1
Woman, Earth, Sun and Richard Feynman
You never think about nerves and breathing. You take breathing for granted. You take the nerves under your skin or under the skin of another animal for granted.
His mother loved him. Gloria said, “You make me laugh.” He had a sense of humor about their lives, apparently. She was a single mother and he helped her collect her library off the streets of Boston and never complained about it. They went through crates of books together and shared what they found. Her boy was never bored, even living in her car.
She came from Springfield, which she called her shitty little city. She had come to Boston to go to college. She wanted to stand on the shoulders of Germaine Greer, the author of Sex and Destiny. She gave birth to Corey at Mass General during what should have been her final year of college.
She crashed in Cleveland Circle, Jamaica Plain, Mission Hill—just her and her son—and her ever-changing roommates. For a time, they stayed at a triple-decker house in Dorchester and he went to a school where a good half the other kids were from the Cape Verde islands. Corey showed his mom the islands on the map, Boa Vista and Santiago off the coast of Senegal, telling her that he’d be sailing here someday when he grew up and went to sea.
He had learned about the concept of a vessel from living in his mother’s car. He had fastened on the concept early. Maybe it was always in his head, one of the basic concepts he was born with—woman, earth, sun, boat.
Her full name was Gloria Goltz. In his mind, she was always a bright blonde. He saw her as having a glass jaw that she kept putting up and it kept getting cracked. But when it came to him, she was stalwart. Once, she took him to a KFC and the manager didn’t want to give her another biscuit with her order, but she demanded it because Corey loved biscuits—he had read that sailors ate hardtack and salt pork—and the manager, with his thin arms and striped shirt, relented.
“Mom, you’re always giving me things.”
“You never ask for anything.”
Gloria and Corey cut the biscuits on their brown plastic tray and had them with butter and honey.
“Will you mind it when I become a sailor?”
“Oh no. But I want you to be a smart sailor. I don’t want you to be dumb.”
“But will you mind it when I have to leave home?”
“I’ll have to accept it.”
“I’ll come back and visit. Voyages usually take about three years. Whaling voyages can take seven.”
There was a pattern between them of her getting blue and of him helping her. She got blue because of herself. She had not fulfilled the ambition she’d had at seventeen, smoking a cigarette in front of her concrete dorm building at Lesley College in the shadow of Harvard—in the literal shadow of its tombstone-shaped ivy-covered law library—to think and write and shock the world, to condemn it, to synthesize all the available evidence—art, history, movies, negative images and messages in the media, her upbringing, her body in the mirror, her own thoughts, even the smallest things down to the cigarette in her mouth—into a single scream of rage against the patriarchy. Instead she’d been a waitress, a barmaid taking bottles off a counter after the bar was closed and the band was unplugging its amps and it was too late to do anything but sleep the next day away. And this had gone on for years—years of telling herself that she was finding her voice, that she was getting ready—years of reading not writing, of groggy afternoons, a feminist book in her hands on the T, Sex and Destiny, Doc Martens on her feet, reading at the Au Bon Pain, jumping up from her wire chair and standing on the red leather toes of her boots to hug the street musicians who drifted in with the pigeons, carrying guitars, wearing bowler hats and German army trench coats, the wet stink of the bathroom around the corner and the weird men playing chess all day; the hoboes from Seattle, skinheads in suspenders saluting in the street, a dyed Mohawk the size of a circular saw blade from a lumber mill atop a gaunt bald head, kids from the wealthy towns of Concord and Lexington exploring new identities as bitter waifs, at night a wolf pack of multiracial youths from Dorchester, one a white boy wearing a shirt saying That Funky Cypress Hill Shit, there to sell drugs. Her skinny legs. She had dropped out of school. She had hung out in The Pit at Harvard Square, sitting cross-legged in striped tights on the granite wall, her eyes mascaraed, her mouth painted black, debating with her fellow anarchists, giving the finger to the square—the bank, the bricks, the Coop, the clock, the privilege and hypocrisy. The scream of rage was at herself.
