Telegraph Avenue: A Novel

by Michael Chabon

  So she arrived home that night, having spent the afternoon listening like some Zen apprentice to the sound of Aviva not saying anything about the meeting with Lazar—the silence more painful than any reproach, Gwen’s life furnished perhaps too amply with people who wore you out with paradox—feeling that smooth cranium of dread lodged against her rib cage, prepared to let her lying, cheating, no-good Darling Husband off the hook tonight—and look at the fool! Saving her the trouble. Messing around with his bungee cords and his moving-van blankets. Big and purple as the cause of all her problems, the ridiculous splendor of his platform saddle shoes measuring in lofty inches the distance between him and any world that might construe itself in terms of duty and obligation.

  Though only a few minutes earlier, she had been trying out on herself various backhanded or gently sarcastic ways of telling Archy that she wanted only to spend tonight tangled on the couch with him, eating Fentons Swiss milk chocolate from a half-gallon carton and watching whatever program he felt like watching, now she perceived that she would rather let him fuck every woman in Ethiopia and Eritrea, in twos and threes, than let him miss out on the company of Ms. Pease.

  Then she caught sight of the play of muscle across the back of his jacket, glints like the naps of knife blades, as, in a single effortless arc, he hoisted the big wooden cube of the amplifier—old Mr. Jones’s precious Leslie, on whose repair Archy had lavished their final weeks of childless freedom—into the back of his car. Hoisting that great big thing as if it were a carton full of packing peanuts. Gwen let out a sound that slipped unintentionally from the intended hmmph of disapproval to a bass thrum like the loosing of some inner string.

  “Uh-oh,” he said, turning. “You got your hand on your hip, that way.”

  “I know you must be unloading,” Gwen said. “Even though it looks like you’re putting stuff in.”

  “Yeah, no, uh, we got a gig tonight. A good one. Kind of political fund-raiser, up by Kensington. Cragmont, someplace, off the Arlington or—” He saw that she was not interested in details of North Berkeley geography. “Oh, shit. It’s Saturday.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Okay,” he said, “here’s the thing. They really don’t need me. It’s Nat and Boom and Mr. Jones, and long as I get him the Leslie, that man with just his one left foot can do anything that I could offer on bass with two hands. Seriously.” He consulted his watch. “We run it up there, drop it off, grab you something to eat, raise that blood sugar up to a useful level, we can make it back down for the birthing class right on time. Sound like a plan?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, that does sound like a plan,” Gwen said. “But not your plan. Your plan, let me guess: Toss the rest of that stuff in there.” She gestured to the J Bass in its case, the bass amp and preamp, stacked beside the right front fender of the El Camino. “Head on up to North Berkeley, not even give a second thought to the only important thing you have going on in your life right now. I bet you didn’t even write me a damn note.”

  At this grave charge, Archy started to register a protest, prepared to make his objections known, feeling his way into it like a man backing down a hallway in the dark, as if hoping that when he reached the far end, he would discover, with a cry of vindication and triumph, that indeed, au contraire, he had written a note and simply, in the interval, forgotten. But no; the hope of this died in his eyes. Then he got himself an idea. Held up a finger. Patted his pocket. Nodded. Overplaying the whole thing with an air of comic pantomime, trying to defuse her by acting cute, a tactic with a decent record of success over the years, though failures were numberless and spectacular. He reached into the breast pocket of the Funky Suit jacket, took out a black Sharpie and a scrap of paper that proved to be an unpaid city of Emeryville parking ticket issued two years earlier, scrawled a few words on the back of it, and passed it to her with a ceremonious lack of ceremony. Gwen folded it in half without reading it, wondered why on that June afternoon two years previous his El Camino had been parked in front of 1133 Sixty-second Street, concluded that it was either a woman or a basement full of some dead man’s records, folded it a second time, and poked it back into his hand.

  “I am going to take a shower,” she said. “Go to La Calaca Loca right now, and get me one of those elotes they have, light on the chile, and a fish taco, two fish tacos, the batter kind. And a bottle of that tamarindo, and have it back here and waiting for me when I come down.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Archy said.

