“Yeah, look here,” Archy said, running a confidential finger alongside his nose. “I got Gwen in the car, and uh . . .”
“She okay?”
“Yeah, no, she’s fine. She uh, she just, I forgot—”
“I heard she’s been, I don’t know”—Nat pretended to search for the right word, though Archy could see it unboxed, unwrapped, plugged in, sitting there in the man’s mind all ready to go—“a little irrational past couple days. Stuff with the birth and the . . . incident. With the doctor. Guy sounds like a royal turd, but the way things work around that place—”
“Yeah, I don’t know, she—”
“You tell her about Titus yet?”
It was like dropping into a manhole, hearing that name. Every motherfucking time. Walking down the street, sun on your sunglasses, beats in your earbuds, rolling with your own particular roll along the pavement, and then fwoop! Not even the puff of smoke or patch of ashes that a thunderbolt might leave behind. Gwen was always accusing Archy of not thinking or caring about, not preparing for, the baby who was on its way. Which only showed how little she knew him or, to be fair, how parsimonious he could be in sharing with a woman, with anyone, the almost constant state of anxiety in which he was living. Anxiety that, for example, had led him to volunteer to keep an eye on little Rolando yesterday, to see how he could manage the whole diapers-and-formula routine. But this boy. Titus. His son, half grown and staring him down from the far side of all that resentfulness and abandonment. If Gwen knew about Titus Joyner—and sooner or later, she was going to find out—then there would be justice in her charge of obliviousness, lack of consideration. Because since yesterday Archy had been trying to resume his former state of happy ignorance and think as little as possible about the child he already had.
“That revelation is still, uh, forthcoming,” he said.
“Maybe you should try it out on her now,” Nat suggested. “Holistic approach. Cure it with poison. Fire with fire. Drive her insane from a totally different direction, she comes out at zero.”
“Yeah,” Archy said without enthusiasm. “Right now we’re at week thirty-six, I don’t think I have too much influence over the situation inside her head anymore.” Nat inclined his head, pursed his lips, nodding, having nothing to offer in the way of argument. “How’s he comporting himself round your house? Titus.”
“Oh, uh, fine. I don’t know. He’s okay. Funny kid.”
“Funny.”
“Solemn little motherfucker.”
“Solemn as in?”
“Solemn as in somewhat restrained in his emotional palette.”
“Fronting? Being hard?”
“Maybe some of that. But it seems like he and Julie—”
Before Nat could continue, he saw something that made both his eyebrows shoot up. His face went blank, like the screen of an Etch A Sketch, in a single shake.
“Hey, lady,” he said.
El Boom said, “Look out.”
Look out, here came Gwen, through the French doors that connected the patio to the living room with its arcing vaults and folk-art Virgins. She had checked a vintage bowling shirt out of Archy’s library, pink on black, originally sported, according to the inscriptions in silkscreen and embroidery thread, by an inferably large gentleman named Stan, bowling in the service of Alameda Wire and Pipe. She was bearing straight for Archy, endowed by pregnancy with that locomotive chug. No chance that she was coming to tell him he was off the hook, forgiven his sins, large or small. Gwen had never in her life arrived at forgiveness in the physical absence of its needful object. Not, at least, without the intervention of some external force: the advice of her father, for example, or of Dr. Nickens, the pastor of her childhood church, or, under certain conditions, some trumping piece of bad news. Said absence affording too convenient a vessel for the laying in of refined counterarguments, further supporting examples, freshly recalled instances of past infractions, etc.
“Hello, Nat,” she said. “Arch. Um. Okay. Listen here.”
Level and cool, she looked from Nat to Archy and back, and with an interior lurch, Archy concluded that Gwen had descended from the El Camino to issue an ultimatum in the presence of Nat Jaffe and the world, and whatever it was or however she phrased it, he would have to tell her about Titus, and that would be that, adieu and later to the second great partnership of his life, not because he had a son on the side, which, all right, was maybe no big thing, but because he had never mentioned the fact to Gwen, ever, neither in passing nor in detail. Because in ten years or more, Archy had never thought of the boy, not once, a habit of oblivion that continued even now, with the kid back and smacking up against the outside of their life like a moth banging against a lampshade. Stashed there, up in the Jaffes’ attic.