So sometimes as the years passed, she’d look at herself and the weight of the time and the evidence of who she was would hit her and she’d get high and ask, “Will it ever be okay?” And for some reason her son would tell her, “Hey, Mom, don’t be sad. You’re great. You’re greater than you know.”
Gloria didn’t just gather things; she left them behind too. She couldn’t keep things as they moved. They lost his toys, his clothes. She cared more than he did, because of the stupid money. She did a self-portrait when she was painting and left it in a closet in Jamaica Plain. Poems too. On the white wall of a room in a house that someone else was renting, she had written in paint “Forgive. This Is the Unimpeachable Voice of God. Let Your Seeing and Your Listening Come from Total Self.” She had lost and gained. An exchange with the city. A coming and a going. The word was many—jobs, roommates, beds, ideas—so many it took a historian to remember. Each year was a miniature history enforcing nonattachment and surprise. Her obsessions and searches for solutions lasted a while and burned out, and they were legion too. And then she returned to them like she might return to a used record store in Allston. She might write a song or pick up paints again, and the feeling she would temporarily have would make her think she never should have dropped this, that doing so had been her worst mistake; here was the answer after all.
As her son grew, he began developing a sharp boyish face. To her, it evoked a primitive axe-head, chipped from flint by, say, the Algonquin Indians. He had a small, round, aerodynamic cranium, like a cheetah. The front of his face—his nose, maxilla, sinuses, jaw—projected forward like a canine skull—what an anthropologist would call prognathous. His blond hair grew in a short, tight cap on his head, like Julius Caesar or Eminem. And he had freckles.
Here was her poem, she thought. How had she forgotten?
She was already a thin woman, as if she had already had the fundamental things taken away from her, like food or love when she’d needed it. But that was how she chose to eat; she was vegan. She gave the usual double-headed reason: It was healthier for her/better for the planet. Cattle ranching destroys the forests, pollutes the rivers, adds to the greenhouse effect. Her cool blue world of wind, air, forest was in retreat from the hot red screaming dying blood-reeking slaughter world.
Was she afraid of her father’s anger or his body? Or was it her hatred of her own blood and meat that was at the heart of it—that drop of blood on the bathroom floor? Or it could have been genetic. She was flat-chested and narrow-shouldered, built for yoga.
Yoga, she knew, was an Indo-European word that meant “to yoke”—to yoke the body and the spirit together by means of the breath. The breath contained the energy called prana. The prana circulated through the body like an ocean current. The circling of the prana-current made the body healthy, just as the circling of the ocean currents made the planet healthy. If you stopped the tide, the earth would die.
The circulation was like the blood but was not the blood. The energy flowed through silver meridians and a sun that was not the sun glowed in the sacral plexus. It was a moon. To her sacral meant “sacred,” the sacred female moon.
Eggs were okay to eat as long as they were harvested humanely.
These were some of her beliefs as she approached the end of her life.
She had long white legs, and when she put on her leotard and did yoga, you could see her rib cage and the bones of her spine counting up her back to her skull, housing the anterior horns of the cervical ganglia.
His memories were fragmented and out of order. If he reached across his sea of memories, he found a scattering of islands, like crumbled cookies, with no first one, in no chronological order.
In one of his earliest memories, he saw his mother in a kitchen and he could smell smoke and burning cheese. She was wearing giant overalls. Her arms were bare, her armpits were unshaven, you could see the sides of her breasts. She was cooking tofu pups in a skillet. Her blonde hair was covered by a bandana like Aunt Jemima on the pancake box. Brown paper grocery bags stood on the floor, filled with tea leaves and carrot peelings. You could smell the wet brown paper of the bags.
She sat down on the floor with him and put her legs in the lotus position. A panting dog came in and licked the pan while they were eating, and she hugged it and fed it a tofu pup.
They were living with musicians, who had blond curly beards and blond dreadlocks and wooden plugs in their earlobes like the Gautama Buddha. They looked like the Spin Doctors from the “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong” and “Two Princes” videos—tall, lanky white men who said they dreamed of ending racism.
