Telegraph Avenue: A Novel

by Michael Chabon

  She passed the empty cup back to the old woman, who acknowledged without gesture or word the look of gratitude in Gwen’s eyes. Master Jew also noted a thickening of the young woman’s pretty features, a blurring of her wide gaze. Overnight Gwen appeared to have moved into the climax of her term. The baby was going to arrive so soon, and here was this woman with her life in disorder. Working too hard. Taking care of other mothers-to-be while neglecting her own health. To make matters worse, she had spent the past three nights sleeping in this tiny room, in a hip-pocket world that crackled with male energies. Master Jew hawked up a pill of phlegm and spat it with feline delicacy into a linen handkerchief.

  No, it would not do.

  When Gwen had shown up for class on Monday night, with a packed duffel bag in the back of her BMW convertible and traces of tears on her cheeks, long-ingrained instincts had caused Master Jew to reach out and catch the falling young woman. But now the teacher saw that she had not handled the matter properly. Irene Jew was a very old woman—she liked to boast, improbably, that she was the oldest Chinese woman west of the Rocky Mountains—and over the long years of wandering and exile, from Guangdong to Hong Kong to Los Angeles to Oakland, she had presented countless students with the black sash that was the mark of longest study and hardest training, pain, devotion, tedium, and work. Some of these students had been capable of magnificence and others of brilliance, and a few had partaken of both qualities. Until now, however, none of them had ever been a pregnant black woman who drove a BMW. Master Jew never quite knew how to behave toward Gwen Shanks.

  “This place very bad for you,” she said. “Bad smell. Also bad to look at. Ugly.”

  “Yes.” Gwen made a sound, a hoarse intake of breath that might have been the precursor to tears or one of her big sputtering guffaws. She massaged her face, took her hands away, opened her eyes. “I mean, no, it’s all right, but. I’m sorry.” She reached for the bed jacket in a metallic shade of good brown silk that lay folded by the futon and pulled it around her. She wore silk pajamas that matched the robe, piped with white. “I just need a good night’s sleep.”

  Her duffel lay open, all the clothes and shoes and bottles of lotion encased in Ziploc bags. It was time to get up and get dressed for her big day; at three P.M. she and Aviva were due to go before a board charged with reviewing the status of their privileges. Gwen looked at the clothes she had stuffed into her bag three nights ago, the distended stretch tops and yoga pants, the preposterous bras and geriatric panties. “Just one good night of sleep.”

  “Need your pillow.”

  “I do,” Gwen said, yearning for the long, cool expanse of the Garnet Hill body pillow that for months, interwoven with her legs, arms, and belly, had been her truest lover. “I do need my pillow, so bad.”

  “Go home,” Master Jew said. “Get it.”

  “I can’t.”

  Master Jew turned her back to Gwen. Across the scarred and glossy bamboo floor of the studio, four high windows looked out onto the blue glazing of a summer Oakland sky crazed with telephone wires. Behind the concrete hulk of the old Golden State market, a palm tree hiked its green slattern skirts.

  “Okay, I know you need me out of here. I’m so grateful you let me stay this long. After today I’ll go to a hotel, I’ll rent an apartment. One of those little places down in Emeryville by the movie theater. IKEA’s right there. Get a crib, some dishes. Whatever I’m going to need. I know I’ve been kind of lying around here moping and feeling sorry for myself. My back hurts, and I’ve been maybe in a little bit of shock. There are a lot of things I don’t know. If I can take care of a baby on my own. If I’m going to be able to keep doing the work I have been doing for the past ten years.”

  Master Jew kept her back to Gwen, who knew that her speech had been disrespectful and poorly judged in both its length and its tone.

  “I’m sorry,” Gwen concluded. “Seriously. Tomorrow, next day at the latest, I’m out of here.”

  The teacup—smaller than the first, red and gold with an intricate carpet pattern and a goldfish—was in Gwen’s face before she realized that Master Jew had moved, a sudden accident of vision like a blackout or a camera flash, and by the time she realized that the crazy old lady had actually tossed a teacup at her head, Gwen’s right palm was smarting, and the intercepted cup lay cool against her fingers, where, at the base of her thumb, it gave up one last drop.

  “Big day. Get dressed,” Mrs. Jew said. “Then go get your pillow.”