  A funny look passed across his face, like the flicker of a television during a brownout, and his eyes darted from right to left, tracking the cicada whirr of a bicycle. She turned to see the back of a long-limbed boy on a bicycle, maybe a neighborhood kid, nobody she could place, and when she looked back at Archy, he was swinging the rest of his gear into the El Camino, saying,“Elote, huh, yeah, that sounds good. I could eat Mexican every day.” He turned back to her. “I love Mexico.” He wiped his forehead with the back of one satined arm. “Baby, let’s go to Mexico. Like, tonight. Come on. Let’s do it. Let’s move to Mexico.”

  “Ha ha.”

  “I’m serious.” He made his face all serious, or maybe it really did fall out that way for once. “I am being totally sincere.”

  “And I am totally, sincerely, about to have a baby, Archy. How am I going to go to Mexico?”

  Even as the words burst from her lips, she regretted them, realizing, probably before Archy did, that when he went to Mexico, he need not take her along. Archy could go to Mexico, flat out move there, any damn time he wanted to. He could leave tonight.

  Archy took off his sunglasses to wipe the lenses on the end of his necktie. Barefaced, he gazed at her, expression ironic, just kidding, for now.

  “Fish tacos,” he said. “For days.”

  The valet parkers in matched tan coveralls stood shoulder to shoulder like convicts chained at the ankle, heads back, chins pointed at the sky. Something up there causing them to ponder. Archy nosed the El Camino up the hill toward them and the venue: round tower of butterscotch stucco with a Juliet window, blue-tiled arch in a butterscotch gate. Creeping up the street as it traced the switchback course of some old arroyo, neighborhood cars shouldering in from both sides to leave clearance just sufficient for his wide-track choogling slab of lost Detroit. Archy already feeling crowded enough by the marital silence that at present filled the vehicle, knowing perfectly well, with all the almanack sagacity the word “husband” implied, that the present silence was more portent than aftermath. A formulating stillness. That pressure drop, brooding and birdless, right before the touchdown of a tornado.

  They passed Nat’s Saab, rolling up to the valet stand where the four parkers in their Carhartt zip-ups stood gawping at the sky, Hispanic kids as varied in size and girth as sample popcorn servings ranged along a movie theater snack bar. Gwen poked her head out the window on her side of the El Camino, saw what they saw, slumped back against the bench seat. Fitted her folded arms between her breasts and belly. Spoke for the first time in approximately eighteen minutes, or at any rate laid down an utterance, troubling to pack it beforehand, like a jihadi packing an IED, with shards of irony, nails of bitterness, jagged chips of bleak wonder.

  “Huh,” she said.

  Archy got out of the car. For a second or two, his eyes were diverted by the great canvas of city, bay, and bridges stretched across the frame of eucalyptus trees beyond the terra-cotta roof tiles of the venue. Paint laid on with brushes fat and fine, washes of fog and winking sun on window grids, the foundered wreck of Alcatraz, the iron giant jubilating up there on Twin Peaks. And then there it was, against the curve of August sky.

  As long as his forearm, as fat around, humming to itself like Nat Jaffe evolving a theory about the profound effect on world history if Hank Crawford had not stood up Creed Taylor for the sessions that became the first album by Grover Washington, Jr., the Dogpile blimp slid by. All black from nose to fins, emblazoned on its flank with a red paw print and the Dogpile name
in bold red slab-serif type. A taunt implied in the sloth of its passage, lazy and deliberate as a Benz-load of bangers rolling by your door with their windows down.

  “We’re not staying,” Archy told the valets as he went around the back of the El Camino to unstrap the Leslie in its swaddling clothes.

  “How about you just leave the suit, then,” one of the parkers said. “Because my flashlight is dead.”

  Archy might have liked to offer the young man, if not a return critique of the brown bag he was standing stuffed into like a furtive forty-ounce, at least an anatomical storage suggestion with regard to the putative flashlight. But like all pure stylists, Archy had long since learned that in handling those who could not dig, the only proper course was to carry on confusing them. Light ’em up, blow ’em out like candles. The intended effect of his withering stare was diminished to a degree by the snort of laughter that came out of Gwen.