They lived in a bad neighborhood—the apartment must have been in Mission Hill—and they were worried about getting robbed. Corey slept alone in a back room where the musicians stored their instruments. His cot faced a window with a security gate; the window faced an alley. Someone had climbed the fire escape and tried to break in and steal the musicians’ guitars and drums while his mother was in the house alone.
Corey got sick and had to stay in bed for a long time. While he was lying there, his mother came in and climbed on the windowsill and stood on her tiptoes, stringing up Tibetan prayer flags over him. She hammered nails in the ceiling and tied the string of flags to the nails. The sun was flooding in the gated window and shining through her dress.
She got a TV from the musicians and put it at the foot of his bed. He watched a cartoon show called Action Man. The superheroes were extreme athletes and they were after an evil scientist who had a luxury yacht armed with a nuclear missile. The hero water-skied behind a rocket-powered speedboat, which turned into a submarine. It shot underwater and sped around a coral reef. It blasted out of the water and turned into a fighter plane. Careening through G-forces, the hero went through every medium—water, air and land—his wake pluming up behind him. His success depended on acrobatic physical control. Accidents happened; racecars spun in circles, planes got wrecked, and he’d have to eject. When the hero got injured, he said his arm was tweaked. He’d use his one good arm instead to save the day. “Go for it, Action Man!” his team said. Corey loved the way they talked. Their voices were so positive and strong.
There was something that spoke to Corey in the way that Action Man talked about his injured arm as if it were a piece of machinery that could be fixed. The word tweaked isolated the damage, confining it to a limb, unlike the phrase “I’m hurt,” which potentially meant the entire person and all the suffering they could feel, including loneliness and fear.
He’d had a dream while he was sick, one that recurred throughout his childhood. He imagined he was trapped in a wooden closet; he was very small and he could not get out. His mother was on the other side of the closet door, which had been slammed shut and locked, and he couldn’t get to her; he was locked in—or out, rather—locked away from her. There was a suffocating silence. He tried to climb out the window but couldn’t reach the sill. He knew his mother was in trouble because he could hear her muted voice pleading—but whomever she was speaking to wouldn’t listen to her. The house was made of lacquered pine, which could catch fire and burn them to death in an instant. The air was combustible with turpentine vapor. They were in the remote countryside, miles away from help.
The dream would not go away. It felt like a memory. He assumed it was something he had imagined, brought on by fever, but he was never sure it wasn’t real.
There had always been something he should have known but somehow didn’t. There had always been a sea he couldn’t cross inside his mind.
He remembered his mother taking him to a first communion in the basement of a church when he was small. The church was where, he couldn’t say; somewhere in the Boston area, like Saugus maybe. He remembered asking his mother what a communion was and Gloria telling him, “It’s a Catholic religious ceremony.” She put on high heels and lipstick for it. They met a man at the party. Everyone was standing by a table with bowls of potato salad and platters of sandwiches and helium balloons except the man, who stood at the back of the party, not like a guest but as if he worked there like a janitor. His mother told Corey to say hello, not to be a stranger. The man spoke to him and Corey didn’t understand what he was saying. The man explained it was because he was talking to him in pig Latin.
She invited the man over to their house to play chess with her. Later, Corey asked who he was and she said, “You know him. That’s your father.”
The man who was supposed to be Corey’s father acted more like an uncle or a family friend who would see them for the occasional weekend. Sometimes, he’d drop in wherever they were staying and meet Gloria’s roommates, who tended to be shocked by his intellect. Sometimes, Corey and Gloria would have to drive to meet him. Gloria would navigate out into the rural suburbs of farm stands, cornfields, office parks and the commuter rail, to a highway strip mall—and there he’d be, wearing tinted sunglasses like a Mafioso, waiting to buy them ice cream.
Gloria had met him when she was still in school. He was an East Boston man who worked at MIT. Corey grew up addressing him by name, as Leonard.
