Telegraph Avenue: A Novel

by Michael Chabon

  “How’d you get in here?” Gwen said.

  “I have a key.”

  “I heard there was only one extra key.”

  When Valletta snapped open her handbag to fish out and brandish her own key to the door of the institute, Gwen glimpsed against the red satin lining a hole in the universe that was exactly the shape of a large handgun, just sitting there absorbing all light on the visible spectrum.

  “How’d you get a key?” Gwen said steadily, though her heart swam in her chest, kicking like the boy who inhabited her. “You take lessons here?”

  She glanced across the studio to the glass cabinet where Mrs. Jew had amassed a gold-brass conurbation of trophies ranked in dusty skylines. Generations of insect citizens had abandoned their husks and limbs in its necropolitan streets. Propped along the back of the topmost shelf, a half-dozen framed black-and-white photographs depicted Mrs. Jew with some of her most successful colleagues and students, among them the future Kato, looking grave as a mycologist in a white gi, and a handsome brother in a tall natural, bent down to get his smiling face alongside that of his tiny sifu, a man whom Gwen had long since identified as Archy’s father, Luther Stallings. She first learned of the Bruce Lee Institute from Archy, who recommended it solely on the basis of the sheepish nostalgia that informed many of his recommendations, back in the fall of 2000, after somebody told her that martial arts might help with the lingering stiffness that getting rear-ended by a Grand Wagoneer had left in her knees and lower back.

  “You used to be a student here, too?”

  The “too” hung there, unglossed, a pin to hold the map threads strung by Gwen as she worked her way from the woman standing in front of her; to the photograph of Luther Stallings in the trophy case; to his estranged son, a memory of him crying in the bathroom at their wedding, relieved and crushed because his daddy, conforming perfectly to Archy’s expectations but not, alas, to his hopes, had failed to show; to stories she had heard from Archy about crack houses and court appearances and, long ago, a naked woman shaving her legs in the bathroom of a Danish modern bachelor pad in El Cerrito.

  “I know you?” Valletta Moore said, clearly doubting it.

  “We’ve never met,” Gwen said. “My name is Gwen Shanks. I know who you are.” Knowing it was probably a mistake yet unable to let the woman, pathetic as she might be, have the satisfaction of thinking that Gwen had recognized her famous face from the movies or from, say, a glossy pinup stuck to the wall of a garage workshop twenty years ago, Gwen added, “I’m married to Archy Stallings.”

  “What? Get the fuck out.” Valletta Moore pushed up her sunglasses and dazzled Gwen with green. “You are? You and Archy having a baby?”

  “No, I’m just incredibly fat.”

  “Not really?”

  “No,” Gwen confessed. “I’m just feeling sorry for myself.”

  “Oh, honey.”

  “I mean, wow. Valletta Moore. How are you?”

  “How am I?” She seemed to teeter on some edge. “I am doing what I have to do, you know what I’m saying?”

  “I ought to by now.”

  “And I am trying to stay fly.”

  “Oh, you are. Most definitely.”

  “Thank you, honey. What are you . . . You living here now?”

  “I was just— No. Right now I’m moving.”

  “You and Archy aren’t together?”

  “No, ma’am. Not right now. I guess we—”

  “You don’t need to say nothing. If that boy has, like, only ten, fifteen percent of what his daddy came equipped with, then you got my full sympathy, and you don’t need to say nothing else.”

  “Is he all right? Luther? Is he . . . in trouble?”

  Valletta seemed to try to decide how best to answer. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s nice to meet you, Gwen, but I really have to leave.” She took a step toward Gwen. Leaned in. Swept Gwen up for three seconds in a riot of perfume and hair oil and piña colada–flavored gum. “All right, now. You take care.” Again she adjusted the heavy burden on her right shoulder and started to turn away.

  “Are you in trouble?” Gwen said. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

  “Stay fly,” said Valletta Moore, hurriedly reversing the terms of her equation. “And do what you got to do.”

  Then she was gone. Gwen weighed her parting words, wondering at how a certain warmth kindled in her chest at the sound of them, almost like the flame of nostalgia. They rang a bell; a snatch of lyric, a parting line tossed to the crowd at the end of a live album. A catchphrase. Ah. It must be something that her character said in one of those dreadful movies she was in. Taking the yoke of a plummeting cargo plane, just before leaping from a fire escape to the roof of a passing uptown bus, strapping on for a showdown with a gang of heroin dealers. Or with a hospital review board.

