Corey knocked on their door and went in. He saw his mother standing in the bathroom in just a T-shirt, balanced on her walker. Leonard was sitting on the toilet seat behind her holding a tampon applicator.

  “I need help,” she was crying. There was blood running down her leg.

  “What’s wrong, Mom?”

  “He’s hurting me!”

  “I’m telling you to lie down so I can do it, Gloria,” Leonard said.

  “Leave me alone!”

  “I’m telling you for the last time, Gloria. I’m warning you.”

  “Leonard!” Corey screamed. “Get the fuck away from her!”

  “Let me tell you something, Corey. If you lay a hand on me, you’re going to go straight to jail for assaulting a police officer. And then nobody will be here to take care of your mother.”

  Corey rushed over and grabbed Leonard’s wrists.

  “I’m not assaulting you. But you’re not touching her.”

  They struggled. Leonard broke free and shoved him. Corey lost his balance and fell into his mother. He knocked her over and barely managed to catch her before she fell. He was left holding her, half sliding down the wall, the walker tangled in his legs.

  He slid all the way down to the floor. With his mother lying on him, he turned himself sideways so he could get on one knee, stand up and pick her up under the arms. They stood there a minute, his arms around his mother’s waist, her T-shirt riding up, Corey holding her and gathering his strength. One of his feet was through the walker still, and the walker was trapped in the doorway. It would be easy to trip. A shelf had collapsed. The tile floor was a mess of combs and spilled green shampoo. The only light was coming from the bedroom. He reached out and snapped on the bathroom light and stepped carefully out of the walker. He felt his mother getting her feet under her. He relaxed his hold on her waist and pulled her shirt down. Leonard had disappeared. With one part of his mind, Corey listened for him in the house.

  “Are you hurt?”

  “No.”

  “I’m going to get your walker.”

  While continuing to hold his mother, he bent down and picked it up. Unjamming it from the doorway was a bit of a puzzle. He had to breathe and calm himself to do it. He righted the walker and his mother put her hands on it. They began walking out of the bathroom, one foot at a time. She led the way to her bed.

  “Get a towel.”

  He ran back to the bathroom, got a towel and put it on the bed for her and she sat down on it.

  “Do you need a doctor?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t think so.”

  “Should I check you? I don’t want to, but should I?”

  “If you think you can.”

  He went to the bathroom, got a wad of toilet paper, wet it at the sink, and blotted her, and showed it to her.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I think so.”

  She told him to get her a pad. He found her sanitary supplies in a white wire basket by her bedside. He peeled the backing off a Lightdays pad, pressed it down on the old stained cotton liner of a pair of her underwear, and fitted her feet through the leg holes one at a time and pulled them on her, and put her back in the bed.

  He brought her her laptop, but she had trouble touching the mouse.

  “Did you get hurt when you fell?”

  She had. She had hurt her wrist.

  He began cleaning the bathroom, picking up combs and toothbrushes. The shampoo sudsed up when he tried to wipe it up. He got in the tub barefoot to rinse a towel, twisting it over and over again. He took the broken shelf out of the room and leaned it against the wall. He found the tampon applicator under her sink and threw it out.

  He opened her bedroom door and looked around. The house was empty. He went outside and looked up and down the street, but saw no one.

  “Do you think I should call the cops?” he asked his mother.

  “No.”

  He went to sleep on her futon, but all night long he kept smelling Leonard in the cushion and waking up, feeling himself in mortal combat with the man. At two in the morning, he woke again. He’d had a nightmare. The dream was so real that Corey got up and crept to his mother’s room and made sure she was breathing. Her room was warm. The sound of her snoring came from her bed. He went out to the living room again. A tiny bit of light here. Enough to perceive the room as a black-and-gray painting. Shapes and masses, shadows and squares. A window with a night sky behind it. He checked that the door was locked. He spread the blinds and checked the road.

  * * *

  —

  Leonard stayed away for nearly two weeks after this conflict. The second night he was gone, Corey took the train to MIT and began walking around looking for him, circling the edges of the campus as the sun went down. He hiked alone through the soviet-sized emptiness of Kendall Square, dwarfed by the huge geometric research centers, which reflected the gold sky in the west. He passed the open bay of a loading dock and heard the whistling of a magnetron. The sun slipped under the horizon. He walked for hours—in and out of East Cambridge, to the Galleria and back—back to the train tracks that cross Mass Ave and the giant redbrick warehouse that looks like a castle. He saw a herd of MIT students leaving the Infinite Hallway and dispersing like shotgun pellets across the avenue and into the trees beneath the amber safety lights.