There were many interesting things about Leonard. His last name was Agoglia, but his driver’s license said DeCarlo. As a child, he had lived, he said, in an apartment above a gumball factory and taken showers at an East Boston community center. Leonard’s mother had been on state assistance. He’d had seven brothers and sisters, but all the boys had died. His father had been a drug addict, a heroin junkie, a neighborhood figure who belonged to the streets. Leonard would see him sleeping outside Eddie C’s, waiting for Tripe Wednesday. Allegedly, Leonard’s father had shot a man in Malden on orders from the local faction of La Cosa Nostra. In high school in the mid 1970s, Leonard had denounced the Vietnam War. The other kids, whose fathers wore American flag stickers on their hardhats and followed longhaired protesters onto the Boston Common to confront them with violence, had labeled him a communist.
“I was more of a Workers Party socialist. I was highly aware of economic injustice. When our check ran out at the end of the month, my sisters and I would dig for clams on the flats. Otherwise we wouldn’t eat. When I was fourteen, I lied about my age to get a job as a machinist.”
Leonard’s mother had been a strict woman. Leonard had told Gloria a number of memorable stories about her. Corey heard that she would wait until the market was closing on Friday to get the fish that no one wanted. “Once, I touched a fish in her pan,” Leonard said, “and a worm came out and wrapped around my finger.”
Gloria shuddered and Corey was amazed.
But the most interesting thing about Leonard was that while he was working there as a campus security officer, he was also studying physics at MIT.
Everything had been stacked against Leonard from the start, said Gloria, who was his biggest champion. He had to wear expensive aviator glasses for his headaches, a curse that made him suffer. And don’t forget that all his brothers died. The East Boston schools were no good: a throwaway education for throwaway kids, the idea being that they were going to grow up to pour concrete, and here was this special young person with nowhere to turn, with no one to recognize his gifts, no nurturance—it was something she could relate to.
“And then he’s working as a security guard at MIT, and he starts reading Springer-Verlag textbooks on quantum mechanics.”
If you listened to the story of Leonard’s life as Gloria told it, apparently Leonard had discovered his gift for scientific thought much the same way Siddhartha had found enlightenment one day beneath the banyan tree.
Corey had no frame of reference for how hard physics at MIT was, but everyone said it was hard; it was as hard as anything could get intellectually, and to go there while working as a campus cop had to be unheard-of. More than once, Corey had heard his mother and her friends comparing Leonard to Good Will Hunting.
For years, Leonard had been saying he was working on what physicists called a result of some kind. He talked at length about his intellectual work, about why he wasn’t having much luck with it: He needed to get away; he needed time. Our capitalist society stood in his way; he had to make a living like a peasant. As the years passed without a result, she worried for him. Was he getting bitter? A professor to whom he submitted a paper had failed to respond. She listened to Leonard’s diatribes about the man; they lasted months. She grew afraid to ask him about science, even in the most general way. A safer subject was union politics (the campus cops were unionized, he said—and they were all screwed up). He made it sound as if he was busy all the time. He said he planned to become a millionaire. He was always away, always disappearing, always occupied, always involved in something, but she had a feeling it was nothing after all.
When they first met, she recalled, Leonard used to talk to her in an endless stream of science metaphors. There had been no question in her mind that he was a genius. To make herself more interesting to him, she’d tried reading popularized science books. Usually she retained nothing from these efforts, but James Gleick’s Chaos: Making a New Science had made a lasting impression on her and changed the way she saw the world. It described the fractal geometry of nature, the patterns in random, unpredictable and turbulent phenomena, like storms and weather.
Trees, lightning, river deltas all shared the same geometry, a self-replicating fractal pattern where the large-scale structure was repeated on the small scale, on the smallest scale, no matter how far down you went. This endlessly reiterated self-dependency could amplify the tiniest disturbance—the flutter of a butterfly’s wing—into a hurricane that took down houses. If you looked into a storm deeply enough, a complex tapestry emerged, often of fantastic beauty. She thought the Mandelbrot set looked exactly like a Tibetan mandala.
