26
Gelato
In his second year at university, Adrian had undergone a transformation. In September, he had arrived at school with a mountain bike, a Habit with out-front steering geometry, full suspension, and eighteen inches of travel, which he rode across campus to his independent project, an internship at a research lab in the Polaroid building, on the geometric image of a photon. The mountain bike, which retailed for two thousand dollars at REI, sliced along the winding paths trod by quiet academics. It was powered by Adrian’s bulging legs, fitted into clean tight-fitting denim.
He had gotten rid of the motorcycle jacket, the sweatpants, kneepads, the tattered wrestling shoes. Outside a steel and glass, corporately donated research facility, beneath a twisting modern sculpture, he secured his bike with a Kryptonite bike lock and went into the lecture hall, carrying on his shoulder a new backpack from Eastern Mountain Sports, dressed in clothing so unremarkable and inoffensive that one couldn’t say what he was wearing. Quietly, he took his seat and seemed to vanish among the other young people facing the front of the auditorium.
In stark contrast to his freshman year, he gave a general impression of a mature young man leading a highly scheduled life, moving in duty-bound fashion from one commitment to the next, turning in assignments when they were due, meeting with his study group to work on problem sets, communicating a machinelike responsibility and task orientation. He had taken to wearing a pair of horn-rimmed glasses.
He had grown a partial beard and bought a pair of leather dress boots from the New York Lug Company for the weekend nights when he went out. He’d gotten a fake ID. On a typical Saturday night, he went to a bar in the Fenway, wearing his high school letter jacket for wrestling, which had white leather sleeves, and when asked “What’ll it be?” pressed two fingers to his lips and said, “Hm…I think I’ll have an IPA.”
Those who knew him included Ajay Singh, his freshman roommate. Ajay would report that Adrian had a new interest in evolutionary biology, which he was using to try to understand women.
“He was getting better about his mother,” Ajay would say. “He had a plan to go to grad school at Caltech. All he had to do was finish MIT in excellent fashion in the next three years, and he’d be free.”
In October, just after midterms, Adrian was at a dorm-wide meeting when a chemistry major from another wing of the building made a pass at him and invited him to her room. She was a loner herself—a short-haired woman with a cold, strong-jawed face, who led an adult social life without sentimentality. In her room, Adrian removed his cup. She reportedly said, as she took hold of him, that he had a beautiful cock.
They were seen together around campus after that—not holding hands, but trading looks with one another while they locked up their respective bikes—she had one too.
Adrian was very pleased about the affair, according to those who knew him. Athena—the chemistry major’s name—was very interesting intellectually: “She thinks just like a man. She’s even turned on by other women. She’s perfect for me.”
One night at the peak of the affair, Adrian went out to Red Lobster with his mother. His mother bought them daiquiris and asked about his girlfriend. He told her he didn’t want to tell her—but he’d tell her a little. His mother picked up a spoon, rubbed it and hung it on her nose.
“No fair!” he said. “You’re cheating!”
“You try!”
He took her spoon and set it on his nose. His mother smiled.
When he got back to the dorm that night, he was seen walking up and down an imaginary line on the floor like a tightrope walker, arms out, the spoon, which he had kept, balanced on his nose.
Ajay asked what he was doing. Adrian said he’d been to dinner with his mother, he’d had a couple daiquiris, he felt as gentle as a bear.
They started Gloria’s dinner around five and it took until eight o’clock to get it all done. The day got harder as it went along because everyone, Gloria especially, was getting tired. A great deal of the time, she seemed to be displeased with everyone around her. The house swam in unhappiness and dissatisfaction, the same emotions that an overworked person brings home every day from a hated job. The job was her life, the job of existing in this wheelchair. She wanted to be left alone with a glass of wine in her hand, perhaps. But she could never do that again. And she was always closed in with people, locked in endlessly prolonged interactions over putting a spoon in her mouth. She had to absorb their energy too, just as they had to absorb hers. It had to push her beyond patience. She couldn’t talk about it. She couldn’t go for a walk by herself. She couldn’t pick up a book and forget it. No, the only thing she could look forward to was being put down on her bed and having the lights turned out on her.
As the evening turned sour, Joan, who had a temper and who wasn’t immune to having moods, went out to the kitchen to wash the sippy cup and the Tupperware, smeared with pureed squash, and put the wet dish towels in the laundry basket by the dry gray mop in the spiderwebby alcove that housed the boiler. She went outside, squatted compactly on the steps and smoked a menthol, shook her head and said, tearfully, “I’m not a fuckin’ doormat.”
