Telegraph Avenue: A Novel

by Michael Chabon

  “I can’t believe they aren’t letting us in there!”

  “Take it easy,” Aviva said in a hushed voice that was meant, Gwen knew, to communicate the fact that she was talking too loudly. But Gwen could tell that she was rattling Aviva, and for some reason, it pleased her to see it. For the second time that day, she had a sense of trespassing on some internal quarantine, crossing a forbidden zone into the pon farr; amok time. It would not be right for Aviva to make her go there alone.

  “I’ve had enough of this,” Gwen said. “Aviva, no, seriously. Listen to me.”

  “I can hear you loud and clear, Gwen.”

  “Come on. You have worked too hard. We have both earned the right to be treated better than this.”

  There was the squeak of a sneaker on tiled floor. The partners turned, startled, to the door of the examining room, where a young pink-faced doctor appeared, his head shaved almost to the scalp, leaving only a ghostly chevron of pattern baldness. Dead-eyed, already tired of listening to them before they ever opened their mouths.

  “I’m Dr. Lazar,” he said. “I was able to do a manual removal of the placenta. Mrs. Frankenthaler is stable, uterine tonicity looks good. We stopped the bleeding. She’ll be fine.”

  The partners stood, perfectly still, tasting the news like thirsty people trying to decide if they had just felt a drop of rain. Then they fell on each other and hung on tight, Gwen half stupid with relief, drunk on it, clinging to Aviva as if to keep the room from spinning.

  Dr. Lazar studied the celebration with his flounder eyes and a mean smile like a card cheat with a winning hand. “Do you think,” he said after an interval not quite long enough to pass for decent, “uh, I don’t know, do either of you ladies think maybe you could explain to me how you managed to screw up this birth quite so badly?”

  “Excuse me?” Gwen said, letting go of Aviva as the dizziness abruptly passed.

  “Ten more minutes of sage-burning or whatever voodoo you were working, and that mom—”

  “Voodoo?” Gwen said.

  Instead of wincing at this clear instance of having said something he was bound to regret, Dr. Lazar turned gelid, immobile. But he flushed to the tips of his ears. “You know what?” he said. “Whatever.”

  He turned and walked out of the room, and Gwen noticed a purple Skittle adhering to the seat of his surgical scrub trousers. For some reason, the sight of the smashed piece of candy stuck on the doctor’s ass inspired a minute compassion for the fish-eyed and weary young man with his burden of alopecia, and this, in turn, sent her over the edge.

  “Gwen!” Aviva said, but it was too late, and anyway, the hell with her.

  An hour ago, when they had blown in on a gust of urgency from the ambulance bay, EMT yelling instructions, calling for a stretcher, Garth looking modestly wild-eyed, dancing like a man who had to pee, holding the baby who needed to be fed, Aviva breaking out a bottle of Enfamil from her backpack and cracking it with a sigh and that formula smell of vitamins and cheese, the wonderful avid baby needing every ounce of it—Gwen had failed to remark just how busy it was tonight at the emergency room of Chimes General Hospital.

  Every room seemed to be occupied. Her pursuit of Dr. Lazar was haunted at its edges by glimpses of a pale hairy shin slashed with red. A forlorn teenager in a volleyball uniform clutching her arm at a surrealist angle. A young man with baby dreadlocks gripping either side of a sink as if about to vomit. The whole scene scored with a discordant soundtrack of televisions and woe, the nattering of SpongeBob, an old man’s ursine expectorations, a pretty Asian woman cursing like a sailor as something nasty was extracted from the meat of her hand, the horrific shrieking of a toddler being held down by its father while a phlebotomist probed its arm for a vein. Outside the last examination room before the waiting area, a young Hispanic man lolled in a chair, holding a bloody ice pack to his face, while from inside the room, a doctor yelled cheerfully in English at his bleeding companion as if the man were deaf and retarded.

  “I am a nurse,” Gwen said, managing to sound calmer than she felt, catching up with Lazar. “Please tell me that I did not just hear you employ the term ‘voodoo’ in reference to my licensed and certified practice of midwifery.”