Nature could not be understood, not ever. To experience chaos, she saw you didn’t need a storm. All you needed was the right man. Leonard always left her. He was like her inspirations. She never knew when he would call on her again. She recognized the faucet turned off, but not quite all the way, inside his head. And hers as well. If you plotted his visits on a graph, the self-similar beauty would emerge. The minutes with him would look like the weeks, and the weeks would look like the years. All the essays she’d never written and never would. It would make a fractal, Gloria was certain. It would bloom like clouds or be a starfish or a tree.
Once, when Corey was ten, he and his mom had driven out to meet Leonard at a D’Angelo’s sub shop off Route 2 near the town of Ayer. Pine trees rose above the restaurant, which was next door to a dry cleaner’s and a quiet grocery store with a long brown roof—and all around them there were trees and the suburban silence and the sun falling silently into the wells of greenery below the stone-gray highway.
Gloria was wearing a hippie dress and round blue sunglasses that made her look like a thin, blonde-headed Janis Joplin. They had finished eating and each now sat before an empty paper plate that used to hold a sandwich.
Leonard wiped his hands and cleared his throat. “I’ve got it now,” he said and began telling them the structure of the universe. “Some people think the universe has seven dimensions. Some people think it’s expanding like a balloon. Some say it’s flat. But I know now that those models are wrong. The evidence points to multiple universes.”
Gloria was thrilled. Multiple universes reminded her of a Tibetan mandala. “Worlds bubbling into existence all around us. Bubbling up and vanishing!” She sighed. What excited her was to see the convergence of Eastern and Western cosmologies, as suggested in The Dancing Wu Li Masters, a book on the haunting similarity between traditional Taoist views of the universe and modern physics, which she was trying to comprehend—with difficulty!
“That’s not a good book,” Leonard remarked. “It’s been discredited”; and she stopped talking.
“Anyway. Multiple universes: That’s the model. My intuitive starting point. I still have to prove everything. And then after I prove everything, I have to prove it to a peer review board, if I want to get credit for it.”
“The good old peer review board,” said Gloria. “We know about them.”
“They’re very capable of putting professional self-interest before the search for truth.”
“So if you were flying up there in a spaceship, what would it look like?” Corey asked.
“It would look the same as it always looks to people in spaceships.”
“What would it look like?” Gloria asked.
“What, the universe?”
“The multiple universes, all the bubbling worlds. Or is that a dumb question?”
“It wouldn’t look like anything. You can only be in one bubble at a time. It would look the same as this one.”
“Why couldn’t you break out of one bubble and fly to the next one?” Corey asked.
That same year, he had tried to build a vessel of his own. He had gone exploring with the neighborhood kids in Dorchester in an abandoned field beneath an overpass. Venturing into the trees, they discovered a clearing in the center of a spiral mazelike thicket: a mattress, rusted beer cans, a rain-sodden roll of toilet paper, someone’s clothes, a shit smell—one of the greatest discoveries of his youth. This would be their base. “We can build a ship here and go anywhere we want.”
Despite their island origins, the Cape Verdean kids didn’t seem to realize that Boston was a port city, that there were seaways all around them. One boy told Corey to watch out, yellow hair attracts bees.
In the sweaty summer heat, they dragged boards and junk into their base with a general construction project in mind: either they would build a spaceship or a submarine. On paper Corey used a crayon to draw a vessel with a propeller and a tube for oxygen. He enlisted the others to bring back parts that they could use. They went out and found ropes, chains, strange but indispensable gizmos—broken toasters, a hollow pipe with a divider inside it like a nasal septum. Carlos, whose father fixed cars, recognized it as a carburetor.
One of the boys handed Corey a rusted D-cell battery.
“Is there any juice in this?”
“No, we were throwing it out.”
Corey looked at what they had in their coffee can of nuts and screws, conscious of a dilemma.
“I think maybe we have to stick with a submarine.”
“Why?”
“I don’t think we have enough parts for a spaceship.”
But it wasn’t long thereafter that, by opening his mother’s copy of The Flower Ornament Scripture, a sixteen-hundred-page book, he had encountered the mystery of Vairocana, that being of emptiness and bliss who had overcome his animal nature through seated meditation. Corey was gripped by the idea of the mind as a vessel gliding on an endless inner sea, entering a trance and coming out of it refreshed and empowered, able to reach into secret stores of mental and physical strength. He aimed to learn tantric practices, to remake himself as a shaved-headed disciple in a bare room with his gaze turned inward.