  Gwen went into the secret room, and instead of packing up her things and lighting out, as she had planned, she submitted her clothing to harsh inspection, trying to find something that would do for the board. Nothing: She would have to go shopping; there was just enough time for that and a trip to Glama. All the while the words echoed and re-echoed, and finally, in mid-carom, she caught them: Do what you got to do, and stay fly. They were the parting words of Candygirl Clark, the character played by Valletta Moore in the Strutter movies. As she undressed, Gwen wondered whether the phrase was something cooked up by the screenwriter, some Jewish dude trying to think like an ass-kicking soul sister, or if they had started out as an ad lib, something that Valletta used to say for real. She went into the bathroom, wrapped in a towel that strained to girdle her, her hair tucked under a shower cap, and noticed that the lid of the toilet tank had been knocked off-kilter. She looked inside and saw a plastic bag taped to the inside of the tank, slit open, empty. The lid of the tank tolled like a bell as she restored it.

  There were all kinds of things wrong with her life, and as they swarmed her, she did an admirable job of identifying and taxonomizing them. As a meteorologist of failure, she had proven her mettle in the teeth of an informational storm. That was how troubles arrived, mourners rushing the bar at a wake. Though they came in funereal flocks, they could be dismissed only one at a time, and that was how she would have to proceed. She ran the water in the shower, letting it get hot, watching her face in the steel mirror until it vanished like San Francisco into a summer fog. She took the water onto the load-bearing points of her body as hot as she could stand, hoping to undo some of the kinks from another night without the body pillow. When she emerged from the bathroom, feeling luminous, giving off steam, she found that the most recent of her troubles had taken it upon itself to find its own way, literally, to the door. To a door, at any rate. Against the bottom of the black-and-white photographic poster of Bruce Lee, propped against the sheet of Lucite that covered it, bent at the center as though to duck and allow Bruce, feet and fists flying, to hurdle it in a single, unending, eternally incomplete bound, lay a large, plump pin-striped body pillow. On the floor beside it lay a square of yellow sales slip on the back of which Julie Jaffe had written, in his antic all-caps hand, DO WHAT YOU GOT TO DO AND STAY FLY.

  In the seat by the center door of the 1, a young Latina mother with her hair pulled up into a palm tree atop her head sat yoked by the string of a pair of earbuds to a little boy on her lap, a bud apiece in each left ear. The little boy was holding by its remaining arm what appeared to be a Goliath action figure from the old animated Gargoyles program. Long ago, it had been Goliath’s orotund voice, stony musculature, and leonine coiffure that stirred in little-kid Julie, as he watched Gargoyles on the Disney Channel, what he recalled with poignance as his first conscious erection. The show had since gone off the air, and the little boy probably did not even known who Goliath was, how much tragedy there was in his gargoyle past, in the lives of all the gargoyle race. To him the toy was only an imperfect enigma, at once cool and ruined. His mother probably bought him broken old secondhand toys off of eBay, to save money, or shopped for
him amid the desolation of the children’s bins at Goodwill. Or maybe she worked cleaning houses for women who gave away to their servants their children’s old, broken things. The little boy probably thought of Goliath as simply a toy monster. Such bias and ignorance were, after all, the usual portion of monsters. Julie felt a stab of sympathy toward monsters and toward himself, but most of all, he felt sorry for the little boy with his armless plaything and his one earbud. Julie always found ample cause for sorrow in his fellow passengers on the bus.

  “Ain’t my grandma,” Titus was saying.

  “I know, but still.”

  “You saying you would not want to get up in that.”

  It was hard to imagine wanting to, but Julie felt no need to say so. Nor did he point out that, for example, a swordswoman wearing a steel brassiere and chain mail, occasionally subject to fits of magical bloodlust, was theoretically awesome in more or less the same way that Valletta Moore was awesome, but if, say, Red Sonja were to turn up on the Number 1 bus, headed for downtown Oakland, the question of whether or not to, quote, get up in that, unquote, would not necessarily feature in Julie’s first series of internal discussions on the matter. And that was leaving aside the whole question of her possibly being somebody’s grandmother.

  “Sure,” Julie said presently. “Totally.”

  “Faggot.”