  Gwen felt nervous about her footing, her status under her own roof. So she had in mind a kind of marital Grenada, the deployment of massive force in support of a modest, even risible objective. But when she drove past the sleeping house at 6:51 A.M. (an hour with which her husband had never been intimately acquainted), it looked so ordinary, blue-painted cedar shakes peeling, honeysuckle strangling the slat fence, empty tanks from the Arrowhead bubbler ranged along the front porch, that she lost her stomach for a fight. She rolled right past the house and, for an instant, considered driving on.

  True enough, as she had told Master Jew, the body pillow did not just preserve her sleep: there were nights when she felt it was the only thing in this world that felt and understood her. True to its name, the body pillow had come to embody the unknown child inside her, mute and shapeless but imbued with some distinct essence or presence of the baby to come. The body pillow was a doll that she nightly cuddled as, in weird pregnancy dreams, the baby was transformed into all manner of beasts and vegetables and stuff a whole lot freakier than a pillow. At the same time, she knew, it was only a forty-five-dollar body pillow she had bought online. It could easily be replaced.

  “The hell with that,” she said aloud, and parked the car in front of the Lahidjis’ house. “I want my damn pillow.”

  She did not get out of the car. She did some qi breathing. She groped for the shimmery little bead at the center of herself. She tried to harness or at least to tidy up her qi. She had enough conflict to deal with today, she reminded herself, without adding to the toll of stress, measurable in rads, to which she and the baby had been exposed. Still, her sense of outrage over all that Archy had done and failed to do as a husband, a father, and a man remained undiminished by her reluctance to confront him, and that outrage fixated on, swarmed like a cloud of bees around, the sum of forty-five dollars. She was not going to throw that money away. She had left behind many things of value in the house when she left Archy, and if she never got back any of those things, so be it; let the body pillow serve to redeem the remainder of the life and possessions she had abandoned. She got out of the car. Only one course open to her: to come in not like a battalion of marines overwhelming some little isle of coconuts but like Special Forces: surgical. Stealthy. In and out.

  Gwen decided to try the back door first. She slipped—without much clearance on either side of her—along the broken snake hide of the brick walk that ran between the house and a hurricane fence, the fence woven with morning glory like some kind of feral basket. She sneaked past the kitchen windows, past the garbage and recycling bins, through that whole shadowy side zone of the house, which she had entered rarely over the years, a dense and leaf-shadowed passage hospitable, or so she always imagined, to rats. That thought hurried her along.

  The backyard looked worse than she remembered. Brick barbecue area, angel’s trumpet tree hung with yellow wizard hats, chain-link fence obliterated from view in many places by green flows of ivy and jasmine and morning glory. Shaggy stand of pampas grass. The forlorn expanse of concrete that some previous occupant of the house, through an excess of laziness or optimism, had painted lawn-green. It was a mangy, scraggly, jungly mess that must be lowering property values as far away as Claremont Avenue. It was an embarrassment. But Gwen had been gone only a week; this ruin was the work of years. A faithful record of her untended life.

  She averted her gaze from the broken latticework around the foundation of the house, the loose weather stripping that peeped like a gang banger’s drawers f
rom the seams around the back door. When she and Archy bought the house, it had been a semi-wreck, cheap but ill used. They had prepared a list of the repairs and improvements they were going to make. This list was divided among the required, the optional, and the fantastic. They put in new toilets and sinks, using a book from the library. They redid the floors, rehung the windows, patched the roof. It was the first common project of their marriage, and looking back on that time, Gwen felt a twinge of loss and regret for their happiness. In time they had crossed off all the things that were required, but when they reached the next phase, they opted against the optional. At some point well before they arrived at the fantastic, they had lost track of the list.

  Gwen unlocked the back door and pushed, but the door pushed back. The chain was set. It was a formidable chain installed by the previous owner, and to Gwen’s knowledge, neither she nor Archy had ever employed it. There was something unnerving about the vigor with which the chain resisted letting Gwen enter the house. It was as though Archy had changed the locks on her. Gwen was insulted. She was about to start pounding, demanding an explanation, but she remembered her maternal resolve to stay calm. It occurred to her that Archy might feel less secure without her in the house, and the thought touched her. She shut the back door with a soft click and crept back around to the front door.