What would his vessel bring back if he sailed as far as he could go? He imagined super strength, an iron body, immortality, the ability to slow his heartbeat down so that he could survive being buried alive.
At dawn, he came out of his room and sat on the bare wood floor, as the book said to, and fixed his gaze on the shadowed wall in front of him. He drew his breath into his lower abdomen, pressed it down, and blew it out. This made one round. He did 48 rounds. The last breath he held. As he held it, he counted his heartbeats. The technique of heartbeat-counting was called a Tour. Seventy-two heartbeats made a Small Tour, 108 heartbeats a Grand Tour.
By the time he got to 20, the pain began. He heard a voice that rationalized, saying it wasn’t worth it, urging him to give in. He held on, focusing on the count. The agony set in at 30—31, 32, 33…He experienced his first convulsion. His mouth wanted to open, and he clenched it shut. At 40, he was entering the deeper waters of anoxia. The spasms came every beat. He was making choking sounds. In between, the pain turned almost pleasurable and he felt himself sailing in a dark blue world. His thoughts were growing panicked and incoherent. He tried to focus on the count. If he could just make it to 60, he thought, the rest would be possible.
He bucked in place as if he were going to vomit. His eyes rolled back. His head was filled with noise. A voice in his mind cried, “Please, please, let me breathe!”
The pain of not breathing overrode every effort at self-control. He was going to give up and then he wasn’t and then he was—and then he opened his mouth, and it was over. The vacuum in his chest sucked the air in. He experienced primal relief. There were tears in his eyes.
He could barely remember what the count had been. Sixty-eight? Everything had gotten very confused at the end.
Why couldn’t he have held on for just a few more seconds? Something deep down in his neural matter was defeating him, short-circuiting his will.
The purpose of the exercise was to have enlightenment come rushing from the belly up the main channel of the body like mercury rising in a thermometer and flower at the crown of the head.
In 2007, Gloria had taken her son and moved to Quincy, a suburb ten miles south of Boston, in time for Corey to enroll in junior high. She rented a run-down, teepee-shaped mini-house with a sandy concrete driveway just big enough to tuck her hatchback in. A concrete seawall stood chest height on the road. The ocean—Quincy Bay—lay to the east. She took a social service job, a forty-hour job that was more like fifty when you added the commute up 93. At home, she lay down on their futon, a piece of secondhand furniture that used to belong to a graduate student at Harvard Medical School who had left it on the sidewalk in Jamaica Plain. And she lay there watching TV.
The job was to pay the rent. They were there for the school system, which was better than Dorchester. She’d done it for her son.
The move to Quincy—it isolated her. Four years. The loneliest time of her life. She hadn’t expected this depression, how it cropped up when everything was fine, just from small things being wrong. First World problems—sadness. Her friends lived back in JP. They were all gone now. Here, the neighbors were Boston Irish, and Gloria said they scared her: “They’re too tough for me.”
Once, she confessed her distress to a neighbor lady who helped her look for the electricity meter. An older, square-jawed woman with her white hair cut short around the column of her head and a small billow of white on top, and the patchy, sun-spotted skin of a sailor—a woman who herself was Boston Irish—the kind who went to Star Market and if the checkout girl didn’t know what something cost, said, “That means it’s free, right?”—even she agreed with Gloria that the neighborhood men were hard.
But Corey had grown up here, and once in a while he went out with them on small construction jobs, to hang drywall in the back room of a local business, like the Rent-A-Center, or fix a broken sidewalk by pouring concrete in the broken part. They gave him a shovel and a wheelbarrow. He chopped open a bag of Sakrete and mixed the powder with the water from a hose. “You don’t want it runny,” they said, and turned off the water. Corey had a lot of fathers—he found them everywhere. He did odd jobs for them and they taught him to change the oil.