Archy knew an instant of pure panic. Nothing caused him greater revulsion than signs of weakness in a man, keenest of all in himself; and there was no one in this world weaker than someone trying to keep something secret, unless it be someone obliged to confess.
“I can’t stay, Nat,” he said, deciding to throw the littlest confession overboard first, see where that got him. “I’m really sorry. Gwen and I have birth class tonight, and when I said I could play, I just fucking forgot.”
“No,” said Nat and Gwen at the same time. Jinx, lock, you owe me a soda. And then Nat, without waiting for anyone to speak his name and release him, said, measuring the words, always happy to take the opportunity to educate, “Please, no, I totally get it. That shit is important, Arch. They’ve done all kinds of studies. You’re on your game, things are going to go a lot easier for Gwen and whoever that is in there.” He pointed a furry finger at Gwen’s belly. “Y’all go on and go.”
“No,” Gwen repeated. “Guys, I— Archy, your phone rang, in the car. I answered it.”
The mainspring of Archy’s panic tightened farther, his thoughts, like Nat’s watch, running seven minutes ahead of themselves. Ransacking all the files, thinking what girl, bitch, or lady, what mess did he leave lying around.
“It was Garnet Singletary,” Gwen was saying. “Archy, Mr. Jones. He, oh, Archy, he died. He’s dead.”
“He . . . what?” Archy said, feeling the words first as a surge of blood to his cheeks. “No, I saw him this morning.”
“I guess—I guess the neighbor lady, uh, Mrs. Wiggins, across the street. She’s the one who called the ambulance.”
Archy not all the way there yet, enough presence to notice how Gwen seemed rattled, shaky. This is true, he thought.
“I talked to him two hours ago!” Nat said, as if he thought these words could disprove, discredit, the nonsense Gwen was talking. He ran his fingers through his steely Brillo. Fished his phone out of the hip pocket of his jacket. “Yeah, hey, Garnet,” he said. “Nat Jaffe. What the fuck?”
He spun away across the patio, his back to Gwen and Archy, skeptical to a fault, doubting every story he heard on principle until he got independent confirmation, anything at all remarkable that anyone felt like putting out there an “urban legend,” a “misnomer,” a “popular delusion,” a “false etymology.” One of the man’s balls there to question the testimony of the other, both of them doubting what his dick had to say. Probably hoping Garnet would help him get hold of Mrs. Wiggins, the police report, the coroner’s statement.
Oblivious, El Boom woke up the kick drum, divvied out sixteenth notes between the hi-hat and snare, then began to lean heavily on the one, working up a half-drunk second-line crab-step rhythm that stumbled somehow into the break from “Funky Drummer” (King, 1970). Mr. Jones always claimed James Brown as a cousin on his mother’s side (offering no evidence that would satisfy Nat Jaffe beyond an unsupported mention in the liner notes for Redbonin’). Archy remembering the way Mr. Jones one time got down off his stool at Brokeland to execute a tricky Mashed Potato across the tile floor, studying his bitty bird feet with a dazed smile as if they were a couple of miracles.
“Oh, no,” Gwen said. “Archy, please don’t start that.”
She wiped at her own cheek with a forearm. She came over and did her best to get herself around him. He was too high and she too deep. So she pulled him over to a chair, one of those Mexican affairs made out of pigskin and sticks. She fell onto his lap, panicking the chair. In her arms, Archy let go of himself for a minute. The smell of Gwen’s hair, cool against his cheek, clean, flowery.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I know.”
All at once—just like that—he could feel her forgive him. Somewhere in the midst of the continent of shock and grief that was Archy Stallings, a minor principality rejoiced.
“Closest thing I had to a father,” he said.
“That’s what you always said.”