She wiped her eyes on her brown hand and said to no one, “I know it’s hard for her, but my heart’s not made of gold but it’s not made of leather either.”
One night not long thereafter, Corey was sitting in the kitchenette listening to the baby monitor. He could hear his mother’s breathing the same way he could hear the night sky when the window was open.
“I wish she’d never had anything to do with him.”
“You mean you don’t want to be alive?” Joan asked.
“I don’t know why she ever liked him. I wish you were my dad.”
Joan knocked the ash off her cigarette. “I’m not perfect either, you know, my dear.”
“What’s wrong with you?”
She shook her head.
November. The North End was strung with thousands of red, white and green lights and banners for a saint’s day, Saint Therese of Lisieux, patron of the little flower. Local tourists—Mass. residents who had driven in from Peabody with their families—crowded the narrow sidewalk, big people, their small sons carrying a football. They walked in front of Corey. The dad said, “Why don’t we go in here?” and pointed to a pastry shop. Mom, strong and fat in tight-fitting jeans, her hair in a sexy ponytail, pivoted on the ball of her Under Armour sneaker and went in, her purse over her shoulder like a rifle sling, calling back to her girlfriend, passing the word back. The girlfriend was the wife of another guy and they had kids and friends too. The families were chained together in a great united clan.
They all entered the shop, enveloping Corey like an amoeba, carrying him along. The women wore baseball hats and their ponytails fed out the hole above the adjustable plastic hatband like a horse’s tail coming out the back of a ceremonial saddle in a parade. The boys played together; the men stood with their hands in their pockets and their sunglasses over the brims of their ball caps, looking over everyone’s heads at the loaves of bread. An aging yellowed hue to the shop’s interior. Glaring fluorescent lights like a public school built in the 1950s. Industrial gratings. Statuettes of the Madonna. A photograph of “Our Nonna” signed “with love from all of us.” The antique kitchen in the back. Corey waited in the crowd. It was like waiting for tickets at Fenway Park, the customers forming into several lines to get to the women behind the counter who were like moving ticket windows—pale Old World women with brown and blonde hair and oval faces—Italian, Slavic, Albanian.
The mothers and dads ahead of him were joking. “Mike’s getting her a cannoli.” “I’m putting out an Amber alert.” “Why does he take her out on a Friday night? He’s setting her up for Saturday.” “He should pay for her hair. He works at the beauty parlor. Let her get a cut and color.” One of the boys tossed the football to his brother. It missed and Corey picked it up and gave it back. The father: “Thanks. He drops things.”
He reached the counter and bought his mother twelve dollars’ worth of gelato in three flavors—hazelnut, chocolate and vanilla. Leaving the store, he passed a church with a white plaster Madonna in the front yard, her robe rippling and draped against her legs, as if it weren’t made of stone. She was a figure you had seen a thousand times through a spiked wrought-iron fence. Tilted head, downcast eyes, ritual pose.
Across the avenue, the construction site where he had worked had grown into a tower thirty stories high with a crane parked next to it, reaching skyward in the darkness.
He got on the T and left the city, riding south through the tangled black trees of Dorchester, the nightscape opening up and panning by as they roared above the water, the treetops dropping away, the shore spreading out, lit by distant industrial lights.
At home, Corey told his mother, “We’ll have a party.” He set out the gelato and lit a candle like a single Italian light. She made a moan of surprise. He thought he understood her. “Thank you for getting me a present, Corey. This is fun.” She closed her eyes and leaned against him. “Thank you,” she was saying. It was just the two of them. Joan wasn’t there. Gloria might have been crying, he couldn’t tell.
Joan did not show up the next night or the next. She called instead. Corey held the phone to his mother’s ear. He translated for her when she wanted to talk. He found himself in the middle of a conversation he didn’t understand.
“I’ll try to be there tomorrow,” Joan said, “if I can make it.”
“My mom says, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ Just a minute.”
He got the letter board.
I forgive her.
“Tell her that?”
Gloria moaned.
“She says she forgives you.”
The phone went dead in his hand.
“What just happened? Did she hang up on us?”
His mother said, She isn’t coming back.
Corey thought that was impossible.
Gloria said, You’ll see.
He called her in secret when his mother was asleep. He hid in the kitchen and talked to her, as far as possible from his mother’s hearing, his voice lowered, just as he had when she was here in person. On the phone, her speech was colorful as always, but she never said how she could leave like this. So he called her back at Christmas and asked her why she’d left—was it because of him? She intimated that it was.
“Joan, this is my mom we’re talking about. I can control myself.”