  Lazar stopped at the threshold of the waiting area, where he planned, she assumed, to tell Garth and Arcadia that Lydia would be okay, business that was definitely more important, as Gwen knew perfectly well in some cool, quiet corner of her being, than whatever point she was attempting to make. The doctor turned to confront her with an air of resigned willingness to go along, an obedient soldier saddling up for the ride into the valley of death.

  “I know you were burning something,” he said. “I could smell it on her.”

  “It was ylang-ylang,” Aviva said, hurrying up behind them, taking a step toward Gwen as if to interpose her body between Gwen and the doctor. “Her husband was burning it during the first part of her labor. She likes the smell.”

  “That woman,” Gwen said, “Lydia. The placenta was retained. There was stage zero hemorrhage, borderline stage one. Uterine atonicity. And she went into a hypovolemic shock.”

  “Correct,” the doctor said, impatient.

  “Even though we had her on a course of supplements and immediately began to administer oxytocin and do uterine massage. Exactly like you or any doctor would have done. Is that not correct?”

  He blinked, not wanting to give up anything to her.

  “So tell me this, Doctor, how many accretas, how many postpartum hemorrhages, have you guys had here this month? Like, what, I’m going to say six?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Ten?”

  “I don’t know the answer to that, Ms. Shanks, but see, the thing is, when those things happen here, okay? When they happen here? When there’s some hemorrhaging? Which does occur, of course. Then the patient’s already in the damn hospital. Where she ought to be.”

  Gwen looked over at the young man with the ice pack, his visible eye dull and maddened, his knuckles swollen like berries on the point of rot.

  “You know what?” Aviva said, and out came the pointing finger so feared by all who loved her, Gwen among them, as the Berkeley faded and the Brooklyn broke through, and all at once Aviva’s proximity no longer buffered but menaced the doctor. “In fifteen years, my practice has never lost a single mother. And not one single baby. Can this place make that claim? No, I happen to know very well it can’t, and so do you.”

  “Who would ever want to have a baby here?” Gwen observed, half to herself, a hand settling on her belly like an amulet or shield.

  “It’s a birth,” the doctor said. “You know, call me crazy, but maybe in the end that’s one of those things you just don’t want to try at home. It’s not like conking your hair.”

  Somebody gasped out in the waiting room. An arch, eager female voice went Awwwwww shit.

  “You racist,” Gwen began, “misogynist—”

  “Oh, come on, don’t start that crap.”

  Lazar turned his back on her and went into the waiting room. Throwing up his hands, shaking his head: all the bad acting people tended to engage in when they were most sincere. Gwen stayed right with him. Everyone in the waiting room raised their head, face blank and attentive, prepared if not hoping for further entertainment.

  “Don’t you bait me,” Gwen said, feeling an internal string, years in the winding, snap with a delicious and terrible twang. “Don’t you ever try to bait me, you baldheaded, Pee-wee Herman–looking, C-sectioning, PPO hatchet man.”

  Ho! Uh-uh! Go, Mommy!

  Gwen was right up against him, her body, her belly, the pert cupola of her protruding navel flirting through the fabric of her blouse with actual physical contact. He backed off, betraying the faintest hint of fear.

  Garth stood up, holding the baby stiffly, forlornly, as if it were a rare musical instrument, some kind of obscure assemblage of reeds and bladders that he would now be called upon to play. His blue eyes looked frightened, be
wildered, and when she saw him, Gwen felt ashamed. Arcadia, curled in on herself in a plastic armchair, woke up and started to cry.

  “Mr. Frankenthaler?” the doctor said.

  “Garth, she’s fine,” Aviva said. She hurried over to Garth, rubbed his shoulder. “She’s fine, she’s going to be fine.”

  “Why don’t you come with me, Mr. Frankenthaler? I’ll take you to see your wife,” Lazar said.

  “She isn’t my wife,” Garth said, dazed. “My last name is Newgrange.”

  Lazar crouched down in front of Arcadia and spoke, in a tender voice, words that only she could hear. She nodded and sniffled, and he moved a thick coil of her dark hair, damp at the end with tears, out of her eyes, painting a shining trail across her cheek. Suddenly, the man was the kindest doctor in the universe. He stood up, and Arcadia took hold of the hem of her father’s windbreaker, and they followed Lazar back into the ER. Two seconds later, Lazar reappeared and pointed his finger at Gwen in a parody, perhaps unconscious, of Aviva’s recent performance.