  “Flashlight,” said his betrayer. “I love it.”

  The musicians had been asked to set up out-of-doors, beside a goldfish pond at the far end of a slate-flagged courtyard strung with chili-pepper lights and paper lanterns: pink concertinas, green pagodas. Archy came huffing and heaving through the French doors, moving fast under a hundred pounds of Leslie, harried along by a calmly panicking little Asian chick with a clipboard over which her pen hovered, ready to inventory every ding or scrape Archy might be inclined to put into a wall or doorway.

  “Thank you for coming, by the way,” she said. “At such short no—oh. Oh my God, please be careful.”

  “I am known for my carefulness,” Archy assured her. “I would say thank you for letting us play, but the truth is, I’m doing you a favor, ’cause we are way better than that weak shit that canceled on you, fully three of those guys are dentists.”

  “Oh, well, thanks,” said the girl from the campaign.

  Nat, wearing his red Jazzmaster slung low across his narrow hips, raised an index finger and the opposite eyebrow, signaling to Archy. Warning him not to interrupt or spoil the effect of the display of ferocious swearing being mounted by Stanley “El Boom” Ellerbe, hunched over the leg bracket of his floor tom, fiddling at it with a plastic table knife. El Boom was a bus driver, as notorious for jinxed equipment as he was for letting out, in long and enthusiastic skeins, the choice words he bit back and stored up all day long in serving the public and the whims of traffic behind the wheel of the 51. Cool as a cup of crushed ice on the drums, though, El Boom kept time like an atom clock.

  No sign yet of Mr. Jones or his Hammond, a circumstance guaranteed to complicate Archy’s own marital timing since A) he could not in good conscience drop off the Leslie without first verifying that it worked all right for Mr. Jones, B) the old man, despite his pride or vanity, would need help getting the Hammond down all those stairs, and C) Archy liked the way Mr. Jones always seemed to dig it when he swung the Leslie around, taking the pleasure an older man sometimes took in the exertions of a younger one. Flashing all those little Krugerrands he kept salted away up inside his mouth there, saying, “Look out! Comin’ through!,” getting his whole bony self into it the way he might snuffle up the breeze off a snifter of Hennessy, a plate of fried catfish, or something else forbidden by his doctor. Tears in the man’s eyes when Archy first offered to repair the Leslie; Archy wished Gwen could have seen that. No need, of course, to mention that Mr. Jones had those pearly oyster eyes, always a certain film of moisture. Or, for that matter, what a grouch he was that morning, something mysteriously offensive to him in talk of Titus Joyner.

  “Y’all go on, do what you have to do,” Archy told the clipboard girl, who was glancing toward the ever darkening cloud of blue air over El Boom Ellerbe as if trying to decide whether it presented a security threat. “I need help with this, I’ll be sure to call you.” His eyes went to her name tag so he could give proper emphasis to the dismissal and there read, with a smile, LESLIE.

  El Boom left off questioning the maternal purity of his drum kit and stood up to greet the amplifier, venerable and pedigreed, a Model 122 known to have been owned at one time by Rudy Van Gelder, in whose Englewood Cliffs studio it was employed by Johnny “Hammond” Smith and Charles Earland before passing into the possession of Mr. Jones, on whose Redbonin’ it could be heard to everlasting glorious effect. Cleaned, oiled, restored, and rewired. Archy had been grateful for the chance to climb inside of history like that, walnut-paneled, belt-driven, analog history with all its parts spinning, however many hours of his spare time the job had required. What kind of insensitive, disrespectful, superficial person with the necessary skill set would ever turn his back on an opportunity like that? Not to mention the chance to help out a lonely old gentleman living off his Social Security, nothing but that and a small royalty on the co-credit (with a white record producer whose label kept the rights to every other song Cochise Jones ever wrote) for “Cold Cold Sunday,” a minor 1969 hit on the soul charts for Wilson Pickett that had been used in the late eighties in an ad campaign for Dreyer’s ice cream? Thus arguing on with the Gwen who lived inside his head, Archy eased the Leslie—the wooden one—down onto the flagstones and rumbled it, stately as a hearse, across the patio.