But she did not return. And he wasn’t brave enough to tell her, “You can give me any reasons in the world, but this is wrong. What about that woman dying in there? You call yourself her friend?”
She’d fled to Dorchester, apparently—or so she’d said. She’d moved in with someone—man or woman, sex unknown—who lived on a Haitian block. She’d lasted a year with Gloria’s disease.
By the end of fall semester, Athena had dropped Adrian for a girl, a female student who was as innocent as Athena was sophisticated. This new partner had floppy limbs and looked like someone you could unfold. Adrian saw them walking around campus arm in arm, whispering and laughing. He told a classmate he was used to using his rational mind to deal with rejection; he was back to being “a proud, lonely boy.”
Over Christmas, he went to stay in Cincinnati with his father. Mr. Reinhardt was prepared to let his son stay over, but wasn’t prepared to feed him. The elder Reinhardt was sharing his home with “his new playmate,” as he described her—a petite young blonde named Sheila, who drove a black sports wagon, wore sunglasses, short skirts and played tennis in the summer. The only thing Adrian was allowed to touch in the kitchen was the stove. Frank and Sheila’s groceries were off-limits, so Adrian lived on black-eyed peas, which cost 89 cents a dry pound. He made pounds at a time, soaked them overnight in a ten-gallon pot, boiled them for hours, filling the tall-ceilinged kitchen with steam, and stored the giant pot in the refrigerator. When he was hungry, he ate the cold congealed peas directly out of the pot, without seasoning, up in his room.
He ate and studied at the same time so he didn’t have to take his eyes off his physics. The peas gave him gas, and he lifted up one buttock and farted loudly. His father on a lower floor said, “Adrian, you’re disgusting.”
“I know,” said Adrian. “That makes me so happy.”
The big, dusty house had four or five floors, a winding central staircase, which switched directions like a snake at each landing—the kind of house that cost a million dollars, but there’d be rusted nails sticking in a closet door or broken glass shards in a window frame and old wires wrapped in gummy black electrical tape jutting from a light socket. The large windows in Adrian’s room didn’t have shades or screens.
Sheila and his father were eating dinner in the kitchen. Adrian walked in to get his beans, and Sheila remarked she’d come across a photograph she thought he’d want to have: It was of Adrian in the woods carrying a deer across his shoulders.
“No, my dad wants that. That was from our hunting trip together.”
“No, I don’t. You can keep that,” Frank said. “Sheil’, you want to know the story behind that picture? Adrian’s fourteen. We bag a deer, and he wants a picture of it on his back. So, Mister Show-off, he picks it up. But it was a buck, and he didn’t know it. Its penis went in his ear. The weight compressed the bladder and it pissed in his ear!”
“Oh, Adrian!” Sheila laughed. “Didn’t you see the horns?”
A few weeks later, the vacation ended and he went back to MIT. He did well on his highly difficult exams.
Over intersession, the period of independent study and self-renewal between finals and the start of the spring semester, he lingered in the dining hall, eating copious amounts of ground meat and rice long after the kitchen closed. A classmate who sat with him one day learned that Adrian was teaching himself the crystalline structure of metals, a subject that interested them both. They fell into conversation. Adrian revealed that his vacation had been marred by an incident in consequence of which his father had told him that the only women he was ever going to get were “gas station women and nigger whores.”
Adrian’s listener was shocked. He thought people only talked like that online.
“Yes, it’s damaging to my self-esteem. But,” said Adrian, “I’ve accepted what I am.”
Suddenly, he put on a whiny falsetto: “A-drian, I don’t like what you’ve become!”—and laughed. His mother’s cancer was getting worse—that is, she was claiming it was worse. She was simply angry, he explained, that he hadn’t spent the holiday with her.
It was around this time, in early January, that other residents of the dorm noticed Adrian’s renewed affinity for the basement.
Adrian said he was having certain ideas in his head, things he had to tell someone.
Corey’s father said, “Come with me.” He picked up his radio and led the way downstairs into the basement. It was long past midnight.
They came to a locked door at the far end of the basement. Adrian thought they’d have to turn around, but Leonard had the key and they passed into an old tunnel with two-tone painted brick walls: a fallout shelter from the Oppenheimer days, the subterranean rock so thick it blocked all frequencies and sounds. You couldn’t use your phone down here.
“Now you’re in the catacombs,” Leonard said.
“I love this!”
“What’s on your mind?”