  “I’m writing this up,” he told Gwen, who stood there, shoulders heaving, all the righteousness emptied out of her, the last bright tankful burned off in that final heavenward blast. “Count on that.”

  “Did you hear the way he spoke to me?” she said to Aviva, to the room, a note of uncertainty in the question as if seeking confirmation that she had not in fact imagined it. “ ‘Voodoo.’ ‘It’s not like having your hair conked.’ Did you hear? I know everybody in this room heard the man.”

  Aviva was back to the hushed voice, gently taking hold of Gwen’s elbow. “I heard,” she said, “I know.”

  “You know? I don’t think you do.”

  “Oh, come on,” Aviva said with an unfortunate echo of Lazar in her tone. “For God’s sake, Gwen. I’m on your side.”

  “No, Aviva, I’m on my side. I didn’t hear him say one damn word to you.”

  Gwen pulled her arm free of Aviva’s grasp and trudged out of the waiting room, through the covered entranceway to the ER, and out to the driveway, where Hekate the Volvo still sat, her hazard lights faithfully blinking. The late-summer-afternoon breeze carried a smell of the ocean. Gwen shivered, a spasm that started in her arms and shoulders but soon convulsed everything. She had barely eaten all day, which was horrible, reprehensible, two months from delivery and already a Bad Mother. Now she felt like she was starving and at the same time like she might throw up. The stitches burned in her cheek. There was a reek of butts and ashes, out here beyond the doors, and a live thread of fresh smoke. She turned to see a pair of women whom she recognized from the waiting room, young and wide-eyed with matching taffy curls, cousins or possibly sisters, one of them even more hugely pregnant than Gwen, sharing a Kool with an air of exuberant impatience as if, when they finished it, something good was going to happen to one or both of them.

  “Hello,” Gwen said, and they laughed as if she had said something stupid or as if she herself were stupid regardless of what she might say. They were among those who had cheered and taken great pleasure in Gwen’s public argument with Dr. Lazar. The pregnant one smoked, inhaling in that strange impatient way, and studied Gwen as if the sight of her confirmed some long-held theory.

  “You a midwife?” the pregnant woman said.

  Gwen nodded, trying to look proud and competent, a credit to her profession and her people. The pregnant woman dropped the burning cigarette and stepped on it, and then she and her companion turned to walk back to the emergency room, the pregnant woman’s flip-flops scraping and slapping against the soles of her feet.

  “See, now,” she told her companion, “don’t want to be messing with that country shit.”

  Around the time when Baby Frankenthaler was bundled from her mother’s belly red and headlong into the world, Archy came rolling out of his front door for the second time that day and stood on the topmost step of his porch, freshly showered, toweled, and eau-de-cologned, dressed in a crisp shirt of seafoam-green linen and a linen suit of dulce-de-leche brown. Only to his pride did there still cling, perhaps, the faintest whiff of sesame. He reached up and out with both arms to shoot his cuffs, and for an instant he might have served to illustrate the crucial step in a manual on the seizing of days. He had already seized this particular day once, but he was prepared, if need be, to go ahead and seize the motherfucker all over again.

  It was a pretty day for seizing, that much was certain: the prettiest that Oakland, California, had to offer. The fog had burned off, leaving only a softness, as tender as a memory from childhood, to blur the sunlight that warmed the sprawl of rosemary and purple salvia along the fragrant sidewalk and fell in shifting shafts through the branches of the monkey-puzzle tree. This whimsical evergreen, mammoth and spiky, dominated the front yard of Archy and Gwen’s sagging 1918 bungalow, formerly the home of a mean old Portuguese man named Oliveira. Reputed, when Archy was a kid, to contain an extensive collection of shrunken heads gathered during Mr. Oliveira’s career as a merchant seaman, the house had been a reliable source of neighborhood legend, especially at Halloween, and the mythic memory of those leering heads gave Archy pause sometimes when he came home on an autumn evening, a ring-and-run thrill. He had to this day never forgotten the strange horror of glimpsing one of Mr. Oliveira’s many tattoos, like something out of Nathaniel Hawthorne, consisting of a ragged rectangle, a bar of black ink scrawled across the cordovan hide of the old sailor’s upper arm in order to blot out, like the pen of a censor, some underlying name or image whose memory, for mysterious reasons, was abhorrent.