  He walked for hours in a fog. He passed a group of young people standing outside a bar, smoking cigarettes. By now it was nearly midnight. The T would be closing. The drinkers were getting on their phones calling Ubers. Corey was wearing baggy jeans and a black hoodie. He had an urge to say something impolite to them. He saw an MIT Police cruiser and thought, What if he really is a cop? What if I did something out here and he arrested me?

  He took a side alley through black trees and dumpsters to the Central Square T station. From a long way away, he saw a man coming towards him. They were the only two people on the street, but instead of making room for him, the man was walking an undeviating path straight at him. Corey spread his arms. The man made the same gesture back at Corey, as if this was a game. There was a weave in his step. He had been drinking. He was a big, well-built guy in his twenties. He walked straight at Corey with his arms out and stared down at him from an inch away. He had black curly hair and he looked amused.

  Corey punched him in the jaw with an uppercut, and the man collapsed on the sidewalk.

  The man lay on the sidewalk without moving. Corey was afraid to leave. Sixty seconds went by. Ninety seconds. Two minutes went by. Finally, the man’s head came up and he let out a groan. Corey fled down the block to the T. On the train he wondered if the man was paralyzed. He had lifted his head as if it was the only thing he could move and he had wanted to see his feet. It would be months before Corey again set foot in Cambridge.

  * * *

  —

  Alone with his mother, Corey demanded: “Is he a cop or not?”

  “No, he’s not.”

  “I knew it. Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

  “I didn’t want to run him down to you.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “It’s not good for you to hate him.”

  “Why the hell not? Do you know how strange that is, that he lies?”

  She didn’t answer. He shook his head. “The physics professor. I can’t believe I fell for that…That bum. He’s a rent-a-cop.”

  “Afraid so.”

  “He’s got problems.”

  “Well, maybe he does.”

  “I’d like to go see him at his job. I’d like to join the police force and go see him in my dress blues. I could be a cop, if I wanted.”

&nbs
p; “Sure you could—you could be anything, Corey—but why would you want to do that?”

  “To stick it in his loser face.”

  “Oh, come off it. It’s no skin off your back.”

  “What are you defending him for?”

  “So he’s a security guard. He’s the one who’s got to live with being a loser.”

  Corey looked at his mother’s thin-nosed, delicately aquiline German face. He was going to ask Gloria why she had gotten mixed up with his father.

  “That bastard’s more than a loser. He’s rotten and screwed up.”

  “You think I don’t know that!” she cried.

  * * *

  —

  Since Leonard had been gone, it had been unseasonably, autumnally cool for several days, but now there was a resurgence of the summer heat. Now the noon sun was glaring down on the old red car, turning it into a hot box outside their door. The shadow of the car fell directly on the salt-white asphalt. The shadow shrinking under the metal chassis, growing inside the house—the shadow of the blinds on the dusty wooden floor—the bars of sun, which began as planes of gold in the morning when they shone in from the ocean, having withdrawn across the splintered decking and vanished beneath the sills, the entire house steeping in glowing gray shadow, trapped heat, the green marsh soughing and rustling—the silence from his mother’s bedroom where she had been taking a nap.

  Corey went in to ask her if he could get her anything and found her awake.

  “No,” she said.

  There was an intricate tapestry of the Tibetan universe on the wall. The figures of peasants, monks and deities were rendered in black outline on a tomato-red earth, the boundaries of which were ornamented with designs that could have been breaking ocean waves, blooming flowers or billowing smoke and fire. The tapestry hung above his mother’s dresser. It was littered with the jewelry she used to wear to represent her allegiance to Asia and Africa and South America. She had put her pipe away; she owned a phallic glass pipe for smoking marijuana, and it was out of sight now, in her drawer, a forgotten embarrassment, one of the many things she’d rather not remember. Her books on art and health lay in a corner. Her closet was open and some clothes lay on the floor. Her hippie dresses, thrift-shop dresses hung flat and drab from the hangers. She lay on the bed on her side, facing out the window with her back to Corey. One couldn’t see out the blinds, but the sun slanted in and one could hear the leaves in the marsh and the birdcalls and feel the air coming in. Her small round head, like her son’s but smaller, lay on the mattress. She was in her clothes, a long, body-hiding dress that she could put on without asking for help. Her feet were tucked up and hidden. The walker stood next to her bed on its own lightweight aluminum legs with rubber feet.