  As she let herself in, she realized that a faint rolling hum she had taken, coming up the porch steps, for the vibration through the old fir floor of the refrigerator, or maybe the humidifier in the basement, maybe even some kind of distant cement mixer or the MedEvac helicopter landing on its pad over at Children’s Hospital, was in fact the entwined snoring of two boys. Julie Jaffe lay half extruded from Gwen’s old sleeping bag, shirtless and shockingly pale, with little pink guinea-pig nipples. Titus had been neatly interred beneath Archy’s Diff’rent Strokes sleeping bag, only his weird fingery toes and the upper half of his face visible. A glacier of DVD cases slid across the coffee table, Strutter, Ghetto Hitman, Soul Shaker, all those crazy crap-ass movies that Archy’s father had spent the seventies cranking out or being cranked out by. Peeking from under a Styrofoam clamshell from which a couple of french fries poked like the feelers of a large and cautious insect was another disc on whose label she recognized the astonishing Afro of Valletta Moore, along with the barrel and silencer of the .357 she fondled, in that iconic pose from the poster of Nefertiti, forty stories of endless brown leg with a pair of highjacked fuck-me pumps for a ground floor, yellow satin hot-pants jumpsuit for a pediment. The room hung heavy with a fug of puberty, microwave popcorn, and something unidentifiable but horrible.

  Julie, in his nocturnal wrestling with her sleeping bag, had crawled so far that she nearly stepped on him when she came into the room. The hollow of his hairless chest, the puzzled knot of his brows, the soft straight hair pasted by night sweat across his bony forehead, all stirred deep memories of the nights when she used to watch him for Aviva and Nat, sing him her grandmother’s grave lullabies. His innocence then struck her, as she recalled it now, as having also been her own: before Nat and Aviva fixed her up with Archy, before the long, gathering disappointment of her professional life.

  She preferred not to look at Titus, snoring away under a goofy and tragic mantle blazoned with an image of Gary Coleman and Todd Bridges in matching sweaters. She felt sorry for him, but she did not want to feel sorry for him, and so she let him piss her off. Meanwhile, the mystery smell, it became clear to her pregnant nose, plain as the pall of carnage, was the smell of old hamburger. She made the mistake of looking more closely at the clamshell package on the table. A pink and beaded gray streak of fat dribbled like candle wax down the outside of it and sent a rocket of hot bile arcing from her belly to her mouth.

  She would have been willing to bet forty-five dollars that ninjas and Green Berets did not, generally speaking, incorporate vomiting into their operational procedures. The humiliation of that would be too much to bear; Archy had spent, without complaint, a fair amount of time in the early days of her pregnancy handling her various ejecta.

  The molecules of oxidized fat seemed to trail her like malodorous pixies as Gwen crept down the hall to the bedroom and opened the bedroom door. The blinds were drawn, but in the window behind Archy’s auntie’s old Marie Antoinette−style dresser, the job had been poorly done, so that they hung at an angle to the windowsill. In the daylight seeping under this hypotenuse, Gwen could see Archy heaped up on the bed, flat on his back. It was a round bed that Archy had brought to the marriage—he called it his secret-agent bed—and with his legs and arms spread in four directions, he reminded her of the naked man by Leonardo da Vinci, squaring the circle or whatever it was. Only Archy was not naked; he had on a pair of Cal basketball shorts. Her objective lay right alongside him, bent double, ignored or perhaps trying to wriggle away. All the other, more conventional pillows had been kicked or flung over the side of the bed and lay in dejected attitudes on the floor. Typically, Archy slept flat on the mattress and employed a pillow only to cover his face when a room was too full of light. He was not going to miss the body pillow at all.

  The molecules drifting downwind from the burger-joint packaging in the living room seemed at last to abandon their pursuit of Gwen. She could stand to breathe through her nose again, and what she smelled was her bedroom, her husband, her life. The clove-and-citrus redolence of his aftershave, a Christmasy smell. A smell she had fallen in love with early on. Now it struck her as a tonic, bracing and restorative, steeling her to reach for the pillow, careful, moving slow, holding her breath. She grabbed two feather-fill fistfuls of pillow and began to peel it away from the mattress one patient millimeter at a time.

  Archy rolled over onto his side and, with a sharp intake of breath, threw his legs around the body pillow. He pressed his hips against it, took it in his arms, drew it close to him. He embraced it, let his breath out shuddering, sighed once, and began to snore. Gwen froze, horrified, thrilled, and pricked by a sense of betrayal, though whether by her husband or the body pillow, she would not have been able to say.