“I dream about hanging up a live deer on a tree like a heavy bag.” Adrian began throwing pantomime punches from his hyper-muscled torso while staring far away. “I’d have my hand wraps on. I’d be wearing nothing but my kneepads and my cup, so it couldn’t kick me in the groin, and I’d start smashing it. I’d break its ribs. I’d beat it until I popped its organs and it exploded. I’d put my fist right through it. Then I’d take it down and put a condom on and fuck it while I was punching it as hard as I could. My body would be completely covered in its blood.”
“And?”
He wished his penis were made of steel. He fantasized about ramming his hips into a woman until he had smashed her womb into a bloody pulp—into taco sauce.
“And you feel like there’s something wrong with you?”
“No. I feel like something’s right.”
Leonard held silent.
“It’s like a prison down here,” Adrian observed. “Sometimes I’ve thought jail would be perfect for me. I’d lift weights all day and wouldn’t have to worry about room and board.”
“The end of all worries.”
“One time, my mother didn’t want to pay for me to join a gym, so I found this cheap place to work out, the Y in Central Square. It’s like this halfway house. All these guys were ex-cons. I met this one dude who had gone to jail for statutory rape, and I asked him about it.”
“Did his alleged crime bother you?”
“Well, let’s look at this. Here’s some woman who’s been having sex since she was twelve, she’s fully developed, she lies about her age—if you ask me, the real crime is putting him in jail. He served like ten years. They ruined his life! And he had this great attitude: He was philosophical about it. If that happened to me, I’d be so angry. I’d be looking for revenge after I got out.”
“What would you do?”
“I’d find that girl.”
“And what would you do to her?”
“I’d file a sexual harassment lawsuit against her.”
They laughed.
“But then you’ll never know what it’s like to do certain things.”
“Yeah, but I don’t actually want to go to jail.”
“You don’t have to. FBI statistics say there’s about a hundred serial killers in the U.S. at any given time. That’s an estimate based on the number of unsolved homicides, the key word being unsolved. Nobody has to go to jail. There’re a lot of people who are gonna die anyway.”
“But a lot of people go to jail for murder.”
“Not everyone.” Leonard gazed at Adrian from behind his brown-lensed glasses, which protected him from cosmic rays. “Not everyone gets found. Decomposition can be catalyzed.”
“Yeah, but the human body is like ninety percent water. You need a super-high temperature crematorium.”
“You’ve heard of a pot roast, haven’t you? You cook that in a household oven.”
“Oh. Like Jeffrey Dahmer?”
“The biggest bone in the human body is the femur. You could have it in a bag of golf clubs in your closet. Then you got the skull, the spine and pelvis. You can do different things with each one. You could have a cop over to your house and serve him coffee in the skull of some unlucky individual and he’d never know it.”
“I guess there is something kind of primitive and special about eating someone.”
“It’s the ultimate in domination.”
“Yeah, but isn’t it gross?”
“No. I mean, yeah, it is, obviously; it’s sickening, but that’s illusory. Once you get past the societal prohibitions, you’re dealing with the meat. You’re handling it; it’s up to your standards of cleanliness.”
“I don’t know. I tried eating this whore’s pussy over Christmas and it made me throw up.”
“Why’d you do that?”
“I wanted to get good at it. I wanted her to have a good time.”
“You could catch something like that.”
“I dipped my tongue in Clorox afterwards.”
“Did she like it?”
“I don’t know if she could enjoy it. She told me when she was a kid, her stepdad used to come home drunk and make her sit with her legs spread open on the kitchen floor, and kick her right between the legs with his boot. But I could sort of tell when I was doing it right.”
“I’m surprised you fool around like that given your experience with gonorrhea.”
“It was a great experience for me. I went out there every night. She was blown away by my physique. I was the best sex she’s had—and she sees tons of men all the time, so she has her pick of the litter. We basically started going out. It was just like being boyfriend and girlfriend.”
“How much did she charge you?”
“I didn’t pay a thing. I took my stepmother’s credit card and used it at the whorehouse. When the first charge of five hundred bucks came up, my stepmother was like, ‘What’s Starlight Entertainment’? I was like, ‘I have no idea.’ So she called the card company and stopped payment and they cancelled the card, but the whorehouse didn’t figure it out until the charges got declined. By then, I’d had like all these times with Tricia. When she found out, she was pissed. She said I owed her two thousand dollars and she was gonna send these corn-fed guys out to my dad’s house to do a job on me. They had the address off the credit card.”
“They show up?”
“Yeah. They threw a brick at the house. I called the cops.”
“Look, kid, if you want to have a good time without paying, all you gotta do is slip the girl a Mickey. You give her a date-rape drug, and it’s your word against hers.”