  Archy patted the hip pocket of his jacket, checking for The Meditations, coming down the front steps with his sense of resignation stiffened, in best Stoic fashion, to a kind of resolve. Knowing he had done wrong, prepared to make amends, settle his business. Determined to return to Brokeland, open the doors wide to the angel of retail death, and run the place into the ground all by himself, if that was what it took—but to fail calmly, to fail with style, to fail above all with that true dignity, unknown to his wife or his partner, which lay in never tripping out, never showing offense or hurt to those who had offended or hurt you.

  He heard the grumbling of a vintage Detroit engine, inadequately muffled, and watched with dull foreboding as a 1970 Oldsmobile Toronado, recurrent as a bad dream, turned onto Sixty-first Street. The vehicle was in awful shape: formerly green and bleached to a glaucous white, rusted in long streaks and patches so that the side visible resembled a strip of rancid bacon.

  Archy was a compulsive admirer of American muscle cars from the ten-year period following his birth in 1968, a period which, in his view—a view often and with countless instances, oral footnotes, and neologisms expounded at the counter of Brokeland Records—corresponded precisely with the most muscular moment in the history of black music in America. His own car, parked in the driveway, was a 1974 El Camino, butterscotch flake, maintained with love and connoisseurship by himself and Sixto “Eddie” Cantor, Stallings Professor of Elcaminology at Motor City Auto Repair and Custom Jobs. Archy was the author of the as yet unwritten Field Guide to Whips of the Funk Era, and thus, even if he had not grown up as the virtual older brother of this particular Toronado, he would have been able, by its GT hood badge and dual exhaust, to identify the model year of the low-fallen specimen rolling up to his house. Of the chrome trim only the white plastic underclips remained, and the hood was held shut by a frayed knot of nylon rope looped through the grille, several vanes of which had fallen out, leaving the unfortunate car with a gap-toothed and goofy Leon Spinks grin. In the backseat he thought he glimpsed the blue plastic Samsonite suitcase his grandmother used to take with her on the Fun Train up to Reno. From the right rear window protruded a deco-style halogen floor lamp of the type that caught Lionel Hampton on fire.

  “Nuh-uh,” Archy said, seeing that this was to be one of those days when it was best to remember, following the cue of Marcus Aurelius or possibly Willie Hutch, that the things of the body are as a river, and the things of the soul
as a dream and a vapor; and life is a warfare and a pilgrim’s sojourn, and fame after death is only forgetfulness. “Y’all can just continue on your way.”

  He could see that it was not Luther at the wheel. Any one of a number of interstellar fuckups and freakazoids might be at the helm of this broke-down starship of the seventies, but Archy’s thoughts leaped with a bitter instinct to Valletta Moore.

  Sure enough. A lamentable lamentation of the door hinges, sounding like the gate on a crypt filled with vengeful dead folks being thrown open, and Valletta Moore got out of the car. Big-boned, shapely, on the fatal side of fifty, high-waisted, high-breasted, face a feline triangle. Beer-bottle-brown eyes, skin luminous and butterscotch, as if she herself had come fresh from the spray gun of Sixto Cantor. Ten, eleven years since the last time Archy had seen her, at least.

  “Uh-oh. Look out.”

  “I know you remember me,” she said.

  “I remember you didn’t used to be quite as fine as you are now.”

  “ ‘Look out,’ ” Valletta quoted back at him, shaking her head, lowering over her amber eyes a pair of bulbous sunglasses with white plastic frames. “I guess I know where you learned that shit.”

  Looking at her, already smelling her perfume, Archy’s memory dealt him a rapid hand of images, of which the ace was unquestionably the grand soft spectacle of Valletta Moore, 1978, shaving her legs at his father’s apartment in El Cerrito, glimpsed through the five-inch crack of the open bathroom door. Slender right foot planted on the floor, other foot arched on the shining lip of the bathtub, Valletta bent like a watchmaker over the work of painting a brown razor stripe up the white lathered inside of her long left leg, hair wrapped in a towel but her strong body naked and bold as a flag. The architecture of her ass was something deeper than a memory to Archy, something almost beyond remembrance, an archetype, the pattern of all asses forever after, wired into the structure of reality itself.