Now he was in high school and, as always, he was still her friend. When he came home, thumping up the steps and burst in swinging his arms, she thought he sounded as if he was going to knock the place down and put up a better one for her.
Recently, he had taken a ride with a carful of local kids up 93, across the Neponset River, all the way to Central Square in Cambridge, her old stomping grounds. They listened to a live ska band play at the Middle East Café in the company of coeds from Boston University, and he had come home talking about college girls.
Watercraft were everywhere in Quincy, but Corey had never sailed. When he started high school, he was a virgin; the flower that bloomed above his head held the glowing body of a woman. Her face changed with the faces of the girls he went to school with. He let his breath-holding meditation lapse because it wasn’t helping him with the major questions now: Did you make the team, get the grade, get the sneakers, get the girl? Have you tried X? Are you hip? And does she like you?
On the outside he looked like every other townie in an NFL warm-up jacket, smoking a cigarette with some other kid holding a pit bull on a leash. He told no one how, in quitting his secret Buddhist regimen, he felt he had betrayed himself.
Freshman year, a classmate named Mark Fahey and his dad took him out on a one-masted Mercury off Wollaston Beach. Mark’s father, dressed like his son in cargo shorts and shoes without socks, had just completed a hunger walk for his church. Both Faheys used the boating trip to try to get Corey to open up. He admitted he really liked sailing but that this was his first time on the water. They told him the thing to do was “to get involved more.” Corey should join the Navy.
Corey’s skateboard was his substitute vessel. He found The Norfolk Bible of Seafaring at the local library. In the summer, he rode his skateboard in traffic down the Adams Shore, his hands black from climbing trees, stopping at garages, looking for a job pumping gas, dreaming of a Mountain Dew.
In the fall, he turned into a sophomore. Someone gave him OxyContin and he took it.
It was possible that Gloria owed their move to Quincy to a friend. Over a decade ago, before the turn of the millennium, she had been living in an apartment in Cleveland Circle—an apartment of many rooms, stone-hard plaster walls, cracked paint on the radiators, few windows, an old cooking smell in the stairwell with its mosaic pattern of tiny marble tiles—and a racing bike in the hall that belonged to her new roommate, Joan, a short strong woman with broad shoulders and trim waist, who was an as-yet-unknown quantity. A pleasant but tactfully distant accord obtained between her and Joan—until one night when Leonard came over to speak to Gloria in his characteristic way about science. He sat on their velvet couch and began discoursing on Feynman diagrams. Gloria was kneeling at his feet, playing with little Corey.
Joan came out of the shower and strode into the living room, wearing a short black kimono, her wet hair smelling like strawberry shampoo, and interrupted.
“Feynman—what’s that mean? Is that like, ‘Yo, she’s fine, man’?”
“Not exactly. It’s named after Richard Feynman, who was a genius. Probably one of the greatest geniuses who ever lived. And the Feynman diagrams have to do with quantum mechanics.”
“So it’s not like the finest silks, man? The finest silks a lady can wear?”
“No.”
“It’s not like, ‘Yo, my bitch be lookin’ fine, man’?”
“Not at all. You’re way off.”
“I guess ya can’t fool a fool. Are all your boyfriends so smart?”
“You have other boyfriends, Gloria?”
“See, I think women totally blow men out of the water when it comes to who’s lying and who’s telling the truth.”
“What are you saying!” Gloria exclaimed. “You’re going to get me in trouble! Corey, she’s silly! She’s getting me in trouble!” She held the toddler by his arms. She looked up at Joan and used his hands to wave at her.
Corey was wearing faded cotton pajamas with a rubberized image of Spider Man on the chest, which was peeling like a fresco of an early Christian saint on a temple wall in Italy—exploding out of the halo circle of his landing site in rings of red and white.
“Blowing people out of the water at lying—that’s what I’d call a dubious distinction,” Leonard said.
He must have wanted to be invited into Gloria’s room that night. From where he sat, he could see down the open throat of her shirt to her breasts as she played with her son, catching him, lifting him, so the boy could run in place. But Leonard was disappointed; Gloria didn’t invite him in.