  “Hate speech.”

  As if in reply—a reply uttered in the silent and intricate language they used to transact the secret business that underwrote their friendship—Titus took hold of Julie’s hand and pressed it against the fly of his jeans. They were at the back of a spiffy new Van Hool, segmented and capacious, and there was no one in the seats behind or around them, but the bus was far from empty, and you would not have said that Titus’s move was quite covert. Julie pressed his palm against that straining arc of denim, rocked it back and forth, fingers spread. Titus kept his eyes on Valletta, imagining, Julie understood, that he was up in that. In the rape scene that opened Mayflower Black, Valletta Moore bared breasts that had the graceful architecture of eggplants, paler than the rest of her, nipples fleshy, aureoles far-flung. When she stabbed her white rapist in the throat, improvising a shiv with a shard of broken vinyl LP, rolling off him, you could see, in freeze-frame, there! and there! the tangled shadow of her bush. No doubt Titus was making use of some of that material now. He was not, Julie knew, picturing Julie naked. He was probably not even thinking that it was Julie reaching to unbutton his fly.

  Julie’s fingers staged a brief bit of comedy with the buttons and the waistband of Titus’s boxer briefs, in which Titus’s dick played the role of clown bursting from a pint-sized car, snake liberated from the fake can of nuts. Smooth and cool against the hand as gargoyle stone. As he played with Titus, Julie tried to look at Valletta Moore the way he imagined that Titus was looking at her, but all he could manage was the idea that his lips were Valletta’s, a vivid O painted red around Titus’s penis. That his head was bobbing up and down and mechanically in Titus’s lap the way Valletta’s had done during her love scene with Luther Stallings in Strutter at Large. The idea that Julie could ever resemble Valletta Moore, in this or any way, struck him as only slightly more likely than his being able to get up in her, and he smiled at his poor little gargoyle self. Things went as far as they could between Titus and Julie’s fingers without causing cleanup issues. Titus brushed Julie’s hand aside and, still looking at Valletta, buttoned himself up. He gave Julie’s fingers a gentle squeeze.

  Julie said, “Seriously, dude, you shouldn’t say ‘faggot.’ ”

  “Yeah, whatever.”

  “I’m serious. It’s—”

  Titus said, “You go right ahead, call me ‘n—’ ”

  “Oh, yeah, right.”

  “I really don’t care.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  Titus frowned, half-closed his eyes, rehearsing the scene in his mind. Slouched low next to Julie, legs sprawled out into the handicap area, Nikes slanted like a couple of Easter Island heads. Taking up about a third of Julie’s seat, too. “Probably true,” he conceded.

  “Anyway, I never would call you something like that.”

  “Yeah, whatever, Wavy Gravy. Peace and love.”

  “Want some tempeh?”

  Titus’s eyes behind his Run-DMCs bore in on the back of Valletta’s head as she stared at the bus window opposite or, less likely, at whatever there was to see on the far side of the glass. As though to offer evidence of the terminal crunchiness, the megadoses of rainbow radiation, to which Titus felt Julie had been overexposed in his sheltered Berkeley youth, they rolled past the ruin of the Bit o’ Honey bar. The Bit o’ Honey, owned by some Black Panthers, was mentioned twice in a book on Panther history that Peter van Eder had loaned them. The Minister of Defense, Huey Newton, had been jumped and beaten in the parking lot, and a few nights later, perhaps in retaliation, someone named Everett “Popcorn” Hughes had been shot inside the bar. Now, affixed to one of the Baghdad-quality blast shutters that blinded the Bit o’ Honey’s face, a bold if oddly worded sign announced, in lean sans-serif letters, that the site would soon be home to the MindBridge Center for the Study of Human Consumption.

  “I think I know where tempeh comes from,” Julie said.

  “Okay,” Titus said to the back of Valletta Moore’s head. “Where we going?”

  “The Number One goes to East Oakland. Out, um, International, kinda like, Fruitvale, I think.”

