The Good Son: A Novel - By Michael Gruber Page 0,1

she had that look, her pumping-for-information look, on her smooth, tan, flat face, with that hair hanging loose and thick on either side. Maybe you have to grow up in a Muslim country to understand the erotic appeal of long black hair. It still knocked me out to see American women just walk through the streets with their hair hanging down for anybody to see, a little fossil of my upbringing. Especially this kind of hair, Asian hair, thick, glossy, blue-black, although Gloria is a Latina and not from where I’m from.

I said to the look, “It’s a long story.”

“You say that a lot,” she said. “Mr. Mysterious. If you think that makes you more, like, attractive, you’re wrong.”

“You’re delving, Gloria. I thought we were going to keep it simple and shallow.”

“Asking about your mom isn’t delving. Delving is who did you go out with and what did you do with them? Or, you know, what you did in the war.”

“You want to know this? It’s interesting to you?”

“Yeah. We have to talk about something. I told you about my folks, my brother, and all that shit, so you tell me about yours. It’s what normal people do. We can’t have sex all the time.”

I snaked my hand under the quilt. “We could try,” I said.

She moved her legs to make a space for my hand. “Yes, but tell me: Why can’t she go back to Pakistan?”

“Okay,” I said, and suppressed a sigh. “My mother is Sonia Bailey.”

“Who?”

“She used to be pretty famous back in the seventies. When I was about three she left me in Lahore and traveled through what was then Soviet Central Asia, disguised as a Muslim boy. She wrote a book about it that got a lot of play, especially from the feminists. Then she hung around Lahore for a few more years, and when I was ten she went off again, but this time she went on the haj, the pilgrimage to Mecca.”

“Also as a boy?”

“Yeah, and that was the problem. She polluted the holy places with her transvestism. The Muslim world went crazy. Death sentences got issued.”

“Like that guy, what’s-his-name?”

“Salman Rushdie, but this was way before that.”

“And nobody found out she was a woman?”

“No, not until she wrote a book about it. She’s small and wiry, like me.”

“No tits, huh?”

“Pretty flat. Narrow hips, too. And she had an artificial dick.”

“Seriously?”

“Uh-huh. She had it made in Lahore. She could pee through it, so when the guys saw that, it closed the deal; she was one of the boys.”

“Did she take you along on that trip?”

“No, she left me again,” I said and I didn’t want to talk about it anymore then so I got to stroking her in the way she liked, which she’d already told me about. Gloria is good with the details. She lives a very controlled life, and after a few minutes of this she said, “Jump on me, quick,” and I did.

After we finished, she popped immediately out of bed. I always thought women liked to cuddle after—that’s their favorite part, is what I understood—but not Gloria. She was getting ready for her early shift. I heard a shower going for what couldn’t have been more than ninety seconds and got strobelike sightings of brown skin and sensible underwear, and there she was in her pink scrubs with her long hair coiled and pinned into a shining black bun.

She leaned over—a quick kiss—and said, “Toss the key through the mailbox; don’t forget, okay?”

I said I wouldn’t and she was gone in a flash of pink. A minute later I heard the sound of her old beater starting up, and off she rattled.

Gloria is a nurse at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, in the north end of Washington, D.C., where I’m being treated, and she was a soldier too, once, and is now a civilian employee. She is the child of Mexican immigrants and a big striver, which I am definitely not. I am what they call a lifer; I will probably be in the military my whole life. When your average troop says this, it means twenty-and-out or thirty-and-out, retire on the pension, maybe get another job, and have a pretty nice life—what with the benefits and all—but I will probably get killed, considering what I do, so I will really be in the army my whole life.

I fell asleep and awoke at dawn like a good soldier. Then I took a lot longer than a ninety-second shower and helped myself