After Leonard had left and Corey had been put to bed, Joan, still in her kimono, invited Gloria into her room to listen to a rock song on her Walkman. She put the headphones on Gloria’s head and pushed Play and watched her eyes.
Gloria soon found she had a friend in Joan, someone in whom she could confide. In the evenings, they made dinner together and learned each other’s histories, lying side by side on the carpet, flipping through Joan’s notebook of pencil drawings and song lyrics: an unabashed nude self-portrait showing Joan’s small-breasted, short-legged body—she looked Mayan; a poem or song about roses and their thorns.
“How are you so creative?” Gloria exclaimed.
The answer lay perhaps in Joan’s interesting life. She hailed from San Francisco. As a girl, she’d run away from home and grown up on the street, sleeping in cars, getting hassled by cops, making all the wrong friends, cutting school and surviving on her own. A girl gang at her all-black Oakland high school had forced her to shoplift. “This bunch of big loud screaming black girls comes charging in the store, getting security all freaked out, and I’m over here shoving these designer jeans inside my bag…They told me what to steal or they would beat me up.”
She was half Japanese, half Irish-Italian, one thirty-second Portuguese, and one sixteenth Hungarian, however that worked math-wise. Of her Japanese side, she said, “We have a sense of honor.” She had a temper. “I grew up having gutter fights.” She was a tough girl and didn’t feel right unless she was practicing karate. She lived a high-risk life. “I’m a very promiscuous person.” She’d had more than one abortion. “You come in me, I’m pregnant.”
She had strong tan legs with full calves. Those legs had powered her bicycle up the hills of San Francisco. “Flying down the other side is like a video game, weaving in and out of cars.” The momentum of that breakneck ride had carried her down east. Boston was chump change compared to Oakland—not at all as dangerous. Her first job here had been as a dishwasher in Methuen.
After hearing Gloria’s story, Joan volunteered to screen Leonard’s calls, to meet him at the door and check with Gloria before she let him in—to be her first line of defense. The next time he stopped by, Joan changed into jeans and sneakers—fighting clothes—and challenged him to chess.
She wasn’t afraid to open up her heart any more than she was afraid of getting hit by a car. It wasn’t long before she told Gloria, “You’re one of the best people I’ve ever met, a doll.” And she loved Corey. “If I was a boy, I’d be just like him.”
She bought Corey a birthday present and gave it to Gloria to give to him—a book called How to Bake an Apple Pie and See the World. Gloria was moved. She sat with her son, holding the book, looking at the drawings, contemplating each of the pages in turn. At each page, Gloria waited for him to study the picture. The book was about a girl who rode a hot air balloon around the world, gathering the ingredients to bake an apple pie.
“Why is she a girl? Why isn’t she a boy?”
“Because girls like to go on adventures too.”
One night, Joan pulled her into her room and made love to her, and Gloria let her do it. Afterwards, sitting by her side on the velvet couch where Leonard had once sat, Joan put her head—she had coarse black bangs—on Gloria’s shoulder and said “Aww” as if this vulnerable-looking gesture wasn’t to be taken seriously. To Gloria, she said, “I hope I haven’t perverted you.”
Their romance became the start of a war with Leonard. Joan said he was a creep and fraud and if she had to, to protect Gloria, she would bite his face off.
For many years, Joan and Gloria had remained close, sometimes intimate, friends. But they’d fought and nearly lost their friendship over the fact that Gloria would not renounce Leonard despite everything Joan insisted he had done to her.
Ironically, Leonard was the one relationship that survived Gloria’s move to Quincy. He still saw her sporadically. As always, there were such long gaps between his visits that Corey kept thinking he was gone for good. Boston lay between the South Shore and the North Shore, his father’s country, the land of Chelsea, East Boston, Malden, and Revere, making it almost possible to forget that Leonard walked the earth. Then, as ever, he’d drop by. His tie to Corey’s mother had stretched and attenuated over the miles and years like a strand of spiderweb, floating invisibly in the atmosphere until it touched the face.