She meant it to sound sweet, he knew, but it came out sounding like reproof as much as eulogy. Gwen got along with Mr. Jones, but to her he was a sweet-natured, emotionally vague, and reticent man whose greatest steadfastness, away from the keys of his organ, was loyalty to his parrot and to leisure wear of the 1970s, nothing at all like a father in any important way. Archy did not disagree with that assessment. He was okay with coming in second to Fifty-Eight, parrot was like some kind of prodigy, a Mozart of the birds.
“He was loading the Hammond,” Nat said, slipping his phone back into his pocket. “I guess he didn’t have the straps right on the dolly. The Hammond fell on top of him.”
Day I need help moving that thing is the day I give it up for good. Archy had let him go, let him walk out of the garage. Angry, stirred up about something that Archy would never understand. Careless, distracted, nobody to help him lift that heavy, heavy thing.
“Oh, uh, hi,” said Leslie the clipboard girl, peering out from behind Gwen, the one they sent in with a stick to poke the wrestling bear. “So, people are starting to show up? Robin and David were thinking you might want to, uh. Start?”
“We’re ready,” Nat said. “Just, uh, I’m going to have to make a little adjustment in the fee for you all, a reduction, I mean, because my bass player has a birthing class, and it turns out, wow, tragic thing, my organ player, he, uh, he just died.”
“Oh, no,” Leslie said, blinking. She glanced down at the clipboard, looking for a little help from the campaign on how to proceed in the event of a dead musician. “I’m so sorry.”
“So I only have a two-piece for you tonight. Guitar and drums. But we can—”
Two of the valet parkers came out onto the patio. One had Archy’s Jazz Bass in its soft gig jacket, the other coming right behind him with Archy’s tubes and wires. The lead parker handed Gwen a claim ticket for the car, and Gwen nodded them toward Archy.
“You got a trio,” she said to Leslie. “Plus one pregnant lady in a bowling shirt.”
Just before his hostess for the evening, who held the patent on a gene that coded for a protein to prevent the rejection of a transplanted kidney, directed everyone to gather under the carved and stenciled fir beams of her living room, and sent the young woman from the campaign out to tell the band to knock it off for ten minutes so that the state senator, Obama of Illinois, could address his fellow guests, each of whom had contributed at least one thousand dollars to attend this event, an address in which he would attempt by measured words and a calm demeanor to reassure them (vainly and mistakenly, as it would turn out) that their candidate for the presidency of the United States would not go down to inglorious defeat in November, Obama stopped in the doorway that opened onto the flagstone patio to listen for a minute to the hired band. They were cooking their way with evident seriousness of intent through an instrumental cover of “Higher Ground.”
The rhythm section consisted of a gray-haired older man in a white turtleneck, who had that deceptive stillness of the rock-solid drummer, whaling away and at the same time immobile as a gecko on a rock. A big dude in a preposterous suit, a younger man, played bass through a huge old wooden organ amplifier that was the size of an oven. Its acoustics lent a fat, muddy, molasses-black grandeur to the bass line. Off to one side, a grim-countenanced stick figure of a white guy coiled up the notes in high jazzy meringues on top of the heavy, heavy bottom of the tune, a personal favorite of the state senator. He lingered there in the doorway, his hostess getting a tiny bit antsy. Obama tapping his foot, bobbing his close-cropped head.
“Those guys are pretty funky,” he observed, directing his remark to a short, extraordinarily pregnant woman in a man’s bowling shirt who stood beyond the open patio doors, dark, pretty, her hair worn in a fetching artful anemone of baby dreadlocks. The fingers of her right hand flicked shadow bass notes on her belly. At his remark, the pregnant woman nodded without turning to look at him—there was an elaborate candelabra of a potted cactus behind whose tapered thorns she appeared to be attempting, somewhat punitively, to conceal herself. Obama was running for the United States Senate that summer and had given a wonderful speech last month at the Democratic Convention in Boston. When she did turn to him, her eyes got very wide.
“Friends of yours?” he said.
It was a reasonable inference, given the fact that, in her bowling shirt, she stood out from the other women in attendance, most of them done up in cocktail attire. She was also one of a strikingly few women of color in the room. She nodded again, more stiffly, no longer playing along with the bass, stare going glassy. Feeling big, he supposed, underdressed, and trapped behind a cactus by a celebrated black man in a fancy house full of white folks. He went further out a limb.