  “Deep purple!” said El Boom, taking stock of Archy in his Funky Suit. Across the beeswax-buffed surface of the Leslie, the drummer ran the varnished walnut of his big-hitting right hand.

  “Yeah, Boom, what up. How you doing?” Palm slap, finger tangle, shake, the older man’s hand dry and cool. “I got some tools in the car, you need pliers, a socket wrench, anything like that.” Archy fought down somewhere around 92 percent of the smile that tried to break loose on his face. “Blowtorch.”

  “She-it,” said El Boom, reduced by helpless despair to this monosyllable, though he sustained it. “Thing’s a brand-new secondhand Ludwig.”

  Archy shook his head in sham sympathy and turned to Nat, letting fly the smile. Nat played a lick on his unplugged guitar, a comic snippet of Carl Stalling’s cartoon jazz. With Mr. Jones sitting in at the organ, and with the original contractor for this evening’s musical entertainment laid up at home with some chronic alphabet letter of hepatitis, being a (soporific, in Archy’s opinion) guitarist, Nat had come armed with his Jazzmaster and a finicky old Epiphone to which he was attached for sentimental reasons, guitar being his second best instrument after piano. Guitar, organ, drums, they would be fine without Archy. He tried to work some of that reassurance into his eyes, then drew back a step and inclined his head in a way meant to signify the need for confidential communication with his partner. Nat fitted the Fender into its stand and picked his way among the cables to join Archy beside a man-high cactus in a Talavera pot, where only the goldfish would be able to overhear. Ugly things, technically koi, Archy supposed, freaky mutant motherfuckers all dappled and pop-eyed and tangled up in the shimmery scarves of themselves.

  “Mr. Jones running late?”

  Everything would be fine, Archy thought, at least until Nat looked up at the sky, got an eyeful of that big black visual pun on centuries of white male anatomical anxiety.

  “Generally speaking,” Nat said. “Did you call him?”

  “I saw him this morning. He was on it, giving me shit about being on time.”

  “I find you have to tell him to come half an hour before you actually need him to be there. Now, not unlike you, he’s”—checking his watch, a Swiss-railroad number Nat kept set, out of habit from long-ago days tending bar, seven minutes ahead—“twenty-three minutes late.”

  Something—pre-gig jitters, the last-minute-sub nature of the booking, the high caliber of the venue and clientele, for all Archy knew the politics behind the event itself, the candidate for president whose campaign the event would benefit not doing as well as might be hoped at this juncture—was bringing an edge to Nat’s voice. He had on a black sharkskin suit, by design too short at the cuffs of trousers and jacket and too snug across the chest. Black cowboy shirt snapped all the way up to its collar button. A bolo tie whose cinch was
adorned with a miniature black-and-white portrait of Richard Nixon. Any one of these items of apparel might contribute to the increase of Nat’s native tight-assedness. Archy elected to forestall for another second or two having to tell Nat that, Leslie delivered, he would be blowing off the chance to expose the Wakanda Philharmonic to a mansionful of deep-pocket East Bay tastemakers any number of whom could be counted on in the near future to get married, turn fifty, or bar mitzvah their children, in order to go sit around, instead, on a rubber mat in a foot-stanky church rec room, learning a set of procedures and techniques without which, for fifty, sixty thousand years, fathers had managed to do all right. Even though it was becoming more difficult to imagine that Gwen would in any way welcome his feckless presence at the birth. Archy all stumbling and dropping shit around the castle like Eyegore in Young Frankenstein while Gwen plunged two-handed and full-tilt into the thunder and the lightning (life! life!) of the business, the job that she knew better than anyone with the possible exception of Aviva Roth-Jaffe, who for that matter was going to be there, too, rendering Archy more useless than he already felt.

  “Is that how you do?” he said. “Tell people to come half an hour early just because you anticipate they going to be half an hour late?”

  “Black people, yeah,” Nat said. “Thirty-seven minutes.”

  “So, including me, you routinely—”

  “You I cheat at least forty-five. And somehow, go figure, you’re still twenty minutes late.” He gave the back of his head a puzzled scratch. “I don’t claim to understand the math of it.”