  Julie knew that Titus had not been asking about the bus route and where it might lead them. The gist of his question had been: Where is she going? They had literally bumped into her, emerging with a dreamlike matter-of-factness from the front door of the Bruce Lee Institute. The body pillow serving to absorb, like an air bag, Julie’s impact with the woman. At that point, enveloped in the deep, cool cushion of her fragrance, Julie had sort of recognized her, thinking, That woman looks like her and smells how I would imagine her smelling how funny since I have just seen all six of the nine films in which she appeared between 1974 and 1978 and which are available on DVD or VHS I wonder how old she is if she was born in like 1954, and then when they came back outside, having left the pillow and note for Gwen, and saw the woman waiting by the bus shelter across Telegraph, he had known her for certain: Valletta Moore, in the flesh. High, fine, feline, with that Candygirl Clark aloofness, but looking, to the eye of a rainbow-irradiated East Bay boy, maybe a touch on the tranny side.

  Titus got very quiet when he recognized her, the way only Titus could get quiet, shutting down nonessential systems, patching all available impulse power to the sensors. There was Valletta Moore, waiting for AC Transit, tapping her cell phone against her hip, face unreadable behind her foreign-dictator shades but standing folded into herself, with impatience or the need to pee. Her head fixing like a radar dish on every car that passed her. Going somewhere. Looking out for someone.

  The possibility that she was on her way to a rendezvous with Luther Stallings occurred to both boys simultaneously, since in the interval between the doorway collision and now, they had not only deposited the body pillow by the door behind which (a thought as fearsome to Julie as that of having sexual intercourse with Valletta Moore or Red Sonja) the naked expanse of Gwen Stallings was evidently being lathered and rinsed. They had also seen a framed photograph in the dusty trophy case: the picture of Luther Stallings in his prime, posed beside the crazy little Chinese sifu lady when she was only one hundred, and not one hundred and thirty-five, years old.

  “Okay, check this out,” Titus had said, watching her in the bus shelter. Power restored to all systems. He’d patted at the side of his tidy natural with his dazzling palm. Then he had crossed the street in disregard of a don’t-walk signal and converging vehicles, with Julie bringing up the rear like an old worried grandpa. When the lady’s bus came, the boys got on it. They drew a line from the photograph, lost in the dust of kung fu oblivion, to Valletta Moore, and now they were riding the bus along that line as she took up the
pencil and marked the course they might follow to find the magical man.

  It would not be accurate to claim that Julie had no illusions as to whether Luther Stallings would turn out to be worthy of the admiration, regard, and even—in a way that was, at this point, almost pure fanboyishness—the love that Titus and, loving Titus, Julie felt toward the man. True, Julie Jaffe was one of those rare beings capable of adopting an optimistic view toward the past, and furthermore, he had experienced while watching the available filmography of Luther Stallings the kind of sexual arousal that must afflict Titus as he stared at Valletta Moore. Not because Stallings was beautiful—though he was, his litheness in fight scenes and action sequences like a base stealer’s, head down and ready to get some dirt on his pants. What got to Julie was the way Luther Stallings off-gassed something invisible that Julie wanted to call equipoise: unruffled, confident, prepared to improvise. Something so rare and fragile could not be entirely faked. Archy had the same quality, softened up, and so, in his turn, did Titus: There had to be some kind of genuine basis in the famous original.

  A number of Julie’s illusions remained intact, therefore, at the end of the ride as he followed Titus, who was following Valletta Moore, east to Franklin Street, where she opened her phone, made a brief call, then went into a takeout whose sign argued, with a certain apathy that must have been the fruit of language heedlessly applied, that it was properly known as EGG ROLL LOVING DONUT. But even without having heard the disparaging words and tone his father and Archy had used about Luther Stallings, Julie had read enough books and seen enough movies to suspect that if Titus ever did meet his grandfather, he was in for a disappointment, perhaps a grave one. Julie was so conscious of this possibility that as great a part of him hoped Valletta Moore was only stopping for a donut on the way to pay her electric bill, say, and had not seen Luther Stallings in twenty years, as hoped that they were seriously on the man’s trail. Titus showed nothing but scorn for Archy and had never said anything remotely to the effect that he had a hole in his heart in the shape of a father, but like an astronomer with an exoplanet, Julie could infer that hole’s presence from distortions in the field around Titus. It was there in the ambition and the scorn. It was there in the daring that led Titus to cut past Valletta Moore, duck ahead of her into Loving Donut with its brushed steel and white tile like a police morgue, and get in line before she did. Julie recalled having read in a spy novel that the best way to tail somebody was to walk ahead, but there was an élan to Titus’s move that went beyond spycraft.