“My man on bass?”
The pregnant woman looked sidelong at him, a droll look, and seemed to recover from her initial bout of self-consciousness. “Well, that’s the question, now,” she said with an asperity that took him aback. “Isn’t it?”
“Senator?” said the hostess, looking very handsome in an elaborate thing, all crinkled and structural. “If you’re ready? I can ask the band to—”
“Let’s let them finish this number,” Obama said.
His memory filled in the missing vocal line, the lyrics that somehow managed to be at once hopeful and apocalyptic, perfectly in keeping with the mood of the hour politically, if there were anyone in the crowd to attend, which, frankly, the state senator from the 13th district of Illinois, judging from the bright unrelenting roil of chatter and gloomy expatiation going on, inside the house and out, kind of doubted. He listened awhile longer.
“Shame nobody’s dancing,” he said.
“I guess it’s not that kind of party,” said the pregnant woman.
“They seldom are,” Obama allowed. “All too seldom. Now, I would ask you to dance, but I don’t think my wife would be happy if it got back to her that I was observed dancing with a gorgeous sister in your condition.”
“I like the underlying philosophy of that,” the pregnant woman said, staring fixedly at the bass player in a way that confirmed, to the senator’s satisfaction, his earlier inference. “That’s a philosophy I can get behind. Shame it isn’t more widespread.”
The senator felt compelled to smile. “Brother puts his heart into it, though,” he observed. “You can see that. A lot of heart.”
The bass man felt his way up and down the fretboard like a blind man reading something passionate in Braille. The senator recalled having caught a few words over the PA earlier tonight, to the effect that the band wanted to dedicate tonight’s performance to someone who had died, name of Jones. He watched the man in the purple suit play his kaddish.
“That is quite a suit,” Obama said. “Takes a special kind of man to go around wearing a suit like that.”
“You know, he isn’t even aware of that?” the pregnant woman said. “Man doesn’t feel self-conscious, not one little bit embarrassed, walking around in that thing.” Scorn and admiration in her tone in about equal measure. “The outside of him matches perfectly with the inside. It’s like, I can’t even tell you. Not stubborn, I mean, yes, he can be stubborn as hell, stubborn and full of pride, but to walk around looking like that, I mean, a purple suit even a pimp might have doubts about it, and sa
ddle shoes . . . you have to have—”
“Dignity.”
At the sound of the word, the pregnant woman looked at him. A strange expression passed over her face, as if, he thought, she might be experiencing a contraction.
“He just had a loss,” she said.
“I gathered that, something about a man named Jones.”
“Yeah, yes, he was supposed to be here, he played the organ. It’s Cochise Jones.”
“Cochise Jones, okay.”
Perhaps the name registered, a shallow footprint tracked in the sand of the senator’s memory. But the print might as easily have been left by Elvin or Philly Joe.
“He was supposed to be here, to play. It just happened, he passed this afternoon.”
“I am so sorry to hear that.”
“He was like a father to my husband.”
Somehow, seamlessly, the band morphed into a cover of Bad Medicine’s “Trespasser.”
“Thank you for telling me that,” Obama said. “You know, I could hear it in his playing. Something grieving. But I didn’t know what it was.”
“Mr. Jones was his own kind of shiftless fool,” she said gently. “A musician. He made, I guess he made, all these elaborate plans for his funeral, a marching band, a Cadillac hearse.” She shook her head. “The past two weeks, when we could have been getting ready for the baby, enjoying our last time alone together? My husband chose to spend them in the garage, repairing that dusty old dinosaur of an amplifier over there. Now, with a month to go? He’s going to get caught up in all this funeral foolishness. Instead of what he should be focusing on.”
“But you know,” the senator said, “I, I understand your frustration. We’ve all heard, we all know how musicians can be. But traveling around, campaigning, at home, around the country, I have seen a lot of people, met a lot of people. The lucky ones are the people like your husband there. The ones who find work that means something to them. That they can really put their heart into, however foolish it might look to other people.”
Telegraph Avenue: A Novel Page 18