  “Don’t get up yet,” Archy said without opening his eyes. Begging in his sleep. He took another long appreciative sip of unconsciousness, weighing the flavor of it in his mouth, smacking his lips. “Don’t leave me.”

  Gwen considered a number of possible rejoinders to this, among them “Too late, motherfucker,” “I’m sorry,” “I won’t, ever again,” and “You are talking to a pillow.”

  She let go of the forty-five-dollar pillow without saying a word. She turned and slipped back out of the bedroom. As she looked up from easing the door shut and releasing the doorknob with practiced soundlessness, she saw Titus standing at the other end of the hall, watching her, not quite smirking, not quite looking confused. Those blue-green Luther Stallings eyes, rimed with the unreadable force-field shimmer that veiled the light eyes of black folks.

  “I just came to get my special pillow,” Gwen said in a pathetic whisper.

  Titus nodded, then seemed to notice that she was not carrying anything.

  “I changed my mind,” Gwen said.

  She felt a pulse of tightening across her belly that she knew meant dehydration. The boy got out of her way as she moved past him into the kitchen. Standing behind her, he became the only thing that prevented her from backing away in horror at what she discovered there.

  “Oh my God,” she said.

  The boy concurred with a mirthless snort.

  “What did you do?”

  “He said you could grind coffee in the blender.”

  “Who did?”

  “Julie.”

  “Did he also say you could shoot Ragu out of a SuperSoaker? Because that’s what it looks like happened in here.”

  The boy shrugged.

  She soldiered in, holding her breath as if walking into a recently vacated portable toilet, and ran herself a glass of water from the sink. “Now I see why you put the chain on the back door.” She drained off the whole twelve ounces in on
e greedy draft. “It was for the protection of others.”

  “That was Julie, too,” Titus said. “He gets scared.” Again there was not quite a smirk on his face; his expression held too much curiosity for that.

  “I know he does,” Gwen said.

  Something, some routine tenderness in her tone or aspect of her he had not considered, made him train his curiosity apparatus on her. He measured her circumference and girth. “You got a special pillow for that,” he said, pointing at her abdomen.

  “A body pillow.”

  “To hold it up when you’re sleeping?”

  “I don’t really sleep,” Gwen said. “But especially not without.”

  “So, and, that kid in there. That’s, like, my brother.”

  Gwen thought about rinsing the lipstick from the rim of the water glass, but in the unlikely event that anyone noticed it among the marinara Pollocks and the termite mounds of plates and pans, the print of her lipstick could serve as a calling card, a silver bullet, a bent joker.

  “Or sister,” she said.

  “You didn’t have no ultrasound?”

  “Any. We asked them not to tell us.”

  “You want the surprise.”

  “Archy does. I don’t like surprises.” It came out sounding more pointed than she had intended, but not inappropriately so.

  “Why don’t you just find out and not tell him?”

  “I could do that,” she said.

  “What. Aw, you already did,” Titus guessed. “Am I right?”

  Gwen took the chain off the back door. “Half brother,” she told Titus before she went out into the rest of her day. “And half I don’t know what.”

  “Who was that?” man wanted to know.

  Nothing but questions ever rising from that quarter, man shaking them up in the cup of his fist like a handful of dice every time he walked into a room that was furnished with his son. You like Rice Krispies? English muffins? Baseball? Star Wars? Peaches? The ladies? Mos Def? Cats? Dogs? Mentos? Monkeys? Nobody ever taught you to brush your teeth when you wake up in the morning? Did that shirt used to be white? How you spend so much time playing that damn game? What would happen if you read an actual Marvel motherfucking comic book one time? You ever hear of washing a dish? Listen to Duke Ellington? Do you know who Billy Strayhorn was? Aw, shit, are you trying to break my heart? Letting fly the dice. In that regard, the man offered little in the way of novelty; Titus felt himself to be a vortex around which the questions of adults routinely came to circle, like that wheel of plastic he had seen one night on the Discovery Channel, out there past Hawaii someplace, great big endless turning of plastic bags and pop bottles. Every conversation a quiz, a debriefing, an interrogation, a catechism. Every sentence fitted at the end with its whiplash curl, a hook to snare him. And every single one of those questions, at bottom, nothing but rhetorical, admitting of and needing no reply.